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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Around here, Portugal, were every Summer the temperature exceeds 40 C for at least some days in August, we have outside rollup shades on every window, so one of the tricks is to keep the shades down and and the windows closed during the hottest and sunniest parts of the day, at the very least the afternoon.

    Then at night you open the windows and let the cooler night air in (even better if you do it early morning, around sunrise, which is the coolest time of the day).

    Note that this doesn’t work well with curtains or internal shades, because with those any conversion of light into heat when the light heats the shades/curtains (as they’re not mirrors and don’t reflect all light back) happens inside the house and thus that heat gets trapped indoors.










  • Not in the EU it doesn’t, unless they got the user to review that Agreement and agree before the sale took place.

    After the implicit contract which is the sale has been agreed to by both parties (the buyer gave the money, the seller took it), one of the parties can’t force the other party to agree to a new contract before they’re allowed to get the contractual benefits of the original contract (i.e. the buyer getting to use the product they bought, the seller getting to use the money they got).

    It doesn’t matter if the seller has such power de facto - legally they most definitelly can’t blackmail the buyer by denying them their side of the contractual rights they got in the Act of Sale by blocking their use of the product they bought until they agree to a new Agreement from the seller.








  • Well, the language is generally different, which is a big barrier to moving (though you can get away with just English in a most countries, but some stuff - often public services - is only in the local language). There is also a cultural element in that people behave and expect slightly different things in different countries, which can be a bit of an adjustment.

    Even bigger than that is that most people aren’t comfortable with big changes and tend to stick to their own country - at the very least the first big move takes a significant amount of courage.

    Then if you have your own house with lots of stuff you have to arrange for the move, which will probably cost you maybe €1500 - €3000 depending on the distance and how much stuff you have.

    And finally, in my experience no country is all good or all shit - they generally have some good things and some bad things. Also, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence until you move there, were after a while it’s the grass on the other side of the fence that starts looking greener.

    That said, some people - mainly the so-called Digital Nomads - do spend their life moving from country to country whilst working remotelly, which works especially well if you spend different Seasons in different places in Europe (some places are much better in the Summer and others in Winter). This is not new: I’ve met people whose life was working as Scuba Diver instructors in Summer in a country and as Ski Instructors in Winter in a different country.


  • EU countries are allowed to, by Treaty, expel EU citizens who moved there without the means to live there or a job.

    However it’s incredibly rare and there really isn’t any general procedure to do it: each country does it (or not) it’s own way. This tends to be used for people caught sleeping or begging on the streets.

    Further, for countries in the Schengen Area, they don’t even know you’re there unless you register, since you haven’t passed any border controls and thus aren’t in any database as having arrived but not departed.


  • I’ve literally done that inside the EU, though to the UK (back before Brexit) rather than Germany - I flew to London and stayed about a month in a hotel whilst looking for a contract there (I’m a freelancer) and more permanent accommodation.

    Years later I did the same to Germany, though I only stayed 3 months.

    The only requirement is that you either have a job or have the money to pay for the costs of living there (so you can still go without a job, as long as you have the money to pay for a place to stay, food and so on). The reason for the requirement that you can pay your way (either from a job or savings) is because people can’t just move to another EU country to do things like living on the street and begging or living of the local Social Security.

    Some countries also have a requirement that you register after 3 months there (for example, Germany), though it’s not any kind of applying to stay, it’s simply registering as living there. This is usually because there are associated obligations for residents in that country, not just in terms were do you pay tax, but in some countries (for example, Germany and The Netherlands) there are things like mandatory health insurance.

    In practice as an EU citizen, if you have the savings or the kind of job which you can do in 3 month stints or remotely, you absolutely can hop from country to country every 3 months without having to register with anybody (though I’m not sure how taxes would work - I suppose you would pay them in the last country you registered as a Resident).

    If you know the language, if it weren’t for taxes being per country and the rights and duties of Residents being different in different countries (such as the Mandatory Health Insurance for Residents in some countries but not others) hence the requirement to register after 3 months in some countries, the whole thing would be as easy as moving within your own country.