I could not agree more. It’s a minor axis dominated by much bigger forces, serving as nothing but a distraction while the rich get richer.

I 100% agree. I was talking about what I think Labour should do if it wants to stay relevant in British politics, not what I believe we, as a country, should do.

I’m not sure I agree. That’s not me saying Labour’s leadership is competent.

But we keep circling around “the message just isn’t being heard”.

I think the message js being heard fine, it’s just that people disagree with it. Labour’s core philosophy around how we should treat refugees and asylum seekers just doesn’t line up with what many voters believe.

Until we recognise that people, rightly or wrongly (I believe it’s wrongly, but that’s beside the point), feel immigration really genuinely is too high, and “we should take care of our own first”, Labour will, I think, continue to lose (as will the Tories) and Reform will continue to gain.

The social democrats of Denmark “solved” this. And when I say “solved”, I simply mean they adopted a policy on immigration that I personally don’t agree with, but one which has kept the more extreme views out of too much influence. Their argument, at least the public argument, is that “immigration puts pressure on those with few resources first” and “to look after those people, we need to curb immigration”. They call this “good social democratic policy”, and call out that immigration can’t be seen as more important than looking after those we’ve got.

If Labour wants to regain relevance in the industrial ghost-towns, they have to move towards an expressed and inacted “harder line” on immigration.

I don’t think they will, or can, or should. And therefore we are seeing weird FPTP results all around the country (LibDem suddenly have a huge chance of winning my own constituency, where before they were a remote third), but with an overall push towards Reform UK.

If you really want to change that picture, supporting our education system so that people vote backed by data, not by emotions, is the real change we need. But that doesn’t serve anyone - the uneducated can much more easily be told what to believe and thus vote.

The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.

However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.

GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.

GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.

Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.

It wouldn’t stand up to traffic pattern analysis:

• VPN traffic tend to have very uniform traffic pattern
• Most VPN traffic runs on UDP, not TCP
• All VPN protocols that I’m aware of have characteristic handshake patterns, even wireguards extremely fast 1-RTT handshake.
• HTTPS traffic is very bursts and TCP retransmission patterns look very distinct.

But then I doubt an ISP would run deep traffic pattern analysis on all traffic. So you’d probably be fine.

But yeah, setting up your own VPN server on some random 1-core/2 GB RAM server is extremely easy.

That’s wrong.

Article 4(3) TEU requires that the country holding the rotating presidency of the council must act in the spirit of sincere cooperation, which means it must act as an “honest broker” and not pursue national interests. This means it must seek to find a compromise if the council cannot agree, which Denmark has done.

Look, I’m not a fan of chat control. But the blame doesn’t lie with the Danes, it’s the whole of the EU one must blame.

And for anyone actually bothering to read the legislation instead of joining the band wagon, that’s is literally exactly what the EU proposal calls for: Zero Knowledge Proof.

https://youtu.be/ULFTrTznG7Y

Scan your biometric proof (passport, id card or log into government issued service), get a set of ZKP tokens which the app can release on demand. These tokens are not traceable back to your identity.

Because Denmark holds the rotating EU presidency, Denmark is literally required by treaty to work towards compromise when the council cannot agree. If it wasn’t Denmark doing this work, it would be another country holding the EU presidency doing it.

It’s not really about Denmark - it’s about the entire council agreeing with a compromise the presidency has to seek.