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Older generations blame Millennials for “killing off” enclosed malls. I suppose they imagine Millennials havestarted a #MallToo Twitter movement or are personally demolishing malls†.

“Completely uninterested in” is not the same thing as “killing off”. Millennials have committed many atrocities and should be censured for these actions – I agree – but they didn’t kill off the mall any more than they killed off 80s music. In fact, they may bring back the Mall after awhile and claim to have invented it.

† Likely by means of some sort of labor-hiring app or something.

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There’s been a lot of angry chatter about our digital assistants responding to commercials lately. A commercial saying, “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google” or “Alexa” invokes our now-omni-present “friends”. Many of these scenarios can be avoided due to foreknowledge that the “wake word” will be spoken but the AI doesn’t know this. So what can we do? One obvious solution has existed for decades and comes from a non-obivious place: amateur radio. I propose a human-imperceptible “suppression tone”.

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