freedomPusher @ freedomPusher @sopuli.xyz

Posts

151

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143

Joined

4 yr. ago

Moderating

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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 even bigger, if different.

Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Paypal famously colluded to block donations to wikileaks. That control was exercised at an international level.

Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. Banks in those places will freeze your account easily, like a doc on file expiring.

US banks are more trustworthy with your money than European banks, but US banks are less trustworthy with your data. Exceptionally, there is a pitfall where you can lose your money: dormancy. I recall a woman in California who had a safe deposit box that she did not access for a number of years. The bank declared it “dormant”, drilled it, and gave the property to the state’s unclaimed assets, who then auctioned off her stuff.

Are there women who can stash thousands away to prepare to flee, but cannot somehow have a SECRET bank account?

^ fixed your question - an important word was missing. And now to answer it, in some countries it is impossible to open a bank account without your spouse knowing about it. If you are married, your spouse must cosign.

indeed. This was recently surveyed in fact:

https://layer8.space/@hyakinthos/112554837920009346

If you deposit money at a bank, it is covered by federal deposit protection insurance (up to some limit that varies by country but generally in the range of $100k-$250k), so you are guaranteed to be able to get it back no matter what.

Time matters. Those insurance claims take months to process and they only cover bankruptcy (which is the least likely reason a bank denies you access to funds).

The copy of my ID card that the bank had on file expired. I renewed it on time but did not think to update the bank with a new copy. The bank’s way of communicating to me that their records of my card were out of date was to freeze my account. Boom, just like that, I have no money all of the sudden. I don’t recall the time of day it happened, but if it had happened on a Friday night I would not have access to my money until I appear in person at the bank Monday morning --- assuming it’s even possible to get off work. At that time, I kept an empty fridge.. only eating on the go. Had I not had cash on hand, getting food could have been a struggle.

Even if the bank fails. Banks are subject to extremely strict regulation to protect consumers and make sure you have access to your funds

LOL! Those so-called strictly enforced banking regs are not for us. Banks are scared shitless of AML/KYC shit hitting the fan. Banks laugh at the consumer protection variety of regs with reckless disregard. It’s a joke. I’ve reported banks in breach of consumer rights. The bank’s regulators do fuck all. One reculator responded to me and said “why don’t you switch banks”. I shit you not. That came from a regulator who’s job it was to enforce a law that the bank was breaking.

PayPal is not a bank, it’s an EMI (e-money institution), but those are heavily regulated to protect consumers. Your funds are not covered by deposit protection insurance, but as an EMI they have to keep your money in a safeguarding account at a real bank and they can’t use it themselves, so in case PayPal fails you will still get your money back.

No, that’s not how it is. PayPal has a reputation for copious extremely out of whack “anti-fraud” false positives. I was burnt by it. Paypal blocked my acct and kept my money. There are many similar complaints.

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

In case of domestic violence, you go to the police.

What a bizarre disconnect from reality. You have waaay too much confidence in police power (and assumptions about actionable evidence), capability, and motivation, and no idea about battered women living in fear of the next attack, which a restraining order does not necessarily stop, if you can get one, especially if the next attack is a bullet. A cop who checks on a battery victim will be told “that big bruise on my cheek is from falling down the stairs”.

Domestic violence victims need options. You’re advocating for taking options away. That’s fucked up.

Spain, Belgium, and France have banned cash transactions above a threshhold (e.g. €3k) at least 5 years ago already. Cannot pay tax using cash in Belgium. Think about that for a minute.

New recent law in Belgium: all businesses (incl. self-employed workers and even landlords renting out property) MUST accept electronic payment. Try doing that without using a bank.

26% in a recent poll:

https://layer8.space/@hyakinthos/112554837920009346

Prepaid cards are neither gratis nor anonymous in some countries.

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.

My god… “Consumer power” is a myth, there’s no evidence of it working for anything significant.

I guess you are not following Gaza. McDonalds in Israel decided to give free meals to Israeli soldiers. McDonalds customers who boycott Israel impacted McDonalds’ bottom line. And it’s a franchise. The McDonalds shops in Israel had different ownership than McDonalds outside Israel (where the boycott was impacting). So in response McDonalds HQ directly bought out all Israeli branches in order to stop the support to Israeli troops, just to protect their brand.

Lidl and Aldi both started taking a hit in Europe because their produce from Israel was being boycotted. Aldi got caught removing the origin label from their produce when Israel was the origin. Lidl got caught falsifying the label by displaying a different region. If the boycott was insignificant, there would be insufficient motivation for a grocery chain to commit fraud against their customers. So I boycott the whole Lidl chain and Aldi North, not just Israeli products.

Organize your workplace

Or boycott without organising, as this person did:

https://slrpnk.net/post/4687232

Indeed. And it’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare encourages admins to deploy heavy websites, pushes graphical CAPTCHA (which adds weight), and makes text browsers less usable. So I boycott Cloudflare, as well as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Lemmy.world uses CF, so changing instances to get off Cloudflare is also a climate action.

It seems anti-immigration is driving all these right wing votes. And xenophobia manifests from the naïve idea that immigrants will somehow reduce incomes.

Well, you can vote harder. The polls are not the only place you vote. Every purchase is a vote. Most people neglect their consumer power. I’m boycotting hundreds (if not thousands) of harmful companies and products, including Amazon. You can always vote harder by investigating the shops and brands you support. You can investigate whether your bank invests in the fossil fuel energy and change banks (or better, become unbanked). You can follow the !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net community.

E.g. certainly one small thing @lurch@sh.itjust.works can do is ditch sh.itjust.works for a different instance. Website weight has quadrupled since Cloudflare took hold because CF encourages web admins to create heavy websites. sh.itjust.works is CF-based.

Indeed. What a setback. I will continue practicing individual climate action (!climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net), which is the only control we have now.

I cannot see how Paypal is GDPR compliant. Not sure why they have not been fined out of EU existence.

A cashless cafe recently had their “Square” terminal on the counter. I asked: is there a way to pay without using Square?

Answer: no, we use Square because it gives us the best deal.

Of course it does, because Paypal is behind Square and Paypal shares your data with 600 corporations so the fees are subsidized with the monetization of customer data. I walked out. Since I boycott Paypal, it means that small local shops using Square also lose my business.

They might as well go all the way. Anyone who gives the slightest shit about privacy has already cancelled #PayPal over the past ~10+ years anyway. Those still using PayPal are obviously pushovers who won’t change their habits over this.

This link is a bit more respectful of pro-privacy visitors:

https://thefinrate.com/paypal-to-launch-advanced-advertising-platform-using-customer-data/