- 2 Posts
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122·16 days ago“One more step…”
Nothing like a privacy abusing Cloudflare site to expose privacy abuse. If anyone has openly accessible Cloudflare-free links, plz post.
Mastodon is not niche. Mastodon is a diverse community of nerds and low tech people, artistic brains and analytical brains, white collar workers and blue collar workers. A substantial portion of Mastodon is from Reddit refugees. Reddit is no more niche than Facebook.
The greater Mastodon venue lacks right wing conservatives, who tend to stay in their bubble of extremist networks. That does not make Mastodon “niche”. Running the same survey on a right wing Mastodon node might be interesting, but we can see from the linked poll that political affiliation is generally orthoganol on this issue.
Why do you think 210 is statistically insignificant? Is there a reason why the central limit theorem does not apply in this case?
If you’re more fixated on the samples coming from Mastodon, can you explain why you might expect cashless proponents to be even fewer in populations outside of Mastodon? IMO, a Mastodon-using population is more likely to embrace individual rights and condemn imbalances of power that favor giant corporations like banks. I believe if the same survey is carried out outside of Mastodon, the 26% will be even bigger, if different.
Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Paypal famously colluded to block donations to wikileaks. That control was exercised at an international level.
Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. Banks in those places will freeze your account easily, like a doc on file expiring.
US banks are more trustworthy with your money than European banks, but US banks are less trustworthy with your data. Exceptionally, there is a pitfall where you can lose your money: dormancy. I recall a woman in California who had a safe deposit box that she did not access for a number of years. The bank declared it “dormant”, drilled it, and gave the property to the state’s unclaimed assets, who then auctioned off her stuff.
Are there women who can stash thousands away to prepare to flee, but cannot somehow have a SECRET bank account?
^ fixed your question - an important word was missing. And now to answer it, in some countries it is impossible to open a bank account without your spouse knowing about it. If you are married, your spouse must cosign.
indeed. This was recently surveyed in fact:
If you deposit money at a bank, it is covered by federal deposit protection insurance (up to some limit that varies by country but generally in the range of $100k-$250k), so you are guaranteed to be able to get it back no matter what.
Time matters. Those insurance claims take months to process and they only cover bankruptcy (which is the least likely reason a bank denies you access to funds).
The copy of my ID card that the bank had on file expired. I renewed it on time but did not think to update the bank with a new copy. The bank’s way of communicating to me that their records of my card were out of date was to freeze my account. Boom, just like that, I have no money all of the sudden. I don’t recall the time of day it happened, but if it had happened on a Friday night I would not have access to my money until I appear in person at the bank Monday morning — assuming it’s even possible to get off work. At that time, I kept an empty fridge… only eating on the go. Had I not had cash on hand, getting food could have been a struggle.
Even if the bank fails. Banks are subject to extremely strict regulation to protect consumers and make sure you have access to your funds
LOL! Those so-called strictly enforced banking regs are not for us. Banks are scared shitless of AML/KYC shit hitting the fan. Banks laugh at the consumer protection variety of regs with reckless disregard. It’s a joke. I’ve reported banks in breach of consumer rights. The bank’s regulators do fuck all. One reculator responded to me and said “why don’t you switch banks”. I shit you not. That came from a regulator who’s job it was to enforce a law that the bank was breaking.
PayPal is not a bank, it’s an EMI (e-money institution), but those are heavily regulated to protect consumers. Your funds are not covered by deposit protection insurance, but as an EMI they have to keep your money in a safeguarding account at a real bank and they can’t use it themselves, so in case PayPal fails you will still get your money back.
No, that’s not how it is. PayPal has a reputation for copious extremely out of whack “anti-fraud” false positives. I was burnt by it. Paypal blocked my acct and kept my money. There are many similar complaints.
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md
In case of domestic violence, you go to the police.
What a bizarre disconnect from reality. You have waaay too much confidence in police power (and assumptions about actionable evidence), capability, and motivation, and no idea about battered women living in fear of the next attack, which a restraining order does not necessarily stop, if you can get one, especially if the next attack is a bullet. A cop who checks on a battery victim will be told “that big bruise on my cheek is from falling down the stairs”.
Domestic violence victims need options. You’re advocating for taking options away. That’s fucked up.
Spain, Belgium, and France have banned cash transactions above a threshhold (e.g. €3k) at least 5 years ago already. Cannot pay tax using cash in Belgium. Think about that for a minute.
New recent law in Belgium: all businesses (incl. self-employed workers and even landlords renting out property) MUST accept electronic payment. Try doing that without using a bank.
26% in a recent poll:
Prepaid cards are neither gratis nor anonymous in some countries.
2·4 months agoI would say mostly true.
I moved to a region where my lifestyle (accounting for wages, tax, cost of living) was effectively cut in half. Yet it was still the right move. My initial thinking was I will live anywhere for a year to get a different experience - I can always bounce back if I don’t like it… if the pay reduction bothered me. I ended up staying ~10 years.
A big factor is where you are in life. Fresh out of university, it’s important to gain ground right away and perhaps get the house paid for, or nearly so. But once you’re a senior dev and at a point of calling yourself “privileged class" with a decent sized 401k built up (which is great to convert to a Roth while abroad), you’re only cheating yourself out of life experiences by continuing to chase the money. Some research concluded around ~10 yrs ago that people’s overall happiness improves as income increases up until the $55k/year mark. Beyond that, income doesn’t matter much. Of course that would be a little higher now with inflation but I guess the OP has cleared that figure.
I think it was around 15 years ago I started researching typical incomes around the world and I noticed that Japan paid SWEs double the US average. Cost of living was about 50% higher in Japan but it still worked out that a US→Japan move would have been a lifestyle upgrade. So there are some rare exceptions.
I think you would benefit most by moving abroad. Staying in one country your whole life is very one-dimensional. If you move to another country, esp. overseas, you will look back on your current boredom as wasting your life and you will regret not having done it sooner. Go for just one year. You can always return if you don’t like it. You might be someone who says “I went for 1 year, but stayed 5”.
But first move to a purple swing state like GA or PA for just a month or two, then move your stuff into mini storage. Two reasons: you get to experience a different part of the US, briefly, and you can register to vote in a place where your future votes will count the most. Because that’s the state you will vote in while abroad. OTOH, isn’t Texas on the edge of being a swing state? It’s probably not a bad place to vote from.
I wasn’t aware of the “Privacy Shield”, but the article mentions that:
Found this and this to help me catch up on this.
(edit) in this doc I counted 81 “should”s and 33 “shall”s, to get an idea of the strength.