3,030 karma · joined December 8, 2008
In NL I saw loads of water/water heat pumps (so using geothermal) in plans for new buildings. The latest plans now seem to prefer air/water. The air/water is cheaper and the units nowadays are much quieter than they used to be. This is just my observations, I could be way off.
If you've installed an airconditioning system which can cool and heat up your home you've installed a heat pump (air/air). They're hardly magic.
£500 for what? Total cost for a month? A year? The monthly average of a full year of costs. The monthly average cost thing is common in NL; people often have no clue other than knowing the monthly average cost. And it's often estimated beforehand by the energy company. It's assumed to be correct.
Anyway, people need to check the SCOP instead of figuring out if it is efficient (COP) at a certain temperature.
> On that note I think biopropane will be the solution for Europe.
Oh please no.
On UK, I was in Scotland. I thought the homes in NL are often terrible quality. Scotland was another level. Pretty much no insulation, terrible windows. Really drafty. Yet the media (as a result the public as well) hates the "Insulate Britain" movement.
a) Escape sequence to set the "dynamic" terminal title
b) how e.g. GNOME notifies you that a long running command has completed
c) how e.g. GNOME asks if you are certain to close a terminal, but only in case you're not in a shell
d) maybe readline or /etc/inputrc
e) bash completions maybe? it's sort of in there already
In a big company it's often a hassle to pay something to a "new vendor". It usually takes a long time.
> If you don't prevent fraud at the $500 level you'll have two problems
I had a colleague who used to work in the Auditing section. He had various stories of people committing fraud (stories of 50k USD+). There's a cost to trying to prevent all cases of fraud and that might hurt more than to try and prevent everything.
I've also heard cases (not from the auditing guy) where a vendor notified that we paid them 1000 times too much (caused by an input error with the , and the .). That happened despite several layers of checks.
> At a "really big company" the labor cost of paying an invoice might be $2000.
At a "really big company" if something is a good idea then it'll get done. And those handling administrative tasks are often "outsourced" to cheaper countries, e.g. India/Philippines/China/etc.
There have been several donations to "good causes". Those were handled without trying to figure out the cost of someone working in an entirely different part of the world and company. This as it's not like someone will specifically will be hired, or it really matters.
They usually made an event out of an donation (e.g. handing out something in person in an office). Funny enough the event surrounding that was often poorly attended.
> that's $750 of labor costs just to have the dev team possibly agree to support urllib3
You're not talking about a donation any more.
I highly recommend reading the following article:
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139964806/how-elon-bought-tw...
Elon Musk bought Twitter with "loans". The interest of those loans are now a responsibility for Twitter. Meaning did NOT have a huge run rate. The leveraged buyout caused this.
There have been an insane amount of focus that the huge predicted losses are a result of lazy overpaid developers. This while ignoring that Elon Mush did a leveraged buyout. The number of employees wasn't the issue, making Twitter responsible for billions in loans while the interest rate of those loans went up is the problem.
Elon Musk keeps complaining about the federal reserve and the interest rate. He's complaining for a reason. He gambled and couldn't back out.
FOSS isn't about it being free though. You've already stated the issue:
> FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources
That doesn't mean FOSS is has as a moral to not charge for software.
Seems more that you want government to facilitate running a business where it's not in the interest of that government, nor in the interest of the locals. Airbnb's aren't beneficial, plus they aren't checked as properly as a hotel.
Usually it isn't banned, what they're after is that it is limited (days/year), plus the AirBnB income is properly taxed.
Why would the liability be solely with the person? Especially if that company has a representation in the other country I highly doubt this.
In e.g. NL the company has to "take care" of the employee. A company cannot just ignore such a question, or take it as "not my problem".
There are separate arrangements for touring groups. However, if you're not from the EU then good luck. You'll notice that there are huge complications after brexit. That said, likely nobody will check, care or notice.
That's not legal. To work in the EU you need a work visa. Though they ignore the business trips. What's legal and what's checked are different things.
E.g. new foreign colleagues need to get a tax id in The Netherlands before they do any work. Doesn't matter if they came from the US.
I hope you're being sarcastic here, no?
That's what Russian propaganda keeps saying. But they ignore the huge amounts of gas that was found in the region of Ukraine that was annexed by Russia. Further, Ukraine gave back their nuclear weapons. Meaning, Ukraine already acted to demilitarize.
Ukraine moving closer to EU and NATO can be traced back to Ukraine finding huge gas reserves in 2012 and Russia attacking Ukraine in 2014.
In Netherlands various farmers invested to switch from gas to alternative sources. These farmers are now way more competitive than before. Netherlands leads the way in technology around farmers. Farmers have huge expenses, these expenses can be reduced by investing. Some invested, some didn't.
What would help is to have more guidance around this. That not every person (and e.g. farmer) needs to figure things out on their own.
Netherlands is planning to get rid off gas for a while. I've attended a presentation by the city. They planned to spend 12.500 EUR per house to switch to an local heating plan. Basically a source of hot water will enter the home. This pipe is way bigger than a gas pipe, this is why 12.500 EUR is needed per home.
They mentioned that likely you'll pay the same for heating as before.
I find it bonkers. With 12.500, why not insulate and maybe prepare it for a air/water heat pump. The radiators on really old homes will need to be replaced with ones that work with a low temperature. Walls need to be insulated, windows and window frames likely need replacing. Still, it's way better to be more energy efficient than to spend 12.500 EUR per house (of which 11.500 will be "subsidized") than asking people to change things without actually improving their homes.
The problem doesn't seem to be the money. The problem is that idiotic solutions are suggested. Plus that whatever is subsidized goes up in price. E.g. a air/water heat pump costs way too much.
I know various people who work in shifts. It's really bad for your rhythm. It takes months before people find a way to deal with the effects. It's worth it due to the additional money they earn, that's it.
e.g. it completely skips over the reliance on chassis to do anything on a US terminal. Anywhere else in the world and the terminal setup is quite different. Another issue is that most other places in the world work 24/7, unlike US terminals. This is coupled with a really strong but strange union (preventing any changes) on the US terminal side, while trucks are more or less abused.
It complains about things (globalization) that on its own aren't bad. What's bad is that various governments did nothing to prevent that only a few benefitted from that globalization in e.g. US/Northern Europe.
Then it points towards some law that's a US law and not global. It's a bit strange to ignore China->Europe trade.
Nothing fancy was needed for this, the sensor I'm talking about is battery operated. I have this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ11LM.html or this one: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/devices/WSDCGQ12LM.html (they look alike too much).
A 40' container is either 2 or 2.25 TEU. The .25 is when the container is a bit higher than standard. Though nowadays loads of containers are a bit higher. The extra .25 is ignored in various cases (basically when it doesn't matter).
What likely happens is that the shipping line is sending these charges out automatically (global systems, huge company, etc). Which are then usually disputed as the terminal isn't accepting the empty.
The story makes it out that a shipping line is behaving more strangely than what happens in practice.
There's a huge backlog of vessels that need to be handled. Usually you have space on the vessel to bring back the empties, normally the reason not to do that is if it takes too much time to bring them on board (terminal is slow or vessel was late). If it was due to too many vessels it could've been solved by sending a vessel purely for empties. But there's a huge backlog in vessels to be handled. Productivity increases usually take quite a while to materialize.
I'd suggest checking Felixstowe. Various years ago they were quick. They changed their terminal system. After that they were utterly slow (still are). Due to UK importing way more than what they export, Felixstowe always has way more empties going back than full containers.
However, Felixstowe works 24/7, plus they apply pressure on shipping lines the various times they are overwhelmed with empties.
The idea comes up at every "innovation" session. After which the responsible department shows then the last study they did (study is repeated every few years).
Fedora/GNOME prefers to install updates during a reboot. So although most updates can work this way, it's not always the case.
There are some minor cases where a reboot is better, or where an update requires a bit of work. E.g. Firefox updates, but also I sometimes have that video playback suddenly breaks (not sure why; kernel/mesa/something). Only a reboot seems to fix the video playback and it happens in various applications once it breaks (Firefox, mpv). I install the updates via dnf via cron/systemd (forgot what I did), so not with the suggested reboot and so on.
I do appreciate the Flatpak bits, those update easily.
Cars aren't efficient. The zoning should be such that things are close by enough. Then with proper cycling infrastructure you can just go by bike. As a result you'll need way less road. As cycling infrastructure is cheap and road maintenance is costly, it'll reduce expenses for e.g. cities.
> European cities with decent public transit.
I'd rather have the mix of public transport, bicycles and roads. Combined with proper zoning. Loads of electric cars just increases demand for a highly inefficient transportation method.
What is strange that people asked for e.g. Amazon.nl support. This isn't implemented as Keepa relies on Amazon (this is their answer in the forums). But if they scrape, why do they still need Amazon?