ah, thanks!

Thanks for the tip! But I’m a bit confused about what that place is. The pic on the landing page is certainly what I am after but I think that's just a recipe site, not a shop. I see no address and openstreetmaps does not have a shop by that name in Amsterdam.

Glad to hear you can help drive that from the EU side. Until then, I will continue sending paper correspondence. It would help if more people would insist on paper correspondence to create a bit of motivation.

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.

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

Thanks for the clarification.. that was a bit counter intuitive. I went back and approved the report.

I clicked “reject”, but it’s not even clear what that action means when I am looking at someone’s report that is attached to the alert. Does that mean I am rejecting the alert, or rejecting the content that is being alerted? It’s a shitty UI for not having any clarity on this.

Glad to hear that an app exists. But I don’t see Flutter in the Debian repos. If a framework for a platform is not in official Debian repos, that’s a bit of a red flag for me as far as maturity goes. Hopefully that platform will reach a point where the quality and momentum get it into Debian repos.

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.

(deleted -- I wrote from the notifications timeline without context)

No, it must land on an account electronically, as directed using an IBAN. Post offices double as banks in Europe, so I brought up the post office because their banking service tends to cover this need.

(edit) but regarding your comment that no courier guarantees cash, I thought FedEx did and that people used FedEx for cash for that reason. But then there was a recent scandal in the US where a big FedEx hub allowed cops with sniffer dogs trained specifically to sniff for cash, and the police were simply confiscating banknotes without cause (arbitrarily without a crime). I have to wonder how the insurance claims play out in that case.

Do all accounts support cash deposits?

In Belgium, banks can refuse you an account for any reason unless you open a “basic” account which they cannot refuse. But cash deposits are banned from basic accounts (which is possibly a Belgian-specific constraint). What about basic accounts in Germany?

No, it’s nannying. When the hunt for criminals interferes with law-abiding people, it’s oppression.

Forced banking and anti-cash policy is definately something that varies from one country to the next. There is an “EU recommendation” that all debts be payable in cash. Belgium is not following the recommendation and it causes problems. Germany has a reputation for respecting people’s privacy, autonomy, and ability to use cash. Hence why I thought Germany might have a decent option.

You can make an account in Germany without being a resident, better try this

I do not want an account. I could fill a book with reasons.

Normally post office’s demand ID. I am fine with that as long as my ID is accepted (which I’m not sure if it would be if it’s not German, although in principle any EU resident should have equal access to any EU service).

i get error 500 when I try that link.

Yikes. I am disturbed to hear that. I was as well appalled with what I saw in a recent visit to a university. It’s baffling that someone could acquire those degrees without grasping the discipline. Obviously it ties in with the fall of software quality that began around the same time the DoD lifted the Ada mandate. But indeed, you would have to mention your credentials because nothing else you’ve written indicates having any tech background at all.

How have I made your point at all?

You have acknowledged the importance of having multiple points of failure. It’s a good start because the defect at hand is software with a single point of failure.

You're a bit incoherent with what you're talking about.

I suppose I assumed I was talking to someone with a bit of engineering history. It’s becoming clear that you don’t grasp software design. You’ve apparently not had any formal training in engineering and likely (at best) you’ve just picked up how to write a bit of code along the way. Software engineering so much more than that. You are really missing the big picture.

This has nothing to do with software design or anything else along those lines.

What an absurd claim to make. Of course it does. When software fails to to protect the data it’s entrusted with, it’s broken. Either the design is broken, or the implementation is broken (but design in the case at hand). Data integrity is paramount to infosec and critical to the duty of an application. Integrity is basically infosec 101. If you ever enter an infosec program, it’s the very first concept you’ll be taught. Then later on you might be taught that a good software design is built with security integrated into the design in early stages, as opposed to being an afterthought. Another concept you’ve not yet encounted is the principle of security in depth, which basically means it’s a bad idea to rely on a single mechanism. E.g. if you rely on the user to make a backup copy but then fail to protect the primary copy, you’ve failed to create security in depth, which requires having BOTH a primary copy AND a secondary copy.

This is a simple thing. If your data is valuable you secure it yourself.

That has nothing to do with the software defect being reported. While indeed it is a good idea to create backups, this does not excuse or obviate a poor software design that entails data loss and ultimately triggers a need for data recovery. When a software defect triggers the need for data recovery, in effect you have lost one of the redundant points of failure you advocated for.

When you reach the university level, hopefully you will be given a human factors class of some kind. Or if your first tech job is in aerospace or a notably non-sloppy project, you’ll hopefully at least learn human factors on the job. If you write software that’s intolerant to human errors and which fails to account for human characteristics, you’ve created a poor design (or most likely, no design.. just straight to code). When you blame the user, you’ve not only failed as an engineer but also in accountablity. If a user suffers from data loss because your software failed to protect the data, and you blame the user, any respectable org will either sack you or correct you. It is the duty of tech creators to assume that humans fuck up and to produce tools that is resilient to that. (maybe not in the gaming industry but just about any other type of project)

Good software is better than your underdeveloped understanding of technology reveals.

Thinking that a federated service is going to have a uniform or homogenous approach to things is folly

Where do you get /uniform/ from? Where do you get /homogenous approach/ from? Mbin has a software defect that Lemmy does not. Reporting mbin’s defect in no way derives and expectation that mbin mirror Lemmy. Lemmy is merely an example of a tool that does not have the particular defect herein. Lemmy demonstrates one possible way to protect against data loss. There are many different ways mbin can solve this problem, but it has wholly failed because it did fuck all. It did nothing to protect from data loss.

on your end and a failure of understanding what the technology is.

It’s a failure on your part to understand how to design quality software. Judging from the quality of apps over the past couple decades, it seems kids are no longer getting instruction on how to build quality technology and you have been conditioned by this shift in recent decades toward poorly designed technology. It’s really sad to see.