Summary: George Carlin (1937-2008) said some wise things about how people are led to believe they have freedom because they're given a few choices and how their rights can be taken away or denied at any time
THE stand-up comedian and popular critic of society came from a family cynical about the state of the country (and its society); he repeatedly spoke about how "choice" (like Apple or Microsoft) is used to distract from actual freedom (not just a freedom to make binary choices). Here is what he said about "rights" (similarly animated) in his later days.
George Carlin is an excellent commentator, putting comedy/humour aside. Like a sit-com artist, he takes actual (real) issues and turns them into catchy skits. In some sense, he was ahead of his time. ⬆
Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
From what we can gather, the tram ticketing system does not use Windows; we never saw it crashing or rebooting (or showing some Windows logo) in decades, so we assume it runs some kind of Linux