I don’t know. I might have to try to track one down since I currently have devices I cannot control easily.

Good point. The claim to the contrary came from:

“Gerrit Stehle, Managing Director of Elephant & Castle IP GmbH, wants to raise the regulatory cash tracking in Germany to a new level.”

Certainly someone who is biased.

Is there an IR receiver or something we’d need?

Woah, I’m glad you asked. I have an Iguana USB IR transceiver which runs on FOSS.

It has an IR sensor which can record remote control signals. But the project has quit! No idea if there is a competitor, but given their rationale (slow sales) I guess not. Wow… that sucks. I wonder if they just had bad marketing. Instead of targetting people like me who use the device to control a decreasingly popular MythTV rig, they could have targetted governments and NGOs with an interest in e-waste salvage operations. I just cloned their repo and fetched their last software release since the days are numbered.

A city that accummulates a massive collection like that could hire someone to record the signals of all those remotes and enter as much data as possible. Then the stash could help salvage appliances that would become e-waste worldwide, as opposed to just those in that city.

There are RCs like this with no name, no model, no part number… just totally unidentified (should be illegal):

So ideally the DB would also store pics of them.

I don’t have it in front of me but it’s the cylindrical fabric speaker that looks like this:

https://www.cravingtech.com/best-alexa-smart-speaker-for-the-price-with-great-sound-bass-amazon-echo-3rd-gen-2019-review.html

That will be nice if I can put Lineage OS on it. Though I have to wonder how useful a headless unit could be… if I could get a remote display on my PC that would be cool.

Data subjects have a right to complain under art.77 to the extent their own data is involved. But I am not a data subject in this case.

I could still complain, but it would not have the force of art.77. It would basically be a request that the DPA voluntarily investigate in an “ex officio” capacity – on the DPAs own initiative (if they care to do so). I’ve done that before and the DPA simply ignored the complaint. I did not even get an acknowledgement.

Indeed that was why I called it out. To stress what shit is happening despite the GDPR. Violations are rampant and enforcement is sparse.

In the end we need an easily readable PDF with bookmarks (aka contents sidebar). I suppose in git it would be a markdown or LaTeX doc which can then be compiled into something civilians can handle.

I have no idea what chaos it must be for the EU to write law in 15+ different languages.

Yeah it would make sense to start small and local. A large high-level gov would likely be risk averse.

I wonder if it could be somewhat forced by using open data law, which I suppose would only work if the information is collected to begin with. Then the open data request would require them to put the data in a machine-readable format (JSON or XML).

You’ll need to work out a system of responsibility for accurately recording the data.

Politicians are full of shenanigans. They want to face voters and say they are doing right by the voter. Then they want to face corps like Google and reassure them that their interests are respected. They must love being able to say different things to different audiences. The representative would ultimately need to decide how to represent themselves. The reps vote would just be a simple straight fact, but the more granular things like who gets credit for each phrase/clause could be tricky. An admin getting it wrong would have consequences. So indeed you’re right the devil is in the details.

Where is the vegan lobby in all of this? Did they not fight back? I would gladly sign a petition that forces the meat industry to put pics of animals on all processed foods where ingredients are not obvious from the cover, like on ramen noodles.

The move would have merit if there were a real issue of confusion in the marketplace. But indeed caving to the meat lobby is just a display of lacking democracy… not representing the people.

I would love to see a counter petition that demands ramen noodles have animal pics on the frontside.

I suspect it’s a signal that the politically hard right is in control of Europe. I recently heard Spain is currently the only notably progressive leadership in Europe at the moment.

i said a lot things in that post. What are you asking for evidence on?

You’re talking about a different law for a different purpose. There is indeed truth in advertising laws and consumer protections that prohibit deceptive practices in the marketplace. Those laws predate the law I linked, which specifically bans the practice of surchaging electronic payers even when properly disclosed. At the same time, no law prohibits surcharging cash payers given proper disclosures that circumvent misleading prices. And so the reality that we see playing out is that cash payers are forced to pay surcharges and/or penalties. This is the case with rail, buses, utilities, etc.

This is a false conclusion.

On what basis are you concluding the contrary? Neglect to extend reciprocity to cash payers is trivially verifiable. Find in the paper where the contrary is true (that there is a prohibition on cash surcharges). Can’t find it? Yes, indeed it’s not there. Because there is no statutory reciprocity in the statute the article refers to. It is therefore a true conclusion.

Apparently, some merchants have done this in the past, and this is now prohibited. But they can never charge you more than the published price if you pay cash.

You’re confusing cash with electronic payment. There is a new prohibition on surcharges for electronic payment. The same is not true of cash payment. Or do you have a source to cite proving the contrary?

To be clear, proving the absence of law is non-trivial. But if there is a protection for cash payers, I would be very interested in seeing the citation because I will use it in legal actions. I will wait while you dig that up.

But then you criticize sources linked by other while claiming you are right.

Sources exist to be scrutinised. That’s the whole point of sources – to see what information comes from where and to assess the quality of it. But in fact I saw nothing to criticize in your sources because your sources actually supported my claims by proving that dynamic pricing is in play (which is trivially verified anyway).

If you are not able to provide even a glimpse of evidence of what you say, I end this discussion.

I listed the cash options that incur penalties. You failed to prove that cash payers have a penalty-free option. You only had to find 1 possible cash option, and you failed. I cannot prove a negative. It’s your burden to prove the positive claim here. If you cannot come with a penalty-free cash payment option outside of Amsterdam, then we are indeed done here.

I’m not sure how you are not grasping this. If there is no cash penalty, the proof you need is not that dynamic pricing exists (this actually proves my point) – you need proof that cash payers can buy a future ticket from Flixbus using cash. Nothing in your linked article indicates that cash payers can avoid the penalty from the dynamic pricing that it describes. This is only possible in Amsterdam where they have a ticket machine.

The dynamic pricing is a cash penalty because cash payers are forced to buy last minute just before departure. If you approach a driver today and ask for a ticket 1—2 months in the future, they will refuse to sell you a future ticket to avoid getting stung by dynamic pricing. Exceptionally, Amsterdam residents exceptionally have a cash-accepting ticket machine for cash. The online sales does not support cash payment methods. E.g., no PaySafe card (which you can generally buy locally with cash).

Some cities have 3rd-party ticket vendors. They are independent of Flixbus and charge what they want. Commission can be as high as €20 for a ticket that costs €5… depending on what the 3rd party charges.

I mentioned Flixbus in another comment (this thread), where the cost can be in excess of 4 times as high.

Also consider SNCF, where a ouigo ticket can be as cheap as €10 online, but face-to-face sales incurs a fee that exceeds the cost of the ticket itself. I don’t think offline prices are given online in this case.

No publications AFAIK… all anecdotal. You may or may not be able to verify depending on where in Europe you are.

The purpose of the thread is to collect similar scenarios across Europe.