There are some German cities (Munich) where you can’t enter the city center with a diesel car that doesn’t meet the EURO 4 standards. EURO 4 is a low bar but there’s really nothing stopping them from eventually implementing it more widely and upping the requirement to EURO 5, 6, etc.

I've been driving a 1996 VW diesel van in Germany including Munich, and nowhere anyone ever actually cared about the lack of the sticker. And now, at 30 years of age, it turned "oldtimer", so it is officially exempted.

Same in Lisbon, nobody cares.

Seatbelts are actually heavily enforced around the EU, most people would rather just belt up than pay the fine.

Toyota... When we look after a dog for a few days for a friend, it beeps. When I put shopping on the back seat, it beeps. Drives me wild. It "beep... beep... beep..." for a minute then "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP".

I wouldn't get another because of how annoying that is.

I once made the mistake of renting one of those cars, putting my backpack and some groceries behind me, and driving straight onto a freeway. This absolute sh*tbox was beeping so loud I was afraid for my hearing. I drove some 10 miles like this before I could pull over and move the things. I'd not set foot in one of those cars ever again (same goes for Lexus). I was dreaming of really bad things happening to people who thought it was a good idea to emit series of very loud beeps while the car is driving.

This is how you get many people to just keep the belts fastened permanently and not bother putting them around themselves.

As if those people were going to be using the seat belts anyway

I once rented a VW which beeped the seat belt warning at me from the weight of my phone in the passenger seat. It was absolutely insane. Seat belt nags are an utterly terrible feature.

It won’t be long until someone finds a way to flash the firmware or install a bootleg sensor or something else. You can already get a lot “chipped” on VAG and BMW cars.

Oh great you just had an accident with modified software in car - we are not covering that.

Truly yours, car insurance company.

I'd rather keep my warranty.

Warranty I don’t care. Insurance on the other hand is useful.

That camera isn’t on all the time scanning your face. God knows what sort of sketchy implementations car companies will come up with.

Not really, it will still be fully road legal, at least in my EU member state.

You are kind of expected to adjust yourself to the culture of the country you’re immigrating to. If you fail (or refuse) to do so in the most obvious/visible ways possible (like clothing), I think you shouldn’t be surprised when people look at you weird because you look out of place.

Someone wearing a hijab looks out of place in the land of the Döner?

> Someone wearing a hijab looks out of place in the land of the Döner?

The history with the Turkish gastarbeiters is a complicated one. Please don't twist the knife in the wound.

How is this twisting the knife in the wound? I wanted to say that they (and other people wearing hijabs) are part of German culture.

It was in fact not, hence why I asked :/

I don't think even the women wearing the hijabs would consider it to be part of German culture.

Depending on the country in question, SWE jobs might be quite scarce, so companies can afford to be picky about the candidates.

You have outliers in both ways (companies that don’t care and companies that will ask you about your uni grades) but the general sentiment in my (EU member) country is that you do need at least a two if not a three year degree to get a decent SWE job. Most of the time it’s explicitly listed as a requirement in job listings too.

I agree. I find it tacky when people buy old BMWs and Mercedeses just to throw the original (often mint condition) radio unit out and put in a cheap carplay display.

Like you have this 30 year old car with a pristine wooden trim where all components align nicely in design and you decide to ruin it for the convenience of having notifications in your face while driving? A phone holder looks much less invasive.

Good for Germans then. Slovenian banks won't let you use physical 2FA authenticators (for personal accounts and maybe even business ones at this point) anymore and will also require you to constantly update their stupid app (I've had to replace some otherwise good phones because the OS version wasn't supported anymore).

Is that because of some regulatory requirements that they don't support physical 2FA?

It's all good until your European bank starts requiring unrooted Android and iOS for their mobile banking app, then tries to force you to use that app instead of letting you sort things out at their building. Then the government starts requiring you use unrooted Android or iOS to sign into their website for administrative tasks, and so on.

The endgame is that I will keep a phone in a drawer next to a 20 yo hardware token I still use to access a bank. When on the move, we will see.

Then I'd switch bank. A lot of banks work with SFOS [1]. Given the way the US is acting, we are trying to lower our dependence on American services, and I very much doubt all banks will walk the US bandwagon. There's a serious market for something else.

[1] https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/banking-apps-on-sailfish-os/1...

If that ever happens (what am I saying we all know it’s happening). Then just a phone in the drawer I use it just for such administrative tasks.

Right, until you have to use a mobile app to pay for parking or validate your bus/train ticket and so on. Yeah, "I can use my physical card", for now. Long-term we need a better solution than keeping an extra up-to-date phone.