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The physical card has a chip, which is digital.

The point is that the ticket has a unique ID which is tied to the owner.

Normal non-digital paper train tickets just indicate "someone paid this" but aren't tied to a unique personal identifier.

Well, having a smartphone is still optional in most countries, I suppose in Germany as well.

Movement on the other hand is a mandatory thing for many people unless you want to sit at home all day...

"Digital-only" = By smartphone app OR by smartcard, i.e. a card like a credit card with a chip and your personal unique ID stored on that.

In other words: You cannot get a plain old paper ticket without personal information, the ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked.

Disclaimer: Not a resident of Germany.

The ticket is digital-only (smartphone or smartcard), there is no paper version, and it's coupled to your personal identity (name etc.).

So some people have voiced concerns about that being used to profile the movement of Germany's citizens.

IIRC the tracking is being justified by the government "to gather statistics so we can improve the service", or something like that.

Disclaimer: I don't live there, I don't know the details.

Thanks, will have a look! :)

The problem IMHO is that it is so well-known that HN hates crypto that anyone who wants to voice a reasonable opinion is likely to avoid doing so in order to not get piled on with downvotes, hatred, etc.

- At least for me that's it, it would be stressful to deal with that so I go elsewhere to discuss the technology.

And this is probably precisely how an echo chamber can be created even without recommendation algorithms.

The "in-group" harasses the "out-group" until all of them leave - or not dare to speak anymore - and only the "in-group" is left.

Feel free to prove me wrong with sources :)

Anecdotally, I can say that their effect is already bullshitting indeed:

When being in a random conversation on the "normal kind-of-average people Internet" (Twitch chat), discussing a subject where the host doesn't know a certain word, people already are pasting ChatGPT definitions of the word into the chat, believing it's some kind of dictionary or whatever.

If you tell them it could be completely making things up they'll be like "yeah dunno but it can be a nice overview of the topic".

So people will treat it like the new Google, with no idea (or no concern?) that all it does is mash words together because they're likely to occur next to each other in an arbitrarily defined reference dataset of text which was likely downloaded from random places all over the Internet.

Remember when COVID hit and some people were saying "1% chance of death isn't much" and then they had to be informed that 1% is very high and we're in serious trouble?

Why is 1% low when we're talking about lifelong pain?

Even if much of the force is alleviated by that there's still enough moving kg's left to break condoms

- which we don't even have to discuss, because there is statistics about this, and their failure rate is quite high, as said between 2% and 12% (I suppose it's a range because usage errors and quality vary).

Google "Pearl index".

It's a 0.07 mm piece of plastic which has to absorb the forces caused by two moving bodies weighing > 100 kg together. Thus condoms do and will fail, even if properly fitted. The failure rate is estimated between 2% and 12% pregnancies per year.

Or to put it in more visual words:

If you had $ 200 000 in cash (that's the cost of a kid), would you secure it against theft with a 0.07 mm piece of plastic?

It's insane that this is expected of men.

Uhm, what, reliable? Source?

The failure rate of that is in the double digits percentage AFAIK !?

Besides, as long as you are still fertile and relying upon someone else not being fertile that is not self-determination. Men can also be victims of violence.

And as soon as multiple $100k in potential alimony payment (raising a kid for 18 years costs that much!) get involved some (not all!) people will lie to your face as much as humanly possible.

Whenever I again consider getting one and start reading up opinions on the Internet, it is usually a mix of a lot of people who say they're absolutely OK now ... and then I run into someone who says it COMPLETELY destroyed their life and they're in pain all day every day.

Some even say they've been fine for quite a bit of time and then suddenly the pain starts.

Which in total makes me absolutely NOT want a vasectomy even though I have zero desire to reproduce.

Because it does feel plausible that it can cause trouble to lock something up in the body which is meant to be released once in a while.

I hope some day men too will have real and reliable (condoms fail a lot) self-determination in terms of reproduction, not only "suffer abstinence your whole life or risk getting financially gutted for decades."

I would guess the reason the cheaper ones don't have it is that making it removable implies making it accessible from the outside which implies adding a pump and hoses to pump the ink into it:

The slot for the box at my printer is at the back of it, not at the ink head, so the ink can only get there by pumping it.

(Not defending Epson's design choices here, just trying to explain them.)