Thanks for your support. I also find these dark patterns unacceptable and even as a technical person one needs forums to figure out why it only shows the 26.2 update very prominently and not the relevant one. x
We can argue over whether 3 extra taps to access counts as "acceptable" or not, but it's clearly not enough of a hurdle to be considered "not available". Otherwise you might as well count iOS 26 as not being available either, because that needs at least 4 taps to install (settings -> about -> software updates -> install -> enter pin -> ok).
It's not only about GDPR. It's even more about profit shifting and low taxation of big tech. Ireland has been selling out EU on digital front for over a decade.
In the EU, they've had the GDPR – a big, muscular privacy law – for nine years, and all it's really done is drown the continent in cookie-consent pop-ups. But that's not because the GDPR is flawed, it's because Ireland is a tax-haven that has lured in the world's worst corporate privacy-violators, and to keep them from moving to another tax haven (like Malta or Cyprus or Luxembourg), it has to turn itself into a crime-haven. So for the entire life of the GDPR, all the important privacy cases in Europe have gone to Ireland, and died there:
Now, again, this isn't a complicated technical question that is hard to resolve through regulation. It's just boring old corruption. I'm not saying that corruption is easy to solve, but I am saying that it's not complicated. Irish politicians made the country's economy dependent on the Irish state facilitating criminal activity by American firms. The EU doesn't want to provoke a constitutional crisis by forcing Ireland (and the EU's other crime-havens) to halt this behavior.
I agree. The railway now is mean, willing to prosecute, unhelpful and expensive
I've read various accounts of people trying to reclaim lost baggage and it's a Kafkaesque process designed to be totally useless
But the railway operators are 50% nationalised now. Northern, TransPennine, South West Railway, LNER, Greater Anglia, c2c, ScotRail, Southeastern, TfW are all government owned.
And the forerunner in increasing fares the last couple of years has been...the government. They renationalised various operators during and after COVID and are now busy decreasing rail subsidies and increasing fares.
(yes even with the freezing of some fares in April. It's only some fares. And prices had been going up multiple times a year in many places for a few years. There is a wider picture and other schemes happening pushing up prices)
Maybe Great British Rail will slowly and surely return us to a less mean system. Time will tell
I left my bag on a train recently. I’m not sure I can describe “describe the bag using an online questionnaire that took about two minutes to complete” as Kafkaesque… bag returned in a little under one week.
Did you try contacting someone to get back sooner? That's what the people did in the cases I referenced - just people not answering the phones, dead lines, "computer says no”, passed around, refusal to help etc
I guess you being somewhat fine with waiting a week meant nothing important was in the bag.
The trouble with the UK is we continue to put up with the bar getting lower and lower each year. Honestly someone would defend it taking a month to get a bag back as being fine
The UK railways are expensive, and I have a car, so I very rarely go by train. But all those road trips cost everyone else, in terms of congestion, pollution etc. Maybe the railways should be regarded as critical infrastructure, run at a loss and subsidised accordingly.
Brings back memories of a recent 16 year old stood in tears whilst they took her details to prosecute her because she was travelling on a child ticket "but my mum always bought me a ticket".
No mercy. Fuck those guys.
Same guy that stung me for not having a ticket when every other day they'd come round and let me buy a ticket on the train.. I even went to the window at the destination for a ticket, and then got referred for a penalty fare. Fuck that guy.
Yeah for many years the railway would let a lot of things slide even though they've had the legal right to prosecute.
Many people find out the hard way just how many legal powers the railway has (they have even more they could enforce, such as dropping litter, or playing music, or being inebriated - criminal offencs with no excuse)
The social contract of buying a ticket and behaving in return for good customer service has broken down, it's gone. It's really the entire of the UK at this point.
I'm pretty sure GP was being sarcastic. These things are very obviously not the same. You give one example, but another is algorithmic engagement - this has been most extensively studied in kids and teens but it affects everyone.
I made this point elsewhere in thread, but another difference is the daily content aspect of online influencers. Instead of reading one or two shallow, vapid articles a month about "what's wrong with your relationship" they are seeing new content every day, and they are mostly seeing the content that is upsetting the most people.
I discuss that elsewhere. The feudal tag is inaccurate. The USA is not feudal minded, at least not yet. Europe is far more feudal in its deference to the authorities. (I live in Europe by the way.)
Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.
> Also you can't have a feudal system when the peasantry have been replaced by machines which is the end game here. Feudalism is parasitic but it still requires goods and services to flow up from below. When your food, defence and goods are all supplied by robots or AI, then that is not the case.
Do machines drive your Uber ride? Deliver your food? No. They assign jobs to gig workers. Those are the serfs. Your goods and services are by people managed by AI.
Yes, I know, FSD is just around the corner rendering truck and taxi drivers obsolete. /s
I have boycotted Uber and dodgy food delivery companies from the beginning because of their zero hours contracts... I've never used Uber in my entire life.
Imagine you're in London. How you pick a restaurant for dinner? Do you simply walk into a restaurant or do you use Google too feed you a list of 'curated' venues? Because in the latter case both you and the restaurants (along with their owners, employees) are subject to FAANG's central planning. And that's exactly how people end up in tourist traps.
For some reason you seem to believe that the old-school solution of just walking into the neighborhood and picking something that looks good has completely disappeared. It is not the case and, I would argue, is still restaurants primary business.
People also consistently share advice/tips on restaurants to try, and that largely escapes tech control.
And even a well-reviewed/noted restaurant isn't immune to people's choices. As someone who has restaurant owner friends, I can assure you that tech companies have very little impact on the restaurant's success/survival.
Someone will maybe come along and tell you it's just "indexing" slowing it down and to wait a few weeks lol. That's the common gaslighting method
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