Oh this entire post is hilarious.

In Catholic thought, the Pope is considered somewhat of an intermediary between God and mankind. One of the Latin names for the pope is Pontifex Maximus (also origin of the word pontiff and pontificate), which means something like “supreme bridge builder”, as in bridge between God and Earth.

He did not, in fact, get the water.

Als je niet weet waar de kosten voor de boiler gemaakt worden, zou ik even op de meters kijken voor en na het douchen. De teller die omhoog loopt geeft je dan antwoord.

En wees blij met maar 350 euro vaste kosten. Ik betaal bijna 1100 euro per jaar aan vaste kosten.

Even uitgaande dat de eenheid een GJ is valt me dat nog mee. Bij mij rekenen ze daarvoor 47 euro.

Ik betaal zo’n 1100 euro per jaar alleen aan vastrecht.

Vastrecht is waarschijnlijk de reden: de vaste kosten om überhaupt een aansluiting te hebben. Bij mij is dat ongeveer 80% van mijn totale warmte kosten.

Er valt dan weinig tot niets te besparen.

Ik woon in een nieuwbouwwoning. Wij zitten bij een warmtenet. Verplicht. Kunnen niet kiezen. Is ruim 2x zo duur als mijn oude gasgestookte grotere huurwoning, terwijl mijn energieverbruik voor warmte in deze giga-geisoleerde woning niet eens de helft is van wat ik voorheen verbruikte. Per saldo dus ongeveer 4x zo duur als een ouderwetse gasaansluiting. En het maakt niet uit hoe warm of koud ik de thermostaat zet, 80% van de kosten voor het warmtenet zijn vastrechtkosten waar ik 0 controle over heb.

I am so glad my car was made just before all this massive enshittification.

So wait, bit-shifting some integers is now considered being malicious? Is that really the defense here? Using that definition just about all software in existence is malicious.

My grandparent’s desktop computer. I didn’t break the hardware, but i set the default font size in windows 98 to some ludicrously high value. That made it so large the OS became unusable and the dialog to change it back was also unusable. Probably a quick terminal command would have fixed it within a couple seconds but I wasn’t old enough to understand that and my parents weren’t very tech-savvy.

Dried grasshopper does really taste like prawn crackers.

Including comic sans. German website with aesthetic from the previous century, what else is new?

I think 5 or 6. I’d get to experience living in different cultures without having to abandon friends and family in my current location.

The mammoth one is uncanny valley for me.

I laughed a lot reading that series. Lots of profanity, but really fun.

Some suggestions

• Saturn Returns by Sean Williams
• the Uplift universe by David Brin (Sundiver, Uplift war, Uplift trilogy etc)
• Existence by David Brin
• Helix and Helix Wars by Eric Brown
• the Shoal Sequence by Gary Gibson

As a Dutch resident, I seriously disagree here. We are just coming out of a 15 year long neoliberal period that has caused the following:

• public transport costs just went up 12% in January, whereas they are going down in surrounding countries
• the total amount of minutes of disruptions with the largest rail company has gone up by five-fold over the last 10 years, and no sign of abating
• the high speed rail line was taken out of service completely at the beginning of this month.
• peripheral areas have increasingly less access to public transport and other services. Everything gets centralized to Amsterdam.
• the local tram network in The Hague is downsizing in March due to lack of personnel. And the trams are already completely full in rush hour.

All these things are having the effect of pushing people IN cars, because the alternative is getting more expensive for reduced service. Heck, road congestion is significantly up from pre-pandemic levels and that’s with the neoliberals investing billions upon billions in new asphalt.

Not Just Bikes is in a bubble, and it’s seriously irritating to have foreigners believe we’re this utopia.

And nearly all of that is usually prefilled correctly to the euro by the Belastingdienst.

Why did this take the IRS so long where other nations have been doing this for decades?

Official government recommendation for Dutch school is to ban smartphones in class. For now it’s just an advice, but it may become law in the future.