ciferecaNinjo

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out! Should be corrected now.

I was thinking about doing that. I read that mother of vineger is not necessary, but it speeds up the process. I also read that results are only good with certain beers like brown ales.. and I think IPA was given as an example of a bad result (i’m assuming due to the hoppy bitterness).

I mainly use it on fried potatoes, and I’m open to experiments, perhaps with lentil salad. I am familiar with Sarson’s and managed to find another bottle of that but I would like to try more varieties of malt vinegar. Saw a small bottle of lambic-based vinegar in a speciality shop and didn’t buy it because the price is a bit high (€14).

Well, it wouldn’t require lying but certainly it seems tricky. You can deregister before you leave the country and neglect to provide an address for where you are going -- because you wouldn’t necessarily know in advance and you cannot provide information that does not exist. So they clear your address from your id card which then just has an empty address.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a specific legal obligation to state where you live abroad.

Though one snag is that you have a legal obligation to vote in elections and you must vote in the nearest embassy, which requires giving an address to get on the voting roster. However, voting is not strictly enforced. If you fail to vote there is a small fine but I don’t think they actually hit unregistered people abroad with that. If you do not vote in 3 consecutive elections, then you could lose your voting rights for a few years, I think.

I do not believe the bank gets a notification that you have deregistered. But at some point your ID card on the bank’s files will expire and they will expect an updated copy and freeze your account until they receive it.

If you walk into an embassy to “renew” your passport, do they demand an address? I would think you would pick up your passport at the embassy a week later. Or do they mail it?

Anyway, I can understand giving in to surveillance and disclosing US ties, but OTOH it seems like a nightmare to do what’s expected as well.. to be tagged as a toxic US person. It’s a mess either way. Perhaps the wisest move is to “move” to Canada, stay there a couple months, setup residency, then move to the US and just neglect to mention it. Get mail forwarding from Canada.

Half their internet banking site is off-limits to me

Mind elaborating? Did they restrict your account specifically, or does the website simply treat logins from the US differently? I’m surprised you wouldn’t retain full cloud access so long as your account exists under the terms you signed up for.

I don’t understand why you would tell your Belgian bank that you left Belgium, particularly when your new residence is the US which flags you as a toxic asset that requires special handling. That could only work against you. Surely you would be better off not telling them you moved and use a VPN to Belgium to access your acct.

Bingo. This is true even across EU borders. Rabobank in Netherlands does not exchange info with Rabobank in Belgium, IIUC. (but note I think Rabobank quit doing business in Belgium eventually anyway)

I don't know of any such law or even which organization would be able to make such a law.

Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 covers ATMs to some extent. I think there was a law even broader than EU law but I’ve lost track of it -- or just have a bad memory.

(found the bit about receipts being required)

Article 4Currency conversion charges related to card-based transactions
With regard to the information requirements on currency conversion charges and the applicable exchange rate, as set out in Article 45(1), Article 52, point (3), and Article 59(2) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366, payment service providers and parties providing currency conversion services at an automated teller machine (ATM) or at the point of sale, as referred to in Article 59(2) of that Directive, shall express the total currency conversion charges as a percentage mark-up over the latest available euro foreign exchange reference rates issued by the European Central Bank (ECB). That mark-up shall be disclosed to the payer prior to the initiation of the payment transaction.
Payment service providers shall also make the mark-up referred to in paragraph 1 public in a comprehensible and easily accessible manner on a broadly available and easily accessible electronic platform.
In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, a party providing a currency conversion service at an ATM or at the point of sale shall provide the payer with the following information prior to the initiation of the payment transaction: (a) the amount to be paid to the payee in the currency used by the payee; (b) the amount to be paid by the payer in the currency of the payer’s account.
A party providing currency conversion services at an ATM or at the point of sale shall clearly display the information referred to in paragraph 1 at the ATM or at the point of sale. Prior to the initiation of the payment transaction, that party shall also inform the payer of the possibility of paying in the currency used by the payee and having the currency conversion subsequently performed by the payer’s payment service provider. The information referred to in paragraphs 1 and 3 shall also be made available to the payer on a durable medium following the initiation of the payment transaction.

….

What I find shitty about this wording is it’s unclear if the receipt is only required in the case of currency conversion by the ATM. Apparently yes.. apparently if DCC is not offered the the ATM is off the hook for giving a receipt. Several ATMs did not have DCC, but the machie that did not even have a receipt printer offered a DCC option, which seems to be illegal.

Fee structure is indeed extremely intransparent in most cases. Generally, I have too look up ATM fees in my online banking access and I never know them beforehand. Iiuc, your bank and the ATM-operating bank roll the dice to find out the fees they each want to charge as part of the process of handing out your cash anyway.

The fee structure is indeed very well concealed. Before approaching an ATM the fees are undisclosed and many ATMs demand your PIN as the very 1st step. It’s a shit show for sure. But at least they must inform you of fees before you commit to the transaction, per 2021/1230.

In any case, no store wants to receive notes above €100 because politicians and media have successfully created mental associations between those notes and money laundry/corruption/organized crime.

Yeah I heard Germany has no cash acceptance obligation whatsoever, which by extension supports your narrative that they can be fussy about banknotes, as in France.

This contrasts with Belgium where brick and mortar merchants must accept banknotes. They can reject money that is disportionately sized if they want. E.g. they can reject a €200 note on a transaction of €20 but not on a transaction of €175. Or they can reject a shit ton of coins on a 3+ figure transaction.

I would say mostly true. And that much is driven by Regulation (EU) 2021/1230. If an ATM offers DCC¹, it must show the exchange rate and fees, and it must give a comparison to a non-DCC option, which must be offered (iow, there must be an opt out).

A common practice is to charge a flat transaction fee when DCC is not used, and to charge no fee when DCC is used, because the exchange rate is so terrible they are profitting hand over fist if you use DCC. But the ATMs often do not expressly state that the fee is waived in the DCC case -- they simply make no mention of the fee you would /otherwise/ pay had you not taken DCC. This is because (IMO) the ATM operator does not want users to relise that the exchange rate builds the fee into their fat margin.

I avoid DCC. But then my bank statement only shows how much was taken from my account in the account’s currency, not the ATM’s currency. The ATM receipt (which apparently does not exist in Germany) gives the local currency you pulled out. These two figures leaves you having trust them as far as the fees go. Some ATMs bundle the fee with the withdrawal amount and the drafting bank has no way of knowing what portion was for the fee. And of course neither do you, unless the machine properly informed you. But what if it didn’t? There is not enough information for the end customer to work out what the overhead was in some cases because the exchange rate applied by the account’s custodian is undisclosed.

¹ DCC: dynamic currency conversion

Maybe. But I hesitate because Brussels does not get much sunlight so I would need many panels. At the same time hail storms are common, which would likely reduce the lifetime of PVs.

I’m seeing the most mold on the plastic frame of the window. Seems strange that the mold finds food in plastic.

When I’ve got clothes layered on, what could use improvement is cold hands. I’m not going to type with gloves on but your suggestion could be a fix if I could mount a heat lamp above my keyboard but in a way that does not obstruct the screen.

(update) It has been done:https://www.pcgamer.com/the-envavo-heatbuff-is-an-infra-red-lamp-to-keep-your-fingers-warm-as-you-play/

I have a dehumidifier but it consumes energy, which I think is ultimately going to come from Russia. Belgium is shutting down its nuclear power plants (2, iirc) and replacing them with 3 natural gas burning plants. Not sure about schedule.. maybe it already happened.

I didn’t know leaks exacerbated the condensation. I don’t think I have any noticeably big gaps but probably all the seams leak a bit. Maybe I should try to seal off entire windows with plastic film.

I have the problem on the inside of exterior walls around the windows, which are usually covered in water. The proprietary anti-fungal sprays work quite well for the cleanup, which I don’t do too often. I’ll just tolerate it until spring.

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

i don’t see any limitations in the sidebar

wow.. then when I posted the above thread, it responded with “This page isn’t working” and looked like an error msg that was generated by the browser itself. So I reposted. Same thing. Then I discovered that it posted despite the error. So then I deleted the dupe.

the privacy policy for kbin.earth is just empty for me, on Ungoogled Chromium. I get the page title in large bold, but then an empty box below it despite enabling some foreign 3rd party JS (jwr.one).

But I must say, something like Cloudflare should not be buried in a privacy policy. It should be something that no one misses especially if Tor is whitelisted. A lot of Tor users likely rely on CF’s “just one moment..” page to know it’s a CF page (a mitm we usually want to avoid).

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?

It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice.. not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.

Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site -- which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.