Scare tactics definitely play a part of it but, having seen official documentation covering up to reasonably recently (can say no more, sorry), I can confirm the technology described did exist, continued to evolve beyond that, detection was possible, and the vans were / are real. I’m sure it’s continued to evolve since those old docs too, and I can’t say it was ever particularly effective, but there was some clever stuff at play from what I read!

Of course it’s all in aid of a horribly outdated principle, and I don’t approve of the scare tactics or intimidating nonsense letters, but I can appreciate some clever tech and documentation :)

I use the em dash constantly, and have done for years, so finding out it’s a big “this was written by AI” indicator makes me sad — I’m not an AI user, I just like the way it looks!

Exactly the same - I was very interested in the premise but struggled to make it past this section, too, for the same reasons you’ve mentioned. Would certainly agree that these clips should’ve been used more sparingly, as it’s a bit of a slog otherwise.

Very sage advice, though in this instance the issue was more me trying to tear off a small piece of tape by holding the dispenser at face level with the blade facing towards me… Whilst pushing the strip of tape away from me to try and tear it. I learned an important lesson about physics that day.

Managed to perfectly perforate my chin with one of these as a foolish 16 year old in my first job. Entirely user error (I’ll let you guess how) and left my chin looking like you could tear it off like a postage stamp for weeks after.

Safe to say I wasn’t allowed to use it again after that, so my only experience with these is that they’re terrible - though that’s probably not a fair judgement given the circumstances 😂.