“Welcome to the Two Minutes Tim Cook Hate”

I got annoyed yesterday because I realized I had wasted $429 on a vacuum cleaner which is not as good as a $130 shop vac from Home Depot. Today I’m annoyed about refrigerators.

I had been hearing a lot about Samsung’s new policy of forcing refrigerator owners to allow fridges to display ads in their kitchens. You didn’t dream that last sentence; it’s actually happening.

Today I decided to take a look.

First, let me say that we have all been hoodwinked when it comes to fridges. We pay too much for refrigerators that do things 1) other than refrigerating 2) which are not actually very helpful.

When I was a kid, a fridge was a fridge, not a TV, video game console, telephone, camera, therapist, sex surrogate, French tutor, urologist, dog trainer, palm reader, thought leader, icemaker, or water fountain. Fridges had excellent mechanicals, they lasted 40 years if treated well, and they could be repaired easily.

In the 1960’s, things started to change. Clever marketers decided people wanted their fridges to make ice automatically and dispense cold water through the door. Over the ensuing decades, fridges got more complicated, the mechanicals started to fail after 10 years, and repair became less and less practical due to the use of cheap parts.

My grandparents built a beautiful home in about 1965. My grandmother put two deep freezes in the basement, along with the fridge from her old home. When she died in 2003, these appliances were still working, as were her Speed Queen washer and dryer.

I have seen modern fridges fail in under 5 years.

Consumers love shiny gadgets, so as technology improved, we started seeing truly ridiculous features in refrigerators.

Now you can talk to your refrigerator in America while you vacation in New Guinea. You can tell it what to do. You can make it show you video of its contents. If it gets lonely, it can text you.

They make fridges with external TV screens that allow you to see what you could see if you took your precious little hand and opened the doors.

I thought my old refrigerator was dying last year. Turned out it wasn’t true. We had been blocking the air from the freezer. Moving food around fixed it. Before we got it straightened out, we went to look at new fridges.

Spoiler alert: there aren’t any good refrigerators now. You think your Sub-Zero or Fisher & Paykel is going to last longer than a Frigidaire? It won’t. I talked to an appliance guy who was working on a dryer, trying to find out which brand of refrigerator was best. He was familiar with every brand. He said, “They’re all junk.” I asked if that included the boutique brands. Yes, it did.

Interesting side note: your new refrigerator is full of flammable gas. FLAMMABLE. Isn’t that nice? Good thing to know if you have a house fire. The greenies have panicked us through several iterations of refrigerant, probably needlessly, and now we have reached the point where they think it’s better to have a giant bomb in your kitchen than risk damage to the ozone layer, which seems to be doing very well.

We decided we did not want an icemaker or any type of dispenser. My current fridge has a door dispenser, and we almost never use it.

Here is the dirty little secret of all door water dispensers: they dispense warm water, not cold. At least compared to actual cold water you might keep in a jug inside the fridge. If “cold” means 5 degrees cooler than the tap water from your sink, then yes, they dispense cold water. To me, it means 35 degrees.

Icemakers fail frequently. They are the parts that go bad most often on refrigerators, and they aren’t very good. They have evolved to the point where they dispense ice in awkward semicircular chunks that block the flow of liquid to your mouth. Seems like the ice always smells, too. These machines make so much ice, it sits around absorbing odors for weeks or months. Are you a fisherman? Get ready for gin, tonic, and perch.

Another issue: icemakers and water dispensers kill cubic footage. They take up room. If you see a refrigerator advertised as 22 cubic feet, you have to deduct the volume of the water and ice apparatus, because the manufacturer won’t.

There’s more: these machines have unnecessary water filters. My water is just fine. The manufacturers have started putting digital chips on their filters so you get no ice and no water unless you use their OEM filters, and those can cost $50 to $80 each, although a filter probably costs Frigidaire $5. I saw a guy claim he needed to spend $250 per year to keep up. That’s like 70 cases of bottled water.

My fridge has a filter cartridge (non-OEM), and I never replace it. The water keeps flowing. Sometimes when I feel like it, I push the little button that says to reset the filter life, and the fridge obeys as though I had installed a new cartridge. It has no idea whether the filter is full. It apparently goes by time.

Making your own ice isn’t really that tough.

If I want a big, shiny stainless bottom-freezer fridge from one of the least-worthless brands, it will cost me at least $1500. That’s on sale. I can get a plain old white top-freezer fridge for $850. Nearly the same cubic footage. Maytag sells a 22-cubic-foot model for $1800 (regular price), and I can buy a 21-cubic-foot top-freezer fridge for half of that.

Am I being cheap? Well, sure, but the main thing is that I don’t have to be concerned about repairs to parts I don’t want to buy in the first place. I don’t like waiting for repairmen. I don’t like paying them. I don’t trust them. I don’t enjoy doing appliance repairs.

I could buy a top-freezer fridge and a standalone ice maker for less than the cost of a fancy fridge with no ice maker or dispenser.

The thing that really sticks in my craw, however, is not the ice and water problem. It’s the ad problem.

People bought Samsung refrigerators, thinking they were getting cool gadgets they actually owned, and then Samsung updated their firmware without permission and started showing them ads. That’s immoral. You don’t change a deal once you make it.

I hate unsolicited ads. When I see ads playing on a gas station pump, I face the other way until my tank is full. I have smart TV’s, and I do everything I can to disable their ad functions (which didn’t exist when I bought them). I block and report all spam emails. I put a spam filter on this blog. I pay for Youtube Premium because it kills ads. I quit watching Amazon videos for multiple reasons, and one was that they swindled me on ads. They sold me Prime with the promise that I would see no ads, and then they started showing me ads anyway.

Call me spoiled, but I would rather watch nothing than watch a really good show interrupted by the same ad 30 times.

Video ads are pathetic these days. Some shows can’t get a lot of sponsors, so they run the same three sponsors’ ads over and over. They also increase the frequency of ads as the shows progress. You get a short interruption every 8 minutes toward the beginning, then you get hooked, and then you get a longer interruption, featuring the same ads, every two minutes until the show is over.

It’s also common for video providers to lock up ads while you look at other browser tabs. You move to a new tab while the ad is running, hoping to avoid it, and when you go back, the ad resumes at exactly the same point where you abandoned it.

If I don’t want to buy your silly product during the first three seconds of the ad, I still won’t want to buy it after being forced to see the other 27 or 157 seconds.

I quit watching secular entertainment, so I suffer much less than I used to. I still watch videos related to my interests.

I can’t imagine the misery of going through the work of minimizing the ads in my life and then having them forced on me, on a big screen, in my kitchen.

Do they have sound? Can you shut it off? I certainly hope they default to silence, but I’ll bet they don’t.

The ad-forcing TV’s don’t cost less than the ones that have no screens. They cost more. So where is the ad revenue going? To Samsung, of course. Samsung is subjecting you to torment and taking money for it. You get nothing for your service.

You’re like a prisoner on a chain gang, working for 50 cents per hour while the state charges private land owners for your services. Except you don’t get the 50 cents.

If Samsung put a billboard in my yard, they would have to pay me, not themselves. Common sense?

Samsung fridges have cameras inside them. I’m not kidding. I’m going to guess they film your food and send you ads based on what you eat. They sell the information to other jerks.

I hope some prankster starts putting dummy grenades and pipe bombs in his Samsung fridge.

Samsung says the ads are “curated.” This is a nonsense term intended to make products seem special and consumers feel important. It just means someone chose the ads. This is true of all ads. Also, Samsung’s “curator” is a computer that belongs to Samsung. It’s not a human being. “Curated” means “chosen to appeal to you based on information we shouldn’t have, and provided by predatory corporations.”

It’s odd to use the term “curated” to apply to products which are…advertisements. Ordinarily, marketers use it to apply to things we like and want, not things we hate. Assortments of skin care products. Music playlists.

“We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Tower of London. Next in our series of curated experiences for valued subjects, the iron muzzle with spikes on the inside!”

Samsung lies and says the ads are intended to benefit you. It’s all about you. For the children. So you can live your best life. Because we are stronger together. And it takes a village. Love trumps hate. Coexist.

If you’re going to lie, at least try to come up with lies that would fool a two-year-old. The lies make this worse, not better.

It will get worse. If our government wanted to do anything about it, they would have done it by now. Our laws are made by people lobbyists pay for service, lobbyists have lots of money, and you can’t expect the same people who take bribes to ban bribes.

Here’s a critical video about Samsung’s disgusting actions. Here is the height of irony: the video was clearly made using AI. AI will defend you against creeping tech tyranny. Yeah. That will happen.