Remember that in capitalism, anything but growth is a tragedy

Can’t say I’m with you. If the top hat shop goes out of business because the demand for top hats dies off, it’s a good thing. It’s one of the few good features of capitalism to have a natural death of that particular variety of waste (the waste of producing beyond demand).

If the consumption of meat is dropping (good!), then it’s even more important for grocers to stock less of it.

Not eating it is much easier than stealing it.

Indeed. But also less effective.

I consider vegans neutral. They neither help nor hinder the industry of animal products. I love this quote by Desmond Tutu:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Or, more controversally, stop paying for meat. I personally have no ethical problem with shoplifting meat. To buy meat is unethical because it supports the meat industry. To shoplift is to punish and deter those causing harm.

The only thing that stops me from shoplifting meat is I cannot be bothered to study the art of it and then take on the risks of getting caught.

Guardian is paywalled for me.

Certainly that’s the case in the US. It would be suicide for US republicans adhere to their conservative values and drop subsidies, which would outrage all the farmers whose vote republicans rely on. (edit) So the survival of the republican party inherently forces them into hypocricy.

But why don’t the dems nix meat subsidies? No farmers vote for dems, so no loss there. But I suppose there would be enough meat-eating dems who would abandon their own party. Just like in California a politician tried to push a fuel tax and got voted out by both parties.

Sounds like Paypal, who is “not a bank”, but who operates on the basis that you must link a bank or interact with a bank to do transactions. But you say unbanked people can use it? How do you get cash loaded onto it?

I suppose it’s still far from being something I could find useable because apps that reject rooted phones would be closed-source (read: untrustworthy; misplaced control).

Wow, wtf! I would not expect that degree of mass surveillance to be economically viable. And so overtly stark in the face of the GDPR. In principle, we should be able to make a GDPR access request to the central bank to ask them where we shop with cash and which ATMs we used.

I don’t get why “QR” is described as a “payment option”. It’s still a bank account transaction in the end which is exclusively for banked people. And worse, it excludes people without recent smartphones and the Google Playstore account needed to get the closed-source app that violates our software freedom.

I have a hard time giving a shit about the novelty of not carrying a plastic card in the big scheme of things, when forced-banking is being oppressively shoved in our faces and privacy is toast, while also being vulnerable to systemic denial of service in the event of cyberattacks as acts of war. While violating our human rights (banks treat different people differently based on where they come from).

Europeans are fucked as far as privacy goes. The GDPR is unenforced. But even if were enforced, the GDPR’s data minimisation (article 5) rule only obligates data controllers to consider options that are available.

We know from all the cashless bars in Amsterdam how naive and flippant consumers are about privacy. Creating a digital footprint of alcohol consumption is one of the most foolish things consumers can do, particularly in light of that Scandinavian guy who was denied a mortgage on the basis of his drinking habits, which were known to the bank by his purchase history.

Privacy aside, there is a human rights issue because banks treat different demographics of people differently. It’s disturbing how the human rights problem is so overlooked.

In any case, Albania cannot join the EU while being cashless unless Albania keeps their own currency.

Perhaps that was the case a year ago when you posted this, but now the free accounts allow zero outbound msgs.

It’s interesting that their highest tier plan is capped at 150 msg/day. In any case, I think @jet@hackertalks.com has no cause for concern.

My problem is that they delete trial accounts without reason & without warning. So I distributed my email address to people and just a few months later the address is dead. They don’t say the free accounts have a time limit. I thought the only limit was lack of sending feature.

Yes, and in fact it’s worse than your linked page suggests. I was happy to receive email and not send. So that free trial would have been forever perfect for me. But after a few months my login creds mysteriously quit working. No warning and no msg after the fact to tell me why my #onionmail.org account was deleted.

It’s a dick move because people rely on email for important tasks. It’s fair enough to have limitations, but concealing the limitations is off.

What disgusts me about this is the digital markets act names all the tech giants except Cloudflare as gatekeepers. The single most harmful bully on the block is Cloudflare. I can (and am) boycotting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon. It’s difficult for most civilians but possible.

But if you want to be free from Cloudflare, it’s impossible because Cloudflare has even MitMd public services. You cannot get public information from government sources operating on public money without Cloudflare. Because I choose to boycott Cloudflare, I have had to give up my voting rights. I cannot vote in elections because of Cloudflare. So indeed it’s disgusting that Cloudflare is not even on the radar when it should be at the top.

BTV can cause abortion, in animals? WTF? I guess they must mean miscarriages. AFAIK non-human animals don’t do abortions.

That’s the same portal that they expected us to use to report what a shit show GDPR enforcement has been the past 4 years. The irony was the site demanded more information than necessary – thus the site asking how is the GDPR going was itself infringing on data minimisation. It’s fussy about who hosts the email address they force you to disclose. I eventually got an account after revealing more than I wanted to and then the JavaScript doc submission app gave vague errors anyway and could not be used. It also forces periodic password changes which seems a bit over the top for this sort of mission.

tl;dr: not everyone can have their say. Only some people.

I said it was unlikely to change, because there’s little profit in catering to such the niche crowd of cash-only tourists with incompatible cards who also

^ this is a stark good example of endorsement of marginalisation. You identify a group as “niche” and say it’s okay to fuck them over because they are a minority.

didn’t think to pick up foreign cash at home.

What an absurd attempt to declare ATMs redundant. You cannot just walk through the airport with €10k and expect no problems or questions asked. You cannot carry that around with you and claim you have the same security than if don’t. Some will go as far as to only use ATMs inside casinos because they rightfully have concern for security just along the road between the casino and external ATM.

Also, not offering a specific service to anyone isn’t “marginalizing”.

Of course it is. Discriminating against a demographic of people is obviously marginalisation.

I don’t marginalize black people by not cutting their hair, because I don’t cut anyone’s hair…

This is a fallacy of bad analogy. If you don’t cut anyone’s hair you are not faced with treating different hair clients differently. Unlike ATMs which are treating different demographics of people differently.

Seems like the US bank should make a new partnership then? It’s weird you place the onus of this entirely on the destination bank instead of your own.

It’s weird to rationalise the consequences of elimination of competition as something other than antitrust, and then misplace the onus on consumers and external banks who are the ones disadvantaged by the loss of competition as if there is no cost to that. It’s somewhat like another manifestation of victim blame. The power imbalance inherently makes negotiation unfavorable for those burdened by the monopoly. It also intensifies the damage done by the monopoly. If all banks negotiate a deal with Geldmaat, Geldmaat’s sparse competition (which only exists in some cities but not others) is not interesting for foreign banks to negotiate with.

Well no, it’s not all about getting cash. Or at least, that’s not the message you’ve been sending, from all your exceptions and problems.

Of course it is. The problem is for me to define and describe. And I have described a problem increasingly broken cash retrieval infrastructure. You saying “use a card” is absolutely not relevant to the problem. It’s an attempt to undermine the discussion of the problem as described.

It’s about getting cash while on vacation (no long-term stay)

It does not matter how long the stay is. ATM monopoly X treats people Y poorly no matter how long they are visiting.

without traveling to a specific foreign exchange machine/office (has to be within the small town you’re staying in)

Don’t try to muddy the waters because you’ve failed to defend the increasing enshitification of the status quo. FX offices are a different service with different costs serving a different workflow and cannot replace ATMs because they rely on assumptions about the sending bank that ATMs do not. Not to mention hours of operation and availability differences.

or bringing foreign currency from home (something you didn’t respond to),

That doesn’t need a response because it fails to replace ATMs. That option always existed independent from ATMs and still remains less popular than ATMs for countless reasons. To suggest OTC cash exchange is to disregard fees and various offerings by different banks. A bank with zero markup exchange on their card at an ATM will not typically give you that zero markup when you appear in person with cash.

There are more methods of payment or ways to get goods and services than in 2015.

You can have all the smartphone frills you want. QR codes, apps, NFC, … all useless to those who grok privacy. All the privacy-naive cashless options are rich for sure. There is no shortage of innovations to get your data. But when you break ATMs, you break privacy. All these bullshit options do not serve as a replacement for people who are not privacy-naive.

For Dutch people, that doesn’t matter at all, since to them, all those machines were exactly the same for many years,

This is a common theme in your messaging… that it’s okay to marginalise demographics of people you are not in… that it’s their problem for not being in your marginalisation-free demographic.

I’m not fully sure on what rates different banks used to charge foreign accounts, maybe that was different.

Different banks have different partnership agreements with US banking networks. I’m sure it’s a shit show now that competition is gone. Some US banks simply eat the ATM fee for their customers and some do not. It’s another loss of options. Some people probably have to start paying a fee once their bank’s partnership with SNS (for example) becomes useless.

But for some reason, you have a burning need to implement one specific solution (cashback) in favour of all the others. Why? What is the core of your issue?

It’s all about getting cash because electronic payment cannot replace cash from a privacy standpoint. I expect to pay cash for alcohol and marijuana. I also expect to pay cash for everything else because privacy matters. You can name off all the fancy new electronic options you want – they do not replace cash. Cash is how Wikileaks survived when the banks blocked payments to them. Not even cryptocurrency can replace cash (though it comes the closest to being a viable alternative). Anonymous prepaid cards don’t likely exist in Netherlands, and they are not likely as free as cash transactions and would at least have the waste of expiration and unspent funds. So still lousy compared to decentralised ATMs that work.

Trading one good option for a dozen shitty inferior options that tie you to electronic records and limit your control is a poor trade-off. It’s clearly worse than it was 2015.

Meanwhile, you’re shouting things have gotten much worse, when they clearly haven’t:

Clearly they have. Ten years ago when an ATM tells you to fuck off, you could just walk a block or two down the street to an ATM by a different operator. That choice was taken away from us in the past few years. And it’s getting worse. Independent ATMs are getting boarded up and mothballed. The trend of banks leaving the ATM business and consolidating into a monopoly is spreading. We have lost ATM diversity and competition. And there are fewer of them. If you are in a small city with only Geldmaats and Geldmaat decides to marginalise you, you’re fucked. That was not a problem 10 yrs ago.

It’s unclear how you are not grasping that fewer options means less autonomy. Fewer players implies power imbalance. Monopolies are a bad idea in general not just because power becomes centralised but also because our data becomes centralised and consequently centrally vulnerable along with being exposed to centralised mishandling.

So you say I shouldnt beleieve the news

That’s not what I said. Read your own quote. Sensational penalty figures are irrelevant. I gave you the source of the raw unadulterated data with stats. If you want to ignore that and have the media tell you what they think you should find relevant, you are free to do so. But this is why you are misinformed about GDPR enforcement. That, and your anecdotal experience which does not even test GDPR enforcement.

It really seems that this is a very you-problem,

Victim blame is really fucked up here. ATMs are violating the GDPR by making use of undisclosed automatic decision making. Only pushovers blindly accept that the ATM is serving them well when some AI algo decides you are not profitable, or whatever… we actually don’t even get the benefit of knowing what that non-transparent algo is basing its decisions on. It’s really a dick move to then say to those rejected by that AI processing are themselves the problem. People rejected by that machine aren’t even told what they need to do to not be rejected.

and you’ve decided you want a solution that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen here.

You’re not paying attention. The fix exists: shops like SPAR and Aldi give cashback. The purpose of the thread is to crowdsource information that is undisclosed. It’s unclear exactly which SPAR locations outside UK supports cashback, and who else does. In this shitshow of a hunt for criminals causing collateral damage to lawful citizens, we need options. And we need them documented.

Oh, right I forgot the EU controls that. The EU limits those fees by law. Outside the EU the free market yields fees of ~3—5%. It’s still a shit show of cash payers subsidising card payers in the end, helping the consumers who reduce our privacy by supporting the war on cash.