That's far more to do with the death of the shopping "high street", because of rising rents and staffing costs.

Every week some famous high street retail outlet goes bust, I normally post them on my social media because I find it quite funny that anyone shops in physical stores any more.

The mobile phone stores I see tend to be trashy repair shops and 2nd hand outlets, and cell networks, never the mobile phone manufacturers themselves.

The physical store is dead. And I was a kid in the 80's. I can't even remember the last time I went "into town" to physically do some shopping, and certainly I wouldn't do it for a PC or phone (which you can just order online and are the same product wherever you order it).

I took great joy in even seeing things like my local DIY store die off. There's only so many of those that you need in range of your house, and having more doesn't help anyone. And to be honest, if they just stocked fence panels, doors and other large items they'd do just as well. Nobody is buying a screwdriver or a set of blades or some small ironmongery from a huge retail DIY outlet.

Dumbass business practices have nothing to do with cashless societies.

A business that doesn't have a cheap iZettle/Square/whatever reader under the counter, a backup SIM on a different network, or similar is just asking to lose business. It's like having a cash register that doesn't open... well... find another way to take people's money rather than standing there looking gormless.

And things like those readers are dirt-cheap and charge about 2%. I'd rather be taking 98% of my customer's money than nothing.

Just because some spotty teenage "manager" can't work that out is nothing to do with a cashless apocalypse. It's to do with literally failing to observe the primary rule of IT... always have a backup.

Now if ALL the cell networks and ALL the broadband goes down in an area and ALL the power and ALL the batteries in everything run flat... then you might have a problem. But a store taking literally hundreds of thousands per year, employing several staff, and not bothering to put a $20 reader behind the counter for emergencies? That's nothing to do with the price of a sandwich.

Same used to happen in McDonald's if they had to fall back to handling cash, to be honest. The teenagers just weren't able to do the sums on paper, even. So if the till (checkout) stopped working.... they used to give up or take MINUTES for every customer to add up the total, take the money, work out change, etc.

If you have no payment method, shut the shop. If that seems extreme, well, it's what happened effectively anyway. It's no different. The way to avoid it is to never be without a payment method that works, which means several backups.

Hell, places like supermarkets etc. in my company have local broadband / leased lines AND satellite connectivity on the roof. Because they can't afford to be without it because they would lose thousands every second even in one store.

I've been cashless for 20 years, I've never had a problem. In fact, the only problems I've witnessed were with cash (where stores literally didn't want to take cash, or didn't know how to) and with things like one particular credit card provider falling over, but, hey, I have half a dozen different cards in my wallet alone. Why?

BECUASE YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP.

Wage garnishment is a literal legal process in any developed country.

Haven't been paying your child support? Then your EMPLOYERS are legally required to take it out of your pay before you ever see a penny.

Tax debt, etc. all kinds of reasons why they use it. Sorry but the "I'm going to hide in a cash-only industry" thing is not only outdated but soon to die and actually raises MORE suspicions than just having a bank account. Money laundering regulations are slowly killing off the ability to operate like that and living a cash-only life is becoming increasingly difficult in any developed country now.

All of which are closed systems which have human checking elements before they are finalised.

HR/Payroll, they're just going to take it at its word and it only has to summarise something slightly incorrectly, or use a certain property to make a decision, or reveal the tiniest amount of information to someone else and you have tribunals and lawsuits coming.

Meanwhile, I give their custom to Amazon instead because every time I've ever spoken to their customer service they've understood one thing:

- Customer service is a necessary business expense.

So they normally just refund without question, let you keep the erroneous product, etc. - anything to get you off the line quickly, so long as your account is long-standing, has a good history, etc.

It's really NOT WORTH arguing with your own customers, or upsetting them... they will just go somewhere else for future purchases.

I have always said that - if they don't already - all CRM programmes should show, the second you connect to a phone call, your order history AND the amount of profit that company has made from that one single customer alone in the last year or so.

You're arguing with someone who's given you millions of dollars over decades about a single 2-dollar missing component on a massive order they made? You're insane. They're just going to go elsewhere. It's not even worth the time on the phone call to argue it.

The guy who, by popular consensus, leads the project.

A project which could be forked (and has, a thousand times over), could go elsewhere, could be renamed, could have any number of spinoffs, is the choice of plenty of famous developers who actively work with the intention to get into Linus' tree, including all the big distros.

He's literally the democratic leader and founder of the project. If he was that wrong, people would have gone elsewhere and there's be Linux spinoffs everywhere. Instead, every distro bases their trees on the main Linus kernel tree, include those in use by IBM, Microsoft, et al.

Sorry, but if you don't understand that someone has to put down rules, enforce those rules and rule on those rules and their interpretation... and that the guy who most often that's escalated to for the most definitive answer was basically PUT on that pedestal by countless thousands of developers.... then I don't think you understand that you don't need to be nice, "popular" (in the common sense), or involved in every patch to do that function. You just need to be good at that job, which means technically and academically (in terms of computer science).

You just need to be the person who people seek out to answer those questions, and heed when they give an answer.

Linux is a meritocracy. Those who can't follow the rules, do what's required, update, adapt (e.g. convert their drivers to a new API, etc.), or have the skill and experience to point out where things will go wrong and fix them... they don't last long.

I have had at least three suppliers who I have called up and asked them how to / to turn off the AI features they've introduced.

No, I don't not want your AI "summarising" long helpdesk tickets chains so that people don't bother to read them before telling users what the fix is or how long it'll take.

It will, quite assuredly, affect my future renewals and purchasing of such products if I can't turn it off, and it's something I'll be looking for. We're looking at new HR packages. I hit upon one that said it was an entirely AI-powered HR and payroll package. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a situation more likely to go drastically wrong than AI being used in HR or payroll.

As a Brit, pro-Europe and anti-Brexit, who is quite into my solar...

I think this is a good idea. The money is better spent elsewhere and it's increasingly proven risky to rely on things running across ocean floors. To our nearest neighbours across the channel, we're probably okay, we can monitor that stretch easily enough and none of it is international waters.

But round to Morocco? That's just a nightmare of a project to even start and keeping that cable safe for decades to come? Seems unlikely.

For that price we can build nuclear sites, or HUGE solar or wind farms and just solve the problem ourselves, or more interconnects to closer countries (but I don't think we're at capacity in that regard anyway).

So when they shoved promotional content into your music library against your will and generated worldwide outrage, that WASN'T enough for you?

Microsoft spend decades shuffling where your stuff is stored around, while simultaneously letting every company in existence use that same storage however they liked.

That's on them.

In an ideal world, your documents folder would be under your control, have only your documents, and individual apps would have their own segregated storage that if you want to interact and open in other programs you have to grant permission to do so and it's done via a temporary conduit for just one file.

Having every cheap-shit app on your computer having full access to your documents folder to spam with whatever subfolders and junk they deem necessary was always going to end in tears. Don't even get me started on the two ProgramFiles folders, and the hidden-for-reasons ProgramData folder, and all the subfolders under your user profile.

There's a reason they stopped calling it My Documents. Because most of the crap that's in there isn't my documents at all.

Another specious argument?

Maybe educate your kid. Or lock the cable.

Gosh, if only there were thousands of locations all over the country, in which you could install dozens of chargers, which charge your car more than fast enough, and which were all conveniently located near roads, and which - for instance - could be sited on an existing, now going defunct, site which won't be used as much by ICE cars as time goes by.

The EV charging argument is dead - fast charging and high-capacity batteries. Same way that apartments never used to come with parking spaces at all... things will evolve. Same way they had to add telecoms, laundry rooms, Internet, cable/satellite TV, online rent payments, etc. etc. etc.

If they want the customers, they'll add in EV chargers to the existing spaces. It's really that simple. After a bunch of tenants associations demand it, it'll happen and become the norm. And they'll add their 10% to the cost and realise it's actually a direct revenue stream (unlike all the above which are just ways to entice customers) so long as they don't go silly with it (because then people will just charge elsewhere).

Saying that THAT's going to be the blocker? You're just looking for excuses. It's that simple.

Landlords will start lobbing in EV chargers with a 10% commission as soon as their tenants start demanding them. And then laugh at the free money for doing nothing, because people are too lazy to just drive it down the road to an already-existing gas station converted to have EV points on it.

I'm literally at a workplace with EV charging points, and EV vehicles for company use. They save a fortune on their own transport expenses AND they get revenue from... customers! Willing to charge their EVs! There are sometimes literal arguments over the spaces (e.g. when a non-EV car is blocking an EV charger).

On my way home are a dozen stations with EV charging. And MOST houses (not all, granted) can have an EV charger fitted very simply. And new-builds are starting to mandate them.

Sorry, but "oh the software's a bit clunky" or "my landlord might not want to" is literally the bottom of the barrel for arguments.

For reference, I don't drive an EV. My next car - without doubt - will be an EV. And I'll install an EV charger at home to do it. I literally bought a house years ago with the criteria for having an EV charger... before I ever had an EV. Because, to me, it's like buying a house that isn't on the electric or doesn't have broadband. Whether or not I need/use it this instant, I want my house to be able to do that.

So I bought a house which deliberately has a driveway, a porch with power, and an ideal spot for installing an EV charger. The only reason I don't change today... is an actual problem with EVs... it's a bit pricey to lay out for one up-front. But when my car needs more than a basic service... I'll be pricing it up.

It is a universal constant that when I have a machine, I want to tell it what to do, and I want it to do that.

I don't want it running off doing stuff I don't need it to, nor telling me what I can or can't do, especially when the restrictions are arbitrary and non-technical.

I've already decided at this point that my next machines won't be Windows. I ran Slackware as a primary desktop for 10 years, I'm not scared of it at all... and it did what I asked it to do. But even Linux has systemd nonsense that breaks my "golden rule" all the time now. It is, without question, however one of the closest modern OS to just doing what I tell it to (even if that's "remove systemd").

We lost sight decades ago, and Microsoft aren't making money from Windows any more so they don't really care. There won't be another XP / 7 / 10 in terms of just letting you do what you need to do and getting out of the way as an OS.

The purpose of an OS is to get the hell out of my way and do what I told it to do. Windows increasingly does the opposite. I've given up tolerating it again, and things like the Steam Deck and Valve's input have progressed my old classic gaming to the point where I wanted it to be back in the early Wine/Crossover/Steam Machine days. As usual, that was my only real hangout, because everything boring and technical I want to do could already be done on Linux and with open-source software for years.

Now... I really don't see a reason for Windows to even exist, let alone be the OS of choice.

Enjoy the few years before oil prices surge when everywhere else mandates EV and the demand for oil plummets.

As it is, for decades I heard about nothing else but the cheap fuel in the US compared to the rest of the world... and that's gone REALLY quiet for the last few years. Maybe you need to invade some more oil-producing countries again, that's bound to lower the price, right?

20% of new car sales worldwide are EV (not counting hybrid etc.). And we haven't even STARTED actually taxing/banning fuel based vehicle properly yet.

Embrace -- You are here.
Extend
Extinguish