activistPnk

Have they thought this through? To install batteries that are much heavier than what the bus trip requires makes the bus less efficient. Research in the UK found that a bus carrying 5 people is about as efficient as 5 cars each carrying 1 person. That’s because of the weight of the bus. So the goal should be to fill the bus with people, not excessive batteries and overhead that need not move back and forth from A to B which then requires more riders to maintain the same efficiency.

Sure they need to store energy for to smooth out peak grid consumption but probably smarter to do that with stationary batteries -- if they must use batteries. Another way to store energy: pump water to the top of a mountain and open a dam that turns a hydro turbine when they need the energy back.

from the article:

Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism.

Seems like a stretch. Even if they can attribute chronic absenteeism to air pollution and keep a straight face, moving the pollution of a fleet of buses that makes 2 trips/day from the street to the power plant isn’t going to change the absenteeism by reducing asthma. This claim only signals a bit of desperation to get support.

Indeed I’ve seen basic checking accounts with no interest. Then the more feature-rich accounts which offer a number of perks at either a higher fee or higher requirements to offset the fee also include interest. That’s really backwards because an anti-feature is being bundled in. By giving up interest the client should get more features, not less.

fees - either no fees, or fees are really easy to avoid

Try getting out of the paper statement fee at a CU. That’s an important one because when the enshitification of their tech crosses your threshold of tolerance, it’s important to have agency to instantly go back to analog. Having that power also creates pressure on them to not enshitify their tech in the first place.

Gratis paper statements seem much less common at CUs than commercial banks.

Also regarding fees: very hard to find CUs that give a zero FX fee when pulling cash from a foreign ATM. IIRC, there is only one CU in the US (Penfed?) that has fee-free foreign currency.

Chase is okay if you can reliably avoid fees

Unless you consider ethics. Chase is one of the worst.

You should never pay for a bank account, that’s just dumb.

I used to think that. But in my boycott on free technofeudal pushers (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) I’ve evolved to prioritize privacy (and thus control) over non-transparent exploitation of my data. Have you thought about why your billpay service is free? It’s outsourced, so the billpay service has to make money somehow. Of course they are selling your data. Google and Amazon want to know about people’s offline purchases so they know whether it traces to an online ad.

I also learned the hard way that Credit Unions are exempt from this

Wow.. there’s a gem of knowledge for sure.

I don’t get why folks even care about interest rates when they are so negligably low anyway. When interest rates are ≤1%, I would rather get zero interest just to silence the excessive reporting, like a 1099-int for a couple dollars which serves as a kind of heartbeat signal for where your assets are kept and then having to pay your accountant to declare it. Not worth it. I would rather see the 1% go to a good cause, if not toward just improving the banking service.

I’m done with credit unions. They just create the illusion of a small org but then farm you out to big companies via outsourcing anyway.

• Most credit unions have outsourced just about every aspect of their business. They are like shell companies all working as many different façades to the same giant corporations. CUs in-house expertise doesn’t go far beyond their branding and marketing. Your sensitive financial info gets shared around with a handful of giant corporations while giving the illusion that you have the privacy benefits of a small CU.
  • billpay outsourced to 1 or 2 different billpay services nationwide
  • monthly statement generation: outsourced to the same few corps
  • statement printing: outsourced, then they charge you for it
• Credit unions spam the shit out of whatever email address you supply, thus enabling all entities handling the email to see where you bank each time the CU decides to spam you. Commercial banks are better on this in my experience. I think commercial banks have calculated that spam just angers people and drives them off, whereas credit unions are either not diligent enough to make that calculation or they are assuming their small org appearance will go a long way in obtaining forgiveness.
• Most credit unions have put their website on Cloudflare in the past few years. Which means:
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose their account credentials to a privacy-abusing tech giant (while agreeing to be accountable for damage stemming from credential leakage)
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose to their credit union their approximate physical location every single time they connect to the website as a consequence of Cloudflare. Which means if they move outside of the CUs service area some CUs will notice that and even freeze/lock the account. They tend to admit directly in their privacy policy that they collect IP addresses specifically for geolocation tracking of their customers.
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose to their ISP where they bank as a consequence of Cloudflare. And considering Trump overturned an Obama policy that required ISPs to obtain consent for collecting and selling customer personal data, there is nothing to stop your ISP from selling info about where you bank to data brokers and debt collectors. Biden did not reverse Trump’s privacy sabotage.
  • Cloudflare can at any moment decide to block you for any reason arbitrarily, and suddenly your web access to your money is gone.
  • Consumers who are behind CGNAT outside of their control are often blocked by Cloudflare. If a snot-nose script kiddie in your CGNAT pool decides to scrape some websites, CF’s excessive protectionism might kick in and block the IP which could go to you next, and you lose access to your money because CF overreacted to a harmless snotnose kid.

Being free from Cloudflare sometimes means you can login over Tor and avoid most of the problems above. OTOH many commercial banks also block Tor increasingly more frequently lately (because they also want to track your physical whereabouts). There may be some Cloudflare-free CUs that still permit Tor logins though it’s becoming harder to find them.

Gratis paper statements are important more than you realise:

If you cannot find a bank or CU that gives you the privacy of Tor, the best feature to look for is gratis paper statements and paper checks so you can scrap the website and take back your privacy. It’s more common to find gratis paper statements from banks than CUs. As enshitification of the web proliferates and more FIs join Cloudflare, gratis paper statements is an important safety net so you can ditch their tech the moment it goes sour.

Regarding apps:

Credit unions do not write their own software. You have just a few closed-source Google Playstore banking app makers who all the credit unions outsource to. Whereas every commercial bank reinvents the wheel with their own implementation. For me it’s a shitshow no matter what. I am not going to enter Google Playstore and tell Google where I bank and let Google track exactly which software version I have which also reveals what vulns I inherit, to then run a closed-source app that snoops on me in countless unknown ways. Fuck all that.

URL gives me a 404 error. But I found this link that mentions it which is both working and Cloudflare-free:

https://www.b-europe.com/EN/Blog/Night-trains → https://www.b-europe.com/EN/Routes/Brussels-Vienna

From the site:

Travel at high speed and in all comfort between Brussels and Vienna.

I suppose all trains are sustainable but night trains are typically more sustainable because they tend to be slow (more efficient) trains. But the Brussels-Vienna train is fast. Though if it gets people off planes I guess it still scores some points for that.

This is what we find in the Sherman act link you supplied:

A Section 1 violation has three elements:

(1) an agreement;
(2) which unreasonably restrains competition; and
(3) which affects interstate commerce.

(emphasis mine)

It’s a good principle but I think it /is/ legal for Bob to do that because Bob could do it without explicit agreements. They give the sensitive info to Bob (which is legal outside of San Francisco) and Bob suggests prices. Without agreements in place they simply trust that Bob’s hint will work to their benefit and they follow along on the basis of trust rather than agreement.

from the article:

The challenge is this: Under existing antitrust law, showing that companies A and B used algorithm C to raise prices isn’t enough; you need to show that there was some kind of agreement between companies A and B, and you need to allege some specific factual basis that the agreement existed before you can formally request evidence of it.

What normally happens with pricing shenanigans is there is no agreement. The companies develop a code to signal to each other through advertisements. E.g. company X runs a 10% sale on product A, and company Y sees a pattern and reacts in a way that signals back to company X. X and Y learn each other’s language and have a coded conversation through published ads. AFAIK, that’s anti-competitive but legal because no agreement is in place. The AI seems like a new legal loophole that’s much more convenient and efficient than the coded conversation. Prosecutors might find an agreement that makes their job trivial. But what if they don’t? I don’t see how agreements are needed given that the coded ad conversation does not involve an explicit agreement as it’s just a pattern that both “competitors” (collaborators) benefit from. These cheaters operate with an understanding among each other, not an “agreement”. Hence:

None of the situations Stucke and Ezrachi describe involve an explicit agreement, making them almost impossible to prosecute under existing antitrust laws.

As long as republicans have a significant piece of Congress, the AI price fixing will prevail. Dems would oppose it across the board, but republicans would be divided. Trump and his faction would favor price fixing while the truer conservatives among the republicans would oppose it. But there are probably too many Trumpers.

from the article:

Similar complaints have been brought against companies in industries as varied as health insurance, tire manufacturing, and meat processing.

I guess any self-respecting environmentalists would just look the other way on the meat processing price fixing. I might welcome anti-competition in markets of unsustainable products where inflation is a benefit. The meat market is too big. If meat prices increase wildly, that leads to an increase of vegetarians.

The nationwide fuckup in the US is zoning rules that block commercial venues from residential regions, which means people cannot step outside their front door and get groceries in a 1 block walk. People are forced to travel unwalkable distances to reach anything, like food and employment. Which puts everyone in a car. Which means huge amounts of space is needed for wide roads and extensive car parking, generally big asphalt lots, which exacerbates the problem because even more space is wasted which requires everything to be spread out even more, putting resources out of the reach of cyclists. Making the city mostly concrete and asphalt also means water draining problems where less of it makes it into the soil and groundwater, and it means the city temp is higher because of less evaporative cooling from the land mass (Arizona in particular).

This foolishness is all done for pleasant window views, so everyone can have a view of neighbors gardens instead of a shop front.

Europe demonstrates smarter zoning, where you often have a shop on the ground level and housing above it. You don’t need a car because everything is in walking or cycling distance. But you more likely have an unpleasant view.