Absolutely disgusting chocolate in my opinion. Chalky and bland. It’s nice that they claim to be about equality, but the product itself just isn’t to my taste. And yes, the dumb way they make these bars also really puts me off.

I just want a normal, boring bar that tastes nice. And this is not the brand for me.

I will definitely second that recommendation. They turn basically every shoe into a slipper.

I was skeptical when I read about them, but gave them a go. Reason being: my feet swell during the day, which means I was constantly loosening my laces throughout the day. Which isn’t ideal.

The Lock Laces help in that they’re always perfect: they flex with my feet and always have just the right tension.

They are popular with a wide range of people. Triathletes like them for fast transitions since you don’t need to retie your shoes. Marathon runners also love them since it means no more laces getting undone. And yes, they’re obviously great for old folks and people with disabilities.

I like them so much, I now put them on every new pair of shoes that I buy.

They actually raised it back in 2019.

http://11foot8.com/raising-11foot8/

It didn’t help much, obviously.

Victorinox has never disappointed me. I own a few kitchen knives, their cutlery and an extensive collection of pocket knives. Everything is solid, dependable, arrives sharp and stays sharp. Plus they have good company ethics, as far as those things go. I like their products so much, I frequently give them as gifts.

When I worked in radio production, basically everything was formatted like YYYY-MM-DD. Which means stuff is really to find and properly in chronological order.

I still usw the MM-DD format for my own file formatting, even though DD-MM is the Dutch standard.

YYYY-MM-DD is god’s perfect date notation as far as I’m concerned.

Could be, but I think a seat heating malfunction is more likely. Looks like an older vehicle so there’s all sorts of things that could break down.

The driver also might’ve just parked it in the exact right spot to catch problematic sun reflections. There’s been a few buildings that are known to cause issues. People who parked around the ‘Walkie Talkie’ building in London had melted body panels, mirrors, burns in their interior, etc. They had to install screens on the building to stop this ‘death ray’ effect.

Bats. Some species really look like adorable little sky kittens. But they are also significant disease carriers, ranging from rabies to ebola. Bats themselves have evolved to be immune to things that can kill us and other animals.

It’s why you should never, EVER touch a bat. Just don’t.

I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.

It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.

That game is dead to me. I really loved it when it was actual humans playing, but I checked out years ago when the bots started taking over. Some days you couldn’t get ANY actual match in, since bots would straight up vote-kick you off.

Valve doesn’t seem to really care or they would’ve fixed it on their own. So I doubt a petition will have much effect.

Well, here in the Netherlands we definitely need far more energy in the near future. We’re moving away from natural gas for heating and fossil fuels are going away in favor of electric vehicles. Add in things like heat pumps, more people getting airconditioning, data centers and other growing energy needs.

Basically, right now we have ‘just about’ enough electricity available, but soon it won’t be.

Nuclear plants are expensive and take a long while to build. Which is why I hold politicians responsible for not pushing them through years ago. The best time to build a nuclear plant was ten years ago. The second best time is today.

Even the link itself mentions how it’s not really a good metric to use as it doesn’t factor in whole lot of externalities. I.e coal is cheaper, but when it creates air pollution that shortens your lifespan, is it worth the tradeoff? Nor does it factor in things like energy density: a nuclear power plant is far smaller than the amount of land needed to put up enough wind turbines to match its output.

Basically… LCOE looks like a neat gotcha, right up until you look past that first diagram.

https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood

Absolutely that’s scary. Heck, we’re seeing the effects of it every day. If more nuclear means less coal and other polluting options, I’m all for it.

I’ve got solar panels on my roof, and being Dutch windmills are in my blood. But I’m also not blind to the reality that both wind and solar will only get you so far. And there’s already a lot of opposition to wind farms - they ruin the view, endanger birds and there’s health concerns due to noise and shadow projection.

If we just build even one nuclear powerplant, we could basically just… not do wind. And we’d have pleeeenty of power for the coming energy transition, change to electric vehicles, etc.

But noooo… nuclear is scary. Especially to the people who only cite Fukushima and Chernobyl in regards to safety. That’s the same as banning air travel because of 9/11 and the Tenerife disaster. Nuclear power is safe, cheap and we owe it to the planet to use it wisely instead of more polluting alternatives.

Well we are proud of Dutch manufacturing in general. We like to make good products, even if they might be bad for you: for decades, we had the best weed in terms of THC content. And the Netherlands is also a highly regarded global producer of XTC pills and amphetamines. There’s only so many tulips you can export…

So yes, loose tobacco is one of our fine export products. We Dutch also loved it; it was really popular to use in joints (see: Dutch weed) and rolling your own cigarettes tended to be cheaper than buying packs (we Dutch are notoriously cheap). These days people prefer a vape, or pure joint. And with smoking in general on the decline, loose tobacco is a rare sight here these days.

Well, Europe is a big place. The percentage of smokers differs from country to country, as well as the anti-smoking legislation and when that was introduced.

In the Netherlands, you cannot smoke in the workplace, restaurants, cinema, on public transport, near a hospital, etc. Sale of tobacco products is illegal to anyone under 18 and we’ve banned things like flavoured vapes.

Because of all these measures, ‘only’ 19 percent of the Dutch population 15 and older smokes, with people lower on the socio-economic ladder smoking more frequently. That’s below the European average of 19.7 percent.

Now, compare that to other countries like France (22 percent), Spain (23 percent) and Bulgaria (28 percent).

Now, those countries have anti-smoking legislation as well. But because they had statistically higher numbers of smokers, it takes longer to see the overall effect.

So depending on where you are in Europe, your perception of smoking habits could vary wildly.

Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.

Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.

I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.

Well that’s… certainly understandable. Not gonna argue that one :D

The early days of web shopping sure were interesting. I was a very early adopter compared to most people.

The very first thing I ever bought online was a flashlight back in 1999. Which was such a novelty at the time that I actually visited the two guys who ran that shop from a literal broom closet in order to collect it. I was like their third customer ever. These days they have 75 employees and around 7 million euros of revenue.

Collecting a web order seems silly now, but at that time it basically avoided a two week wait. Back in 1998-2005, if you bought something online in the Netherlands, you usually had to transfer the money by bank. Which took a few days. After that, they would send the product, which again took a few days.

In 2005 we got a new online payment method that let you transfer the money immediately, much like paying at a register. That made it way more convenient for everyone and you saw massive increases in spending year over year.

Well that’s pretty much every platform’s lifecycle. Starts small, reaches a sweet spot and either implodes or sucks ass.

I was on Digg, I had a MySpace page, I was an early Twitter user, I had a Reddit account… who knows how long I’ll be on here. But for now, I’m happy to be one of the users on the upswing.

In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.

From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.

Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.

I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…