A very well-crafted post!
1. No generalization/unqualified generalization - ie, "all" "none" "everybody" "no one"
2. No insults
3. Logical and thought provoking
4. A measured level of exaggeration regarding human behavior
        a. This was done without breaking the usefulness of the post, while making it an excellent mental visual of the humor being conveyed.

I am plenty resourceful enough to not go without basic comms also.
The problem is that lack of funds, knowledge, or disability can make this quite impossible for some. I would bet good money that these "some" also just happen to be a good portion of those still using POTS lines.

This isn't feasible. The central office has large backup generators and fuel stores. There are a LOT of cell towers out there. implementation and monthly maintenance alone would be an extremely high cost.

If it could be done, that would be really great. Until your cell phone battery died....

It is confusing to me that so many here do not comprehend how important it is that there is a communications option for times when power has failed for extended periods. I do understand how people could see wireless and VOIP options as more than sufficient if they've never experienced an ice storm that takes out power for 1 or more days in an area. Carriers are required to maintain landline 911 service for extended periods. This service does not require the end user to supply anything but a simple handset, as the signaling is analog, and the line has 48 volts of power with sufficient current to power devices compliant with ringer equivalency specifications.

Cell towers do have backhaul to central office or data center terminated IP network. The problem is that it's not typical to have onsite power other than the same power that goes to homes and businesses, with at best a short term backup power available. Even so, cell phone batteries die. Landline power has proven to be available even an entire region has rolling blackouts, ice storms, etc.

I think that removing POTS would result in very bad results, up to and including lives lost, if it happens.

Accurate prediction or not, you've presented a very clear and easily understood comparison between then and now. I find it both interesting and plausible.
I also find myself hoping it never occurs as presented, because preventive measures are taken.

You started with an absolute. That is really all that was necessary to expect that the rest was some kind of emotional rhetoric.

The next thing you did was tack on "without exploiting the work of many, many other people for their ill-gotten gains" as requirement for not meeting your 100%/absolute/black and white part of the statement.

In fact, the entire post is a just baseless hyperbolic defamatory attacks on the very wealthy.

I have great disdain for how lopsided wealth concentration is in our country. I just feel that the focus should be on the apparent private industry and government collusion to maintain or expand the gap. Making broad, generalized attacks on groups of people may be easier and make for better agitation, but it lacks any nuance, is deceptive and divisive, and slowly stacks up to impede any reconciliation.

I get it, sort of.
Yet I've lived long enough to remember when politics wasn't part of nearly every conversation. Especially in high profile, not politically affiliated events. There were unwritten boundaries that most followed. Those boundaries absolutely had plenty of room for espousing the virtues of your political/religious/sexual/etc choices. It was a much more peaceful time on the whole. Yes, objectively.

I honestly give zero fucks about his or anyone else's views, if we are not sitting down and discussing it together.

If you have to take a celebratory event and twist it into a vitriolic, ranting monologue, I tune straight out, leave, or change the channel. I see too many people living politics, religious views, racial views, etc as chips on their shoulders, and treating much of their time as some kind of destructive crusade.

I like that you put this thought into it.
There is a bit too much focus on -just- CO2, lately, and atmospheric effects. Methane is a much stronger gas than CO2 in that arena, but harder to control.
With that said your biking has no real effect on what some folks are hyper-focused on, and this very specific topic, but the big picture view is a lot more important than trading a current problem for creating a potentially bigger future problem.

I run into this exact same problem in considering using ICE vehicles versus electric. There are some very terrible environmental issues attached to producing, (attempting to partially), recycling, and disposing the batteries.

Look up switchgrass as fuel. Fast growing, burns pretty danged clean, and ( before the inventors disappeared off google....) makes a very high octane fuel. I'm talking A-Fuel for cars. Think 1970s leaded gasoline performance, with no lead. Certain large interests seem to have pushed and kept it aside from becoming potentially mainstream. It was used in a (small) airstrip in Indiana as Aviation Fuel, not sure if it still is, or if the patent was bought, etc.

All I see now is info on it being an Ethanol equivalent, and I am pretty certain that the married chemists that created the "good stuff" had a differing formulation, as Ethanol isn't a good fuel at 100% concentration. At all.

Anyway, aside from that sad little rant, the point is that we have to consider the full picture on anything we do that is supposed to improve global warming/climate change/whatever and how it affects our treatment of the environment.

.... And I have brought many arguments against large companies as well as government entities storing data to the "cloud", except as a faster/better version of tape backup. US Army Recruiting and Human Resources Command had a big presentation from Microsoft, when MS first jumped on the Data Center = Cloud bandwagon. There were already redundant Data Centers under direct Army control, onsite, fully secured, and staffed with government employees that can (practically) never be fired.

No employee headcount cost reduction, and IT is a huge increase over normal civil service pay, even at same "grade". Expense to decommission a lot of equipment. Rely upon public internet for communications (although fully encrypted, and not classified data, as that's an isolated network), and large increases in bandwidth cost.

Last , and most important, trusting a third party entity with your data. That was always the deal breaker. Even in the case of the secured section of the data center collocation scenario. It's still in the hands of a corporation, and not truly yours.

I am interested in opinions and information that differs from what I have.

As to this Google Drive thing - Business accounts are paid for. If only free accounts were affected, then free doesn't mean any guarantee.

It's akin to wanting firefighter pay for working in the County Clerk office.

I get it, others here really seem lost. If the occasional conference or travel is a requirement, it's a requirement. Those job specifics are set by the employer. Plenty of other things can be negotiated, except the base job description....

This isn't informative. A large mexican drug cartel gang "reportedly" put up signs in ONE town stating not to traffic.... From your own link: "Even if the cartel were to stop its production and sale of fentanyl in Sinaloa, those operations could continue in many other Mexican states where the cartel has a presence."

The GOP proposal was to hold ALL discretionary budget spending to 2022 levels through 2024. That is not a cut.

The scheduling problems were in Windows. Microsoft made Windows recognize the "weak" cores. It's likely automatic to sense the AMD versions that will come out. If not, I expect the update will be out before/at the CPU release.

Honest question-
Glass that is old enough looks wavy. This is because it settles. Is this a different glass, or could the glass distort to the point that the data is irretrievable?
I was told long ago that glass has characteristics like a fluid. An extremely slow to move fluid, but a fluid nonetheless.
I followed protocol on this one, and did not read the article one bit :-)

There is nothing wrong with that method compared to physical media, with caveat(s) applied for folks like myself.

1. It can be a bit difficult to track to a lossless copy of most music
2. It can be very difficult to get 4k in high quality - we're talking about 15-50 GB of data or more

The reason I bring these up is that it takes some hunting (fishing, if you'd rather) to get better than "tolerable" quality in this fashion.

So getting a solid level of quality can take some effort. Then there is the bit of potential legal issues....

I pay for 5 different A/V streaming services, and TIDAL for audio streaming, and the better your playback equipment is, the more you notice that all video streaming is a compromise at best, and TIDAL doesn't have a completely lossless music catalog. A lot of it, but nowhere near 75% even.

I do the streaming option now, because for movies, I only get what they offer for quality, and it is normally 1080p or 1440/4K with a good quality surround implementation. The compression used often does hamper video quality, but the streaming services offer a baseline audio and video quality that is well above "tolerable". So - low personal effort, but zero ability to get true blu-ray quality.

With the 'fishing' version, you just need patience, time, and some personal effort on a consistent basis, and it is likely that one can get even lossless rips of almost everything you'd want.

For me, I have (barely) enough money to pay versus losing some of my time and putting in the effort.

Misunderstanding there. Poor editing on my part. Yes, I looked not bright due to cut and paste fail. Thanks for not ridiculing me as much as I should have been :-)

I was referring to the Palestinians with the why not just attempt recapture part.

I was curious why the horrible acts instead of recapturing whatever it is claimed Israel took?

This stuff has been ongoing for decades, and if you get to the point of rape, murder and torture of unarmed citizens, you are no longer in a legitimate struggle. You are a bunch of human shit stains that need high temperature removal. Like autoclave temps...