ciferecaNinjo

Since e-mail has become recognised as the equivalent of a registered letter (scary!), I would like to know how courts want it submitted as evidence.

Email arrives with enough headers to fill half an A4 page. It often has a plaintext MIME part and an HTML MIME part. The HTML part is almost always garbage. The code is usually unreadable and it only renders in a decent form in recent mainstream browsers. Sometimes the whole payload is base64-encoded, which is printable but wholly useless to read.

So the question is, what does the court generally accept?

If the details of the email were quite important and it’s a murder trial that calls for evidence of a very high standard, then I suppose the raw forensic blob of text would be needed. But murder trials aside, what’s the general practice?

I use a text-based mail client and generally refuse to render the HTML due to tracker pixels and various shenanigans. My text view of an email is sometimes a bit rough looking, but I prefer it. Does the court accept a raw text representation, including cases where there is only an HTML part and w3m is used for rendering?

There is a shitty practice by tech illiterates to top post (which means to quote the entire message they are responding to below it). So every message embeds a redundant copy of the long history of the thread, sometimes followed by a 20+ line signature block. Are we expected to print 2+ pages for each message in this case?

My temptation is to truncate the quoted threads entirely, and also use a tiny font on the giant signature blocks. But I have no idea how a court will regard this.

Orange gives gratis minutes exclusively for calling other Orange/Voo subscribers. Base does the same. So it would be useful to know before calling which network the other person is on -- particularly if call credit is low.

Any tips on this?

In general, prefixes are relevant:

• 049× ← Orange
• 048× ← Base
• 047× ← Proximus

I forgot Proximus. But in any case, this is not reliable due to phone number portability whereby people swich carriers and keep their number. There are also prefixes that are not widely known (e.g. 0491).

The only way I know to check is to place a call then login after the fact and check whether gratis minutes were consumed or whether the balance dropped. Is there a way to check a number without contacting it?

I ran out of chipotle¹ powder and do not recall where in Brussels I bought it. Mexigo sells it but it’s like over €5 for just 100g (about 5 times the price per unit of paprika powder).

Bottles of Cholula chipotle sauce are easy to find but always over €5 which is still a bit pricey and does not keep as well as powder.

¹ It’s basically smoked jalepeño peppers.

Upon signing up for a 1 year insurance policy, I was told the policy is effective immediately but I have 14 days to pay. I asked if I could terminate the policy at any time and in particular if I could do so in the first 14 days. The answer was no -- that I was locked in for a full year from the very moment of signing with no 14 day cooling off period.

I accepted. But for clarity and knowing my rights I had a look at the law of 04.04.2014, which seems to contradict what the insurer told me.

IIUC, there is a 14-day termination allowance:

(fr) Le preneur d'assurance et l'assureur disposent d'un délai de quatorze jours pour résilier le contrat d'assurance, sans pénalité et sans obligation de motivation. Toutefois, pour les contrats d'assurance sur la vie, ce délai est porté à trente jours.

(en machine translation) The insurance taker and insurer have a period of fourteen days to terminate the insurance contract, without penalty and without any obligation of motivation. However, for life insurance contracts, this period is extended to 30 days.

And regardless of the time of termination (beyond 14 days), it seems consumers are entitled to pro rata refund on the unused portion:

(fr) Art.73) Lorsque le contrat est résilié pour quelque cause que ce soit, les primes payées afférentes à la période d'assurance postérieure à la date de prise d'effet de la résiliation sont remboursées dans un délai de trente jours à compter de la prise d'effet de la résiliation ou, en cas d'application de l'article 57, § 3, à compter de la réception par l'assureur de la notification de la résiliation.

(en machine translation) (Art.73) Where the contract is terminated for any cause, the premiums paid for the period of insurance after the effective date of termination shall be refunded within thirty days from the date of termination or, in the case of application of section 57, § 3, from the date of receipt by the insurer of the termination.

Am I misreading? It seems like this is very basic information that would commonly arise, so it’s a bit unexpected that an insurer would get it wrong. Or is this a case where the contract can supercede the law? I did not read the contract yet (was in a hurry).

When charities like Oxfam ask for donations, they actually refuse cash donations because the practice is banned. Presumably this is to deter the fraud of a beggar posing as a charity.

What’s the deal with the trash collectors, who once per year just before the holidays go door-to-door asking for donations? It seems they are asking for gratuity for the work they did over the course of the year. Questions:

• Are they strictly compensating the scheduled trash bag collection service, or does that also compensate those who pick up litter along the sidewalk and curbs?
• Do they accept cash? If yes, is that legal? I’m thinking there must be a distinction between charity and gratuity, and since it’s still common to tip waitstaff in cash the law may only apply to charitable donations. OTOH, there is no fraud risk with tipping a food server. But anyone can pose as a trash collector and go door-to-door.
• What are people’s thoughts on trash collectors going door-to-door asking for money? Is it fair enough, or is it off?
• What amounts do people give? And what amount would be an insult?

Fun fact: If you have credit on a prepaid SIM and you switch carriers, the balance is portable (minus fees of ~€5).

But if you want to switch from one Orange SIM to another, the credit is trapped on the old SIM. In effect, Orange steers customers toward their competitor, inadvertently.

It has been very hard to track down the service manual for a Beko washing machine. I found a few places that sell Beko parts, but Beko does not make the service manual available.

So I thought I’ll see if I can get this right the next time around. I went to Cora¹ which has over a dozen or so washing machines and asked the sales person: do any of these machines come with a service manual? He was baffled by the question and said there is a user manual. I said that’s almost useless when the thing breaks down. I want the service manual. Can you sell me a machine that comes with the service manual?

No.. none of them have one.

It’s not really a surprise. And I’m not even confident that the right to repair law will change that.

I would love it if thousands of consumers would ask sales people for the service manual, and walk away when the answer is bad. How many consumers holding out for how long would compel a change, I wonder.

¹ I generally boycott Cora for blocking Tor, but occasionally make an exception and enter the store for something specific.

I would like to know if vegans have any protection for their practice under human rights laws. Veganism is essentially a boycott against all industries that exploit non-human animals. And more broadly, are boycotts of any kind protected?

These laws could potentially be relevant:

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Article 1

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Self-determination seems quite vague and would seem to imply autonomy in general. Does that imply that someone can boycott whatever they want, like fossil fuels, credit cards, cars, meat, Internet, etc?

I also wonder about the language effect of using “peoples” in that wording. It would seem to imply that individuals do not get self-determination, but a people (a group of people) have that right. Can anyone clarify?

UDHR

Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Article 18

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.
2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

Vegan is not religion but this seems to say you can manifest a belief and practice it. So then I wonder about (for example) a vegan in prison. Can a vegan prisoner insist on a plant-based diet?

I wonder to what extent ¶3 can reduce these rights. To say it’s okay to limit ¶1 rights in pursuit of “public order” is quite broad. Any action by a gov to repress ¶1 would be argued to be in the interest of “public order”.

If an Amish person or luddite were to say “fuck the Internet -- I’m done with CAPTCHAs, tracking and surveillance, forced use of email…etc“, and develop beliefs against Internet and thus unplug from it, couldn’t the gov argue that going analog compromises “public order” (as governments increasingly impose the use of Internet on people)?

(edit) A big fuck you to the cowardice assholes silently downvoting this thread for asking questions. Contempt for people knowing their rights is despicable.

Some libraries in Brussels charge a fee for borrowing digital media and some do not. Even within the same network. That is, there is a French library network and a Dutch network. But Brussels branches within the French network vary in fees based on the commune. This is because the commune decides how to finance the library.

I’m not sure about the Dutch network.. they could be consistent on this.

I’ve noticed regulators and ombudsman in Belgium often ignore complaints. I always assumed they also took no action. But on a few occasions the agency who my complaint is about will directly contact me even though the mediator did not, or an agency who received a forwarded complaint will reach out to me.

So if you submit a complaint and hear nothing back, it does not necessarily mean the complaint is untreated. They’re just bad at communication. It’s very frustrating because how do you know whether to escellate a complaint to a higher authority? It seems like you pretty much have to assume the worst and also complain about to another agency about the apparent deadbeat agency that seems to be doing nothing.

This is largely a problem because there are deadlines. If a transportation service breaks the law, contract, or policy, you have 6 months to complain to an agency that does not ignore it. Six months sounds long but if you allow a couple months for the carrier to respond, then allow a couple months for whoever you think is the proper regulator to respond, and they all ignore, you can easily run out of 6 months before you reach the right person.

Indeed, it’s shitshow because they don’t send acknowledgements or status.

There is a sneaky hack using the GDPR: if some time passes and you get only silence, you can make a GDPR art.15 access request asking for records about how your complaint was processed. Then legally they must respond to that within 30 days. But only if the complaint contains personal data. In order to make sure it contains personal data, hand-sign the letter. In reality, they tend to ignore GDPR requests as well so it’s only a theoretical solution.

In Belgium real estate listings mostly omit addresses. This makes it extremely annoying for consumers looking to either buy or rent because they are forced into engagement with the landlord/seller just to find out the address. Very time-wasting. You must register on a site and disclose your email address, then wait for someone to reply with the address (and often they do not, or they want to speak on the phone and hear your voice -- which can go badly if you don’t speak the local language)†.

The published listings tend to only disclose what approximate neighborhood the dwelling is in (useless for my needs because you have no way of knowing if it’s near a tram stop that is relevant). But there are some exceptions. Maybe ~5—10% of listings have an address. I decided to ignore the majority of listings and only consider those with an address. This meant in order to get a decent number of choices I had to scrape every single real estate site that covers my city to harvest just the listings with addresses.

Then I used a geocaching API to convert the addresses to GPS coords. From there, I scraped the public transport websites. For every address in my city the tool would grab all weekday public transport routes from every GPS fix, which includes trams and transfer times. Then it calculated the walk time on both sides to/from the tram stops on every route to derive the shortest door to door time.

I also wanted to be within a certain cycling time from the center of the city, to ensure I don’t get too far from the center. That was calculated using an API.

The tool also accounted for the usual filters, like budget. I ended up selecting the dwelling that was the shortest commute without deviating from the proxity to center constraint.

The only problem with my approach was that one listing used a fake address. So my tool trusted the addresses and some jack ass published bogus info that lead me to a place that was occupied and unavailable. When I called to say “where are you” he said “down the street.. I gave an address that was close but incorrect”.. WTF. It was far enough to screw up the public transport option.

Anyway, this would have been impossible to do without scraping all those websites. I had freedom and power that’s denied to all other consumers who are trapped in the UIs of the real estate sites. But the next time I need a dwelling, the tool is certainly broken due to how rapidly websites change and also how increasingly anti-bot they have become. I think when I built that tool it was during the last moment of time that the web was relatively open access.

Everyone is generally forced to look for a place close to work. But close in terms of straight distance does not translate into a short tram commute because the routes are chaotic. You could be somewhat close but need 2 or 3 transfers. One interesting thing I noticed was a dwelling on the complete opposite side of the city was reasonable because it was close to a train station with no need for transfers. Trains are the fastest with much fewer stops. Also, there are express buses (fewer stops) and normal buses. So intuition is too inaccurate.

† The point of contact is often a real estate agent or property manager who has many listings. So if you call or write to ask for an address of many listings, the same person sees all your requests and ignores all of them because they assume you are not serious. They think: what kind of person looks all over the place.. surely they only want to see one or two neighborhoods. So this bullshit blocks consumers from searching for a place to live in a way that accounts for public transport schedules. They want to force you to choose where to live based on everything other than the address.