Couple facts according to BBC early reports:

• gunman was a registered republican
• gunman donated $15 to the dems

FWIW. Ideology could be either way based on that info. People sometimes register for the opposing party as a tactic to vote in the primaries for the weaker candidate (less likely to win). Donating to dems could either mean allegiance to dems or it could just as well be a true conservative who hates Trump (because true conservatives tend to oppose Trump as well over Trump’s disregard for antitrust situations and his sloppy spending). A Trump-hating republican would also likely register as republican to vote against Trump in the primaries.

The only thing I can think of is that my phone forces all traffic over Tor. It’s possible that wherever StreetComplete goes to fetch maps may be a Tor-hostile server, and StreetComplete does not bother to inform the user. I could try making a config exception to direct StreetComplete traffic to the clearnet. Maybe I’ll try that the next time I have an unlimited connection at my disposal.

This would be an interesting test for others to try: use SC with tor and without tor and see if there’s a difference.

AOS 5.

My area is well mapped if that’s what you’re asking. The openstreetmap.org is no longer accessible because it became a Cloudflare site, but OSMand shows that the map covers the area I was in back when I tested Street Complete while online with GPS running. That test was actually a few weeks ago, before openstreetmap.org became a restricted access website (so Cloudflare is unrelated to this particular problem).

The Geldmaat website states that debit cards need to be Maestro or Mastercard and that credit cards can be Mastercard and Visa. I’m surprised the Visa debit card worked at all in a Geldmaat, because as far as I can tell it shouldn’t.

One of the (otherwise helpless) bankers I spoke to said Visa is probably not accepted by Geldmaat. I thought the banker had to be wrong but maybe they meant to say visa debit does not work. Yet I have a receipt from a functional Geldmaat machine which says “visa debit” in a field named “app. label”. Then at the bottom of the receipt it (incorrectly) says “credit card account … credit limit …” which actually reflects the card balance.

Some point of sale terminals are said to only work with visa credit or visa debit, but then I’ve had banks tell me their cards act like what the machine wants it to be. I’m fuzzy on the details. There are situations where you have to choose “credit” or “debit” on the terminal, and the bank says I can choose credit even if it’s debit, and vice versa. So it’s hard to pin down what’s going on. I don’t even get why the distinction between the two exists at the network API level. It’s not the business of the merchant or the ATM to know those details.

I can only imagine that perhaps it’s there for casino situations. A credit card holder once went to LasVegas with a credit card from a region where gambling is illegal. One of the laws was that it’s illegal to collect on a gambling debt. So he took a cash advance on his credit card inside a casino, lost it all, then returned home and told the bank it’s a gambling debt, get lost. My understanding of the story is that he got off the hook for the debt on that basis. But I wonder if that’s why this distinction exists on the card networks.

Another theory is that credit cards have more buyer’s protections and higher fees to the merchant and so some merchants don’t like that and want to insist on debit cards. But the ATM seems like the reverse of that.

Anyway, maybe not all Geldmaat machines are the same.

I appreciate your insight. Perhaps some of the refusals is related to visa debit incompatibility.

Withdrawing money from Dutch banks is effectively free (that’s what the banks charge you for) so a commercial party putting down ATMs in public can’t make money from the vast majority of potential customers.

Well free to the customer but the ATM likely still profits. My bank eats the atm fee but they have no deal to hide the fee from the customer. So I agree to the fee, see the fee on the receipt, and the fee appears on the bank statement followed by a credit back in the amount of the fee. EU accounts probably just hide the fee from the customer otherwise ATMs would not be sustainable.

update

This page says:

You can make a cash withdrawal at every geldmaat ATM using your Maestro or Visa debit card and/or your MasterCard or Visa credit card.

(emphasis mine)

On the other hand, if they have clear signage, then the argument that “card doesn’t work for me” isn’t an ability to pay if you have a working card, but a refusal to pay.

This can also be a dicey scenario. Some foreign cards have no fees for global use, while cards not designed for foreign use can have absurdly high fees if used outside the country. I would plan on using only cards that are reasonable and perhaps carry the very costly cards for emergencies.

It’s also seems a bit haphazard that businesses only have to specify “no cash”, but not necessarily the forms of payment they take. So a customer could pull out a Diner’s Club card and find it’s not even compatible. This is another problem that would normally be easily solved with a cash option.

Your comment is mostly sensible and I appreciate your insight on the obligation to post cashless signage, but this seems a bit off:

What about the case where someone enters with bank card(s) that are in a broken state, unknown to the card holder?

What if someone enters a place that takes cash, thinking they can pay with dollars (which happens at a non-zero rate in Amsterdam), or rubies and gold? The answer is the same in both cases: that’s the customers problem.

EU law has established the definition of legal tender in the eurozone to include euro banknotes and coins. Each eurozone member state keeps its own laws as far as defining the role and purpose of legal tender (and that creates a bit of a mess, but it is what it is). I think a member state can include more forms of money as legal tender, but euro banknotes and coins are mandated by the commission to be part of the legal tender definition. So there can be little confusion about other currencies having legal tender status. There is also an EU Recommendation that legal tender be accepted on payment toward debts, and I believe running a tab and paying later must be a debt (as opposed to a point of sale). In any case, gold and rubies would not have equal standing to euro banknotes in Amsterdam.

I cannot say I put much stock into any guesswork that a broken card would be treated as if the customer brought nothing to pay with. Banks can (and often do) spontaneously disable cards at any moment without communicating to the card holder. The card may even be functional while you eat, and the bank could disable it 5 seconds before you tap the payment terminal. It could be entirely outside the card holder’s control – by an shitty anti-fraud AI mechanism (which I have been at the receiving end of lately). It would be absurdly and embarrassingly harsh for a society to treat a victim of AI like a deadbeat freeloading non-payer. I can’t say you’re wrong because I don’t know Dutch law and procedure, but it sounds like conjecture.

Sometimes the card and card holder’s bank is not even at issue. Some machines rejected my perfectly valid card in Netherlands. The logo for the payment network matched and my account was funded. Machine rejected it saying “contact your bank”. The bank said there’s nothing wrong with the account… no blocks… card should work. The bank did a deeper check and said the transaction attempts were never even transmitted to the bank – that the card processor itself decided to reject the card. So the machine that rejected my card lied, and erroneously implied the problem was on my side.

So when a card fails to pay out, that failure can potentially be entirely on the merchant side of the transaction. E.g. some merchants refuse foreign cards, which violates the terms of the Visa merchant agreement but it’s not enforced so merchants are happy to break it. And the messaging cannot be trusted. So surely as someone is in a bar or restaurant with a failing payment, there is no way to know with certainty on the spot where the fault is, amid false error messages. It requires investigation which may take some time. On top of that, some banks charge high hourly fees for investigations. This is why I’m interested in what Dutch law and procedure is in this situation.

sure, that’s all fine, but a pilot wouldn’t see anyone.

Is English your first language? The phrase “I would absolutely see a passenger who is equipped to jump as a safety threat” does not imply a visual line of sight. In this context “see” means to have a viewpoint. Pilots regularly make decisions on whether to carry a problematic passenger without actually seeing them.

look at your list - what remains if you exclude anything with >40% of boeings? not much. and even after that, it is still a lottery.

You can’t see that 10 out of 19 on that list are <40% Boeing? If you fail that step, then boycotting Boeing is indeed hopeless for you. You should also be able to use your head and derive a cutoff that’s tuned for your local options. The 40% was a good threshold for that sample 7 years ago.

That list is a very small sample of airlines worldwide. And why are you trying to draw conclusions from figures that I said were 7 years old in 1st place? The guide is not going to do your homework for you. It shows you /how/ to derive the info and how to use it. It’s not written to give precise answers when some people live in regions where many of those airlines don’t even operate.

not even selecting specific flight based on an aircraft type is going to help you, because airlines swap aircrafts routinely, same as bus operator would swap buses. bus has a problem, just take another one.

No, it is not the same as swapping buses. Bus drivers are versatile. They can drive a Saab bus just as well as a Mitsubishi. You can’t just take an arbitrary Airbus pilot and put them in a Boeing. Very few pilots are trained in both. So if you’re going to swap brands, you have to send off two pilots and bring in two others. And if your Boeing fleet is small (as my advice suggests), then you also have fewer Boeing pilots to be able to spontaneously call to duty. If you lose on the odds that a/c are not swapped, and you also lose on the odds that brands are not swapped, passengers have demanded not to fly on Boeing then they discover they boarded one, and airlines /have/ been accommodating anyway.

What a silly attempt to claim a Boeing boycott is impossible.

if something changes in the industry in will be battle behind the scenes and it will happen by airlines gradually buying more from one manufacturer at the expense of the other, not as a result of enlightened traveller’s action.

The ol’ “boycotts don’t work” claim… that never gets old, but there is always fresh evidence proving the contrary. Such as McDonald’s HQ recently buying up all the McD’s in Israel after the private owner offered free meals to Israeli solders which triggered an international boycott against the McDonald’s brand. Brand protection was important enough for McD’s to buy over 300 stores just to change the policy.

I’m trying to get my head around how you reconcile in your own head the contradiction. If someone wearing a genuine wing suit or a fake wing suit cannot be a threat, how can you simultaneously claim they are too much of a threat to get through airport security?

how do you “generally boycott boeing”? are you buying lot of aircrafts on a daily basis? 😂

Boeing is not simply an aircraft. It’s an infrastructure of aircraft, pilots, airlines, and flights.

I answered that question several years ago and it got censored on every Reddit venue it was posted to (so some of the figures would be different by now but the basic idea is the same):

(drafted in Jan.2017)

How progressive travellers can boycott Boeing and General Electric

Suppose you want to boycott Boeing. A Boeing aircraft is probably not on your shopping list, so you can’t simply scratch Boeing off your shopping list as easily as you can with a company like Dell, for example. But there are some things you can do to reduce money that ultimately feeds Boeing.

Boeing has a duopoly with Airbus (detailed on wikipedia).

Most airlines own both Boeing and Airbus products, so it would be impractical to extend the boycott to all airlines that have Boeing’s in their inventory. But there is a bias. Some airlines have a strong majority of Boeings in their fleet compared to Airbus. Here is a sampling of some of the large carriers:

I recommend boycotting airlines with a Boeing inventory over ~40%. In addition to avoiding Boeing-dominant airlines, it’s also a good idea to exclude flights on Boeing aircraft from your air travel search. Here’s how:

1. Go to itasoftware.com
2. Fill out the search form as you normally would
3. Click on “Advanced routing codes”, and noticed that a new box appears to enter outbound and return routing codes.
4. In all the advanced routing codes boxes, paste this:

/-aircraft t:703 t:707 t:70F t:70M t:717 t:721 t:722 t:727 t:72B t:72C t:72F t:72M t:72S t:72X t:72Y t:731 t:732 t:733 t:734 t:735 t:736 t:737 t:738 t:739 t:73C t:73F t:73G t:73H t:73J t:73M t:73W t:73X t:73Y t:741 t:742 t:743 t:744 t:747 t:74C t:74D t:74E t:74F t:74H t:74J t:74L t:74M t:74N t:74R t:74T t:74U t:74V t:74X t:74Y t:752 t:753 t:757 t:75F t:75M t:75T t:75W t:762 t:763 t:764 t:767 t:76F t:76W t:76X t:76Y t:772 t:773 t:777 t:77F t:77L t:77W t:788 t:789 t:B72

That will exclude all flights that make use of a Boeing aircraft from the search results. Why is that a good idea? A pilot is either a Boeing pilot or an Airbus pilot. Rarely is a pilot trained in both. Riding on a Boeing aircraft feeds Boeing pilots, who exclusively cator for Boeing products.

Commandline nerds who want to know how to derive that syntax may want to run this:

$ lynx -dump -nolist https://www.flugzeuginfo.net/table_accodes_iata_en.php | awk 'BEGIN{ORS=" ";} tolower($0) ~ /boeing/{print "t:"$1}'

Don’t forget to prefix the /-aircraft .

Why boycott Boeing and General Electric?

See the rationale chart.

Boeing has made a deal with General Electric to ensure that some Boeing aircraft can only be fitted with GE engines. It turns out that General Electric (a former ALEC member) is itself very boycott-worthy anyway because it’s involved with the same evils as Boeing. Also note that Airbus does not contribute to any of the below-illustrated problems. It will not be immediately obvious to everyone why drug testing is such a bad idea. I suggest this article for more detail.

Note the Reddit links are all bad. Reddit moderators and/or Reddit bots censored the above info in like 3 different places (including an “unpopular opinions” subreddit and most ironically the “Boycott_Boeing” subreddit also censored it). All the air fleet links are now Cloudflared… the article needs to be updated and reworked to have links reachable from the open free world.

you can’t open the plane doors during flight

On Boeing flights you don’t have to open the door – the panels simply fall off. IIUC, the only reason no one was sucked out was because everyone close to the panel wore their seatbelt.