It goes deeper than parents being nostalgic. The veneer of meritocracy is load-bearing to neoliberal ideology, especially post-WWII. If we, as a ~society~, acknowledged that no matter how big kids dream and how much they work they’ll probably never make it more than maybe one or two steps up the social ladder, our entire social model would collapse.

At its most fundamental level, that’s what the war against “wokism” is. It’s the privileged correctly identifying and targeting the existential threat that is the mere acknowledgement that we do not live in a meritocracy.

Belgian here. The rules vary depending on the collective agreement the position falls under (hospitality workers’ unions negotiate separately from construction workers’ for instance).

Most people in most jobs are some variation of salaried (whether on a fixed or indeterminate duration contract) and the contract must be broken either upon natural termination (fixed contract or tryout period), with a predetermined amount of notice time, or due to an egregious fault (multiple warning notices, stealing from the employer, failing to pay the employee, etc.).

Contractors can be hired and fired willy-nilly, but they normally get paid enough for that not to be a concern. I’m not aware of “hourly” contracts in the way North-Americans usually mean them, AFAIK the number of weekly working hours must always be determined in advance. I just checked, in the hospitality industry there is obviously some regulated leeway for scheduling but the yearly average must be exactly 38 hours/week (hence why some Americans always complain that European waiters aren’t kissing their boots every 5 seconds). Though there are many different collective agreements, each with enough different rules to keep the employment lawyers well fed.

“Odd jobs” are legal and not subject to those rules, but if you regularly employ someone for “odd jobs” then it is very likely that were they to challenge it in court, the judge would reclassify that as a salary position and rule according to that and even possibly fine the employer for unlawful employment. Generally speaking if someone can just walk away from a job with no repercussions in Belgium, I’d expect that it is either an illegal employment situation, some kind of odd/seasonal job, or a job where the employer just doesn’t care enough to sue (if they were paying out the minimum wage, they certainly aren’t going to get anything back by suing!).

It will take years before you make that money back on the investment though, depending on local taxation and electricity prices. And that’s assuming that you have a decent enough orientation in the first place - some people live on the north side of their apartment block!
Always do the maths on PV for your situation, a 25 year positive ROI does not justify a purchase but a 10 year ROI might.

We need more A/C to survive climate change, but the solution can’t be “put PV on balconies” because it’s highly situational (not everyone has an adequately big south-facing balcony) and won’t solve your problems if you could not afford the cooling bills in the first place (the only people who consider a 10 year ROI a good investment are the ones with capital to spare on home improvements). As with all personal renewable tech, it’s a cost-saving tool for the well-off, not a structural solution to anything.

Two panels on the balcony of a 40m² studio? The 2x1m 400+ W ones? I did not even have a balcony when I lived in a studio lol. Anyways if you only require 1.75 kWh that’s less than a euro of electricity even on fixed pricing. I think the real lesson here is that we haven’t had summer yet this year so the AC barely turned on at all.

I just checked on Hubo, their cheapest portable A/C is 7000 BTU, i.e. 2 kW. That means if you had to use it at full tilt for an hour (not exactly an outlandish scenario in the previous years’ summers), you’d use more electricity in that hour than you’ve had all year this year.

These won’t even power a small portable AC, if you have a balcony and it’s on the south side and you have enough m² to angle the panel halfway properly, you’ll be lucky to generate 500 W.

That’s only half the power draw of a small AC unit, and doesn’t even get into the fact that in most places you cannot hook up a solar to your house without an approved inverter with appropriate safety features (otherwise you’d endanger the linemen in case of an outage). Where I live if you still have an old installation with net metering, you also pay a tax based on the inverter capacity (which is good because net metering is bullshit subsidies from the poor to the landowners).

PV energy is good, but apartments are not a reasonable use-case for it. Residential PV is inherently a tool for privileged house owners, and if PV is to help apartment dwellers it’s through grid-scale renewables and dynamic pricing and/or smart grids that provide cheap power for A/C on sunny summer days.

It makes some sense contextually.

Purple and light purple are “NFP (left)” and “not NFP (left)”. Socialists are traditionally red.

The two blues are “LR (right)” and “not LR (right)”. Liberals are traditionally blue.

Yellow are center-right neolibs.

The independent left/right seats don’t matter much because they will vote predictably with their political side on most issues, so since this will be a coalition Parliament there is not much point in outlining individual party affiliation (anyways the NFP is already a coalition of several parties).

On top of what others have said, most Brits (even a lot of remainers) are under the deep delusion that Rejoin means Rejoin on 2016 terms.

Earliest rejoin is 10 years in theory, but in reality it will probably be decades before the Brits are ready to swallow their pride and join the EU on the same terms as everyone else (no funny license plates, blue passport, no funny big ag exemptions, no more special opt-outs, and most importantly immediate euro adoption). The EU does not have any more political incentive to offer the broad exemptions the UK used to benefit from, and have publicly stated as much.

If a British party ran on a rejoin campaign and actually won, they’d fuck themselves about as hard as Cameron did because the political reality does not match the ludicrous expectations. If Brits have to turn in their Pound notes for Euro notes, the political backlash will be so enormous that it will set off seismometers in Bucharest.

Uh, they originally weren’t paid. They were paid for.

I think that goes way further back, because Brittany’s butter is traditionally salty. Like, cronchy salty.

Never had a problem with salted butter but mine’s European, dunno how y’all do it.

It’s a real color (as real as colors can be, which is not very). It’s not a spectral color, you won’t find it on the rainbow. It’s actually the result of your red and blue cones being activated together.

Life is Strange’s writing is trope-y and often not that great, and my neurospicy ass doesn’t even relate with pretty much any of the nostalgic tropes about teenagehood (as far as I’m concerned these were the worst years of my life, by far, and any piece of media that wants to make me relive them is very unlikely to make its way onto my computer).

However the game manages to more than make up for all of that with an enthralling story that fully immerses the player with compelling gameplay, meaningful choice-based storytelling, great artistic vision, and ground-breaking character acting. The whole thing is expertly calibrated to deliver emotional gut-punch after emotional gut-punch.

Hellblade is just straight-up amazing and the Melinda Juergens’ character acting is hauntingly raw and poignant.

Right, I have abolished my government but the other guys have not. Now what?

Oh you poor things, the lack of attention we give you is what allows you to thrive. I’d almost shed a tear if there was an inkling of truth in those ramblings.

People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

Get out with this class essentialism.

Going from prole renting a shitty apartment who barely owns a car and a washing machine, to forcibly deported or forced to renounce your culture and teach your children the invader’s language and culture is not “potato, potato”.
Sometimes there are other things to fight for than capital, even if this might sound like a foreign concept to Westerners whose country hasn’t been directly involved in a meaningful non-imperialist conflict since 1945.

I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).

It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.

The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.

Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.

It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.