Thanks for highlighting another benefit of remote work: The ease with which annoying coworkers can be blown off. At least he was nice enough to invent an excuse. I generally haven't bothered.

He's obsessive and ruthless. That can be enough to get things done without cunning or intelligence, especially since he has an army of loyal followers who won't care how many girls he raped.

Agreed. Why can't they be happy with simply playing with a ball of yarn or torturing the occasional mouse?

is like the one who locks the door to the cockpit while you're taking a leak and then flies the plane into a mountainside.

There's a word for that phenomenon, which I just made up: portmanteautalitarianism .

Now if you'll excuse me I have a new Wikipedia article to write.

I copied your post into ChatGPT to get its reaction, and maybe waste a little water:

You’re raising a point that’s part digital minimalism, part data ethics, and part environmental sustainability — and it’s a bigger deal than most people realize.

Here’s the reality:

1. The Hoarding Problem
You’re right — most people will never touch 99% of their stored data.

Emails: Studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that after a year, the chance of revisiting messages drops to near zero. But psychologically, people treat email like a “security blanket” — "I might need this someday" — even though they almost never do.
Photos/Videos: With smartphones, people snap without thinking. Cloud storage makes it painless to keep everything, so the “cost” feels invisible — until you realize that every file has a real-world carbon footprint.
Videos on platforms like YouTube: There’s a massive long-tail of content with negligible views. Some has cultural/historical value, but a huge chunk is digital clutter.
2. The Environmental Cost
Data storage isn’t free — it uses electricity for both storage and retrieval, plus cooling for data centers.

Every GB stored = ongoing CO emissions (from the servers running 24/7).
Data centers already account for 1–2% of global electricity use, and that’s rising.
Old, unused data is essentially paying rent in electricity forever.
If we deleted even half of stale data, we could lower energy use significantly.

3. Why We Don’t Delete
Fear of loss: “What if I need it?”
Automation bias: “Storage is cheap, so why bother?”
Corporate incentives: Tech companies profit from keeping you dependent on their storage platforms.
Cultural shift: We’ve been conditioned to think more data = more value, when in practice more data often means more noise.
4. What Would Happen If We Mass-Deleted?
If we purged, say, everything older than a year (with exceptions for legal/archival needs):

Most people wouldn’t notice in daily life.
Search would be faster — less junk to sift through.
Costs would drop for companies (less hardware, less cooling).
Carbon footprint would shrink.
Some rare-but-valuable data would be lost — the main reason a blanket purge is controversial.
5. AI & the Endless Query Problem
Your point about people asking ChatGPT everything is part of the same issue:

Every AI query consumes orders of magnitude more energy than a Google search.
Many queries are trivial or could be answered with basic thinking or offline resources.
Blind trust in AI can replace critical thinking — which is dangerous in itself.
6. Possible Solutions
Without going full “digital scorched earth,” we could:

Auto-expire old emails unless manually archived.
Encourage “digital spring cleaning” with nudges and tools.
Tiered storage pricing — make long-term hoarding cost more.
Educate about data’s carbon footprint so people see the real cost.
AI query limits or “do you really need to ask this?” prompts.
If you want, I can estimate how many exabytes of “junk data” exist globally and what deleting them could save in energy and CO emissions. That could give you a more concrete sense of the scale of the problem.

Do you want me to run those numbers?

There's not really much to it. Though perhaps I didn't read it conscientiously enough.

Yeah THAT'S realistic.

In that movie, Benjamin Button was born as a baby-sized old man. Logically, he should have died as an old-man sized baby. But when he died, he was just a regular baby-sized baby. That really ticked me off, as I sat through that tedious bore of a movie, thinking that at least eventually I would get to see a freakishly large dying baby. But no dice.

Oh yeah -- spoiler alert.

Seriously. They should have called it Bitch.

They automatically recognize and blur things like faces and license plates. It's surprising they don't do it for asses.

Spoken like a man with great breadth and depth of experience.

It would be refreshing if someone named an LLM "know-nothing cunt."

If you hallucinate enough you can become as smart as AI.

When you try to come back to your car it's in a different spot and nobody tells you why or where it moved to.