Humanius

That’s not exactly surprising. Europe has a dispropotionally high prevelance of lactose-tolerance.
In most other places around the world lactose-intolerance is a lot more common.

India has always embraced their third world status (in the original meaning of the word) by trading with both the Western and Eastern block.

They’ll work with whomever benefits them the most at that moment. If they can buy cheap Russian oil, or in this case sell oil back to a desperate Russian president, they’re going to jump on that.

Just keep in mind that India is not an ally to the West. They merely are a partner as long as it benefits them, and they won’t let it keep them from trading with countries who you might not want them to trade with.

It’s not like the state media will honestly report on all the war crimes being committed.
I’d chalk it down to the majority of that 19% simply not being aware of what is going on Ukraine

I travelled to the UK back in the 2000s, and they confiscated a bottle of lens liquid I had mistakenly put in my handluggage rather than the main luggage.

A friend of mine was travelling from Amsterdam to Berlin and got delayed by 5 hours…
It was indistinguishable from Deutsche Bahn operating as normal.

Higher productivity should either lead to more free time, or an improved quality of life (or a mix of both). If one gets to retire later, but they get to experience a proportionally better retirement, then that could also be acceptable.

Worth noting that wages in the NL do generally go up with inflation, people tend to work part-time quite often (giving them more free time before retirement), and the price of luxuries tends to come down over time (except home prices…)

So quality of life generally tends to go up with increased productivity.

I think using electronic counting (of paper ballots) can be an acceptable way to speed up how soon we get to know what the result will likely be after the polls close. But it is important that there always happens a manual count, and that that manual count should ultimately be the answer we trust.

And with voting machines there is no verifiable oversight.

You just kind of have to trust that the software that is running on the voting machine is actually correctly tallying your vote, and not doing shenanigans behind the scene. Even if the code is open source, and everyone knew how to read code, you cannot reasonably guarantee that that is the software that is running inside the black box that is a voting machine.

With paper voting you can observe the entire process from start to finish. There are no black boxes which just spit out an answer that you simply have to trust.

In the Netherlands we had switched to electronic voting in the past, but we switched back to paper after some very serious security flaws were pointed out. These days there is some discussion on whether electronic counting of paper ballots should be allowed, but at least there is still a paper trail in that case and you could hypothetically double check everything by hand.

This seems similar in concept to how we have set up the retirement age in the Netherlands, and it is not entirely unrealistic.

People live longer and healthier lives than they used to, so retirement becomes a proportionally larger part of the average life. But retirement also needs to be paid for, so that may not be sustainable long-term. So instead you need to occasionally raise the retirement age, which is politically unpopular.

Tying the retirememt age to life extectency with an automatic mechanism removes the political toxicity surrounding that debate, and makes it more predictable and understandable how the relation is set between life expectency and retirement age.

In the NL for each year your age bracket gains in life expectency, the retirement age goes up by 8 months (the formula is more complex, but that is more or less what it boils down to afaik)

I’m born in 1994, so given the life expectency of my age group (this is ultimately determined closer to my actualy retirement) I will likely be retiring in 2063 at age 69 and 6 months.

“Everbody should use AI”

-Person financially benefiting from everybody using AI

That’s fair

Norway is both a monarchy and a democracy. There are several countries in Europe that are considered to be some of the most democratic in the world, which just happen to have a monarch as the head of state instead of a president.

What you are thinking of is an absolute monarchy, rather than a constitutional monarchy.

Shared bike/pedestian paths are very uncommon in the Netherlands, and I don’t think there are any mandatory bikepaths that are explicitely shared with pedestrians.

In the Netherlands there are two kinds of mopeds.

• Blue plates, which are (should be) capped at 25 km/h.
  They generally go where cyclists go (with the exception of Amsterdam where they have to go on the road) and are effectively treated as motorized bicycles.
• Yellow plates, which are (should be) capped at 45 km/h.
  They are supposed to go on the road, unless signs indicate otherwise. If they are on a shared bike/moped path (which is mostly found in rural areas) then the speed limit is 30 km/h in cities and 40 km/h outside cities.

Cycling on the road is not allowed in most cases in the Netherlands, if a bike path exists. Bike paths are usually signed with a round blue sign, which means the bikepath is mandatory for all cyclists.

In the Netherlands the issue is, from my understanding, that people are cycling increasingly late in life.

Elderly people cycling was always a common thing. But now that e-bikes are commonplace, elderly people are able to keep cycling for much longer than they would have been able to without the assistance of an e-bike.

When an elderly person falls or otherwise gets into an accident, they are far more likely to get severly injured and/or die than when that happens to someone younger.

As a Dutchman, I’m not a fan of this proposed speed limit.

My natural speed at which I comfortably cycle is around 25 km/h, which is perfectly safe if you pay attention and slow down when it is necessary in order not to hinder your fellow road users. The issue is people who cycle recklessly without keeping other cyclists in mind, in my opinion.

Enforcement is the key. And we already have reckless road usage laws.

I much prefer the Belgian method, where they set a recommended speed limit with signs of 25 km/h on the bikepath. You can cycle faster, but that’s at your own risk.

Edit: E-scooters are not normally road legal on Dutch roads, so you don’t see many of them.

Technically there is a path for a manufacturer to get an e-scooter tested for compliance, making them road legal. But virtually no manufacturers go through that process, making them defacto illegal (with some rare exceptions here and there)

1000/300 sounds like coax to me. That is the exact theoretical speed Ziggo could deliver if they upgraded their network to DOCSIS 3.1… But ofc upgrading is expensive, so they don’t do it.

I’m with Odido myself. That is a rebrand of the Dutch branch of T-Mobile.
Quite happy with their service generally. The mechanics had no idea what they were doing when connecting everything up, but once it was working it all worked flawlessly.

In the Netherlands symmetric fiber is the standard. I don’t think any company that offers fiber offers less than symmetric speeds

I have 1000 down / 1000 up personally.
They offer plans ranging from 100 / 100 to 8000 / 8000 at my address.

The only company that doesn’t offer symmetric is Ziggo, because they made the (wrong) bet that they didn’t need to invest in fiber. They only offer up to 1000 / 50 over coax.