Cooling a poorly isolated building with airco just transforms all the electricity into heat making the city even hotter.

With the rise of the living standards, someone buys a cheap airco. The airco lowers the temperature inside the house, and heats up the temperature outside the house. This hotter environment pushes all their neighbors to also buy airco's. This raises the city temperature even more, and makes the airco pumps work harder to fight the higher outside temperature.

To fight this heat island effect, cities and home owners must plant trees. Trees provide shade and cool the city by evaporation. They also give oxygen and capture CO2, a relieve from woodfire cooking and old cars/mopeds too dirty to be allowed in western countries, so exported to developing countries. In the Netherlands they are promoting micro forests in cities, a small forest even as small as 10 x 10 m.

Yellow Vest protesters in France forced president Macron to speed up the introduction of the GAFA tax (hitting the tech goliaths Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon). The EU version of this tax was being opposed by Ireland, where a lot of tech giants operate.

The GAFA tax started 1 jan 2019 in France only, but other country's yellow vests activists will demand the same tax in their country.

Range of gas/diesel cars has historically grown to save you driving to a gas station every day or every few days. But what if you live next to a gas station, or in the case of electric vehicles, your house is the electric charge point?
We have gotten used to plugging in our smartphones into a charger every night, didn't we? Treat your car like a smartphone and you only need 1 day of electric range, plus a bit extra for that small road deviation.
A smaller battery is cheaper, and lighter, so your car and its brakes can be lighter too, making it cheaper once more. And suddenly the world does not need that many batteries.

I just joined a small company as their first/only IT guy, and was tasked to do a survey which computers were needed, Only 3 out of the 45 employees that responded wanted a desktop, everybody else (even de CAD developers) wanted a laptop. So to save on support cost and simplify maintenance, it was decided by the boss that the 3 desktop lovers would get a laptop too.

At my previous job I had a Intel NUC with core i3 and 16 GB memory which was fast enough for me and never ran hot. The laptop I will get will be 2x as powerful so I will give it a chance, but I will be watching it for any reason to replace it with a good desktop...

I bought a Xiaomi A1 for 168 Euro. it is the size of a Samsung S9, battery lasts 3 days, and has the 'unbranded'/light AndroidOne OS.

For a laptop I bought a Acer 14" Chromebook for 260 Euro, it had full HD screen and all-Alu casing, better than a 13" MacbookAir of 4 times the price.

If you are an average person with average requirements, any bottom of the range phone or laptop suffices. But not you, you are special, you need a 1000 euro phone and 4000 euro laptop. Just for whatsapp, email, facebook, other internet browsing and online banking.

I built my house in the Netherlands 24 years ago with a rainwater collection system: 2 filters in the pipes of the largest roofs, and a 10 m3 concrete water container. I use the water for flushing the toilets, the washing machine and occasionally the garden. Although it has drinking water supplementation it very rarely runs dry, it's usually a signal for me to clean the water filters in the rain pipes.

My year water utilities usage for 2017 was 18 m^3, which is 49 liters per day, for daily showering, weekly dishwasher, daily kitchen use and drinking. The average dutch water usage for one-person household is 52 m^3, which is 142 liter per day. 65% of my water consumption is done with rainwater.

Even when it does no longer rains as much in CapeTown, any water you collect is saved drinking water, and also does not burden the sewage system at the time of the rain.

A pretty secretary walks past a few business men at the coffee machine. She asks one of the men "Do you shower after you had sex?"

Taken off-guard by this out-of-place question he says "Yes, of course. Why?".

She replies "Then it's about time you had some sex..."

15 years ago I went on holiday to Senegal and met a local girl. Her shower was a circle of poles 1,5 meter high, with 1 bucket of water and a 1 liter can, out in the sun on some stone slabs. 1 can gets you wet, you soap up, and then 2 cans rinse it off. Stand around naked drying in the sun.
One funny fact was that the dutch nurses who helped at the local hospital were much taller than the Senegal women (and the poles around the shower area), so they got a lot of attention when they went showering.

After getting outsourced from a job where Windows was mandatory in 2013 I chose a career in Drupal back-end development. The first 2 companies I worked for gave me a Macbook Air and Mac Mini, but most of the applications were cloudbased and on the second job I worked 4 days per week from home on my Linux Mint PC.

In 2016 I got a job at a company where all employees were allowed to choose their own machines as long as they were Mac or from one brand of locally built (or rather configured) laptops. As I hate laptops for their unproductive design choices I also noticed the tiny NUC PC they offered, so I choose an NUC with Core i3 and 16 GB memory, and put Linux Mint on it. Unfortunately the job only lasted a few months, but the NUC held its ground against the Windows and Mac laptops, never overheating or even turning on the fan unlike the older MacBook Pro's.

A few weeks ago I found another job at an all-Mac startup. I was offered a top-of-the-line MacBookPro, but said I wanted something costing only one-third. Pleasantly surprised by the low price, they bought me exactly what I asked: a NUC with Core i3, 16 GB memory, 256 GB SSD, wireless keyboard and mouse and a 43" 4K monitor. Especially the 4K monitor is hugely productive as it offers something 2 side-by-side monitors don't have: vertical space. Long database tables, tall web pages, seeing a lot of code lines, it saves me so much time on scrolling. And at 43" there is no need to zoom in.

While there will certainly be a few people who will use up all that CPU and graphics power, for many it will be complete overkill.

One month ago I was offered a job as Drupal web developer, and as all others in this hip startup had Macbooks varying from MacBook 12" to MacBookPro they offered me a fresh MacBookPro too. I declined and said I wanted a PC one-third of that price. Curious, they agreed.

What did I order? An Intel NUC (half the size a a MacMini), with a Core i3, 16 GB memory and a 256 GB SSD, with a 43" 4k monitor. Running Linux Mint 64bit Cinnamon, the most boring and most productive Linux flavour around. It costs ~EUR 1200. It can't do what this new Mac can do, but I don't have to do that anyway. Like so many Apple fanboys who won't either but will still buy this new Mac. Buying what you need can save you 75% versus what you want. Most of the software you use is Cloud-based, or Linux-capable.

My 43" monitor is the absolute sweetspot for 4k display. I do not have to zoom in because at this size it's just like 4x 22" HD monitors without the monitor edges cutting up the view. We do our weekly Trello sessions on my system because it feels like a whiteboard with Post-It notes. In PhpStorm it shown me a lot of code lines vertically. That 27" 5k monitor is way too small for that resolution, All-in-ones are not for professionals but for marketing people. But they do not need the processing power in that new Mac. So it will be a commercial success, selling more than twice the amount of units actually needed in this world.

While in principle you could get up early in the morning and enjoy the sun then, it is much more convenient to enjoy the sun in the evening. So get rid of wintertime and stay on summertime.

After 15 years of coding websites, intranets and extranets in Perl our whole department got outsourced/replaced by indians (the asian type, not native americans). Luckily we got 1 month of salary for every year we worked at the company (I did 23 years), but unluckily i was to young/energetic to retire at that age (50), and the money was not sufficient anyway to bridge the years until 67.

I gave my whole transition allowance (7500 euro) to a small company so they could teach me Drupal/PHP. PHP is a breeze after 15 years of Perl. After 1,5 years I switched to a bigger company also doing Drupal and PHP. After 1,5 year and 3 contracts there they let me go to avoid giving me a permanent contract. I then did a 4 month contract in CodeIgniter (didn't like it, but I did improve their regular expressions from 48% effective to 95%) and 8 months of unemployment. 1 nov i will start a new Drupal PHP job, now 54,7 years old. I ran the stairs with my 30 year old boss-to-be to the 4th floor during the interview and won. It's a startup of 6 directors and I will be employee #1, twice the age of each of the others.

They were going to give me a MacBookPro, but I refused and convinced them I just needed a Core i3 NUC (with 16GB memory) with a 43" 4K screen and PhpStorm. I wil put Linux Mint on it, just like I have at home. I think they agreed because MacBookPros are so expensive nowadays.

I still have not touched my golden handshake money which I invested in 50% ETFs, 40% cash and 10% crowdfunding. If this job works out fine it will be my last job before I retire at 60, 7 years before the official retirement age of 67 in the Netherlands. I requested 30 days holiday annually so i could get used to more free time already. I even found mesome hobbies already for when I retire. Making my own Limoncello liquer and building cyclekarts.

It is quite easy to put Linux on a Chromebook. But I would not buy a 1000 US$ laptop for that, but rather the Acer Chromebook 14. It is an all-Aluminium case, with decent 14" full-HD screen. You can find it for around 330 US$.

In the Netherlands police are trying (and failing) to disband Outlaw Motor Gangs based on the criminal activities of their members. Everybody knows there is a big correlation between OMG membership and crime, but the crimes are not orchestrated by the OMG. You cannot blame an entire organisation because one member committed a crime.

Volkert van der Graaf, who killed the dutch politician Pim Fortuyn 9 days before the 2002 elections, was a vegan and memeber of environmental pressure group Milieudefensie. Should we have pulled the plug on al vegan and milieudefensie websites?

Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was killed by muslim Mohammed Bouyeri after being critical of Islam. Should we ban all islam websites? And close all salafist mosques?

I am not a fan of the far right or the far left. I am peacefully a bit left of the center. This witch-hunt is the end of free speech. If we give in to those social justice warriors you might as well start chipping the heads of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from Mount Rushmore as they were slaveowners. Do you know who else destroys ancient art that does not conform to their ideology? Terrorist group IS.

The old MO was:
1. Wait for a terrorist attack
2. Tweet how terrible it was
3. Put a 'pray for [insert name of city here]' picture on your FB account
4. Police arrest a few people like family but will let them go later
5. Have no clue at all when the next attack will happen, goto 1

What Theresa May said is to attack the safe space the terrorists enjoy in our society. To me this includes:
a. Close all Salafist and Wahhabist mosques in all of Europe
b. Block their bank accounts and use that money to pay victims damages and expenses
c. Kick out all their imans to outside Europe so they cannot continue underground
d. Post a notice on the closed extremist mosques where the moderate islam mosques are
e. Make it a responsibility of the moderate mosques to signal and report any extremist ideas and people.
f. Monitor the moderate mosques on their progress towards integration and open mind towards western culture and society
g. When a terrorist attack takes place close the mosque the terrorists visited for 3 months.

This puts the moderate muslims on OUR side. Which is opposite of IS and the right-wing xenophobes mutual plan to push the moderate muslims towards IS. Moderate muslims now do not feel responsible for terrorist attacks because to them Wahhabism and Salafism is not their (flavour of) religion, so they are not to blame. By shutting down all (branches of) religions that reject our society you take the rotten apple out of the basket.