mtts

This is very cool, but very expensive. For this money (€230 in EU) there are a lot of other options, however, for getting an oscilloscope that is useful and robust (unlike those €30 DIY kits that ... I'm too clumsy not to break).

- The Netherlands is in no way refugee friendly. They tried to ban families from reuniting (which international treaties explicitly forbid) and so many shelters were closed down that incoming refugees has to sleep out in the cold for weeks before they could be “processed”. - The victims of the benefit scandal were (often second or third generation) immigrants, not refugees.

Yes, the Dutch are incredibly racist (I’m Dutch, btw) but the “no internationals” isn’t because of the color of their skin but because they don’t stay around for long. With “internationals” (meaning expats and foreign students) you have to go through the hassle of putting up your rental on the market much more often than with non-“internationals”. “No internationals” basically just means “long term rentals only”.

Edit: but, in typical Dutch fashion, this essentially innocent statement is worded as rudely as possible.

One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is the piano-centric nature of a lot of (amateur) music since 1800 or so. In small settings, a single woodwind or even a violin isn't all that useful. When you're targeting amateur musicians (a vastly larger group than professionals), basing yourself off a piano keyboard is a good bet as most of them will at least be familiar with it.

I appreciate that you’re angry and I agree that for the most part there’s entirely too much privatization going on (railways? really?). As far as healthcare is concerned, however, in the Netherlands (it might very well be different elsewhere), it is mostly not being privatized and the government is spending ever increasing amounts of money on it which take up an ever increasing cut of the budget and the reason for this is more people are growing older and sicker and are therefore requiring more complex care.

We’re currently at €7000 per person per year spent on health care, with average salaries being €36.000 annually. This is unsustainable.

The difference being that Taiwan is a goose that lays golden eggs (TMSC) so you'd be crazy so invade and thereby kill it.

Pretty sure Ukraine had / has nothing that Russia wants to keep alive.

Any proof for this? Because in the Netherlands wait times are increasing because, get this, more (old) people are using health care. This increases pressure on the people who work in health care so they burn out, leaving fewer people to pick up the work, who then burn out, lather, rinse, repeat. Salaries in health care are not fantastic, true, but the people burning out do so because they have to work too hard, not because the government is defunding them. Another problem is that there simply is more treatment options available because of scientific progress. Afflictions that used to kill people can now be treated or at least managed, but this takes up a lot of time and money. Great for you if you end up living longer and in better health, not so great for the system as a whole.

Not “software engineer”, though. Anyone can be one of those. Maybe because it’s an English term?

I've tried to run Emacs this way and quickly gave up. There's just too many packages which don't work at all. Also, it's very, very slow. Finally, for it to be truly useful you need to be able to edit all the text files on your iPad with it and setting that up is either very finicky or doesn't work at all (looking at you, Dropbox).

This definition is not necessarily wrong. It’s easier for them to argue that they need telemetry to provide (and improve) their own services than it is to argue some third party advertising behemoth needs it. The former is perfectly acceptable, also according to the GDPR (first party advertising is also A-Ok according to he GDPR, btw).

If I’m not mistaken the latest research on this topic incorporates the results of DNA studies that seem to suggest there was indeed a population replacement (made possible in part by the very large number of the Anglo-Saxon immigrants and the very much reduced, as a result of the upheavals after the departure of the Romans, number of Britons).

The linguistic evidence has always suggested complete replacement. Even with the prestige language of invaders taking over you would expect some geographical names, especially for small, insignificant and / or out of the way features to persist and yet in England there is pretty much not a single place name that has Celtic origins (outside of Cornwall of course)

Rare how? Charlie Parker famously used it on Jazz at Massey Hall

Dunno, NIN (which I love, btw) was always the Disney version of Midwest Industrial which itself was the Disney version of Throbbing Gristle and friends, so, you know, it’a not entirely unexpected ;-)

Friend of mine called PHM “Michael Jackson with dirty words” which isn’t an unfair characterization by any means.

This used to be true, but in 2000 (!)the US government enabled the full range of GPS features for civilian use, vastly improving the accuracy of GPS receivers.

GPS.gov says single band receivers should be able to get less than 2m accuracy. Dual band units, like the latest Garmin Forerunner watches, can do much, much better.

> I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.

Given Garmin’s long, long history as a manufacturer of (often very small) GPS devices, I personally wouldn’t be.

(I also know for a fact they do mapping better. This summer I was in the South of Italy and only Garmin accurately distinguished between small public roads and long private driveways while both Google and Apple royally messed this up.)

Fear of RDBMSes is quite common. I used to suffer from it too. It’s just so annoying to have to switch your brain to a different programming paradigm every time you need to do something with the database that you start to make up all sorts of excuses as to why it’s really just better to “do it in the code”. Your coworkers argument about FKs making data migrations difficult is one of them.

Another classic is the “joins are slow” argument, which I believe goes back to a period in the late 1990s when in one, not highly regarded at the time, database, namely MySQL, they were indeed slow. But the reason “everyone” knew about this was precisely the oddness of this situation: in fact RDBMSes are highly optimized pieces of software that are especially good at combining sets of data. Much better than ORMs, anyway, or, god forbid, whatever you cobble together on your own.

There is, in my mind, only one valid reason to not use foreign keys in a database schema. If your database is mostly write only, the additional overhead of generating the indexes for the foreign keys may slow you down a little (for reading, these very same foreign keys in fact speed things up quite considerably). Even in such a case, however, I’d argue you’re doing it wrong and there should be a cache of some sort before things are written out in bulk to a properly setup RDBMS.

This is about his fading pigments. There are letters of his where he acknowledges that he uses bad quality paints that are likely to fade, which is why he uses stronger colors than he knows he should.

The linked article (which has very few pictures, this link to work by the original researcher has much more: https://asada0.tumblr.com/post/11517603099/the-day-i-saw-van... ) is about something else, namely a form of color blindness that distorts your vision in ways that are a lot less obvious than the way more common red/green or even blue/yellow color blindness.

I’m not an expert, of course, but to my layman’s eyes the “corrected” images look much, much better than the u corrected ones (you’ll need to see them indoors, however, on a reasonably good screen, to truly appreciate the difference). Uncorrected van Gogh’s work always strikes me as flat, lifeless and therefore amateurish. The corrected ones have much more depth and therefore, while garish, strike me as much more competent.

This problem is pretty solved in the Netherlands. https://www.thuisarts.nl is set up by the Dutch federation of General Practitioners and provides good, non-sensationalist information that is guaranteed to be vetted by the likes of the very doctor you'd normally visit (or by the people who train them, I presume - pretty sure if you look up a GP handbook you'll find almost the same text as on that site, only with more detail and with more complicated language).

Spot on assessment of “The History of Jazz” (just finished it myself). It’s probably more of a reference book than anything else.

For actual reading, his “How to Listen to Jazz” is probably much better - and covers quite a bit of the same ground.

Yes. Even before the source material for GOT dried up it was borderline unwatchable due to the constant nudity.

I’m really not a prude, I hope, but I prefer to keep my intriguing and backstabbing separate from my softcore pornography.

  The revival we need, urgently, is of recorded music income 

Why? That ship has sailed. In 2022, as in 1922, 1822, 1722 etc musicians will have to earn their income by playing live.

PenStore.nl is like a Dutch version of Jetpens. Really nice. Alternatively something called japanstore.nl has the fancier versions.

Very much this. The Netherlands is essentially a frat house kept afloat by dangerously unregulated immigrant labor, a dwindling number of middle class professionals and tax laws that would be an embarrassment to all but the most unrepentant of tax havens.

High risk score means you’re under scrutiny. Once you’re under scrutiny every minor thing that goes wrong or is unclear is by default assumed to be fraud and you get slapped with (often outrageously high) fines, payable immediately. You can only appeal after the fact, so you’re drowning in debt even before the first judge looks at your case.

That is assuming a judge gets anywhere near your case. This often didn’t happen because access to the law is made extremely difficult in the Netherlands (on purpose). The people this affected mostly did not have the skills to find their way in the Dutch legal system so they were ruined.

All of this is by design, by the way: the system assumes ill will by default, spends an inordinate amount of resources on detecting it and punishes it severely all because being tough on fraud polls well.

Yes. In fact the stuff you list doesn’t come from China at all but Indonesia. More complicated components come from Malaysia and Thailand, as do hard drives and the like.

The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.

Agreed, it’s false. Pizza in Italy (and in the rest of Europe, for that matter) is very little like pizza in the US.

Amusingly, however, while it’s influence on the food itself is at the very least debatable, the influence of the US on how pizza is consumed is in fact very real: the fact that Italians nowadays drink beer with their pizza is something they learned from American GIs in WWII who brought the practice over from home.

Before that time, there was no overlap between Italians who drank beer (Northerners) and Italians who ate pizza (Southerners). Thanks the American soldiers Southerners learned to drink beer and Northerners learned about pizza.

No, he died really early

Not much of a retort. It starts of with an insult at the journalist asking the question why they need to be so strict and then goes on with the usual fear mongering about heroin use being so rampant it destroys society.

Fact is LKY and the government he founded is exceptionally brutal and petty (to this day foreign journalists who dare criticize the PAP government will find themselves sued for libel) but there is very little to suggest that specific aspect of theirs actually does Singapore any good.

A much more likely explanation for their success is that they’re famously incorruptible. Unlike other SE Asian strongmen LKY never diverted his CIA bribe money to a Swiss bank account but instead spent it on beautifying his fief.

(Of course government officials do pay themselves exorbitant salaries so you could argue it’s just corruption by another name, but at least that happens out in the open and comes with a veneer of respectability)

In China you were fined when you had more than one child. In Singapore, you were not. It was just a publicity campaign, basically.

> I'd guess the lack of space and longer working hours would be more of a contributor.

Yup.

Also, Singaporeans of Indian and Malay descent have more children than Singaporeans of Chinese descent. Over time this would lead to the ethnic composition of Singapore changing. However, the government has decided the ethnic balance as it was upon independence is sacrosanct, so they hand out permanent residence status to anyone of ethnic Chinese descent that wants it - people from mainland China, mostly.