Shit… sounds about right.

Although the /water is hot enough/ scenario could be addressed mechanically: bigger water tank, lower heating element raised and the heat pump heating the bottom exclusively where it could /always/ add heat because it would never be hot enough at the bottom.

(edit) after some thought, it would superficially make sense to get a factory water heater (tank) and not tamper with it at all. Just have a PV-powered heat pump heat water before it enters the stock water heater (in a tank or coil). Thus there could be 2 heat pumps (but for economy the stock tank would just be a simple non-heat pump type). I guess this is still a dead idea anyway if it’s true that a PV cannot simply directly connect to a compressor.

Would the materials have much more of a footprint than geothermal installations? Because that slight 7° difference between below ground temp and above ground temps apparently justifies the labor, materials, and power to the circulators for harvesting geothermal energy. So this seems to be the same but adding a cherry on top – incorporating a heat pump to add to the energy of a geothermal system.

Because of Google’s DoS attack, those of us in the open free world cannot reach Youtube. So would someone please explain the concept in text?

Is this it? → https://utahforge.com/2022/12/30/did-you-know-that-scottish-clubbers-use-dance-beat-to-generate-heat/

Seems like a great idea. Like using the body heat to boost geothermals.

Someone plz tell Massive Attack about this. Massive Attack has gone gung-ho on eco-friendly festivals (in places inaccessible by car). They might want to throw some indoor events with this tech.

(edit) from the article:

“An experienced DJ could get up to 600 watts with the right song at the right time.”

So IIUC that’s like ~1½ solar panels getting a full dose of UV, correct? I guess that’s not much. But nonetheless not something to throw away either. So during the day solar panels on the roof could heat the ground pipes and during the night the clubbers keep the system powered.

Would be fun for that power output to be measured, and then that power measurement could be a performance index on each DJ. You pay the DJ according to the power output they can produce. Though I guess that would screw over the ambiant / trip-hop DJs.

Have they thought this through? To install batteries that are much heavier than what the bus trip requires makes the bus less efficient. Research in the UK found that a bus carrying 5 people is about as efficient as 5 cars each carrying 1 person. That’s because of the weight of the bus. So the goal should be to fill the bus with people, not excessive batteries and overhead that need not move back and forth from A to B which then requires more riders to maintain the same efficiency.

Sure they need to store energy for to smooth out peak grid consumption but probably smarter to do that with stationary batteries – if they must use batteries. Another way to store energy: pump water to the top of a mountain and open a dam that turns a hydro turbine when they need the energy back.

from the article:

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism.

Seems like a stretch. Even if they can attribute chronic absenteeism to air pollution and keep a straight face, moving the pollution of a fleet of buses that makes 2 trips/day from the street to the power plant isn’t going to change the absenteeism by reducing asthma. This claim only signals a bit of desperation to get support.

Well that depends on how equipped you are. One cool thing about compressors is you can straight up connect a PV directly to a compressor with no voltage regulators or anything. So if you have a simple setup like that, I can see up front cost effectiveness in storing ice. But if you already have batteries, and thus voltage regulators and all the costly intermediate components to make that possible, then I would agree… I might rather store it in lead acid batteries as that would be more versatile.

Sounds like they would do well in Arizona, where the air is dry. IIUC swamp coolers were very popular in Arizona until ~20 years ago when temps increased so much that swamp coolers could not make enough difference (this is largely because more and more land became concrete, which reduced the effect of evaporative cooling the land mass). So a/c became more popular in AZ IIUC. But the dry air would still be dry.

Great basic concept but I think I would benefit more for the stored cooling going toward ice cubes for mojitos.

I don’t imagine that a single family dwelling would benefit from the extra complexity of adding cold water pipes in all the floors of the house. Probably makes more sense for apartment buildings (or perhaps homes that already have hydrothermal floors for heating).

Consider this excerpt:

When the grid is extremely stressed, utility companies are sometimes forced to shut off electricity supply to some areas, leaving people there without power when they need it most. Technologies that can adjust to meet the grid’s needs could help reduce reliance on these rolling blackouts.

So grid-powered a/c can give the grid relief at peak times with this tech.

But indeed this tech on a PV-powered compressor seems sketchy. There are probably moments when the sun is hitting hard but the temp has not climbed up yet (sunrise) in which case it would be useful to store the energy. But I’m struggling to understand how the complexity of the system would be justified considering the overall efficiency is reduced as well. I wonder what proportion of time this system would be working in storage mode. If sunrise is 9am and peak heat is 2pm, maybe there’s ~2—4 hours of storage time potential.

OTOH, consider someone with a slightly underpowered PV. Maybe the energy storage can compensate for peak heat times when the PV output may be insufficient. Perhaps it would enable homeowners to spend less on PV panels.

That’s the same portal that they expected us to use to report what a shit show GDPR enforcement has been the past 4 years. The irony was the site demanded more information than necessary – thus the site asking how is the GDPR going was itself infringing on data minimisation. It’s fussy about who hosts the email address they force you to disclose. I eventually got an account after revealing more than I wanted to and then the JavaScript doc submission app gave vague errors anyway and could not be used. It also forces periodic password changes which seems a bit over the top for this sort of mission.

tl;dr: not everyone can have their say. Only some people.

fwiw, here is an emacs version:

https://codeberg.org/martianh/lem.el#headline-11

I think what would be most useful would be a usenet→lemmy gateway, so that rich catalog of usenet clients can be leveraged on Lemmy.

I said it was unlikely to change, because there’s little profit in catering to such the niche crowd of cash-only tourists with incompatible cards who also

^ this is a stark good example of endorsement of marginalisation. You identify a group as “niche” and say it’s okay to fuck them over because they are a minority.

didn’t think to pick up foreign cash at home.

What an absurd attempt to declare ATMs redundant. You cannot just walk through the airport with €10k and expect no problems or questions asked. You cannot carry that around with you and claim you have the same security than if don’t. Some will go as far as to only use ATMs inside casinos because they rightfully have concern for security just along the road between the casino and external ATM.

Also, not offering a specific service to anyone isn’t “marginalizing”.

Of course it is. Discriminating against a demographic of people is obviously marginalisation.

I don’t marginalize black people by not cutting their hair, because I don’t cut anyone’s hair…

This is a fallacy of bad analogy. If you don’t cut anyone’s hair you are not faced with treating different hair clients differently. Unlike ATMs which are treating different demographics of people differently.

Seems like the US bank should make a new partnership then? It’s weird you place the onus of this entirely on the destination bank instead of your own.

It’s weird to rationalise the consequences of elimination of competition as something other than antitrust, and then misplace the onus on consumers and external banks who are the ones disadvantaged by the loss of competition as if there is no cost to that. It’s somewhat like another manifestation of victim blame. The power imbalance inherently makes negotiation unfavorable for those burdened by the monopoly. It also intensifies the damage done by the monopoly. If all banks negotiate a deal with Geldmaat, Geldmaat’s sparse competition (which only exists in some cities but not others) is not interesting for foreign banks to negotiate with.

Well no, it’s not all about getting cash. Or at least, that’s not the message you’ve been sending, from all your exceptions and problems.

Of course it is. The problem is for me to define and describe. And I have described a problem increasingly broken cash retrieval infrastructure. You saying “use a card” is absolutely not relevant to the problem. It’s an attempt to undermine the discussion of the problem as described.

It’s about getting cash while on vacation (no long-term stay)

It does not matter how long the stay is. ATM monopoly X treats people Y poorly no matter how long they are visiting.

without traveling to a specific foreign exchange machine/office (has to be within the small town you’re staying in)

Don’t try to muddy the waters because you’ve failed to defend the increasing enshitification of the status quo. FX offices are a different service with different costs serving a different workflow and cannot replace ATMs because they rely on assumptions about the sending bank that ATMs do not. Not to mention hours of operation and availability differences.

or bringing foreign currency from home (something you didn’t respond to),

That doesn’t need a response because it fails to replace ATMs. That option always existed independent from ATMs and still remains less popular than ATMs for countless reasons. To suggest OTC cash exchange is to disregard fees and various offerings by different banks. A bank with zero markup exchange on their card at an ATM will not typically give you that zero markup when you appear in person with cash.

There are more methods of payment or ways to get goods and services than in 2015.

You can have all the smartphone frills you want. QR codes, apps, NFC, … all useless to those who grok privacy. All the privacy-naive cashless options are rich for sure. There is no shortage of innovations to get your data. But when you break ATMs, you break privacy. All these bullshit options do not serve as a replacement for people who are not privacy-naive.

For Dutch people, that doesn’t matter at all, since to them, all those machines were exactly the same for many years,

This is a common theme in your messaging… that it’s okay to marginalise demographics of people you are not in… that it’s their problem for not being in your marginalisation-free demographic.

I’m not fully sure on what rates different banks used to charge foreign accounts, maybe that was different.

Different banks have different partnership agreements with US banking networks. I’m sure it’s a shit show now that competition is gone. Some US banks simply eat the ATM fee for their customers and some do not. It’s another loss of options. Some people probably have to start paying a fee once their bank’s partnership with SNS (for example) becomes useless.

But for some reason, you have a burning need to implement one specific solution (cashback) in favour of all the others. Why? What is the core of your issue?

It’s all about getting cash because electronic payment cannot replace cash from a privacy standpoint. I expect to pay cash for alcohol and marijuana. I also expect to pay cash for everything else because privacy matters. You can name off all the fancy new electronic options you want – they do not replace cash. Cash is how Wikileaks survived when the banks blocked payments to them. Not even cryptocurrency can replace cash (though it comes the closest to being a viable alternative). Anonymous prepaid cards don’t likely exist in Netherlands, and they are not likely as free as cash transactions and would at least have the waste of expiration and unspent funds. So still lousy compared to decentralised ATMs that work.

Trading one good option for a dozen shitty inferior options that tie you to electronic records and limit your control is a poor trade-off. It’s clearly worse than it was 2015.

Meanwhile, you’re shouting things have gotten much worse, when they clearly haven’t:

Clearly they have. Ten years ago when an ATM tells you to fuck off, you could just walk a block or two down the street to an ATM by a different operator. That choice was taken away from us in the past few years. And it’s getting worse. Independent ATMs are getting boarded up and mothballed. The trend of banks leaving the ATM business and consolidating into a monopoly is spreading. We have lost ATM diversity and competition. And there are fewer of them. If you are in a small city with only Geldmaats and Geldmaat decides to marginalise you, you’re fucked. That was not a problem 10 yrs ago.

It’s unclear how you are not grasping that fewer options means less autonomy. Fewer players implies power imbalance. Monopolies are a bad idea in general not just because power becomes centralised but also because our data becomes centralised and consequently centrally vulnerable along with being exposed to centralised mishandling.

So you say I shouldnt beleieve the news

That’s not what I said. Read your own quote. Sensational penalty figures are irrelevant. I gave you the source of the raw unadulterated data with stats. If you want to ignore that and have the media tell you what they think you should find relevant, you are free to do so. But this is why you are misinformed about GDPR enforcement. That, and your anecdotal experience which does not even test GDPR enforcement.

It really seems that this is a very you-problem,

Victim blame is really fucked up here. ATMs are violating the GDPR by making use of undisclosed automatic decision making. Only pushovers blindly accept that the ATM is serving them well when some AI algo decides you are not profitable, or whatever… we actually don’t even get the benefit of knowing what that non-transparent algo is basing its decisions on. It’s really a dick move to then say to those rejected by that AI processing are themselves the problem. People rejected by that machine aren’t even told what they need to do to not be rejected.

and you’ve decided you want a solution that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen here.

You’re not paying attention. The fix exists: shops like SPAR and Aldi give cashback. The purpose of the thread is to crowdsource information that is undisclosed. It’s unclear exactly which SPAR locations outside UK supports cashback, and who else does. In this shitshow of a hunt for criminals causing collateral damage to lawful citizens, we need options. And we need them documented.

Oh, right I forgot the EU controls that. The EU limits those fees by law. Outside the EU the free market yields fees of ~3—5%. It’s still a shit show of cash payers subsidising card payers in the end, helping the consumers who reduce our privacy by supporting the war on cash.

You linked to a comment, and I don’t see an article there, but maybe I’m not noticing something.

That comment is the source. It is now your job (if you choose to accept it), to chase that up, ask the source for their source, and investigate until you are satisfied. Or give up. You have the source to do what you want with it. But you can’t reasonably claim the source was not given.

I’m not going to do an investigation for you. Do your own homework. You are the sole judge for the standard of evidence you seek. I could not act your behalf even if I wanted to.

Afaik GDPR applies to EU citizens worldwide, not expats living in the EU.

The GDPR covers EU citizens worldwide and also everyone in Europe regardless of citizenship (expats and even 1-day tourists passing through). That doesn’t mean you have a functional enforcement infrastructure when shit falls apart. The system isn’t even fully operational inside the EU for EU citizens facing EU companies. Enforcement is a shit show. Absolutely laughable to think someone can return to the US and demand GDPR protection on their EU transactions. It’s technically covered but there is no long-arm jurisdiction that would effectively lead to a fine on a US bank. No teeth. These rules are just for show. The EU has rubber-stamped the US as “adequate” w.r.t the GDPR likely for political reasons / trade relations, but it’s a joke. It would be naive to put stock in that.

(edit) What do you even expect to happen in this bizarre fantasy where you think you have all the benefits the GDPR attempts/pretends to deliver? That a US card holder would call their US bank and say “delete those transactions where I was drinking at a bar in the EU”? Even wholly within Europe, the bank has a legal obligation to retain that data. You cannot willy nilly make an art.17 req. and expect satisfaction of your demand. Your art.17 request to delete your speeding ticket will just be laughed at. With banking transactions you have an expectation that EU banks keep that data but does not needlessly share it. Try demanding a non-EU bank tag all your EU transactions and block them from sharing. Your demand will be laughed at (despite being technically valid). Then to come into this forum and tell people they can rely on non-EU banks not sharing EU-based transactions is perversely reckless.

I really hope no one would actually believe your bullshit. It’s dangerous to mislead people to think they have privacy safeguards they can rely on when they do not.

GDPR enforcement works, it’s not a quick process, but companies gets fines all the time for that, if you follow related news.

Nonsense. Forget the news, they just sensationalise the fine amounts. Have a look at https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ to get the real data. Look at the fines per month stats. It’s at the bottom of the stats page. An embarrassment.

it’s not a quick process,

The EDPB published the average times from submission to fine per member state last year. When i say all the violations have been mothballed, it means they have sat more than double the average processing time. They sat for years – so long that the benefit of action has diminished and unrecovered damage is history.

I regularly request deletion of my data from websites, and never been refused that.

That is not a test of GDPR enforcement. That is simply data controllers complying voluntarily.

A data controller sought out my sensitive personal data without my consent, collected it from another data controller who distributed it without my consent, used that info to send even more sensitive info outside the EU to a surveillance advertiser, and neither of them informed me of the collection and processing. When I discovered it, the acquiring data controller ignored my repeated article 17 requests. This is the most perverse abuse you can have in the right to erasure category. Then the DPA mothballed what was an easy open-shut case.

Different people pay different fees. Even “basic” accounts are non-free in Europe. But I believe what daddy32 has in mind is the extortionate ~3-5% fee charged to the merchants by the card networks. Consumers are oblivious to that but they pay it one way or another. The visa/mc merchant agreements also bar merchants from surcharging card payers, which further conceals the fee. So the cost gets factored in. The only practical way to escape it is for the merchant to be a cash-only shop. Which btw was just banned in Belgium. Shops are now /forced/ to accept electronic payment and effectively pass on all those fees to all consumers.

By paying in cash, you at least reduce the fees the merchant pays on your transaction, which helps all consumers. When you pay by card, you effectively force other consumers to subsidise the fees you generate.

The source is the article I linked. I would love to see the author to get that story published by a credible publisher because that story really needs widespread exposure.

It likely was the US. And if that same US card holder were to do their alcohol consumption in the EU, I would like to see them return home and demand their GDPR right to have that information not leaked all over the place and abused. Such an attempt would be laughable.

Even inside the EU, GDPR enforcement is a bit of a shit show. It’s not something you can rely on. I’ve reported dozens of blatant GDPR violations that are simple, stark, with solid evidence and would be trivially easy to enforce yet they just get moth balled. They enforce a few token cases to make it look like the GDPR is working well. I’ve seen enough to know it’s a terrible idea to rely on the GDPR. Especially with banks. Data protection authorities are turning a blind eye to banks. They are scared of them for some reason. It’s good that the GDPR is at least in place, but a bit of street wisdom is still absolutely essential in the EU.

Even in some hypothetical utopia where the GDPR is thoroughly enforced and adhered to, there is nothing in that GDPR to empower consumers who are disempowered by forced banking. It would take one hell of a brilliant lawyer to effectively argue that cash elimination violates the data minimisation principle. If a bank decides they don’t want you donating to Wikileaks, or that they want to freeze your account because your ID card expired, that is entirely outside the purview of GDPR rules.

Get a Dutch bank account, and fix your EU-wide problems. It takes all of 10 minutes

If a tourist from outside the EU attempts to open a normal bank account they will vary likely be refused. Banks want to see that you are doing business locally and their KYC/AML needles go off the charts with this kind of rationale which then creates a reporting burden. But if a bank is exceptionally flexible, I’m highly skeptical that they can have an account open with bank card in hand in 10 minutes. It would likely take much more time than they want encroaching on their vacation time. The fees are also a problem because many European banks have annual fees to compensate their overhead.

Then how do they fund it?

If a tourist is refused a normal account (which I find likely), they can demand a “basic” account which cannot legally be refused (though most tourists would not know about that nuance). But a basic account is especially crippled to not accept cash deposits. So the consumer cannot make an ATM withdrawal to then fund the account. And even if it’s a non-basic account, they can do that in principle but if the ATM works for them why are they opening a euro account to begin with?

Money transfers are extremely expensive for consumers in some countries (e.g. the US). $40-50 per transfer is typical in the US, plus ~3% for the currency conversion. Not even all banks support international transfers. There are countless small credit unions in the US and some have no intermediary agreement with a SWIFT bank to be able to offer a SWIFT transfer service.

Then when they leave the eurozone the money sits idle in an account that eats away at it. So they have the burden of closing it, or wasting whatever they cannot withdraw.

If you still think the idea is viable, you might bring that idea to the debate going on over whether Belgium should bring back more ATMs for tourists. See if they like the idea of tourists opening accounts for periodic visits.

BTW, Denmark is a disaster for getting an account open. You have to prove having a legal right to live there at the commune, then you have to wait 30 days for a social security number. Banks will not talk to you without that number. None of those steps can be done in advance via mail. People must start the process in person. It might be amusing to appear at a Danish bank without residency and demand your EU right to a basic account. I would guess they are non-compliant on that.

The Dutch Geldmaat is already a mandated thing

Apparently they are mandated to exist, not to actually function and serve all comers. The Geldmaats can apparently refuse service if they want because I’ve seen them use that power.