Back home?

Really? Not by choice? Weird. Where I live, we all get to choose our skincolor right up to our birthdate. After that it's set in stone, though. But thanks for clearing that up for me. Otherwise I'd have thought you'd volunteered or something.

Oh, and by the way? Get help. You obviously cought Trollitis from a tree that snuggled up close.

Okay. Well, actually I applaud that. The tax on groceries hits the people with the lowest wages the hardest (relatively), reducing their intake of vegetables even more. Locally, I think the VAT is reduced to one third of the standard percentage for essentials like food.

Being smart isn't the only reason for promotion. For instance, 10 years ago I was not promoted to a senior position where I worked at the time, and I was pretty upset about it. I mean, I was competing with former kindergarten teachers, in an IT position. Should have licked them without even trying, right?

Wrong. The next step up required all sorts of "soft" people skills that I only graduately received by training and experience. Looking back, my boss was right at the time from his POV. So while smart people get passed over for promotions all the time, it's usually because their intelligence has specialized in just one direction, where the next level up requires more diverse skills. I know several senior scientists that I'd never promote to head of anything. But they're extremely smart. However, they need "handlers" and those are the people that get promoted to a position of more authority.

In some companies this source of friction is reduced by giving people a technical promotion track - with the pay, but without the authority and need to manage other people. I think that would help a lot.

What, no Value Added Tax?

Unless you make sure *they* reach their goals and know that they did it because you helped them - unobtrusively, not rubbing their nose in it, coaching them as much as you can. As a freelancer/contractor (thus: non-threatening) this has helped me get a lot of repeat business because the clients *like* me. Even up to the CxO level. It's also a matter of knowing your weaknesses: I'm not going to encroach on any CxO area because that's not where my ambition lies.

I did see one very smart guy getting the boot from my own boss. He knew he was smart (and he was), but he was also a really annoying asshole who always tried to let other folks do all the work - and my boss knew. He went over the line one time too many and got fired. Now, he wasn't a threat, but he would be exactly the type to whine about how "dumb people fire smart people", instead of taking a good hard look at his own behaviour.

In my experience I've never seen people getting fired because they were smart. They've always been fired because they were trying to be a bit too clever for their own good and played fast and loose with the rules ("I don't need to test this change before it enters production - I *know* it's good!" - in a regulated environment) and with their colleagues and boss. And sometimes because they thought they were smart, but the rest of the world just disagreed.

In The Netherlands most banks that use SMS do this. It's not hard to implement when your IT is already reasonably capable.

While I agree the last explanation is probably the most likely one (a dampening effect that occurs at a certain point could be a plausible explanation), don't discount nr. 2: we just don't know (and we cannot know) how many universes are generated at any given point in time. Perhaps quantum fluctuations generate 1 billion "universe seeds" per cubic centimeter at any given second, and since they are random, most don't lead to another universe. Some do, and the ones that are "exactly right" give rise to universes like ours. Should we ever find a way to measure these things (not in the next decades, I think), we might find that option 2 is actually the real one. But I agree that option 3 is the most likely one.

I think we can use the English equivalent: Cat-holic :)

As far as I understood the physics, it was because "space" doesn't have a set of well-defined borders with customs etc. but is a curved area, where the curve is defined by the energy available inside the universe (energy == mass). Once the whole thing collapses it should curve the area much steeper, "contracting" the universe.

But I may be totally off base here, I'm not a physicist.

Expectation of privacy deals with portrayal of humans, but I'm not sure that's the issue here (no football player in a stadium has any expectation of privacy to begin with, I think we can all agree on that). I think "public vs. private space" is going to be the main focus of any lawsuit, because it's about the right of the drone operator to enter private grounds to begin with. Or private airspace - and that's an even bigger can of worms due to the laws about where private and public airspaces start. I know that a lot of countries have different laws on that one.

Let's just say the only ones getting rich from the first few drone video's of football games would be the lawyers.

Have you read the comments on CNN about Syria and Iraq? It's hardcore nazi's vs. Greater Israel fascists vs. The Zionist Conspiracy Is Killing Us All vs. ISIS sympathizers who think beheading children is actually quite defensible since they were evil to begin with. If they aren't the worst, I shudder to think what could be worse.

Jumping over a fence, using whatever equipment you want (drones or whatever), doesn't suddenly turn an enclosed, walled off and guarded space into a public space. So I wouldn't use that argument.

But if you were to overlook the field from an appartment or highrise in the area, well, that would be fair game I suppose.

21 days off per FTE is the legal minimum in The Netherlands. Once worktime reduction (*) is factored in, it's usually more like 21 days + 12 = 33 days off. That's without the public holidays, we're talking flexible days here.

And we're not at the top position for days off. As far as I know, German workers have more days off each year.

(*) a lot of collective bargaining agreements have clauses where most people work 2 hours less each week in order to create more jobs in that sector.