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Per the fun graph in the article, we might even assume your age (Though Canada seems to buck the trend re: dropping cash so completely).

Which I thought was pretty amazing (the graph, that is): older Americans I can see hanging onto what they're used to, but 18-25 year-olds seem to be ticking upwards, which I think is actuallyy encouraging. Privacy implications aside, I appreciate Visa/MC being less an arbiter of what I may buy, as well as cash making it easier to save money and budget.

I can't help but wonder what the yoots rationale is though. I can't imagine they're the same as mine, considering how often I seem to fall outside the Overton window of "normal" - so why the uptick?

I can see if being considered unfair if it's a single business, but I do think that it's at least a little funny, considering we have penny rounding (to the nearest nickel) here in Canada since geting rid of the penny. Now it's by default, everywhere. And as someone that uses cash for all in-person purchases, it's actually really, really nice

The first example given is for a liquor store - where a clerk is very likely to ask for one piece of ID, and in some locations, two - one photo ID, one with the customer's name embossed or printed on it.

> What's so special about 2004?

Ubuntu's first release, IIRC

The bill the end user receives being zero doesn't change how telecom billing is set up. The fact that it's "Free" and costs are hidden from the user in America isn't exactly uncommon.

> non-standard (say parking cameras...

Those are, and have been legally required, for several years in Canada because cars have gotten so big, and visibility so bad, people kept hitting (typically their own) toddlers.

Isn't this in part because so many cities need all the cash they can get to fund individually-insolvent infrastructure? [0] If the goal is to be able to maintain roads that can't pay for themselves by enabling revenue generation, then I can absolutely see why cities would need to accumulate income in whatever way possible.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/8/25/if-strong-town...

In case it's helpful for anyone else having the issue: mmv [0] means you only have to run the command once to rename every file. It's pretty fantastic.

[0] https://ss64.com/bash/mmv.html

> Plex which seems to have stagnated

Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.

Little late, but I think I see how we have such different experiences. Assuming other comments are right, and Reddit's pulling pretty much entirely from cache, you probably just scroll longer than I do - long enough to run out of the first ~1000 (cached) posts, and hit uncached items.

You'd get timeouts, and I'd never see them - despite being West Coast (Canada) as well. Or at least, that's my best guess so far.

To be clear: You mean you have timeouts and failures using Reddit's own "new and improved" web UI and mobile client? Because using RedReader, old.reddit.com, and other third-party apps, I don't actually recall the last time Reddit didn't load for me.

Good call - I'm sure the next private company won't eventually treat their users like garbage.

> no one is ramming pronouns down anyone's throats?

From TFA: "...the correspondence indicates the company insisted on completing the gender field on Scharf’s employee profile, rather than it being an initiative initiated by Scharf himself."

As far as workplaces go, I don't think you can get more forced to go along with it than "Do it or you're fired."

> the worse dystopian case (see Russia and a lot of the third world)

> a pretty smile you get off with a warning, but if you're black with resting bitch face then you'll get a ticket or maybe even some K9 action

Per your own example, America currently belongs in the "wors[t] dystopian case... [including] a lot of the third world" where laws are being used to harass those the state does not like.

I agree, to an extent, I just don't think the average American sees how far they have to go in terms of equality.

Hell, I currently don't even have gigibit fiber and self-host a Mastodon instance at home. Currently hosting Plex (meaning content-sharing with friends and family), Mastodon, Matrix, Airsonic, Wireguard, PiHole, and more. Everything runs off an HP EliteDesk with QNAP hosting all the media. The SFF PC is quiet and uses relatively little power.

I am glad I have no data limit though - I apparently went through >3 terabytes (split 30/60 between up and down) last month alone, mostly due to Plex and Wireguard.

Why would Discord want to do that? I get why we, as people, want that; I do not get why Discord, as a company, would want their platform less sticky. "You have to have an account we can track before we let you get an answer" is all but a literal goal for them.

> Most people outside... like cars and their convenience

Everyone loves [the first order effects of] cars. Climate control, directly to where you need to go, whenever suits you, for a high upfront, but low ongoing cost.

Everyone fucking hates the second order effects (see: literally anybodys take on traffic). Climate change, more danger to everyone around them (from pedestrians to motorcyclists to other drivers), noise pollution, and air pollution from tires and exhaust. Everyone likes them, typically right up to when they aren't the driver [0]

[0] Some gearheads break this rule, but I think nearly all of them would agree that requiring the average person to maintain and drive their car isn't great, considering the average driver's skillset.

High gas prices are explicitly why I take transit and avoid driving. I have a car, but it works out to $10 CAD every day to drive to work - so I make the effort to get up a little earlier and take the train when I can.

"It's regressive and has an undue effect on the poor" and "It's moderately effective" are not mutually exclusive. That was a major reason public transit bounced back so fast in the Lower Mainland of BC, Canada - because driving is decidedly not cheap. Moreover, high gas prices are something I endorse, loudly and often, because it subsidises transit, and how much more expensive it makes the biggest (most dangerous to pedestrians) vehicles.

Still need to drive, and don't want to pay an arm and a leg? Skip the Silverado, get a hatchback or moderately-sized SUV or van. Need to haul your boat (or 40-foot camper instead of a tent)? Sounds like an expensive hobby - and anyone who's owned a boat can attest to that.

Appalling what that says about Google, or what that says about the average search user?

Sounds like it'll be the new drivers license. Instead of waiting to take the test and get a car, which has fallen out of vogue in many circles, some will impatiently wait for their 13th birthday to join their friends in the forever-online world. Grand for those with early birthdays, less great for those born late in the year (assuming they weren't bumped one grade higher or lower based on birth date).

The third and fourth requests even de-Googled (Qualcomm) phones make is to download the GPS almanac. You don't have to wait because it downloads over wifi or cellular, which have gotten pretty quick. There was a recent kerfuffle about this [0].

[0] https://blog.brixit.nl/nitrokey-dissapoints-me/

Respectfully, I think you might have gotten used to the sas state America has ended up in. I'm in a reasonably sized city, and have fresh groceries less than half a mile away. My parents live in a suburban, approaching rural area - and have multiple grocery stores within a mile. Hell, I had fresh produce within a mile in a very small town in Alberta, at both apartments I lived in.

I can see the argument if most people were actually living someplace rural - but they aren't. Living in a city that's also a food desert sounds like it misses the point of what a city is for, to be honest.

> You have that backwards, at least for some companies

Absolutely I do - my overall (and apparently poorly communicated) point was more about Apple pulling in data from OSM to improve their product. They (and others) do contribute back, I only meant it's hardly coincidental that OSM and Apple Maps improved around the same time.

> I've never seen any cite for Google contributing their data to OSM.

This is what I'm so up-in-arms about: people spend so much time adding to Google Maps for free (not even necessarily via OSM), to be locked away behind paid (past a limit) API calls. Perhaps I should have been more explicit in that many companies contribute back, and Google being an outlier in that.

> Then again, Apple Maps started getting sorted out around then too iirc.

And we assume completely coincidentally? Not that Apple Maps, like Google Maps, pulls in data volunteered by the OSM community (both corporate and personal members), packages and improves (sometimes "improves") it, then locks it away behind paid API calls?

In this case and many others, the free and community built project enabled, assisted, or powered the multi-billion dollar tech conglomorate.

I recognize I might sound bitter or dismissive of companies mapping the world and giving it away to consumers for free, but so much is built on openness that so many companies just eat without giving back.

(Regarding Uber, not Lyft, but...) It would also make perfect sense to predict which customers are investigators in areas Uber is illegal, and avoid them. Which they did [0]. I would be shocked if they weren't giving more profitable customers higher priority and better treatment.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/uber-secr...

I paid more in rent than she does, in Red Deer, Alberta. It was not a large city; suffice to say, rent is too high everywhere. Focusing on the city is a bit misleading, IMO.

> I would not call the Redmi Note 5... "terribly slow", instead I call it "perfectly useable".

The software you use plays a rather large role in how the hardware performs. Some people here like to live on the OEM-designed happy path, where things tend to just work. That means using Google Apps for everything, an expectation that the latest video streaming social platforms will open quickly and not stutter, and scrolling the Google Play Store or Google Maps will be a fluid experience.

Others may use simpler apps, or expect less of their phones. I'm in the latter category, and I suspect you are as well. While the BlackBerry KeyOne I use daily was panned by some six months after release in 2017 for being too slow, I instead killed off nearly everything else that would run in the background - including and specifically any Google frameworks and apps.

Some software companies have made a point of taking any hardware gains for granted. Most people have new phones, with fast processors, so some companies will push devs to take shortcuts. I'm quietly indignant about that, though that rant is rather tangental to your original question about how some have such different experiences from yours.

> I don't know what Google does with a longstanding account that breaks TOS in this way

Pretty much nothing. I've had my main account for... 15 years or so? I moved away from Google several years ago [0], and use the account almost exclusively for the Aurora store now. It's been fine, and has been for somewhere between months and years.

[0] If I'm wrong, or Google becomes more aggressive, then nothing major is lost. I've gone through Takeout, stopped adding photos/email/passwords/etc years ago, and completely migrated away. No need to tell me "But what if the account gets banned?", because nothing of value will be lost.

Only if it's evenly distributed. Canada has a population of ~39 million, but most immigrants are settling in one of two major areas.

> What's not to like?

> on-demand E2E encryption for those who want it.

E2E is only available as a one-to-one, not a group. It must also be switched on for every chat. Part of the allure of E2E is that an individual who needs it (say, a reporter) is indistinguishable from those that don’t (the general public), and those that are best blending into the crowd (like an anonymous source).

There are other failure modes here (who speaks to whom isn’t necessarily hidden, just the text), but it’s a better starting point than “on-demand e2e for those that want it”.