I think the doomerism was all to get that moat. There's no vendor lockin either, even if you're using the API. You can switch between providers really easily.

100%. I've had the same email going on 20 years. It's been hosted in a dozen different places. It was on proton for a while, it's on mailbox.org now. I can move again in an hour.

Agree with all your points but none of those reasons are we supposedly live in a democracy and the vast majority of us don't want these data centres.

Charitably the best i can come up with at least the business would know they're not offering enough if people keep rejecting them. But then that's the status quo and all evidence points to wage suppression so clearly they're just making up bullshit to justify wage suppression.

My wife applied to a job this weekend, no salary mentioned at all and a required field on the form was her salary expectation that would only permit a single number, no letters, not a range.

Not even just boomers anymore. I get AI slop shared with me by all ages. I just tell people now assume nothing online is real.

100% this. A cut of every penny we spend goes to mastercard or visa. Most products include cloud compute these days with AWS or Azure, which are really expensive, that are baked into the prices. Everything is on an app that's does nothing but extract a margin. How much of our GDP ends up in these foreign tech companies?

Me too, was a paying customer for several years. Perks of using your own domain. I can switch providers in under an hour.

It's the amount the average energy bill is going to increase by between January and April. It's not supposed to solve problems now, it's for that specific problem coming in January.

They're hoping energy prices will drop by April.

In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it's massively over budget and delayed.

In the same time we've added about 20GW of solar.

My first thought. Everything is going to look the same soon isn't it

I was looking for graphics the other day and the stock images sites I've used before were virtually all AI slop. Why would I pay for that?

Probably 10 years ago I encountered a pump on a job. It was huge. 2-3 stories tall. Probably cost millions.

There was a computer plugged into, an old beige tower case and a CRT monitor with RS232 serial cable between it and the pump.

This was the control system, it was connected to the network (airgapped LAN fortunately).

Was running NT4!

I have no idea why it was set up this way, PLCs were definitely the standard at the time and there were older PLCs than that on the site. No one who worked there was around when it was installed, it was just the way it was.