Yes. Works for me. There will be always Pros and Cons.
- need to save manually and specify directory/file name
This may be also a PRO for me since I may be able to find it without using recoll. Also, how many websites do you need to save? I assume only a tiny fraction. If you want to save everything, recoll does offer this more or less out of the box:
"Indexing visited WEB pages with the Recoll Firefox extension"
"who can certify that the matches you are set up with are people with a track record of dealing honestly ("
Mate, good observation with the market of lemons. My thinking. Actually the same in the official job market.
But otherwise you are nuts. "All warfare is based on deception" [Sun Tzu] and "all is fair in love and war" [Proverb]. And, since all relationships sooner or later end in lies, why not start with it? [Lord of War]
Yes. Banking is very cheap, you can get a free bank account. Transfers are cheap, EC card Payments is cheap for Merchants. What is there to complain about? Try to send money in the US... Send a check and scan it!
Based on my experience with HSBC and SC (from HK) I doubt that they are really outstanding. Revolut? Well, you can buy crypto. But the App is terrible.
Most critique here is basically about Apps not being good in EU/Germany. This may be the case but honestly I have zero interest in doing Banking via an app, except for transaction code generation (actually this was terrible at HSBC and SC). It is much more convenient to do this on my computer. If I want to use an app, it should be like WeChat or Alipay. But a banking App? I personally have no need for this.
I don't know if this is a recent thing, but my CZ bank charges nothing on incoming/outgoing SEPA payments (mbank).
Regarding instant transfers, already supported by many banks in CZ (not mbank though, so can't tell if there is a fee), see https://www.mesec.cz/aktuality/okamzite-platby-umi-prijimat-...
Don't know mate. I don't know the UK banking system so well. But if I take HK experience with HSBC and SC and Newcomers in the UK like Revolut then I doubt your statement will make any sense.
"If Germany would spend 2% of its GPP on military, then it would approach Russia in absolute numbers, That would be crazy."
It is her contractual obligation. Currently Germany does not have an Army anymore but a museum. How many tanks are operational? 100? Russia has 10.000...
When nations agree to targets, and they did a long time ago, its material. That it's not technically part of the treaty is relevant, but not so important.
The 2% target was established long ago, there's a renewed 'agreement' since Trump took office, but it's along the same lines: European states will wait for Trump to be out of office and then ignore it.
The fact remains America provides defence for Europe, and Europe is willing to let that happen because, well, it's very expensive, among other things.
The fact remains that NATO is not an US security organization where other Nations buy protection. Trump may think that, since he knows the Mafia from his real-estate business.
Nobody has asked German citizens yet, if we want to invest 2% of the GDP into defense and where it should be invested.
Basically a military & governments have decided that for us, which is entirely undemocratic and a fully un-controlled process.
It's great that the military-industrial complex can on its own decide how much to spend, without any outside interference. This leads to a situation, like in the US where roughly a trillion USD is spend on military, which is an insane amount of money.
Well, you claim that there is a contract which binds NATO countries to spend 2% of their budget on military and that only Germany is not spending 2%.
Everything of that is wrong, There is no contract. The goal of 2% is set for 2025, not now. Currently a bunch of countries spend less than 2%.
And: large parts of the US military spending is completely unrelated to NATO.
Next you need to ask yourself if these approximate numbers make sense:
Europe minus Russia, without the US: defense spending of 350 billion USD. NATO has defense spending of 950 billion dollar.
Russia: defense spending: 65 billion USD.
Europe is already outspending Russia five times. NATO is outspending Russia by 15 times.
This looks like lack of money is not the actual problem NATO has.
Your comparison is fatally flawed. If someone declared that the US/Europe doesn’t need to spend so much on social welfare or transit, because Russia and China spend much less in nominal dollars/euro, one would quite rightly point out that a dollar buys much more food or miles of subway tunnel in Russia than the United States.
> Perhaps most importantly, the more methodologically sound approach to comparing defense spending based on PPP illustrates that the gap between U.S. expenditure on the one hand and that of Russia and China on the other has closed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today, when taken together, spending by Russia and China is roughly equal to U.S. defense expenditure, with Russia representing a much larger share than previously recognized.
Moreover, even PPP probably doesn’t accurately depict the difference. Beijing spends about a billion dollars a year to operate a subway serving a city of 20 million people. New York spends ten times as much for a system half the length and half the ridership. Moscow spends 1/7 as much as New York to operate a larger system with more ridership.
Military expenditures probably scale much closer to something like a subway system than the overall PPP basket of goods. In that case, we are probably looking at less than a factor of two advantage in what that spending actually buys.
> The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic.
Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now.
The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit.
This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks:
That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes.
For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons.
See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies.
It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs...
It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources.
True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same:
Ukraine is not a Baltic state, the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) are all in the EU and NATO members. No way the EU would let that slide.
I never said Ukraine is a Baltic state. Take out a map. Think about why the Baltic states can hardly be defended militarily. Think about what would be different if Ukraine were in the Nato (and a decent amount of Nato troops on the UA/RU border).
"No way the EU would let that slide."
They EU has no ability in military things if the UK is out. The Nato would not let it slide but they also would not fight back to win it back. It would be cold war II.
Sorry to be a pedant, but the UK's military capability is at an all time low. We have made awful purchasing decisions across the army, navy and air force, as well as failing to recruit enough people. There isn't a part of the UK military which isn't in crisis. We are not the force your post suggests we are.
Awful purchasing decisions from the US, uniformly. The deeper into this rabbit hole one goes, the stronger the smell of rats. One truly wonders who was persuaded to give away the entire fleet of carrier-borne aircraft to the US Marines - and how...
I read it as political stupidity rather than malice. Maybe not though. The requirement to have VTOL craft for our new carriers was an unforced error though, that necessitated the much more expensive model of the F35 that even the US doesn't generally use. We could've just opted for a better carrier design, or retrofitted.
Or just... kept the perfectly serviceable (indeed, newly refitted) fleet of Harrier VTOL carrier aircraft? Instead of practically giving them to the US? Who were mysteriously happy to have them, despite the ostensible F35 replacement being an American product?
The entire thing reminds of this[1] Futurama bit. "You won't be needing Harriers anymore, will you? I take Harriers now, F35 come next decade".
France has a more capable and experienced force than Russia. Also, while small individually, the combined forces of the EU far exceed that of Russia. And the US has troops stationed in Estonia, they would most certainly not let that slide. Russia can't defend its population centres either, the whole discussion is quite absurd.
This is a sham. You need to go through lots of audits & other administrative BS in order to be declared an "AISP" even if you don't actually process banking data yourself and it never leaves the user's device.
Imagine PCI-DSS compliance but without the exception that you don't have to be PCI-compliant yourself if you don't touch card data and pass it directly to a PCI-compliant payment processor.
It might look dreary to you from a distance, but for us on the ground, it is working. My bank is already offering to show any other banks’ statements along my accounts.
It's only working for large, existing players, is his point. For me wanting to build automatic syncing to my budget tools, I'm still out of luck. They don't even let you access your own data.
That’s kind of expected, isn’t it? An integration you make could be potentially used/abused by others and must be thoroughly vetted. For personal use my bank offers daily CSV downloads.
> For personal use my bank offers daily CSV downloads.
Can you automate this? This is my point. Manual CSV exports are not a solution. Open Banking was supposed to solve this but it's a complete sham that is only there to make them look like they're doing something and benefit the existing incumbents.
Why is it a sham? TPPs (who are either AISPs and/or PISPs) process banking information for customers of participating banks. A TPP will typically provide some kind of service like a unified view of customer finances, and as part of that they're processing customer banking info.
It would be an unusual TPP where the data never left the customer's device. Usually there'll be a web service/web app provided by the TPP and the communications will be between the customer and the TPP and then the TPP and the bank (a.k.a ASPSP)
Whilst it's not perfect, it's a hell of a lot better, from a security perspective, than 3rd parties getting full banking creds for customers.
> It would be an unusual TPP where the data never left the customer's device.
Why? The scenario you mention (providing an unified view of a person's multiple accounts & credit cards) can perfectly be done on the device itself and negates plenty of concerns regarding security, the need for a backend, etc. I personally made an app to display my balance & transactions on my Apple Watch. It's purely local and doesn't even have a backend. Yet, I can't actually launch it "by the rules" because I need to become an AISP even though I never come in contact with actual banking data.
> 3rd parties getting full banking creds for customers.
This is clearly a stop-gap solution until something better comes around, and frankly it isn't the worst solution if you trust the third-party. At least it becomes the user's choice whether to share credentials instead of the bank or some other entity deciding who can and can't have access based on potentially stupid or anti-competitive reasons.
Purely on a customer device would be extremely difficult as the OAuth keys for obtaining the consent would need to be stored on the device, which isn't a solution that scales past one user, from a security standpoint.
The problem of customer choice is that customers are very badly informed about the relative security of services, so there's a market for lemons. If the bank has no liability, that's possibly fine (although it could be argued the bank has some responsibility to advise the customer), but if the bank has any liability for issues resulting, then they get a say in the outcome.
Why wouldn't it be good from a security standpoint? How do social media clients do it then? As far as I know they do oAuth too and so hold the consumer key & consumer secrets inside the binary.
Leakage of the consumer secret/consumer key alone doesn't compromise security as you still need the access token and refresh token which are per-user.
You have folders from a-z in your data directory.
You save the website in /data/o/oldestcompanies or into a deeper directory to your liking.
Let recoll take care of the rest.
https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/