coffeeClean OP , 3 months ago to DeGoogle Yourself in motivation to deGoogle: Creditors can lock your Android remotely if you are delinquent.

If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.

Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.

Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.

#WarOnCash

activistPnk Mod , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Individual Climate Action in Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a wiki list of every action we as a society/individual can take against climate change?

It would be more useful to separate individual actions from collective actions. If I want to know what /I can do now/ to ensure I’m doing all I can, the collective stuff is just clutter.

Switch to Ecosia

Ecosia looks like a greenwash to me:

• Microsoft syndicate
  • MS partnered with the absolute worst of the worst oil companies to help them find places to drill for oil (#Chevron and #ExxonMobil) which also feeds the republican party and climate denial lobbyists
• Patronizes Amazon for hosting (it’s hard to be more evil than Amazon)
• Reverse proxies through Cloudflare who then pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs (see ¶9).. not to mention being responsible for compromising the privacy of everyone in the world while enshitifying 30% of the web.
• Forces use of Paypal so they can sell swag, yet Paypal was caught under estimating their CO₂ footprint by something like 4000%.
• Ties to Google, who helps Total Oil find places to dig for oil.

The list just goes on and on... And Ecosia hopes planting some trees will somehow offset the damage of their own existence. Not even close. Mojeek does less environmental harm by far.

Prioritize transit over cars

W.r.t. individual actions public transport doesn’t improve much because public transport systems are also quite harmful. Bicycles are the answer here. I had to take the car → tram step because it’s psychologically harder to make the big change to bicycle. But then eventually realized I could skip the wait at stops by going to bicycle. I wish I had been faster to upgrade from tram to bicycle.

Ride your bicycle instead of the car

Ah, so you had that already.. that’s the problem with this list. I guess the public transport prioritization was a collective action.

-More widespread use of contactless payments

Cash is better for the environment. The #WarOnCash is giving far too much power to banks, who also have a huge CO₂ footprint that shadows what the armored trucks do. Those banks are dumping huge amounts of money into oil companies -- see the Banking on Climate Chaos report. And see the environmental abuses column on this page. The best move is to use cash for everything.

-Require all office work to be done from home for as much as possible

Suppose it’s the middle of winter or middle of summer and 1000 employees work in an insulated energy efficient commercial building. Sending 1000 people home to heat or cool 1000 uninsulated homes is not favorable, even if those homes have heat pumps. Teleworking likely only makes sense during moderate climate times of the year.

-Improve insulation in older buildings

Perhaps a rule that employees who live in a passive home or heavily insulated home can telework all year long would inspire that.

Increase energy efficient standards with new houses with solar panels mandatory

I heard Belgium has mandated that all new builds must be a passive, meaning the not just insulated but designed with big south facing windows and everything necessary to not even need a heating or cooling system. They go as far as not even allowing a windowsill to act as a thermal bridge. Whereas in much of the US people haven’t even heard the term passive house. I spoke to a real estate agent who never heard of a passive house but he was confident that no such house existed in his state.

Someone living in a significantly sized city in the US could not find a single roofer who could install a vegetated roof. So what do you do there? Ideally roofers would get asked for a vegetated roof often enough that they come to realize they should adapt.

activistPnk , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Ask Solarpunk in Tipping when prompted: yay or nay?

Tipping via terminal → NEVER. Even if you get table service.

Rationale:

1. There is a #WarOnCash underway. So even if you make the ethically absent minded decision to pay for your food electronically, the least you can do is pay the tip in cash. (the war on cash is war on privacy)
2. Electronic tips are also subject to siphoning off by banks. When you tip by card, you also tip Visa, Mastercard, or whatever scumbag credit network is in play because their fee is a percentage of the whole transaction. The electronic transaction may be free to you but it’s not free to the business. I don’t know if the restaurant pays the whole fee and transfers 100% of the tip to the server, or if the server shares the hit. But if this is not McDonalds but some small local business, it’s better to give the full amount to the business anyway.
3. Data protection: when you tip electronically, that creates a record not just attached to you but to the server. If you respect /their/ privacy by way of data minimization, you tip in cash.
4. Environmental protection: banks are lousy for the environment. (ref: Banking on Climate Chaos and bank blacklist)
5. Terminal tipping is a swindle (esp. in Europe). Tipping is not only optional in the most pure meaning of the word (not expected), but tipping amounts are lower in Europe meant purely to indicate service quality. Even a tip of €1 is a complement. But terminals suggest American proportions (e.g. 20%). It’s a scam. I think I’ve only seen this in tourist traps. The ownership is happy to make their staff happy by pushing a tip request in a way that deceives the public into thinking it’s out of their hands.. that the technology is asking for the tip. This fucked up scam is training restaurant patrons to overtip w.r.t. the culture (a culture that the locals don’t want to drift into Americanism). In the US it’s not exactly a swindle, but you have less control over the amount nonetheless. Sure most people like the math-free convenience but IMO that does not justify it. And certainly the ~15—25% amounts are excessive when there was no table service.
6. Sometimes servers pool their tips to then tip a portion to the kitchen staff who did well enough to make the servers look good. Cash tips make that go smoothly. I was once in a rare situation where I needed to pay by card and I also wanted cash back. The server explained to me they do not give cash back because of that tip pooling that they do, saying that sometimes they do not get enough cash tips to properly treat the kitchen staff.

I think your main question is whether to tip or not. But it’s an easy snap decision to always tap NO on the terminals. In the days where you get a receipt to sign, on the tip line I would always write “cash”. (not just signal to the server but to also prevent a malicious server from turning a “0” into a “10”)

In any case, you still need to decide whether to tip at all. I would say generally: no table service + it’s pickup (not delivery)→ no tip. But as others said, case-by-case basis. Maybe there’s a partially full tip jar you can toss a dime or nickel into and staff just hears a /ping/.

activistPnk OP , 7 months ago to Shoplifting in When I /almost/ reported a shoplifter (non-food)

Perhaps you’re right but this would not influence my boycotts. My rationale for considering Lidl small is that their per-shop inventory is small with a narrow range of products, which I assume implies they move less product compared to huge stores like Carrefour Market and Delhaize. Carrefour and Delhaize are not so tight on real estate that they have to rotate non-food inventory the way Lidl & Aldi do.

I direct my boycotts to the relatively worst players. For me that’s Carrefour & Delhaize. Rationale:

• Delhaize is under an organized boycott
• Delhaize’s website blocks Tor users
• Delhaize has a privacy-offending loyalty card which ties the cost of privacy to food
• Delhaize’s self-scan option is not offered to cash payers (#WarOnCash)
• Carrefour’s website blocks Tor users
• Carrefour has a privacy-offending loyalty card which ties the cost of privacy to food
• Carrefour’s self-scan option is no longer offered to cash payers

If I were to see a shoplift at one of the above boycotted stores, I’d let it happen. But that’s hypothetical because I’m never in the shops I boycott.

Lidl and Aldi come out ahead ethically. Lidl does have a loyalty program that affects food prices but that in itself is not enough to condemn them against Carrefour & Delhaize. OTOH Lidl has the “zero waste” program. When food reaches the day of expiry, the price for the package becomes a flat 12—50¢ regardless of the weight/size. That’s so cheap it’s almost like shoplifting (but legit). If you notice something expires today as you stand in line and there is no “zero waste” sticker, you simply tell the cashier and they give it the zero waste price. It’s a good way to reduce food waste. That’s not mere appearances… that is progressive. Lidl is also easy going about returns.

I won’t participate in the loyalty programs that keep a DB on me, so I avoid products that have a Lidl Plus promo and call it fair enough.