ciferecaNinjo

It’s disturbing to hear the UK is /again/ changing the banknotes (according to BBC WS). Does this in any way shorten any deadline to trade-in the previous notes? Will it be possible to trade in notes that are 2 generations old?

I have a couple thousand GBP banknotes. These are the previous style and no longer legal tender. I would get burnt if I tried to exchange them for my local currency because the exchange service cannot sell them (they must send them to England). I believe I can still travel to the UK and exchange them fairly legal tender at post offices, correct?

Starting with the open data EU directive:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/NIM/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L1024

I went to "national transposition" on the sidebar, expanded Belgium, and I see lots of Wallonia-specific statutes. The Brussels specific laws would be interesting but what I fetched was not a complete body of current law. It was a long list of modifications of past law along the lines of “change this word… replace that word..”, etc.

Does anyone have a link to the full current open data law? Preferably in french because that works best for machine translation.

I was startled to find this gem in EU directive 2019/1024 Art.9 ¶1:

Where possible, Member States shall facilitate the cross-linguistic search for documents, in particular by enabling metadata aggregation at Union level.

Even if you neglect the “cross-linguistic” specification, merely making public documents searchable is a huge leap of progress in the EU. And I think all member states are currently breaking that law for the most part, as we are generally forced to rely on private sector ad surveillance garbage from Google and Bing to find most public sector docs.

Sure there are a few scattered search tools for some very specific collections of documents. But most public documents are not at all indexed in any publicly administered search tool.

Of course the “cross-linguistic” specification is quite interesting because document translations are sometimes performed but the result is often not shared and even more often not searchable. E.g., for some reason a university or institution in Belgium (possibly public sector) went to the effort of creating a good English version of a big piece of the Belgian Economic Code. I was lucky to stumble into it out in the wild. Per the directive (which is hopefully transposed into national law), someone who searches for that section of Belgian economic code should get a reference to the unofficial English version along with the French and Dutch versions. But they certainly do not because the national legal statutes search site is hard-coded for just French and Dutch.

This touches on a recent question I asked. If the EU were to obtain an English version of transposed directives, in principle they should be furnishing that to the public. There’s one snag here though: the open data directive seems to exclude the EU itself from Art.9.

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

Take the anti-spam directive, for example:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32002L0058&qid=1747912567106

The website gives us the directive but makes no references to the member state’s implementations of that. It seems a bit sloppy that visitors have to try manually searching using some private-sector surveillance advertising search tool to find a member state’s version. In Belgium it’s especially a mess because many of the official websites that “publish” laws are access restricted (e.g. Tor users often denied access). Only some segments of the public can reach some websites. We have Moniteur Belge but that involves digging a law out of a large PDF that globs together many unrelated laws and publications.

According to the EC website, the EC has a duty to verify whether the member state’s version was implemented timely and correctly. Is that done in English, or does the EU have native speakers of all languages on staff doing the verification?

I ask because if there is a translation step, then the EU would perhaps have a good quality English translation of member states laws

which I would like access to. To date, I do machine translations which is tedious. And if the source language is Dutch, the translation tends to be quite poor.

Update: perhaps the biggest shit show is this site:

https://www.stradalex.com/

Visiting from a tor exit node with uMatrix installed, that site is in some kind of endless loop. No idea what kind of shitty JavaScript causes this, but it reloads itself non-stop and never renders. Opening the uMatrix UI shows 3rd party js rows popping up and disappearing faster than you can click to give perms. These people should not be allowed to do web service for legal information.

update 2

This page gives some general links to member state’s law pubs, but you are still left with having to dig around for the implementation that corresponds to the EU directive -- if you can get access.

update 3

Found something useful.. this page is openly accessible and has a “National Transposition” link. From there we can do an /advanced search/ and limit the collection to national transposition and search on 32002L0058, for example.

Then it finds no results, which seems a bit broken. But if I simply do a quick search on 32002L0058 then use the “national transposition” link on the left bar, that seems to work. But then in this test case I followed it all the way to a page that said “ Text is not available.”

In fact, “Text is not available” is what I got on 3 of 3 samples. So it’s a crapshoot. Hopefully the EC folks who verify national implementations are not relying on this same mechanism.

wtf.. we cannot simply do an NS lookup in Belgium?

$ dig @"$(tor-resolve resolver1.opendns.com)" -t ns -q europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com +tcp +nocomments +nostats +nosearch +noclass +dnssec +noauth +noquestion +nocmd

europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com. 0 TXT "Effective April 11, 2025: Due to a court order in Belgium requiring the implementation of blocking measures to prevent access within Belgium to certain domains, the OpenDNS service is not currently available to users in Belgium"

Update

Seems relevant:

Belgian Constitution Article 25:
The press is free; censorship can never be introduced; no security can be demanded from authors, publishers or printers. When the author is known and resident in Belgium, neither the publisher, the printer nor the distributor can be prosecuted.

Many member states a daft when it comes to GDPR enforcement. But there are an exceptional few member states that have a Data Protection Authority that actually does their job. E.g., in principle, I might want to file all Article 77 complaints in Norway. Of course, without living there and having no transaction there, it’s outside of the jurisdiction. OTOH, what happens when a company like Microsoft or Google abuses your data and violates the GDPR? I think MS has headquarters in multiple countries: France, Finland, Spain, Norway, Germany, etc. If I have zero confidence in the DPA for the country I am in, can it be effective to direct the GDPR to a another country if MS has a headquarters there? Is there a heirchy of headquarters whereby an ultimate top level headquarters where a corporation is most relevant?

I asked for a sheet of national stamps. They gave me prior stamps which do not have “prior” printed on them. Price was high, but I just figured the postage rates are jumping leaps and bounds. It turns out a circled 1 “①” is apparently a priority indicator.

Just a heads-up.. watch out for that. The normal stamps come in a sheet of 10 and I think it’s the head of a prime minister on those things.

“The state of government open data across the globe in 2015”

^ ok, bit old. But still, I’m surprised. Maybe Mexico does well on the basis of not having much data to share.

Intro:

“From 1 May, stricter rules on rents apply in the Brussels region. Electrical appliances including dishwashers and laptops will also have to display a repairability score. These and other changes are introduced on Mayday.…”

More info on the repairability index here. IMO this is extremely slow progress. It’s barely a drop in the ocean of what we need for rights to repair.