This certainly sounds iffy.

I’ll say this: if this sort of thing poses an actual potential risk to passengers and crew, the people involved need to be given the harshest possible sentences. Take them out back and feed them into a woodchipper slowly if they wilfully endanger lives.

I got all wibbly wobbly just reading that.

I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.

It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.

Couple years ago, I visited a historic grand prix that featured classic F1 cars. They also had open pits, so you could walk up and ask questions and literally stand next to the cars.

I was standing next to a 70’s F1 car when they performed an engine test. I was wearing thick, professional earplugs and the biggest Peltors you’ve ever seen. When they fired that thing up, I lasted all of five seconds before I walked out. At that point, it was no longer sound but sheer pressure. You could feel it in your chest.

As for how the mechanics do it? Easy, they’re all deaf as a post. Even the best earpro can’t prevent that kind of hearing damage, especially if that’s your chosen career. If you’re worried about good earpro not being enough, best advice is to put distance between you and the object/career path involved.

Which is exactly what everyone does. At least in the US. And every side is equally wrong about it.

The loudest voices always draw the most attention. And I don’t know any other vegan voice that’s as loud as PETA’s. That’s kind of the problem.

There’s also the ‘guilt by association’. Look at organisations like PETA: they even complained about things like the treatment of entirely fictional animals in video games, like Palworld. Basically, you can’t even argue that ‘they look like real animals so it encourages real-world mistreatment’ like they usually do.

That does not make you look particularly sane. I’m sure they do good work as well, but that sort of thing isn’t helping their cause.

It’s interesting that your return rate for cans is worse than for bottles.

There’s actually an interesting historical reason for that. We’ve had bottle deposit here since the days of glass bottles. The bottles would be sold, consumed, brought back, cleaned and refilled. Glass is great for that. The bottle deposit was generally set at 1 guilder. This was the currency we used before the Euro.

If you did your weekly shopping in say, 1995, you’d return your bottles and get a ticket. If you returned 10 bottles, that would be 10 guilders. Now, a FULL cart of groceries for a decent sized family would cost you a 100 guilders max in those days. So that bottle deposit took a nice chunk off that grocery bill. As a result, we had and still have a large percentage of bottle returns. It’s ingrained in people to bring back those large bottles since they’ve always done it.

Now, with cans… there’s a bit of a problem. The deposit for large bottles is 25 cents, but the deposit for cans and small bottles is 15 cents. That’s not a whole lot, especially considering how much the price of groceries has skyrocketed. Basically, the bottle deposit isn’t really a good incentive in terms of monetary value. It only really makes sense if you collect larger amounts of them, like the homeless.

They ARE planning to increase the bottle deposit - make it 50 cents in fact - as a way to incentivize people to bring them back. That will ‘probably’ work to an extent, but most people dislike the system for other reasons than the monetary value. And if those other issues aren’t fixed, raising the bottle deposit only annoys them further.

Oh absolutely! Dutch politicians tend to suck at actually implementing new rules that work.

I’ve heard about excellent results in some of the nordic countries like Sweden. From what I understand, you/they have machines where you can easily deposit a large amount of cans/bottles. We don’t have those here.

Our Dutch machines are basically retrofitted ones that used to just take in large 1-2 liter bottles. You have to put in one bottle at a time. That wasn’t a problem when they only handled big bottles, but now with cans and small bottles, there’s issues. For one, it takes ages to deposit cans. Because you have to put one at a time in. This means that if you’re stuck behind someone who’s depositing two large garbage bags, it’s going to take a while. Also, because the cans are rarely really empty, the machines also get very sticky and break down a lot. In some supermarkets, they basically stop fixing the machines on busy days because… it’s just too annoying. So this means that it’s always a hassle to get your deposit back.

There’s also other issues like: cans can’t be dented in any way, or it won’t read them. And not every machine takes every deposit item. I.e. if you bought it at supermarket A and supermarket B doesn’t sell it… they won’t take back the item and give back the deposit. (To be clear, they SHOULD, but due to different barcodes, SKU’s, old software, that sort of thing… in practice it doesn’t really work. It’s a YMMV situation). The machines also only really give you a ‘deposit ticket’, which you can either use to fund your groceries, or (theoretically) return to get cash. So there’s a lot of friction in the system between depositing a bottle and getting an actual deposit back.

As for why Swedish homeless don’t tear open bags… maybe you just have nicer homeless people than we do.

Right now in the Netherlands, around 95 percent of large (1-2 liter bottles) are returned, but only around 65 percent of the cans.

The thing with bottle deposits is: it really only annoys the people who generally already do the right thing anyway.

Here in the Netherlands, we expanded bottle deposits to cans and small bottles last year. A 15-25 cent deposit.

It’s causing all sorts of problems: deposit machines are breaking down in record numbers and there’s too few of them. A lot of places sell cans and bottles, but a lot of them don’t take returns. This means that it’s a giant hassle to return the cans and bottles, so a lot of people now just see it as a price increase and don’t bother with the return.

The deposit also causes MORE litter in the streets. How? Because we’ve effectively incentivised the homeless and drug addicts to break open trash bins and search for cans and bottles. They break one open, tear out the trashbag, dump the contents and take the bottles. Which attracts rats, since they leave the rest. My city now regularly looks like a garbage dump.

Meanwhile, some call it a succes because ‘there’s fewer bottles and cans on the streets’, while conveniently ignoring literally all the other trash that now gets dumped on it.

I’d honestly vote today to abolish the deposit scheme. Sounds good on paper, but in practice I’m only seeing downsides.

It is not. Nor am I offended by it, as it is a good show :D

I actually work in radio as well, and certainly share a few traits with that character, both good and bad.

Personally, I rarely even have the option to buy the things I want in a local business. They simply don’t have it. My local book store isn’t going to have obscure, expensive, foreign language books on specialty subjects. I also have good, expensive taste in plenty of other areas that stores don’t cater to. I pretty much NEED to buy at an online specialty retailer.

And yes, if they do have it, price certainly is a factor. I don’t mind spending say, 10-20 euros more to have an expensive item in hand that afternoon rather than wait a week. But I’m not going to pay more just to ‘support local business’.

If a store is doing poorly, usually they are to blame. If you don’t sell the products people want at a price they deem reasonable, well, why even exist?

Well we are proud of Dutch manufacturing in general. We like to make good products, even if they might be bad for you: for decades, we had the best weed in terms of THC content. And the Netherlands is also a highly regarded global producer of XTC pills and amphetamines. There’s only so many tulips you can export…

So yes, loose tobacco is one of our fine export products. We Dutch also loved it; it was really popular to use in joints (see: Dutch weed) and rolling your own cigarettes tended to be cheaper than buying packs (we Dutch are notoriously cheap). These days people prefer a vape, or pure joint. And with smoking in general on the decline, loose tobacco is a rare sight here these days.

Well, Europe is a big place. The percentage of smokers differs from country to country, as well as the anti-smoking legislation and when that was introduced.

In the Netherlands, you cannot smoke in the workplace, restaurants, cinema, on public transport, near a hospital, etc. Sale of tobacco products is illegal to anyone under 18 and we’ve banned things like flavoured vapes.

Because of all these measures, ‘only’ 19 percent of the Dutch population 15 and older smokes, with people lower on the socio-economic ladder smoking more frequently. That’s below the European average of 19.7 percent.

Now, compare that to other countries like France (22 percent), Spain (23 percent) and Bulgaria (28 percent).

Now, those countries have anti-smoking legislation as well. But because they had statistically higher numbers of smokers, it takes longer to see the overall effect.

So depending on where you are in Europe, your perception of smoking habits could vary wildly.

Childhood asthma, unfortunately. I was born in 1982 and basically everyone smoked everywhere here in the Netherlands. If you had a birthday, you couldn’t see across the room due to the smoke.

Because of it I had childhood asthma, which cleared up immediately when my parents stopped smoking. In the early 90’s, things got a lot better with smoke-free environments. We eventually got full on smoking bans, thank god. As far as I can tell, it didn’t do any permanent damage.

I still absolutely HATE smokers and smoking. It is and was an antisocial thing and children should never have been exposed to it like we were.

That place really went to shit over the past year. Which is hardly surprising seeing how many good people were pushed away from the platform.

Good mods were replaced by power tripping shitheads and good posters and commenters were driven off when they couldn’t use their desired app and the subreddits they liked went to shit or were nuked. Meanwhile, bots are ruining everything else.

And let’s not even get started on the ads, the IPO shenanigans, the AI thing…

Reddit needs to be taken out back and shot. It’s the humane thing to do; we shouldn’t let it suffer like this.

I absolutely love his channel. The sheer amount of bad puns he can come up with for his April Fools day video is amazing. God only knows how long it takes him to record these without cracking up.

Don’t get me started on Christmas….

At our radio station, we start Christmas music on December 6th, right after the Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas. And like every other station out there, we play the same exact ten songs every hour until december 27th.

Most people probably aren’t really aware, but as a station you get sent a LOT of unsolicited music. Which also includes a ton of Christmas themed songs starting around June. Everyone wants to be the next Mariah Carey.

One year, our music programmers decide to get creative: “Everyone has the same playlist. Fuck that! We’ll play the Christmas songs nobody else plays!”

So they meticulously comb through that mountain of CD’s that we got throughout the year, digging up the proverbial diamonds in a pile of manure. And they put together a lovely playlist featuring unique, decent songs.

December 6th rolls around. 9 AM. It’s The Big Day. The new playlist goes live. By 9.15 the first calls come in. By 10 AM, the phone is red hot with calls. By 11 AM, someone phones in an honest-to-God death threat. The listeners aren’t having it; they want goddamn Mariah Carey or nothing at all. So by midday, the new playlist gets yanked and replaced by four-times-per-hour ‘All I want for Christmas is you’.

And since that year, we know better than to get creative around Christmas. Don’t fuck with Mariah Carey fans…

It’s absolutely gotten way worse the past 15 years or so.

As someone who works for a newspaper: the days leading up to and directly following april 1st tend to be very frustrating because of this.

Usually starting on the 30th, we get the first ‘funny’ press releases, with most showing up on the 31st. Which means you have to be extra careful not to use something that SEEMS plausible enough not to warrant extra suspicion on days other than april 1st.

As journalists, we’re perhaps more aware than most regarding potential pranks. We’re always taught to question sources. Which makes it all the more annoying that so many companies and organisations try to pull one over on us. Making reliable, accurate news is difficult enough as it is without all these fuckers trying to poison the well.

Basically, companies and organisations who do it usually get their press releases trashed for a month afterwards on principle. Waste my time? Welcome to the trash bin.

I absolutely loathe this day. Most of it is just dumb, silly and annoying. Especially when this dumb shit gets forced on you by companies whose marketing teams think they’re clever.

I also used to work at a radio/TV station where we covered pranks during april fools. That was a real eye-opener: there are waaaaay too many idiots out there who fall for jokes and take things at face value. Basically, they’re a cruel way to mess with vulnerable, gullible people.

Now, if someone wants to make a joke at their own expense, go for it. But don’t do it at the expense of others.

And to emphasize: it really is essential to use the proper glasses for an eclipse like this.

I experienced a total eclipse back in 1999. You’ll be looking at the sun for a few minutes. And even though it might look dark to you, it WILL do permanent damage if you stare at it for that long without the proper protection.

Back in 1999 in the Netherlands, seven people had to be treated for eye injuries because of the eclipse. Two suffered permanent damage, with only about 10 percent sight remaining.

Don’t fuck around. It’s not worth it.