Humanius

If he hasn’t shown genuine remorse than changes my stance.
Given what I had read on the matter I was under the impression he had shown remorse. Particularly the “biggest mistake of [his] life” remark.

So I’m not overly familiar, but I can try to summarize what I know.

Steven van de Velde is a Dutchman who went to the UK and raped a 12 year-old. He was sentenced to four years in prison for this by a UK court. Later he was extradited to the Netherlands, so he could sit out his sentence in the NL. However in the Netherlands, unlike the UK, sex with a minor is not automatically considered rape and needs to be proven in court. (Note: That is my understanding of the difference in interpretation) Because of this his conviction was reduced to “ontucht”, meaning sexual misconduct. (Even though what he did would probably also be considered rape in Dutch court).
As a result, he was out of prison after 13 months.

Now, Dutch attitude to these kinds of things, in my experience, is generally (but not always) that if you have paid your time, and have shown remorse for your actions, then it should probably not affect your future career prospects. The justice system is supposed to rehabilitate after all. (That is my experience though, and my experience may be biased, so don’t take this as gospel)

Hart van Nederland did a survey, and apparently only 27% of respondents think he should not be allowed to compete. 63% of respondents think he should be allowed to compete, and 10% don’t have an opinion either way. (Note that Hart van Nederland is not the most reliable of sources, but it gives an indication)

From what I have seen in Dutch circles this controversy is a lot less pronounced than it is in other countries. That’s not to say it is entirely uncontroversial, but it’s not quite to the same degree as I’m seeing internationally.

Personal opinion:

I don’t think his sentence should have been lowered to “ontucht”. I think what he did is morally reprehensible, and he should have sat out the full sentence for raping a minor. That is a failure on behalf of the justice system though, and van de Velde is not personally to blame for that.

That said, given that he has shown remorse for his actions, and has finished the sentence that the legal system imposed on him, I don’t think he should have been barred from competing in the Olympics on behalf of the Dutch team.

Edit: As Flying Squid mentioned I might be mistaken that he has shown genuine remorse.
If he hasn’t that changes my opinion on the matter.

So they can bitch that people booed, but he won’t acknowledge the reason is he raped a literal child?

Mathew Immers is not the guy who raped the child. That is Steven van de Velde.
Immers is van de Velde’s beach volleyball partner.

More like they have an ancient sewage system.

Basically, if the sewer system gets overwhelmed, for instance if there is a large amount of rainfall in a short time, then the sewage overflows directly into the Seine.
They have built infrastructure leading up to the Olympics to capture this overflow in storage tanks, but you cannot build infinitely large storage tanks so at some point it will still overflow.

And 2024 has been a very wet year thusfar, so…

Wasn’t the TGV sabotage attack also targeted at the fiber-optics lines? Wouldn’t be surprised if they were related.
Or maybe these people just really dislike fiber-optics, and are in the pockets of big copper /j

Which can only really be addressed by making it easier / less of a hassle to become a peer.
I for one would love to host a peertube instance, but I keep running into a wall when I try.

I think something that gets overlooked is the ease of use of setting up a Peertube server yourself.

If I want to host my own Mastodon or Lemmy instance it is pretty straightforward, and I can just do so on my unRAID server with a simple ready-made docker container. But when I want to do that for PeerTube, as a novice I somewhat run into a brick wall.

Okay… So he went to Russia in 2003. Considering that the consensus in 2003 was that Russia was still on its way to becoming a democracy I am not that offended by it personally.
“Putin’s hometown” being St. Petersburg, which is the 2nd biggest city in Russia.

What is more worrying is all the things that happened since 2003.

If it’s a publicly traded company the answer is that they likely don’t believe in anything. They just do whatever the leadership believes would generate most profit, since that is what shareholders (usually) care about most.

If appearing to support progressive goals gets people to spend money in the store, then that is something that makes sense for a company like this to do. But if they stand to lose more money than they gain, for instance through boycotts, they will drop the pretence pretty quickly.

Personally I see the stance such companies take more like a reflection of general acceptance in society as a whole. If a company promotes progressive values then that would indicate that society as a whole is on average leaning more progressive.
Similarly, if companies stop supporting these values that indicates a worrying trend with regards to societal acceptance.

Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that the company itself (as an entity) really believes in anything.

(Note: This doesn’t hold for companies that aren’t publically traded. If there are no stockholders to please the leadership can let their personal view affect the company’s policy quite a bit)

You are correct, but that coking process doesn’t have to be done with fossil fuels. Hydrogen (like you mentioned) is an alternative and you can create hydrogen using water and electricity.

In the NL we have a pretty polluting steel mill that is currently still coal fired. They are working on a transition plan where they adapt it to be gas fired instead, with the ability down the line to make it hydrogen fired when hydrogen production capacity is up to speed.

https://www.ad.nl/economie/tata-steel-stopt-met-kolen-binnen-tien-jaar-over-op-waterstof~a801e791/
(Translated headline: “Tata Steel stops with coal: Transition to hydrogen within ten years”)

That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)

While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.

I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.

Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.

Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.

While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.

Christ, my dude… They are quite literally doing everything in their power to make sure their child won’t be run into a concentration camp. Stop lecturing them on what “work and sacrifice” is.

The German state doesn’t recognise Palestine as a state currently, so probably not.
Only a few countries west of the former Iron Curtain recognise Palestine (Iceland and Sweden, and as of this year Norway, Ireland, and Spain)

I guess it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere that the two systems were supposed to be different from each other. /s

Please please please don’t vote the orange man into office… good God.

But at least is was a lemon with style… unlike the Cybertruck ;P

In the end it’s not about your absolute wage, it’s about buying power.
If you can buy the same of more with your wage, your quality of life is going up.

The comparison to US dollars is probably skewing the picture somewhat (since the US dollar is quite strong right now), but I find it hard to believe that an eight-fold decrease in value doesn’t negatively affect buying power.

https://www.thecable.ng/historical-review-nigerias-national-minimum-wage/

It looks like this would be a monthly figure. Based on this source minimum wage currently sits at 30.000 Naira ($22,45) /month.
From what I understand it is higher than what it was set at in the 80s, but the value of the Naira did drop quite a bit over time (when compared to the US dollar)

According to this website the 1981 wage would have been equivalent to $204, while the 2024 wage is equivalent to $24

Guess I’ll be contacting my MEPs, and looking into which MEPs support and oppose this plan.
Though I am glad to see my country at least has stated it finds the proposal unacceptable.