I would guess there's relatively little crime within a block of the police station.

Not necessarily: recently a drugsdealer told the police here in Belgium where he meets his supplier for drugs deals: at the parking lot of a police station :)

typical click-bait: "read here why Pluto still matters...."
How about giving a real abstract on why it matters on the Slashdot post and people can click through for reference and details if they want to.

Cool, thanks for replying!
Yes this was also before the LHC on the smaller loop. The community is probably larger and more diverse now. Also, this is just hearsay of one person's account from a long time ago before the age of social media :)
Good luck with your research!

They tax the perks to a ridiculous extent.
The only thing you can do here as a tax benefit is give employees a company car. Which is still taxed, but less than getting the monthly lease money in cash.
Our company actually had to stop providing a 1-hour per week free gym visit (which nobody used) because after an audit they saw that as a taxable perk.
So we would have to pay taxes on something we never used in the first place.

> I can pay my guys $1000 more apiece but they'll only take home $700

You obviously don't work in Belgium. Here we see maybe $300 of that $1000 raise.

I had a friend who was a PhD student in Experimental Physics in the late 90s.
As part of his lab's obligations, he had to do some grunt/shift work at CERN about a week every month.
He said unless your life is Physics 24/7, it gets boring pretty quickly. A lot of people there only talk about physics, they have no other hobbies.
There was not much to do besides the Physics aspect.

This seems to have changed though judging from the article, there seems to be social clubs which is certainly an improvement. Still, she (the woman in the interview) says the turn-over rate is huge, people are send there at the beginning of their PhD and get back to their home labs after a while. Looks like that aspect hasn't changed but that's probably true for most University Labs in the world.

As a Belgian, I would tend to agree, except for maybe the South of Europe (Italy for example) whom have far more aggressive driving.
Congestion isn't much worse than you would get in other big cities, except our cities are so close to each other (Antwerp - Brussels : 25 miles) that congestion just flows into one big clusterfuck.
One of the issues is that the highways around big cities aren't bootstrapped for ongoing traffic, so there is no way to swirl around Brussels for example if you just pass by and don't need to be there.
Also Belgium is on the crossroad of many bigger countries ( Germany, France, Netherlands, UK, ...) so our roads are heavily burdened by foreign trucks passing through our country. You can actually see that in the crash clip above. You have a truck driving behind a truck that just passed it, while the accident happened another truck was overtaking the truck with the dashcam, and the car who tried to cross to the exit crashed into another truck waiting on the exit.
This is a typical situation here in Belgium. You could say the driver was not cautious enough and should have been in the first lane sooner. However, I drive that highway (the E40 from Brussels to Oostende - sea side) every day to work and you just have a string of trucks driving one behind the other that stretches for miles.
It's choosing between sitting between 2 trucks for a couple of miles (which really gives you zero chance of survival if the truck in front of you crashes and the one behind you smashes into you) or just hoping the stretch before the exit clears up and you have a safe passage to get into the first lane.

The closest spiral galaxy to us is Andromeda, 2.2 million light years away.
Andromeda is approaching our galaxy at a rate of 670,000 miles per hour.
Five billion years from now it will probably collide with us.
So, we'll just have to be patient if we want to hop onto another galaxy :-)

Art for ants?!

I've still got an American passport and I'd need strong reasons to ever get rid of it.

As it stands now, it is the only one I have. I'd love to have a passport from an EU country but that takes some effort. I had hoped having great grandparents that emigrated from Hungary would have helped, but now I don't think so. I could go the traditional route but that requires a level of proficiency in Hungarian that I doubt I'll ever attain.

Yep. American, living in Hungary.
 
I agree about Reddit, in terms of the defaults. But I view it logged in. I've unsubscribed from that stuff that I find useless and learn a decent amount from the subreddits that I do read. The smaller subreddits have less activity, so they are easy to keep up with and they have a better signal to noise ratio.

Well - it is the language for native Android development. I think that will mean something for a while.

And I think you can still make good money working on Cobol - so there is that.