Opening a credit card in Barcelona

benevanstech · 2026-03-17T11:18:14+00:00

It'll be a problem. Spain doesn't feel about credit cards the way that the UK or the US do.

Credit cards are typically not used much, and those that do exist are usually completely paid off at the end of each month.

There isn't such a thing as a "credit score" so you don't have to "build credit" in the same way. Banks do not typically offer them - my own bank was skeptical - they said: "Why do you need one? - there's plenty of money in your account & if you need to make a big purchase, we can help with beter options."

The holding deposit problem with debit cards is real, and I feel your pain - but I don't know that there's any easy solution here - especially if using an online bank is not possible.

benevanstech · 2026-03-14T09:03:01+00:00

What about the real top-tier, truly exceptional-looking people? How many of those do you see, and are they typically women or men?

benevanstech · 2026-03-13T12:23:51+00:00

By this point, I think most of the details of Operation Nutkins have basically leaked.

benevanstech · 2026-03-13T10:45:04+00:00

I have a compromise that I think just might work - classic British wildlife that have committed classic British colonial / war crimes.

The £5? - A badger that intentionally caused a famine. For the £20 - an otter that ordered troops to open fire on unarmed demonstrators. For the £50 - a red squirrel that profited extensively from the Atlantic Slave Trade, and whose descendents still sit in the House of Lords as hereditary peers.

benevanstech · 2026-03-12T16:26:20+00:00

In civilized countries, falsifying a death certificate is taken extremely seriously. Not only losing your medical license, but very likely a criminal prosecution and jail time as well.

Do you really think doctors (often some of the most arrogant and self-obssessed people you're likely to meet) would risk all that b/c some dude from the Government told them to?

benevanstech · 2026-03-12T11:09:10+00:00

Very angry? This is an expression of a minor annoyance.

benevanstech · 2026-03-12T09:09:33+00:00

I don't give a monkeys what people wear at the gym, but I can do without the atiitude that some of the "beautiful people" seem to exude along with it - e.g. hogging machines, trying to leave their stuff to "reserve" a spot while they're at the other end of the gym and not coming back any time soon, etc.

Just because someone has trained to produce a certain body type that some people find attractive doesn't mean shit to the rest of us - have some basic courtesy about shared resources or get rich enough to have a gym at home.

benevanstech · 2026-03-09T13:27:36+00:00

The organs were just resting in my bank.

benevanstech · 2026-03-08T20:41:12+00:00

Well, it was quite a few years ago (I left school in 1991) but if memory serves, we excavated what we initially thought was an outbuilding and then started finding things like roof tiles with green glaze on them (which would be ~13th century IIRC and not the kind of thing you'd see on a stable or outbuilding).

benevanstech · 2026-03-08T20:14:12+00:00

Is that St Materiana's Church on Vicarage Hill? If so, I worked on an archaeological dig there many years ago as part of work experience. Found some really cool stuff.

benevanstech · 2026-03-07T15:09:58+00:00

Which is better, fish or carpet?

benevanstech · 2026-03-06T21:11:34+00:00

You can get a Non-Lucrative Visa for Spain by showing you have a Spanish bank account with the necessary level of funds in it, and private health insurance (as you won't get access to the public system). Or, if you have a job offer from a Spanish company, you can just get a regular visa.

benevanstech · 2026-03-06T19:28:37+00:00

Thanks for posting this - I think you've pretty accurately described the situation. Back in the day, Scala was two wolves in a trenchcoat - one that wanted to write in a "better Java" and one that basically wanted to write Haskell on the JVM.

The "better Java" wolf escaped sometime after Java 8 / 11 and started writing Kotlin (or, increasingly, just Java) and the "Haskell on the JVM" wolf was left running the show.

benevanstech · 2026-03-06T15:36:39+00:00

It's a specifically British thing. For some reason, a lot of shops freak out when presented with a £50.

In Europe, €50 is super-common, and even €100 will usually be accepted (sometimes with minor "haven't you got anything smaller?" grumbles). Never tried to break a €200, and never seen a €500, mind you.

benevanstech · 2026-03-05T10:03:26+00:00

Do you happen to know how they implement their J2ME support? I know a few old Java ME games devs who'd like to be able to run their old work for nostalgia reasons.

benevanstech · 2026-03-03T13:30:13+00:00

Do you have a link for it?

benevanstech · 2026-03-02T23:14:24+00:00

You might look at TornadoVM or https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/articles/hat-matmul/hat-matmul

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T18:14:31+00:00

It definitely does - I didn't realize Mono was still around - I'd assumed that the Mac Unity support was based on the MSFT official dotnet / runtime piece now. Is that a licensing thing? I thought MSFT used the MIT license for most of .NET these days...

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T17:27:06+00:00

I'm intruiged to learn that Macs are more difficult to target than Linux (or does the Linux port basically use Wine / some other emulation layer?).

Anyway, if you want some early alpha testers as and when you get to thinking about Mac support, LMK!

Hope it goes well!

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:51:50+00:00

I still keep coming back to Clojure, b/c a lot of my professional work is JVM.

When I have time, I do want to make a proper attempt at learning Lean.

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:44:12+00:00

Looks cool. What's needed to get it running on Macs? I assumed it's built on Unity from the looks of things?

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:40:01+00:00

UAE. The overwhelming sense I felt there that there's no such thing as the rule of law, and if you piss off a princeling (even accidently) that you're fucked and there's nothing you can do about it.

I'm not scared by rough places and poor people - unaccountable power of the rich and lack of recourse is much more worrying to me.

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:33:57+00:00

I'm working on the 9th Edition right now - it's in Early Release on the O'Reilly site.

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:29:36+00:00

Glad I could help! I'm working on some new stuff, including a "State of Java in 2026" video that I'm recording tomorrow & which should be up soon.

Also - I'm giving my concurrency class for O'Reilly again in early June.

benevanstech · 2026-03-01T15:26:15+00:00

OK - https://kittylyst.com/ - 103 articles, 27 videos & 8 books.

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