My 1950s meter still works fine.

The smart meters were never about reading meters, it's for load shedding. They can turn them off remotely.

I know multiple people who after 10-20 years with them, they have tried to increase the price to 4x what a new customer would pay. They phone to complain and it's cut to 3x. This is despite alternative fibre having been installed on their street so they switch to that. VM make no attempts to cut the price to something even close to reasonable.

We do have a right to free speech under article 10 of the human rights act - the thing that all the right wing parties are saying we should remove.

I got a Captcha on some search result a few weeks ago that initially looked legitimate then came up with this.

It had put obfuscated code on my clipboard to download and run an executable.

Yeah i write financial software now and we're PCI compliant. Devs can't access prod or its very limited and read only with no access to encryption keys. Those who do have prod access, don't have write access to the code. No one has both.

All software installs on any company device are reported to ops.

I'm not saying this couldn't happen but i think it would be way more difficult. Also, we're a company of 15 people.

Yeah i do this. Whenever i try to write in paragraphs the recipient ends up not responding to half of it. It's like they reach the first question and stop reading.

This AI expansion and summarization reminds me of when translation online was new and you'd translate something then translate it back and get a totally different thing.

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?