Or have bet on Mercurial. Which is also close to dead. Or darcs, which has been big in certain environments and now practically extinct.

Having lived in Germany it's quite different, but I'd argue the centralized handling of the CPR is actually quite convenient and doesn't meaningfully impact privacy. In Germany every authority has its own ID for you anyway (my password manager has a category "Government Primary Keys" for this), however that means that you have to provide all your information from scratch to every authority. This would theoretically lead to more privacy if we lived in 1926, but now computers are ubiquitous and a rogue government (like Germany is close to electing) can just correlate these keys together. Relational databases have existed for decades and JOINS are cheap. Thanks to surveillance capitalism by now we have very sophisticated ways to deanonymize people, the government can just hire someone to do it.

So the privacy in Germany is most often inconvenience for the citizen paired with hardly any privacy gain from a potentially hostile government. At this point I think the better solution is to avoid electing hostile governments. To Denmarks credit, they're currently doing that better than many other European countries.

This is true and was definitely a criticism of the old system, where websites would open the NemID iframe and ask you for your username, password and a specific indexed OTP code, without providing any authentication to you. You only notice something weird if it asks you for an the index of a code that is not on your card but maybe the scammer is lucky and guesses an index that you have and then they can use that phished username/password/OTP triple to perform an unauthorized action.

The new system is slightly different, because if you use the mobile phone authentication it will send you a notification to your phone, but if you use the (bespoke, non-standard) OTP dongle it still does not authenticate itself towards the user. However the codes are now time-based so if they collect an OTP code they can only use it in a ~30s window, so the phished credentials have to be used immediately.

How that would've prevented this issue: not at all. If the login service is down, having the piece of paper with OTP codes is worthless as the problem is not getting the codes (I can still get MitID codes with the OTP dongle) but the authentication website. The previous system was just as centralized.

Given the Swedish version of it is called BankID I assume the situation is nearly the same in Sweden.

That's just the usual experience of German customer service. The consumer is expected to quote the relevant paragraphs to explain customer service why they need to cover cost of return shipping or whatever and they will fight you every step of the way (or try to ignore you). It seems to be a cultural thing.

I feel the same about a lot of online shopping. In Germany people often moan about Amazon and while it's has it's share of issues, the competition is often so bad. Really slow processes that feel like someone adopted a "submit order via fax" process slightly for the web, horrible web sites, sometimes next-to-non-existent customer service. No wonder the alternatives aren't taking off as they fuck up the basics before we even get to the point of starting to compete.

In a way? I always found it more sensible to use German words like "Namenwort" instead of "Nomen" to express German grammar, instead of using latin terms. After all Latin is a language that comes from a completely different language family to start with and is not used at all in Germany except when wanting to pretend you're fancy (law, medicine, grammar).

Even proper, separated bike lanes often terminate in right turn lanes for cars (even in places where there is a lot of bikes and in places where there would be a lot of space), leading to weird situations where a car is trapped in a wall of cyclists from every side.

In practice it mostly works but I'm not surprised car ownership in the city is on the rise, because the city still prioritizes cars way too much. Copenhagen is mostly a regular city with consistent bike lanes.

[0]: https://www.tosche.net/fonts/dossier

KWZ got started as a producer of iron gall inks but has branched out a bit since. But they still have a large range of colors of IG inks, potentially the largest: https://mountainofink.com/blog/kwz-ink

I have some of them, the gold one is a lot of fun as it darkens as you're writing.