I have a script that resolves the hostname to an IP address, then it checks to see if the IP is tied to a Cloudflare ASN range. But there are many other ways to check:

• there is a Firefox plugin called “Cloud Firewall” which can be configured to block Cloudflare sites
• there is a collection of useful plugins here for both FF and Chromium: https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/addon The BCMA one will automatically redirect attempts to visit a Cloudflare site to the archive.org mirror of the page.
• without any tools, you can hit F12 in FF or Chromium when visiting a website, and look at the headers. If there is a “CF-Ray” header, then it’s a Cloudflare site.
• if you install Tor, then try to visit the website of the CU. If you are blocked or forced through a CAPTCHA, then you are likely on a Cloudflare website if you see “one more step”. It’s best to test with a browser other than tor browser configured to go over tor because those browsers get the worst treatment.

I wish I knew! Since commercial banks are mostly tied to harmful investments you pretty much have to nix commercial banks because AFAIK there is no way to stipulate that your money must not facilitate those investments. That leaves CUs, most of which have eligibility restrictions and most outsource with reckless disregard. But if you use a credit union purely offline, that’s perhaps the best option. If you never login, then there’s a good chance Cloudflare does not see your financial info. So you’ll want paper statements. That means looking for a CU that does not have the paper statement fee. And you also need to scrap billpay, not just because that uses the MitM’d website but also because the billpay service is another giant centralised MitM who likely sells your data. That means either you’ll be writing paper checks and paying postage, or you’re going to arrange for payees to pull the money out (e.g. autopay from the credit card company). But having control is better, so pick a CU that includes free blank checks (which is becoming increasingly less common).

I also suggest getting a checking account /without/ interest. Because that crappy minuscule interest payment of 10¢/month triggers extra reporting and statements, and bookkeeping effort. It’s not worth it.

So, ideally:

• free paper statements (funny how FIs advertise “free e-statements”, which was maybe only worthy of praise in the 1990s)
• free checks (now they tend to just give you a paltry 3 or 4 blank checks when you open an account, not even a whole check book; but a thorough investigation may reveal a CU that gives a few whole checkbooks to start and periodic free refills)
• no interest

In Germany there’s a bank that will e-mail you your statements so you don’t have to login. It’s the only bank in the world that’s customer oriented like that. They PGP encrypt the statements. Apart from that, banking is a sad state of affairs.

I would immediately nix Alliant CU and Lake Michigan CU because their website goes through Cloudflare. So they are not financed well enough to secure their own website. The biggest web-centralizing tech giant in the world is Cloudflare. Those two CUs use Cloudflare in a way that excludes people arbitrarily, which makes them overly exclusive.

Navy FCU blocks Tor users from applying. That’s not as bad as using Cloudflare, but KYC rules do not require knowing a customer’s IP address so Navy FCU disrespects privacy enough to not have my respect. It also bothers me that if you click on “Eligibility” at the bottom of the landing page, it directs to a page that says nothing about eligibility and only pushes an arbitrary ad. That’s not really something to be non-transparent about. People need to know if they are wasting their time before they apply, particularly if they have no connection to the Navy.

yeah, credit unions are less likely to have unethical investments. But they bring a separate set of problems. Since they are small they struggle to profit, so they cut corners by outsourcing everything, like the website, the app, printing checks, printing statements, bill pay, etc. Credit unions have become helpless with all the outsourcing of quite trivial tasks. So they all outsource to the same 1 or 2 suppliers for each service. Then you find that a handfull of giant corporations end up seeing the data of all credit union customers. In effect, a credit union is just a proxy brand of giant corporations. Many credit unions now expose their customers to Cloudflare.

So you basically have to choose between shitty investments (commercial banks) or privacy compromises (credit unions as proxies for giants).

I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.

• society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
  • could not check out a library book without CPR №
  • could not make a photo copy without CPR №
  • could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
  • could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
• society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
  • many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
  • university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
  • someone could not simply do laundry
• university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
• university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
• university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
• university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
• banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
• banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
• housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
• severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
• was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
• expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
• cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.

That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.

Luckily you don’t need to burn uranium to avoid 5 steps of energy transformation.

No you haven’t. Read your own source. Hint: biogas

biogas was used in 2009, not in 2020 when the stats were collected. Nor would it matter if it were still used. Hint: it would be an increase on the 80%.

recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Also, nuclear fuel is not gas, so this speaks for electric stoves, silly.

That’s fuel. That’s in the 80%.

again: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Ignoring other renewables

I have accounted for all the renewables mentioned in the linked wikipedia page, which covers sources as insignificant as hydro (<1%). What else is there? Have you thought about updating wikipedia with whatever you think is missing?

Ignoring French nuclear imports

That would only increase the proportion of fuel energy even more, which only works against your botched claim. If you want to count French nuclear, then the portion of solar, wind, and hydro is proportionally even less. Brussels currently has a nuclear power plant inside the region. Why do you think it would it be sensible to transmit over such distance? That would introduce even more substantial inefficiency in the transmission.

Ignoring current state but talking about possible future plans

The status quo only has 1 year left on it. And nuclear power still has the same stages of energy transition loss you’ve failed to debunk. What’s the point? Your claim is nonsense either way.

Get your facts straight, or update Wikipedia to reflect your understanding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Belgium

wind + solar + hydro → 20%

80% from burning fuels¹. With 3 new gas-burning plants under construction to replace nuclear, that’s not going to improve things.

Belgium is aiming to reduce its use of gas as much as possible.

Nonsense. I guess you missed the whole “Code Red” march against Electrabel last year protesting the plan to build 3 new gas-burning power plants.

there are two nuclear power plants, not one.

And that’s important why? From wikipedia:

“Belgium decided to phase out nuclear power generation completely by 2025.”

Whether there are 1, 2, or 5 nuclear plants is immaterial when it’s all being phased out, and replaced with gas-burning power plants.

Betting on gas, be it a stove or something else, is just stupid.

Betting in a way that neglects plans that have already been announced is stupid for sure.

¹ recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Electricity is usually not made from fuel

You’re generally wrong on that:

“Over 60% of global electricity generated so far in 2023 was produced by fossil fuels” --Reuters

Belgium is what’s relevant in the case at hand. In Belgium ~20% of power is from solar, wind, and hydro. The other 80% is from burning fuel. I group nuclear with fossil fuel because the nuclear power plant in Belgium is being decommissioned and will be replaced with 3 new gas burning plants.

Gas stoves are far inferior in this step, losing most of the heat into the surtounding air. Induction stoves have almost no transmission loss.

That’s true but that’s stoves not ovens. You’d have to exaggerate quite a bit to claim more than half of the heat energy is wasted on gas stoves or ovens.

In order to use gas in the kitchen, you have to have a gas pipe in the kitchen, which has become very unusual.

Where? Unusual Belgium-wide? The cities concentrate populations. Brussels city is mostly old homes likely all piped with gas judging from the dominance of gas boilers. Are you saying there are lots of old homes that did not bother to branch a gas pipe into the kitchen?

During construction, it’s easier and cheaper to not lay gas pipes.

That’d be a false economy. Pipes are like ~€7 per meter so it would take ~1—2 years for the pipes to pay for themselves if they are used for daily cooking.

Most people do not have a choice – either you got an old house witha gas pipe in the kitchen or a newer one with a 400 V power outlet.

I do not have a 400V outlet. I have no idea how many electric ovens require that, do you? I’m using a crappy portable 220V oven. If the big properly insulated wall ovens are 400V, then I would have to run a new line to the fuse box. Not sure if I could wire that myself, which I assume involves bridging two 220V circuits.

I guess most people don’t do their own work. So you are implying hiring someone to add one or the other post-construction would be cost prohibitive. Sounds reasonable. But I’m not convinced kitchens lack gas pipes to begin with because gas stovetops are still popular in Belgium. Just not gas ovens.

(edit) In Brussels in 2011, “natural gas consumption was 10,480 GWh and the electricity consumption was 5,087 GWh”, according to Wikipedia.

I’m still waiting for someone to show me an induction oven. This is the same as saying “don’t use an oven at all”. Of course, if you don’t need an oven, then it would not make sense to install an oven at all.

It’s not an assumption. This is how power is produced in Belgium. There is only 1 nuclear power plant and it’s being decommissioned. 3 new fossil fuel burning power plants will be built.

If I were to open the boiler before and after using it just as I have a wood stove, that brief exposure to trace amounts of toxins once a day would not influence a choice to use it. That theory is quite far fetched.

The finding that gas stove toxins can be significant is also more recent than the popularity drop in gas ovens. IOW, to have a cause-effect, the cause must come chronologically before the effect.

(edit) also worth noting that gas stoves are still popular in Belgium, just not ovens. So this theory is bogus. People are not going to avoid ovens out of fear of toxins when the door opens while at the same time having no problem with gas stoves.

not everyone has a gas line to his/her house

That might explain electric oven popularity in rural parts, assuming there is also no propane tank service. But Brussels city is networked with gas and dense with old homes. California has banned gas in all new builds, IIUC. I’m sure that ban will happen everywhere at some point, though it would not generally impact existing buildings.

Also I am pretty sure cooking is not that significant on your energy bill

Maybe that’s it then. I didn’t look into that. Paying ~50—80% more for energy is no big deal if it’s fueling something that’s insignificant to begin with.

(edit)
I calculated that it would cost €24/year to run a poorly insulated electric oven at 200 °C for 30min every day. Any efficiency differences between gas and electric would likely amount to less of a difference than that. So cost efficiency is likely insignificant.

Why do you say that in the past tense? You can see from my figures that in Belgium gas is still cheaper.

This is something that varies from one region to another. In the US, some states have cheaper electric than gas. Electric is less efficient because of big losses in all the conversion steps:

fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Gas simply has:

fuel energy → transmission → heat energy

It is important to note that gas transmission is also lossy due to the impossibility of leak-free main lines, but it’s still more efficient in the end. Thus in most of the world gas is also naturally cheaper due to the efficiency difference. It gets inverted in some regions because of pricing manipulations as well as the drive to promote green energy (and rightfully so – social responsibility should be incentivized). And in some regions they cut down on the transmission losses by putting the power plant inside or close to the big city. But in Belgium gas is still cheaper than electric even despite Russia’s war and efforts to get off Russian fuels.

Poor venting is not inherent in the technology. A diligent installer can run a duct from the oven to the outside just like we do for gas boilers. A diligent building code can make it mandatory. The lack of gas ovens (and selection thereof) in Belgium is not likely a consequence of concern for toxic gases, because if it were, then gas boilers (which burn far more fuel than an oven would) would be far less popular than they are. So what is your theory on that difference?

Still sounds like you’re talking about stoves. To use a stove, you inherently need to stand next to it and your face is between the flame and the vent. Ovens are well insulated (this is important for energy efficiency), they vent to the outside, and you are not generally standing over the oven throughout the baking.

That depends on how well vented they are. Most people undersize their range hoods for aesthetics and don’t take venting seriously. Of course recent findings show it’s a bad idea to cut corners on that with gas stoves, and ovens to some extent. But it’s mostly stoves that have the issue you describe.

I have never seen an induction oven. Are you sure they exist?

I don’t think I’ve seen an oven that uses a heat pump. Though I’ve not paid close attention. It sounds a bit bizarre because a heat pump can only move heat IIUC, so the kitchen would have to have quite a lot of hot air to start with, no? Theoretically it would be nice to simultaneously heat the oven in the summer while air conditioning the rest of the kitchen, but in the winter months that’s a problem.

Heat pump tumble dryers are common in Belgium. They take much longer than US style tumble dryers because they just don’t get as hot. This is gentler on the clothes but it’s why I cannot imagine an oven using a heat pump.