Ah yes, this moral panic is totally different than all the other times people have been whipped into a frenzy by an almost bon existent problem.

We have real problems to solve. I'll leave the fake ones to people like you.

If Judas Priest listened to what you said and wrote custom songs about you individually, sure.

To some extent, yes, but two minutes with one of those damn chatbots has me ready to strangle someone, and I'm a really nice person who basically never gets rage-level angry at actual human beings even when they're being complete a**holes.

Here's the thing: If someone explicitly asks to speak to an agent, your bot gets exactly one question after that to direct them to the right place. Any more than one question, and it becomes psychological abuse. This is doubly true when you have rage-inducing pieces of s**t that that ask you incessantly whether you want to do A or B when what you actually want to do is C, and they refuse to do anything but repeat the same question, and then they hang up on you rather than connect you to an agent over and over again.

These automation systems are quite literally designed to make customers get so fed up that they give up before getting help that would potentially cost the company money. That means when customers do get lucky and manage to get a human being, they are almost invariably absolutely fed up to an extent that they would not have been had they spoken to an actual human being the first, second, or even fortieth time they asked the sociopathic piece of donkey-s**t bot to let them speak to an agent.

So from a hostile working environment and corporate liability perspective, the fact that assholes will always find ways to be assholes doesn't change the fact that these systems make the problem orders of magnitude worse by turning normally calm, rational people into raging lunatics in under three minutes. Before those customer-abusing systems were installed, call center workers only occasionally dealt with customers who were already at their wits end, whereas now, customers exhibiting that level of post-traumatic stress psychosis are the default output from the automated call trees. The difference between a few bad customers per day and a few good customers per day is not insignificant to the mental health of workers. That makes those automated systems the proximate cause of the extreme psychological abuse that these call center workers go through.

BTW, you worked in the industry way too late to have seen call centers back when the system worked. By 2004, phone tree abuse was already in full swing. You'd have to go back at least another decade to get a call center environment that wasn't designed primarily to minimize the extent to which customer get actual service, and maybe longer. Ultimately, the root cause are the a**holes who run the companies, and customers and employees both need to take out their rage on them, not on the call-center workers. So the other thing you can do is give out your CEO's personal phone number when you get a particularly angry caller, and let the problem sort itself out.

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

Oh good, another moral panic. If people aren't terrified every waking moment of their lives, someone hasn't done their job.

Ostensibly, but realistically, if the law were unconstitutional, it stands to reason that someone would have sued over it almost three decades ago, so the burden of proof required to argue against its constitutionality is basically insurmountably huge after so many years of no one doing so.

The only plausible grounds for arguing unconstitutionality after so long would be if there were new information that did not exist at the time, e.g. if you were able to collect statistics from a generation of people living under a school segregation law showing that separate but equal doesn't work, or if some new group of people were born who were somehow affected by some law who had some protected characteristic that did not exist at the time of the law's creation, or... something else new that could not have been determined at the time.

Absent that sort of pivotal change in reality or information, decades of presumption of constitutionality represents a high enough bar that such a challenge would almost inevitably fail. There's really no reason to not apply laches after such a long period of time, in the absence of new evidence, a new class of aggrieved party that didn't exist at the time the law was passed, or some other substantive change in reality that would make the constitutionality suddenly worth calling into question, where substantive change in reality is something much larger and more significant than a particular party winning the White House and deciding to throw their weight around in an effort to smash everything they don't like.

More to the point, in a reasonable world, the courts should have applied punitive damages for wasting the courts' time with such a frivolous, laches-doomed, decades-of-unchallenged-presumption-of-constitutionality-doomed legal challenge. It should be genuinely *masively* expensive to pursue a case like this about something that is not exigent. The courts have enough on their hands dealing with all the constitutional challenges from the actions of the current government without having their time wasted litigating the constitutionality of laws passed before a decent percentage of eligible voters were even born, and the fact that even a "win" would have been nothing more than a procedural unconstitutionality that limits how government does something rather trivial, rather than a meaningful unconstitutionality that truly deprives anyone of rights or creates any sort of grave societal harm makes the case doubly appallingly. Everyone involved in bringing that suit should be ashamed of themselves.

This was a waste of the courts' time. And although in some ways, it is nice that the courts shot down their absurd argument once and for all, it was still a waste of the courts' time to bother doing so.

The worst part of it, though, was realizing that the opposition's position, if taken to its logical conclusion, would also make it illegal for the IRS to accept credit card payments, accept direct withdrawals from banks, and lots of other similar situations where a private business ends up collecting a tax on the government's behalf. It would nationally eliminate red light cameras. It would nationally eliminate private parking enforcement contractors. And so on. The sheer number of things that would have to be rolled back and rethought if the other side of this case had won is mind-boggling to such a degree that a modicum of common sense makes it clear that their argument had no merit.

Estoppel by laches would have been too good for this case.

Maybe if enough of these folks get angry enough, they'll finally get together and file a class action lawsuit against their employers for creating a hostile work environment.

The fact of the matter is that her bad experience is 100% caused by their employer designing a phone tree to waste people's time maximally and make it as hard as possible for someone to reach a real human being. By the time anyone reaches a person at most of these dirtbag companies, they're so angry that they are ready to shoot someone. And ultimately, that's a decision that their employers are making that is clearly creating a hostile work environment. It isn't just horrible for the workers. It's also hell on earth for the people calling in.

Unfortunately, the people calling in rarely have the power to do anything about it. But if all the employees got together and asked for injunctive relief in the form of forcing their employer to employ front-line human customer service reps with a maximum of one single routing question to get you to the right team, they absolutely *do* have the power to use employment law to compel these companies to stop that nonsense, and the world would be a better place for it.

So to all the customer service reps out there in the world, please, for your own mental health and the mental health of the people you're trying to help as well, hire a lawyer and sue your employers. It's the only way to rid ourselves of the hell that automated phone systems have become, for the good of literally everyone, including, ironically, for the pencil pushers who incorrectly think that they're saving money.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

The doctrine is not nearly as narrow as you seem to believe. In fact, it isn't generally applied to damage situations at all, and is primarily concerned with the impact of an injunction.

You're probably thinking of patent cases, where it can be an affirmative defense against patent claims. However, the reason for it being an affirmative defense is not because the damages resulting from the lawsuit would have increased over time, but rather because the company ostensibly violating the patent would have become more dependent on the patent over time, which means that injunctive relief would cause more harm to that company by, for example, preventing them from manufacturing a larger number of products, thus causing a bigger impact on their ability to stay in business.

At a high level, the doctrine of laches just says that you can't pursue a legal claim if you've taken an unreasonable time to pursue the claim and that because of that, conditions changed resulting in the relief you seek being inequitable.

Other classic examples are situations where, by waiting so long, you made it infeasible for the defense to find evidence to support their position, e.g. because all of their potential witnesses have already passed away, left the company, etc. and can no longer be compelled to testify.

In this case, laches could apply because of the number of people who depend on services provided from that fund, the number of companies that depend on money from that fund to operate cell towers in rural areas, or some other conditions that have changed such that rolling back the program would cause massive harm to a large number of people and result in unreasonable harm to the government in terms of having to make good on its contractual obligations.

Basically, any situation in which your delay is unreasonable, as opposed to, for example, taking a long time because of the need to gather evidence, track down witnesses, etc., and in which your delay prejudices the defendant, potentially violates the doctrine of laches. Waiting twenty-nine years is clearly unreasonable, and clearly prejudices the defendant, because most of the people who created the program are not still around to defend it, lots of historical notes are likely lost, etc.

Hence, estoppel by laches.

Depends on your constraints. It's certainly the best way to make a lot of money while robbing a bank, if that's something you really want to do for the thrill of it.

The best way to get lots of money, obviously, is to invest lots of money. Start out with a few billion dollars, invest it in starting a bunch of businesses, make somebody else do all the work and earn money for you, and then run for President. :-D Just kidding about the last part. But for people who don't have lots of money to start out with, obviously that is not an option, obviously, so one of your constraints is that you didn't inherit a fortune.

Another great way to get lots of money is to win it in the lottery, but you can't make that happen on demand, making it not an effective strategy. And rigging the lottery means that if you get caught, you go to jail, so it may or may not be the best idea, depending on your tolerance for jail time, which is another constraint.

And so on. You have to start with a complete constraint system. If you later discover that your constraints do not completely model your needs, you may get something that later turns out to be a bad decision for you. Part of maturity is understanding what your constraints are.

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.

Facebook offers services, some free, some paid, to citizens of Brazil so yes, their activities can be legislated.

This is where his supporters on /. tell us that voting for Harris would have been voting for foreign wars...