At present, governments and banks are freeloaders piggybacking on the popularity of the smartphone. If these entities end up mandating access to their services via this route (or making them nigh on impossible to access by other more traditional means) then users should demand they be issued with phones specifically for the purpose, as owning a phone is not prerequisite or mandated requirement to live in society—although if trends continue it likely will be.

Moreover, as phone technology easily lends itself to location tracking any mandatory requirement for phone vehicle licences would soon lead to mandatory location tracking (and easy to implement and impossible to disable with government/bank-issued phones).

That's the logical endgame, and it'd be showdown time. The question is does the citizenry have the guts and resilience to resist such authoritarian impositions.

Frankly, I'm horrified at how easily users of these essential services have been bought off by online conveniences, they've not only become careless and blasé but by default they've also conceded to the withdrawing—and in many cases—actual withdrawal of traditional services in favour of ones that both governments and banks have more control over—and in the bargain they've chucked privacy to the wind.

https://www.usnews.com/insurance/auto/how-do-those-car-insur...

Only a question of time until it becomes mandatory

When I turned JS on it could not determine my machine type, got screen reso wrong and it provided incorrect location info (map and coordinates were wrong). Moreover the browser type was incorrect (but then I automatically randomize the browser type on each launch).

It's decades since I backpacked around Europe on trains and such, and back then slashing pockets and bags was rife. I never traveled anywhere unless I was wearing a money belt strapped to my waist—it held my passport, traveler's checks, large denomination notes and credit cards. I kept my wallet (with only a small amount of cash) in my front jeans pockets—I reckoned that down there I'd notice any slashing pretty quickly. Pants with side pockets were a no-no because they were too easy to pickpocket.

I recall one particularly bad incident in Italy of being surrounded by organised mobs of kids who'd act in ways to distract one's attention whilst others tried to pickpocket one's valuables. I came out unscathed because I was wary from the start.

Later I was living and working in Europe and it was very obvious to me that this sort of crime is much more prevalent in areas where people are unemployed or where there is a great disparity between rich and poor. I've no doubt the solution to such crime is having a society where the distribution of wealth is more equitable.

Re that point and yours about self-checkout for bus rides. That system was implemented a few years ago where I am. I've made the interesting observation that those who travel outside normal to-and-from work hours—say late morning and early afternoon—are the ones most likely to not swipe their travel card on the payment terminal. When I've traveled at those times I'm surprised at the numbers who do not pay. This is in stark contrast to those who are traveling to and from work, at those hours just about everyone pays.

Again, this, no doubt, is an equity/financial issue. Those traveling in the 'off hours' are more likely to be unemployed and or financially hard up.

When in Tokyo I encountered vending machines on a public street (the Ginza) that dispensed bottles of whiskey—Suntory if I recall—that operated 24 hours a day. If you wanted a drink at 3AM you could get it.

Where I am that vending machine would be vandalized overnight and the owner of such an appliance shop would be broke and out of business the next day.

Shame really.

Edit: A Westerner but longtime resident of Japan told me when I was working there of a hotel robbery where an American tourist had valuables and jewelry worth a substantial sum taken from her hotel room. The robbery was big enough to make the newspapers which led to the return of the jewelry. The thief after seeing the news story returned them with a message to the effect "Sorry, I wouldn't have stolen them if I'd known you were a visiting tourist".

Perhaps the story is apocryphal but it and other stories such as if you lose your wallet there's good chance it'll be returned complete with cash—is testament to the honesty of Japanese people.

Than he ran equally fast to his train, which was ready to leave. Had he not run so fast while returning the wallet to its owner, he would have lost his train. Therefore, doing a good deed had required quite an effort for that Japanese, but this had not dissuaded him.

As a nonsmoker, I can't speak about cigarette machines, likely there was no ID on them too.

Nowadays, with smartphones etc. checking IDs is comparatively easy but I can't think how it would have been done back then.

I guess that also applies to France... because why would we use machines when we could just walk into a shop and buy cigarettes without ID?

I remember my much older sister sending me off to buy cigarettes for her when I was maybe 12 and having zero problems. Many of my friends smoked through high school, also with zero problems acquiring cigarettes.

So yeah, using machines to buy cigarettes as a kid? Unimaginable for me, but I'm guessing not the way you were imagining it.

Exactly, I'm not in France but that practice was pretty common in most Western countries not that many decades ago (see my reply to this post). I didn't mention it but where I am (Australia) it also was pretty common for a kid to go to the shops to pick up cigarettes for, say, a parent.

When I first went to France decades ago (I've relatives in Paris) I found smoking was even more culturally entrenched than where I am, there were posters everywhere for Gitanes, Gauloises and other cigarettes. In fact, France is the home of many classic posters advertising or showing people smoking, many are so good they're now considered works of art.

I've not been to France for some time but I gather in recent years the French's attitude towards smoking has changed dramatically and the practice is now frowned upon culturally—or at least that's my perception from a far. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's not what I'd have expected (anyway, not to such a degree); unlike the puritanical guilt-ridden English, I'd have thought French culture was more resilient. What brought this change to my attention was the recent kerfuffle over the French icon Jacques Tati's M. Hulot where posters on the Métro were censored—M. Hulot is portrayed sans pipe!

My immediate reaction was 'sacrilege, the vandal who did that had an unmitigated damn hide—what the Hell's going on in France to allow that to happen?'. You see, I'm a great Tati fan and Jour de fête, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle are some of my most loved films—so the 'desecration' affected me personally.

As I've mentioned, I'm a nonsmoker and I applaud the reduction in smoking in recent years but vandalizing a cultural icon is carrying the anti-smoking message too far, it not only rendered M. Hulot's most idiosyncratic characteristic mute, but also make a mockery of the anti smoking message and it's likely to have been counterproductive. If what happened to M. Hulot had occurred in the UK or Righteous America I'd have said 'that's to be expected' but that it occurred in France was a total surprise.

No doubt, there was a backlash from Tati fans. I've not heard the outcome, what occurred in the wash-up?

BTW, As a kid I saw Mon Oncle not long after the film was released and I was enthralled. I never tire of seeing it.

TBH, I think "frowned upon" would be an optimistic take on the current attitude towards smoking. It is still (to me) inexplicably common and popular.

That said, I actually think you've got an inverted view on French opinion. I'd say it's what you consider a desecration that didn't matter to us. People do stuff, sometimes silly stuff, and I think we generally do not lose sleep over it. The notion that it was vandalizing some cultural icon is honestly the kind of thinking that we'd be less likely to abide, more than we'd oppose anti-smoking vandalism. :)

But: maybe I'm just projecting.

I've not been to France for well over a decade so I've no personal feel for the current cultural mindset so in my ignorance "frowned upon" seemed a way of extrapolating with only limited information. I thus cannot say whether I've an inverted view of French opinion, what I can say however is that my opinion was formed from multiple press reports that many in France were outraged and that some politicians were even calling for a change in the law to stop any repetition (as I've mentioned, I'm not au fait with subsequent events).

As a fan of Tati films of course I'm hyperbolizing to a degree but it's not anti-smoking vandalism that's my main point. The issues are complex so I have to be careful what I say here, I cannot give a long explanation on HN to cover every nuance; and paraphrasing is dangerous, when doing so issues can become black and white when in fact they're various shades of gray.

The best I can do here is to say that the Hulot's pipe issue is symptomatic of a bigger problem in society(ies) where after a problem or issue is identified there's often an overreaction that's not necessarily beneficial to the outcome, it can not only slow down solutions but also it's likely to create a very charged and ugly political environment.

There are many instances of this, nuclear power and accidents, Montreal Protocol/CFCs, Plastics/pollution, CO2/fossil fuels vs renewables vs climate change, fear of chemicals/chemicals in the environment, etc.—all matters I obviously cannot cover here in detail.

I will however come back to the smoking/tobacco matter for a moment. This controversy has divided societies to various degrees for decades, and much of the debate is emotional rather than rational (that said, I'm not suggesting for a second that smoking isn't dangerous, it certainly is). In some countries such as the US, UK and Australia (especially so anglophone ones) debate is no longer just that but rather has descended into a screaming match between sides, logic no longer reigns. Some opponents of smoking act almost to the point of hysteria when anyone with a cigarette comes near them but many of these very same people are quite prepared to sit near a camp fire or BBQ and not complain about the smoke—and in so doing they'll absorb a much higher dose of carcinogenic dioxins than they would from someone with a cigarette. As with those other examples, all too often emotions overrule facts.

Now briefly back to Tati's M. Hulot. When those films were made in late 1940s through to the '60s smoking was not only culturally acceptable but also it had a certain prestige and sophistication about it. Now that in many countries smoking is on the nose so to speak what are we to do? One obvious option is to ban these films altogether, or to give them an 'R' rating so only adults are able to view them. If this trend were to continue (which in my opinion is highly likely) then we could end up in a situation where we see people sneaking into movie theaters in the dead of night or in the case of online streaming viewers would have to first provide verifiable ID of proof of age. If alive today long-dead filmmakers of these once-deemed harmless movies would be horrified.

To some extent this has already happened, many truly classic Warner Bros cartoons of my childhood are now banned from television, same with The Three Stooges on grounds of them being too violent. That said, the hypocrisy is truly outrageous, these days there is any amount of gun and gratuitous violence on TV, in movies and online. Most find this acceptable, only a comparatively small minority of the population actually objects to the violence. So much for objectivity.

Moreover, I expect such problems only to increase. Recently, I've been watching TV soaps from the 1960s (on free-to-air TV) and frankly there are themes—both dialogues and images—that would not appear in TV programs made today, in fact I'm surprised they too haven't been withdrawn because of content that's 'unacceptable' to modern audiences (again, I cannot go into specifics for reasons stated).

The broader issue is how far do we go to protect society from not only itself but also from its past, and what effect does such action have on society? The extension thus is how do we measure whether interventions have positive or negative outcomes, or is often the case how do we quantify the actual damage when opinionated groups within society lobby government for laws that overprotect and mollycoddle citizens? Evidence is that in recent decades certain rules introduced to protect society have ended up making its citizens less resilient, moreover it wasn't necessarily obvious this would occur when they were introduced.

For example, rules introduced to protect the welfare of children have in recent years become so strictured that we're now seeing instances of negative outcomes, consequences are that some kids have become dysfunctional. Overprotecting kids out of fear for their safety has become so all encompassing that we're now witnessing all too many instances of kids being too frightened to leave their homes unless accompanied by an adult, isolation from the world around them has made them fearful of it. If you'd mentioned to anyone that could happen to kids when I was that age they'd have quickly retorted that you were bonkers.

That might seem a long stretch from banning M. Hulot's pipe from the Métro but it is not. Fact is, this is how the rot begins. As I implied, making the correct calls to protect society is both complex and fraught with difficulty. That's not to say we don't need them or that we shouldn't try because we definitely do need them. What we don't need are decisions made on the spur of the moment by the opinionated, rather we need to make time to develop well thought through strategies

"Unimaginable in most countries."

Well, perhaps so these days, but it wasn't at all so when I was a kid. At somewhere between 10 and 12 years old when still in primary school occasionally we kids bought cigarettes on our way home and ducked off somewhere secluded to smoke them.

A few shopkeepers wouldn't sell them to us but many would. There weren't many cigarette machines about (they were usually located on railway stations, in theater foyers etc.), but those in use could be operated by anyone including us kids. Moreover, cigarettes were very cheap, they had nothing like the huge taxes on them of today—so cheap we had no difficulty in purchasing them out of our pocket money.

Kids smoking was frowned upon by most parents and teachers but it wasn't illegal. That's why we smoked in secluded places where we wouldn't be seen. (Back then, smoking was accepted and considered pretty normal for adults, especially men. Since then attitudes have changed dramatically.)

For the record, except for that occasional experimenting as a kid I've never smoked since, nor have I ever had any desire to do so.

It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.

As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.

If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.

Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).

By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.

The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.

The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.

But I'm not yet convinced. Several things I find worrying, first is the absence of a technical description of the chemistry involved—one that'd instantly pique the interest of polymer chemists, second there are some unusual aspects of the Investor Presentation—web latest (PDF). Therein, is an unusually worded Preface followed by a very long two-paragraph statement in extremely fine print headed:

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FOREWORD-LOOKING INFORMATION

If I were an investor the wording of this document would concern me greatly. I'd read into it that this is a highly speculative venture, especially so given there is no real description of the chemical process(es) involved.

In short, I'd need a great deal more information before I'd be convinced that what Denovia Labs has is truly viable groundbreaking technology.

Caveat here, perhaps I've missed the chemical description of the process in all those links but why would Denovia be so secretive about its tech in its Investor Presentation and in press releases? Presumably, the process has been patented and thus protected before it began seeking investors.

One sting was particularly memorable. I had what I thought was a bee buzzing around the room where my computer was and I tried for some minutes to shoo it out the window but it disappeared, either it went to ground or snuck out without me noticing.

About two weeks later whilst working at my computer I felt several quite painful 'stings' on on my left ankle and noticed a wasp biting through my sock. What's more my first attempt to remove it was unsuccessful, it just bit me again.

An examination of my ankle showed several lacerations of about 2mm in length in near proximity to one another and they were bleeding.

Seems to me these weren't deliberate stings as such, rather the wasp was starving and I was the nearest food available. (I should add that that window and the door to the room were normally kept shut so the wasp would have had difficulty escaping.)

Would be interested to know if others have been bitten in a similar way.

I agree with that for the same reasons. Nevertheless, I'll still use sunscreen when I have to. In Australia there are times when it's hard to avoid the sun but I avoid it at every opportunity.

If at the end of a day I feel my skin the slightest bit sore from exposure I know I've not been proactive enough.

That just means the fines are inadequate. The solution is to increase them until shareholders are noticeably hurt. Pressure from shareholders on Google's management to stop the offending practices would soon effect the necessary change.