Australia: Consumer protection laws are better than most other countries, even European countries. For example:

• Products must last as long as a “reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, regardless of the warranty period. For example, at least 5-10 years for large appliances.
• If there’s a “major failure” any time during that period (a big problem with the product, if it stops working, if it differs from the description, is missing advertised features, or you wouldn’t have bought it if you knew about the problem beforehand), the customer has a choice of whether they want to have the item repaired, replaced, or return it and get a refund. Customers can also ask for a partial refund based on loss of value.
• The store you bought the item from must accept returns and warranty claims. They can’t tell you to go to the manufacturer.
• For repairs, returns and replacements of large items (like appliances), the company must pick it up and drop it off for free.
• It’s illegal for a store to not offer refunds (unless the items are second-hand).
• Products must match descriptions in advertising, including what a sales person tells you. If a sales person tells you the product does something but it actually doesn’t, you can get a refund.
• Businesses get fined for breaking these rules. A chain of computer stores had to pay a $200,000 fine for showing an illegal “no refunds” sign and forcing people to go to the manufacturer for warranty claims, and were later fined $750,000 for doing it again: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered-to-pay-penalties-of-750000-for-consumer-guarantee-misrepresentations

This applies for digital goods, too. As far as I know, Australia is the only country where you can get a refund from Steam for a major bug in a game regardless of how long you’ve owned the game for or how many hours you’ve played. Valve tried to avoid doing this and was fined $3 million: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/valve-to-pay-3-million-fine-for-misleading-australian-gamers/

You could probably swap out the TTS engine. I’d like to hear a podcast narrated by Microsoft Sam.

The current owner of Winamp tried to open source the Winamp 5 source code, but there were so many problems with the launch that they had to delete the repo. Things like a license that prevented the repo from being forked (which violates Github’s terms of service), the repo contained licensed proprietary code from companies like Dolby and Intel that wasn’t supposed to be open sourced, things like that. They didn’t understand how Git works so they unsuccessfully tried to delete the infringing code.

I think it’s all read-only access through, so you can only use it to import data not make new transactions.

That’s alright. Even read-only access is useful. I could write a script that pulls my current investments, prompts for the amount I’ll be investing in total, and prints out the buys (eg “buy 10 x VOO, 5 x VXF, 20 x VXUS”) that’ll keep the account balanced based on some percentages.

It’s the same in SmartTube. Age-restricted videos haven’t worked for a while, even if logged in.

Does SimpleFIN use OAuth to log into bank accounts, or do you need to enter your bank’s username and password?

Unrelated to this post, but do you know if SimpleFIN supports investment accounts? If it does, it seems like an easy way to let me write a script to help rebalance my investment accounts. I might look into it.

I didn’t see a docker image

https://actualbudget.org/docs/install/docker

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server/blob/master/docker-compose.yml

California already has a law like this, so the companies have already implemented this workflow. They just need to remove the geogating.