When “such engagement” is required to exercise human rights, I’m not as quick as you to call that optional. I expect to have all of my human rights simultaneously satisfied together in aggregate.

A mandate can be explicitly written or merely implied. If you need food to survive, for example, and a law were to say all food distributors must refuse cash, you can safely call that an implied mandate to use a bank. Or would you say they are off the hook for the human rights consequences, perhaps on the basis that people can freely refuse to buy food and opt to grow their own food?

art.4 & art.23 (employment)

Are you suggesting that the ban on cash wages is not a banking mandate because it’s an “engagement”, despite exercise of human rights articles relying on that engagement? Consider that art.4 entitles people to be free from slavery and couple that with art.23 which states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment”. In Belgium, it is illegal for an engineer to receive cash wages. But it is not illegal for a domestic worker to receive cash wages if that has been established as a common practice in that trade.

Do you see the issue? An unbanked engineer can freely refuse to work and live on welfare (if offered by their gov assuming no disqualifying requirements due to their ability to work), but then they must give up their rights under art.23. And even then, how do they get their welfare payment? See below.

art.25 (housing & social svcs)

Consider that no real estate transaction can involve cash, by law. Yet, art.25 states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services

I highlighted social services as well as housing because social services in some countries refuse to pay cash to beneficiaries. You cannot get financial aid without a bank account.

Regarding utilities, is that also what you consider to be an optional engagement? That people do not need water and power service? This may be debatable but I believe the right to housing likely includes a right to energy in regions where a box with walls+roof is insufficient to prevent freezing. I believe housing implies having a warm space. So when the energy supplier refuses cash, is that not a mandate to use a bank? If you are wondering where the gov comes into play in this case, it would be when the utility supplier refuses cash then sues the unbanked consumer in court for non-payment. When the court finds the energy contract to be “legal” and sides with the utility company, that’d essentially be a case of the gov mandating the use of banks.

It’s also worth noting that the UDHR is not limited to govs. The private sector is also bound by the UDHR.

Anyway, this is all quite far off from the original question in the OP, which remains unanswered.

(edit) And what about tax?

Some govs require taxes to be paid electronically. Tax is by definition a mandate. Both income tax and property tax must be paid electronically. There was a guy in Germany to was denied the option to pay his radio licensing fees in cash. IIUC, that’s like BBC, a mandatory tax. You could perhaps argue that income tax is optional because income is optional, and that property tax is optional because home ownership is optional, but I’m not sure the same can be said for radio fees in Germany.

I answered that same question upstream earlier today.

But at some point to interact with any kind of large company … You could also consider not interacting with large companies at all

Actually the large corps are more likely to hold the data in-house. Small companies cling to outsourcing. E.g. credit unions are the worst… outsource every service they offer to the same giant suppliers. Everyone thinks only a small company has the data (and consequently that the small dataset does not appeal to cyber criminals) but it’s actually worse because they outsource jobs even as small as printing bank statements to the same few giants most other credit unions use. Then they do the same for bill pay with another company. It’s getting hard to find a credit union that does not put Cloudflare in the loop. So in the end a dozen or so big corps have your data and it’s not even disclosed in the privacy statement.

Of course it depends on the nature of the business. A large grocery chain is more likely to make sure your offline store purchase history reaches Amazon and Google than a mom & pop grocer who doesn’t even have a loyalty program.

Whether businesses get copies of information is usually included in a site’s privacy policy,

I have never seen a privacy policy that lists partners and recipients apart from Paypal, who lists the 600+ corps they share data with for some reason. Apart from bizarre exceptions privacy policies are always too vague to be useful. Even in the GDPR region. If you read them you can often find text that does not even make sense for their business because they just copied someone else’s sufficiently vague policy to use as a template.

If you really want to limit your information exposure, you either have to audit everyone you do business with this way (because most large companies do this) or hire someone (or a service) to do it.

The breach happened in a country where companies are not required to respond to audits. No company wants any avg joe’s business badly enough to answer questions about data practices. In the EU, sure, data controllers are obligated to disclose the list of parties they share with (on request, not automatically). And even then, some still refuse. Then you file an article 77 complaint with the DPA where it just sits for years with no enforcement action.

My approach is a combination of avoiding business entirely, or supplying fake info, or less sensitive info (mailing address instead of residential, mission-specific email, phone number that just goes to a v/m or fax). This is where the battle needs to be fought – at data collection time. Countless banks needlessly demand residential address. That should be rejected by consumers. Data minimization is key.

In the case at hand, I’m leaning toward opting out of the class action lawsuit and suing them directly in small claims court. I can usually get better compensation that way.

I’ve been out of the loop on games for a while but ReactOS may be worth a look.

The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…

And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.

That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:

However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)

Apparently I’m wrong about this… the preview is said to be created by the server:

https://links.hackliberty.org/comment/1068761

EDIT: well, apparently it’s questionable. No one knows with confidence.

Yeah this article caught me by surprise. Natural gas is naturally odorless so that probably works against awareness.

I tend to be lazy about turning on the loud fans which downgrades the ambiance. But I need to change something because grease cakes up on everything near the oven and on the cabinets. My range hood is also the ventless style, which must be totally useless against the benzine byproduct.

I will certainly put more thought into kitchen design in the future. The gas appliances should probably be in the corner of the room so there are fewer directions to control, and the hood should probably be big, industrial, and vented outside. It’s a shame because I might prefer the gas stove to be in an island layout or at least centrally located.

It depends on what you’re baking. You wouldn’t want your cake to have a crispy hard crust on the outside, but you would want that with bread and pizza.

That’s interesting but it seems like an incomplete answer. I’ve read that it’s very common for people to install a range hood that’s too small. If it’s true that range hoods are often under-sized, then it naturally follows that they would often be ineffective. So I would like to know the answer in terms of a high-end well-designed & /big/ range hood. I would also expect a low hood to be more effective than one installed high above the stove.

Many coils pulse full heat to simulate different heat levels. Gas gives you very precise control over exact heat levels and it is instantly responsive to change.

You’ve got the precision factor backwards. Gas is a clear loser on that.

When you have knob levels 0—9, if you set the knob to 3 on electric you get exactly ½ the heat energy that you get from level 6. It’s perfectly linear. This is not true in the slightest with gas. A gas flame is non-linear as you go from 0 to 9. All you can do is eye-ball the flame and guess. Even when you have a flame size in mind, it’s not reproduceable because you’re still eye-balling it every time. You can’t trust the levels on a gas knob either because they’re so non-linear that you can get a big flame difference in certain points along the scale.

Gas also has less precision of control because of the reduced range at both ends. The lowest possible gas setting is still too hot for some tasks. So the best you can do is manually mimic the pulsing of electric by turning the burner off and reigniting periodically. The highest temp on gas is also less than the highest temp electric can achieve.

The only “precision” task that gas wins at is at the zero (off) level, and speed, AFAICT, which is related to precision. Both of those factors can be discarded for the most part when comparing induction because it adjusts temp demand fast enough.

indeed some houses have gas-fired wall heaters which have shitty ventilation, if any. In which case the air would of course be moist.

It’s also worth noting that moist air feels warmer and is not prone to any evaporative cooling effects. Some people will vent their vented dryers into the house to boost the humidity in order to save on heating costs.

Can anyone just pick up and move to the US? Or the EU?

Are you not distinguishing wealthy developed countries from developing countries? This may sound anecdotal but I believe I’ve detected a pattern of people from privileged countries having the copious red carpets you mention, such as EU administrations & border police not hassling Americans who overstay their visa. Even within Europe eastern block Europeans face more red tape than westerners. Some passports yield many red carpets & some none.

You don’t think you’d be considered a migrant if you wanted to move to Cuba, with all the restrictions that would entail?

It’s not what you think. The restrictions in that movement actually come from the US. Cuba welcomes Americans to the point that they will even hold back on stamping a US passport on request. Considering Cuba actually has an emigration crisis (with an “e”), it’d be ironic for immigration into Cuba to be difficult.

Claming that car owners have less intelligence strikes me as a bit elitist,

I suppose the Douglas Adams joke & anecdotes might be the culprit there but the intelligence paragraph was motivated by research by others & not really meant to be supported by my experience. IQ tests have some unavoidable subjectivity but hopefully modern standardized tests have gotten past the elitist history of IQ tests in the 70s. Readers of course should chase up the citations and see for themselves if the research is solid if there’s any doubt & sufficient motivation.

they are for the most part victims of a misinformation campaign of colossal scale.

Indeed it’s tricky to separate misinfo from true info. OTOH cycling has benefits even if climate denial were to nix the climate factor although it’d be less clear-cut.

Frequency is actually an issue that can make public transit basically unusable if it’s low enough.

True. It would perhaps be more sensible to dispatch smaller lighter vehicles in preference to frequency dropping below <15min. The double-decker buses and bus-trains (double length with that accordian connector) could be replaced with normal sized buses with more seats for handicapped and more flip-up seats for strollers & bicycles.

I recall some parts of Los Angeles where a bus comes once hourly. It was reasonably full but that infrequency probably kept people in cars. I think I only used it when my timing was just right. I’ve gotten quite spoiled where I am now. My blood would start to boil if I have to wait more than ~7 min.

And if ridership gets low enough the bus route will be canceled or relocated which can be a death sentence for disabled people who relied on that bus stop to get around.

Low ridership of non-handicapped people enables routes and schedules to better cater for those who really need the network. Disabled people have fewer masses of people to compete with and can be prioritized. Bus stops could be put closer to their homes with less impact to others.

Great find! Glad to see there are some onion hosts as well.

Any idea how to adapt the monero.stackexchange link in the sidebar? The code.whatever.social page cannot handle that link apparently because it does not lead to a specific thread.

GDPR gives people a fair amount of protection and it is enforced.

Not in my experience. I have filed complaints of ~20+ GDPR violations under article 77 going years back. Not a single one of them enforced to date. These cases just sit idle for years. The problem is the GDPR gives no recourse when DPAs fail to honor article 77 obligations. It’s toothless.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

That shows a low count of cherry-picked enforcement actions. If you had a way to get a count of unenforced reports it would likely be an embarrassing comparison.

I cannot imagine a hairless RMS. He should have insured his beard and hair, just like Tom Jones’ insured his chest hair for $6.8 million.

i’m not the best person to ask since I’m not maintaining and domains myself right now. I thought porkbun.com looked like a good choice at one point. They announced that they were going to move to cloudflare (just for the management portal), which was quite off-putting nonetheless, but it looks like they did not follow through with that.

EDIT-- I recently heard they are using CF for DNS and some people are avoiding #Porkbun for that reason.

Some sites use CF DNS just to have the ability to spontaneously switch on the proxy at will. They tend to keep the proxy turned off but then when traffic peaks a bandwidth detection mechanism switches on CF proxying. The problem with that is users don’t know from one click to the next whether their traffic will be intercepted. It can happen at any moment. So the deCloudflare project treats CF DNS cases no different than always-proxying sites.

So if you have no intention of using CF’s proxy, using a non-CF service would make more sense so your domains don’t get treated as CF. CF is not a good company to support anyway.