The good old says were when there were about 60 million people on the internet and it was new and unknown.
I think it wasn't social media that changed it for the worse, at least not perse, it was the internet-connected phone.
This is all part of the big corporate hatred of things that are free. Nobody has to pay for wind or solar power, beyond the cost to get started.
There's no monthly bill and THAT worries the utilities and their investors. If consumers got used to free, they would gradually flee the money-minting utility bills that keep $20bn reactors funded. Free cannot be allowed. Freedom cannot be allowed.
The utility companies are terrified of anything that gets people out of the habit of paying those bills. This is one reason fleets of power company trucks flock into disaster areas. A downed power line is a customer not using power and not making money for the power company and they are at risk of finding another source for power, like solar. So they scramble to get the power back on to keep that revenue flowing and the old habit in place.
Every address has lists of people associated with it, whether they currently live there or have ever lived there or are related to people who have or do live there.
It is used all the time in business like banking, insurance, background checks. My former auto insurance company got very concerned after I moved from a house into an apartment building. They could see in their data that a lot of people with driving issues also had the same address, past or present. None of them had anything to do with me, of course. But it was all one big block of people at the same address, including former residents of my particular unit, and that's all they needed to see to panic. The whole place was a red flag to them.
I had to send them a copy of my lease with just my name on it and a notarized statement assuring that none of these other people had access to my vehicle. The fact that it was an apartment building you can see on Google street view did not matter at all. Even after my statement, they still didn't want to keep my policy in force.
Whatever data they were looking at was clearly easy to fill in with info and details but sticky and reluctant to ever drop old data in favor of current info.
This is all the fault of selfish young adults. The more women are educated and able to work and pay for their own lifestyles, the less they want to become moms, which is a very specific and limited role. Why do that when they can live how they like, travel, buy luxury goods if they want and generally live comfortably.
Japanese men, on the other hand, don't particularly want to deal with women who don't exactly need men and don't want to get married any more than the women. Like single women, single working men are free to indulge their hobbies and games or whatever else they want to do. The have jobs sufficient to fund it.
For both sides, getting married and having kids represents a loss of income, but even worse, they lose tremendous amounts of freedom as they are forced into extremely narrow roles for mothers and fathers. Moms will be expected to do all the childcare and keep house and home, while the dads are expected to work ridiculous hours and turn over almost all their income to the wife. She becomes a housewife mom robot. He becomes a work robot. And that's IT.
These are smart people. They see how they were raised. They see what will be expected of them and want nothing to do with it. They are the generation that can say NO.
The government talks big about meaningless changes that do nothing at all to address why young adults are not having kids. They don't want to make the real changes it would take to fix the problem. At this point, the only way to save the population would be to outlaw not having kids.
Yet another dumb decision from Xerox. One sinking ship towing another one.
My employer had been a pure Xerox shop for decades. A legendary loyal customer. That changed when Xerox stuck us with a couple junk color inkjet machines that are absolute trash. We are lucky to get one day a month of run out of them.
Meanwhile, we risked buying a competing machine which turned out to be an incredible workhorse. It never breaks. It runs circles around Xerox. Our workers love it. Management actually listened to the workers and bought more of them and now we are laughing at Xerox as their service techs continue to retire and leave anyway.
There's almost nobody left to fix their machines. Dozens of techs in our city alone have left. They have like one guy left and he's ready to leave.
There is absolutely no way in hell anyone in our area would invest in more Xerox printers at this point.
Another related problem is that the mail-order providers (and possibly Amazon) will not call your doc for refills.
Amazon does contact the doctor office. Not sure if they call or just send an electronic request. But they always ask my doctor, somehow, and always get denied because I have to go see the doc in person to get new refills. My doctor never ever ever issues refills without collecting her office visit copay.
But at least Amazon does try to ask on my behalf. YMMV
Also getting the wrong Amazon package or delivered to the wrong address is mostly an inconvenience. I have had to deliver Amazon packages to neighbors and vice versa. Getting the wrong prescription is a major problem.
All of my Amazon Pharmacy orders have been delivered by UPS, not Amazon's own drivers. That says a LOT to me about who Amazon trusts more.
I don't think UPS has ever messed up any delivery to my home. Amazon has. Fedex and USPS have. But not brown.
Have used Amazon pharmacy for over a year because it ends up being cheaper than any other option, and that matters when I take 8 different medications every day.
My job provides medical insurance but the prescription co-pays are three or four times what it costs just using Amazon pharmacy and paying out of pocket. It is even cheaper than GoodRx.
But the main downside is that they appeared to have just one pharmacy hub in Miami. The deliveries are by UPS, not Amazon drivers. Make of that what you will. They have not messed up or lost any of my orders.
Gosh this sounds too much like a Bezos fanmail. Yuck. I need my pills.
This problem is impossible to solve. Educated women tend to have fewer children. Education enables opportunities doing things besides being a parent, like working full time.
Many Japanese women who work earn enough to sustain themselves and provide for some luxury goods or travel, without needing a partner. They are happy as they are.
Asking them to be a parent means sacrificing all of that in favor of being a mom who stays at home, because daycare and similar childcare is in extremely short supply and there is almost no government support for working moms. Thus an educated and employed woman accustomed to managing her own life is basically asked to surrender everything and take on the wife and mom role and jumper costume that goes with it. It's no wonder few want to do that.
What is in it for her except some sort of duty to country? It's absolutely not enticing. The government offers pathetic incentives to have kids and does nothing to support women who do choose that path.
On the men's side, many of them aren't even particularly interested in starting a family.
The only way this is ever going to be "solved" is to take unprecedented drastic measures like forbidding women from working jobs above menial level, to force them to marry to survive and hope that produces enough children. This is not going to happen. Nobody would stand for it.
There just soon won't be enough people to stand for or against it either way. Japan has very little time left to fix it and a terrible really bad track record of poor attempts to do anything -IF they even take it seriously at all.
The ones with actual users
These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.
Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.
A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.
Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.
Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.
Actually, it's not impossible at all. The UK grid needs about 3 times the amount of wind and much more solar and 2 terawatts of underground hydrogen storage.
There's enough salt caverns around the UK that can give it that storage, and the hydrogen can be manufactured via electrolysis when the wind and solar is producing too much. It's not very efficient, but renewables are cheap.
It CAN be done.
The Australian grid is rather different, it's a LOT closer to the equator and their renewables are a lot more consistent, so they need a lot less storage in percentage terms.
Programmers do it bit by bit.
