> Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company

I used to be in a mobile application team for a bank, where I had genuine meetings with the loans department where it was discussed if we truly wanted to make it easy and obvious to users how they could pay their loans on time (their logic was that those who default and have to pay extra fees were the banks "best" customers).

We obviously pushed back hard on that. But I can imagine these scenarios playing out in other places and with other results.

In my new credit card app I can set if I want to repay 3%, 5% or 100% at the end of the month. If I set it to 100%, I have to pay $2 per month. Banking is already actively hostile against the customer.

You have to pay more money when you pay the total amount you owe? That's just evil.

In some locations banks are allowed to charge you for the interests they will loose out on when their clients pay more of the principal.

In other locations this has been deemed illegal and/or only allowed above a certain amount (think 10-15% of total remaining principal).

I do not agree with this being an ok practice (to charge).

Banks make money on interest. Perhaps the principle itself is the issue, if it's legal to earn money on loans, no surprise a bank incentive is to make you take loan, and have you keep them for as long as it can.

Typically a mortgage does not allow over repayments. Why? It would get people in the nasty habit (from the perspective of the bank) to pay back a little more every month with the spare they've got.

Of course you can pay a fee to overpay.

Mortgages have amortization schedules, Banks love it when you pay more as it only reduces the tail end of your loan. You still pay the interest up front.

Not all banks are the same, some have other incentives to pay off early.

With my mortgage, interest is monthly on the remaining principal and paying extra in a month is entirely on the principal - it reduces the total interest paid, so the bank gets less.

The idea that you pay the interest up front is a very common misunderstanding of how mortgages work and more broadly the concept of an amortization schedule.

Yeah, I see people describe it like that all the time, it's never corrected, and doesn't match how I always thought mortgages in general work (and definitely doesn't match mine), so I'm never entirely sure if it's a different system from another country or just a version of the blind leading the blind. Which is why I made my comment so specific to myself.

The parent of that comment mentioning "a fee to overpay" is one I've never even heard of before. Definitely not the case here, free to pay down the principal as much as I want whenever I want as long as the current interest for the month is paid first.

Yes, I think that's standard in the U.S.

Banks don't care at all how or when you pay your mortgage. They only originate and service the loan. The loan is sold to Fannie & Freddie and isn't on the banks' books anymore.

Only credit unions and small regional banks still hold mortgages on their books. The overwhelming majority(90%+) of mortgages are agency - ie sold to the federal government.

What country is this?

I believe this to be illegal in the USA but would not be shocked if a rule change was slipped into some random unrelated bill.

If we're talking normal credit cards in the US, you technically are getting a 30 day loan for free, no interest if paid in full every month.

I don't see a issue if credit cards charged 30d interest on balance, but if mine did that I would drop it instantly.

...which is to say nothing of the interchange fees they earned on that "free loan"

Which bank is this?

By definition, usury/interest based banking is hostile against the customer.

I've attempted to take two DB trains this year, while travelling both through Germany and with Berlin as a destination. In the end there were seven trains, and 8 hours extra lost travelling with DB. My compensation was pitiful.

Living in the Netherlands (not native Dutch) I will now rather fly than take a train if it means that I can avoid using DB.

For contrast, tomorrow morning I am heading from the Netherlands to Paris with a train (non DB), and don't really expect anything but a pleasant and smooth journey.

Both PGP and Signal will leak if you use them incorrectly, so that comparison doesn't really hold up.

I say this as someone who uses both.

PGP email doesn't match Signal security:

* PGP doesn't encrypt email metadata, so the attacker gets a record of every senders, receiver, time, date, and subject line, for free, with PGP actually working at its best.

* Email usually isn't usable without storing it server-side (for multi-client access), and without being able to search it. That requires your email to be in clear text on the server. That's solved with an on-prem mail server, but not many people have that - very few end users can operate one.

* Email endpoints generally aren't secure, so even if you somehow secure your personal mail store, possibly nothing is secure except your draft messages. Every email is sent to or received from other people, so your messages are subject to their security practices.

One key difference is that Signal intentionally makes design choices to make it harder to use incorrectly, and PGP is comically easy to use incorrectly.

Write to your legislators/representatives.

Honestly, it is the only thing that you can do, apart from voting and talking to people in your near environment.

Is it a good solution, and always likely to work? No, absolutely not.

But is a hell of a lot better than doing nothing or sharing social media posts, which is frankly as effective as screaming into your pillow at home.

A local roasters recently opened up a cafe (again, they had one but lost their space some years ago).

Having only been there three times now, each time I've gotten into long conversations about technique and equipment with the baristas.

Is it possible to have a robot pour as good a filter or pull as good a shot? Probably. But I don't go to cafés just for that.

This happened not so many years ago, in a certain small European nation, where official government housing valuation numbers were incorrect for some years due to a flaw in a spreadsheet.

I remember my apartment got a ~10% bump in value one year due to this flaw being fixed (fix didn't apply to all housing, just those who were on floors 5 or above).

I don't think though that a SaaS would have solved anything here.

This is clearly getting more reporting on than on any domestic news outlets. This is the first I am hearing about this.

Is it the first time you hear about the risks of AMOC collapsing?

To clarify, no the AMOC collapse I have grown up with as a discussion point over the last 40 years.

I am talking about the decision by our national security council. I had not seen any reporting on that domestically.

Frankly the originator of this pull request deserves the "classic Torvalds" treatment, no matter who is delivering it.

Note though that the sulfur smell from hot water in Iceland is only a thing in certain areas in Reykjavik, and perhaps some locations around the island.

This is due to the hot water in those regions literally being pumped out of the ground and into homes, and on a completely separate plumbing system. Majority of other areas use heat exchangers with pristine cold water, thus no smell nor taste is transferred.

So if you are staying in any other municipality in the capitol, you can use the hot water in cooking directly without boiling cold water. It's the same.

Something that I feel needs to be clarified, since I've noticed this being parroted around and it's technically incorrect:

It is incorrect to say the FBI has subpoenad the register for Archive.is. The FBI can not subpoena the register for .is domains, since there is only one and it is Icelandic. US subpoenas have no power outside the US.

So they are going after another of Archive.is domains, just not the Icelandic one.