Estonia's system was an area of some fascination for me years ago, so here's what I can remember:
After splitting from the Soviet Union, Estonia were basically starting from scratch with their telecoms system. Finland offered them their old stock to get started, but the Estonians decided to instead treat it as a greenfield project and deploy the most modern infrastructure available at the time. Compare to the UK, where most of our infrastructure is literally crumbling as it passes its 50-year predicted lifespan and we spent almost a decade of time and tens of billions of pounds on a vapourware railway line. So the technical inheritance (or lack thereof) favoured Estonia.
I don't know much about how the Estonian system was initially built, but I would imagine a post-Soviet state likely retained enough state capacity to do it mostly in-house (and perhaps they received outside funding too, as the '90s were a period of largesse). Compare to the UK, where state capacity is effectively nil and the project would invariably be outsourced to the same contractors and consulting firms that have taken on every other aspect of government, with concomitant price and time overruns (see also: train).
A crucial element of the Estonian system is that data is private by default (see https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/e-services-regi... ) If I recall correctly, any government agency can request access to specified data for a state purpose, but each request must be reviewed and approved by the data subject. All access requests are logged so a subject can audit who has been accessing what (which suggests maybe it's possible to bulk approve access in advance, or grant persistent rights to someone like one's own doctor). In comparison, the Snoopers' Charter granted unfettered access to Brits' Internet connection records to a huge number of agencies, from the security services to the Food & Agriculture Agency (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#... ).
Estonia is also recognised as a global leader in IT security, following massive investment after Russia-attributed cyberattacks in 2007; they host the NATO Centre of Excellence and the eu-LISA HQ. As far as keeping one's data away from prying outside eyes, they're probably a pretty safe bet. As for the UK… (Eyes passim ad nauseam).
Lastly, I believe Estonians generally report greater levels of trust in their government than Brits. 2023 figures suggest the gap may have narrowed from when I last looked (I can't say I've been following Estonian politics, so I couldn't suggest why) but still some 37.8% of Estonians say they trust their national government as compared to 26.7% of Brits (see https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru... ). And there are certain sizeable constituencies in the UK where, in light of historic abuses, they are even less likely to ever trust the government: Scousers; northerners; women & ethnic minorities (specifically for the police, doubly specifically for the Met); environmental activists (see the spycops scandal); and people of Irish descent. I'm sure there's some skeletons in the Estonian government's closets, but there's a limit to how much damage you can do when your state is 35 years old rather than a centuries-old former world-spanning imperial hegemon.
Those stated trust figures also predate the UK government's support for the genocide in Gaza, which has doubtless had a significant impact on that figure; even people who wouldn't have considered themselves particularly political a couple years earlier are appalled at the regular arrests of protesting pensioners outside Parliament (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/09/palestine-acti... ). The incredibly unpopular incumbent government is only the latest in a long line of increasingly authoritarian regimes of both the political right and (allegedly) left (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/09/labour-needs-arrest-uks-... ), meaning everybody in the country of any political persuasion can think of recent examples of why they might not want to invite increased government surveillance. Plus, with the recent passage of the Online Safety Act, most people are now primed to associate a new digital ID with the government wanting to know their porn habits, and we're a famously prudish nation.
So, in short:
· the Estonian government had the ideal circumstances, made all the right choices, prioritised privacy and security and are reasonably trusted by their citizens
· the UK government has doddery old infrastructure to work with, no money left, an addiction to outsourcing in spite of repeat disasters, a track record of authoritarian disregard for privacy and have little to no legitimacy amongst the populace
And, as others have pointed out, there's just no obvious constituency in the country that would be interested in this sort of thing (outside of Tony Blair and his mates) and no obvious problems that it provides a solution for; it seems like a hard sell, whether on ideological or practical grounds.
We utilized a professional photographic inkjet printer
(ImagePROGRAF PRO-1000, Canon), equipped with 11 ink
cartridges and a chroma optimizer (PFI-1000 LUCIA PRO Ink,
Canon), and used the manufacturer-recommended genuine
paper (Photo Paper Premium Fine Art Smooth, Canon) for
printing. To reproduce the desired reference colors for the
spectral color chart, we also implemented a customized printing
calibration process while maintaining the International Color
Consortium (ICC) profile. The actual printed colors (output)
showed notable distortions compared with the intended colors
(input), which were particularly influenced by the type of paper
(print sheet). For customized printing calibration, we mapped
the exact relationship of the CIE xy chromaticity values
between the digital color input and printed output values. After
the printing process was completed, we measured the
reflectance spectra of all reference colors from the printed
spectral color chart (Fig. S1) using a spectrometer and a diffuse
reflectance standard (equivalent to using CIE illuminant E). We
confirmed that the CIE xy chromaticity values obtained from
these measurements were in excellent agreement with the
desired input values within the SWOP v2 gamut (Fig. 1(e)).
On play and app stores if you search for Microsoft Authenticator, which I imagine most people working at a company would be doing, there's an Ad first, which is rather annoying for a security application
> Here's the problem (and it's not insurmountable): right now, there's no easy path towards sustainable content production when the audience for the content is 100x smaller, and the number of patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the same.
So they're not paying YouTube but get free advertising for their product from it, which brings in 100x more users that elsewhere? Seems like an OK deal.
Some do, and those who are able to make the move to patronage or subscriber monetization seem much happier for it. But that's most viable for creators who have already built up a viable customer base, which usually started on YouTube. It's much harder if you start out somewhere else.
And if the audiences got larger on a site, governments around the world would decide together to drag them into court and keep them there until they closed down or sold to Ellison's kid.
Facts have a well known liberal bias, the only way the right wing gets enough votes is to have more people who don't do facts. Promoting science would just reduce the number of votes they get.
Same with global warming, it causes migration, loads of immigrants is great for the right wing, scares people into voting for them, they have no incentive to fix the problem that's causing them to get more votes.
They're wealthy because they were paid for not using their agricultural land, so they cropped down all the trees on parts of their land that they couldn't use, to classify it as agricultural, got paid, and as a side effect caused downstream flooding
Well, the topic is really whether or not the EU's regulations are effective at producing desired outcomes. The comment you're responding to is making a strong argument that it isn't. I tend to agree.
There's a certain hubris to applying rules and regulations to a system that you fundamentally don't understand.
For those of us outside the US, it's not hard to understand how regulations work. The US acts as a protectionist country, it sets strict rules and pressures other governments to follow them. But at the same time, it promotes free markets, globalisation, and neoliberal values to everyone else.
The moment the EU shows even a small sign of protectionism, the US complains. It's a double standard.
Most books are in x39.50 catalogs, I have koha at home, using the British Library, Library of Congress, National Libraries of Scotland and France, and Oxford, it finds 90% of my books, barcode scan a shelf, import, add missing books
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