How is recycling free but you've got to pay for organics? Don't you just pay a tax (or pay it indirectly through income tax or VAT)? And you've got the whole returning the plastic bottles on the supermarket thing too, right?

I don't like this one either. Does the cinema store the ID (or information extracted from said ID) of every single user visiting, along with what they've watched, on electronic records that can and will eventually be breached? Do they ask a third party (like Persona) for said verification providing the user's information?

On the cinema you show your ID to the person in front of you, they check the birth date, if it's valid (and not an obvious forgery) and if the photo matches the person providing it.

So even if you do switch providers, chances are you are using one of the same (if not the actual same) provider, and got perhaps other options in those 4 groups. There's an actual coverage map by our Ministry for Digital Transformation[^2] that shows what actual coverage there is. Sometimes there's "Aire Networks" or others, but mostly it's the four large groups I mentioned before.

[^1]: https://masorange.es/en/brands/ [^2]: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/275e90e49dc544ef94e...

In Germany, the Federal Cartel Office fined Amazon[^2] 59 million euro (68.7 millions US dollars) because of "abuse of market power" with anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission[^3] also opened an investigation regarding Amazon's practices regarding Prime and the "Buy Box" (I had to look this up, apparently it means being picked as the default seller for a product where multiple sellers are offering it), since you need to pay extra for FBA to have your products marked as Prime (appearing before on the search results, and being the "buy box") and Amazon itself competes with you sometimes, being both a marketplace and a seller.

[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/... [2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/german-regulator-fines-amazo... [3]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...

Yeah, collaboration usually requires some sort of centralisation. Whether that is the LKML+git.kernel.org, gitlab.gnome.org, salsa.debian.org or Sourcehut, or GitHub. At least Sourcehut isn't completely proprietary and shoving AI down your throat at every possible chance. The same can be said for Codeberg and almost any GitLab CE, Gitea or Forgejo instance

You can't compare someone checking your document before entering a strip club (or even a pub, or asking for alcoholic drinks) vs a computer system getting and logging an attestation and verifying it against a government database (or third party) where the Govt knows who the credential belongs to, and who's checking it. Along with my government "compelling me" to run software (even if it's open source itself) that requires me to have a binding contract with a foreign third-party company known for privacy violations, and running their proprietary software stack on my device for said government software to work, so I can participate in most parts of the digital society.

Of course the existing "identity verification" done by scanning yourself and your ID document (passport, national ID or driving licence) is not acceptable, unless counted exceptions where said documentation is needed (banking and others, because of KYC/AML)

The damage is already being done, whether you are a 401k/IRA holder with a position on the S&P 500 way too overweighted by the Mag7&co and their circular dealings, or just needing to buy computer parts way over their market value because some companies are over-leveraging to outcompete you for that hardware (or electricity), or even at a smaller scale by increasing software costs because everything is "AI-powered" now and of course you wouldn't want only "deterministic" software that just works and doesn't have a slop machine integrated.