Neither are a problem in the European countries that I’m aware of yet young voter turnout is catastrophic there as well. Some parties definitely have a hard anti-Israel line. I’d be happy to see a counterexample but I think only bitter disappointment lays ahead.

Young people are increasingly disengaged from the “traditional” democratic process, globally. Less voter turnout, but also way less participation in traditional politics (which 25 year olds have a party membership card anymore?)

Interestingly though, Gen Z isn’t necessarily politically inactive; they are still being activists, engaging in political discourse, and are donating a larger average percentage of their income than Gen X/Y IIRC.

That’s not to excuse the extremely shortsighted decision not to vote, but the problem is a lot larger than some practical barriers. I truly think there are strong and multifaceted cultural elements to the youths increasingly not responding to the traditional representative democratic systems in the way that generations who grew up on TV did. Gerrymandering is bad, but don’t expect a hypothetical fix to bring zoomers to the voting centers.

All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we’ll have to have it at some point. It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn’t make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company’s part.

There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike’s. Instead we’re happy to shrug and move on when management doesn’t even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn’t sound particularly outlandish to me.

But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.

Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.

Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they’re buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is “Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials”.

Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.

If the dev is “the guy who presses the ‘go live’ button” then he’s an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that “go live” button.

As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything… If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we’d be surprised).

I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but “blame” is not the same as “consequences” and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that “low likelihood, big impact” corner.
Because likely when the problem happens (again) they’ll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.

What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer’s recommendation).

To be annoyingly nitpicky, how is “unnecessary” defined in this context? Whitespace is usually “unnecessary” but I quite like it for readability.

I broadly agree with you though, the W3C spec changes things.

> Clicks on <br>
> Example is <br />

The actual thing that matters is that the / is ignored so (unlike with XML I believe) you can’t self-close a non-void element by adding a trailing /. But “void elements should not have trailing slashes” is extrapolation on your part; the trailing slash improves readability and is kosher since it doesn’t act as a self-close.

Corporate behemoths are going to keep doing what they do best.

Their ISO-whatever certification says they gotta get that kind of software, so they do. Whether it is found to actually increase business risk does not matter in the slightest, what matters is that a box is checked for the audit.

It’s like Oracle or IBM, who did not contribute anything of value to the world since about 2005 and notoriously have some of the most aggressive licensing lawyers on the planet. But there are lots of companies out there who sort a product segment from Old to New and pick the first result on account of the fact that it’s “established”, “reputable” and “reliable”, every other consideration be damned.

The Catholic Church: Co-opts a pagan holiday and re-brands it

Two millennia of tradition: Mix pagan imagery with Christian imagery

Nonbelievers: Co-opt it back without the explicitly Christian imagery

You: Nooooooo it’s religious!

The Church has had an iron fist over much of my continent for near two millenia, so of course you can find a religious tie for every holiday (except the First of May probably). However my family is almost completely non believing and we’ve always celebrated Christmas and Easter, with Coca-Cola Santa and no Mass. Why this laic co-optation is so controversial I will never understand.

Easter is not inherently a christian holiday goddammit. At least not in its popular celebration. Last I checked Jesus didn’t pop eggs from his butt when he resurrected (that we know of) and the preachings of the Easter Bunny are unfortunately not canon in Catholicism.

To complain about “religious persecution” of profoundly pagan (if not outright heretical depending on who you ask) traditions is… certainly an interesting exercise in religious cognitive dissonance.

… This was Belgium, not a backwater shithole. It was one of the richest countries in the world, the illiteracy rate was already very low. The enlightenment was two centuries prior and Belgium was very much part of it.

The individual baker who never set foot in the Congo may not be personally responsible, but there definitely is a collective responsibility from the population. Like I said, this was reported on and I am sure that if you go back you will find all the major newspapers reported on it long before the Belgian government took back control. It was just politically convenient for most to ignore Leopold II’s exactions.

Lots of members of civil society and private companies participated in the atrocities though. And Belgium has been a democracy since its independence, so “the people” are further responsible by being complacent despite contemporary reporting on the atrocities (especially from British investigators as I remember it).

Then the Belgian government continuously failed the Congolese people, especially with the decolonization process which was rushed and ill-prepared which led to a civil war and the rise of Mobutu.

In Rwanda Belgium was one of the actors who cowardly failed to act to prevent genocide.

To say “it’s the king” or “it’s the government” is way too easy. The country as a whole is responsible for what happened to the Belgian Congo.

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.