Europe is also an unwise choice. As is Canada and the UK. Some of my recent threads on this:

• The spread of travel authorisations (🇺🇸→🇬🇧→🇪🇺) has scrapped our visa-free travel rights. Also resulting in privacy loss and suppression of speech
• What if Europeans want to petition Europe to negotiate for visa-free travel to the UK and Canada? Do petitions ever attempt to change the policy of 3rd countries?
• UK imposes ETAs on EU citizens too, now. (the money grab: £16/2yrs)
• Travel authorisation (ETA) scams – both legal and illegal scams target Americans, and Europeans

It should be a place that has ETA-free travel, not just visa-free, if they want global attendees.

thanks but it does not solve my problem. My internet is capped so i can’t do streaming.

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.

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.

Well, it wouldn’t require lying but certainly it seems tricky. You can deregister before you leave the country and neglect to provide an address for where you are going – because you wouldn’t necessarily know in advance and you cannot provide information that does not exist. So they clear your address from your id card which then just has an empty address.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a specific legal obligation to state where you live abroad.

Though one snag is that you have a legal obligation to vote in elections and you must vote in the nearest embassy, which requires giving an address to get on the voting roster. However, voting is not strictly enforced. If you fail to vote there is a small fine but I don’t think they actually hit unregistered people abroad with that. If you do not vote in 3 consecutive elections, then you could lose your voting rights for a few years, I think.

I do not believe the bank gets a notification that you have deregistered. But at some point your ID card on the bank’s files will expire and they will expect an updated copy and freeze your account until they receive it.

If you walk into an embassy to “renew” your passport, do they demand an address? I would think you would pick up your passport at the embassy a week later. Or do they mail it?

Anyway, I can understand giving in to surveillance and disclosing US ties, but OTOH it seems like a nightmare to do what’s expected as well… to be tagged as a toxic US person. It’s a mess either way. Perhaps the wisest move is to “move” to Canada, stay there a couple months, setup residency, then move to the US and just neglect to mention it. Get mail forwarding from Canada.

Half their internet banking site is off-limits to me

Mind elaborating? Did they restrict your account specifically, or does the website simply treat logins from the US differently? I’m surprised you wouldn’t retain full cloud access so long as your account exists under the terms you signed up for.

I don’t understand why you would tell your Belgian bank that you left Belgium, particularly when your new residence is the US which flags you as a toxic asset that requires special handling. That could only work against you. Surely you would be better off not telling them you moved and use a VPN to Belgium to access your acct.

Bingo. This is true even across EU borders. Rabobank in Netherlands does not exchange info with Rabobank in Belgium, IIUC. (but note I think Rabobank quit doing business in Belgium eventually anyway)

I’ve not tested a banking app on a rooted phone but what I care about is escaping the ecocidal practice of designed obsolescence whereby people are needlessly forced to buy more new hardware to update their software. So I tried running a banking app on an Android emulator and it refused to run.

So there are 2 show-stoppers for banking apps for me:

• forced patronage of Google – no escape from Playstore (not sure if I’m okay with the Huawei store as an alternative)
• ecocidal designed obsolescence – emulators rejected

If a bank were competent enough to eliminate those two factors, I would also likely demand the app be open source.

It’s not about the last €20¹. It’s about the last €18.45. How do you get €18.45 from an ATM?

Well, shit, that could be an answer too… cashless banks could have a special kind of ATM that has no denomination limitations. Even my local grocer has a cash machine capable of dispensing all small denominations.

So there are several reasonable things they /could/ be doing, but there is no pressure on them to be competent.

¹ I will edit my post to make this more clear.

(edit) it just occurred to me this is a human rights violation. A very minor one, but against international law nonetheless. You cannot deprive someone of their property. UDHR Art.17:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

The answer is in what you quoted: cash.

There should always be an option to cash out when closing an account. The ATM can get all but the last €20 €19.99. It’s foolish and embarrassing that the bank cannot handle the remainder… that they are so anti-cash that they refuse to have some petty cash around for micro transactions.

Or the bank could accept a small cash deposit. If the balance is €18.45, a customer should be able to deposit €1.55 so that they can pull €20 from the ATM. But cashless banks refuse to accept even the tiniest of deposits.

It should be illegal. It’s a kind of “binding”, where a business requires you to use another business. People should have a right to exit the banking system, full stop. Forcing someone to open another account as a condition to exiting (in effect) is absurd and denies people autonomy.

Apart from that, if a cashless bank insists on being 100% balls-to-the-wall anti-cash in their war on cash, they /could/ give customers who close their account a prepaid credit card funded with their account balance. Customer still has the problem of spending an exact amount but at least they could deal with it later, without fees eating away at their balance. They could do the split restaurant bill at a time of their choosing.

Worth noting that some banks are pushing this transition in a more subtle way. By gradually removing options from their web banking and making functions that are smartphone-only.

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

good, thanks!

Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?

It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice… not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.

Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site – which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.

(edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.

I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.

On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.