Most people seem to like the combination of the internet and electronic communication, but what happens if that’s all you’ve got, and something goes wrong? And you can’t get a real person to even address the problem, no matter what you try?

Think that’s an unfounded worry? A skeptic’s dystopia that can’t happen?

Let me tell you about our struggle with a meal delivery service called Tovala, that delivers meals for quick preparation with a computerized oven/broiler. Weekly, you select what you want from the menu and the meals are delivered the following week.

Some six months ago, we signed up for a food delivery system from Tovala. While there were a few meals we didn’t care for, the system worked reasonably well, and it definitely cut down on meal preparation time.

But the warning signs were there early. In March, my wife asked the electronic system to skip a week. That was an option on the ordering schedule. The system took the instructions, but we still got and were billed for the delivery of another week’s worth of food.

When the university semester ended, and we had more time, we paused meal deliveries for the summer, an option available on the online ordering system. But the following Wednesday, we got another order. We persisted, sending an email to Tovala, asking to stop meal delivery service. But the next Wednesday, we got another delivery, for which we were billed, even though the Tovala system indicated that our orders had been suspended indefinitely.

I tried to call the company, but could only find one telephone number, which had a recording telling me to use the on-line service or email Tovala. We lodged a complaint by email and got a response saying that deliveries had been suspended. We emailed the customer service section of the credit card company asking that charges from Tovala not be honored, but there was no response to that.

We thought the problem had been resolved when, the next week, there was no delivery from Tovala. Except the following week, there was another delivery, for which we were billed. So, we finally got a real person on the line, but only from the credit card company – who informed us that there was no record of our request to stop payment to Tovala, but who promised to look into the matter.

That didn’t work, either, and the next week we got yet another shipment.

After another hour of internet searching, my wife finally found a number that connected to a real person. That real person insisted that the order hadn’t been cancelled. My wife persisted. The real person actually searched and discovered that, for some reason, my wife had two accounts, and that they’d cancelled the inactive one. My wife definitely never signed up for two accounts, and we never received two orders. In any event, the real person promised that both would be cancelled.

Finally, this week, we didn’t receive a shipment of food we didn’t want and hadn’t ordered. I’m still a bit worried that, despite it all, we might get a shipment next week.

But my question is: How many people are going to be overcharged, hurt, or worse by electronic/AI systems with no way to get to someone who can actually address the problems? We’ve spent hours dealing with this problem so that a company can save a little money, and it’s cost us not only time, but dollars for meals we weren’t around to eat, not to mention the waste of food.

So far as I can see, these systems are too often one way — cost saving for the company and endless hassles for the customer.

Yes, I know. There’s no such word as simplisticity, but there should be, because it’s a perfect word to describe false and simplistic comparisons between events or facts.

The GOP and the right have an amazing tendency to rely on simplisticity. Equating Trump’s deliberate and massive heist of classified documents to a handful of classified documents inadvertently kept by Pence and Biden or to conversational email references to classified subjects by Hillary Clinton is definitely simplisticity.

So is equating the January 6th armed uprising to peaceful protests.

Or equating Trump’s thirty thousand plus documented misstatements and lies to literally any other U.S. national political figure. Well… except for George Santos. Yet I’ve heard Republican after Republican dismiss Trump’s lies with the statement, “All politicians lie.” They may, but nowhere to the extent that Trump has and continues to lie.

Another area where simplisticity reigns is in arguments over taxes and tax policy. Those on the right cite statistics generally based on “taxable income” and percentage of taxes paid, or occasionally on proportion of taxable income generated by the wealthy and the percent of that income that’s taxed federally. The problem with that simplistic approach is that the majority of income held by the wealthiest Americans isn’t taxed or taxable under current tax codes. Likewise, because poorer families pay a greater percentage of their income in state, local, and Social Security taxes, comparing the percentage of income taxed based on federal income taxes misrepresents their tax burden.

Simplisticity isn’t new. I can recall from my childhood people saying that blacks were stupid or ignorant because they bought expensive cars and lived in run-down neighborhoods. At the time, I was young and didn’t realize that in some cities and areas, that was because of various restrictions, such as redlining, that made it impossible for them to own or rent houses in more upscale neighborhoods.

So, when you have a simple and popular view about something, it might be a good idea to ask whether it’s actually accurate… or just comforting simplisticity.

Year 92 From the Forest (January 2024)

Year 101 Overcaptain (November 2024)

Year 103 Sub-Majer’s Challenge ( September (?) 2025)

Year 104 The Last of the First (2026 (?)

Year 410 Magi’i of Cyador

Year 418 Scion of Cyador

Year 801 Fall of Angels

Year 803 The Chaos Balance

Year 815 Arms-Commander

Year 825 Cyador’s Heirs

Year 833 Heritage of Cyador

Year 1075 The Mongrel Mage

Year 1076 Outcasts of Order

Year 1077 The Mage-Fire War

Year 1093 Fairhaven Rising

Year 1300 The Towers of the Sunset

Year 1590 The White Order

Year 1600 The Magic Engineer

Year 1605 Colors of Chaos

Year 1900 Natural Ordermage

Year 1903 Mage-Guard of Hamor

Year 2050 The Order War

Year 2110 Wellspring of Chaos

Year 2112 Ordermaster

Year 2250 The Magic of Recluce

Year 2255 The Death of Chaos

The years date from the founding of Cyad.

The Republicans are absolutely right that the United States can’t keep up deficit spending running over seven percent per year, not without creating long-term inflation and a national debt whose interest could soon reach forty percent of annual federal government spending. But they’re wrong in how they want to deal with the problem. At a time when we have multi-millionaires and multi-billion-dollar corporations who pay little or no taxes and whose businesses are essentially partly subsidized by federal government income and healthcare supports, the Republicans want to cut funds for the poorest of Americans while cutting taxes on the richest and passing tax credits for them as well.

The Democrats, on the other hand, want to keep increasing spending on existing social programs without being able to come up with a politically viable way to support those programs without increasing the deficit.

The so-called compromise bought us some time, but not much else. The plain fact remains that, under the current political stalemate, only corporations and the well-off really benefit. They keep their lower taxes and tax credits, and one way or another, everyone else pays.

One of my neighbors recently retired, not because he wanted to, but because, after forty years or more of working with heavy machinery his knees and shoulders gave out. Even with two replacement knees he couldn’t do the job he once did, and he couldn’t wait to get the maximum social security benefits. While he was more prudent than many, the fact remains that too many workers can’t physically work long enough to get even reduced social security benefits. Yet these are people who get hurt most by Republican policies, and one of the great ironies is that a disproportionate number are Republicans who don’t even seem to see that.

But until those who are hurt the most and don’t realize it finally understand, nothing will change.

I live in Utah, and I’d never exactly thought of the state as an expensive place to live, but changes creep up on you. When we moved to Cedar City, not quite thirty years ago, the cost of living was statistically about 94% of the national average. Today, depending on which index you use, we’re between 99% and 103% of the national average, and I suspect that those numbers are low. My property taxes, while not insignificant and low by the standards of some states, have doubled over the last eight years. The price of natural gas has tripled since last year.

But where Utah has really taken a hit is in the increase in housing prices. Depending on which figures or indices you look at, Utah is on average between the fourth and tenth most expensive state for housing, and housing prices have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years. Housing prices in Cedar City have more than doubled.

Four factors, I suspect, lie behind the rapid and substantial price increases. First, Utah has the highest birth rate in the nation, and has had for decades. Second, immigrants are pouring into the state, especially into Cedar City, which has one of the fastest growth rates in the nation, and the majority of those immigrants, at least here in town, are from California. Third, the local university has expanded from 3,500 students to over 15,000. And fourth, despite new housing developments everywhere, the amount of new housing hasn’t matched the demand.

There’s another factor, as well – that too many of the developers and builders are concentrating on higher-end housing, and that’s reflected in the fact that Cedar City now has a small but growing number of homeless people, while high-priced houses up for re-sale take a long time to sell, because the majority of newcomers insist on building new houses, most likely with the gains from selling houses in California and elsewhere.

But then, what’s happening here is also occurring in far too many other areas as well.