Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

The data does not clearly show that at all. It shows the expected result of inflation in a competitive market.

When Company A decides that it's time to raise prices on Product B due to inflation (maybe their wholesale price went up), Company C, being under the same market pressures to raise prices, also raises their price but, because they still want to be competitive, they don't raise them beyond Company A. Reacting to the market isn't collusion, anti-competitive or anti-consumer. If you just reverse the direction the prices are going, it seems a lot less sinister and it's still the exact same inputs/outputs.

The whole thread is made of points like that, especially the "asymmetrical information warfare" bit. He's scraping the websites for this data, right? Obviously that information is available at home. Moreover, the situation has actually dramatically improved because of the internet. You can now put together a cart on two different websites and go to the cheaper store if you'd like. Try doing that twenty years ago. I used to have to read the weekly ad to know these things, now I can just look online.

The _only_ point that's being made is that Austrian prices are a bit higher than other nations and, for some reason, he thinks it's because the companies are conspiring in some way and not that it's, for some reason, more expensive for those companies to operate in Austria. That seems like the obvious solution to me since they appear to have a competitive market with a few major players.

The FPÖ had actually signed a cooperation agreement with Putin's party "United Russia" in 2016, which is not to terminate before 2026.

Austria and Vienna in particular as a "playground for spies" is something entirely different and goes back to the days even before the Cold War era. Austria has, like many other countries, only laws against espionage which is against its own interests. So espionage against an other country has been perfectly legal. This also served a vital function in the Cold War era, where Austria, also after WWII a neutral country and explicitly so as a buffer between blocks, played a bridging role and was a crucial exchange. However, most of this espionage was actually what we would now call open source intelligence and it was really more a matter of proximity to the places of actual interest.

(On the other hand, the Austrian military intelligence has some agreements of cooperation with the NSA and won't report to parliament on the matter, while the latter still has official oversight. As citizens, we can only guess. So, I wouldn't say that this is particularly lopsided in favour of any Eastern interests. Moreover, Austria installed a law, which fines relaying any Russian sources by up to EUR 50,000, rather early on in the conflict.)