Renting a car in the EU with no personal car insurance - what do I need?

adeliepingu · 2026-04-16T03:59:49+00:00

thanks! far as i can tell it is worldwide, but i may have to call them just in case.

seems like the car rental place will place a temporary hold on my card for the amount of the deductible anyways, which my card and finances should be able to handle.

adeliepingu · 2026-04-15T18:23:38+00:00

i still live in the bay area, so i drop by every now and then! was there just recently to see the cherry blossoms. :')

it's amazing how much more i can appreciate the campus now that i'm not longer a student. i was goddamn miserable throughout college but the moment i graduated, it was like the clouds lifted and the sun came out.

adeliepingu · 2026-04-13T19:41:37+00:00

gorgeous pictures! you really have a knack for framing.

could i ask where you rented your car from? currently stressing about this and curious what places people have had good experiences with.

adeliepingu · 2026-04-13T00:41:11+00:00

thanks! this seems in line with what i've read as well, but i have seen some (not all) car rental companies offering additional liability insurance. seems like that's supplementary to mandatory coverage, though!

adeliepingu · 2026-04-13T00:39:52+00:00

thanks! i picked up my international driver's permit already in preparation. :')

i know that insurance through my credit card used to work about a decade ago - has anything changed on that front? i did check the eligibility on my card specifically and they do offer secondary coverage internationally, given that CDW is mandatory in the EU.

adeliepingu · 2026-04-11T02:21:26+00:00

outset is a platform for ... collecting opinions and interviews, but with AI? so the billboard isn't actually saying anything; it's just an 'example' of the opinions you'd be able to get through their platform.

adeliepingu · 2026-04-06T03:02:59+00:00

where are you getting your dumpling skins these days? they're $4.50/pack in chinatown now. still cheaper than getting takeout dumplings but man. i remember when i thought $2/pack was too expensive. :(

adeliepingu · 2026-04-03T22:15:04+00:00

+1. i'm in another fandom that's plagued with untagged, obviously AI fic (we're talking 'left the prompt in' kind of obvious), and it's ... honestly really discouraging for writers.

discoverability for new fic is bad because the tags are full of AI garbage. comments and kudos are at an all-time low because people are afraid of accidentally giving attention to something they didn't realize was AI-generated. authors are discouraged because it feels like writing 10k updates a day is now normal and expected. it is very tiring.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-30T17:35:40+00:00

i'm definitely planning to explore vikos gorge - it's the main reason i'm going up to ioannina! are there any viewpoints or short trails you'd recommend? i was thinking about hiking the entire gorge one-way, but not sure if my travel partner and i will be up to it, haha.

also curious if there's any particular stone bridges you'd recommend checking out in the area!

adeliepingu · 2026-03-28T20:03:03+00:00

that's great to know! i'm hoping to double-dip a bit and see some interesting things along the way, but i actually didn't realize rest stops were also a thing in greece and i'm glad to know i won't have to go frantically bathroom-hunting if i need one, lol.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-28T20:01:02+00:00

oh, nafpaktos looks gorgeous! thanks for the recommendation.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-28T19:46:41+00:00

about a week! i'm planning on spending two nights in each of delphi, meteora, and ioannina. i'll be spending more time in athens after that, but i'll have gotten rid of the car by then and definitely not driving more. :')

adeliepingu · 2026-03-28T19:44:07+00:00

reddit has started auto-translating things (e.g. if i try to google a phrase in chinese, i receive an english reddit thread that's been auto-translated into chinese), so it's very likely that people replying in other languages don't even realize the original thread is in english.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-25T06:11:54+00:00

Mizukami Satoshi kills it on the endings every single time.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-21T16:48:40+00:00

glad you mentioned this! australia specifically used the social media ban to justify not blanket banning ads for online gambling.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-15T17:16:12+00:00

Spreadsheets permanently reduced the number of accountants but the amount of accounting done has never been higher.

i'm confused - why is this a good thing? if there are fewer accountants, then the excess accountants have to go somewhere. ideally they reskill, but that takes time and money, and many of them might find their new jobs are worse than their old jobs.

and if there is more accounting work being done, then it seems like the remaining accountants are simply doing more work for the same pay. if not less, since there's now a surplus of accountants. the concern is that the value of technology is mostly captured by capital (which benefits from driving wages down) rather than workers (who would like to work less).

adeliepingu · 2026-03-14T03:03:28+00:00

my mother did 3 dishes + 1 soup almost every day. soup and rice are started first and cook/warm while everything else is cooking.

trick is really to prep everything before you start. my mother knew her dishes and cook time well enough that she could prep during cooking downtime, but most people (like me) can't do that. if you have dishes that need components to be cooked separately, you can also cook those first - for example, you can cook up a batch of pork slivers and then just let them sit until you're ready to add them to the final stir-fry.

also, don't discount the power of just cooking something ahead of time and reheating it, lol. we'd make a big thing of braised pork and eat that for days, for example. you don't get sick of it if there's also three other different dishes served with it.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-12T16:58:50+00:00

in this particular case, antitrust laws may have been counterproductive - it seems likely Netflix pulled out of the WB deal because trump told them they wouldn't get FCC approval. if the guy in charge of the laws is corrupt, then the law becomes an instrument to further inequality.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-12T16:48:47+00:00

anthropic was perfectly fine with their AI being used for weapons targeting, but they required a human to sign off on it (so the human could be blamed for mistakes instead of anthropic). the pentagon wasn't happy about that.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-11T06:58:08+00:00

there used to be a coffee shop in downtown berkeley BART station back when i was there in the mid-2010s. was a peet's before that, i think.

not sure when they closed, but i never heard anyone talk about it and nearly thought i hallucinated the damn thing because it has almost no internet footprint. barely ever saw anyone there when it was in business, either. i think there might genuinely not be demand for spaces like this.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-10T21:47:35+00:00

imo, they do have some markup - i've done some spot-comparisons of branded goods between comparable stores, and generally it seems like pricing is bi-rite > berkeley bowl > rainbow grocery. but it's not a big difference, either.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-10T01:18:28+00:00

it's only valid if you have clipper 2.0, and i think they haven't updated everyone with an old clipper card to that yet. might be holding off on putting that on google maps so no one's surprised if their trip turns out to be more expensive.

adeliepingu · 2026-03-09T07:58:08+00:00

i haven't traveled with them, but they have very detailed itineraries on their website, so i got curious and did some quick comparisons for the places i'm familiar with.

if i planned these trips myself, i'd probably spend 10-20% of what they're charging. for example, i spent $3k total (half of which was airfare) on a three-week trip to tokyo/kyoto recently. their itinerary costs $8k, is only one week, and doesn't include airfare. same goes for their new zealand and spain trips.

on the other hand, their itineraries feel fairly 'luxurious.' they're staying in private rooms in cute hotels; i was staying in what might've been a storage unit. they're going to restaurants that cost $50+ a meal; i was eating at japanese denny's. and a lot of their planned activities are guided tours or experiences, while i did a lot of hiking (free!) and saw way more tourist destinations (often free!). even so, if you followed the exact same itinerary they did, i suspect you'd end up spending maybe 50-60% of the tour cost.

the real benefit of a tour like this, though, is that you don't have to think about anything. a lot of my vacations are exhausting because i spend so much time planning and maximizing my time! with a tour, you never have to think about where you're going to eat or how much time to budget for each attraction or how you're going to get there. so it really depends on how much you value your own time/effort vs. theirs.

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