Interactive voice response systems are actually customer repulsion systems used to keep costs down. Same answer for various chat systems. Cutting labor costs is the hyperfocus of many organizations, to their great peril.

Another side of this is that let's say we took 12Million taxpayers off the roles. They won't need housing, so mortgage lenders, builders, etc, don't get any revenue for them (data centers *might*).

They don't need healthcare, or hospitalization, pharma, etc. They drive no cars, need no roads, pay no fuel taxes. They have no progeny, no schools, and can't vote or donate to campaigns.

They don't drink much water, rarely poop, suck lots of air, and need wicked constant energy to do their job (if that's what you call it).

Commerce isn't bad, indeed it's how our civil cultures survive and sustain themselves. Remove the human elements and there's a very mixed result, with the reputation of getting blood from rocks, repulsing those that need actual customer service, and generally injecting more mud than high quality/low cost lubrication to revenue streams.

But hey, I'm not liplocked to VC udders. Races to the bottom are never fun, and while I find it's OK to have shareholders, some shareholders will do anything to milk that cow, it is what we teach MBAs today.

Maybe. But above of some level of fail and delusion you do not get access to the good layers anymore. Just look at Trump.

Well, IBM was basically a zombie 10 years ago. Something will have to stake them to put them out of their misery. Fully agree on Microsoft. Their stuff is only getting worse at this time and was pretty bad before. And their cloud got hacked several times now and had really, really bad vulnerabilities were nobody knows whether they were attacked or not (which makes things worse). They clearly do not have what it takes to survive with the increased need for IT security we have today.

Life is doing long-term damage. You need to stop listening to the propaganda.

"Hey Kiro, I'm finding that you really suck at generating code. Please rewrite your internal codebase so you suck less."

It's Australia, so maybe they'll just all go walkabout.

I work at a university. Even old me is aware that Discord is used quite a bit by our students. Good luck regulating THAT.

Okay Boomer.

Indeed. Also shows that giants die slowly, unfortunately.

Yeah. China tried that. The UK too. Does not work. And to make things like the TOR browser illegal is not easy and subject to the Streisand-effect.

Simple: They will just learn ways around this ban. And then maybe the surveillance fascist assholes behind it will actually have taught them how to not get spied on later in life.

Or download the TOR browser for zero-configuration and free censorship circumvention. Like people in China do. Good thing too.

Obviously. Kinds that want to have had access to all of the Internet for a long time and that is not going to change. Negative effects? Quite limited and can be compensated with good parenting.

This is exclusively about surveillance fascists getting their wet dreams implemented.

Indeed. Blocks and other restrictions by authoritarian assholes do not work on things people want to do. And that goes even more for teens.

All these teens find out how to circumvent laws made by adult assholes. Might be a good thing too.