Corporate America's offloading of customer "support" to mistake-prone bots is nearly complete, it seems. Getting a human on the phone becomes more and more difficult -- a deliberate strategy. Even non-monopoly/cartel businesses are doing this, which is amazing to me.

A carpenter friend in California told me today that the price of copper has gone through the roof -- e.g. $100 for a short section of pipe. He said the data centers are hoovering up raw materials in such a frenzy that the cost of essentially all construction materials is insane. I haven't seen […]

Just noticed the new bookmark feature here. Fantastic. Now, how do I find old bookmarks?

Doing the belt+suspenders option: Cloning current drive; backing up home directory, making app lists, etc., and upgrading in place. If one fails I can revert (albeit with some hassles).

I still remember the day in 1976 when Gary Kildall typed in "dir" to an "A>" prompt on his hazeltine green-screen character display to show me a directory listing on his 8080-based, eight-bit computer running the first release of CP/M, the first real microcomputer operating system (that Gary […]

Filled out an online form, and to get a copy of my answers I am required to sign into Microsoft. Hell, no. One more reason I despise the greedy control freaks who run Big Tech at this point.

The bi-annual dilemma has arrived: Do I install the latest Ubuntu LTS (26.04) as an upgrade on top of 24.04 or do I wipe out the current (backed-up) drive and install from scratch and do the tedious reinstallation and tweaking of applications, scripts, settings, etc?

More and more it looks like the big "AI" companies are ripping off their customers. It's the American way, of course, but this stuff looks egregious -- and it's going to push people with common sense toward the open-source local models […]

The tech oligarchs are rallying around Elon Musk to block a filmmaker from advertising a deeply reported documentary that lays bare what a slimy -- and dangerous -- person Musk is […]

Succinct metaphor for sky-high stock market while regular people's lives worsen: "Watching the stock market and declaring the economy healthy is like watching the growing python [strangling its prey] and declare that everything inside its coils must be thriving." […]

All corruption, all the time in Trump world: U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for Trump-praising advertisements running on right-wing media. It's a transfer of our money to media scumbags that are effectively part of the regime […]

Susan Collins isn't just a pretend-moderate Republican who's supported almost every catastrophic Trump policy and nominee (including all the current radical-right Supreme Court "justices"). She's also corrupt as hell […]