Thanks. I wonder how long that statement has been made. In the past I was never confident in the wording from the national bank as far as expiry of banknotes. But the page you link seems solid enough. Saving an archived version here as an extra measure against any future shenanigans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250521052910/https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes

(and because bankofengland.co.uk is not an open access website)

I don’t know the Belgian case, but I think it’s the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out!

I was thinking about doing that. I read that mother of vineger is not necessary, but it speeds up the process. I also read that results are only good with certain beers like brown ales… and I think IPA was given as an example of a bad result (i’m assuming due to the hoppy bitterness).

I mainly use it on fried potatoes, and I’m open to experiments, perhaps with lentil salad. I am familiar with Sarson’s and managed to find another bottle of that but I would like to try more varieties of malt vinegar. Saw a small bottle of lambic-based vinegar in a speciality shop and didn’t buy it because the price is a bit high (€14).

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)

Do you think it’s politicians’ job to provide technology education?

Of course. Public education comes from the public sector. We should be electing politicians with administrations who are smarter than the general public. Any tech education that comes of Twitter abandonment is welcome.

But there is a need for politicians to reach their constituents, and if they can be effectively reached by an imperfect method,

Leaders should lead, not follow. Politicians can reach and be reached on a Mastodon server, where all their constituents have access.

Asking ~8 billion (or however many) people to make a personal change first is a non-starter. Demanding many orders of magnitude fewer people (politicians) make the first move to break the dystopian cycle is far more sensible.

then I can accept them using it while also promoting better methods.

Posting on Twitter is an assault on promoting better methods. Mirroring everything on Twitter facilitates the Tyranny of Convenience (great essay by Tim Wu) by making Twitter the superset. It’s important and socially responsible to withhold info from Twitter so that it cannot be the superset.

RMS gives good advice for orgs who think they need a Facebook presence:

https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html

Politicians don’t need a Twitter presence, but to the extent that they are not convinced, the bare minimum action they can take is implement some of the advice on that RMS page.

Any random 3rd party joe shmoe can make a Twitter bot that mirrors a politician’s msgs to Twitter. In fact, force Twitter to do the work simply by not feeding Twitter. Motivation for Twitter’s self-preservation would appropriately ensure gov resources are not spent on Twitter. Make Twitter be the host of dodgy mirror bots without engagement, where you need Mastodon to actually engage with a politician.

There are moral problems with crossposting to Twitter.

• Twitter is financed by advertising. I do not finance public services to then finance the advertising revenue of private corporations. Politician’s IT staff, time, and resources used to feed Twitter are not free. Public money is used for the tooling and the operations on that platform of inequality. So people who are excluded from Twitter are financing content fed to Twitter involuntarily via taxation. And those who are priviledged to be on the Twitter platform are hit with ads as a precondition to reaching content they already paid taxes for – due to an inappropriate intermingling of public and private sectors.

• Network effect: making Twitter a superset of content exacerbates the stranglehold Twitter has on the world. The private sector will do its thing, but the public sector has a duty to work in the public interest. A public office adding to Twitter’s network effect disservices the public interest.

• Twitter is a politically manipulated venue with a bias toward right-wing populism. People who vote for a green party or socialist party politician do not endorse feeding an extreme right-wing US agenda with worldwide consequences. They do not have an equal voice on that platform which is wired for right-wing propaganda.

Recall how Trump took power in 2016: Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. FB and Twitter are pawned by right-wing extremists.

Shopping – Right to safe, high-quality products that can be repaired, replaced, or returned if needed.

It’s an illusion.

Right to repair started in the US and has been implemented in various states, but still does not exist in Europe. They have been discussing a r2r bill in Europe for over 10 years now. And if you read what they have so far, it’s weak. You can’t even get a repair manual unless you are a licensed professional.

Cannot repair my washing machine because the Dutch manufacturer will not tell me the secret unlock code.

I had a Belgian product die under warranty. No protection. Manufacturer ignored my request for warranty service. Belgian regulators ignored my complaint that the manufacturer ignored me.

Travelling – Compensation for delays or cancellations.

Flixbus was a no-show. Complained to the regulator. No response.

Strange loopholes in EU law too. If the bus route is under 250km, there are no protections for delays or cancellations. You can be stranded in Amsterdam because the bus to Brussels ditched you, and because that trip is under 250km there are no useful passenger rights.

Banking – Secure payments and fair contracts.

Secure payments yes, but FATCA guarantees all contracts are unfair, which discriminate against people on the basis of their national origin.

If you want to do a cash transaction above ~€1k or so, prepare for hostile treatment. A friend asked to withdraw €5k (IIRC) of her own money and the bank called the police, who then brought her in for questioning.

ATMs are really thinning out amid Bill Gates war on cash, which is really taking hold in Europe. Instead of making banking enticing, they are treating cash with hostility to force banking on people.

Surfing – Protection of personal data and safeguards against scams.

Most gov services block Tor. The data protection authorities take no action on most GDPR complaints. Public libraries refuse wifi access to people without mobile phones (the people who need it most).

I have a right to use twitter to the same extent as you have a right to use lemmy.

Not in the slightest. Twitter is like a private road controlled by a single gatekeeping corporation whose private property rights are the only rights to speak of – and it’s run by a right-wing populist who controls who can participate. Lemmy is like a network of public roads without centralized ownership, where the concept of rights is not even needed because there is no central corporate control.

The right to choose to use twitter is markedly different from making it a universal right to be able to access twitter.

Why are you talking about a universal right to access Twitter? AFAIK, no one here endorses that.

Either you lick Musk’s boots or you bounce. Those are your choices. Politicians who lick Musk’s boots and drive exclusion cannot effectively represent the people.

Public protest existed for centuries prior to Twitter

Those are different times. We are in Twitter times. Shouting on a street corner brings a smaller audience than posting on Twitter. Higher effort and less exposure; for not licking Musk’s boots. And because of network effect, non-Twitter methods have lost ground to an unequitable elitist platform that exludes people without mobile phone numbers as well as those wise enough not to share their number with Twitter, and those who object to feeding a right-wind ad surveillance platform. The open letter audience someone would have in a free world is dimished because the audience has their eyes glued to Twitter, who poached them by exploiting network effect.

People don’t have a right to use Twitter – b/c it’s a private company that excludes people (e.g. people without mobile phones). That’s the first problem.

I heard a rumor that (like Facebook) Twitter was closing read access so only members could /read/ posts. Did that ever happen? Maybe not, because I was just able to reach a twitter timeline without having Twitter creds as a test. If that exclusivity plays out, then politicians will be writing messages that a segment of people are excluded from viewing. It would not be enough that they can be reached by other means. Politicians would also have to copy all of their messages to an accessible space somewhere.

It’s also insufficient that I can reach them outside twitter only by non-microblogging means. E.g. by letter. A letter is a private signal not seen by others. Microblogging is an open letter mechanism. It’s important to deliver your msg to a polician in a way that the msg has an audience. Take away the audience and you take away the power of the signal.

“Support” is vague. Your link is unreachable to Tor users so I can’t see what it’s about.

I boycott Twitter wholly. Will not set foot there. In fact, it’s mutual. Twitter kicked me off their platform when I refused to share a mobile phone number. Thus I inherently support dropping TWTR by not consuming it.

It’s embarassing and very disturbing that the public sector (especially in Europe) uses shitty corporate exclusive walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook. When a politician uses Twitter or Facebook exclusively, they should be sued for free speech infringement. The #1 purpose of free speech is to express yourself to policy makers. When they use an exclusive gatekeeper to block some people from reaching them, it’s an assault on free speech.

Whether they do Mastodon or not does not matter so much. Would be useful if they did, but the real focus should be on just getting them off exclusive tech. They can work out for themselves that Mastodon is useful and inclusive.