Aceticon

I've regularly commuted by bicycle for almost 2 decade in 3 different countries.

I'm sorry but if you're cycling (or using an e-bike) on the sidewalk you deserved to get punished for it. Same if you cross a red-light when pedestrians are crossing. (I'm so so about crossing a red-light when there are no traffic or pedestrians crossing: I won't do it myself but if you're not endangering others it's no big deal in my book if other cyclists do it).

Lack of infrastructure as cited by cyclists in the article is no excuse to put pedestrians at risk for the convenience of the cyclist.

Big Brother states (which the UK is certainly headed towards)

When the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK had even more civil society surveillance than the US.

As a consequence of those revelations, in the US some of the surveillance was walked back, whilst in the UK the Government just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK system of Press Censorship) to shut up the Press, got the Editor of the newspaper that brought it out in the UK (The Guardian) kicked out, and the Press there never talked about it again.

Also, let's not forget the UK has the biggest number of surveillance cameras per-capita in the World.

Oh, and they have a special and separate Surveillance Tribunal (the Investigatory Powers Tribunal) were the lawyers for the side other than the State are not allowed to be present in certain sessions, see certain evidence or even get informed of the final judgement unless their side wins.

They easily have the most extreme regime of Civil Society Surveillance in Europe, and in the World are probably second only to the likes of North Korea and China.

Britain is well beyond merely "headed towards" Big Brother and has been for at least a decade.

Well, they really are constantly thinking of the children...

The most likely to succeed at the moment, IMHO, would be a standardization of the various local payment systems in Europe, and there is already some movement in that direction in a growing group of countries, but it probably needs a push from the EU itself, similarly to how GSM was pushed as a standard for mobile communications by European governments as a group and ended up dominating globally (which is also why, for a period and until smartphones became a thing, European mobile telephony companies were wildly successful).

I'm sorry for Americans who aren't assholes (most here in Lemmy as far as I can tell) but the rest of the World does need to decouple from speed-running-to-Gilead America at all levels before it's too late.

Time for Europe to get its own payment processor and stop being dependent on companies from Gilead.

The Labour Party is just a mainstream party from a system with First Past The Post (where power is pretty much a doupoly) which was captured and the ideology of those who captured it isn't even left of center.

Remember that not that long ago they were purging Leftwingers in that party.

They're Neoliberals so far to the Right that they're actively supporting a foreign ethno-Fascist regime committing a Genocide along ethnic lines now entering a Holocaust phase, and do so using authoritarian measures against the population of their own country, all of this whilst wearing a Labour Party suit.

I lived in Britain for over a decade until a little after the Leave Referendum and kept track of British politics for a while after that, and this surprises me not one bit after the style and nature of the coup against Jeremy Corbyn done by the very people now in Government there.

Well, it's American-style "liberal": hard neoliberal with some of performative (rather than principled) moral liberalism.

It's definitely not Liberal in the sense of taking a principled stance for people's freedom, as made painfully obvious by what they're doing against anti-Genocide protestors.

I would even say they're more towards the Authoritarian side than the Liberal one.

Britain was never liberal.

The very same people harping about "gay rights" would also be writing scatting opinion articles against something or other they believe was a moral perversion (for example, men who used sex dolls) with not the least bit self-awareness about how those articles were very much like those that used to be written against homosexuality, just with a different group being targeted.

The middle class in that place is big on doing what is fashionable and makes them look good socially (keeping up with appearances) which means certain minorities which are now fashionable to support get a lot of loud, performative support, but those actions are seldom driven by actual Principles about Freedom (quite the contrary, the place is big on people "knowing their place" and has a ton of laws meant to silence and push-back on those who are loudly contrarians outside a few "permitted" domains).

Having lived in a couple of places in Europe, including Britain and The Netherlands, in my opinion Britain is actually unusually conservative for an European country.

I expect that Israel has got a lot of blackmail material on a lot of people in Government and heading main political parties all over Europe,

It's a New Holocaust, ever so slightly whitewashed so that the (US, UK and German style) "Liberals" who are ever so slightly less Fascist-loving than the actual Fascists, have the flimsiest, most transparent of excuses so that they can de facto support it whilst denying that it's happening.

It's not even "content at it's zenith" - AAA games nowadays are pushed out both expensive and broken, plus they come with the risk of some form of enshittification being sneaked in later (be it promised content that we're told "couldn't make it into the launch" being sold later as overpriced DLCs or even monetisation).

I would say that the zenith of most AAA games (in the sense of peak enjoyment) is at least a year after release once most bugs have been fixed and the threat of enshittification has passed, sometimes never (for those games that did got enshittified).

IMHO, the best value, not just in terms of fun-per-$ but also in avoidance of unpleasant feelings (such as feeling that you've been swindled by a game maker or are being taken advantage of) is in buying games which are at least 2 years old, or in the case of some publishers like Nintendo, it's never.

You're still thinking it at a the level of "can", rather than the level of "is it worth it".

"Possible" isn't the same as "profitable" - the whole point of stores doing it would be to sell that data to entities such as Health Insurers, and that data would be sold at pennies (and I don't mean pennie-per-entry, I mean pennies-per-thousands), so it has to be possible to do it extremely cheaply, which it is if you already have the necessary information in digital form in a database (user id from the payment card and the list of items purchased along with date, time and location of purchase), but it's not if you have to do reverse image search in bulk, not least because the providers out there won't just allow other businesses to do it for free to make money out of it - they'll demand a cut for doing the computationally hardest part of the process (or, if the supermarkets want to do it themselves, for access to their store of pictures).

Also, the quality of results from reverse image search is pretty bad in terms of actually finding and correctly identifying a person from a picture - it often just outright fails or gives false positives, which means data obtained that way is a lot more polluted with false results than just finding the person ID via the card used for payment, which is near perfect (not quite perfect because somebody might let somebody else use their card or the card might have been stolen, but way more reliable than identifying somebody via a picture).

So all this hassle and cost to have a parallel process to try to ID people like me who pays in cash to sell my purchasing habits information, when most people are like you and just give them their ID on a platter by paying with card, doesn't make any business sense.

They ain't doing it because they can't, they ain't doing it because so long as the market is flooded with customer purchasing habits data obtained cheaply by just using the information from their card payment, deploying facial recognition technology to match buyers to purchases wouldn't actually be profitable.

Just because it's technologically possible to go after the hard to get info using a complex process, doesn't mean it makes business sense to do it, especially when they're already making money with a far simpler and cheaper process.