ciferecaNinjo

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1
Now illegal in Belgium for lawyers to accept cash payments, according to a lawyer. Thus, no due process for unbanked people? (fedia.io)
1
Now illegal in Belgium for lawyers to accept cash payments, according to a lawyer. Thus, no due process for unbanked people? (fedia.io)
1
It is now illegal in Belgium for lawyers to accept cash payments, according to a lawyer. Thus, no due process for unbanked people? (fedia.io)
 

How are unbanked people and those with cashless bank accounts expected to pay lawyers if the money they have for the lawyer is in cash?

Why are lawyers of all people not trusted with cash? Can’t lawyers be disbarred if they do something dodgy?

6
2025: illegal in Belgium to install solar panels if you have an analog meter (fedia.io)
 

I’m not sure when in 2025 the law takes effect - or if it’s already in effect - but there is a ban on installing solar panels if you have an analog meter. People who already had solar panels before 2025 and an analog meter are grandfathered in, but the grandfathering is only good until Sibelga forces you change to a digital electric meter (at which point you get a lousy price for injecting energy).

I heard if you want to install solar panels going forward, you are better off selling your energy to the neighbors than feeding the grid. Otherwise to feed the grid you must apply for green certificate which entails a process that includes replacing your meter with a digital one.

6
German ATMs do not give receipts. This goes against intl law, no? And what about fee transparency? Upside: they give big notes, but how do you know in advance? (fedia.io)
 

no receipts

ATMs in Germany did not ask if I wanted a receipt. Then they simply neglected to print a receipt. I noticed one ATM did not even have a printer.. no slot to output a receipt.

Not too long ago I came across some international law regarding ATMs. One of the requirements was that ATMs provide a receipt. How is Germany getting around that law? Or did the law change?

no mention of fees

Every ATM I have encountered outside of Germany (w/the exception of 1 machine) mentions a fee for non-SEPA cards, which is then printed on the receipt. The transparency is also an obligation imposed by international law. Is it safe to assume German ATMs do not charge a fee to non-SEPA cards? Or did I just get lucky on the ATMs I encountered? I think I once used an ATM in France which did not charge a fee on a non-SEPA card.. so they do exist but I’ve found it to be quite rare before traveling to Germany.

Ideally there would be a list of ATMs somewhere that are wholly fee-free. AFAICT, it’s a crapshoot.

banknotes

I heard some German ATMs will dispense bills as big as €200. But banknote availibility is never disclosed until you do a transaction. Some ATMs only went up to €50 and some €100 but I never got a bigger note than that. What bank or ATM operator has €200?

tailgating to reach an ATM

There was a locked ATM room. I did not try my card to open the door because it was not of that bank. But luckily there was enough traffic that I could tailgate someone in to access the ATMs. That’s a bit bizarre, no? Anything wrong with tailgating? Is it setup that way to be a kind of VIP privilege to enter for just that particular bank’s customers?

1
Fight for ETS by sending snail-mail instead of email. Because almost all gov agencies in Europe use MS Outlook. (fedia.io)
 

If you send an email to a recipient whose email account is hosted by Microsoft, or you share you email address with such entities, you are part of the problem.

I refuse to be part of the problem. So before contacting a recipient (gov agencies in particular), I do an MX lookup on their email address. It almost always points to MS servers.

So snail mail it is. Otherwise sending them email serves as a signal to the recipient that MS is okay for email.

1
Consider linking other free-world Belgium forums in the sidebar (fedia.io)
 

The mod might want to consider adding these related communities to the sidebar (all of which are properly decentralised):

3
New Cloudflare-free instance europe.pub has a Belgium forum (europe.pub)
 

Added to the sidebar.

It’s probably not ideal to split a tiny community into even more tiny segments. There are of course decently sized active forums covering Belgium, but they are unworthy of mention because they only exist on large centralised freedom-compromising platforms (like lemmy world).

The best we can do is link the free world sister communities in the sidebar so people can crosspost and monitor the other decent venues.

11
What kind of cuisine uses malt vinegar (besides UK and US)? (fedia.io)
10
What kind of cuisine uses malt vinegar (besides UK and US)? (fedia.io)
 

I cannot find malt vinegar in Brussels. I think it would help to know if there were a kind of cuisine that uses malt vinegar frequently other than British and American food. E.g. if the Japanese use it, then I could look for an importer that specialises in Japanese food.

6
Struggling to find malt vinegar in Brussels (fedia.io)
 

Any leads for finding malt vinegar?

A spice shop called Misao has vinegar based on lambic beer, which would be worth trying if it weren’t so costly (€14 for a small bottle).

You might think the shop “Oil & Vinegar” would have it.. but no, only really exotic vinegars.

Are there any European cuisines that make use of malt vinegar apart from British? I thought searching for German specialty importer types of places might be worth a look but German cuisine somewhat surprisingly does not use malt vinegar.

Seems bizarre how Belgium has thousands or so beer breweries but none are taking the next step to make vinegar.

8
Prepaid mobile calls cost what public payphones had cost when the plug was pulled (fedia.io)
 

This seems a bit off. Public payphones were what, 25¢/min? Now that they have been eliminated, the cash equivalent is a prepaid mobile service.

Public payphones had an infrastructure of phone booths that needed to be maintained, cleaned, and serviced. They consumed real estate.

Prepaid mobile service is a trivial deployment by comparison. I must maintain my own hardware. Yet my carrier charges 22¢/min in 2025. Comparable to the cost of public payphones.

What happened to the phone booths? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (4 children)

That’s a quite good deal. There are some barriers with Digi that makes them exclusive:

  • Only people who are willing and able to use ItsMe can place an order with Digi. ItsMe is a Cloudflare service which is a US tech giant who discriminates against several demographics of people and triggers a lot of ethical issues. So I will not have anything to do with ItsMe.
  • Strangely, the ItsMe authentication that Digi uses demands a phone number. Did it occur to them that someone ordering a phone subscription may not have a phone? (I happen to have a phone [without credit] so it wouldn’t stop me, but I still like to call out incompetence when it appears)
  • I don’t like the discrimination against unbanked people and apparently there is no way to get that 5€/month plan without patronizing a bank.

I prefer prepaid because unbanked cash payers are not excluded (apart from some exceptions). And because use-it-or-lose-it within a time limit is designed for people to pay for more than their consumption.

Orange prepaid is 15 €c/min. So at €5/month that amounts to 33 min/month, which is probably the max I would use in a month. On average I would use less. So an Orange top-up for €15 would last me longer than 3 months. Even though 15 €c/min is a terrible price, it’s still cheaper than Digi for my consumption strictly in terms of voice calls. The 15gb of data really puts Digi ahead for me, but the exclusivity factors still prevail. I can’t stomach the thought of supporting Digi’s forced Cloudflare and forced banking policy. Digi will test my ability to stand by my ethics.

I appreciate your feedback nonetheless. The one thing Digi does for me is at least they add to the competition which should keep prices under control. Phone booths would serve anyone including tourists & cash payers. Prepaid GSM is the next closest service to that market. The quite a big pricing gap between prepaid and post paid plans seems to reflect the indirectness of that competition.

Finding out the mobile network of a phone number (edit: updated but still no answer) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

mobile numbers

In the case of mobile phone numbers, the called party is not entitled to privacy as far as which network they are on because it is public information:

“The calling party may be informed that the called party has ported his number. (today, the network of the customer is not a private information and is in advantage of the customer. This does not need to change)”

(source)

So if this is public information, how can we get it?

geographical numbers

In the case of mobile phone numbers, the called party is entitled to privacy as far as which network they are on:

“The privacy of the user which has ported his number should be granted. That means that the calling party should not be informed that the called party has ported his number.”

(source)

You can transfer prepaid phone credit from one carrier to another, but not from one Orange SIM to another Orange sim in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

(update)
Proximus claims phone number portability is gratis. So perhaps it’s the balance transfer alone that has a cost. This information is not well publicized. In fact it’s contradictory. According to Brussels Times:

There is no balance transfer but there is a credit refund option. And the number porting itself as a fee of €5From 2023, the nearly 2 million users of prepaid telephone cards will be able to change operators without losing their remaining call credit, Minister of Telecommunications Petra De Sutter announced on Wednesday. A royal decree will come into force in 2023.

“A lot of people use prepaid cards and they lose their remaining credit when they change operator. I find this absurd: you paid a certain amount, so in the event of a change of operator, you should be able to keep it. From 2023, customers will keep their call credit,” the minister said.

This money will not be automatically moved to the balance of the new phone provider. Instead, “holders of a prepaid card can ask their former telecom operator to reimburse the remaining amount.”

The refund will typically be received in a customer’s bank account within four weeks. To receive it the customer must have already taken the steps to open a new prepaid account with their new operator and transfer their existing number.

Phone providers can still charge €5 to switch to a new operator, the minister reminded.

(Brussels Times is not an open website, hence why the article is quoted here instead of a link)

The following clause appears in this document:

“The Donor Network may not charge the Customer for the porting process itself. Of course, all charges due to the contract signed before the porting are due by the Customer.”

Registered letters delivered without signature requirement. And email is considered legally equivalent to registered letters. in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I wonder if they are doing something dodgy. When I signed in the past it was on a digitized signature pad which would give bPost a reusable copy. They also photographed my ID card which seemed a bit off. They need to check ID to verify they are delivering to the right person, but I don’t see why they would need to keep a copy of it.

VOIP and SMS service in Belgium in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That’s hard to say because a phone call can often cover the same purpose. IIRC Base gives like 4000 gratis SMS when topping up, but they only last 1 month. I think 4 SMS’s can be joined to send a larger message, which I exploit because I enter the SMS from a full size keyboard. I think it does not exceed a couple hundred msgs on those months when the credit is high. But then when they expire, they are thrown away and I’m not going to topup just to get more SMS msgs. So then for a month or more I have no SMS credit. If I send an SMS anyway then it comes off the balance. When the balance drops even by one penny there is not enough credit to buy a data package. So it would help if I found a hassle-free SMS service for the times I have no SMS credit.

I’ve not turned the heating on yet this winter (in Belgium), because fuck Putin’s war in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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’ve not turned the heating on yet this winter (in Belgium), because fuck Putin’s war in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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

I’ve not turned the heating on yet this winter (in Belgium), because fuck Putin’s war in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

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’ve not turned the heating on yet this winter (in Belgium), because fuck Putin’s war in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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’ve not turned the heating on yet this winter (in Belgium), because fuck Putin’s war in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

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