In the context of age limits, that is wrong. The German eID has a zero knowledge method of proving that your age is above a certain number without revealing anything else. That method has been around for like 15 years and these days, thanks to smartphones with NFC readers, is quite user-friendly.

In practice it's basically not used anywhere except for cigarette vending machines because it's much simpler to hire some dubious third party "wave your ID in front of your camera" service

Edit: mandatory age verification is still an atrocious idea for a number of other reasons, just to be clear

I won't use the eID because I don't believe in its promises. I don't need a third party, which would be completely dependent on government, to put a signature on my net access.

I would even prefer the dubious service because of the relationship dynamics I mentioned. Best case is that age limits for the net should be enforced on device by parents. Problem solved, no unnecessary infrastructure needed.

Theoretically you could have anyone sign and attest to your age at any time. So maybe the government gives you an attestation of 0 at birth, with timestamp (allowing age to be calculated at any time), as part of the normal new-human bureaucracy. And/or maybe you can separately hire an accredited (co-signed?) lab to perform carbon dating on you later on :)

I totally would prefer the biopsy to a government Id. So carbon dating here I come.

You're basically describing Volt Europa. They're having some success with that approach in Germany and the Netherlands, primarily at the municipality level

The last election must have been around the recent middle-east events (framing it purposefully neutral), because I remember I had some conflicting thoughts about their stance. I can't (honestly) remember if I voted for them then or not - but I strongly considered it, that much I know.

Edit: Writing this out I think, I'm probably part of the problem. Voters should remember who they voted for and benchmark the results against their campaign pledge. Keeping politicians responsible with the little power we individuals have.

Doing that benchmarking is far more important then whether you actually voted for them last time. If you do the former then I don't think you're part of the problem.

I'd be happy to pay for premium if it actually removed all ads from the platform. I wish they forced creators to declare which segments of a video are ads for their sponsors and then removed or skipped them for premium users. Basically built-in Sponsorblock except not crowd-sourced.

Alternatively, many creators already upload ad-free versions to their Patreon or other paywalled platforms, they could upload those to YouTube as well to be shown to premium users if YT allowed for it and forced them to.

Alas I'm not willing to pay 13€ a month for just slightly fewer ads.

I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.

I'd love an option to be able to filter out all videos from my feed that have sponsored segments. For me, I find the best content is the underground stuff made by folks who don't have a clear profit motive.

This is a feature that could probably be added to sponsorblock. They have the data already.

Yes, this is the change that would most improve YT for me.

yeah I think the free market can figure ad load out. creators who go overboard on sponsored segments will get less views, less engagement. there's a natural equilibrium.

In many countries ad sections have to be clearly marked for another reason the "free market" hasn't solved: disguised advertising. I wish the US got with the times.

They actually do have this but it's only on the mobile app. Most videos if you tap to skip forward an auto skip button shows up.

I have recently started seeing this on the website, too. It also shows up after you use the temp 2x speed mode by holding left mouse button on the video/tap-holding the video on the app.

You can remove videos from your watch history and in my experience that does have an impact on the recommendations as it's not factored in anymore

Right, but that's annoying and you gotta remember. Something easier would be nice.

With the main difference being that you don't get an actually usable visual diff for free but instead have to buy those from third party vendors to make any use out of the manual diffs.

Matlab plays a sound on error by default (on some systems through the internal speaker, bypassing volume controls) and I always found it irritating.

The only use case I see for them is something running in the background that takes a while and might get interrupted.

Let's see. Cologne to Berlin takes ~4:40 hours by train. Flixbus takes 9-10 hours, not counting the time it takes to get to their departure station which would involve a train journey as it's not actually in the city centre.

Flixbus is 50€ cheaper when traveling that route tomorrow but that's about all it has going for it.

Train and bus normally have that “10-20 minutes ahead” planning to be at the station.

Planes? At least an hour, and if you cut into that, and the queues or security theatre more mind boggling than normal, you’ve missed your flights.

Eurostar is similar to airports, so I’m glowering at them too!

Even if you aren't at the airport that early, it still takes you an hour to get from the airport to the city centre in Berlin, and about half an hour to get to the airport from Cologne's city centre. That's by train, by car it takes even longer.

It depends if you're going from "centre to centre" or "somewhere near Cologne to somewhere near Berlin".

Sure but assuming you're traveling from centre to centre, which is where population densities are highest, is a sound assumption. Otherwise you can always find spots where getting to the airport, train station, flixbus stop or whatever takes extremely long with one mode of transport over the other.

Doesn't distract from the point that long distances busses are very much not an alternative to rail (or planes for that matter) unless price is the deciding factor. And even the latter is questionable in many cases thanks to the 49€ ticket.

Also no time at all when arriving. Getting out of a train and the station rarely takes more than five minutes; usually less.

It's used by lesbians just as often and giving vs receiving has nothing to do with fetishes. You can have the most vanilla sex imaginable and still have a top/bottom.

This isn't true everywhere. E.g. in the alps you might be billed for rescue, particularly if you're not injured or in a medical emergency. That said, SAR insurance is cheap. Many alpinist associations and the likes offer it as part of their membership, which is often less than 100€/yr. There's no reason not to have it if you're going out into the mountains.

> * An ICE every 30 Minutes (high frequency, not just high speed)

That's part of a long term infrastructure project dubbed "Deutschlandtakt": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandtakt

The current estimate is that the overall project will take until ~2040 (though I think we all know how that'll go) with ongoing improvements to frequency on individual lines.