Hey, I get it, who wouldn't want to have servant appear with your meal at the tap your mobile phone. It makes us feel important and indispensable doesn't it?

The down side is the extra you pay for this service. Someone's got to pay for it, right? The issue is, a significant chunk of the population is blind to this fact, and they even make it worse by using a credit card to pay for the delivered meal, then don't pay the balance off at the end of the month.

The "Live for Today and don't worry about tomorrow" primal drive probably accounts for some of this.

If you're making $62K/year (US Median Wage) or less you're a fool if you use these delivery services, and probably are a fool if you go out to restaurants on a regular basis.

If you're a restaurant owner, you have to ask yourself if the hit to your razor-thin margins is really worth it t outsource delivery. If you have a good location, great food, and great service, coupled with low monthly lease payments, and good control of your food and labor costs tou just might be successful without selling your soul to the food delivery cartels.

Not sure about this. Q has a lot of experience with communications solutions, but they're new to AI processors. I don't know if they'll be able to pull it off.

The biggist issue with AI processors is their power consumption. A rack full of these new AI processors from Q is going to draw 160kW of power.

There's an old saying: "You can t cut your way to profitability" It takes more than that. You need a coveted product and customers who are able to afford it as well.

Delighting customers seems to have fallen by the wayside. Nowadays, there seems to be a arrogant "Take it or leave it" attitude projected by many companies when selling products or hiring employees. Instead it's management, and then distantly, the shareholders which are on the receiving end of the delight.

They aren't the only ones doing the chopping.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/24/tech-layoffs-2025-list/

What we are seeing here is the beginning of a recession. The total number of unemployed workers is going to go up by a few million once the recession takes hold.

Meanwhile everything will be getting more expensive once the cost of the tariffs are passed on to the consumer.

Humans have become too expensive to employ and provide health insurance for. AI and robots will take over.

More evidence we are living in the "Precarious Economy"

If enshittification of Internet platforms l is analogous to the heat death of the universe, what happens after that to cause a new big bang?

Boomer here. Not necessarily true. I use a Linux thin client to watch Youtube. I use a wireless mini keyboard to control the thin client. The TV remote is only used to power on and off the TV.

My fear is that there's too much money to be made by Alphabet to continue to ignore users who run ad-blockers.

When I happens, I figure most people people will suck it up and a few will have nothing to do with it.

Will a proprietary youtube viewer of some kind be required to be downloaded which is drm'ed to death and tracks your every move? (After all you are the product) Ad-blockers would be useless against it since it isn't running in a web browser. You'd need network-level blocking, and the proprietary app could just tunnel everything in an encrypted tunnel to prevent traffic analysis and interference with the unskippable ads with a quiz at the end.

I suspect that this will happen during the next economic downturn. That's when companies start looking harder to find ways to increase revenue.

Unfortunately, that will just make it worse. Managers will be even more desperate to improve cash flow they know that they will be able to extract even more concessions from their employees.

For "Exempt" employees.

https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/rights-work/labour-law/working-conditions/working-time-directive_en

And there never will be anything like it in the United States. Ever. The business lobby is way too powerful at the Federal Level. They will spend whatever it takes to to defeat such an effort.

Anyway you look at it things are going to change in the United States. Whole systems are about to be torn down soon at the Federal and State levels of government. No more government subsidized health care (ACA, Medicare, Medicaid) , no more food aid (SNAP), These are coming. The citizenry will be up in arms. Eventually those in power will crack down and the citizenry may lose the right to vote, and the government will rule by edict.

The USA is still a flawed democracy until real attempts at limiting those who can vote take place. Then it will be classified as a "Hybrid Regime" or even an "Authoritarian Regime".

When one source dominates a market that source becomes "orgullosisima": (very proud in Spanish). When companies become very proud, they tend to do stupid things which can cause the whole thing to come crashing down, or just because of the sheer scale of their operations, they expose their customers to too much risk. The problem is that everyone gravitates to the "market leader" thinking that they are the most competent in the market, when in all reality they might not be. The market leader is actually getting drunk off of the profits, and is trying to optimize the business to generate even more profit. Doing that almost always runs contrary to the interests of the customers, (and in a lot of cases, the shareholders and employees too.)

So is AWS probably "pisando el hielo fino"> : Spanish translation : treading on thin ice? Probably not. Are business customers stupid to put all their eggs in one basket? Probably so.

So who should learn a lesson from this: Probably the business customers. AWS will learn indirecty (hopefully). Although they could double down and reduce their rates further and/or deploy additional vendor lock-ins.

" As long as AI doesn't destroy humanity or tank the stock markets, I consider myself extremely lucky to have escaped the AI hype. "

I retired in 2021. AI tanking the stock market, and destroying the United States' ability to issue bonds, and canceling social security payments and medicare is actually the thing I fear the most.

Something bad is going to happen. You can see foreshadowing of it all over the place. Can you do something about it as an average person? No. No matter how you are invested, you are probably going to lose a significant portion of your retirement investments and savings. The well-connected people will know when to pull out of the stock market and bonds before it is news. They will be able to keep more of their lifetime savings, but the rest of us will be toast.

You won't know where it will come from, but the "black swan" will rear it's ugly head. My guess is sometime before the next presidential election.

A lot of people are going to get hurt by this. We may even see a version 2.0 of the great depression, but this time, the government won't care about the plight of the average citizen.

What really is so stupid is "Fake Typing" when you respond to the question. There's no typing going on, you're just red to believe there is because they want you to believe you're talking to someone with a pulse.

and cool climates. Expect consumers to pay more for power in those states.

"and the donor class of the other party doesn't want them to make material changes"

This is spot on, and one of the main drivers why no material changes will ever occur as long as there is really only "one and a half parties" in the United States.

How is this fixed? Probably only by a constitutional amendment stating that all candidates are to be publicly financed in some form which cannot be perverted by special interests.

Will this constitutional amendment ever be ratified? No, not without tremendous sacrifices by the citizenry to dig out of the quasi-authoritarian state we are in now,

Living is becoming more precarious as time marches on.

Most jobs will be come "Work to Live".

The degradation/enshittification has been slowly occurring for some time now and will continue until we get to a point were we were in the mid to late 19th century again. In the mid to late 19th people worked in factories for 14 hours per day 6-7 days per week.

The biggest flaw of the citizens of the USA, as that they don't seem to care about this gradual decline in job quality and living standards. The proverbial frog is being boiled and they don't even know they're cooked yet.

The right to vote will be taken away soon. This because once the citizenry realize they are cooked, they'll try to vote out the politicians who put them in this condition. The politicians in power will have none of this. The politicians in power will break their oath to uphold the constitution and they'll declare martial law under the guise of some kind of national emergency or "invasion".

Anti-vagrancy laws and debtors prisons will make a comeback. People who refuse to work or can't hold down a job will be sentenced to the Workhouses". Those who can't pay their debts will end up in the workhouses as well. Those who can no longer work due to health conditions will be euthanized.