"Bizarrely, it’s apparently now required by the FTC for me to write, somewhere “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” So those links to books include Amazon referral tags, which you probably already know if you care about that sort of thing."

https://jakeseliger.com/about/

I also noticed that.

Then I remembered: this is just a free and open blog of a very talented writer. I assume this is not his only income, but I think it's justifiable.

> What is happening here.

Wordpress Plugins.

It’s almost certainly an automated tool that is installed in the whole blog.

what's happening here is that cancer is expensive to treat, even with insurance.

Doubt that’s it, they would make more disclosing the affiliate links as a way to donate or requesting donations directly. I’d guess it’s just normal for them, or maybe inserted automatically, or maybe somebody was amused by it.

There was no malicious intent - this is Sam. Jake simply likes that cooking device, so he put a link to it when he edited my essay. He makes almost no money from his website.

> Several funeral homes that had good reviews online. The folks on the other end of the line seemed nice. They said the right things, which makes sense because they’ve got a sales funnel. And then they asked for a credit card. I get that funeral homes are businesses that need to make money, just as most of us do. It still feels callous and transactional. Send me an agreement, or something. I’ll DocuSign it. You’ll get your money.

Like he writes, that's just the world we live in. I always wonder at why certain realities under capitalism trigger our innate disgust and not others - is it just overton window? I agree that it's gross to have affiliate links on a blog about a dying brother, just like I think it's gross that funerals can cost damn near as much as weddings, and he's right, at every step of the way people are asking you for money at really shitty times, because you're one of 20 funerals the given vendor is dealing with and they're running a business.

I also think it's really gross that the majority of people money to a stranger every month for the right to live in their home, for years, decades even, but most people don't find that gross in the same way. Most people also don't find it gross that you have to pay to have children, pay a fee to activate the coax into your house to make it actually be able to connect to the internet, pay to be able to receive data on a very busy electromagnetic spectrum all around us, pay to have your kids eat at school, pay to get onto a train full of a thousand other people, etc. Why are some things gross and not others? Was there friction as certain things started costing cash that didn't before?

Under communism you let the government take care of things, but still in the end, it's the people you have to deal with. So even for a funeral, you will have to talk your way in, use your connections or bribe for better something... It is still transactional, just a different type of transaction. I always felt that life in Israeli Kibutz(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz) is how I wanted the society to work, but it just doesn't scale and even that way of life is going away under the pressure of the society from outside.

I'm a little confused by your comment, because I also admire the Kibutz method, however it's widely regarded as communistic (some interchangeably call it "socialist") so I'm not clear at the implied contrast to the other communism system where you need to bribe officials for a good funeral. Can you help me understand better what you mean?

I don't see Kibutz as socialist or communist even if some ideas are similar. As I wrote the scale is very different. Kibutz is communal, like a large family. You can't have transactional relationships with family members. Also, you are not forced to be a part of it, you can leave any time. So if I compare it to a communist farm like Kolhoz where the former serfs still were enslaved by the government. So there is a certain difference in the personality of someone who lived and worked in Kolhoz (alienation) and Kibutz (open and not competitive/selfish). I'm saying this as someone who had family members in Kolhoz and knew a lot of Kibutz-born people and also worked in Kibutz(which was privatized).

Of course, I'm also generalizing a lot.

is the whole thing true or not?