There is a new law that allows merchants to stop giving paper receipts.

The forced use of e-receipts in Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, England, & Italy)

That bug tracker is in MS Github - a place I will not go. And I have yet to find an organised or simple way to find downstream trackers. I generally check Debian but when a pkg is not in official Debian then I report to !bugs@sopuli.xyz and !bugs_in_services@sopuli.xyz.

So not what their running debt is but only whether they can take on a new, specific one.

I knew the criteria was out of the hands of EU-based lenders, but didn’t realise the data is also out of reach to the lender. I suppose it makes sense that the lender would get no info other than a yes or no, if lenders have no discretion.

I noticed A shop had a rediculously priced phone (like €800+, something I would never buy) but advertised something like €9 if you take a contract. So it’s effectively a loan factored into a locked-in phone service plan. IIUC, the phone shop must arrange that with a bank and does not have the option of taking on risk, and then the bank asks the central bank if customer X can handle that loan, correct?

You can reverse payments through the bank in the EU as well but it’s seldom necessary, since the companies tend to revert the charge willingly when confronted by the consumer protection bureaus.

I’ve only had to resort to bank reverse a couple if times.

One was when I ordered a pair of shoes of what appeared to be an Italian website. It later turned out it was a scam site that listed popular models that were not made anymore and then sent you a ridiculously poorly made knock-off copy from China. I explained the issue to my bank and showed the knockoffs I got and a week or so later the charge was reversed.

That’s quite a surprise. I heard SWIFT/IBAN transfers were permanent and irreversable. I heard of mistakes being corrected but it required the two banks to collude and the bank of the recipient to do a money grab on their account, which I suppose would be impossible if a criminal closes their account. I wonder if your bank took a loss or if they colluded with the other bank. IIRC, banks have a minimum “investigation” fee of like €25 plus an hourly rate to pay bankers to deal with bad transactions. Did your bank offer that service for free?

Young voters did this, ironically enough, according to BBC World News. Young people struggling to get jobs after graduation think that right wing parties will fix that.

So as older generations are trying not to hand-off a burning planet to the young, the young are signing up for a burning planet under some delusion that right wingers will get them jobs. Schools have apparently failed to teach kids that the jobs they get under conservative governance are shit jobs – lousy pay and lousy benefits.

Is it that you prefer not to insert coins, or that you prefer not to end up with coins? In principle a machine could take bills, but then you’d be getting coins back if you need change.

I’ve seen a laundromat with a centralized cash machine. You can insert as much in bills and coins as you want, then you tap the numbers of the machines you want to send the credit to. This single transaction made it easy if you needed to start ~3+ washing machines. If you plan diligently, you can ensure you don’t end up with coins, but then you need to bring coins.

I prefer coins because the rejection rate seems to be far lower than banknotes. But euro coins are probably more sensibly denominated than other countries. The US is a bit of an embarrassment in this regard because the $1 liberty coins never caught on, so people need a ton of quaters or small banknotes would can get quite ratty.

The scooters they mention in the article are the e-scooters you ride standing up in the bike lane.

No they are not. That makes no sense. Stand-up e-scooters are relatively quiet. Quotes from the article (emphasis added):

“worst of all, the high-pitched wail of motor scooters that speed by every few seconds.”

“Motorcycles and scooters — often with their exhaust systems illegally modified to boost noise and power”

“The noise can be ear-splitting,”

Obviously you would not describe a stand-up scooter as ear-splitting or capable of waking someone up. They’re talking about gas small gas combustion engines, most of which are the worst variety on scooters: 2-stroke.

Or if you meant the OP’s article is talking about e-scooters, that article actually covered both:

“Weight rates are usually over 10 times more favourable for the average motorbike or scooter and, of course, even better for lighter vehicles such as electric bicycles or kick-scooters.”

My reaction was to the idea that motor scooters are more favorable by a factor of 10 due to the weight – which is true, but my criteria is more complex than just ecocide-avoidance… I want my sleep too!

There is a quite good opt-out procedure: cycle.

A recent study found that a single unmuffled scooter driving through Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people.

So sure, scooters have low CO₂ emission but I would like to see a ban on non-electric scooters for their sound emissions, at least during certain hours.

smart lights come in other forms:

• If you are speeding, the next light detects it and nearly guarantees you get a red light
• If you are not speeding, your license plate is read and entered into a lottery where you can win money from the pool of money collected by traffic violations.

I don’t recall which country implemented what, but IIRC Canada, Sweden and Spain each had one of the above two systems.

Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.

It’s a pro and a con. Cars waiting is a good thing. Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars. I’m in a place where bicycles can turn right on red but cars cannot. And there are cycle paths through woods and fields and niche trafficlight-free places cars cannot go.

I love traffic jams because cyclists are immune to them and car drivers can only sit in frustration as they get passed by cyclists.

A couple intersections are still fucked up though, where cyclists might have to wait for ~2-3 differently timed lights to cross an intersection. Luckly red light running is not generally enforced against cyclists.