What part of "or take advantage of the free public API" wasn't clear?

Interestingly, no such company exists here in Brazil. The reason is that our government has been offering full tax filling apps for free since I remember filling taxes (about 25 years). It's written in Java and runs on Windows, Linux and Mac without any problem. And for people who a normal salary, without investments or anything complicated, there's also free simplified tax filling apps for Android and iOS.

If the person has extra-complex stuff going on with their earnings, they can hire an accountant to fill the taxes for them. That accountant, in turn, will use the same app on their end, or take advantage of the free public API.

And if one's extra fancy, one can sign their submission with a publicly available encrypted token. This one is paid for, but it's also fully optional, and only people who do LOTS of stuff involving governmental systems get one, as it makes signing into those services faster and easier. So if one already has one for other uses, using it to sign their tax submission is a no-brainer.

Trump took the EU to the woodshed. They had to drop all of their protectionist tariffs they have against AmeriKKKan goods(I thought protectionism was ad?) and in return America puts a 15% tariff on all of theirs. Moreover they had to write a check to us for hundreds of billions. The tariffs will bring in a shit-ton of money. We can use this to replace the income tax and repeal it entirely.

The usual TDS sufferers are screaming it's a tax on AmeriKKKans but it's not. When's the last time an American bought anything made in Europe? I mean one of us, not the CA/NY American passport holders who write the media articles describing what happened.

Hey, I've got an idea - make things in America and there are no tariffs. It's weird but worth a shot, it could work.

Anonymity is eliminated. In countries adopting these policies one cannot watch YouTube content targeted at adults without signing into a Google account and having their face or ID scanned into a database they have no control over. Additionally, hundreds of smaller sites are closing because their operators cannot afford the intrusive ID tech, including text games that have existed since the early 2000s, as well as online forums that existed since the 1990s, where children hardly went. Slashdot itself, were it hosted in the UK, which is slightly ahead of the curve on these matters, would have likely closed too. In fact, in the UK Wikipedia is being threatened, and there are plans there to force VPN providers to start preventing citizens from sidestepping all of that.

Additionally, payment processors are taking part of the censorship efforts. Steam and Itchio were forced to remove thousands of adult games that are completely legal due to pressure from Visa and Mastercard, both of which have also forced physical and online stores to either remove legal adult content or close -- and some had no choice but to close. All that adult material, which, again, is fully legal, is now almost impossible to acquire legally.

TL;DR: anonymity, privacy, and free exchange of legal adult content.

As I said, I have no interest in your antisemitism. Bye.

Sorry, I have a grand total of zero interest in antisemitic nonsense.

And before you say unhinged, I oppose the genocide of the Palestinians by Israel's government, while supporting the sane side of Israeli politics, which alas is currently powerless and incapable of stopping the madness.

That's the excuse used. "Think of the children" is always extremely effective at curbing the rights of adults, while doing little for actual children.

On the contrary, it will have a ton of good effects. All DoS attacks will stop. Fraud will crash and stay there. Email spammers will go away. When alt-right trolls get banned, they will STAY banned. Forever. Imagine an internet without them. A boot stomping on 4chan's face, forever.

The impression I have, from the seemingly coordinated global effort on age verification and anti-sex censorship, is that we're seeing preparations for war. Three weak quasi-evidences for it:

First, these age verification systems are effectively nation-wide, systemic, government-supervised information access control systems. Right now they only control for age and have only two buckets: children and adults. But nothing prevents expanding the buckets and the control parameters via changes to the laws once they're all in place. It doesn't mean something like this will happen, but the potential for it is there.

Second, this is being implemented by three of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance plus the EU plus the major network payments, simultaneously. Sure, this may be a coincidence, or a sign of the times, or a cultural shift, or whatever. But the time coincidence is suspicious.

Third, war requires strict information control to keep up support for war, population morale, and also contain avoid enemy psyops and disinformation campaigns, but the control cannot be so much that it interferes with production. In the past this was easy to do, all a government need do was enable emergency powers and have publishers and broadcasters censored. But the Internet requires much wider and more fine-tuned mechanisms, that is, high granularity in access control, which these systems provide.

Considering the US is pushing hard for everyone but the kitchen sink to see China as The Enemy, to the point of having that as a core aspect of its enforced global trade accords; that this view of China is bipartisan, both Republicans and Democrats sharing it; and that one of the bills proposing similar controls in the US also has extensive bipartisan support, it'd at the very least make sense that all these governments are preparing for extensive information control in case the dispute with China turns hot in a few years. And for that to be possible, the infrastructure needs to be in place ahead of time, well tested, and well debugged.

This is going to fail bigtime. Nobody will move there for jobs. As a tech professional, I would rather eat glass than live in a flyover state. I have in-demand skills and I have zero desire to live in places that are small minded, lack immigrants, and lack interesting and rich culture. The tech sector is chock full of diverse immigrants and unique people who have no desire to live in a conformist mono-chromatic culture. Tech talents don't want to eat breakfast at the Waffle House.

That's incorrect. Visa has been pulling the same shit in Japan, forcing manga and anime stores to drop adult content or get de-credit-card'ed. This included a store owned by an elected national representative. It's gotten so bad the Japanese government has recently started an anti-trust investigation against Visa.

Do you realize you had an intrusive thought, wrote it down and started railing against something that nobody said? This is literally Trump Derangement Syndrome. Please, see a therapist. CBT does wonders for people in your situation. Don't suffer needlessly. It doesn't have to be like this.

They're not in the home gym business. They're in the data harvesting and selling business.

Your data is worth more than the profit margin on their exercise equipment.

This is the world now, and you cheered it on all the way.

Even Google won't allow you to watch random Youtube videos any more without "sign in to prove you're not a robot". Google, the original evil privacy rapist.

We got a solid ten years out of them before they went evil, I guess that's pretty good. LLMs are where Google used to be in the year 2000, an improvement on search engines that blow the existing products away. Remember how awful search engines used to be? Then Google delivered actual good results. Then they took away the + and - operators and started censoring politically inconvenient content by removing it or demoting it to page 137 of results.

Did you learn of figures of speech during your English Literature classes?

Then you have dedicated little time to the topic and are basing your view on stereotypes.

For which I stand corrected and, as I said before, I apologize.

Indeed. That's what Jesus intended, yes. Too bad there's little agreement among Christians on what, precisely, showing love means.

At last someone is willing to tell off the little people to their faces. It's heartening to see even in this day and age of open nullification of federal power in California and others that someone supports the US government. You tell those deplorables how it is! Speak truth to the powerless!