I think it's both, but good language skills generally go hand in hand with an ability to think.

With call centres, especially in developed nations, it's hard to hire and even harder to retain staff as it's a terrible job no-one wants. So you're starting with a pool of applicants that is either desperate or can't get a job in a supermarket. So your good workers are going to be looking for the first job thats better and that will be almost any job. Even if they stay, they get promoted pretty quick (or poached by other departments) if they have any aptitude so you're back to trying to recruit because turnover is insane.

AI could actually improve call centres, not because AI is any good but because most call centres are fucking terrible... and I mean terrible even if they're run with the best of intentions, let alone when they get run as cheaply as possible.

Don't tell him about those pesky consumer protection laws either, he'll shit a kitten. That darn EU, looking after ordinary Europeans over corporate greed... I mean who do they think they are?

This. A lot of sites just have a perfunctory "we use cookies on this site" banner that disappears quickly because they aren't trying to violate the GDPR and the easiest way to do that is to collect as little data on the visitors as possible. The only reasons these banners are even there is because some lawyer is justifying their exorbitant fees.

If you want to stop the annoying popups, stop doing business with companies that sell your private data to all and sundry and support GDPR like laws. Also get "I Still Dont Care About Cookies", it'll take care of almost all of the cookie popups. You should already be running something like Privacy Badger to thwart their attempts to spy on you.

This, a 400 mile range isn't that good when you've a 5 hour charging time. Electric cars might be a bit more appealing to the average commuter if you had an 80 mile range but could charge to full within 15 mins. Current battery technology doesn't permit this.

This, "electrifying" a design adds an additional £10,000 to the price, a Volkswagen UP! is about £13,000 where as the E-UP! is £23,000. It doesn't make sense to try and make these commodity cars, you're paying 3 series money for a VW city car.

Current battery technology is just not suitable for electric cars. If we're going to bet on a yet to be developed technology, my money is on sustainable alternative fuels.

They were making assumptions, the type which can often go against the average citizen and it should not be such.

There are liberals on the supreme court?!

VERY much so...

Kagen, Jackson and Sotomayor....I dunno if I got the spelling right on those...

Tik Tok sprung out of nowhere and killed Vine and whatever, and grew at an insane rate. Such doesn't happen in a dictatorship without funny business behind it. I don't know if it involves secret spyware, but just letting the oligarchs have a finger in the company's skyrocketing value is more than a sufficient reason to Rochambeau them.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I'll bet you are the life of the party, amiright?

Personally, I'd rather stay young at heart and mind....especially when the body starts to fail a bit.

Can you cite some examples of overreach besides vague recollections?

Sackett vs EPA is the one I was thinking of...easy to google my friend.

And I found one from NPR to satisfy your liberal bent...

;)

This ruling arrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and the agency's power to regulate waterways and wetlands.

There have been others, this is setting precedent in a number of unrelated cases of citizens vs govt agency overreach.

A number of pending 2A cases going before SCOTUS use this and other rulings to fight against the ATF in their recent rulings...some of which turn millions of every day citizens into felons overnight for buying weapons that the ATF expressly stated for years (in writing) that it was legal to buy and own....pistol braces for one, and even the bump stock case.

I'll leave those for you to google.

here does it state anything will be shutdown? This about cleaning up their act which might cut into the constant record quarterly profits.

Well, to start with, it is expressly mentioned in the title of this thread:

"New Rule Compels US Coal-Fired Power Plants To Capture Emissions - or Shut Down"

EVs are perfectly fine for daily commutes within a 120 mile round trip (just pulled that number out of my ass with 1 hour each way @ 60mph) as long as you can charge at home over night. The entire problem for those potential customers is PRICE PRICE PRICE.

Everyone seems to be missing a BIG factor that isn't price.

It's the fact that a LARGE, very significant number of people do not live in single family dwellings they own with off street parking where they can "charge overnight"....

Right now as it stands, they are not interested in EVs either as that refueling is VERY inconvenient.

Sure, but the public demands some God-given right to drive everywhere that is not urbanized or otherwise densified enough to encourage alternative modes of transit like ebikes (bikeshare is in a lot of these locations already, often with government funding e.g. Washington DC's capital bikeshare). There is an unbelievable lack of acknowledgement that the roads infrastructure and city/town layout disaster we have created requires a change in thinking. BEVs are a politically appealing & personally appealing - they are more fun to drive - solution to at least making the driving everywhere issue produce less smog.

You seem to think that everyone in the US yearns to live in a dense urban city, sharing walls and stacked on top of each other like rats.

That simply is not the lifestyle everyone WANTS.

God given right? Well, I believe everyone has the GGR to live however most makes them happy. And for me...it's having a single family dwelling, where I don't share walls with anyone, I have a back yard where I can keep and fire up my wood burning offset smoker, or ceramic grill (lump charcoal)....park my motorcycle...have room for friends to come over and maybe set up for a big crawfish boil, etc.

I'd not be happy in an urban city where I couldn't plant my summer veggie garden and BBQ....and basically HAD to walk everywhere and buy groceries multiple days of the week.

I have no animosity to those that prefer that, but I do believe in CHOICE in the US, and I like the choices I have.

I'm far from being alone in this train of thought.

I suspect it has far more to do with price than anything. iPhones are just too damned expensive, even on the low end. You can get a decently built, solidly performing Android phone for $200 or less. If you're not an iTunes user, or iMessage devotee, there just isn't any real reason to pick an Apple phone over an Android phone.

The public demand argument (it's there, cost is the issue currently)

It's not just cost....it's range anxiety, and the fact that not everyone has a single family home they own with covered parking where they can recharge overnight....and the lack of charging infrastructure in the vast swaths of land between CA and NYC on the extreme coasts.

For a number of reasons, the people that really want EVs....have them, the rest of the country for the most part is "meh"....and not really in the market.

At least not for the present. I don't know of any one in my circle of friends that owns an EV. I only know of one, that had a Prius years back, and told me him and his wife are thinking of getting maybe an EV Jeep in the future, but other than that, I don't know of anyone with interest in going EV just yet.

I haven't seen any in my neighborhood....middle class. I see a few teslas here and there...mostly Uber drivers from what I've observed around town.

This is in the New Orleans area.