sturger

After your internet is shut, you’ll be forced to buy Google Prison Internet, where you’re surveiled 24/7 and you’re only allowed to download ads.

The key is to tell your audience something they wish would be true.

“Honey, you know what would really tie this room together? A giant electronic advertising billboard!”

Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal.
That’s an excellent idea!

all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets.
Ha! Great observation. There’s no way in hell stores are going to give up on gambling cash. :-)

I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me.
Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit.
One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.

Good point. A US department store chain – Kohl’s – has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?

I more or less avoided Kohl’s, so I’m not sure how that was handled.

I saw demos online where they could also determine heart rate through video. The example I saw was a video of a newborn’s face.

I’ve heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?

robo voice: There are 352 hot, single women in your area.

robo voice: 350 of them have a pulse.

Your door is ajar.

Ah. That explains it. Conservative pols are extorting porn sites for donations.

Ironically ew music has never been more accessible, but few people take advantage because of the noise we have to wade through.

Also remember that Torvalds invented Git and gave it away for free. The Corps are stealing the free software and leveraging it to force everyone to give them money instead.

Your point about music is a great analogy. Basically:

1. People play music and people enjoy listening to music.
2. Businessman inserts himself between the musician and the audience to “deliver the music”.
3. Businessman charges listeners huge money to deliver music, gives no money to musicians.
4. Businessman the decides to replace the musician with a robot (e.g. “AI”)
5. Businessman explodes market. Listeners leave. Businessman gets bailout from government.

From Java beans™ to Magic Beans.

You don’t have to influence a populace. Just purchase a subgroup willing to do violence on the populace.

5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.

My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.

We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.

I’m not sure which is worse:

• greedy, irresponsible tech bros trying to convince everyone that their pinball machine can fly an airplane.
• people desperate to let the same pinball machine tell them what to do with their lives.

Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.

/s