Opinions differ I guess. I thought it was quite good.

Exactly. Intellectual property only applies to corporations. As soon as it's an individual's, it's fair game it seems.

Meta even got caught illegally downloading books via torrents and using those as training material for A.I.

You know what would be fair, seeing as that A.I. is trained on the collective knowledge of everyone that has added content to the Internet? All A.I. models trained on public data should be free to use for everyone.

a proposed electronic version of the physical euro that has banks and right-leaning politicians fuming.

That should tell you enough about why we need it.

TL;DR the digital euro isn't stored in a bank, but in a digital ledger, making it impossible for banks to use it as they wish for investments, mortgages or trading.

Never again do banks need to be saved by governments from their own bad and risky investment decisions because they are "too big to fail".

Tipping in general is a concept that should just die. Same actually as bonuses. I work at a rather large company where sales closing a deal will get them a bonus. In my job I don't directly deal with customers, so I can never get a bonus. U don't work less hard than sales. I would actually say my job is more stressful. They should just pay people what they're worth.

And nothing of value was lost. In fact, it might shield more European users from FUD, misinformation and propaganda.

Remember how clean the air was when most people were working from home?

But shareholder value is more important.

Good luck to this woman finding good employees. Good employees have a choice.

Of course they want to politicize this. And the EU is being far too careful here, these amounts are only 1.5% of the maximum penalty. They got off easy

I got a Sonos speaker for Christmas a couple years ago.

As soon as I realized I needed an account for it to simply play music, I went to return it. The guy in the store told me that there were no speaker brands that did not require an account these days, and that I shouldn't be so petty. He said "but you also have a Google account, right?", "Why is a Sonos account such a problem?".

I told him indeed, I already need a Google account for my phone to work, a Spotify account for listening to my music, and now a Sonos account for my speaker that plays that music , and I thought that was ridiculous.

My previous speaker was a Sony, and while that did have an app to configure it, it didn't require setting up an account with any personal data, which I think is fucked up for a device whose main purpose is just to produce sound. I left the speaker in the store and got my money back.

I did some research and found Teufel devices, speakers from Germany that work fine with an app that doesn't require an account. Now all my speakers and soundbars around the house are Teufel, and I'm very happy with them. I think also Yamaha has (or at least had) accountless speakers. So win/win - buying European and keeping my privacy a little more in check.

I did the same for my smart scale. I don't want my weight in the cloud somewhere, or on the servers of some Chinese or U.S. company somewhere. An app on my phone can store daily weight and other health data just fine.

So when I wanted a smart scale, I also did some research. It turns out there's an open source app called openscale that does exactly that: just store the data locally on my phone, and it supports a bunch of devices.

I got myself a Beurer scale (coincidentally also a German brand) because I read you can skip the whole account setup. Then used openscale to register my weigh ins. It works, I'm sure the cloud apps of larger brands have a nicer user interface, but they come at the cost of my privacy, which I simply refuse to sell out for a piece of hardware whose main purpose is to show me what I weigh.

I think people should be more conscious about their data. I don't use apple pay or Google wallet, my bank already knows most of what I pay, where and when. Why would I want to share that with these big corporations? I will gladly trade in a little convenience for a lot of privacy.

From a purely "vote with your wallet" standpoint it doesn't make sense, because there's no money paid. However, one might worry about data/information getting in the hands of a fascist/compromised government. So I think people should judge this themselves case by case.

Jury nullification would send a very powerful message .