Amusingly, as part of similar laws in the UK the regulator decided to make a public shame list of non-compliant websites.

Essentially if you don’t want to follow the government’s writ that you must send your ID to a shady offshore ID firm, they’ve kindly provided a list of websites that won’t ask for it!

With this on top of trying to claim extraterritorial powers against 4chan in the US (fucking lol), I’m starting to think a key check on tyranny in the UK is the incompetence of its public institutions.

I find the further you get from London, the friendlier people tend to be with strangers in England. If you go west far enough and end up over the border in Wales, the difference is even more pronounced.

When I lived in Aberystwyth, cigarettes were basically a communist economy!

Your approach of making fines payable in equity might be an interesting way for the UK to renationalise the infamously underperforming private water monopolies. They incur fines all the time for things like pumping sewage into the waterways.

I don’t think they’d use this mechanism though, the whole point of water privatisation was to keep the much-needed infrastructure upgrades off the government’s books and nationalisation in general would subvert this goal. The glaring flaw in that plan is that the regional private monopolies didn’t do the needed upgrades either, and instead paid massive bonuses to their senior managers.

Isn’t the ‘dead’ part more that nobody speaks it as a mother tongue any more, so it doesn’t really evolve like a living language would even though it’s still spoken in specific contexts? I think it contrasts with an extinct language which nobody speaks for any reason.

Yes it does feel like swapping a ticket for the Titanic with a ticket for the Lusitania.