Most landlines today are VOIP.

A lot of corporate apps (i.e. that people are required to use for work) will not install on phones that aren't receiving security updates, which effectively "bricks" them.

"en masse" not "on mass"

sincerely,
a pedant

https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... I found/ordered this one after wondering the same!

Being able to search a specific site's contents isn't remotely the same as searching a specific "context" and most modern search engines have removed Boolean operators.

I don't think that's true at all: Google has *so many* ways of tracking you already that it's silly to think that they'd need to use their CAPTCHA service to do it. Having said that, the reasons I'm aware of are still nefarious. The Google CAPTCHAs are a great way for Google to dissuade uses from using their competitors' browsers (I rarely see them when using Chrome, they're constant on Firefox) and a way for them to train their machine learning models (e.g. primarily for self-driving cars, which is why the pics' odd perspectives are from the roof of cars where those sensors are).

I have the same use pattern and use DDG as my primary/default search engine: I just add "!g" if I want to see Google's results. I add "!g" reflexively for the "zero click" type queries and "!b" for porn**.

**image search

This is true for a savvy user. There are some users, however, that benefit from the fact that a password manager won't populate on illegitimate pages if they get phished.

I think we can trace this all back to Lee Atwater and his "wedge issues". Our political landscape has been redrawn to excite strong emotional reactions and social media's algorithms are tuned for engagement. Pointing fingers at either side is fully reasonable but essentially ineffectual.

your pithy reply: "Except heroin."

I understand that everyone is different, I was not the one making absolutist claims.

I've had friends that tried heroin and said it just made them sleepy. I personally tried oxy several times in college without developing a dependency (or even a fondness) for it.

The problem isn't our lack of comprehension of the second-order effects, it's with the messaging.

There is a lot of really affordable hardware out there. Just last night I bought an i5 with 8gb ram last night for $150 to replace an old Surface 3, which was my daily driver. Browsing the web is fine on lower-spec systems if you run script blockers.

You should volunteer in a retirement home and reassess your assumptions. They are not full of childless people.

My supervisor's father was employed as a fact-checker at a major newspaper when he was younger; while in his 90's, he regularly fell for social media hoaxes that were blatantly/obviously false to his son. Ignore the "OK Boomer" flamebait and there is a relevant argument to be made about cognitive decline in the elderly.