Thanks. I wonder how long that statement has been made. In the past I was never confident in the wording from the national bank as far as expiry of banknotes. But the page you link seems solid enough. Saving an archived version here as an extra measure against any future shenanigans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250521052910/https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes

(and because bankofengland.co.uk is not an open access website)

According to the attorney general who entered the opinion that influenced Hessischer Rundfunk case, over 3% of people in the EU were unbanked /despite/ the basic banking option.

I don’t know how many people are unbanked by choice, but certainly forced-banking is a form of oppression; the freedom from which is only possible if you have the choice not enter the marketplace and patronise a bank. If, for example, you oppose the fact that all banks finance the fossil fuel industry, you should have a right to boycott all banks. It also seems incompatible with the GDPR to /force/ people to create a digital footprint which then entails trusting a bank to not be breached.

Presumeably the 3% includes some undocumented people and asylum seekers.

In Belgium, basic accounts are crippled such that they do not support cash operations. So if your income is in cash (e.g. domestic workers and sex workers), the basic account won’t help.

The problem with banning mazut boilers is that it marginalises unbanked people. Suppliers for natural gas and electricity refuse cash. As forced banking becomes reality in Belgium:

https://fedia.io/m/Belgium@europe.pub/t/2376978/The-UK-has-an-NGO-to-defend-cash-Payment-Choice

^ Mbin copied the text of that article into the body. I went along with it because Bulletin is a relatively defensive website. Works over tor but apparently after lots of delays and snags. Would be nice if mbin could preserve the paragraph breaks.

Anyway, I hate the damn things. These e-scooters clusterfuck bicycle racks. Shared e-scooters don’t need to be locked to a rack yet they block bicycles from the racks. I picked one of them up and tossed it. It bounced off another one back to me and landed on my foot, which took weeks to heal. So indeed, I hate the damn things.

The Council of State still has to make a ruling on whether the Brussels government followed correct procedures when it decided which scooter hire firms to retain.

Interesting that there is a selection process. Competition is fierce yet all the apps are jailed in Google’s Playstore, and closed-source. Considering the scooters are a public nuissance, in the very least they should be open to the public – not just patrons of Apple and Google. The Brussels gov could easily make FOSS apps a criteria for the scooter apps considering how motivated Lime seems to be.

No, he did not say mint or menthe, and I did not taste that either. I can only imagine that he meant meat spices.

He also mentioned (in phonetics) “loo-pon”, which could be lupin. I have some stuff called “Not Coffee”, which is actually roasted ground lupin beans. This stuff is not coffee but it’s prepared and brewed like coffee, and tastes similar. Though it would not explain why he mentioned meat.

But you’re also adamant you didnt mishear or misunderstand?

The misunderstanding is on your part. I said it wasn’t sarcasm. I didn’t say there wasn’t a misunderstanding. Hence why I asked the question in the first place.

How do you arrive at a claim that I did not misunderstand when you quoted me at the same time as saying my French was rough? You don’t make sense. For me to say my French is rough is to say that misunderstanding is possible.

Certainly not sarcasm. He was speaking English but he had to switch to French for the ingredients, which was “cannelle” and “viande”. The cinnamon taste was obvious but he also described a process with meat which I could not understand because my French is rough, so I could only gather that meat was involved. Or if there is no chance of that, maybe he was describing spices or something used in meat.

English. But the issue does not seem to be a language barrier.

ah yes, thanks for the correction. Indeed I meant Belfius.

I appreciate the tip, but I’m not even willing to put an alternative form of contact through Google. In part because I find it disturbing that I have to do a dance just to send the email the way Google and MS want it sent (from an IP address blessed by the tech giants).

It is bizarre how Le Soir, De Standard, De Tijd, and RTBF all stick a gatekeeping surveillance advertiser from the US between them and their confidential sources who they need to earn the trust of. When I manage to reach someone at a front desk, they are always puzzled. They think it’s weird that someone would come into their front door with a story, and they say “we don’t work like that”. They don’t even have enough motivation to hear the gist of the story.

This is so contrary to my hollywood movie influenced perception of how contact with the press would work. I was expecting reporters to be eager to hear a juicy story, as if I would have to fight them off from over-probing investigation.

I don’t know the Belgian case, but I think it’s the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out! Should be corrected now.

Well that rationale doesn’t withstand the fact that people can change their gender identity without updating their ID docs. Recipe for disaster.

I was thinking about doing that. I read that mother of vineger is not necessary, but it speeds up the process. I also read that results are only good with certain beers like brown ales… and I think IPA was given as an example of a bad result (i’m assuming due to the hoppy bitterness).

I mainly use it on fried potatoes, and I’m open to experiments, perhaps with lentil salad. I am familiar with Sarson’s and managed to find another bottle of that but I would like to try more varieties of malt vinegar. Saw a small bottle of lambic-based vinegar in a speciality shop and didn’t buy it because the price is a bit high (€14).