General Discussion

could be a real person reading some clickbait script into a camera and pushed by a bot farm.

But anytime anyone mentions numbers to me... I always do the math.

Years ago I attended a conference where a speaker was talking about grocery inventory systems and items being purchased... and acting like this is just an impossible amount of data to collect and store... millions of dollars would be needed... blah blah blah.

I build large data storage systems for a living... so I took the speakers example stores ( a popular large chain of supermarkets ), and started doing the math...

And to store all that data ( including all sorts of ancillary data like the name of the shopper, discount codes, the checker, etc )... and came up with a number that was under 1TB per day. Sounds impressive... 365 TB per year! but even then the cost of a replicates storage system was under $200 per TB. Their entire example was bogus. The particle physics people would laugh their asses off... not to mention the remote sensing environmental data folks ( like me ). But we all sat in the audience and politely listened to this person. At least until i got to ask some questions.