I checked some reviews to see how they operate. It looks like the main difference is that the Sofabaton does not have “activities” where the remote keeps track of the state of a device. That is a bit of a shame, but other than that is seems like a pretty close match.
Thanks. I’ve been looking to a proper remote to carry the torch of the Logitech Harmony. This seems like a great package
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
There was an update on this a couple days ago from Accursed Farms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw
tl;dw They were already expecting the Commission to be unwilling to propose new legislation, but they have a plan to go forward and achieve what they set out to do, using existing legislation. That would bypass the Commission all together, since no new legislation would be required.
The average person […] is surprisingly afraid to mess with electronics
These e-bikes often don’t require you to mess with electronics to “tune” them. It is usually as simple as flicking a switch in an app. Manufacturers know what they are doing and make the process as convenient as possible.
The most I have seen is a police estimation that 5-10% of e-bikes on the roads are illegally tuned.
That is 1 in 20 e-bikes on the road. Given the total amount of e-bikes on the road, those are insane numbers.
My comment didn’t say “most people”, it says “many people”.
That is already how it is set up in Europe.
Regular e-bikes have to have their electric assist limited to 25 km/h, but you can still pedal faster than that on your own power.
If an e-bike is not limited to 25 km/h, then it falls in the category of speed pedelec, which requires a licence plate and insurance.
However, it is trivially easy to illegally remove the limit on some models of e-bike, and many people (mostly teenagers) do remove that limit. They then recklessly cycle at excessive speeds down the bike path, without regard of other cyclists who may be cycling there.
The issue in the Netherlands (idk about other place in Europe?) is lack of enforcement of the existing rules against tuning e-bikes.
Edit: Also worth noting that this is by no means a new problem.
We used to have the exact same problem with people tuning their mopeds, back when blue-plated mopeds (which are also supposed to be limited to 25 km/h) did not yet have a helmet requirement. After helmets were made obligatory a few years ago, most of these people moved to e-bikes instead.
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.
I don’t like the idea that we should be implementing sub-optimal laws with the assumption that they won’t be properly enforced anyway. Then it will be the same as all those other laws we already don’t sufficiently enforce, such as reckless road usage.
If we are going to implement a hard speed limit we should enforce that speed limit, and not just leave it at the discretion of the police officer to determine whether they feel like it is something that should be enforced or not.
Edit: That is why I argue in favour of an advisory speed, rather than a hard speed limit.
I’m also Dutch and I’m not against the idea of an advisory speed on the bike lanes (like they do in Belgium), but I think a hard speed limit at 20 km/h is too low and restrictive.
A lot of cyclists (including myself) naturally cycle at a speed faster than that, and are most comfortable cycling at that speed. This limit would also apply to them, not just the mopeds and e-bikes. That reduces cycling comfort, which I don’t think you should be doing if you want to encourage people to take the bike.
By all means tackle the problem of speeding mopeds and e-bikes. But don’t penalise the regular cyclist who cycles fast, but pays attention to their fellow cyclist and slows down when the situation calls for it.
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.
I’ll copy my comment on this article from a different thread
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.
In the Netherlands there are two kinds of mopeds.
I’d love it if they’d release a base station-less version with activity capability. I see no reason why that wouldn’t be possible (other than potentially cannibalising their own sales with a cheaper and similarly capable model)