this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Wait until the NSF cuts fully hit. We are tanking everywhere.
You probably won't notice some of the STEM cuts but our healthcare system is going down hard.
Many NIH grants are gone or messed up now as well.
Good luck without grad students, funded research, or supported labs.
It's going to be one of those situations where EVERYTHING is going bad at once, but nobody will notice until it all just stops.
I can already see it happening. Have you noticed that NOTHING works anymore? Customer service has been replaced by chatbots with canned answers. Quality control is nearly non-existent. The new corporate attitude is: You wanted a thing, we sold you a thing, now you have your thing, get lost. Customer service, quality? We got your money, you got your thing, we're done here, fuck you, get out.
If corporations are going to have access to our citizens, then we can require them to behave responsibly, or that access will be rescinded.
And, level II for automated support are low cost humans who are not empowered to do anything. Just repeat the script and dump the call.
I think you are right about the cash grab.
In SaaS, the classic idea is you pay lower costs incrementally and you can more discretely adjust for consumption (e.g. AWS can grow or reduce according to your monthly consumption needs). They always compare this to a high priced server or a IBM/Western Union cash register (B4B) which would mean insane expense with significant amounts of wasted consumption because you pay for tiers of what you don’t need.
This makes sense and works if everyone is a good actor.
What we seem to be seeing is that isn’t the case (surprise people are greedy, abusive, criminals).
Rather than enabling scaled consumption the monthly or SaaS incremental payments are just low enough for you to see it as too much of an inconvenience to fight a charge. They use the automation and pointless cheap headcount to make it so annoying you just surrender the 100s of dollars that they robbed you of. It isn’t worth your personal time and, in the case of B2B, you are fighting for your employers benefit anyway. Either, you sacrifice hours of your own time or you fight for a company that underpays and under appreciates you.
This will destroy trust, which we already are seeing with AI “tokens.”
The real crooks will find a way to force you to buy their stuff through corrupt politicians or exclusivity. You want to visit a national park. You need GrocParkAI credits to find the right trail for you. You need MedGroczi to activate your medical discount Medicaire replacement. If you bank with US Fargo you have to use Crytpogrokss to transfer funds.
There won’t even be an illusion of choice.
I think everyone notices except the rich and their dogs.