Morning Bob,
That's Me, No Apps just a simple mobile phone.
I don't want to be a part of the Borg Collective.
E

Hi Eric,

I know somebody else that has no internet. They have a smart phone, but they don't use internet. Just text and voice.
It surprised me, but just that one person.

 

Well, we got along very well without refrigeration, without vaccines, without cars, without printing presses, without steel. So let's get rid of everything and we will be so much better off emotionally and physically if it all just disappears.

Hi,

I think the solution would be moderation. Probably government intervention, as usual. But maybe they are doing it too.

 

https://robohorizon.com/en-us/magaz...n-cells-into-an-llm-after-they-mastered-doom/

So AI is possibly going to have a living human brain maybe....
Ghost in the machine.

Imagine a world of android robots enhanced with human brains grown in labs Powering AI machines.

That could make a great dystopian future, movie, how entertaining to interact with something half alive.

 

Imagine if someone told you, 30 or 40 years ago, that you could carry all the knowledge and information in the world in your pocket for less than $1000.

And if they threw in a set of Ginsu knives, now how much would you pay?

 

NO!! THAT is a false assertion!! AND you are totally aware of the falsity!!
Glittering Generality and False Comparisons are classic propoganda tools, hiding blatant lies ! !

And yet making blanket claims that the only thing that data centers do is make profit for the owners and provide no benefit to anyone else is SO specific.

 

https://robohorizon.com/en-us/magaz...n-cells-into-an-llm-after-they-mastered-doom/

So AI is possibly going to have a living human brain maybe....
Ghost in the machine.

Imagine a world of android robots enhanced with human brains grown in labs Powering AI machines.

That could make a great dystopian future, movie, how entertaining to interact with something half alive.

That's been a plot point, big and small, in countless movies and books.

 

At a social function, someone tried to deride me because they heard that I still had a landline. I told him he was 100% incorrect - I have two. The astonished follow-up question: Why?

Backup.

ak

 

At a social function, someone tried to deride me because they heard that I still had a landline. I told him he was 100% incorrect - I have two. The astonished follow-up question: Why?

Backup.

ak

Same here (well, I only have one these days, but at one point I had three).

I've used my landline to find out what what going on with my cell service and/or internet service several times.

Strangely, I've never had to use my cell phone to find out what was going on with my landline, because it has always worked. Even when we lived on the mountain, we only had one disruption of landline service (things like that happen when a road grader tears up the line). Even that outage lasted for a shorter period of time than two of the cell phone outages we've had since we moved into town (cell service on the mountain was so unreliable that we seldom even tried to make calls using the cell phones).

A friend of mine used to say that he felt sorry for kids today because they would never know what it was like to have reliable phone service.

 

Same here (well, I only have one these days, but at one point I had three).

I've used my landline to find out what what going on with my cell service and/or internet service several times.

Strangely, I've never had to use my cell phone to find out what was going on with my landline, because it has always worked. Even when we lived on the mountain, we only had one disruption of landline service (things like that happen when a road grader tears up the line). Even that outage lasted for a shorter period of time than two of the cell phone outages we've had since we moved into town (cell service on the mountain was so unreliable that we seldom even tried to make calls using the cell phones).

A friend of mine used to say that he felt sorry for kids today because they would never know what it was like to have reliable phone service.

I wonder how long it will take before POTS maintenance is no longer cost effective, and service will only be available for special cases or at a premium?

 

My "landline" is VoIP, does that count?

 

I wonder how long it will take before POTS maintenance is no longer cost effective, and service will only be available for special cases or at a premium?

According to Grok, it's already too expensive:

**POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)**—the traditional analog landline service over copper wires provided by the "local Bells" (incumbent local exchange carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Lumen/CenturyLink, Frontier, etc.)—is already becoming prohibitively expensive to maintain for these carriers, and for many customers as well. This shift has been driven by aging infrastructure, declining subscriber numbers, high repair costs, and regulatory changes from the FCC that have removed obligations to maintain copper at regulated low rates.

### Why It's Already "Too Expensive" for Carriers
Maintaining copper networks is far costlier than modern alternatives like fiber, VoIP, or wireless:
- Copper requires physical repairs for corrosion, damage, and outages.
- Fewer users mean maintenance costs are spread across a shrinking base, driving per-line expenses way up.
- Carriers no longer face strict pricing caps (thanks to FCC forbearance orders starting around 2019–2022), so they've been raising rates sharply to discourage use and accelerate migration.

This has made POTS unsustainable for carriers in many areas—they're actively phasing it out rather than continuing to subsidize it.

### Current Status (as of early 2026)
- **Costs for remaining customers** have skyrocketed: Business lines often exceed $100–$1,000+ per month (sometimes $2,700+ in extreme cases), while home lines average $40–$70 but are climbing. This is a massive jump from historical $20–$50 rates.
- Carriers are grandfathering services (no new adds/moves/changes) and issuing discontinuance notices.
- **AT&T**: Grandfathered in many areas as of October 2025; some discontinuances start as early as late 2026, with a goal to retire most copper by end of **2029**.
- **Verizon** and others: Similar aggressive timelines, often targeting full transitions by 2026–2029 in regions.
- **Lumen (CenturyLink)** and regional carriers: Also issuing notices and sunsetting copper geographically.
- FCC actions in 2025 further eased retirement rules (e.g., shorter notice periods like 90–180 days), speeding up the process.

### When Will It Become Fully "Too Expensive" to Maintain?
It's already crossed that threshold for carriers in practice—they're no longer investing in or fully supporting copper in most places, and full nationwide retirement is projected in phases through the late 2020s:
- Many experts and carrier announcements point to **2025–2029** as the window where POTS becomes effectively unmaintainable or unavailable in large swaths of the US.
- By **2029**, major players like AT&T aim to exit most legacy copper operations.
- Some areas may see earlier cutoffs (already happening regionally), while rural spots could linger longer—but costs will continue rising until migration is forced.

In short, for the local Bells, POTS is already too expensive to justify maintaining at scale. The question now is more about when service gets discontinued in specific areas (often with only months' notice) rather than if it will happen. If you're still on POTS (e.g., for alarms, elevators, fax, or legacy systems), transitioning to VoIP, fiber-based, or wireless alternatives sooner rather than later avoids surprise outages and escalating bills. The "sunset" is well underway in 2026.

 

I used to have BOTH an actual COPPER lendline with lodcal telco service, AND a small cell phone that cost me $100 USD per year for 100 calls a year. THAT was more than what I needed. THEN my cellcompany changed the plan, and then after a year they cancelled it! From service that was just what I needed to NO SERVICEAT ALL. So I bought a used obsolete- sort-of smartphone for $20 and put my sim card in that and it worked quite well. No need to spend several hundred bux on a phone with lots of features that I don't need or want. And when that one failed I did it again.

 

I just checked my cell phone usage and last week I averaged five minutes a day. Looking at the history for the prior weeks shows that the max was 28 minutes a day and the average over all four weeks was fifteen minutes. About half the days have zero usage.

By and large, I actually use my phone to make phone calls. This appears to be about half the usage. The other half is split between using Life360 to see where my daughter is and using it for navigation when driving someplace I'm not familiar with. I take a picture here or there and, very rarely, capture some video for a specific reason, such as my daughter's performance or having someone record my doing a shooting stage so that I can evaluate what I'm doing well and what I'm not. No games. No X. No Tik-Tok. None of that crap. Even though I've become comfortable reading e-books on my Kindle, trying to read a book (or watch a movie) on my cell phone would drive me up the wall. I have thought about using an app to play music when I'm out walking and getting a pair of wireless earbuds for that, but haven't pulled the trigger on it.

 

Since my hearing ability is rather damaged, I use my phone mostly for texting. In that aspect the newer phone is much better than the original that had only the 12 button keypad for message entry. Textingis very useful, not only are the mesages easy to read and understand, but also they allow private conversations while others are nearby. THAT is a big benefit.

 

Textingis very useful, not only are the mesages easy to read and understand, but also they allow private conversations while others are nearby.

And you have an exact record of the conversation. That has proved invaluable to me more than once.

Just don't ever text something that can be used against you in court.

 

(.....Idlely wondering what the average age is in this forum.....)

 

And you have an exact record of the conversation. That has proved invaluable to me more than once.

Just don't ever text something that can be used against you in court.

THAT has been my policy for the past 25 years: "NEVER put anything that I do not want shared into a sharable media." That does often result in very careful composition work.

 

THAT has been my policy for the past 25 years: "NEVER put anything that I do not want shared into a sharable media." That does often result in very careful composition work.

While this MAY be the same thing you are saying here, my policy is perhaps a bit more stringent -- I don't even put something in a form that could potentially become sharable.

For instance, when composing an e-mail in some emotionally-charged situation, I don't type anything into it even if I am just venting to myself and have no intention of sending it at all. I might think them, or even say them outloud, but my finders never type them (and I would not say them outloud if and when I ever use some dictation capability of some app). Some might argue that my computer's RAM, where my draft resides, isn't shareable, so that's why I don't know if we are really saying the same thing or not. But all it takes is one hiccup -- having the mouse in slightly the wrong spot when I click or dropping something on the keyboard at just the wrong time -- and now it has become a very shareable item.

I generally operate under the assumption that anything I write, even on paper, let alone in an electronic document, is eventually going to end up on the front page of the New York Times (as a lot of people are discovering vis-a-vis the Epstein file releases). Even in situations in which I have no choice but to discuss confidential matters, I make every effort to do so in a way such that some eventual disclosure two decades from now is not going to come back and bite someone in undeserved ways.

 

And yet making blanket claims that the only thing that data centers do is make profit for the owners and provide no benefit to anyone else is SO specific.

Hi,

I found another interesting use for 'ai'.
It's used for summarizing customer reviews on some products. You get a result like:
"Some customers say it works well, others say it breaks on the second use."
The results are more involved than that though they usually go into more detail.

Now if I could just get another drive for less than $200 USD

 

Imagine if someone told you, 30 or 40 years ago, that you could carry all the knowledge and information in the world in your pocket for less than $1000.

And if they threw in a set of Ginsu knives, now how much would you pay?

Hi,

I wish it was ALL the knowledge, but it's still limited in some areas, and paywalls makes it harder to get some advanced information.
It SURE is a LOT of knowledge though, isn't it. It is pretty fascinating. When I was very young (under 16 or something) I had to ride my bike to the library to read about chess and electronics. The books they had were very limited in those areas so I was pretty much beat there. The next town over had a really big library but that was a lot farther away.
That's all we had back then though ... physical libraries.