systemtest

Yes they changed it after a while so people without a CoC/KvK could also purchase them. But initially only companies and institutions could buy them.

In The Netherlands the first generation RPi was only sold to users with a Chambers of Commerce registration, I figured this was always the typical end user for it. Like schools, universities, prototyping for companies. Was the RPi in the rest of the world targeted towards home users?

* https://tweakers.net/nieuws/80350/verkoop-goedkoop-arm-syste...

In Brussels? Over half your net income would go to rent. If you are frugal then maybe you can get it to work out. This is not the type of income where you eat out every week.

Does your Germany figure include healthcare and church tax? That could push it over 50%. Though church tax is optional and you can go private for healthcare.

I meant compared to the US it has basically no crime. Total gun incidents in the US is 10x more than Belgium.

And yes obviously there are guns in Belgian society but with no guns I was referring to how regular people don't walk around with guns. If you play football and your ball enters someone yard you don't have to worry about getting shot.

What you listed for the past 10 years in Belgium is an average week in Chicago.

And Chicago had 2853 gun violence incidents in 2024. On a population of 2.7 million. Belgium had 184 incidents on a population of 11.8 million. That is about 67 times more incidents.

What I meant to say is that even if you have a very high income you will never pay more than 60% in total tax and social premiums.

On €100,000 a year you pay €57,512 in tax (58% tax). On €60,000 a year it's only €32,405 (54%).

See:

https://be.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=100000&from=year...

https://be.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=60000&from=year&...

If you are able to make it work in Belgium it's a great move. Free education, free healthcare, 20 days PTO minimum, public transport, 15 weeks of maternity leave, labor protections, basically no crime, no guns, no weekly school shootings, total tax rate of at most 60%.

I had that issue but as it turns out I was just getting fatter

I kinda prefer cultures where benefits and pensions are enough so that people don't have to dig into trashcans for Pfand.

"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.

Because of enshitification of the internet you now need to solve puzzles before you can access websites. Welcome to 2026.

Smart move. Germany has the highest rate of lawsuits per capita. You need to be able to cover yourself.

I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support tasks for former clients.

For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code).

For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this.

The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features.

I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.

When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.

This is for solar only installations. People are advised to flip the breaker of their solar installation when energy prices are negative as it would cost them money if they deliver electricity to the grid. This helps to reduce strain on the grid.

That is without accounting for depreciation of the installation.

Don't buy junk bonds. Why are you looking for bonds that yield 9%?

Can you point out what part of what I said is factually inaccurate?

But is that rate always positive? Where I'm from during peak sun hours, the rate is negative and you end up paying money to deliver money to the grid. They do this to incentivise you to decouple your solar installation during peak sun hours so the net doesn't get flooded with too much energy.

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Is delivering back to the grid economical in California? Where I'm from people disconnect solar panels on sunny days because it costs them money to return to the grid.

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Could be related to billing cycles

Please note that you need Microsoft 365 Copilot Live Essentials for Business Premium if you want InsightDeck (formally PowerPoint) included.

That is still very impressive from my European viewpoint.

PostNL is a private company that used to be government owned. PostNL currently operates at a loss for mail delivery. They are mandated by law to deliver mail and that is something they can't get out of. There is not a maximum what PostNL can ask for stamps but the ACM (Authority Consumer & Market) can step in if they raise prices too much.

So it appears to be privatised but with strict government regulations.

How can it be that low? The Netherlands has a stamp rate of €1.40 for 20 grams and you can traverse that country in three hours. 20 to 50 grams is €2.80. If you have to cross a border that goes up to €4.22

Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!

I used it up till 2011. It had multiple top-cases replaced under the extended warranty, display CCFL was changed a few times due to flickering, disc-drive got swapped once, new logic board because the audio-jack was stuck on SPDIF, new power adapter.

The only device I ever got Apple Care on and I got thousands in repairs covered for free. This was from before Apple would just replace the entire device.

All my other MacBooks have been trouble free luckily.

I have been using OS X since 10.4 Tiger. I still remember standing in line at midnight trying to get a copy on DVD. Getting to test all the new features back home in the middle of the night was so exciting! Well worth the €129/€29 they charged for it. Nowadays the yearly releases are more of a "meh". I hit install, they added a new grouping feature to Reminders and that is about all I use from what they added.

Still bitter that my 2006 Core Duo MacBook only had support up to 10.6 Snow Leopard but back then that was over 4 years of being able to use the latest OS, so comparable to four releases with the current cycles.