I would love for a self-service broker to materialize.
i.e. Where you upload your paperwork, fill in and certify the forms online, make a payment, and the broker just feeds all that through. You do the work, they're just your gateway to the system.
I've used courier's internal brokers (like DHL/UPS offer, at their ripoff rate), professional private brokers, etc. and seen all of them make stupid mistakes costing me money/time (eg. including the shipping cost in value for duties, transposing the wrong currency at face value, etc). I could do a better job myself, and frankly with a decent portal it would take me less time. Heck I bet I could build a fairly automated system that is more efficient (higher-margin) and accurate.
Here in Canada there's new legislation that even if you use a third party broker, you still need to post a security or bond with CBSA (see CARM) maintained on an annual basis. It boggles my mind they made the infrastructure to deal with money from all the individual buyers, but not a self-service portal to deal with the forms. Self-clearing here still entails a physical visit to a CBSA office.
Glue and seals weaken with exposure to temperature extremes in both directions. I found this out the hard way too.
Yeah, the stuff everyone uses in consumer electronics is crap.
I learned a lot about this after I got a used boat and started working on it myself. I wish manufacturers would take a page from the marine industry and use better quality materials like Stainless 316 for metal frames and fasteners (much more rust-resistant than common 304 Stainless), Santoprene for gaskets (a UV-resistant EDPM blend with a working temperature from -81°F to 275°F / -60°C to 135°C), higher quality adhesives, etc. I noticed SCUBA (diving) and SCBA (firefighting) hardware tends to be built somewhat better (though still not perfect), presumably because it's life-safety. And NASA and others pioneered incredible materials and assembly methods for aviation and spaceflight back in the day. We have the means to build for longevity, it just costs 3X+.
Don't even get me started about commodity vulcanized rubber coatings that become a sticky mess after a few years.
...AI race consuming NAND flash at an extraordinary rate, but consumer platforms have not yet adopted PCIe 6.0 (and won't until 2030), making a consumer variant completely useless.
I'm annoyed at everyone who shares my name, phone number and any other details with Meta. I never consented to it. The behavior of their app slurping up your contacts database is despicable.
This doesn't answer your question, but in case it helps for others out there: it's possible to use WhatsApp with no access whatsoever to your contacts and I used it that way for years. Connecting with people is slightly jankier but it still works.
This assumes people are putting in their real birthdays, which IMO is a terrible practice to encourage.
I never put in my real birthday. It's just one more datapoint to leak in an inevitable hack and help scammers exploit me.
Just because a website sticks a field on a form, doesn't mean you need to fill it out.
I can think of maybe 1 website I use that has a legitimate use to know this info about me... and a dozen that use my fictious birthday for no other purpose than an excuse to market at me under the shallow guise of a 'Happy Birthday' email.
There are many websites that believe I was born on January 1st, in a year close to my actual birth year.
When it's actually required by some law or regulation (e.g. financial stuff) I give my actual birthday. But when some site is just wanting to comply with age verification? Yep, I'm over 30, so you don't need to see my identification. (Jedi hand wave).
Well, they would have the legal right to force-choke your account, or chain your partner to a golden bikini, when they discover that you weren't abiding by the Terms and Conditions which you agreed to. Seems fair.
IIRC, it went like this: the account creation screen prompted them for a birthdate. They entered a fictitious one and pretended to be over 13. (I saw my niece do this in front of me, and I just sighed a very heavy sigh. She was way more interested in Club Penguin.)
Then later, they let the cat out of the bag. They tell their friends "lol I'm only 10! Today's my birthday, so give me a hat!" or something. And so if they claimed they're 10 they got 3 years suspension.
I think there was never any verification done, and no verification was possible: think about it, under COPPA, a service in the USA cannot collect PII from children under 13, so what do you do when a kid gives you two contradicting datapoints? Err on the side of caution.
I gave Yahoo! a false birthdate when I signed up. I was 27, but I also just felt they weren't entitled to knowing it. However, I soon found that maintaining a fraudulent identity is tiresome and error-prone. And Yahoo! wouldn't let me simply change my birthdate as often as I wanted to.
I once had a conversation with a friend about cheating on IRS taxes. She said "can you lie to a piece of paper?" like fudging numbers wasn't like lying to an auditor's face. It was a rhetorical question, of course.
My first reaction is, what a disaster. More of the web becomes gated behind sacrificing your privacy to companies who by and large don't give a damn about it.
Then I remembered when I was a teen, thought about how I'd have reacted to this, and realized over the long term youth will rediscover old-school tools like IRC or migrate to new alternatives outside the claws of big corps and government.
And I felt a little better about the future of human civilization.
Play Store pages for all 3 list strong assurances about how the developer declares no data is being sold to third parties, or collected unrelated to the item's core functionality.
My open question to Google is: What consequences will these developers face for lying to you and your users, and why should I have any faith at all in those declarations?
i.e. Where you upload your paperwork, fill in and certify the forms online, make a payment, and the broker just feeds all that through. You do the work, they're just your gateway to the system.
I've used courier's internal brokers (like DHL/UPS offer, at their ripoff rate), professional private brokers, etc. and seen all of them make stupid mistakes costing me money/time (eg. including the shipping cost in value for duties, transposing the wrong currency at face value, etc). I could do a better job myself, and frankly with a decent portal it would take me less time. Heck I bet I could build a fairly automated system that is more efficient (higher-margin) and accurate.
Here in Canada there's new legislation that even if you use a third party broker, you still need to post a security or bond with CBSA (see CARM) maintained on an annual basis. It boggles my mind they made the infrastructure to deal with money from all the individual buyers, but not a self-service portal to deal with the forms. Self-clearing here still entails a physical visit to a CBSA office.
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