min fine €400… yikes. I don’t see from the video how they could ID all those riders. Some of their numbers were showing… probably not all. I never heard of a “level crossing”. Apparently that means rail crossing?

I would hope they aren’t this harsh on urban cyclists running reds at street intersections.

Good news. Let’s put this to the test.

For some reason I thought Brussels had no gov, which would make petitions useless. OTOH, it was a competition. Perhaps no gov outperforms the rest of European democracies after right-leaning autocracies took power.

It should be in here:

https://refli.be/fr/lex/1994000357

AFAIK there is no English translation published.

“the non-profit that has been campaigning for years for places to swim outdoors in the capital.”

Interesting to see what an uphill battle a simple and non-controversial change is.

It’s bizarre that a liberal party politician is praising this, considering Deutsche Bank is relatively evil for anyone who is progressive. It has ties to Bank of America and heavily finances fossil fuel.

I’m a bit on the fence about whether this is a good move in Belgium. It’s an interesting experiment, but the election process is democratic because a representative is selected by the majority who they represent. This would seem to risk shifting power to those not elected, which could be regarded as a reduction to democracy.

This citizens’ council and assembly would perhaps be a great idea in the USA, where politicians are bought and owned by corporations. It would be a good hack to show corporate lobbyists the door.

“To achieve this, De Wever said Europe must invest more in artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, cybersecurity and telecom networks. Governments must also create conditions that allow innovation to flourish, he added, as “innovation is not a law of nature. Innovation requires talent and daring”.”

He may be right, but he is missing the low-hanging fruit. Every single Belgian gov agency uses Microsoft for email. WTF? Email is not that complicated. There is no reason for this. They could have simply used a European email provider. They also use Facebook and Twitter when they could simply be using the fediverse. Before talking about starting local industries, just make the simple changes first.

Indeed it’s a trivial move. No reason to break international law and help countries that don’t even need help. It would just risk creating haters of Belgium, thus attacks.

Thanks for the insight. Apparently Mozilla is okay with this.

I suspect it violates open data law to impose JS execution as a precondition to reaching public documents.

I gave some feedback here, but wanted to give video ideas (in vain of course because the Norwegian Consumer Council is not here in Lemmy.

Would have been great if one of the high-up enshitifiers were giving a seminar to the staff to emphasize how consumers are pushovers. They really missed something important. He could have said “just throw more CAPTCHAs at them… they will solve them… the consumers have no spine, which is great for us!”

Would also be cool if they did a more serious Michael Moore style documentary, where they cover historic enshitification, such as British mail delayers (that is, there used to be a job where a human would look at how fast postal mail was being delivered and if lower class mail would be delivered as fast as 1st class mail, they would deliberately hold it back). And Intel who deliberately crippled their CPUs to clock at slower speeds than the chips were capable of. There are countless examples like this.

The only reason beer is ever refrigerated is to sell it to people who want to drink it cold right away after purchase. The dates are always /best before/ dates on beer.

So IIUC, the grocer could have legally sold me the beer. In principle, a grocer could care about quality and decide not to sell anything past the /best before/ date… Though I am skeptical that that would happen. The impression I got was that the staff at the grocery store did not even think about what kind of date it was… just saw the date had passed and thus would not sell it.

So I have to wonder what happened to the clip of beer. The sensible thing for them to do is to put a -50% sticker on it, as they do with other beers that are just slow to move. I hope they did not pour it down a drain.

Grabbed the PDF and commented over here with:

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification — except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.

The Norweigans missed the most important (and easiest!) action:

• Public services themselves need to get off Facebook & Twitter. If they can’t walk the walk and take their own advice, it’s not just an optical embarrassment. As someone who already boycotts the shitty gatekeepers (Cloudflare, google, ms, fb, apple, twtr), I am already free from enshittification — except when I must interact with a public service.

WTF?! The only unmanagable evil force I must deal with comes from the gov itself, who imposes shitty gatekeepers in the course of doing public tasks. I can’t boycott the government.

Belgian public services ALL use Microsoft for their email. So you should do everything on paper in Belgium. But what do they do? They scan paper letter/form/submissions and then they email it to themselves via Microsoft’s server. I shit you not. Microsoft is inescapable even by the most disciplined. And it’s only because the government itself will not ditch the motherfuckers.

Exceptionally, it’s somewhat redeeming that the Norweigans mention that public services should use open source. But that just scratches the surface. The very first thing they should do is get off Facebook and Twitter.

ah, shared ownership was naturally my assumption. Now that I translated the article, I’m not sure why they needed to cooperate, as opposed to each independantly buying them.

I didn’t hear of the shared ownership but certainly that weakens the defense argument for the merger.

Defense was one of the stated notable motivations. But I struggle to imagine what weird corner case scenario would require NL and BE to be merged in order to react more effectively.

I also think future wars will be heavily information based… like cyber attacks that bring down banks. Netherlands cashless direction makes them more vulnerable to that.

Brussels Times blocks tor, but I was able to get past the barriers and reach the article this way:

torsocks lynx http://web.archive.org/web/20251208075118/https://www.brusselstimes.com/1842240/turning-the-benelux-into-one-country-belgian-pm-wants-to-reunite-beating-heart-of-europe

Merging these countries seems like crazy talk. I certainly don’t like the Dutch idea of making shops cashless (which violates EU law), and the fact that there is a cartel on ATMs in NL. Dutch public services are also non-responsive to complaints, such as when trains and buses fail to meet legal quality standards and neglect consumer rights.

I like Amsterdam’s ban on ads for meat and fossil fuels, but that’s less important than the other factors.