Most people who say that do so for dogmatic reasons, not because they arrived at this conclusion after careful analysis. It's the political point of small government.
These are the same people who will probably be first in line shouting for government intervention when their drinking water is full of chemical waste.
You can try to reason with folks like that but you probably won't change their mind. Just try not to shout at them.
But FSBhub is!
I would think the sandwiches would be delivered before any declaration of independence.
Language isn't logical in a mathematical sense. Every language develops its own logic over time as an unspoken consensus that only after the fact gets codified as orthography and grammar.
The big mother language to most languages in Europe, Protoindoeuropean, has its origins millennia ago somewhere in Ukraine. Linguists have pieced together what this language most likely sounded like. It's a game of probabilities and good educated guesses but it's fascinating. If you're a nerd. One theory is that at the earliest time when this language was formed, most if not all verbs were what we would call today irregular, think know-knew-known or sing-sang-sung etc. Small language communities have no problem with insane and arbitrary grammar like that. You learn it with your mother's milk so to speak. Very few outsiders have to deal with it. And life just goes on.
English is a true mix of stuff. The Germanic invadors after the Romans left had to deal with the native celts. They were themselves invaded by Vikings from Scandinavia and some 300 years later by Vikings that had become French. Both brought their own languages with them and influenced English. Both invasions caused situations where adults were put in a situation of having to learn another language. What kids soak up like sponges, grownups have a harder time with. So they take shortcuts in their speech. They didn't struggle too much with sing-sang-sung because that's a typical protoindoeuropean vowel change that exists just like that in many European languages to this day in versions of this particular verb. But some of the other verbs were just too hard to remember! Let's just whack a -t or -d sound at the end and Bob's you uncle. And that's how English lost a lot of its irregular verbs. Over time this became -ed in most cases. But, as I said, we don't follow a mathematical Boolean logic here. It allowed for hangers-on, regional varieties, and new formations of irregular forms. Burnt/burned hung on, fucked/fuckt did not. The reason is the flow of history.
I would think the same so-called AI that told us to eat rocks regularly, or that thinks it's still 2024, or that "hallucinates" other stuff will make conquering our planet harder. Particularly, if these aliens are unaware of the concept of deception.
I would say this system is safe until one password - through no fault of their own - gets leaked. Worse even, two of them. If a bored hacker sees them in a stolen list, they could go to town on all other accounts. So you should advise your acquaintance to change their system. Long passwords are great but if they repeat a lot of characters they are immediately less useful. If the repeating string is known it makes brute-forcing other accounts that much easier.
The best advice is to keep unique passwords for all accounts. And by unique I mean not following a system like that. Long, random, non-sensical crap is best (but also most annoying) - for now. Once quantum computers become a thing, all this probably won't matter any more.
Edit: And always with non-SMS, non-emailed 2FA. But if those are the only options available it's better than nothing.
People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.
I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there's a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids' backs.
If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn't know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That's a silly stereotype but I like it.
So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.
One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.
So looking at the status quo you're correct. I'm just hopeful we can change that. I'm also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn't burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That's where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.
Google has a vested interest in keeping Android open source. Because the moment they turn away from that more antitrust action is going to hit them like a ton of bricks.
What's an "important app" to you here?
But that's not all phones, is it. If you buy your phone directly from Google, you made a mistake. Like buying one from Apple. If Google want to continue to claim Android is open source, they have to allow for devices that forego any of this crap and boot vanilla non-Google-Services Android. And if you're privacy oriented enough, you will give up on apps that are not.
And given enough time somebody is going to work out how you fool a modified system into booting. The problem is legal. Depending on where you are circumventing any digital locks can mean jail time at worst. We have to address the legal situation at the same time.
I think with PCs it will be harder to lock them down and not disgruntle consumers too much in the process. I'm also hopeful that over time right to repair will be the standard, so they have to allow for third party repair. So all these restrictions like chipped components and software only from our store will be phased out by incremental legislation. The EU is not perfect but it's on this path. Even in the US people are thinking antitrust more often now. There is hope, however small.
You can run whatever you like in your Android phones. Jailbreaking iPhones is also possible. All these devices are just computers that can run anything within their hardware specs. Hacking some of these things may be against the Ts and Cs or even illegal. But technically possible. The restrictions are mote political, not technical.
Chromebooks are not the way to the future. They fill a niche in education for cheap hardware in connection with limited capabilities. They are not technical limitations, they are designed to limit users in what damage they can do. AFAIK you could technically wipe a chromebook and put Linux on it. It may violate the Ts and Cs and we're right back at political. Google would like to develop future customers at an early age. They don't care about the education so much as about their bottom line.
Weather is expressed in different ways in different languages. The fact that English, like many other European languages, uses a mysterious "it" as a subject to say what's going on is actually the outlier. More languages use a formula more like "rain falls, snow falls, sun shines, etc."
So you tell him the "it" stands for "the weather" although that isn't true. You could more truthfully say it's a convention and English sentences need a subject. And then you add that "is raining" also transports the idea that it is in the process of happening right now. Don't question it, accept it.
Learn a bit of Russian. That language is full of colorful images, irregularities, and inexplicable grammar. More so than English, probably. So you can put him in his place when he complains. Like, dude, y'all don't even know what blue is!