I am an EU-citizen, I live and work in the EU and know the GDPR well, as it is part of my daily work. If authorities take stupid decisions, because they ignore the law, it is not the fault of the GDPR. The GDPR explicitly has excemptions for the purposes of carrying out legal obligations and exercising specific rights in the field of employment, social security and social protection law as well as scientific work and even small entities (with less than 250 employees, like a kids football club - as someone else mentioned):

You are misinformed. The GDPR has effectively replaced the old privacy laws in all EU countries. Yes, it is even uniform throughout the EU.

The GDPR does not require nag-screens. Session-cookies, that do not track, are perfectly legal and do not require any prior consent - not even a mention somewhere on the page. The GDPR even requires that the content of the websites must be accessible without the visitor being tracked. And also the button to DENY tracking or cookies HAS to be of the same size and visibility as the ACCEPT-button. The DENY has to be the default, so unchecking a lot of boxes to inhibit being tracked is illegal under the GDPR. Many developers (intentionally or out of ignorance - I don't know) fail to implement those consent-popups correctly.

Those annoying popups are solely a decision of the web developers.

There's no need to fix the GDPR. The GDPR is an excellent law, well written and easily understandable for anyone with a minimum of technical knowledge. It's the big corporations who should stop ignoring it and respect peoples privacy.

Mostly yes. The client committing the website to the web-developer has usually no idea about the necessity of cookies, the GDPR or technical possibilities ti implement a shopcart. It's the developer who suggests one solution or the other. A lazy developer resorts to libraries and tools from different sources (often from or hosted by Google, like jQuery, Fonts or Analytics) which allow Google or others to track visitors, thus making a nag-screen necessary.

Many lazy developers even rely on external vendors to implement the cookie-consent-popups (there emerged a whole business around that problem). Funnily enough often those popups are needed solely for the popup itself, as the popup is loaded from an external server implementing the consent-status-administration per visitor.

Yes, that's simple. I'm in the EU and I do webdesign and -programming for a living. My websites need no cookie-warning or consent-popup. I simply host all data on my server and do not link resources (jQuery, Fonts or whatever) from servers outside the EU. I also do not track users. I only use session-cookies to hold shopcart-contents, user-settings or the likes. No consent is needed for that under the GDPR. Even Google Analytics can be used, if the IP-masking function is used and data will not be crossed with Google-Ads or similar. But I do without GA and prefer local solutions (e.g. Piwik) for statistical analysis.

In Italy we pay 26% tax for capital gains on local stocks, and up o 52% for stocks from foreign companies (like Switzerland).

A fact many people and journalists are missing: the energy prices began to rise in September 2021. The Ukraine invasion was on February 24th 2022. The Ukraine war has minimal effect on the gas- and energy-prices. Energy prices are traded at the futures market.

Once upon a time (not so long ago - around 1996) - online stores charged a few percent fee when choosing to pay with credit card... until the government decided it was illegal to levy a surcharge. Who bribed our politicians to pass these laws?

I cannot confirm that:
see https://www.spamcop.net/spamgr...

addendum: as it seems, Windows CE was only used for the navigator system supplied by Siemens VDO Automotive AG, (see https://news.microsoft.com/200...)

Didn't BMW use MS Windows some years ago?

So true. Back in that days I had a VGA card which could show 256 colors at a resolution of 320x200 pixels oder 16 colors at 640x480 pixels. To see the images at a higher resolution, I wrote a dithering routine and was able to look at the GIF.pictures a the higher resoloution of 640x4080

Most likely "the team" was a single person. The GIF algorithm is not that complicated you need a whole team to work on it.

I'm a software developer myself, an I often write or speak "we" did this and that, when in reality I'm a single person and using the plural only to give my work more importance.

Insightful!
(I'm missing my modpoints today)