Thanks for the insight!

Have you encountered any merchants charging a fee for cash back?

I’m astonished to hear of that degree of nannying. But then it occurs to me that’s probably not an ATM limit; it’s probably a limit of the bank that issued your card. I would check your bank’s contract.

Since ATM fees don’t apply in your case, the fix is perhaps to open a few accounts so you can use one card after another. I guess assuming these are gratis accounts (not sure if that’s a thing in NL).

Another trick: buy something at SPAR and ask for €150 in cash back. I’ve heard SPAR has a 150 limit but not tested it. I would like to hear if any shops have a higher cash back limit than 150 as well.

Judging from the article and abstract (not the study itself), I think it shows that natural reforestation is clearly better than humans doing arbitrary ad hoc reforestation. It does not seem to suggest that natural reforestation would outperform well-designed strategically engineered reforestation. We could make it as diverse as we want.

But it’s interesting nonetheless to be able to conclude that reforestation that is not well thought out is worse than doing nothing. It also means that the greenwashing practice of just planting arbitrary trees to take credit for carbon offsetting is even worse than previously thought.

Since it’s a small amount of money, the legal process would be with small claims court. You don’t need a lawyer for that. Small claims is cheap and easy going. It’s typically under $100 to file (which you get back if you win) and in some states a registered letter is sufficient to serve the other party.

You would not want to sue OFAC though. In this case you would ideally keep a paper trail of your payment attempt and carry on. Give your landlord the proof of payment (attempt) and wait for the landlord to act against you. That’s the easiest.. you wait for the court date and show up with proof of your attempt to pay and a copy of your landlord’s payment procedure (which you followed). OFAC apparently did a money grab on the landlord, not you, so you would come away clean so long as you paid as per your landlord’s instructions.

I’ve never heard of cops being called dogs. Pigs, sure. Anyway, money confiscated in this way usually finances police station frills like high-end coffee machines.

They probably weigh the birthday cards to see if anything seems worth opening.

Patagonia boxers are made using recycled plastics and they also accept worn out boxers for recycling. Patagonia is the only boxers I have found that are very loose fitting (baggy in fact), silky feeling, yet stretchy, yet moisture-wicking all at once. Nothing like this seems to exist in Europe.

So here’s a debate: synthetic vs cotton

Synthetic boxers can be recycled and can be made from recycled plastics. But every time synthetic clothes get washed they shed microplastics which most sewage treatment centers cannot filter out. You would have to buy a special filter to attach to your washing machine. Researchers in Ghent discovered that the bacteria that loves perspiration also loves synthetic clothes but not cotton. This is why synthetic clothes get stinky fast and thus need more frequent washing than natural fibers.

Cotton production consumes absurd amounts of water (2700 liters of water to produce 1 t-shirt). And when you wash it, hang drying takes /days/ (whereas microfibers hang dry in a couple hours). So people use energy wasting tumble dryers when cleaning cotton. But cotton has the advantage of being biodegradable. You can simply compost/landfill finished cotton as long as it doesn’t have harmful dyes that leech out. There is also a cotton t-shirt that is claimed to wearable 7 times before each wash. IIRC it’s blended with silver for anti-microbial effects.

The environmental debate can go either way depending on which problem you want to focus on, but cotton is clearly lousy performing underwear considering how it retains water and gets soggy. The only natural fiber that performs well for underwear is wool (ideally Marino from what I’ve read). But the prices on that are extortionate. €60+ for one pair of wool boxers, and they’re tight fitting.

Anyway, the OP’s thesis is lost. There is no BifL boxers AFAIK.

There are BifL socks though, called “Darn Tough” which have a lifetime warranty. They have 1 competitor but I forgot the brand. Both use marino wool.

update

Patagonia plans to open a store in Amsterdam.

I think you’re right. In one of the articles I posted, an apparent Boeing insider demanded exiting a 737 Max upon finding it was that specific aircraft model that he boarded.

But the problem is not just with the nuts and bolts. A PBC documentary did a deep probe on the #737max. We have to accept that engineers make mistakes. But what I do NOT accept is managers making the deliberate calculated decision to coverup the mistakes to the extent of proactively consciously deciding not to train Boeing pilots on the KNOWN flaws and idiosyncracies to save money. Lives were lost because of these management decisions -- which are the same managers who lives depend on w.r.t. the older Boeing aircraft as well. These decisions also lead to under-trained Boeing pilots.

The 737 Max will probably go through copious scrutiny. But even if they make every nut, bolt, and sensor quite safe, that does nothing for the shitty infrastructure of right-wing business people who will continue working to pinch every penny for their shareholders.

I would love to see a dated line graph of the historic and current pay rate of Boeing test pilots with annotations on each incident.

~~The mere fact that the manufacturer had a remote kill switch is the safety issue that should have a big spotlight.~~(edit: this is not the case - see the reply below) What if a malicious hacker decides to trigger that kill switch while the train is loaded with people and at a sensitive moment (e.g. on bridge/cliff with a huge drop).

If the kill switch were in place for dealing with hi-jackers, perhaps fair enough. But having it for the purpose of business protectionism is an entirely reckless safety risk.

There’s an overlooked failure here: why doesn’t the Polish transport authority have a clause in their procurement contracts that bans trains with remote-control kill switches that are not under user control? And why wasn’t the code reviewed to catch that in advance? The hackers say they did not alter the code, which somewhat implies that the source code might have been available for inspection.

Bluntly banning Megayachts seems excessively interventionalist when you could instead ban the fossil fuel engines they use and ban the emissions. Make them pass a smog test that’s no more lenient than a car. Why not effectively force them to be wind and solar powered and thus force them to blow their money on advancing green energy? If that kills the megayacht business anyway, well then fair enough.

Gas stoves are better. Finer control, faster temp changes (esp. when decreasing).

Gas stoves are better in some ways, but “finer control” is debatable. If you turn the knob from 0 to 10, it’s obvious that the energy output is non-linear. On my stove the flame has like 50% of its increase between level 2 and 3 or 4. You also have a more narrow range of heat with gas. That is, the lowest setting has to be high enough that the flame does not blow out, so the min heat is higher than the min level on electric. Electric also gets hotter than gas on the high end.

With electric you get precise control. Power level 5 gives exactly half the heat energy that 10 gives; power level 6 is exactly triple the heat of power level 2. You don’t get that precision with gas. You can only eye-ball it which means harder to get reproduceable results.

You probably meant to say gas gives you /immediate/ control. Conventional electric is quite slow, but induction is fast.