Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell… just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.

You’re referring to “basic” accounts. Those are crippled accounts (e.g., no cash services in Belgium). There is no way to get the cash into a basic account. Basic accounts are also not gratis. You generally pay more for less, as retail accounts are sometimes gratis. But retail accounts are harder to get.

There is also the scenario that some people are unbanked /by choice/. They should be able to retain their human rights like right to autonomy as they pursue their human right to a fair trial.

The place to complain – only if you are willing to solve CAPTCHAs:

https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90510992/en

I don’t do CAPTCHAs.

It was hard to get used to. I write a polite request for something and the machine translation looks as if I am rudely demanding something.

I wonder if your reversal is accurate:

🇫🇷 demander : 🇬🇧 to ask

To ask could be to ask a question, so I would say “to request” or “to place an order” would seem more accurate.

Indeed, you lose the convenience of a realtime chat. Which means the conversation will be slow because when they respond in writing it may trigger more questions.

In Brussels we have social interpretters. I’m not sure if they are paid or if they volunteer, but at no cost they send an interpretter to wherever they are needed. They do this for anyone, not just poor people. But there’s a limitation: they are not certified interpretters thus cannot be used in court.

I mention this because perhaps Berlin has something comparable. OTOH, if the legal advice /must/ be in German, it stands to reason that they would also reject non-certified interpretters. Otherwise I don’t understand the purpose of the law. If they would even theoretically allow a friend or anyone arbitrary to help you, it would somewhat defeat the point.

I can understand that a transposition of a directive might be flexible. But in the case at hand, I believe the German translation of the directive was not even true to the intended directive. So it seems some intent was lost before the German transposition was even drafted.

Whenever I have to deal with a French-only gov agency, I give them a bilingual letter with my original English directly next to machine translated French. The machine translation for French is good enough, which is likely the same for German. So the machine translation serves to get the letter past the 1st tier staff who just look for trivial reasons to reject a case. Then having the original English next to it enables the case worker to potentially have a chance at understanding what you mean whenever the machine translation is rough.

Not sure about Germany specifically but worth a try.

(update)

It seems all the *.europa.eu sites are blocking Tor across the board now. Even this page is unreachable to Tor users:

https://have-your-say.ec.europa.eu/index_en

It’s a bit embarrassing at the EU level. You might expect a mom/pop shop to be unable to handle Tor users, but the EU (a government of nation states) should have their infosec shit together and have the security competency to serve Tor users.

I was told that by a lawyer who gives free advice. I do not know if it’s all circumstances or just some. This also came up in the parent thread. I would love to have a source to reference and to read myself.

Around 15 years ago I consulted a lawyer for some advice (before I knew about the gratis advice service), and was charged €50 if paying cash. Was told I could pay electronically but then it costs slightly more and gets messy with VAT or something… I don’t recall the details. But I would be surprised if that law office still operates that way today.

Also, does some form of “legal aid” not exist in Belgium?

Some forms of gratis legal aid exist in Belgium. AFAIK:

• Gratis legal advice to anyone, regardless of income
• Pro-deo representation - only for people with very low income

Indeed lawyers are used as money mules for criminals. This is likely the excuse being used for the law. But of course an arbitrary hunt for criminals is not a good excuse to infringe on the fundamental rights of non-criminals particularly when there is no probable cause for a particular crime. If a specific lawyer is suspect of crime, then it would be sensible to deny cash payment to a specific lawyer. But an across the board ban is a gross injustice.

The EU mandates the availability of “basic” bank accounts. But then each member state introduces their own limitations that essentially defeats those accounts as an option in various situations. Does France allow their basic accounts to have cash services? If not, then they are useless to someone who has their money in cash.

Also noteworthy that basic bank accounts are not free, and generally cost more than retail accounts.

Ice cubes would be interesting for non-fortified wine. But I suppose sherry might not freeze at 15% alc. (not sure).

Anyway, someone just said only 12% alc is needed for shelf-stability and someone else said 15% is fine for the shelf, so that solves the problem. Sherry can simply be kept at room temp.

Glad to hear about the 12% threshold. All the cheap sherry I have easy local access to are 15%.

Cooking wine is indeed cheaper and lower quality. But more importantly it is shelf-stable. You can open a bottle of cooking wine and keep it in the cupboard. The stuff is labelled “cooking wine” in the US so that it is treated as such. It probably gets around some of the tight liquor controls there.

Europe does not seem to have a product with preservatives specifically for that purpose. So you would use substandard wines for cooking. If champaign goes flat because an open bottle sat out overnight, it’s still good for risotto. But I would still chill it if I weren’t making risotto the next day. In the case at hand, I don’t want to be keeping a bottle of sherry in the fridge.

When using a whole bottle in a day, then of course there is no issue. But it takes me a year to get through a bottle of Sherry.

It depends on the level of competency of the executives. If the approach done with low frequency, feedback to upper management could trigger someone to calculate whether lost sales is worth it. If it is done on a large scale, then less competency is required for upper management to do the calculation. So the frequency of abandoned carts to have effect depends on the competency of management.

it prevents the business from functioning correctly and I think in that hypothetical scenario, you’re definitely hurting cashiers.

It’s not a boycott. You can abandon a basket in one Spar shop to send a msg then still buy the stuff at another one.

But let’s suppose it’s not just a signal but actually a boycott. To harm the cashiers the boycott would have to be on such a large scale that it causes at least one Spar shop to shut down. Do you really believe that would happen? It’s beyond unrealistic. Only 60% of the population even cares about cash. Many fewer even shop at Spar to begin with. It would be unlikely if even just 1% were to boycott on this issue. Then you have to figure that the 40% of the population who is okay with forced banking and cashless society would counter the boycott by patronising Spar when they otherwise wouldn’t. On top of that, this is not a hill Spar would die on no matter how incompetent they are. They would give in to the boycott far before closing shop.

In short, you have no chance of harming cashiers.

Giving the cashiers work to do does not “harm” them. If anything it improves their job security for them to have more work to do. They get paid the same whether it is putting back abandoned items or collecting money from shop supporters.

If the cost of unfruitful overhead labor coupled with lost sales does not change the behavior of the executives, fair enough, they are their own incompetent adversary in that case. We can setup conditions for them to make smart and favorable decisions but in the end it’s on them to make the smart decision.

It cannot be about addiction prevention especially when there is only one casino in a given area. The staff sees the faces of addicts on a regular basis, their behaviour, and emotions. This is better information than they could get from a transaction record.

Having to register is common across casinos I think.

It’s recent. In any case, I would like to find rare casinos that are free to enter anonymously.

currency has poisoned humanity,

Not sure what you mean by that.

Regarding pricing, trains are often not the cheapest. On long-haul trips airfare usually beats train fare. And on short hauls Flixbus pricing is unbeatable. Trains have their niche but for years I have quit checking train fare because of enshitification and shenanigans, making it hard to get pricing data.

I actually could not find the law. I’m a bit confused because Belgium supposedly has an exceptional open data law. But at the same time there is an EU Directive (2019/1024) which requires all member states to have an open data law. I cannot find Belgium’s implementation of this law. But in any case, Germany should have implemented the directive to ensure the data is machine readable:

Article 14
Specific high-value datasets and arrangements for publication and re-use
1.
The Commission shall adopt implementing acts laying down a list of specific high-value datasets belonging to the
categories set out in Annex I and held by public sector bodies and public undertakings among the documents to which
this Directive applies.
Such specific high-value datasets shall be:
(a) available free of charge, subject to paragraphs 3, 4 and 5;
(b) machine readable;
(c) provided via APIs; and
(d) provided as a bulk download, where relevant.
Those implementing acts may specify the arrangements for the publication and re-use of high-value datasets. Such
arrangements shall be compatible with open standard licences.
The arrangements may include terms applicable to re-use, formats of data and metadata and technical arrangements for
dissemination. Investments made by the Member States in open data approaches, such as investments into the
development and roll-out of certain standards, shall be taken into account and balanced against the potential benefits
from inclusion in the list.
Those implementing acts shall be adopted in accordance with the examination procedure referred to in Article 16(2).
The Commission shall adopt implementing acts laying down a list of specific high-value datasets belonging to the
categories set out in Annex I and held by public sector bodies and public undertakings among the documents to which
this Directive applies.
Such specific high-value datasets shall be:
(a) available free of charge, subject to paragraphs 3, 4 and 5;
(b) machine readable;
(c) provided via APIs; and
(d) provided as a bulk download, where relevant.
Those implementing acts may specify the arrangements for the publication and re-use of high-value datasets. Such
arrangements shall be compatible with open standard licences.
The arrangements may include terms applicable to re-use, formats of data and metadata and technical arrangements for
dissemination. Investments made by the Member States in open data approaches, such as investments into the
development and roll-out of certain standards, shall be taken into account and balanced against the potential benefits
from inclusion in the list.
Those implementing acts shall be adopted in accordance with the examination procedure referred to in Article 16(2).

(shitty paste but readable enough)