It used to be a place to quickly get content on things from home improvement, to news, documentaries, music, etc. Now it's inundated with inane AI-generated clickbait. When you spend more time filtering the junk than consuming the content you were searching for, it's a loss.

Yuck.

The carrier generally isn't even worried that you'll abscond with the financed phone. The manufacturer often gives them a fat rebate to offset that cost. They are almost entirely focused on retaining the ongoing service fees and subscriber count. THAT is a critical metric for their leadership and "the street".

Don't "finance" your phone with your carrier. Buy whatever UNLOCKED phone you want/need and dispense with vendor lock from the beginning.

All the wireless carriers are slavishly trying to retain subscribers and avoid customer churn so the outcome was inevitable once the rules were relaxed.

Best,

100%. A highly transactional company that's just looking to make their annual uplift in service fees from their customers has found a way to keep their name in the news. Surely this AI integration is worth another 10-20% to you, right megacorp?

zzzzzzzzzz....

Sure, given the current land grab, brute force is being used to "win" and demanding unsustainable demands on power generation. The real winner is going to be the country/company that figures out how to get an "AI" solution that works reasonably well while finding a significantly more power efficient solution to the problem.

What's the over/under bet on when there's an efficiency inflection point and there are suddenly thousands (tens of thousands?) of expensive datacenters that are no longer needed?

Is there a reason why you can't find another provider? Maybe there isn't one you can switch to in a month and a half, but big bang price increases with little notice doesn't bode well for your future with Rackspace.

Best,

It's interesting that the World Bank on the one hand is promoting the following:

This is why the World Bank Group is focused on doing development right: resilient, fiscally sound, efficient, and built to last: smart development. We are supporting our clients to achieve their smart development goals, which include meeting their own Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This includes projects that are building resilience, or that are managing emissions responsibly.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/t... ...while also pinning economic resilience on the AI investment bubble not being disrupted....which seems to be a goal that's not in line with their stated goals of more efficient and fiscally sound development while reducing carbon emissions.

China has a population of almost 1.5 billion people and has indexed its economy on manufacturing and heavy industry. So it's got 4x the population of the United States at ~350 million. Even though China uses less energy per capita, they "make it up in volume."

And when the economy takes a significant downturn, your electrician, plumber, and mechanic will also have significantly more job opportunities than the ambulance chaser.

It's also reminiscent of the "we must have cloud everything" frenzy. It didn't matter if any value was created as long as everyone knew it was "cloud first" or (worse) just lift and shift the lot to (insert public cloud provider) until the inevitable hangover occurred when lack of governance and strategy resulted in huge ongoing cloud provider charges with little in the way ROI to show for it.

There are almost 6000 colleges in the United States. "Dozens" of closures amounts to well under 1%. I think we'll be just fine.

Ads or no ads...

I love the bright bulbs who think advertising is the answer to every ROI problem. Show me a customer (for anything other than people bored during the Superbowl halftime) that actually wants to see and gets value out of a commercial. Actively engaging in behavior that people clearly don't like isn't a great way to build a business.

Time to solve this like brahs.....nerf guns at 10 paces in their mother's basement.

That is precisely what happened.

Least privilege fellas.......

MSFT will do it the same way they're doing it with their other products. Copilot will become a "feature" that can't be turned off.

You won't have any real choice in the matter.