activistPnk

This thread was inappropriately censored by either @[email protected] or @[email protected] claiming:

“Reason: Reason: Literally the opposite of anti-work is "over employment" which OP is arguing for”

There is an English comprehension problem by the mod. Would someone whose first language is English please:

1. notice that over employment is actually the problem that the thread’s thesis seeks remedies for. Being forced into a full-time or nothing ultamatim is a very common problem that oppresses anti-work proponents. It’s the single most common problem we face. Appalling that a mod would block the discussion.
2. undo the improper mod action

The mod’s action to suppress is actually a pro-work action, as it prevents discussion around solutions to over-employment.

Having a progressive tax system means tax rate increases disproportionately with the more work you do. And that’s a good because working less is encouraged by a reduced avg tax rate.

But what happens when you take a year (or 5 years) off? You live off savings that were taxed in higher brackets while earning zero. IOW, consider:

• Bob works 6 years straight earning 50k/year.
• Alice works 3 years earning 100k/year then takes 3 years off.

They both had the same gross earnings per unit time but Alice gets screwed on taxes because of the progressive tax system. My pattern is comparable to Alice due to forced full-time gigs that refuse part-time. My refuge is to subject myself to being over-employed for a stretch then quitting for a stretch of bench time. The only remedies I see:

1. Take a 1-year contract starting in June. Do not work the first ½ of the 1st year, and do not work the second ½ of the 2nd year.
2. Form a corporation, work as independent and direct your own “false independent” 1-person company. Money builds in the company as you pay yourself the same amount whether you are working or not. (Some people put the company in Hong Kong because it accommodates this well and the company feeds the director gradually and persists well after retirement -- or so I’m told)
3. Work in a country that adjusts for income fluxuations by giving you a tax credit if your income drops substantially from one year to the next.

I made up number 3. Does that exist anywhere?

Any other techniques to hack around forced full-time scenarios? Or to deliberately fluxuate working hard and not working without the tax penalty?

There was an ATM sign at a souvenir shop, so I entered to use it. Walked in circles looking for it.. sometimes they are very well hidden. Staff asked me what I was looking for. “The ATM”. They said “that’s me... just tell me how much you want and tap your card on the terminal.

It’s an interesting option for shops because if the cash comes from the register then that keeps the register light, thus fewer bank deposits and lower security risk.

But how does it work? The staff were at a loss to answer questions. They warned: if you have visa, the fees will be 11%. Yikes! Extortionate. Very hard to believe that’s even legal in Europe. Staff said most people use maestro (of course, Netherlands), but really bizarre that visa customers would be charged a staggering 11% and maestro 0%. I asked if it’s really an ATM transaction because that makes a big difference if the card is a credit card. A credit card at ATMs is doing a cash advance which has a cash advance fee on top of the interest. But what is this 11%? ATMs never charge a high percentage like that. I wonder if there is some DCC¹ funny business. Or maybe it’s some wild speculation about what the card holder’s bank would charge.

There is such a thing as cash back that does not require a purchase. I think they use an ATM signposting because they think consumers are unaware of cash back. So it’s a dumbing down. Perhaps fair enough, but the staff was clueless. Whatever is going on in that shop, the owner just put up a sign without informing their own staff as to the nature of the beast.

I opted not to use it because I had no certainty what the fees would be. No way of knowing whether my bank would charge a cash advance fee or whether I’d get hit with an 11% money-grab.

¹dynamic currency conversion (which by law must be the consumer’s choice)

ATMs are a nightmare for folks using non-SEPA cards. The biggest problem is getting solid info. E.g. this page falsely claims “Withdrawal limit: Bank ATMs in Netherlands have a withdrawal limit of 400 euros per transaction. However, there is no limit on the number of withdrawals per day.” The €400 per transaction limit is widely understood to be for non-eurozone cards, not local cards -- but in fact that’s also a bogus rumor because I have seen a non-eurozone card get ~€440 before. And the claim of no limit on the number of transactions is apparently nonsense too.

ABN·AMRO claims the limit is €2k. That’s probably correct for local cards but certainly not foriegn cards.

This page is one of few to acknowledge a difference between local cards and non-local cards. But still dicey info. “€250 - €400 if you use a foreign card” (the limit /can/ be higher than €400). But what’s interesting is the site shows a range. So which machines can push limits for foreign cards the most?

I think the swindle is like this: the ATMs charge foreign cards a transaction fee of €4 (which is probablly legally capped since ATMs are a near Geldmaat monopoly in most of Netherlands). Since that’s a flat fee, it makes sense for consumers to pull out as much as they can in one go (to the extent of their need). The lower the limit, the more recurrances of €4 they can charge. The anti-competitive maneuvering they’re doing is to conceal the limit. Without transparency, consumers are forced to guess. If they guess wrong too many times, the card can be confiscated by the machine, reported, or frozen. So there is pressure to under-estimate the limit.

Anyway, what is the highest amount anyone has pulled out of a Dutch ATM in recent years using a non-euro card?

(By the way, I was forced to choose a language to tag my post with and Dutch was the only choice. Yet the sidebar contains English. So I am submitting this English text with a Dutch tag in order to make the “post” button sensitive in alexandrite)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15774903

No need to circumvent anti-consumer mechanisms and risk bricking. This router is liberated by design.

No need to circumvent anti-consumer mechanisms and risk bricking. This router is liberated by design.

I know it’s unacceptibly high, whatever the figure is. I would like to have a credible accurate CO₂ cost of a Google reCAPTCHA for comparison purposes and also to add weight to my complaint when condemning a CAPTCHA pusher for their anti-human tech.

update:

A study has just emerged showing that traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15232893

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/15232893

Email

The convenience¹ of email inspires a huge bias in favor of email (and likely confirmation bias to a large extent). But if you can detach from the tyranny of convenience and look at email critically, it does not look like such an obvious best choice ecologically. Consider these inconvenient facts:

• Advertising → people needlessly buy more stuff as a result of ads that are fed by email content
• Google sells machine learning to fossil fuel corporations (see also YT videov3n8txX3144)
• Google finances climate deniers
• Apple, Amazon, Google & Microsoft have teamed up to block Right-To-Repair laws.
• Google’s Android phones (and other smart devices) are only updated for a few yrs
• Google got caught excluding climate effects except CO₂ from Google Flights search results
• Google accepted money from Bayer Monsanto to bury unfavorable news (and Bayer-Monsanto is environmentally harmful)
• War is bad for the environment and Google supports Russia’s war (but says they are scaling back)

Google’s support for fossil fuels is probably the most notable problem. Microsoft is even worse than Google (see item 11). Even if you are the rare netizen who uses an ethical email provider, probably over 95% of your email traffic is with a gmail or outlook user. Nearly all corporations and gov agencies are using Microsoft for email service but it’s masked by their vanity addresses. Of course PGP is not an option for ~95+% of your email traffic, so MS and Google profit from your traffic in both directions because it all feeds their advertising networks. From there, the ads fuel consumerism, leading to more purchases of shit that takes a toll on the environment.

So how good is email for the environment when you take all factors into account?

I restricted the dirt above to ecocide as this is a climate forum, but once you also account for non-environmental factors like privacy abuses, MS and Google are a clear non-starter.

¹ I use “convenience” more loosely than justified because email is very inconvenient for some of us, like people who run their own mail servers in order to not needlessly feed extra 3rd parties. The anti-spammers have really ruined the convenience and availability of email by going to extremes that impose colatteral damage on legit email. So it’s not really fair to call email convenient any longer.

Fax

A fax can be sent without printing. Your letter just needs to be formatted for US letter or A4 and in a raster graphic. More often than not, the receiving side is a service that attaches the letter to an email and sends it to the recipient, who likely uses Microsoft.

The pros:

• You can withhold your email address from the letter, thus preventing an email reply (which would then feed the MS ad network and lead to more purchases).
• MS must work harder to snoop and OCR the raster image. But do they? Idk. If they do, it would expend more energy. But if they don’t, the msg avoids feeding the ad network.

The cons:

• The electronic payload is more bulky, thus uses more energy per msg.

Paper letters

Paper must be used, but the paper industry has trended toward sustainabilty and some regions have a mandate on recycling paper (yes, it is illegal to toss recyclable paper in with other waste in wise parts of the world). Unprinting has made progress, which would enable you to erase toner from a page to reuse it.

When a recipient in my city uses Google or Microsoft for email and they have no fax number, I print my correspondence on paper and cycle to their mailbox. It’s a way of saying fuck you to the giant surveillance advertisers. And because all kinds of tech rights and ethics are being pissed on by Google and MS in addition to their environmental abuses, this approach is the clear winner for me.

It’s not exactly obvious which choice is the least harmful for the environment without research that really dissects it and looks at the nuts and bolts of it. But I conjecture that if enough people were to switch back to fax and paper letters and cause inconvenience for Microsoft & Google recipients, it would drive them to choose more ethical email providers in order to esacape the burden of scanning paper and then the cost of paying the postal service to carry their reply. This ultimately favors a more sustainable path even if it’s taking a step backwards in order to take more steps forwards.

The raw figures

• email (excl. indirect impacts): 0.3—50g CO₂/msg, depending on msg size
• paper (non-recycled, excl. ink): 4.29—4.74g CO₂/sheet
• envelope: 24g according to a source I don’t trust. That figure does not specify whether it refers to a windowed envelope. I have recently started saving and reusing inbound windowed envelopes by separating the side seam. LaTeX’s KOMAscript pkg has presets for standard envelopes and also gives a way to enter geometry so the address aligns with a nonstandard window.

The email figure is raw energy consumption assuming the email provider is ethical. It does not account for Google and MS’s involvement in the fossil fuel business, the extra consumption of unnecessary goods due to ads, and all the other factors mentioned. If you send a pure text email and the response comes from an org that attaches an image to every response (cosmetic stationary), it’s comparable to the footprint of a sheet of paper + envelope (still without accounting for the Google/MS factor).

It would be interesting to do for Google and Microsoft what the “Banking on Climate Chaos” paper did for banks, which was to rightfully factor all their harmful activity into their footprint.

This seems like quite a shitty design. I would never buy an HP but I grabbed one off a curb that someone dumped just for the ADF scanner.

It gave a missing print head error. Youtube/invidious videos yEOqnrzwHF4, XvN_i50KShA, g6ySDBW1HRs, 7H2bA8b8XHc and xbM_Eat0VmI show attempts to fix this garbage. Ink leaks can reach the spring and block the connection. The springs contact an unreachable area where disassembly is not possible because they used glue. The UI is vague; does not say which color or contact is broken. I repeated the fix procedure 5 or so times and even sanded the spring ends and it still does not work.

Lucky the scanner still works. But worth noting some HP printer models refuse to allow the scanner to function if there is an issue with the ink, which is an asshole design IMO.

Note that if I were to get it working, I would not buy HP ink. I would perhaps experiment with making homemade ink from spent coffee and tea leaves.