One day a couple weeks ago I was feeling kind of like I had the flu. Luckily I didn't have to go into work. Anyway, I silenced my phone at about 4AM. I also have the iPhone call reject feature that sends things directly to voicemail if I haven't whitelisted them. At about 5:30 in the afternoon I checked my phone again. I had (wait for it) *70* calls that had come in from random numbers and never left a voice message. So no, most people don't really answer their phone anymore.

And what a shit show. I find it highly disturbing that the people in charge of this kind of thing have so little vision, and so little anticipation of what can go wrong. I have to assume that the reality is that they just don't care. Nobody can accidentally be this incompetent.

Obviously this wouldn't help you if your little hub took a hit. (Think, the thing in your back yard so to speak.) But I'm curious to know if they sent the fiber off in different directions. I mean, one line that went through one major street and another that went through another major street. That would mitigate a lightning strike or some kind of weird localized disruption.

I'm lucky enough to be on a power subgrid that includes a few "high priority" sites like nursing homes, so even when the power went out a year or so ago for several days I was covered. The people on the other side of my street were not. I had to make sure to turn off the lights and everything else lest I be raided.

Cloud-based emergency services. You know, even a few years ago that would have invoked widespread ridicule and been a total joke in the industry and a political nightmare. Now, people just emphasize that it's "in the cloud" and that seems to make untold degrees of incompetence acceptable. Even more recently, you can just claim that "AI" did it and therefore all us mere humans are somehow stupid.

I actually think back to the days of old copper POTS and how reliable it was.

I hate replying to myself, but after basically 25 years Slashdot still doesn't have an edit function.

It's kind of like how vulnerable most of the world is to an EMP attack. Think it through. Someone blows off an EMP above North America. It fries everything imaginable, including our electrical grid. We don't have the spares in stock to fix it, and in fact we have to go to China to manufacture them with an ungodly lead time. Meanwhile, the majority of the world's advanced semiconductor production is in Taiwan.

We're all fucked for years. Your new Teslas (or anything made after the early 90s, including ICEs) are bricks. I've been into places that have had a power failure and they literally had to shut down because the retards that they hired as cashiers can't do basic math and check people out.

Obviously, these "engineers" who designed this mess have never considered the concept of redundancy. But I do guess when you're on some engineering team where your boss's major motivation is minimizing cost something has to give. It's even more enshitification of our infrastructure, such as it has become.

According to Mouser a Z80 costs around $9.56 each. I'm sure there are cheaper equivalent processors out there. Actually, that's a Z84 but I think it's compatible.

I think someone needs to take a tour through the legal weed states with a huge joint tied on top of their car. Maybe start in Colorado, then drive down to New Mexico, then Arizona, then Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington. Maybe blasting "Because I Got High" by Afroman.

Surely this will not be abused.

Back in the day there was this monstrosity known as "Windows 95." Microsoft was advertising the hell out of it. The PC manufacturers were advertising the hell out of it and their PCs. Internet in dorms was becoming a big thing. There were ads all over TV telling luddite parents that their kids had to have a Windows 95 PC to go off to college or they would FAIL!

Well, predictably, people did this in droves. They then went to their dorms (or did it at home) and hooked their non-firewalled Windows 95 machines up to the Internet with full file and print sharing turned on. It used to be a sport to go surfing through SMB shares on these college networks. You'd find peoples' email, their entire documents folder, and yes, porn they shot of their girlfriends and God knows what else. One time I knew that this dude had a hidden camera in his dorm and his girlfriend wasn't aware of it. So in the interest of being anti-revenge, I went into his email, found her email address, and forged an email from him to her with a link to it. I'm sure that went over well.

There were also so many bugs in the Windows TCP/IP stack, such as it was. Winsock was still even a thing. Then there was Winnuke, where you could send a malformed TCP/IP packet to an IP address and blue screen someone's computer. Anybody who had any clue blocked it in short order, but you always had the script kiddies and trolls and otherwise annoying shits who would pop into IRC or something else and it was necessary to just eliminate them in short order. Most of them never figured it out. ("Uh, every time I say something stupid my computer crashes. What a coincidence!")

This was before Napster and all the rest. In fact, originally it was kind of the original peer-to-peer file sharing. I used to have a huge library of MP3s and stuff from back in the day but that was lost long ago in a HDD crash. Not that I really miss any of it.

But how, pray tell, will we ever land there again, since the moon is made of hot gasses in a perfect circle? However can we land on it? But how did the Apollo astronauts land on it back in 1969? I always knew that was a sound stage! (/s, as if it's necessary.)

I'm waiting for the inevitable Trump Dump.

Yes, the enshitification is in full effect now.

So this is the equivalent of dropping a huge space turd out of orbit onto someone's house and saying that the residents of the house should be happy they were so blessed?

Or there's something out there which makes sure that no society ever gets beyond maybe a few star systems. Think like the Reapers in Mass Effect or the Shivans in Freespace. In other words, any time a society becomes sufficiently advanced, they are deemed a threat and wiped out. Or maybe there really is some kind of Star Trek Prime Directive kind of thing going on. Since our knowledge of physics is limited by the light speed barrier, it seems unlikely that any civilization capable of FTL travel would be using sublight communication which we could detect.

Really, this kind of speculation is really entertaining as thought experiments, but we just don't have the data. Occam's Razor would seem to actually suggest that it's a variety of mechanisms at work. These aren't really studies so much as philosophical essays.