You’re referring to “basic” accounts. Those are crippled accounts (e.g., no cash services in Belgium). There is no way to get the cash into a basic account. Basic accounts are also not gratis. You generally pay more for less, as retail accounts are sometimes gratis. But retail accounts are harder to get.

There is also the scenario that some people are unbanked /by choice/. They should be able to retain their human rights like right to autonomy as they pursue their human right to a fair trial.

The cheque circulaire isn’t offered since 2010, that’s explained at the bottom of the current fees.

Circular cheques are still being used. I just received one. The articles you link say that the circular cheques will remain when the postal orders are eliminated.

Your links were quite helpful. This looks like the most relevant bit for answering my question (from this article):

(en translation)

…According to the office of the Minister of Public Action and Modernization, Vanessa Matz was able, via the circular cheque, to guarantee a concrete and free cash alternative for the most vulnerable. In particular, this measure concerns those who do not have access to banking services or who are isolated. Neither circular cheques nor prepaid cards will be billed to beneficiaries, says the firm on Tuesday.

(fr original)

…Selon le cabinet de la ministre l’Action et de la Modernisation publiques, Vanessa Matz a pu, via le chèque circulaire, garantir une alternative cash concrète et gratuite pour les plus vulnérables. Cette mesure concerne en particulier ceux qui n’ont pas accès aux services bancaires ou qui sont isolés. Ni les chèques circulaires ni les cartes prépayées ne seront facturés aux bénéficiaires, précise le cabinet mardi.

That seems to explain what I was misunderstanding. I thought if the fee for cheque cashing is going away, perhaps so are the cheques. That would be very disturbing but that’s not the case. Apparently the 4€ fee is going away.🎉 I believe that fee was always illegal. Glad something was done about it.

Remaining question: how does a postal order differ from a circular cheque? What do we lose when postal orders go away? AFAICT, they function the same. This article seems to say circular cheques require movement – going to a bank or post office to cash it, which is a problem for some handicaps. But I don’t get why that would not be the case with a postal order as well. How does a postal order get converted to cash? Is it perhaps about showing ID? Is it a case where a family member could cash a postal order for their grandparent, but not a cheque?

I am using Ungoogled Chromium older than 120, so apparently that’s the issue. Does that also explain the problem of feddit.uk comments not being seen?

for example

Ice cubes would be interesting for non-fortified wine. But I suppose sherry might not freeze at 15% alc. (not sure).

Anyway, someone just said only 12% alc is needed for shelf-stability and someone else said 15% is fine for the shelf, so that solves the problem. Sherry can simply be kept at room temp.

Glad to hear about the 12% threshold. All the cheap sherry I have easy local access to are 15%.

Cooking wine is indeed cheaper and lower quality. But more importantly it is shelf-stable. You can open a bottle of cooking wine and keep it in the cupboard. The stuff is labelled “cooking wine” in the US so that it is treated as such. It probably gets around some of the tight liquor controls there.

Europe does not seem to have a product with preservatives specifically for that purpose. So you would use substandard wines for cooking. If champaign goes flat because an open bottle sat out overnight, it’s still good for risotto. But I would still chill it if I weren’t making risotto the next day. In the case at hand, I don’t want to be keeping a bottle of sherry in the fridge.

When using a whole bottle in a day, then of course there is no issue. But it takes me a year to get through a bottle of Sherry.

still dead for me. Perhaps they are quietly blocking Tor.

I appreciate the tip but I guess that is useless for Flixbus. Flixbus says they only accept credit card, paypal, google pay or apple pay… Nothing I would go near.

I had the same idea but AFAIK it does not exist.

Personalised pricing is evil indeed. You make an interesting point because exposing that evil likely gives an angle on why carriers resist open data which I had not considered.

When I raised the question, I did not mean to limit the request to official sources. In fact, I somewhat expect that a dataset would come from an independent 3rd party. Even if the prices are biased for a particular person, it’s relative pricing that’s most interesting anyway.

Finding the cheapest is quite useful even if there are slight markups/markdowns with whatever vendor sells the ticket. Flixbus discriminates against Americans by adding $1 to every ticket from US IP addresses, but a US dataset would still help me decide outside of the US which route is the cheapest.

Note as well that routes and schedules are useful even without accurate pricing – for BlaBlaCar in particular because people offering seats in their car have no periodic schedule.

Scandinavia has those long-haul bus trips. I recall checking on a bus to Denmark. The time difference was substantial. In my case a flight made the most sense. But in any case, this is not a Flixbus issue generally. It’s the routes which are likely intended for shorter travel, like people getting on and off in just a small segment of the overall route.

so the strange thing about flixbus is that it runs a bunch of routes that take you between the same places as the trains can, in a less comfortable vehicle, and absolutely fucking hilariously slower.
For example gothenburg-stockholm is 3-4 hours by train and flixbus takes 6-7 hours.

Brussels to Amsterdam and back:

• 2h45 each way by Flixbus (about 5 min longer each way than the slow train, which has more stops)
• <€20 on Flixbus; >€40 by train
• Flixbus allowed Tor users to see schedules and fares until just recently. Now both Flixbus and Train vendors block Tor. The train ticketing sites are still a more shitty experience, at least in Belgium.
• Buses are more reliable than trains. We never hear about road works disrupting the trip. But back when I used the train it was a regular shit-show of delays and cancellations because you cannot easily route around maintenance on the tracks.

So you pay at least €20 more to get there ~5 min faster. Or you can pay even double the slow train fare if you want to shave off ~30min using the fast train.

The buses often have Wi-Fi and power. Do trains? IIRC, it was quite rare for trains to have either.

Indeed usb3 is very useful for disk i/o. I wouldn’t treat it as a deal breaker though. USB 2.0 is good enough for OS installations, especially if you do a Debian netinst which uses minimal disc input (although USB 2 is perhaps still faster than your WAN uplink). For backups, it depends on the volume you are dealing with. USB 2 is good enough for small data and incrementals but if you have to transfer 500+ GB then you would want one of:

• eSATA
• NAS storage (over ethernet), or
• USB 3

All of those buses can be added to a pre-USB 3 machine. But if it’s a laptop, the usb 3 expresscards may be hard to find locally because they never really got popular.

What do you need usb3 for? In most use cases, USB 3 can be added. I have a usb3 expresscard in my laptop, which has an external power input from a USB port to drive things like USB3 external hard drives that rely on the USB bus for power.

When withdrawing money, it should appear in your bank account as a withdrawal.

Indeed it does, showing only the currency of the account the money drew from, not the amount dispensed by the ATM in the currency of the ATM. There’s also a data minimisation problem: using a bank statement from another bank to prove a cash withdrawal reveals a lot of detail about that other bank account to the bank taking the deposit along with all transactions on that statement.

It’s a fuckup by the EU. When different countries have different rules and restrictions on the Euro, the interplay downgrades the value of the euro. What good is a euro from country A if country B disallows deposits by their internal rules as a consequence of country A not producing receipts?

Thanks for the feedback. So if the company is collecting pics on the parking, then the company is apparently complicit in bike racks getting stuffed.

They do have the rackless boxes where I am, but not everywhere. I’m not sure if the companies have a requirement to finance those and rent the space, but in any case they are not pulling their own weight in that respect when there is a shortage.

There is one shared bike operator where I am that has stations that the bikes are locked to. It’s a proprietary lock and they must install stalls for them. The bikes must be returned to a stall eventually, to end the billing. It’s an older system than the newer unlocked ones with tracking, but better because the company finances and manages the stalls. They take responsibility for the real estate they consume. It’s also better because your realtime whereabouts is not tracked and you don’t need an app… you just tap an NFC card on the stall.

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)

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).