Hopefully not on MS servers, though…

Heck, they might even have been consenting adults!

Well, North Dakota got a station, and we all know that North Dakota is Worst Dakota.

We can debate exactly where to draw the line, for sure. And, honestly, it should be calculated as a multiple of minimum wage or ‘poverty level’ or something, to avoid the number becoming obsolete due to inflation.*

But, really, anything between $10M and $200M would be a fairly reasonable place to draw the line. The important part is to tackle the ultra-rich, the ones for whom even hundreds of millions is chump change. (Personally, I’m letting it edge up a little higher to account for small(ish) business owners and people/farmers who might own a particularly valuable plot or two of land.)

*Edit: $50M is ~6,896,551x the federal minimum wage of $7.25. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round the limit up to 7,000,000x. Which would make the limit $50.75M in total assets. If the rich fuckers want to be able to own more than that, they’ll need to raise the minimum wage, which would then raise the limit accordingly. Raising the minimum wage to $10/hr would increase their limit to $70M, for example.

Check out the related images!

I would honestly be shocked to find any text file format – no matter how old or obscure – that LibreOffice couldn’t open.

Intellectually, I’m sure there must be some out there. But it would still come across as a huge shock to actually find one in the wild.

What are you using for this?

Not that I’d really trust AI-powered tools to detect AI correctly, but it looks like something you’re running in-browser?

LLM powered search is crazy expensive for no return

Seriously, what return could they possibly be getting out of it? How are AI search results – even in theory – making them any more money than just giving regular old-fashioned search results? Users aren’t being charged for it. Users aren’t seeing more ads because of it. How is it supposed to make money?

Yep, just about to say… You got an old document that MS Word won’t open? I bet LibreOffice will still open it just fine.

The internet: Entire industries were doomed. Travel agents, real estate agents, newspapers, retailers… who needs any of them when everything is online? Some took a beating, others adapted, and entirely new businesses appeared.

Travel agents have all but disappeared. Newspapers are a shell of their former selves – once proud bastions of journalism have become clickbait mills dependent on funding from oligarchs to push their propaganda. Many retailers – even some quite big ones like K-Mart, Circuit City, and Sears – are in heavy decline or are completely gone.

Out of this list, real estate agents are the only ones doing relatively okay. And even then, their role is much different than what it once was. Now, they mainly function as someone to help you with the paperwork and a trusted person who can be available to walk prospective buyers through a house and prevent them from damaging/burglarizing the place in the process.

Still ridiculous that it’s slower than driving.

And that’s a very short trip. Most people wouldn’t take a plane anyway to go somewhere that’s a 5-hour drive away. So I don’t think that’s very representative of what it would be like for the average person to replace an airline trip with a rail trip.

There won’t be anything stopping people from unplugging their tech and just walking away from it.

Facial recognition cameras in stores and public buildings, on poles next to roads and bike paths, and in every modern car you pass near will still be recording and reporting your location.

Go back to writing checks and paying cash.

Checks are just as traceable as credit/debit card transactions. (Perhaps even slightly moreso, since they all come as a package deal with a nice handwriting sample and a memo line saying what the check is for, in your own words?)

Cash is going to be (mostly) traceable soon, too, as more and more places ‘voluntarily’ sign up for programs where they scan and record the serial number of every bill that passes through, in or out. Cash will only be untraceable if you’re very careful about where you get it and where you spend it. And even then, unless the people you get it from and give it to are also just as careful, it will still be fairly easy to reconstruct a picture of where the money went. If $300 is withdrawn from your account, and then later a drug dealer deposits the same $300 in their account, the surveillance state won’t 100% for sure know what happened there, but they’ll have a pretty clear idea.

Buy an old school flip phone in case you need to call somebody.

Can still be used to trace your location anytime you have it powered on. And old school phones are even easier to remotely eavesdrop on, with no option of using encrypted messaging apps instead. The phones (and other devices) of everyone else around you are still listening in on everything you say.

Unless you can ensure that everyone around you gives up all technology just like you do, you’re still subject to mass surveillance.

So … anybody want to go form a tech-backward hippie commune with me, way out in the middle of nowhere?

Hell, even milk will usually last more than one day.

About as NSFW as airliners can possibly get. I have no regrets.

But they’re working on it. That’s the real reason for all that massive datacenter buildout. It will finally be possible to monitor everything everyone says and does.

All individual wealth over $50M should be taxed at 100%.

If you can’t live very comfortably on $50M, you need budgeting advice, not more money.

And that’s just the mandated monitoring – it doesn’t include the monitoring that businesses and banks are doing for free, on their own.

I hear rumors that many places are rolling out systems to record and track the serial number of every bill of cash that goes in or out, because they can sell that information to big data collectors who can use it to piece together a picture of where cash flows – previously the only flow of money they couldn’t completely monitor. And, of course, that big data is available to the government at any time, either by buying it or by getting a friendly judge to sign off on sweeping warrants.

‘the country seeps into your skin’

Yes, from what I hear, it will take a week or two to get the smell of it out of your skin.

(I joke, I joke. I know some parts of India are nice, and I mean no slight to the people of India. But some parts do have a reputation of being quite … odorous.)

the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY

But people who live in SD/WY might want to go other places?

Do people do this outside of videogames?

All the time. Check that bottle of fancy liquor in the cabinet, the one that’s being saved for a special occasion … but ends up never opened, covered in dust, because its owner died before a special enough occasion ever came.