activistPnk

Heat pump water heaters already exist. These are hybrid things where a traditional electric water heater is fitted with a heat pump. The heat pump can increase the water temp but cannot deliver enough, so heating elements are still needed to reach a usable temp.

I’m wondering if that design can be improved on this way: instead of powering the heat pump from the wall, the heat pump can be connected directly to a PV. I think that would be more efficient and cheaper because PV output is not normally directly usable. IIUC, it’s variable D/C which must be regulated and/or inverted to A/C involving more hardware, conversion, and waste. But exceptionally, I’ve heard that a PV can directly power a compressor with no middleware. Any reasons this would be infeasible or uninteresting?

Of course the tank still needs wall power for the heating elements, but would use less wall power and entail less conversion loss.

Some large PVs for rooftops were at a street market for €35 each. I’m not deeply knowledgable about them.. I just know that there are two varieties of solar panels and that the kind that are used from small appliances (e.g. calculators, speakers, lawn lights, etc) are junk. And that junk variety is sometimes used in large rooftop panels. What I was looking at resembled the kind I see on a bluetooth speaker with a slight blue tint so I was skeptical. The info on the backside of the panel indicated “1000 V”. The other thing is, all solar panels degrade over time and reach end of life after like 15 years (though this is improving). They may have been a good deal but I passed on them because I didn’t want to buy them on a blind risk.

How would I know how much life a used PV has left? Would a volt meter give that info, assuming it’s sunny when I encounter them again?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11819804

The trend in western Europe is banks are pulling out of the ATM business and joining consortiums. Then those consortiums deploy much fewer ATMs than the banks had. And they monopolise. If one or two ATM brands reject your card, you may be fucked if it’s a small city, as I recently experienced.

ATM alternatives are becoming increasingly essential due to ATM enshitification & sparcity. Some shops give cash back, where you have more money pulled from your bank and the cashier gives you cash from the register. The US has always been on-the-ball with cash back, even though the ATMs in the US are not the shit-show that we see in Europe lately.

So it’s easy to find cash back options in the US because there are several compiled lists showing various stores and limits, like this. Some shops have a fee and some not and the range of limits vary wildly. But at least there are published options.

I’m struggling to find information like that in Europe. In part this is because “cash back” is an overloaded term that also means rebate deals (like discounts of ~1—5%), so search results are polluted. It’s bizarre there is so little info about this. So many people have become cashless that hardly anyone even notices the shit show that ATMs have become. Hence low demand for info on cash back options.

Cash back can be interesting for foreign card holders in Europe because they avoid ATM fees. Discovercard/Diner’s Club seems to guarantee no cash back fee and at the same time no currency exchange markup. But the data on cashback in Europe is sparse and inconsistent from one country to the next.

• Norway shops offering cash back refuse non-Norwegian cards.
• UK stores require no purchase and have no fee, but they also discriminate against non-local bank cards.
• Denmark: local cards only, credit cards refused.
• Spain: no cash back service (but that article is 10 yrs old).
• Netherlands: rumour is that Albert Heijn, SPAR, and Smullers have cash back. (SPAR advertises cashback on their UK site with a locator because apparently only some locations offer it. Yet they wholly conceal this option from their Dutch website)
• Belgium: Aldi has it. But if you boycott Israel then you boycott Aldi North (all Belgian Aldis are Aldi North)

Mastercard has a “cashback store locator” on their US website. And apparently that db is only populated with US stores. Which is a bit shitty because MC is global and they should have that information.

I’m not getting why shops are non-transparent about this. Presumably they offer cash back potentially fee-free because they profit from whatever you’re buying. It would work on me.. if I have some confidence that I can get €200 cash back at a store, that store is sure to get my business.

Anyway, please feel free to use this thread to crowdsource cashback info.

The trend in western Europe is banks are pulling out of the ATM business and joining consortiums. Then those consortiums deploy much fewer ATMs than the banks had. And they monopolise. If one or two ATM brands reject your card, you may be fucked if it’s a small city, as I recently experienced.

ATM alternatives are becoming increasingly essential due to ATM enshitification & sparcity. Some shops give cash back, where you have more money pulled from your bank and the cashier gives you cash from the register. The US has always been on-the-ball with cash back, even though the ATMs in the US are not the shit-show that we see in Europe lately.

So it’s easy to find cash back options in the US because there are several compiled lists showing various stores and limits, like this. Some shops have a fee and some not and the range of limits vary wildly. But at least there are published options.

I’m struggling to find information like that in Europe. In part this is because “cash back” is an overloaded term that also means rebate deals (like discounts of ~1—5%), so search results are polluted. It’s bizarre there is so little info about this. So many people have become cashless that hardly anyone even notices the shit show that ATMs have become. Hence low demand for info on cash back options.

Cash back can be interesting for foreign card holders in Europe because they avoid ATM fees. Discovercard/Diner’s Club seems to guarantee no cash back fee and at the same time no currency exchange markup. But the data on cashback in Europe is sparse and inconsistent from one country to the next.

• Norway shops offering cash back refuse non-Norwegian cards.
• UK stores require no purchase and have no fee, but they also discriminate against non-local bank cards. Interesting that in the UK you can ask for any odd denomination including coins (unlike with ATMs and perhaps unlike cashback in other regions).
• Denmark: local cards only, credit cards refused.
• Spain: no cash back service (but that article is 10 yrs old).
• Netherlands: rumour is that Albert Heijn, SPAR, and Smullers have cash back. (SPAR advertises cashback on their UK site with a locator because apparently only some locations offer it. Yet they wholly conceal this option from their Dutch website)
• Belgium: Aldi has it. But if you boycott Israel then you boycott Aldi North (all Belgian Aldis are Aldi North)

Mastercard has a “cashback store locator” on their US website. And apparently that db is only populated with US stores. Which is a bit shitty because MC is global and they should have that information.

I’m not getting why shops are non-transparent about this. Presumably they offer cash back potentially fee-free because they profit from whatever you’re buying. It would work on me.. if I have some confidence that I can get €200 cash back at a store, that store is sure to get my business. They also benefit from a security standpoint as there is less cash in the tills at the end of the day.

Anyway, please feel free to use this thread to crowdsource cashback info.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11683421

The EU has quietly imposed cash limits EU-wide:

• €3k limit on anonymous payments
• €10k limit regardless (link which also lists state-by-state limits).

From the jailed¹ article:

An EU-wide maximum limit of €10 000 is set for cash payments, which will make it harder for criminals to launder dirty money.

It will also strip dignity and autonomy from non-criminal adults, you nannying assholes!

In addition, according to the provisional agreement, obliged entities will need to identify and verify the identity of a person who carries out an occasional transaction in cash between €3 000 and €10 000.

The hunt for “money launderers” and “terrorists” is not likely meaningfully facilitated by depriving the privacy of people involved in small €3k transactions. It’s a bogus excuse for empowering a police surveillance state. It’s a shame how quietly this apparently happened. No news or chatter about it.

¹ the EU’s own website is an exclusive privacy-abusing Cloudflare site inaccessible several demographics of people. Sad that we need to rely on the website of a US library to get equitable access to official EU communication.

update

The Pirate party’s reaction is spot on. They also point out that cryptocurrency is affected. Which in the end amounts to forced banking.

#warOnCash

ATMs very rarely inform users before they put their card in the slot whether it’s the kind of machine that uses a motor to suck your card into the machine. If yes, then avoiding the machine is a good idea.

The question is, how do you find out in advance whether the machine has a motor? Obviously if you test it on your actual valid bank card that you intend to use for the transaction, you may not get it back.

So my first thought was carry expired old bank cards which can be sacrificed. Stick the card in and if a motor pulls it in, hit the cancel button and try it on the next ATM until you find an ATM that does not suck the card in. This still has issues. The machine can vary well confiscate the card merely on the basis of being expired (thus invalid). Sure, it’s a sacrificial card but I don’t have 100+ such cards to spare. And also those dead cards will have my name on them and the ATM network could blackball my name.

So my next thought is to cut a rectangle from a plastic food container to use as a dummy card. It’s still dicey because criminals are deliberately sticking thin plastic sheets into card slots to cause the next real inserted card to get jammed (this is in fact one of many reasons why legit users should avoid the motorised card slots in the first place). But if you cause things to jam up, you could get treated like a criminal (camera → facial recognition.. etc).

Maybe loyalty cards.. grab a stack of loyalty cards from a grocery store and use those as dummy cards. Better ideas?

• Lidl owner invests lots of money on Israeli tech companies
• Lidl produce comes from Israel
• Lidl caught mislabeling Israeli-sourced food to deceive boycotters

Just wondering if anyone does this. I occasionally find food that expired yesterday. Of course it’s still safe to eat but the shop has no choice but to trash it. So why not nick it?

And what if you get caught? Do they care that you were stealing something they had to waste? The value is zero. You’ve only cheated them out of accurate book keeping.

1. The right to be unplugged includes the right to be free from banks as banks increasingly force customers online. There is also a #WarOnCash underway. So even if you make the ethically absent minded decision to pay for your food electronically, the least you can do is pay the tip in cash. (the war on cash is war on privacy)
2. Electronic tips are also subject to siphoning off by banks. When you tip by card, you also tip Visa, Mastercard, or whatever scumbag credit network is in play because their fee is a percentage of the whole transaction. The electronic transaction may be free to you but it’s not free to the business. I don’t know if the restaurant pays the whole fee and transfers 100% of the tip to the server, or if the server shares the hit. But if this is not McDonalds but some small local business, it’s better to give the full amount to the business anyway.
3. Data protection: when you tip electronically, that creates a record not just attached to you but to the server. If you respect /their/ privacy by way of data minimization, you tip in cash.
4. Environmental protection: banks are lousy for the environment. (ref: Banking on Climate Chaos, bank blacklist and Wired article)
5. Terminal tipping is a swindle (esp. in Europe). Tipping is not only optional in the most pure meaning of the word (not expected), but tipping amounts are lower in Europe meant purely to indicate service quality. Even a tip of €1 is a complement. But terminals suggest American proportions (e.g. 20%). It’s a scam. I think I’ve only seen this in tourist traps. The ownership is happy to make their staff happy by pushing a tip request in a way that deceives the public into thinking it’s out of their hands.. that the technology is asking for the tip. This fucked up scam is training restaurant patrons to overtip w.r.t. the culture (a culture that the locals don’t want to drift into Americanism). In the US it’s not exactly a swindle, but you have less control over the amount nonetheless. Sure most people like the math-free convenience but IMO that does not justify it. And certainly the ~15—25% amounts are excessive when there was no table service.
6. Sometimes servers pool their tips to then tip a portion to the kitchen staff who did well enough to make the servers look good. Cash tips make that go smoothly. I was once in a rare situation where I needed to pay by card and I also wanted cash back. The server explained to me they do not give cash back because of that tip pooling that they do, saying that sometimes they do not get enough cash tips to properly treat the kitchen staff.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6494438

I pulled money out of the wall in France and rejected DCC to ensure my bank does the conversion. The ATM had a dysfunctional receipt printer, and (unlike other ATMs) the ATM was not smart enough to mention the broken printer before the withdrawal.

Then the bank statement in the US only showed the USD amount, not the euros. Seems a bit off because I think when ATMs do a conversion they are obligated to show both currencies and the conversion rate. Why would the same transparency not be required when banks do the conversion? IIUC, the law seems to be here:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-12/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-205/section-205.9

And indeed I see no mention of foreign currency in the disclosure requirements.

#askFedi #lawFedi

If you incorporate these ingredients in your cooking, your left-overs will last longer:

• honey
• salt
• garlic
• sugar (only in high amounts according to feedback; small amounts shortens the life)
• ginger
• sage
• rosemary
• sage
• mustard
• cumin

Additionally from other articles:

• black pepper
• mustard seed
• turmeric
• cinnamon
• cardamom
• cloves

Acids mentioned by others:

• vinegar
• citric acid
• lemon/lime juice

I just had some harissa get moldy after just a couple weeks in a jar in the fridge. I was surprised. I suppose it implies a lack of the above ingredients.

Most people are unwilling to change their lifestyle significantly in the face of climate catastrophe. In particular:

• refusal to alter their diet
• refusal to ditch their car

Even the idea of simply stopping livestock subsidies is fiercely fought because people would still consider an absence of intervention to be lifestyle intereference. People are hostile toward the idea of changing their commuting and teleworking habits. In the democratic stronghold in California, even democrats voted out a democrat who tried to impose a fuel tax because they are resistant to giving up their car. Examples are endless.

the dominant excuse→ “carbon footprint is a BP invention”

The high-level abstract principle that underpins resistance to taking individual actions is the idea that because the “carbon footprint” was coined by BP in an effort to shift blame, people think (irrationally) that the wise counter move is to not take individual action. Of course this broken logic gives the oil companies exactly what they want: inaction. This has become the dominant excuse people use for not changing their lifestyle.

psilocybin

The deep psychology surrounding the problem is cognitive rigidity-- unwillingness of people to adjust their lifestyles. So how do you make people more open-minded and increase their psychological flexibility? One mechanism is psilocybin, which has been shown induce neuroplasticity and free people from stubborn thinking. It’s a long article but the relevant bit is this:

Other studies have shown increased neuroplasticity through meditation. In any case, we could use a less stubborn population.

Not just for climate, but consider the pandemic where conservatives (by definition the champions of stubbornness) refused to make even the slightest lifestyle change and fought every act of remediation. A population with a higher degree of psychological flexibility would be better to react to changes of any kind.