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'm more referring to the fact that the rate they charge you covers things that you shouldn't get reimbursed for.
That would be the flat fee that they charge annually for overhead (e.g. ~€100/yr). If they are stuffing more overhead into the raw consumption cost per kWh, that’s some dodgy accounting. Here is a typical figure:
- consumption: 21 €cents/kWh
- injection: 7 €cents/kWh
If I inject 1 kWh, I get 7 €cents/kWh while someone else pays 21 €cents/kWh for that same unit of energy that I injected. That’s 14 cents overhead (plus the annual flat fees) on 7 cents of energy. When the overhead is more than double the value of the thing delivered, it seems like a swindle especially considering it does not even cover my overhead in generating it. If my solar panels get trashed by hail, the energy supplier says: your problem, not ours, because that’s on your side of the meter. So in effect, I’m actually getting less than 7 €cents/kWh once I factor in my own overhead.
Anyway, I think the take-away here is that it does not make sense for consumers to feed the grid in Belgium. At least not from their own panels. The Brusol deal is entirely different and worth a look. Brusol owns the PVs that sit on your roof for 30 years and they maintain them. Brusol holds the green certs. Then in one of their offers they simply undercut Electrabel by ~50%, so you pay ~10 €cents/kWh regardless of whether it comes from your roof or the grid.
I think if you’re a heavy consumer (consume more than your roof-covered solar array can feed), the Brusol deal is best. If you’re a light consumer, then going off-grid with batteries makes more sense.
The shame of the Brusol deal is you are locked into a 30 year contract and thus tethered to them, dependant on them to treat you right in a very long term relationship. Off-grid gives the freedom, autonomy, and privacy you expect to have when your roof space is sacrificed for PVs.
No. A dozen or so lawyers were in the conversation and one of them said that. No one said otherwise. Since it was a verbal general comment that lawyers cannot accept cash, the law could detail some exceptions or something that I’m unaware of.
they can't reimburse you forever the same amount for the power you put back.
Not sure why you say that. It would only be a problem if every single household generated a surplus, which would be very unrealistic. As it is, they already charge an annual flat fee on top of consumption costs in Brussels to cover overhead.
That is my understanding as well. The policing only happens when it comes to selling your energy (to the grid in particular). The price you get for selling the energy back is so lousy that it often makes sense to buy and manage batteries, which is inefficient and wasteful but probably less wasteful than the artificial injection overhead.
In principle it would make sense to store energy in a water tank as well, which may be more efficient than the double conversion with batteries assuming the water is not directly solar heated. But I can only imagine the complexity of a solar inverter being smart enough to manage that.
Also probably makes sense to have refrigerators do most of their running during peak sunlight hours, but also complex to manage.
No, jlai.lu is good. That is why I mention them on the sidebar.
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 4
Currency 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
Do you think it's politicians' job to provide technology education?
Of course. Public education comes from the public sector. We should be electing politicians with administrations who are smarter than the general public. Any tech education that comes of Twitter abandonment is welcome.
Can’t reach that link, but sounds good for folks that talk more than 800 min/yr.
But that’s almost like a postpaid scenario.. use-it-or-lose it rather than pay-as-you-go. My consumption would be well below that, and I can’t even be certain I will be in any one given country for whole year. I’d probably be spending over $1/min with that plan.
But there is a need for politicians to reach their constituents, and if they can be effectively reached by an imperfect method,
Leaders should lead, not follow. Politicians can reach and be reached on a Mastodon server, where all their constituents have access.
Asking ~8 billion (or however many) people to make a personal change first is a non-starter. Demanding many orders of magnitude fewer people (politicians) make the first move to break the dystopian cycle is far more sensible.
then I can accept them using it while also promoting better methods.
Posting on Twitter is an assault on promoting better methods. Mirroring everything on Twitter facilitates the Tyranny of Convenience (great essay by Tim Wu) by making Twitter the superset. It’s important and socially responsible to withhold info from Twitter so that it cannot be the superset.
RMS gives good advice for orgs who think they need a Facebook presence:
https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html
Politicians don’t need a Twitter presence, but to the extent that they are not convinced, the bare minimum action they can take is implement some of the advice on that RMS page.
Any random 3rd party joe shmoe can make a Twitter bot that mirrors a politician’s msgs to Twitter. In fact, force Twitter to do the work simply by not feeding Twitter. Motivation for Twitter’s self-preservation would appropriately ensure gov resources are not spent on Twitter. Make Twitter be the host of dodgy mirror bots without engagement, where you need Mastodon to actually engage with a politician.
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.