Uh, let's try this again, shall we?

First of all, let's not be stupid or ignorant. The answer coming back from any and every service provider in defense to the bullshit excuse above would be "They MADE us collect it!", which of course starts the infamous finger pointing exercise they're so damn good at.

And lastly, this move does have an impact. It merely gives the phone companies an excuse to tack another bullshit charge on our bill to warehouse and store the data the government is also taxing you on.

If money is all they care about, then become a banker, for I struggle to call you an artist.

I get what you're saying, but this IS the problem with defining an artist these days. Money is THE priority. When that happens, the ability to express yourself beyond a mathematically calculated attention span becomes impossible.

Yeah.

It would be a shame to allow shitty encoding to ruin the beautiful sounds of an Autotuned voice.

So, this generation of "music" makers, armed with the best Autotune sound mixers and Photoshop artists, along with the algorithms that prove what RPM will drive the most money out of a background bass track, is proving exactly what today? That technology can replace the artist?

Seriously, where do we go from here? How long before the musical overlords simply ask the computer to calculate the next beat and vocal pitch based on revenue?

Enjoy technology. Don't worry though, hologram Elvis will be touring soon, and he'll sound better than he ever could while sporting six-pack abs.

Uh, let's not use time as a measure or indication of quality or intent, shall we?

I'm a bit too afraid that the attention span of today will start handing out Oscars for Vine videos.

Well it sure is a damn good thing we only give a shit about making money these days now that job satisfaction and career happiness has been outsourced to another planet.

As we move into the era of smartwatch-driven communications, along with all of the pressure against anyone who steps behind the wheel of any vehicle to become "hands-free", I'm rather curious. Why do you not feel the art of typing is also a dying requirement in society?

I know we've all been talking about the death of the keyboard for quite some time now. I tend to finally see that on the horizon. At one point we all thought Dick Tracy was the only lucky guy to own a watch like that, and voice recognition solutions aren't getting weaker.

Quite true, especially in today's music climate where a tossed salad is served up hot and fresh with a side of truffle butter.

(Yeah, go ahead, take your own advice and enjoy Google on that one.)

Oh, won't it be great fun trolling the youngsters of tomorrow when I ask them to read something I wrote down.

I'll make sure to hand-write my inheritance checks and will in cursive too.

I didn't know a hung-over backhoe operator was considered in the same class as a major earthquake.

What exactly has caused your last three fiber outages? Chances are it was a human behind a stick or wheel, and not Mother Nature.

Just in the United States, someone becomes addicted to alcohol at the rate of one every three seconds.

http://www.substance.com/live-drug-stats-visualizing-drug-use-in-america/13180/

According to the CDC not long ago, alcohol was the 3rd leading cause of preventable death. Not sure what more we need to talk about. This problem isn't getting better or going away. We've just managed to waste billions making it acceptable to insurance companies for the last few decades by trying to reclassify it as a disease.

If you wish to speak of morals and ethics, perhaps you should review the existing structure and their pricing model first.

There's a reason we have a compelling argument for competition here, and it's not because they have cooler looking cars.

Might as well cull out arts and humanities too. Those have no place in the modern workforce because you know, Picasso painted with a real brush, and Shakespeare wrote on actual paper. No one expresses themselves with that shit anymore...

And why would we not assume this?

Think about it for a minute, you're an owner of a product with a 7-10 year useful lifespan. You're being approached by vendors that have a notorious reputation for going out of date with their products within months, sometimes sooner. Are you going to be willing to partner with any of them without being able to point the finger back at them when shit goes wrong?

And we see this shit happen all the time. It's gotten to the point where they should just call it the legal finger pointing loophole.

Don't have a clue why anyone would want one. Must be the shitty resolution or something...