Re: May not repeat but it rhymes
From where I’m sitting, the USA is ending as a functional society already, without needing outside help.
738 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Oct 2008
I’m with you on not having listening devices in my home, but I can see this technology being used by call centres to replace humans. At the moment it’s easy to tell the difference between a robot voice and a human and I can respond accordingly, but in future it could be impossible to know what or who I am talking to.
Boosters of the tech might say ‘So what, if you receive the service you need?’, but it feels like deception to me.
/oldgit
Most people can distort their personality for a short time, but unless they are a brilliant actor/spy/con artist/politician their natural traits will eventually appear. For people with years of social media posts, finding those traits in the large amount of source material should be pretty easy.
In the 1980s the BBC had a building at the Daventry transmitter where they recycled old audio & video tapes and spliced together the good bits to make new reels from old. Then someone realised that destroying their priceless archive to save a few bob wasn’t such a great idea.
"...the problem with most senior politicians is not so much a lack of knowledge in science as economics - seemingly imagining it to be the same as business, accounting or running a local council."
More commonly, governments from Thatcher onwards talk of running the economy like a household budget, with stuff like "max-ing out the country's credit card" and similar nonsense.
”Part of the American education system is training people to say things confidently regardless of whether there's a sound basis for doing so.”
That’s also true of British private (‘public’) schools, and we all suffer the consequences of over-confident incompetents in important positions.
In my teens I had a Saturday job at MFI, and now and again a piece of their furniture would appear in the back the shop with a ludicrous price tag on it. £1000 for a chipboard wall unit, anyone? The deal was (and maybe still is, idk) that if you sold something at ‘full price’ for one month in just one shop, you could then sell it in all your shops at a heavily discounted ‘sale’ price.
I guess USA has country code 1 because that’s where telephones were invented (not by Alexander Graham Bell). Seems fair enough.
Rowland Hill in the UK invented the modern postal system, which is why British stamps are the only ones without the country’s name on them.
</trivia>
The Sonos story is slightly different to that. Sonos announced they were going to update the app with new features, but the update wouldn’t work with older units. But that was fine and dandy, because Sonos offered to take the old units back and give a 1/3 discount on new ones.
Understandably, owners (including me) of older units were not impressed with Sonos’ generous offer, and there was a huge outcry on their forums and elsewhere. In the end Sonos backed down, and they now provide two separate apps: S1 for old units & S2 for new ones.
That was in 2020. At some point I’ve no doubt Sonos will pull the S1 app citing ‘security issues’, but if/when that happens I definitely won’t be replacing my freshly bricked units with new Sonos ones.
The gov.uk pages have a lot of ‘should’ and ‘may’ rather than ‘must’, which muddies the waters somewhat. For example: ’If an employer does dismiss and re-employ someone, they may be able to take a case to a tribunal and claim:
breach of contract
unfair dismissal’
Fire and re-hire is still very much a thing in the UK, even in companies with unions, so I think employers must have enough wiggle room to get away with it. Labour have said they will stop the practice but I’m not holding my breath.