How can you be so naive as to think money in the bank is yours? That’s not /your/ money in the bank. It’s the bank’s money. There is an IOU from the bank to you.

Same with cash money. It’s no longer backed by gold reserves. It’s backed by nothing. All you have is /trust/; just like gift cards. Have look at what’s printed on US dollar banknotes. It’s spelled out for you.

You can exchange your pesos to euros. Can you do the same with your pokemon cards?

Of course. Just as I bought the gift cards with euros, the person on the other side of the transaction received euros for the gift cards. I could play either role depending on what I am starting with.

Of course gift cards are money. You can’t buy a burger in Germany with Mexican pesos either. But Mexican pesos don’t cease to be money on the basis that it’s not usable everywhere for everything.

Note as well you may be able to buy a burger at the Ikea cafeteria using an Ikea gift card. Haven’t tried it, but nonetheless it would be a shitty test for deciding whether to call it money.

PlayStation gift card, Nintendo gift card, Spotify gift card, etc. The sky is the limit.

That’s money. They exist to buy stuff. And when it expires, it’s money expiring. It’s of course a swindle.

You cannot spend a cake, it still has a point though.

indeed, because a cake is not money. Unlike gift cards, which function strictly as money.

Edit: “phone credit” Is it a for a real company, or for a burner kind of phone?

Not sure what you’re trying to ask but burner phones were banned in Belgium around ~10 years ago. All GSM cards must be registered to a gov-issued ID.

Why would you want a gift card that is not money? If you can’t spend it, what’s the point?

Did you eventually get your answer?

I don’t have a concrete answer so I did not respond when I first saw your post. When there is a cross-border scenario within the EU, data subjects have the right to choose whether to file locally or in the remote country. And generally if two SAs are working together on the case, the data subject can designate which country is the lead supervisory authority. I don’t imagine that this aspect would change when the UK is involved as the UK’s GDPR closely mirrors the EU one.

I’m confused by the relationship between your 1st and 2nd sentence. Your 1st sentence is about making a long stop and your 2nd is about taking an indirect route.

An SNCB worker told me the EU law which allows people to stop at a station along their route and take a break and return to the itinerary has been eliminated. So we no longer have that right under EU law but you seem to be saying Belgium gives passengers the right to stop when travelling within Belgium, correct?

About the app… I have no clue. Google maps with public transport option on?

I should clarify that I would never download an app from Google playstore or use Google Maps (or any google service). I was asking for tools (or “apps”) that can be run using a browser (most websites are actually javascript apps these days). And I would be open to f-droid apps or other free software.

Anyway, since the EU law was dropped my hunt for a resource that lets me pin a waypoint but not the destination is somewhat moot. Although perhaps still interesting in light of the Belgian law you mention.

Most legit providers offer filter rules you can configure as you need.

Filters are for email post-delivery. By the time a server is executing your filter instructions, Microsoft’s server has already delivered the message and disconnected. It’s too late at that point. If some rare mail service were to bounce a message based on user-specified filters, it would have to be after the msg has already been delivered. This would risk “backscatter”, whereby the bounced response attempts to connect to the /perceived/ sending server, which could be incorrect. And even if it is correct, the sending server may not accept the bounced msg.

The configuration I describe can only competently be done on the server and it necessarily must be the same behavior for all users on that server because the refusal happens before the sending server even has a chance to send an SMTP “RCPT TO” line.

Unless you are intentionally finding services that do not use M$ infrastructure then you risk losing a lot of access.

It would be senders who lose access. I’m already happy to not connect to surveillance advertisers. The idea is that users on surveillance ad platforms lose access so they cannot deliver to my inbox.

Any email service could be configured to block Microsoft.

Indeed, whoever controls the server could do that. But who does? I don’t have an always-on WAN-facing machine, so I am interested in finding an email provider who does the blocking.

I’m not sure why you want to do that at the platform level though. That’s a great way to not have delivered legitimate email traffic.

Microsoft is a surveillance advertiser who I boycott. I do not want to feed MS’s ad machine. For outbound mail, I can do an MX lookup first and only send email to non-MS non-Google recipients, but that’s not reliable because some recipients mask their email providers using a firewall like barracuda networks. So when such users try to email me, I would like their email to be refused.

About blocking “legit” traffic, MS does that anyway. I’ve seen MS reject RFC-compliant non-spam email 1st hand. I am happy to reciprocate.

Thanks! IIUC (from a machine translation), there is no code of “good administrative” conduct for Germany:

Administrative Procedure Act (VwVfG) § 10 Non-formal nature of the administrative procedure The administrative procedure is not bound to specific forms unless there are special legal provisions for the form of the procedure. It is simple, practical and quick to carry out.

I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, it’s not great that they have the liberty of writing a vague or minimal standard for themselves. But at least you can hold them to their own standard. And in situations where there is no standard in place, you can argue that your CFREU Art.41 rights are generally undermined.

A good judge would treat an unwritten standard in favor of the complainant. There is a legal concept in contract law that says the benefit of vague or ambiguous terms in a contract goes to the party who did not draft the contract. This principle punishes the side who had the advantage of writing the contract for their negligence. Hopefully a similar concept would be considered in the case of good administration. Not sure if this principle exists in Europe or how realistic that is.

I have encountered several cases where a Belgian administrative office violated the Belgian standards. In principle I can escalate a complaint on that basis. I would not consider this useless.