Yeah, "would you, personally, forgo this" is a very different value proposition vs. "would you delete this from civilization".
A single person might choose the internet over plumbing because at worst they have to compost and use an outhouse, which is less inconvenient than being locked out of most web services.
But while giving up the internet globally sends you to the 1980s, giving up plumbing globally sends you to the 1780s. YouTube and Amazon ain't worth chamberpots, dessicated skyscrapers, and regular cholera outbreaks that would reduce most cities into dysfunctional public health disasters.
As in "lacks running water," meaning you have to dispose of a building's worth of piss and shit at street level multiple times per day. And if it's a residential building, that means no water for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc. (You could ship in thousands of gallon jugs per day, but that's a logistical nightmare.)
Like a world without elevators, urban life without plumbing very quickly becomes unsustainable in buildings above a certain size.
The piss and shit problem is real, but not nearly as bad as you're imagining; I've written a bit based on my extensive shit-related experience and shit-related human history in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908441.
Burning Man recommends 6 liters of water per day per person for bathing, cooking, drinking, etc.: https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/ But that can generally be cut in half when you're anywhere other than one of the world's driest deserts in the middle of summer. This means you need to bring in your own weight in water roughly once a month; if there's no elevator, and you can safely lift 25% of your own weight, you can lug it up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator, you can probably bring the water up the elevator every month or two.
About a third of that water has to eventually go back down in the form of piss, which is not a major problem if you have sealable plastic bottles to store it in. There's always the risk of an unpleasant accident with that approach, of course, but that's rare.
So I don't think there's ever a building size where a lack of indoor plumbing makes urban life unsustainable. If you're strong enough to walk up and down the stairs every day, you're strong enough to carry water up the stairs once a week. If there's an elevator that you can ride carrying two children, you can also ride it carrying water, once a month. Throughout history, and today in poor rural areas, most people have always had to carry their water much farther than that.
I think they meant it's a disservice to act like these panopticons are inefficient/ineffective and thus not a real threat. Even current-gen AI plus mass surveillance would make it trivially easy to build dossiers and trawl communications for specific ideas.
Thanks for the clarification, it went over my head. Re-reading the comment chain multiple times it's now clear that OP was alluding to the ulterior motive, and the ulterior motive being effective, which I agree with. Again, thanks for taking the time to clarify.
My understanding of it has been that aphantasiacs can only imagine in terms of verbal descriptions, not images. If that's the case, it seems like visual analogy would be a good differentiator.
For example: without any internal monologue, think of the Sydney Opera House, and then name some other objects it resembles.
Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins based purely on visual similarity, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.
(Likewise, if you gave a non-aphantasiac a written list of visual attributes the Sydney Opera House and ask them to name similar objects without picturing anything visually, it might be much more difficult to get the same range of answers.)
In addition to ads on their web properties, they still have a sizeable (though aging) userbase that they milk for unnecessary services. I cancelled my mom's AOL subscription years ago and they were charging something like $25/mo when the only thing she used was their (free) email service -- though of course during the cancellation they touted things like antivirus and ID theft protection that she apparently had access to. It's a legacy of when people paid them for their internet access -- no telling how many retirees (or estates) continue paying each month.
"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money." If this is a widespread Boomer phenomenon, it explains a lot. I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
>"Unexamined legacy subscriptions paid without a thought," is another way of saying, "Has too much money."
I constantly see ads for services like RocketMoney which helps people find and cancel subscriptions. I could arguably be in the "too much money" camp, but I couldn't imagine seeing an unknown/unused charge on my credit card bill and not immediately cancelling it. Nonetheless, RocketMoney seems like a widely used product.
Doesn't help that sometimes the charges are coded like *TST VENDOR ACCT #1541*
I don't go over my bill every month but get a notification upon every new charge, and sometimes the only way I know that a charge I just put on at a store is the same one I got a notification for is because the charge amount is some relatively unique number.
> I still kick myself for spending 6x MVNO pricing on my cell phone plan with a legacy carrier whose features I didn't need.
I have a friend who tried to switch to a MVNO (Cricket, I think) to save money and immediately switched back. Even though both companies were on the same network, the MVNO customers must have had a lower priority, because their service level was noticeably worse when literally the only thing that changed was the SIM card.
There's a good reddit, i think NoContract, where you can go to learn more about MVNOs. There are several tiers of them in practice and they each have their own "catches" and "advantages". I used Cricket many years ago when they had a punishing speed cap. In the modern days some of these caps have been relaxed, but as you suspected, prioritization is the main way the actual carriers differentiate themselves from the MVNOs that sell access to the same towers. The worst MVNOs have terrible priority and in any well-populated area congestion makes them super slow almost all the time.
The thing is, this is highly variable -- and also geographically variable -- and some MVNOs can now offer similar priority as a mainstream plan. US Mobile is one, which I've been using for a couple years. Their neat advantage is that they will sell you a SIM (or e-sim) that rides on your choice of the big 3, and they'll also let you port between them without any other change to your account. They call this "Tele-Port". Some people will do that even just to go on a vacation to a state with different "best carrier", since there's nothing stopping you.
The only time deprioritization has been a problem for me is when I've run out of data on my limited plan. With the major carrier, it was still usable; with the MVNO, it was not. As long as you stay below your plan limit (or, for those on unlimited, don't try to tether and use hundreds of gigabytes a month), it's essentially the same service.
I switched from T-Mobile to Google Voice a few years ago for this reason. With 5 lines on the plan the T-Mo version was way too expensive. But then Google Voice raised their prices and T-Mobile offered as much better multi-line discount and I ended up switching back. Also, Google Voice tech support is absolute dogshit.
It is easy to miss a subscription for something on a bill when it is less than £30. I had a match.com subscription I had forgotten about for about 7 years.
That business model is what a lot of tech companies actually bank on that why they require a credit card on a free sign up.
The way you are using irresponsible is perverse. e.g. Being Irresponsible in this context would be remortgaging your house, while unemployed and using all the money to buy gadgets.
Forgetting that you have a small amount deducted for a service you are no longer using, isn't. It is minor oversight.
The way that language is abused by people when it comes to these sorts of subjects is bordering on semantic manipulation. Which in itself is a form of deceit.
It's a difference of degree, not kind. 30 bucks thrown into a corporate black hole instead of a handful of meals, or gas for a day of driving delivery, or medicine. An hour or two or three of a low-income earner's productivity, every month, possibly for years, because... you didn't care to spend 5 minutes looking at your bank or credit card statement? Come on.
But, of course, no one can tell off the comfortable class. It's "perverse" and "abuse" and "deceit" and "manipulation". eyeroll
If the subject were as minor as you say, you wouldn't be trotting out that kind of characterization. I hit a nerve.
Ain't just boomers. Anybody with kids, and no existential financial crisis. I just finally managed to cancel an unexamined legacy subscription paid without a thought — after I noticed WTF I have one Adobe subscription, not 3, across 2 cards ... unfortunately the noticing part took like 3-4 years.
Additionally: it seems likely that it was the result of gas station pump skimmers, just because the card in question had never been used for any other kind of transaction.
I hate to admit it, but it’s like me and my Digitalocean bills (:
I don’t want to think about how much money I’ve paid them over the years for VMs I no longer need. A week ago I finally pulled the plug on those servers. Not a moment too soon…
God, I hated that phrase. Not because it was wrong, but because it was so weirdly soft and indirect. A bundle of ignobles! An assortment of the unseemly!
A single person might choose the internet over plumbing because at worst they have to compost and use an outhouse, which is less inconvenient than being locked out of most web services.
But while giving up the internet globally sends you to the 1980s, giving up plumbing globally sends you to the 1780s. YouTube and Amazon ain't worth chamberpots, dessicated skyscrapers, and regular cholera outbreaks that would reduce most cities into dysfunctional public health disasters.