But you don’t have a human right to have it converted into cash at your leisure (and the bank’s effort) whenever you please.

When a consumer opts to close their account, the banking relationship can only be ended when the balance is zero (when neither party owes the other). You seem to be saying the UDHR does not entitle people to end the banking relationship at a time of their choosing, correct? In which case the banking relationship continues until the service fees eat away at the remaining balance, against the will of the customer. This is just another way to separate someone from their property.

Your argument is like buying gold for $20 and then complaining about human rights violations if the seller doesn’t buy it back for $20 whenever you wish.

Banking customers who open an account in the national currency have a reasonable expectation that the value of their account remain pinned to the value of the national currency. Exchanging that for a precious metal and having an expectation that value not decline would be absurd and I do not see how this analogy makes any sense.

If you see a value limit enshrined in the UDHR, feel free to quote it here.

The bank isn’t depriving you of your property, you agreed to convert your cash into a legally binding right to access cash in the future

It’s not one or the other. It’s both at the same time. Consumers are deprived of their property as a consequence of that agreement. The bank in case 1 currently says: to get your €19.99 back, either open another bank account or fuck off (in so many words).

From there, it comes down to whether you can sign away your human rights.

This depends on the country.

In the US: legal tender has different charactoristics depending on whether it is point of sale (PoS) or debt. W.r.t PoS, legal tender ensures the seller can accept it if they want, but have the option. W.r.t debts, legal tender entitles debtors to be able to use it for payment.

In Belgium: there is no distinction between PoS and debts. It’s as CanadaPlus says… Legal tender must be accepted either way. But there are some exceptions: if the seller and buyer are not in the same physical place at the same time, there is no obligation to accept cash. Sellers/creditors can also reject banknotes that are disproportionate to the transaction amount. The bizarre thing about Belgium is there are various circumstances where a debtor only has cash but a creditor can refuse it, e.g. if they have no physical presence. In practice it’s even worse because some business simply break the law by refusing cash, and it’s not enforced.

Indeed, a banker’s draft almost always involves a fee. Though it’s possible that some high value accounts in places like the US would come with some perks like a few gratis banker’s drafts per year. Certainly it’s not the norm anywhere that I am aware of.

And from there, cashing the banker’s draft is a problem. @protist@mander.xyz is apparently thinking in terms of the U.S. case where there are (predatory) high-fee “checks cashed” shops all over, where at least you can get a check cashed. I think a European with a cheque is on shaky territory as it is – unlikely to get a cheque of any kind, and also unlikely to deposit one, and in if a European has no bank account it’s likely impossible for them to spend a cheque.

The premise of the question is when the bank refuses you access to your money, which manifests in a number of circumstances. Receiving a check from the bank is useful only in scenario 1, and only possible in parts of the world that still have checks.

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations – without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

Thanks for the insight; that’s quite helpful.

The concept of easements still exists in this area but it seems like easements are not being used for façades, which kind of makes sense. The dispute I’m getting into is over a telecom company that is not serving the whole public. They are discriminatory and exclusive. I consider it an injustice that they can arbitrarily drill into people’s houses to support a “public” service which they then exclude some people from access (including owners of the homes they are drilling). Property owners then have a burden of paying €10 per cable to give notice by registered letter to all telecoms using their façade whenever a homeowner wants to perform work on their own façade.

That’s why I am looking closely at this law. I found nothing in the law that requires telecoms to be inclusive.

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I’m starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life… I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.

• society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
  • could not check out a library book without CPR №
  • could not make a photo copy without CPR №
  • could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
  • could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
• society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
  • many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
  • university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
  • someone could not simply do laundry
• university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
• university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
• university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
• university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
• banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
• banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
• housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
• severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
• was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
• expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
• cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.

That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.

Can anyone confirm or deny whether many of these issues are replicated among Denmark’s neighbors?

Luckily you don’t need to burn uranium to avoid 5 steps of energy transformation.

No you haven’t. Read your own source. Hint: biogas

biogas was used in 2009, not in 2020 when the stats were collected. Nor would it matter if it were still used. Hint: it would be an increase on the 80%.

recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Also, nuclear fuel is not gas, so this speaks for electric stoves, silly.

That’s fuel. That’s in the 80%.

again: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Ignoring other renewables

I have accounted for all the renewables mentioned in the linked wikipedia page, which covers sources as insignificant as hydro (<1%). What else is there? Have you thought about updating wikipedia with whatever you think is missing?

Ignoring French nuclear imports

That would only increase the proportion of fuel energy even more, which only works against your botched claim. If you want to count French nuclear, then the portion of solar, wind, and hydro is proportionally even less. Brussels currently has a nuclear power plant inside the region. Why do you think it would it be sensible to transmit over such distance? That would introduce even more substantial inefficiency in the transmission.

Ignoring current state but talking about possible future plans

The status quo only has 1 year left on it. And nuclear power still has the same stages of energy transition loss you’ve failed to debunk. What’s the point? Your claim is nonsense either way.

Get your facts straight, or update Wikipedia to reflect your understanding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Belgium

wind + solar + hydro → 20%

80% from burning fuels¹. With 3 new gas-burning plants under construction to replace nuclear, that’s not going to improve things.

Belgium is aiming to reduce its use of gas as much as possible.

Nonsense. I guess you missed the whole “Code Red” march against Electrabel last year protesting the plan to build 3 new gas-burning power plants.

there are two nuclear power plants, not one.

And that’s important why? From wikipedia:

“Belgium decided to phase out nuclear power generation completely by 2025.”

Whether there are 1, 2, or 5 nuclear plants is immaterial when it’s all being phased out, and replaced with gas-burning power plants.

Betting on gas, be it a stove or something else, is just stupid.

Betting in a way that neglects plans that have already been announced is stupid for sure.

¹ recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Electricity is usually not made from fuel

You’re generally wrong on that:

“Over 60% of global electricity generated so far in 2023 was produced by fossil fuels” --Reuters

Belgium is what’s relevant in the case at hand. In Belgium ~20% of power is from solar, wind, and hydro. The other 80% is from burning fuel. I group nuclear with fossil fuel because the nuclear power plant in Belgium is being decommissioned and will be replaced with 3 new gas burning plants.

Gas stoves are far inferior in this step, losing most of the heat into the surtounding air. Induction stoves have almost no transmission loss.

That’s true but that’s stoves not ovens. You’d have to exaggerate quite a bit to claim more than half of the heat energy is wasted on gas stoves or ovens.

In order to use gas in the kitchen, you have to have a gas pipe in the kitchen, which has become very unusual.

Where? Unusual Belgium-wide? The cities concentrate populations. Brussels city is mostly old homes likely all piped with gas judging from the dominance of gas boilers. Are you saying there are lots of old homes that did not bother to branch a gas pipe into the kitchen?

During construction, it’s easier and cheaper to not lay gas pipes.

That’d be a false economy. Pipes are like ~€7 per meter so it would take ~1—2 years for the pipes to pay for themselves if they are used for daily cooking.

Most people do not have a choice – either you got an old house witha gas pipe in the kitchen or a newer one with a 400 V power outlet.

I do not have a 400V outlet. I have no idea how many electric ovens require that, do you? I’m using a crappy portable 220V oven. If the big properly insulated wall ovens are 400V, then I would have to run a new line to the fuse box. Not sure if I could wire that myself, which I assume involves bridging two 220V circuits.

I guess most people don’t do their own work. So you are implying hiring someone to add one or the other post-construction would be cost prohibitive. Sounds reasonable. But I’m not convinced kitchens lack gas pipes to begin with because gas stovetops are still popular in Belgium. Just not gas ovens.

(edit) In Brussels in 2011, “natural gas consumption was 10,480 GWh and the electricity consumption was 5,087 GWh”, according to Wikipedia.

I’m still waiting for someone to show me an induction oven. This is the same as saying “don’t use an oven at all”. Of course, if you don’t need an oven, then it would not make sense to install an oven at all.

It’s not an assumption. This is how power is produced in Belgium. There is only 1 nuclear power plant and it’s being decommissioned. 3 new fossil fuel burning power plants will be built.

If I were to open the boiler before and after using it just as I have a wood stove, that brief exposure to trace amounts of toxins once a day would not influence a choice to use it. That theory is quite far fetched.

The finding that gas stove toxins can be significant is also more recent than the popularity drop in gas ovens. IOW, to have a cause-effect, the cause must come chronologically before the effect.

(edit) also worth noting that gas stoves are still popular in Belgium, just not ovens. So this theory is bogus. People are not going to avoid ovens out of fear of toxins when the door opens while at the same time having no problem with gas stoves.

Why do you say that in the past tense? You can see from my figures that in Belgium gas is still cheaper.

This is something that varies from one region to another. In the US, some states have cheaper electric than gas. Electric is less efficient because of big losses in all the conversion steps:

fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Gas simply has:

fuel energy → transmission → heat energy

It is important to note that gas transmission is also lossy due to the impossibility of leak-free main lines, but it’s still more efficient in the end. Thus in most of the world gas is also naturally cheaper due to the efficiency difference. It gets inverted in some regions because of pricing manipulations as well as the drive to promote green energy (and rightfully so – social responsibility should be incentivized). And in some regions they cut down on the transmission losses by putting the power plant inside or close to the big city. But in Belgium gas is still cheaper than electric even despite Russia’s war and efforts to get off Russian fuels.