Because US businesses will only compete and innovate if you force them. Leave them safe behind ramparts of protective trade policies, and they’ll keep coasting on 1990s technology, as the country as a whole slowly becomes a backwater.

fud: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. A tactic for denigrating a thing, usually by implication of hypothetical or exaggerated harms, often in vague language that is either tautological or not falsifiable.

That’s just systemd adding a birthdate field to their userdb. Doesn’t require that it be filled out or accurate, and especially doesn’t require it to be validated against a government database. I don’t see it as fundamentally any different from adding a userdb field for favorite color, phone number, or blood type.

Without 3rd party validation, I really don’t see the privacy issue with an age field. Without verification, it is, at worst, one more byte available to hash into a unique identifier, but you can feed that field from /dev/random at every query and poison even that hypothetical.

In the game, you have to improve your properties to charge more rent. In reality, the monopoly can reduce quality and raise price at the same time.