Free email comes with a cost, and it’s more than data scraping.

There are numerous videos going around that warn of the not-surprising reality that Google is, as a default, scanning all your gmail content to train AI. The videos tell you how to turn that default setting off.

That’s fine, but a better solution that provides advantages other than just freedom from email data scraping is not to use Gmail at all.

I have a Gmail account, but I never use it for email exchanges. I only send email using addresses associated with my own domain and use gmail just for subscriptions to newsletters and the like.

While it appears that billions of people use Gmail, it is not professional looking and shows that you didn’t care enough to pay just a little bit of money to get a real email address. This is particularly significant for people using email for business.

Gmail screams cheap and not seriously committed. People need to discard the ideas that everything that is useful must be free.

Formulaic LinkedIn Handwaving

Are people coached to make formulaic LinkedIn videos?

Many I’m shown by the Microsoft algorithm feature individuals holding a tiny microphone in one hand and wildly waving their other hand in every which direction, while they breathlessly spurt a message laced with every business buzzword you can imagine and some that nobody can imagine or understand.

Their message will “land” (can we please ban that word?), and it will be a very soft landing, because there usually is not much hard content in it, but rather mostly an apparent desperate belief in the “LinkedIn success” fantasy.

The nothingburger AI voice is here.

[Microsoft didn’t wait to shadow-ban this LinkedIn post, they did it immediately.
But here’s the thing. They don’t give a shit.
Microsoft is not just looking out for its AI promotion agenda. They’re also socially irresponsible assholes.]

The post that was shadow-banned by the Microsoft broligarchic algorithm:

It’s not A, it’s B.
But here’s the thing…,
They didn’t just C, they D-ed.

Everything lately seems to sound like the above, filled with the same constructions and with the same nothingburger AI voice.
Can’t people write anymore without AI?
The bar has been lowered so much you’ll trip over it if you’re not careful.