To be precise, anything that's not a "personal" computing device running the latest spyware-filled locked-down software and a browser that can be anything as long as it's the three that Google implicitly "approve".
government, banking, etc..
Banking is private-sector, but I believe the government should always be accessible even if you live like the Amish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Canada
...and I wonder how they get along there since they're apparently present in Canada too.
I got a notice from my state that I'm required to make future tax payments electronically. For that they require ACH. Banking may be private sector but participating in it is increasingly non-optional.
Historically, you were known by people around you and you could be "verified by relative" in the case of a house fire destroying all your documents or something, but your life mostly worked in your home town and traveling or moving elsewhere was hard. Trying to cash a check anywhere but your home town was hard, etc.
I'm a former military wife and this was a big enough issue for the American military that military facilities would cash your check at the BX/PX. Local banks and such often wanted nothing to do with military members.
And now we have this highly digital, highly mobile society and if you are rich enough and such and keep all your ducks in a row all the time, you have tremendous freedom to roam the world, pay with plastic, etc. But for a lot of people, it's increasingly problematic that we default to state ID and digital formats and so forth.
These systems should enhance older methods of making life work, not crowd them out and make life a living hell for anyone who can't keep up with it. And we should be optimizing for helping ordinary people make their lives work, not optimizing for trying to squelch bad actors and too bad, so sad if innocent bystanders get run over in the process.
I don't know how to make my life work. It seems impossible at this point and it really shouldn't be. We have the means to make life for me actually work and no matter how much I do, it's never enough.
What's worse is that the the error messages never explain the problem. It's just an endless sequence of "Oops! Something went wrong" "We could not fulfill your request" "Please try again later".
Could drive someone crazy if they're not savvy enough to realize what's going on.
You're absolutely right. They each carry the tone of "This content isn't available right now", like when trying to view a tweet from a shadowbanned user. I've seen that drive people, particularly family, into a kind of aggressive version of frustration.
At this point it's merely static deception. Wait until they run a GPT bot programmed to interactively lie to you, deflect, stall, misdirect and stonewall you based on your personal profile. These companies are devious and untrustworthy to their core, and the only reason anyone uses them is because they're forced to.
Looks like the CRTC mandates cheap plans the mobile companies offer free phone and plans too.
https://www.telus.com/en/about/news-and-events/media-release...
Here is the submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 (August 2022, the letter submitted is from 2021)
I experienced the only slightly inconvenient of this when I was replacing my bank card, even going into a Pret, I was unlucky enough to go into one randomly that didn't accept cash.
But for people that don't have bank cards, or can't charge their phones this is a real problem.
Even worse than that, they're often connecting from public IPs that are "suspicious" which causes automated systems to treat them more harshly.
In Canada it's gotten to the point where you need an internet connected device to participate in the most important systems; government, banking, etc.. It's very sad that device can't be supplied by the libraries. They have them, but big tech discriminates against anything that's not a personal computing device.