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activistPnk

@ activistPnk @slrpnk.net

Posts
85
Comments
173
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • MEPs' gender balance

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  • Considering the right-wing parties won most of the elections in Europe, I guess this isn’t too surprising.

    And the reasons for the swing to the right:

    • “the green backlash”, as voters think climate is getting too much emphasis (WTF? We are still up to our necks in cars and farmed meat); and they believe climate is not impacting them personally.
    • young people struggling to get jobs have the delusion that right-wing parties will fix that; (there may be more jobs… debatable… but surely they will be more of the low-paying shitty benefits varieties of jobs). I heard the nazi party came into power under the exact same drive: people trying to vote for more jobs.

    So as the older generations are voting left in attempt to not hand-off a burning planet to the young, the young have signed up for a burning planet by voting to the right.

    I hope the next 4 years of news reports gives all these stupid voters a daily dose of climate disasters.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • It’s bizarre how you think anonymous leases and hotel stays imply tax fraud. It’s that non-sequitur malfunction of logic that has led to the privacy abuses we face.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • I’m not sure how you get such a perversely twisted idea from my thesis. Nothing in that comment you replied to advocates tax fraud. People should have the freedom to boycott banks. They should have the right to boycott Google and Microsoft. Participation in the private sector marketplace should be optional. Privacy rights enshrined in human rights law are an important component to my thesis. Your contempt for human rights is shameful. To be clear--

    Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12:

    No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

    International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 17:

    1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.

    (emphasis mine)

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • Can you rent a flat anonymously?

    I would hope so, as far as the EU goes. If the EU were to force leases to be registered and to name all occupants, it would be absurdly over interventionalist and it would be a blatant privacy abuse. Belgium requires leases to be registered but then the registration process makes email address a required field. So if someone does not have an email address registration is not possible (despite registration being a legal obligation -- would be interesting to see what happens in court when someone is prosecuted for not registering due to not having an email address). Apart from that, there is no rule that all occupants must be listed on the lease. And cash rent payments are legal.

    It would also be surprisingly extreme if hotels were forced to collect identities of their guests. They likely do it anyway to know who to go after for damages, but a gov mandate would be excessively interventionalist.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • Our car shops just say they can lower the price significantly if you pay by cash.

    Rightfully so. When telecoms and train travel vendors give discounts for paying online, it rewards consumers who are on the unethical side of the #warOnCash and rewards discrimination against the unbanked and punishes the poor. The elitist idea of discounting electronic payment harms everyone by promoting Bill Gates’ war on cash. Visa’s $10k incentive for merchants to refuse cash rewards the practice of excluding people and attacks privacy and autonomy. Whereas cash discounts encourage consumers to carry cash and to use it to support a system of inclusion, which is needed to show merchants on the edge of introducing exclusion that cash acceptance is important.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • Considering $us 1 has about the same spending power as €1, €3k covers room and board in Utrecht (the cheapest indexed city in NL) for about ~11 days:

    https://aoprals.state.gov/web920/per_diem_action.asp?MenuHide=1&CountryCode=1101

    And min wage is set at €2150 (take-home pay, so likely ~€3k gross). So yes, ⅓ of a month.

    It’s a show stopper for me. I will not work for that amount because it’s a small fraction of my market value. That nixes Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. I’m fine with tax declarations so the real limit for me working in the EU is the €10k limit. But that’s still a pay cut. And it limits me to Germany and perhaps a few other countries. So working full-time in Europe has essentially become a non-starter for me.

    I’m not even sure what we’re trading it for. Illusion of privacy from your own state?

    Reread the thread. Privacy from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare, Paypal/Zittle, JP Morgan Chase, Visa, Mastercard, the telecoms, countless payment processors, as well as unwarranted gov. snooping.

    And that just touches on the confidentiality aspect of privacy. Yet privacy is actually more about control.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • Belgium, France, and Spain all have had cash limits of €3k, €3k, and €1k respectively for some time now. And the US has a variety of reporting triggers set at $10k. None of those limits have been inflation adjusted. So indeed more and more people become subject to unwarranted surveillance as time moves further beyond 1984.

    But then consider Germany. Germans are wise enough to understand what they give up when giving up cash, so while the EU law has little effect on Belgium, France, & Spain, Germans are getting fucked by the EU on this and AFAIK there is no inflation adjustment at the EU level either.

    It’s a shit law but if we must have it I would like to see it indexed to postage costs, which has been going up by leaps and bounds. The cost of printing a page at the library has gone from 5¢ to 10¢ in the past year.. so that would be a good inflation index for this as well.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • What I keep seeing in my personal life is car repair shops, medical professionals and other businesses that usually charge a lot and then take cash only.

    Belgium solved that last year by simply forcing all traders to accept electronic payment (in addition to cash). They cannot refuse electronic payment.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • But as @somguy69 said, money laundering is not committed by the middle and lower classes. Using anti-terror tools against someone who neglects to declare some small income. It’s absurdly disproportionate and takes our option to be free from banks away. It’s a terrible trade-off.

  • Europe limits anonymous cash payments to €3k and all cash payments to €10k. Pirate party reacts.

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  • Money laundering has the opposite effect that you think it does. Money laundering takes untaxed money and puts it through a process that results in tax revenue. The /absence/ of money laundering “robs” us, if it’s tax revenue that you have in mind.

    The lazy AML enforcement style is what robs us, and it robs us of privacy, dignity, and autonomy. If they would enforce AML the same way they enforce other crimes (getting proper search warrants that respects our human rights when suspicion warrants it), AML would be enforced without collateral damage to law-abiding people.

    Enforcement of tax evasion would be a petty cause to use as an excuse to force every single person in the land to patronize commercial banks. Like subjecting everyone to facial recognition and tracking just to make the work of a few shoplifters harder. It’s disproportionate and undermines our freedom because law enforcement wants their job to be easy. We lose our autonomy and options so law enforcement can have a bit of occupational convenience. Which amounts to nothing because criminals will simply tweak their operation.

    Our boycott rights have been lost

    We have just lost the option to boycott banks in Europe. Banks that:

    • finance fossil fuels
    • invest in private prisons
    • donate to the campaigns of right-wing politicians
    • snoop on us
    • force us to register for mobile phone service
      • force us to share our mobile number with them
    • force us to supply an email address (then they use MS Outlook themselves so MS can see where we bank)
    • force us to use their shitty dodgy closed-source smartphone apps
      • and force distribution through Google Playstore so Google can also see where we bank
    • block Tor users from their website (thus violating data minimisation principles when collecting IP addresses), then at the same time charge an unreasonable fee to offline customers blocked from their website who request paper statements
    • discriminate against people on the basis of national origin
    • lock us out of our money for frivilous reasons like:
      • forgetting to give them an updated ID card copy the instant before it expires
      • block us from donating to Wikileaks.
      • set withdrawal limits in a protectionist tactic against runs on the bank
    • subject us to negative interest rates
    • deploy ATM machines that lie to us

    We should have a right to decide whether to enter the private marketplace and patronise a business, especially a shitty industry like banking. We should have a right to boycott bad businesses. In the EU, that right has been lost. It’s a profoundly foolish trade to give up boycott rights so tax evaders have to work a little harder to dodge the auditors. Losing our right to boycott then has the consequence that banks can become even more enshitified because they need not earn our business. The banks can piss on us all they want if we are forced to lick their boots.

    It’s a perversely stupid compromise of agency over our own lawful lives in order to make law enforcement a little more convenient and crime a little more inconvenient. To slightly give the cats a bit more advantage in the cat-mouse game at the cost of our liberties.

    There are some parallels to the profoundly naive efforts to ban encryption or impose master keys. They want to make it slightly less convenient for criminals at the cost of our autonomy, dignity, and privacy. And they keep trying to push this shit. It’s not enough to push back once because it’s relentless. We must keep pushing back.

  • Flight free travel from US to French streets

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  • Videos are too heavy for my connection, but I take it from the comments that this is really about reaching franophones on the continent. Lousiana supposedly has some French speaking parts.

    Anyway, just wanted to mention there is a bus that goes from London to New York, the long way around via Russia. Takes a month IIRC. But I guess traversing Russia would be a show stopper for many.

  • 4 out of ~17 ATM withdrawal attempts in Netherlands succeeded; ATMs always give false error msgs; no ATM competition; who offers cash back?

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  • The Geldmaat website states that debit cards need to be Maestro or Mastercard and that credit cards can be Mastercard and Visa. I’m surprised the Visa debit card worked at all in a Geldmaat, because as far as I can tell it shouldn’t.

    One of the (otherwise helpless) bankers I spoke to said Visa is probably not accepted by Geldmaat. I thought the banker had to be wrong but maybe they meant to say visa debit does not work. Yet I have a receipt from a functional Geldmaat machine which says “visa debit” in a field named “app. label”. Then at the bottom of the receipt it (incorrectly) says “credit card account … credit limit …” which actually reflects the card balance.

    Some point of sale terminals are said to only work with visa credit or visa debit, but then I’ve had banks tell me their cards act like what the machine wants it to be. I’m fuzzy on the details. There are situations where you have to choose “credit” or “debit” on the terminal, and the bank says I can choose credit even if it’s debit, and vice versa. So it’s hard to pin down what’s going on. I don’t even get why the distinction between the two exists at the network API level. It’s not the business of the merchant or the ATM to know those details.

    I can only imagine that perhaps it’s there for casino situations. A credit card holder once went to LasVegas with a credit card from a region where gambling is illegal. One of the laws was that it’s illegal to collect on a gambling debt. So he took a cash advance on his credit card inside a casino, lost it all, then returned home and told the bank it’s a gambling debt, get lost. My understanding of the story is that he got off the hook for the debt on that basis. But I wonder if that’s why this distinction exists on the card networks.

    Another theory is that credit cards have more buyer’s protections and higher fees to the merchant and so some merchants don’t like that and want to insist on debit cards. But the ATM seems like the reverse of that.

    Anyway, maybe not all Geldmaat machines are the same.

    I appreciate your insight. Perhaps some of the refusals is related to visa debit incompatibility.

    Withdrawing money from Dutch banks is effectively free (that’s what the banks charge you for) so a commercial party putting down ATMs in public can’t make money from the vast majority of potential customers.

    Well free to the customer but the ATM likely still profits. My bank eats the atm fee but they have no deal to hide the fee from the customer. So I agree to the fee, see the fee on the receipt, and the fee appears on the bank statement followed by a credit back in the amount of the fee. EU accounts probably just hide the fee from the customer otherwise ATMs would not be sustainable.

    update

    This page says:

    You can make a cash withdrawal at every geldmaat ATM using your Maestro or Visa debit card and/or your MasterCard or Visa credit card.

    (emphasis mine)

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • On the other hand, if they have clear signage, then the argument that “card doesn’t work for me” isn’t an ability to pay if you have a working card, but a refusal to pay.

    This can also be a dicey scenario. Some foreign cards have no fees for global use, while cards not designed for foreign use can have absurdly high fees if used outside the country. I would plan on using only cards that are reasonable and perhaps carry the very costly cards for emergencies.

    It’s also seems a bit haphazard that businesses only have to specify “no cash”, but not necessarily the forms of payment they take. So a customer could pull out a Diner’s Club card and find it’s not even compatible. This is another problem that would normally be easily solved with a cash option.

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • Your comment is mostly sensible and I appreciate your insight on the obligation to post cashless signage, but this seems a bit off:

    What about the case where someone enters with bank card(s) that are in a broken state, unknown to the card holder?

    What if someone enters a place that takes cash, thinking they can pay with dollars (which happens at a non-zero rate in Amsterdam), or rubies and gold? The answer is the same in both cases: that’s the customers problem.

    EU law has established the definition of legal tender in the eurozone to include euro banknotes and coins. Each eurozone member state keeps its own laws as far as defining the role and purpose of legal tender (and that creates a bit of a mess, but it is what it is). I think a member state can include more forms of money as legal tender, but euro banknotes and coins are mandated by the commission to be part of the legal tender definition. So there can be little confusion about other currencies having legal tender status. There is also an EU Recommendation that legal tender be accepted on payment toward debts, and I believe running a tab and paying later must be a debt (as opposed to a point of sale). In any case, gold and rubies would not have equal standing to euro banknotes in Amsterdam.

    I cannot say I put much stock into any guesswork that a broken card would be treated as if the customer brought nothing to pay with. Banks can (and often do) spontaneously disable cards at any moment without communicating to the card holder. The card may even be functional while you eat, and the bank could disable it 5 seconds before you tap the payment terminal. It could be entirely outside the card holder’s control -- by an shitty anti-fraud AI mechanism (which I have been at the receiving end of lately). It would be absurdly and embarrassingly harsh for a society to treat a victim of AI like a deadbeat freeloading non-payer. I can’t say you’re wrong because I don’t know Dutch law and procedure, but it sounds like conjecture.

    Sometimes the card and card holder’s bank is not even at issue. Some machines rejected my perfectly valid card in Netherlands. The logo for the payment network matched and my account was funded. Machine rejected it saying “contact your bank”. The bank said there’s nothing wrong with the account.. no blocks.. card should work. The bank did a deeper check and said the transaction attempts were never even transmitted to the bank -- that the card processor itself decided to reject the card. So the machine that rejected my card lied, and erroneously implied the problem was on my side.

    So when a card fails to pay out, that failure can potentially be entirely on the merchant side of the transaction. E.g. some merchants refuse foreign cards, which violates the terms of the Visa merchant agreement but it’s not enforced so merchants are happy to break it. And the messaging cannot be trusted. So surely as someone is in a bar or restaurant with a failing payment, there is no way to know with certainty on the spot where the fault is, amid false error messages. It requires investigation which may take some time. On top of that, some banks charge high hourly fees for investigations. This is why I’m interested in what Dutch law and procedure is in this situation.

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • Most card only shops/places have a sticker on there door. But as a non Dutch person you probably don’t know how they look.

    I noticed one shop with a no cash sticker that looked like it could be a standardised placard. The bar I was in did not have any indicator of any kind on the door or exterior. So I’m asking what the law is on this. Is there a legal obligation for cashless shops to disclose it? If yes, what rights does the business lose if they fail that?

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • Well, the good news is that that’s true for EU people too. (emphasis mine)

    Indeed; confirmed. I have several quite simple purely EU cases that have been just sitting idle for years.

    And yes, GDPR is limited to companies that do business inside the EU. That is also the leverage through which enforcement can happen - losing access to the EU market.

    Well, I suppose if a non-EU consumer opts to use a bank card of a bank that also has an EU presence, that might give a slight advantage over their purely domestic cards. OTOH, banks seem quite careful to separate themselves across national borders, even within Europe. Ing in Netherlands is likely a different company than Ing in Belgium. So if two banks are only sharing the same branding, I wonder to what extent HSBC in the UK (or wherever they are headquartered now) would be the same bank as HSBC in NL in terms of legal action exposure.

  • Using broccoli stems as pickles

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  • ah, right, i forgot about broccoli slaw. Some grocers even sell bags of it cut into matchsticks.

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • Theoretically that’s true but I’ve already seen it fail. Using a non-EU card to buy airfare from an EU airline website still results in all flight details (flight number, time, origin, destination, name of traveler) being needlessly¹ shared with the credit card network and with the bank. So non-EU people can only fantasize about getting GDPR protections on EU transactions.

    And now that I’m thinking about this, the GDPR protection is limited. That is, the bank must know that a bar is on one side of the transaction (legal basis would be a “contract” if not “legitimate interest”). The GDPR limits the bank from sharing that info and also limits the bank from using it internally for purposes unrelated to the performance of the contract (e.g. the bank cannot send you beer ads as a result).

    So consider the non-EU customer angle. The non-EU bank would also know that a cardholder spent X amount in bar Y. Do you believe that non-EU bank would recognize that bar Y is in Europe and thus not sell that info to data miners for whatever the data is worth? If yes, what would the enforcement recourse be? Could the non-EU person report their non-EU bank to a data protection authority under Art.77 in the member state where the bar was located? I’m a bit fuzzy on this cross-border aspect of the GDPR. IIRC there are DPAs in some non-EU countries that the EU considers acceptable (which ironically includes the US), but I’m quite skeptical of their powers or willingness to use their power to handle an Art.77 complaint. I suppose there must be some mechanism in place but I’d be quite far from trusting it.

    ¹ Sharing airfare data happens because some credit cards include travel insurance and the bank needs those details to trigger the insurance coverage. But not all cards have that insurance yet it seems the sharing is automatic regardless.

    (They might also know it by its Dutch acronym, AVG.)

    Good point. It was an English conversation but indeed I should have said AVG. In any case, you just lowered my degree of surprise that they didn’t know the GDPR.

  • (Netherlands) What happens when you can’t pay your tab at a bar because cash is refused?

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  • The UK is this way on debts, where you consume a product or service before payment? Do you know the answer to any of my series of questions w.r.t the UK because that would be interesting as well.