If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are doing complex calculations across sometimes a couple dozen worksheets, where changing one number can take several seconds to recalculate everything even on a reasonably modern computer.

I live right south of San Francisco so I want to note for the record: I, at least, do actually believe you're making shit up.

Your privacy will be violated any which way, but you won't feel it.

When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

It's even worse: the encrypted SD card can be decrypted by anybody who owns the same device. Meaning practically, it's not encrypted at all.

the manufacturer had the decryption key.

Why does this story not make me feel all warm and fuzzy?

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

Have you seen who's in the White House? Remember: he was voted in. Twice. That only happens in a nation with a widespread case of mental retardation.

if all your customers hate it 10x more than humans?

India should protect its pool of human workers: when the backlash against AI hits full force, they'll be well-positioned to retake the market.

I never thought I'd say I find calling customer support and being greeted by this unmistakable heavy Bangalore accent refreshing and reassuring: at least I know I'm talking to someone who understands my question and not something that serves me the nearest matching boilerplate answer from the support knowledgebase in a sycophantic transatlantic accented tone.

How else will I be able to feel that deep sense of dread when I call any company's customer support and I'm greeted by an overly polite chatbot that's so syrupy it gives me type-2, that doesn't understand my problem and refuses to let me talk to a real person?

Censorship is a big no-no for tech companies. Particularly when it doesn't make then any money.

One of the most fascinating aspects of H2O is the sheer number of forms it can take under different conditions.

The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.

Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.