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Convenience Is Not Necessity [1]

['Chitown Kev', 'Sabrina Haake', 'Chloris Creator']

Date: 2026-08-09  

Hey, did you hear the one about the Iranians hacking the water works in a bunch of small towns? Yeah, they had the toilets flushing backwards.

For those of us who remember when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the solution to hacking is easy, don’t connect your peripheral devices to the net when critical infrastructure is involved. Remove network cards from control devices and nobody but the sleaze bags you work with are threats, mostly by their incompetence.

D’oh. But then I can’t run the show while I tidy up my bathroom at home. I might have to work in a place of close proximity to where the gizmos I’m in charge of exist. Yes, you might. Damn inconvenient!

And then there’s this data center phobia. If you don’t mind a long duration return on your query, they can stay small and dispersed. But if you are a Googloid Instant Return junkie, waiting for hours, or days (nooo!) for your favorite AI agent to get back to you, why, golly gee, that’s just plain inconvenient as hell! I’m a busy net surfer, I need, no I demand instant gratification!!

Convenience is not necessity. We could all get along with a slower pace or limited distance of information flow if we weren’t spoiled brats who need to know immediately that we’re being flamed by some cyber-jerk who spills their spleen on the net. Can you imagine not having your nose up your phone for hours every day? Ye, Gods, we might have to have actual face time with people. Eww!

Network isolation and data protection do not need to be everywhere for everything. But if some criminal, foreign or domestic, can ruin your whole day by making the truck load of TP you bought during the pandemic unflushable, maybe you may want to consider it.

The world as we know it is changing and we had better be adaptable because there is nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide, billionaire bunkers notwithstanding. I wonder what our precious B movie banditos in ICE will do when crops fail globally and tens of millions of people who refuse to lay down and starve to death are on the move. Nuke the borders!

So we might want to consider the cost of our hissy fits because we don’t get what we want on the net when we want it and approach gruesome reality more closely than we care to. Because convenience is about to give way to necessity like a dam bursting and it’s time for swimming lessons.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/9/800081791/community/convenience-is-not-necessity/

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