• 25 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: March 6th, 2021

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  • 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?


  • The only similar things I know is the central bank keeping a listing of “unpaid credit” which make ban you from getting any new credit for a certain time.

    Indeed that’s what I’m talking about. In Belgium it seems consumers have no control over whether a creditor can access the central bank’s records. Apparently the central bank simply trusts that creditors are checking records in response to an application for credit. I would like to know if any EU countries make use of an access code so consumers can control which creditors can see their records.


  • I don’t mean to imply anything about scoring, but certainly there must be some kind of mechanism to expose bad debtors to lenders.

    In Belgium, there are no private credit bureaus but there is a central bank. Belgian banks are obligated to report loan defaults and cash transactions to the central bank, and creditors are obligated to check the central bank’s records. Consumers have no way to control creditors access to their records in the central bank. It seems to be trust based. The central bank apparently trusts that a creditor is checking a consumer’s file in connection with an application for credit by the consumer.











  • Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.

    BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.

    It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.

    The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.






  • 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 who that poll reached 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 bigger, if different.