inflagranti

Hope that illustrated the silliness of this line of argument.

Other countries that have nationwide systems should have been able to do something similar - of course there's a good chance they didn't, but that's really not an argument against Covid passports but against bad security practices.

In any case, issue with Tesla is that's it's priced to just not be the leader, but the whole car market and then some.

If there are already trends that other car manufacturers area outselling Tesla, clearly trajectory is not towards even market lead.

For sure privatizing them in the first place was a pure UK decision with - IMHO - predictable outcome.

I hear that every time Switzerland is mentioned. I've yet to see a strong argument to suggest why it wouldn't scale in this day and age.

What I think doesn't scale is centralized systems like France, where all money flows to Paris and rarely any back. Switzerland on the other hand is extremely federated, to the point each canton, often smaller than average cities, have their own school system. Most tax money stays on the local level and didn't go to Bern. This independence IMHO is the critical factor for scaling that would work for moch larger countries.

As to the homogeneity: US has one language any natively born American speaks. Switzerland has 3, with a considerable political divide between the French and German spanking areas. Finally Switzerland has 20% Foreigners vs 10% in US. So again I would very much challenge you there.

From a laypersons perspective this seems exactly how the "private sector stepped in" to fix the problem, with a solution that's actually out there and working well, without the need for blockchain or other form of digital currencies.

The choices are not just between concentrating an obscene amount of money with individuals vs concentrating an obscene amount of money with a handful of bureaucrats.

Why have a system that allows so much money to be concentrated with any kind of entity in the first place and put everyone else at the mercy of their philanthropy? MHO handing all that money to the government instead of a billionaire class is just changing from private trickle-down economics to nationalised ones.

As soon as your having someone deal with billions of dollars a couple thousands become a rounding error and your local concerns become benign, small picture issue. But for you having that 3000 available to finally fix that pothole on your street is critical.

Worker co-ops, taxes on municipal level and wealth taxes might be ways to prevent extreme concentration with any entity.

If Apple sent a security camera picture of the robber together with information from the stolen ID to police, and police the same would have happened. So the core issue here is that the validity of the ID was never questioned, not the use of facial recognition. That might just have amplified / accelerated the identification of the wrong person.

English speaking being the only real differentiator here and probably the most critical reason. However that only goes so far. And what for sure has changed is that we're down from 20+ currencies before to one huge single market with mostly the same currency.

How that all factors in is impossible to say, but to argue that nothing has/will change seems equally unrealistic as the over-the top reporting of the media suggesting the UK banking sector will collapse. Things will go on, but my bet would be there will be a considerable hit.

Ironically, your single statement was actually "nonsense on all accounts" as Theranos definitely was valued multiple billions at some point.

The brilliance is they record a whole music video just for an elaborate prank on the poor presenter by playing this supposedly Finish superstars acting extremly obnoxiously and drinking beer in the studio...

OP clearly states he met the person online and they communicate online and that might involve irregular but deep, friendly exchanges and meeting up once in a while. I.e. exactly a kind of communication Facebook is supposed to facilitate, yet it completely failed him here which is absolutely valid to criticize and call out.