fwiw, here is an emacs version:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11

I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.

I get rid of them pretty quickly by saying I have no bank account. I might start adding to that “take cryptocurrency?” so they leave with the idea that maybe they should be open to cryptocurrency.

@youmaynotknow is spot on. But consider this a very basic primer on just a small fraction of privacy abuse by banks:

• 24 banking problems solved by cryptocurrency that Bruce Schneier does not know about

So there’s 22 privacy abuses by banks to get you started. And that just barely scratches the surface.

You can somewhat ignore paragraphs 15 and 23 in terms of privacy. OTOH privacy is hand-in-hand with control and paragraphs 15 & 23 reflect control being in the wrong hands.

Banks abuse our privacy in countless ways. This could fill a book. This policy amounts to forced banking. I boycott banks. Banks have us by the balls and they abuse that power. A bank recently told me (in effect) to fuck off if I don’t have a mobile phone number to give them.

It’s impossible to define the amount in relative terms such as “average EU monthly salary +25%”,

It’s not impossible. Indexes are published. This is what they do with rent in places where rent is controlled. Landlords cannot increase rent more than an index. So they have to do the math. And in this case it’s not even a variable baseline like rent, it’s fixed, so the calculation can also be published so people need not do any math.

That’s net (take-home pay), not gross. Tax is high enough that you need to double that figure (€4,400) to get the gross pay. And just wait till you account for inflation, which the EU cash limits apparently fail to account for.

this poll shows it’s non-partisan:

https://layer8.space/@hyakinthos/112554837920009346

The left respects privacy far more than the right. But the left also has that high-taxation tendency. The outcome of that tug-of-war within left-leaning people results in ~73% embracing cash – just like the conservatives who don’t give a shit about privacy but have contempt for tax.

Beware on your next trip to Netherlands, where some bars refuse cash and conceal their contempt for cash (reference)

I just linked your post from that one because it fits well with the story.

(edit) BTW, I would like to see your workmate’s story published in a blog that serves better as a reference. It needs more exposure in a venue that’s not quasi temporary. I would even print hardcopies of it to distribute to cashless bar owners. So a nicely typeset PDF would be useful.

What country was that? I heard about a Belgian who tried to withdraw €10k from her bank account. They refused and also called the police who interrogated her and made a report. Belgian banks have cash withdrawal limits written in the contract. Even pulling out €3k raises eyebrows in Belgium. So withdrawing €30k trouble-free would probably require withdrawing €2.5k once per week over the span of 12 weeks. Is the car seller willing to hold the car for a buyer that long?

That’s not because of the cash. Even white collar workers getting paid electronically get audited because Belgium has a very high audit rate. I heard the probability of getting audited in Belgium is around 50%. Belgian auditors are extremely ambitious and highly motivated. They are employed in high numbers. The only way to avoid being audited in Belgium is to not work in Belgium.

This depends on the industry. Domestic workers and builders are often paid in cash in Europe. Belgium even writes it in law that cash wages are prohibited if you work in an industry where that is uncommon. Strange (and discriminatory) law, but indeed white collar workers are legally blocked from cash payment while other industries are grandfathered.

Indeed national laws don’t generally limit p2p cash, but the EU law encroaches on that AFAICT.

Enforceability varies depending on the scenario. Some countries have law that holds employers accountable for tax evaded by workers. Employers obviously won’t gamble, so they refuse to pay cash and cryptocurrency wages because they are scared shitless of being accountable for an employee’s evasion.

I demanded cryptocurrency payment and my employer refused on that basis. I intended to continue declaring it properly and just wanted a bit of freedom from bank dependency, but nothing could overcome the employer’s fears.

Cashier’s checks existed in Belgium a few years ago but I heard they are under fire and will be discontinued at some point.

Personal checks seem to be non-existent but I heard they can be requested but the banks give some resistance and try to steer people away from it. They only work domestically. I think if you gave a Belgian personal check to a Belgian, they would not generally know what to do with it.

Impulsive donations have been relatively killed off because cash donations are banned (I think because scammers impersonate charities). So that leaves check and electronic payment. Oxfam does not (AFAIK) carry payment terminals. Checks would make sense, but they are taboo. So they have to ask for a bank transfer, which gives donors a chance to be lazy and forget about it.

I recently read a complaint about the opposite. Someone deleted their Proton account and their handle was made available 1 year later. They were rightfully angry because the next user would potentially start receiving mail from things like the original user’s bank. The new user could perform password resets on accounts where the original user had not yet changed the email address on file.

Thanks! It’s rarely used so trying to find back a post that used it would be hard. Knowing the terminology (spoiler) was half the battle.

Why?

1. It’s a big database. It would be a poor design to replicate a db of all links in every single client.
2. Synchronization of the db would not be cheap. When Bob says link X has anti-feature Y, that information must then be shared with 10s of thousands of other users.

Perhaps you have a more absolute idea of centralized. With Mastodon votes, they are centralized on each node but of course overall that’s actually decentralized. My bad. I probably shouldn’t have said centralized. I meant more centralized than a client-by-client basis. It’d be early to pin those details down at this point other than to say it’s crazy for each client to maintain a separate copy of that DB.

And how would guarantee the integrity of the ones holding the metrics?

The server is much better equipped than the user for that. The guarantee would be the same guarantee that you have with Mastodon votes. Good enough to be fit for purpose. For any given Mastodon poll everyone sees a subset of votes. But that’s fine. Perfection is not critical here. You wouldn’t want it to decide a general election, but you don’t need that level of integrity.

A lot less effort than having to deal with the different “features” that each website admin decides to run on their own.

That doesn’t make sense. Either one person upgrades their Lemmy server, or thousands of people have to install, configure, and maintain a dozen different browser plugins ported to a variety of different browsers (nearly impossible enough to call impossible). Then every Lemmy client also has to replicate that complexity.

I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?

They get blocked by some sites, and some sites have pro-actively opt-out. archive.org respects the opt-outs. AFAICT, archive.org gets away w/archiving non-optout cases where their bot was permitted.

And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?

You might need to explain why 12ft.io gets away with sharing google’s cache, as Lemmy could theoretically operate the same way.

I’m extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.

When you say “twisted”, do you mean commentary is not a standard accepted and well-known fair use scenario?

You don’t know what a logical fallacy is. Bob and Alice can disagree about whether the pizza tastes good or bad. There’s no fallacy there, just subjective disagreement.

The browser (more appropriately named: client) indeed needs some of the logic here, but it cannot do the full job I’ve outlined. The metrics need to be centralized. And specifically when you say browser, this imposes an inefficient amount of effort & expertise on the end-user. A dedicated client can make it easy on the user. But it’s an incomplete solution nonetheless.