What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.
- RBC 2FA is that if I try to login through my browser, the phone app will ask if I authorize the login. I think I can disable this and use sms/call, but that's even more insecure, so I don't.
- TD lets me login fine and do everything in the browser. But any online transaction that is moderately large or presumably fishy, will force me to authorize the transaction via the app.
I've never seen a website break because of ublock, at least not in the default config. If it's that much of a problem you can just remote in on grandmas computer and disable it for whatever website.
I think that beats remoting in when granny inevitably gets scammed by an ad.
There really is no excuse in my mind for not running an ad blocker. It's as vital to personal computing security as firewalls and anti malware.
Blocking ads helps grandma not accidentally leak private information that could have disastrous consequences, for example, getting scammed out of their money.
Not blocking ads helps grandma visit a few more websites that don't work well with adblock.
The Canadian government has been trying for about 4-5 years now to get Canadian banks to embrace Open Banking, which will allow these sorts of products to be built quickly.
The banks have consistently refused to do anything, because they don't want any change that threatens their oligopoly. Canadian bank services are more or less the same as they were a decade ago.
The current government will have to show that it can resist rich people lobbying in this regard, before any real change can happen.
Indeed, no one seems to ever talk about the banking monopoly in Canada so it's not a big political issue. It's not nearly as controversial as the telecom or airline monopolies.
There are some new banking startups popping up in Canada like Neo Financial (from the guys who made SkipTheDishes) but they are online-only and have limited integration with stuff like Plaid.
Canadian banks still live in 2006. They can't even make EMT transfers more convenient, so people could request a payment or pay with QR.
Sometimes I feel like they don't actually refuse to do things, maybe they are not capable to improve. Something in their chain of command is broken and doesn't let them change.
This is hard to believe without an underlying theory of what's happening. Did teens not know about Coca Cola and are now part of the survey? Was there rural to urban migration?
What I would like is a variant of Jupyter notebooks that uses AsciiDoc instead of markdown. It's really difficult to write anything complicated in Markdown, which I sometimes want to do.
The more stable/secure a monopoly is in its position the less incentive it has to deliver high quality services.
If a company can build a monopoly (or oligopoly) in multiple markets, it can then use these monopolies to build stability for them all. For example, Google uses ads on the Google Search homepage to build a browser near-monopoly and uses Chrome to push people to use Google Search homepage. Both markets have to be attacked simultaneously by competitors to have a fighting chance.
On Wikipedia, there is a fairly complicated timeline chart of the various LibreOffice variants [1]. Same article also says
> Ecosystem partner Collabora uses LibreOffice as upstream code to provide a web-based suite branded as Collabora Online, along with apps for platforms not officially supported by LibreOffice, including Android, ChromeOS, iOS and iPadOS.
I built a lot of Ikea last month. And I was just marveling how cleverly designed everything was so that it was quite difficult to put two wrong pieces together. Mostly, the only warnings in the manuals were to rotate a piece correctly.
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