Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

Dutch people pay so much tax because dutch companies pay so little tax, so pretty much the entire burden of paying the costs of the State comes from the wallets of individuals (whilst companies too are owned by individuals, those rich enough have many ways of avoiding paying tax on that and a lot of the biggest owners of the companies making profits in The Netherlands - whilst paying little tax on said profits - aren’t even resident in The Netherlands).

In countries were the tax take is more evenly balanced between people and businesses, people pay less taxes for more services (The Netherlands doesn’t even have a National Health Service, only a mixed Health Insurance system).

I lived in The Netherlands over a decade ago and already back then the country already had Northern European levels of taxation with nowhere near the levels of Public Services that countries with similar individual taxation - such as the Scandinavians - had and I doubt a decade of right-wing neoliberals in government has made things any better.

Judging by the prices in the various countries I’ve lived in, in Europe, mobile data prices are a pretty good indication of a cartel.

In my experience Germany is one of the worst (by comparison to what you quoted, I use to get unlimited 4G in the UK for £10/month some years ago) though my own country, Portugal, is even worse.

I bet there were “radio spectrum” or “mobile operator license” auctions won by a handful well connected large companies and there’s nothing in the law forcing them to open their networks…

Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.

The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.

Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.

I actually feel sorry for that first placed kid on the picture: he formally won but clearly feels beaten by the sheer enthusiasm of the 3rd place one.

In decent nations, an EULA is considered an attempt by the seller to, after the purchase, change the terms of the implicit contract which was the sale, so it’s has no legal standing whatsoever.

Absolutelly, the seller can set contract terms before the sale is done (and even then there are lots of limitations to avoid things like bait & switch, so it usualy has to be pretty clear and upfront and there are certain rights that a retail buyer simply cannot loose, even contractually), but never after the sale has been done.

EULAs only have legal standing in a few places, including a few States in the US.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).

I holes in your pants became fashionable, so too can holes in your walls!