ciferecaNinjo

joined 2 years ago
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Some of the repair cafes in brussels:

  • St.Josse? (called cafe repair /Brabant/), rue vert (1st Saturday of the month, small 1-person shop, also sells 2nd hand clothing)
  • Ixelles (1st Sunday of the month, large but crowded)
  • st.gilles (2nd Sunday of the month, large but crowded)
  • Schaerbeek (2nd Sunday of the month)
  • St.Josse, rue de liedekerke (3rd Wednesday of the month) -- dicey schedule.. often no one shows up.

There’s often a line at the large ones, which have ~6 or so repairers. The small one on rue vert is 1 person but so few people go there that there is a good chance you have no wait at all.

Some of these places do clothing repair as well. But the focus is small appliances and electronics.

It’s all donation based.

 

I always thought if you produce your own energy, you would need to upgrade to a bi-directional electric meter. The linked article gives interesting insight -- that consumers need not switch to a bi-directional meter.

IIUC, the figures are like this:

bi-directional meter: you receive ⅓ the price of energy you inject as the cost for consuming. (wtf? That seems terrible)

analog meter: your injection simply makes the old analog meter run in reverse. So I think you must get equal credit for energy you supply. But you must pay a flat ~~€50/year~~ (correction: €50 per kW per year) extra tax for that privilege.

~~Both scenarios seem a bit far from fair, but it seems like people with modern digital bi-directional meters really get screwed. Or am I missing something?~~

update: sorry, I thought I read flat €50/yr. It’s €50 per kW per year. So if you inject 1500 kWh/year, you pay €75,000? Can’t be. What’s wrong with my calculation here? Billing deals with kW hours, and the tax is based simply on kW (capacity). I’m not sure what a typical kW would be.

update 2: Actually there is no prosumer tariff in Brussels:

https://soltis.be/en/faq/what-is-the-prosumer-rate/

That makes it easy. So IIUC you get equal compensation for electricity injection in Brussels if you have an analog meter.

update 3: Heard a rumor that analog meters are being replaced with digital ones in all of Belgium eventually. Brussels is slow but it will happen. And when it does, people with the new digital meters will get screwed if they are injecting power into the grid. I’m somewhat wondering if Brussels is deliberately slow. Maybe they are waiting for more people to be enticed to install solar panels before they do the conversion.

Bait and switch.

update 4: some sources say digital meters will replace analog meters soon in Brussels. There is nothing good about this for consumers. Why people should resist this change:

  • (unfairness) Digital meters will enable the electricity supplier to compensate consumers less for injection than they charge for consumption. Even though they are not using unfair pricing yet, the digital meter paves the way to make unfair pricing possible.
  • (reduced availability) Digital meters enable Sibelga to remotely cut off the power to your house at the flip of a switch. People behind on their bills will lose power more easily.
  • (surveillance?) I’m speculating here, but once the meter is digital it might enable the energy supplier to monitor the meter in realtime. This would enable them to (e.g.) know when someone is home, how many people, etc.

I see no advantages for the consumer w.r.t. digital meters. Maybe you won’t need to periodically let someone enter the house to read the meter anymore (not sure), but in any case it’s a bad trade-off.

 

Brusol’s deal seems almost too good to be true. They provide solar panels, insure them, install them on your roof, and maintain them for 30 years, all at no cost. The panels remain the property of Brusol for 30 years.

Any energy you use is free to you to the extent of the input energy. Essentially you give up roof space in exchange for some free energy. Seems like a good deal.

But of course I’m looking for how this can go bad. If you want to bring in batteries and take all the energy for yourself (e.g. to go off-grid), they charge €850 per panel. I heard that’s ten times the cost of a panel. Apparently they factor all their labor and overhead materials into that price.

 

Intermarché has a 1+1 promo on clips of Cubanisto (Tequila flavored beer). Then the 3 packs of beer themselves had 2+1 printed on the case.

There is no print to say the promos cannot be combined. So of course I expect to pay for 2 bottles and get 4 gratis. Other grocery stores work that way. If there is a promo of that discounts multiple clips and then there are also in-pack promos, you can end up buying fewer bottles than what they give for free.

In the case of Intermarché the register is a bit extra diligent and works out which promo is better then makes adjustments to ensure the promos are not combined.

 

I fixed the motor for my washing machine. All the components work fine now (motor, drain pump, water inlet valve). But the controller board is trapped in an error state because it does not know that I fixed the motor.

So I need to reset the PCB to clear the error. Beko refuses to tell me the special sequence of keys to reset the board. And I won’t pay them €200 (more than the value of the quite old machine) to send someone out to reset the board.

Buying a new PCB would likely fix the problem, but the parts dealers sell just about every part for my model except the PCB.

I need a junkyard that that allows people to remove parts. These seem non-existent in Brussels. I only found 2 trash points where large appliances go to die. I’ve been kicked out of them like half a dozen times now. It seems they pile the e-waste quite high, which causes more damage and creates a safety hazard (which would be part of why they kick people out). They seem to be breaking stuff down to its raw materals for melting down. I see no middle step in the process; no way for repairers to salvage the components they need.

So ultimately it looks like I will have to throw away a functional washing machine just because some bits on the circuit board are flipped the wrong way.

 

A lot of useful information covering the city of Brussels is jailed. Apparently only clearnet users are allowed to access the website, AFAICT.

 

“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”

Where else are people forced to solve a reCAPTCHA in the course of public administration or essential public transactions like utilities? We should make a list.

(edit) Those figures are for worldwide use of reCAPTCHA, not just Sibelga. I’m just calling out Sibelga for adding to the problem. Hope my thread title isn’t misleading.

 

If you need to do any kind of public administration in Belgium, such as perform transactions with city hall or the tax authority, for most uses you are redirected to eid.belgium.be to login using a smartcard reader. A PIN and eID serve as the 2nd factor when authenticating on this site.

But eid.belgium.be blocks Tor. Isn’t 2FA enough? Why would the confidence in their security be so low that they are skiddish about someone’s IP address? IMO it’s unlikely that their security confidence is that low. Most likely they want to track the IP address and thus day-to-day of every citizen. Otherwise it makes no sense for this service to block Tor, which mushrooms into being blocked from accessing many essential services.

This is why the right to be analog is important. I think someone in Denmark is working on that. Belgium has an org called something like the gang of angry elders working on the right to be analog.

 

Irony indeed. The agency responsible for protecting people’s privacy in Belgium wholly denies people access to the website if they use Tor to protect their own privacy. The firewall simply drops packets which is even less dignified than a 403 error.

You cannot submit an electronic GDPR complaint over Tor, to complain about your privacy being undermined because the same people tasked with protecting your privacy also undermine it.

 

There are copious hosts in the europa.eu domain. Most of them rudely stonewall Tor users without explanation. Ironically, sometimes they are asking for public feedback on a privacy-related policy but then they block Tor users who would have the most insight.

Few examples of EC sites that are exclusive access:

  • commission.europa.eu
  • single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
  • energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu

Often an open access host links into commission.europa.eu, so people might be part way through a transaction and cannot proceed.

At least eur-lex.europa.eu is open access. That’s the most important one because it publishes enacted law. Yet commission.europa.eu is quite important so definately an injustice that that site is access restricted.

 

I’m not talking about the telco landline phone booths that were probably around in the 1990s. I think it was ~5—10 years or so ago that there were many hole-in-the-wall convenience shops that had phone booths. I never used them but I’m not liking GSM voice prices so I wanted to try them out. I assume they are cheap voip lines.

But I cannot find any now. I saw 6 or so (what I think are) phone booths in a Ria money transfer shop, but they were taped off and out of use. Anyone know of any that still exist?

I found this but I think they are just talking about telco serviced phones:

https://www.thebulletin.be/public-phone-boxes-thing-past-belgium

 

These three prepaid GSM providers will not allow you service unless you have a bank account which you must use for the initial payment before activation:

  • Mobile Vikings
  • JIM Mobile (same ownership as Mobile Vikings)
  • Scarlet
  • (edit) Ello? They might have the same issue as the above three

At the same time, some banks will not allow you to open an account unless you provide to them a mobile phone number registered in your name with proof of that registration.

You open a “basic” bank account at a bank that offers those kind of accounts just for the one-time purpose of getting a sim chip from one of the 3 MVNOs, but Belgium has a separate rule that blocks basic accounts from receiving cash, even a small amount like €10.

So you must obtain a sim from a mobile carrier other than the three to get a normal bank account open which accepts cash. Then use that bank account to buy the Jim or Scarlet sim card. Then credit is trapped on the 1st sim card. You can do a phone number transfer to get it credited back, after they siphon off €5 for the porting effort.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (6 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Can you elaborate on the limitations? In Belgium it seems more like a shitty deployment, but I don’t see what blocks a community FOSS option. Is it just that no one has been inspired to make an open source tool, or are the carrier’s APIs proprietary, secret, or restricted?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Indeed I would do that if I reached a point where I needed to exercise my rights. ATM I don’t have a reason to cancel but just wanted to understand the rules in particular because I will sign up for more insurance of different kinds and would like to know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I hope not.

AML is really getting out of control; harming people trying to go about normal lives. There needs to be some push back against this hunt for criminals when it causes collateral damage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Will be fun if they build structures in the canal. Apparently they move much better in the water than on land so the canal would attract them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah Youtube has become the monopoly of repair advice. It’s been very effective for me over the past decade. But I’m not happy with the business model and the recent protectionism by Google (killing Invidious and blocking tor, pushing CAPTCHAs, enshitification in general). So I am trying to focus on methods that avoid Google.

The service manual should cover how to get into diagnostic mode and test the various functions. I suspect that service manuals are perhaps not even produced for some machines due to Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

you need to learn to read.

Try reading your own source. Look for “usually” in your cited definition. If you replace “usually” with “always” it would get you closer to the definition you’re attempting to apply in your claims. At least it’s more clear why you originally thought expression rights would matter.

I never said a boycott required an organization

Yet you just indicated you are standing behind Webster’s definition, which (incorrectly) claims that a boycott is necessarily “concerted”. An “organised” boycott isconcerted”. Working in concert.

A dictionary’s 2-liner gives a very rudimentary understanding of the practice. It’s good for someone starting from zero, but you should really read the history and learn a bit about the concept instead of trying to think like a robot. Lookup Charles C. Boycott to learn the origins. A dictionary is really a shitty source for gaining in-depth insight. Anyone can find a dictionary that supports different meanings. Then what? A battle of dictionaries.. Webster vs. Random House? A prof would be embarrassed to refer to a dictionary. The problem with Webster is that it attempts to capture the general concept in 2 lines of text but in an effort to capture the typical practice it yields something inaccurately narrow. They made a trade-off. Webster was right to say it /usually/ manifests as an expression, but a boycott does not cease to be a boycott in the absence of a concerted effort of multiple actors. Indeed that is also usually the case but not always. And you’re hoping a 2 line blurb will cover all situations. It’s a non-starter because those of us who live by the boycott as a lifestyle could not possibly convey expression across the board. If I were to introduce expression to my lifestyle of boycotting ~1000+ brands for every one of them, it would be unsurmountable. I would have to cut back on the quantity of boycotts by 2 orders of magnitude.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

A boycott is by definition choosing not to partake in a transaction ~~so as to show your dissatisfaction financially~~, any action that doesn't fit the definition of a boycott is not one.

There is no “showing your dissatisfaction” nonsense here. A boycott can absolutely be silent. You’re under the common misconception that boycotts are necessarily organised by many people with a list of demands. A single person can -- on their own initiative -- decide to boycott a company as just one person. I did not buy the Unilever bar of soap because I boycott Unilever. Yet Unilever does not get the slightest expression or signal from me to “show” dissatisfaction. I may be the only person boycotting them. Wholly undetectable. I might make some noise about it, optionally, but my boycott does not cease to be a boycott for not showing dissatisfaction.

Intent is nothing from a utilitarian standpoint. Someone or a small group might think or hope their boycott inherently signals dissatisfaction. Yet it likely fails in that regard despite having the intent that your definition introduces.

A boycott is consumers refusing to feed a bad actor. They may or may not show contempt. I boycott hundreds of corporations and I never send them my list of demands. That’s optional. Different people partake in boycotts different ways. Vegans often do not voice contempt for their adversary. But it’s a boycott against animal abusers nonetheless. The only way the meat industry could satisfy the demands of the vocal vegans would be to wholly cease their activity.. their existence.

I boycott Micorosoft and Amazon for hundreds of reasons. There is absolutely no hope of those companies changing enough to redeem themselves enough for me to back off my boycott. They cannot be salvaged. I am boycotting them until I die.

You cannot force somebody to partake in a transaction,

How could you possibly not have seen all the examples I gave of people being forced to partake in a transaction? Some are hypothetical but doesn’t matter. I count 8. In every single one of those cases the consumer could (if they wanted) ensure that their dissatisfaction is registered which would then adapt the example for your definition of boycott.

If we assume you are not swayed about the meaning of the word, so what? My questions in the OP are formed using my own interpretation of the word boycott. If necessary, you could mentally find and replace “boycott” with “foo”. My questions still stand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I can’t quite grasp much of what you’re saying but I can respond to this:

Realistically, you can't ban boycotts because you can't make people buy things

Boycotting is no longer limited to purchases because data has value. So boycotting also means to refuse to share your profitable data with the entity who you boycott. Whether the boycott is exercised by refusing to purchase or refusing to share data, there are various situations where people’s boycotts can be suppressed:

  • An arabic teacher in Texas was forced to sign an agreement to not boycott Israel. She refused to sign and so the school district refused to renew her teaching contract. (that actually happened)
  • An obligatory government procedure requires either sending an email to the gov office or supplying an email address to them to receive email from them. The gov office uses Microsoft (a notorious surveillance advertiser who abuses data every opportunity). There are hundreds of reasons to boycott Microsoft. Complying with the gov obligation requires you to participate in Microsoft gaining profitable data from your transaction. OTOH refusing to comply on the basis of boycotting Microsoft leads to whatever action the gov takes for non-compliance with their procedure.
  • A creditor only accepts Paypal payments toward a debt. If the debtor is not legally entitled to pay by other means in the country at hand (or the contract supersedes), the creditor would sue a debtor who boycotts Paypal for non-payment. This could happen if both agree to use Paypal, but then the debtor later gets booted by Paypal (yes, paypal has a reputation for booting customers and even keeping their money). The customer would be reasonable to boycott Paypal in such event, but the boycott would be impeded by their obligation to pay the creditor.
  • (the OP example) a vegan is incarcerated in a prison that has no vegan food. It’s perhaps a messy example, but a vegan could refuse the animal products. When they reach a bad condition, some human rights issues would eventually be triggered since they have a right to live. Force feeding aside, ideally they should have a legal basis to demand vegan food simply from the start. It’s probably not a realistic example in most of the developed world but nonetheless indicates how a boycott can be impeded.
  • Someone who boycotts Google might be forced to use an app exclusive for Google customers. That force can arise out of various circumstances including government mandates as govs increasingly assume everyone has a smartphone. It’s very common for apps to be exclusively obtainable from Google or Apple’s websites, and increasingly common that apps are unavoidable. Google profits from the Playstore, as does Apple from their store. There is a community for capturing some of these situations. See the healthcare thread in particular.
  • Someone who boycotts non-free software might be forced to use a government website that’s actually a JavaScript app, non-free software.
  • A consumer who boycotts Google might be forced to solve a Google reCAPTCHA (from which Google profits) in the course of fulfilling an obligation to use a shitty website. E.g. the water company might require you to supply your meter reading on their website. You might agree after seeing no problem with the website. Then a couple years later the water company decides to make solving a Google reCAPTCHA a precondition to entering the meter reading. Since the agreement does not say they will /not/ do this, you are contractually obligated to solve Google’s CAPTCHA and help Google profit from your labor (because telling Google where the crosswalks are adds value to their profitable maps).
  • A consumer sensible enough to boycott Twitter will be unable to microblog to most (if not all) of their gov reps, which of course has some interplay with free expression rights. If the gov rep were on a gov-administered Mastodon host, boycotts would be respected. Constituents could boycott the shitty corps without sacrificing the option to microblog to their rep.

I could go on but I think this sufficiently shows that there are plenty of situations where people are increasingly disempowered to boycott. Pointing to the free expression article of the UDHR would be useless in these scenarios.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I am not asking for legal advice¹. I am asking how the human rights text I have quoted can reasonably be interpretted -- and in fact what is the common interpretation.

Lawyers have specific disciplines. At this point with so little critical thinking (and thinking in general in this thread) it’s unclear if a human rights lawyer is even appropriate for my situation. Whether I can even obtain a lawyer is an entirely different mess -- totally irrelevant to the thread. But due to those irrelevant circumstances I believe I will be forced to defend myself (btw, it is a human right that someone can defend themself pro se.. fyi). In which case it is extra important for me to know my rights.

This hostility in here to people knowing their rights is something else. It’s far from the liberal community I was expecting to find here. Where are the people who actually endorse human rights, endorse the knowledge of those rights, and the exercise thereof? Where are the thinkers? The profs, and academics?

Folks -- please read the sidebar -- all of it:

!humanrights is a safe place to discuss the topic of human rights, through the lens of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. …

  • Treat everyone with dignity. …

¹ I only brought up the legal case because to fend off the anti-intellectual speech-chilling asshat who managed to break every rule in the sidebar at once. The legal case is irrelevant to the thread’s thesis of knowing our rights -- and was intentionally withheld from the OP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I am being dragged into court over a boycott. Opposition to my boycott is being shoved down my throat, so your uncivil reponse not only fails to answer the questions and neglects to give insight into human rights law and interpretation, it’s not helpful in terms of how human rights law can be applied to defend boycotts. It’s worse than unhelpful because threadcrap is just garbage that assaults the discussion and blocks people from knowing their rights.

BTW, many US states have a prohibition on boycotting Israel, and Texas enforces it. So the idea that everyone happily gets to practice boycotts free from oppression is delusional. I already knew that some prisons offer vegan options, but that mere fact does not reveal the legal basis for that option.

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