• 170 Posts
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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.







  • I can see that you’re upset about cloudfare being forced on anyone using the large instances.

    This implies some kind of emotional drive and disregards the nuts and bolts of the actual problem. The breakage that manifests makes the fedi less usable and more exclusive, which the design rightfully tries to avoid but falls short. CF being pushed on ppl using large instances is not at all the issue. That’s self-inflicted harm. Cloudflare and big instances both independently pose a centralization problem which can easily be condemned together. Neither form of centralisation benefits the fedi. The fact that CF-centralised nodes and disproportionately large nodes tend to be the same nodes is the universe organising the garbage together – like when Bayar and Monsanto merged. Easier to deal with the baddies when they are consolidated.

    lemmy.ml less trivial

    The lemmy.ml instance is less trivial because it’s disproportionately large, but they shrunk a bit and ditched Cloudflare. They bring a lot of political baggage, but they are also said to be less tyrannical than they were in the past. So what how to treat lemmy.ml is questionable and messy.

    You’re right that the large instances are not democratically governed,

    Yes but to be clear, governance is your focus not mine. I’m saying centralized instances are detrimental no matter how they are governed. If they are well-governed then you might say they are more likely to be decentralized, but then of course users could decide to unblock them if they achieve that.

    But more importantly, most people just aren’t going to do that.

    This is more of the “people don’t boycott” logic. First of all, the perception that people do not boycott does not justify stripping people of their power to boycott. The feature I propose gives people boycott power. And not only that, it gives them a way to function – a way to get the exclusive junk and broken images off their screen.

    how my Twitter boycott paid off

    I was on Twitter long before elon took it, and before phone numbers were required. When Twitter started demanding a mobile phone number from me, I walked. Boycotted. Not long after that I got news that Twitter was caught selling users’ personal data which was inconsistent with the privacy policy. Then shortly after that announcement, it was announced that cybercriminals breached Twitter and stole people’s personal info anyway. My boycott was not emotion driven. It was me making a calculated decision not to trust Twitter with my profitable data, and me deciding not to help Twitter profit from their policy of exclusion (people denied access who do not have mobile phones). And it was the right move. It paid off in the form of not being a victim. I’m grateful that I had boycott power. If boycott power is available but underutilized, the idiots who don’t use it can blame themselves.

    The solution should be addressed at a system and process level, not by relying on people making personal choices.

    This is a bit false dichotomy-ish. People should be empowered with agency to control their own interactions. That empowerment does not obviate system-wide improvements. It complements them.

    But again, what I’m driving at is let’s get big, but do so democratically.

    It’s defeatist. To grow disproportionately is to be centralised. Good governance is useless if it fails to prevent centralization. Maybe good governance can lead to a detrimentally centralised instance splitting into many decentralised instances, at which point those nodes are participating in the free world.

    If some giant node organises a democratic process, it’s not for me or anyone to stop them. The feature I propose does not interfere with that in the slightest.

    A democratic process still produces shitty results & cannot be relied on

    Everyone might decide to save money and use Cloudflare anyway. It’s shocking how many people see no problem with Cloudflare. And it’s mind-boggling how selfish people can be in large numbers. Xenophobic Trump supporters shows at what great scale it can happen on. Another example: a majority of the population has a mobile phone subscription, and a majority is also not ethically opposed to tax-funded public services that exclude non-mobile subscribers (e.g. like a public library requiring SMS confirmation to use wifi). They will vote for what benefits them personally at the detriment of the minority. So if a democratically controlled service opts for Cloudflare anyway, it’s the same problem. People marginalised by Cloudflare still need tools to tailor their view to show venues where they are included.

    It’s great to have our little corner of the world that’s sun and roses, but as long as there are giants roaming around we’re at their whim and will eventually get stepped on.

    You are literally advocating for the status quo that causes the giants to step on the rest. My searches are clobbered to a dysfunctional extent because these shitty exclusive nodes fill the top results (that’s another bug I already exposed in this community).

    Sure, we can boycott mcdonalds, but we’re essentially begging them to make a change.

    Not at all. Begging them to change is the position you take when you neglect to boycott – begging is the shitty option you have. I’m not begging. I walk. McDs can fuck right off. They get zero begging from me. To keep feeding McDs is to be in that disempowered defeatist position of weakness. In the case at hand, enough people made the right decision to put McDs in the begging position; begging for customers to return.