You’re not getting the point.

A: You csn shop there without an account. It’s your own choice. An account has pros and cons, and it’s your choice.

B: I don’t know how it works in US, but in my country a McDonald’s account is a fair deal to me. They pay me a fair price for some personal info. And if I go to McDonald’s and I for any reason feel like they shouldn’t register that particular visit, I just don’t use my account.

C: I want to use Windows, but logging into a Microsoft account does not give me any benefits worth the cons. So I use Windows without a Microsoft account. And it will be annoying to keep track of a “fake” account just for that.

Yep, that’s basically what I have.

I’m ready to buy a factory new car, when I find one where the data is mine.

Yes, but this is not one of those times.

Imagine someone poops on your doorstep, and then removes half of it.

You can say it’s good that they removed some of it, but that’s probably not the point you would want to make.

None of them were trying to push privacy as a competitive advantage.

This is why I don’t have a new car. I’m hoping I get one where I have access to my own data (in eg. Home Assistant), and the manufacturer doesn’t.

I don’t have problems with blind spots, so I don’t have much incentive to change anything.

But I need to be able to see my own car (or at least very close to it) while reversing, and my car doesn’t adjust the mirrors when going into reverse. Which means I have a big incentive to not use their idea.

So no, I am not planning on trying it.

This is one of the basic problems - mixing sick leave an vacation.

This thing where you have a certain number of sick days to spend, it often ends up as another kind of vacation. And then when you are out of sick leave, your vacation leave is just another kind of sick leave.

Here in Denmark, there’s virtually unlimited sick leave. If you’re sick, you take a leave with full pay. No “max 14 days of paid sick leave”. If you need to go to the doctor and you can’t do it outside working hours, it’s sick leave.

Then your vacation leave is for vacation. And sometimes errands, but with 25-30 days per year, there should be time for both.

I’m in Denmark, if I need to go to the doctor, dentist etc during working hours, it is usually counted as sick leave. This means full pay and no deduction in vacation time, and here we don’t run out of sick leave.

Although we do have a dury to try doing it outside office hours.

XD

It went up BY 18%, not up TO 18%. This says nothing about how bad it is, only that it’s getting worse.

It went up TO 0.23%.

The price wasn’t too bad for me. I didn’t have a very high income, but I paid for my ISDN myself.

But I do remember the improvement after switching to DSL, even if this was the early days of DSL that didn’t work thaaat great, it was still way better than analog modem or ISDN.

Oooh yeah, ISDN. My cable solution that I got in year 2000 (to answer OP’s question) didn’t work very well, and DSL wasn’t an option yet I think.

For those ready to listen to my nostalgia:

ISDN was awesome because even the smallest solution had two channels. So two phonecalls on one line. Great for businesses. Also, a channel had 64 kbit, slightly faster than the analog modems which I think maxed out at 54 kbit, which was often unlikely to be reached.

But the trick is, the two channels could be combined to 128 kbit. An incoming or outgoing phonecall would simply reduce the speed back to 64, instead of interrupting the connection.

Although I paid by the minute, and using two channels doubled the cost, so I usually only used it when I was literally waiting for a data transfer and would be paying the same price anyway.

Actually, I think my ISDN would count as dial-up, as I paid by the minute.

Here is in Denmark they are at 100%, because that’s our law. As far as I know (as a consumer), it works just fine.

All soda bottles and cans can be returned in (almost?) any store that sells them. When we buy, a small deposit is added. When we return the container, we get the deposit back.

The deposit is adjusted every now and then to keep it small enough to not significantly affect customers buying power, but big enough that most people want the money back.