You don’t need a licence if they are in the category of electric bike, meaning they cannot be self propelled (you need to peddle) and they have a limiter limiting the speed to 25 km/h.

Unfortunately, these things are wicked easy to circumvent. Many retailers will sell you a throttle (meant for moving the bike while walking with it) and changing the speed limiter and peddle requirement is as easy as going into the software settings. This results into what is effectively an electric moped without the licence plate and requirement. According to the law, such a vehicle requires you have a license and wear a helmet, but of course nobody does.

What you need are good laws, not so much a 4 day work week. I just go to the doctor during office hours and tell my employer I have to go. I even get paid time off for it, like everyone else working in this country. Same for the dentist or any other kind of medical thing.

Sure, it’s not always optimal if you work in some sort of shift, but they are required to make sure you can go.

By the way, not that I wouldn’t appreciate a 4 day work week, but this seems like a bit of a stretch to say that this is the reason why you would need one.

Yeah, it’s unbelievable how bad Teams is. It works for the most part, but it’s just not quite there for an actually decent piece of software.

I disagree. I absolutely love the fact that I can just turn it off after office hours and throw it in a corner during holidays and weekends. Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome to take two phones with you, but it’s also cumbersome to take the laptop and everything with you all the time. Just put it in the same bag and you’re good. Good to note, my employer provides me with a phone, so I didn’t need to buy a second one. It also means that if I switch jobs, I just return the phone and still have my personal device.

But if it doesn’t work for you, by all means, don’t do it. For me the good outweighs the bad.

I muted most of my phone and computer notifications. I won’t respond immediately to messages. If you really need me at this moment, call me. You have my number.

Funny thing is that Teams only lets me block all notifications and not just the message notifications. So as a result, I regularly miss a teams call because I ain’t dealing with that message notification bullshit.

I have looked at the routing on routes I regularly drive and it seems like Magic Earth has a better routing algorithm than Organic Maps. At least it doesn’t try to send me through the middle of a town when there is a route around the town using the highway as Organic Maps often tries to do.

To not even consider the consequences of deploying systems that may farm your company data in order to train their models “to better serve you”. Like, what the hell guys?

Oh don’t worry. If you try to deposit it at a bank, they’ll start asking questions right away on how you got the money. Unless you never bring it into the “official” system, the financial surveillance system will find it.

In my experience, charities try to get you on a recurrent donation nowadays instead of taking cash or transfers (although I am in the Netherlands, not Belgium). It’s terribly annoying because they take the “being lazy and forget about it” and weaponise it against you.

One positive on the Dutch coalition talks. We can always say that our southern neighbours take even longer…

On a more serious note, the last three coalition talks in the Netherlands took over 200 days, with one taking 299 days. Sure, not even close to over 500 days in Belgium, but how the hell does this happen?

That I agree with. The specifics of how they build are not suitable to places like Norway (or most of Europe for that matter). That does not mean one cannot look at the concepts and apply them such that it makes sense in the context though. Many buildings in for example the Netherlands (where I live) are mainly built for keeping the heat in nowadays and overheat in the summer. Especially housing stock built from the 80s through the 2000s have overheating problems with the changing climate. This is mainly due to lack of window shading and night ventilation options. And instead of seeing a move towards shading, you see a move towards airconditioning instead, which is generally not needed if you design a building properly.

I thought you were against implementing the concepts and did not expect you to interpret the suggestion literally (aka, to build Moroccan style homes in Norway).

That’s why you make it so that you can do passive cooling in summer but don’t do that in winter. There are quite a few solutions that essentially boil down to opening windows during the night while keeping people, water and insects out.

It’s often called night cooling or night flushing. See for example this company explaining it.

Nowadays I just roll my Linux installation back to before the updates using the BTRFS integration with the package manager. It works great and I’m never at a point where I can’t use my computer because updates broke it. Heck, even if I bork it myself it’s no biggie.

Natuurlijk zijn ze boos. Dit gaat over wat ze kunnen verdienen. En als iemand dan roept dat het te duur is, dan staan ze in een slecht daglicht. Maar laat maar eens zien dat je niet te duur bent. Waar zitten je kosten dan en waarom is het zo duur?

Naar mijn mening zouden de netwerken de de providers gescheiden moeten zijn, net als bij het stroomnet. En dan de netwerkbedrijven vergelijkbaar structureren als de huidige netbeheerders. Dan heb je in ieder geval niet het gezeur dat de providers of hun netwerk dicht houden of dat ze gewoon niet investeren.

I use them as well. Cheap, reliable and easy to use. I only had trouble once, where I was caught in some sort of anti-spam measure and they blocked my account. An email to their support fixed the problem pretty quickly though.

One thing to look out for is to determine where you want your backups. You can’t change your account’s server location after you create your account afaik.

Ever heard of Jehovah’s witnesses? Or Mormons going on their mission? They aren’t constant here, but they are definitely a thing in the Netherlands.

At the very least, do so for the infrastructure. I don’t mind companies trying to sell me the service competitively, but the infrastructure should allow for a competitive market.

Slowly? It’s already dead in most parts of the country, save for the bigger cities. For example, where I live, I can take a bus between 6am and 6pm, once an hour. Most people wouldn’t be able to get home using public transport. The city has no bus lines in the city itself that aren’t volunteer run.

Luckily the bike infrastructure is pretty good, otherwise it would’ve been a car dependent hell.

Wat een vervelende catch 22 oplevert. Stad waar ik woon wilt een nieuwe wijk realiseren en die zoveel mogelijk autovrij maken. Maar er is niet genoeg werk om al die mensen binnen de stad aan het werk te brengen en OV is ruk (lees, binnen de stad kan je nergens komen met OV, verbindingen naar steden en dorpen eromheen zijn ook slecht). Dus, iedereen zeurt over hoe er meer ruimte moet zijn voor de auto of dat het OV significant moet verbeteren. Waarop de gemeente antwoord dat ze niet over het OV gaat, dat is aan de provincie.

Om gek van te worden…

My BIL got a new Tesla a few weeks ago, my dad has an older one (4 years iirc). I’ve driven my dad’s one and I must say, I don’t like it as a car and the build quality is not great. Too much fiddling with the touchscreen to get basic things done. Then I looked at my BIL’s Tesla and it’s a hard no now. You can’t remove the stick for the indicators. It’s moronic.

It’s not just Elon that makes me not even consider a Tesla. He’s just an extra reason to not consider the brand.