One annoying limitation is that the last page and a penultimate page cannot have different behavior in the picturecommand option. I thought I was fucked for ½ a day. But hacked around that by using the pagecommand and nesting \ifthenelse{\AM@page = (penultimate page №)}{\begin{picture}(0,0)\put(50,-50){…}… inside the pagecommand. Makes me wonder what’s the point of having the picturecommand. There is a picturecommand* which only executes on the 1st page, and apparently no equivalent for pagecommand – but we can test the internal variable anyway.

Someone tells me “look into \scantokens instead of rewriting to a file”. After a brief look, I have to say: No. Fucking. Way. That looks like a rabbit hole that leads to the center of the planet. No thanks… I don’t need to spend weeks more on this digging through (what looks like) the most raw low-level code that makes assembly languages look like tinker toys.

Low level TeX code really seems like a strange beast. Something you should learn in your early teens while the brain is still highly plastic. I wish I learnt it because I would better understand all the bizarre and obscure glitches I run into with LaTeX. But I think I might be past the point where benefit outweighs the pain.

Thanks for the tip. It seems to work but I have to say it’s a rough UX because the UI is really meant for a graphical browser. I could not even paste my UID and PW in to login.

For the same reason, I suppose you would love text adventure games like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where you have to come up with your action, as opposed to getting visual aids which come like a loaded question, steering you and somewhat robbing you of control.

indeed… #NeonModemOverdrive failed for me too.

So, how did you do post to lemmy.ml? Did you use cURL? If so, I would love to see the sample code.

It is exactly that.

There are ~95 pages of rights and obligations covered in EU Directive 2015/2366, as well as EC Regulation 593/2008. Have you read them, or anything else to substantiate your claim?

You’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

There is no such thing as a “wrong problem”.

You do you. This thread is not about your problems. Start your own thread if you want a different problem worked. In this thread, you can either help solve the problem at hand, or fuck off.

There was a story about a German guy insisting on paying his radio licensing fees in cash. He setup an escrow account and paid his invoices into that, so that the state could not claim he was just using cash refusal as an excuse not to pay. I don’t think I ever heard what came of the legal case.

I heard postbank was eliminated in Germany but post office banking is still an option in other countries. I doubt any post office banks stand on their own. The one I’m aware of is just a proxy for another crappy bank.

Many elderly people can’t use a smartphone so smartphone only options definitely sound like a no go.

It’s somewhat convenient that tech illiterates are in the same boat with the streetwise (who are tech saavy enough to distrust commercial tech that’s being pushed down our throats). But there are efforts to divide us. Elderly folks are getting social helpers with tech, which will shrink those resisting enshitification of everything to a population that’s easier to marginalise. I also don’t suppose it will be long before the tech illiterate elderly are no longer with us anyway.

at least in Germany companies and state are not anymore required to accept cash for invoices

Yikes. That’s a shame. There is the EC Recommendation of 22 March 2010 (2010/191/EU) which wisely states:

A debtor can discharge himself from a payment obligation by tendering euro banknotes and coins to the creditor.

I am surprised Germany has gone against that. I thought cash was loved by Germans.

Glad to hear you’re standing up for yourself, and others. And glad to hear an analog option is still possible. That’s by far the most important option. If you can do everything offline, then you can escape whatever garbage tech they try to push. Essential services like banking and utilities should always have an offline analog option.

The thesis is: what are our rights? Knowing your rights is a good idea /before/ you go off and try to solve a problem.

It may very well be that we have no useful rights and the choices are: be bullied, or find a different bully. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Other banks are garbage too, so it may be better to improve the bank you have (if possible through legal actions and exercising your rights) then to make it someone else’s problem.

you should probably just keep the money in cash

Of course. Cash would solve the problem. But creditors are refusing that now and also refusing cards at the same time. Otherwise the bank card could get cash out of the ATM and pay the creditors.

No, not anymore. They became app exclusive. Customers must become an Apple or Google patron, or just use the bank card. They also closed their shop doors and terminated their phone number. If you call them on their unpublished phone number, they insist: “email us” and they refuse to give any service over the phone. And their email goes through gmail (and no PGP key given). Paper letters are ignored. They also refuse manual transfers. The app is the sole means for transfers.

The EU has that covered as REGULATION (EU) No 260/2012 imposes 2FA.

But for me personally, I do not trust closed-source apps from surveillance advertisers running on a Google or Apple proprietary platform, no matter how well they do the 2FA. Even if the endpoint were impenetrable, I do not trust the bank itself not to snoop – in part because I do not trust the GDPR, which is scantly enforced and regularly disregarded to a laughable extent. And from the ecocide PoV, I refuse to throw away good hardware and support designed obsolescence. They can pry my old phone from my cold dead hands.

Thanks for the feedback. A couple other people also say they have no problem.

I am trapped on a 3-year old version. I could upgrade from 4.0.7 to 4.0.9, but that’s as far as I can go because 4.1.9 abandons anyone running AOS older than 6.0. So I wonder if they recently changed the map server in a way that breaks old versions.

I am also on Tor. But also tried a VPN. I doubt they would block Tor and VPNs and then also introduce blocks on both at the same time. Thought I should mention it in the remote off chance that it matters.

you can’t just scream legal tender and throw physical money at your creditor¹.

IIRC in the US it’s written simply that if you leave legal tender in the creditor’s possession, your debt is reduced by that amount regardless of what they do with it. But of course gathering evidence in that case can be dicey.

If I remember rightly you need to lodge it with the courts and then it basically prevents you from being sued as the money is there to pick up.

There was a guy in Germany who fought the forced use of electronic payment for radio licensing fees that way. He escrowed it in a blocked account so that the gov could not claim he was just looking to evade the fees. It seems like a good approach.

You’re probably right. But certainly I have seen laws that push back in situations where the party with the greatest amount of power and privilige subjects the other party to various factors outside of their control, where the law counters that to mitigate unfairness.

The GDPR exhibits this with a “fairness” clause, which the EDPB reflects on as follows:

None of that applies to my non-GDPR situation, but just an example of law that tries the shift burden of risks back onto the party with the most power. Labor law often has rules to protect workers from becoming subject to risks and factors outside of their control. In my case I need to look more at credit and debt laws, where the creditors tend to have disproportionate power. The UK’s legal tender law is one such tool to relieve debtors from the disempowerment of forced banking (which is weak where I am but there may be another mechanism).

took an action, namely leaving the country, of your own free will

It’s perhaps worth noting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights art.13:

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

That does not necessarily contradict anything you said, but I think it is a bit harsh for a creditor to make debtors choose between their human rights and satisfying their contractual obligations.

The post was composed with the understanding that different countries have different laws. It is not an attempt to practice UK law outside of the UK. It’s to get a general grasp on core legal theories and common practices and concepts.

For example, I learnt basics of contract law from Nolo. Nolo gives a good basic understanding of legal concepts and norms. Of course Nolo is not an all encompassing reference and does not cover variation from one jurisdiction to the next in detail. But I find that what I have learned from Nolo is very similar concepts span many different jurisdictions. You can imagine that if a law school were to only teach legal concepts that apply specifically in the location of the school, it would be a school of low standards, where lawyers could not easily adapt to other jurisdictions.

I don’t even know if the legal scenario at hand has a wild variation across jurisdictions. Some situations have more variation than others. I’m in the very early stages of trying to get a grasp on what question to ask. I don’t even speak the language of the laws that apply to me, so without even knowing the common concepts for the situation, searching for the relevant statutes is quite an undertaking. If there were some kind of latin jargon to describe the situation of being bound by the action of non-contracting actors, even that would help in finding my way to the precise statutes (or case law) that I need.

Talk to a lawyer, not us.

I qualify for a free lawyer since I have no income. But the agency that allocates pro bono lawyers has very narrow verification requirements (in short, I must have a certificate that proves I am in in the unemployment system). So because I am not in that system, I fall through the cracks. Which means I have to work pro se in this case.

I suspected that. It is interesting to know indeed. That is also the case in the US, where contracts cannot trump legal tender law.

But I believe I’m in a cash-unfriendly country where legal tender does not distinguish debts from points of sale and contracts trump law in this case, so I am still mainly interested in knowing the very general legal theories in contract law for situations where someone is bound by the actions of those not a party to the contract.

Another example: what if a contract required someone to obtain and maintain a mobile phone service, then later in the contract SIM registration is implemented and the obligated party cannot get service because their ID card is rejected or they don’t meet whatever KYC requirements? Hypothetical, but I am increasingly finding myself in situations where a supplier of some kind forces me to be served in some way by some other service.

Really seems off that I can be contractually obligated in a way that requires action by others. Fair enough if I have to make an effort to get served by a 3rd party, but when the effort fails I’m very annoyed that I might be accountable for the consequences.

Your client would make a difference. What you are probably seeing is the mirrored version of !tex@lemmy.sdfeu.org on lemm.ee. You cannot possibly be interacting with a non-existent community. If I post to https://linkage.ds8.zone/c/tex@lemmy.sdfeu.org, then I don’t suppose you would see it on https://lemm.ee/c/tex@lemmy.sdfeu.org.

(edit) just saw your test msg. Well, that’s interesting. Even though !tex@lemmy.sdfeu.org no longer exists, it seems the mirrored versions of it can still collaborate. I’m not sure how that works.