my_hat_stinks

I did already back up the claim with a source, but okay:

US: Senior 128k USD, mid-level 94k USD
CH: Senior 118k CHF (~139k USD), mid-level 95k CHF (~112k USD)
DE: Senior 72k EUR (~80k USD), mid-level 58k EUR (~65k USD)
NL: Senior 69k EUR (~77k USD), mid-level 52k EUR (~58k USD)

Yes, US and Switzerland are outliers.

100k USD per engineer assumes they're exclusively hiring from US and Switzerland, that's not a general "developed country" thing. US is an outlier.

A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it's irrelevant you evidently didn't take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I'll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

I'll simplify.

Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
Alice creates content.
Alice licences the content to Bob.
Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
You download the content.
Charlie does not pay Bob.
You did not breach any licences.
You did not pirate the content.

And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if "the advertisement company [hasn't] paid the content creator." The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it's irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn't matter.

This is nonsense. Your argument is that you're a pirate if one corporation with no relation to the content fails to pay a corporation which distributes but does not own the content. If you watch an ad then the advertising company refuses to pay you do not suddenly become a pirate.

If a struggling McDonald's franchise fails to pay some franchisee fee that does not mean you pirated your big mac.

You're being downvotes because it's irrelevant and you're claiming a feature that also exists in Firefox is the reason your preferred browser is better. It makes no sense.

There was an experiment once where it was determined that a frog with it's brain removed wouldn't jump out of slowly heated water but would reflexively jump if placed into already hot water, leading to a myth that a frog won't leave boiling water if heated gradually enough.

Idioms around frog boiling generally means to make changes slowly and gradually enough that there is minimal reaction from affected parties.

I'm not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don't expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.

From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it's the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they're the ones who started the fire.

Ads. Specifically, a popup served by the OS about chrome and switching to bing or edge or something like that. I didn't even use chrome, just having it installed was enough for them. Any ads baked into the OS is unacceptable, but that's just so far over the line that I find it insane anyone still uses Windows at all.

I contacted support to complain and their "solution" was to reinstall the OS, so I installed a better one instead.

No, it's the website's fault. You only need explicit consent if you're tracking users beyond what your service obviously requires to function, the problem is these sites are stalking you.

And if it's even slightly harder to decline than to accept they're likely not in compliance anyway so it's definitely not the EU's fault.

Social security numbers being involved in a breach does not mean that the breach only affects Americans. Some records might not have an equivalent ID number associated with them at all, and some records could have similar ID numbers from other countries. They also list current address as part of the data leaked but the fact many people don't have a current address didn't seem to cause you any confusion. The original source lists "information about relatives", if that was in this title would you have assumed only people with living relatives were included?

"I didn't read the article" is a poor excuse when you're commenting on the believability of the article. What happened here is you saw an article, immediately assumed it was about the US, realised that doesn't make any sense, then dismissed the article without even bothering to check because the title doesn't fit the US exclusively. It's crazy to me that you wouldn't even consider the fact it's not an exclusively US-based leak.

Okay, but I'm not sure how revelant that is. The article doesn't say only Americans were affected, it says the exact opposite.

[...] this data likely comes from both the U.S. and other countries around the world.

This is the poster child for whataboutisn. You literally just argued that it's okay for cryptocurrencies to pollute and waste energy because it takes energy to make glass too.