June 20, 2014

Boisterous café blames limiter for loud music

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:51 pm

Café Goos in the South of Amsterdam decided to party on with some music after the Netherlands won 5-1 against Spain in the World Cup on 12 June. However, the music was too loud for the neighbours who complained and the café owner was given a warning: pipe down or else it will cost you 5,000 euro next time.

Dutch cafés are required to have limiters on their music installations, often dedicated mp3 players or computers, in order not to exceed legally allowed sound levels. However, the authorities claim that Café Goos’ setup using an iPad was just not working properly. The owner blames the limiter for not working properly, as if he had no control over it, which is lame and will still cost him 5,000 euro if he can’t sort it out.

A football win is not an excuse to make more noise than usual although I am sure many people in Amsterdam would tolerate it if it were a semi-final or a final. Cafés are very often at odds with neighbours over noise in major Dutch cities and is a top complaint around the country. Amusingly enough, the Amsterdam district with the least noise problems as of March 2014 is the South.

(Link: www.parool.nl)

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June 10, 2014

HEMA to hit London high street this week

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:20 am

If Amsterdam can embrace major British retailer Marks & Spencer, then it seems only fair that London gets its very own HEMA. HEMA already conquered Paris in 2009 and has been a staple in Belgium for years, although France has more stores than Belgium. HEMA also exists in Germany, Luxembourg and even Spain.

HEMA’s unique Dutch designs are surely their best selling point, not just their low, rounded off prices — none of that ‘£1,99’ business. And despite the odd controversies HEMA gets itself into here, like plagiarising wine labels and encouraging children to cheat at school, HEMA was considered by 81% of the population as an essential brand in 2008.

I like their tea towels, socks and travel make-up, and sometimes even their food.

(Link: www.independent.co.uk, Photo by Hans Vandenbogaerde, some rights reserved)

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June 7, 2014

The Hague court wants less female judges

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:30 pm

In 2009 for the first time ever women made up the majority of judges in the Netherlands. This year even 64% of the judges of the court of Utrecht are female.

In response, according to Algemeen Dagblad, the court of The Hague (56% female judges) wants to give preferential treatment to male candidates. The court fears having too many women could influence the way the public views the courts’ impartiality.

The court’s plan received support from celebrity lawyer Theo Hiddema in Trouw who warned that you wouldn’t want to create a situation where a male rapist would have face three female judges and a female prosecutor. “Imagine,” Hiddema told Trouw, “that the suspects come from a different culture. Imagine the shame and humiliation when an all-female court tells them their behaviour is not of this time!”

Institutional mansplaining, who would have thought? Only job market news site Werf& appears to have noticed that what the court of The Hague wants is very much against the law. The site points out that affirmative action is only legal when used to help disadvantaged groups.

Although women form the majority of judges in lower courts, as late as 2006 they were still in the minority in appeals courts where a majority of two-thirds of the judges were men, as Trouw wrote back then. Judges that were ‘foreigners’ (allochtonen, Dutch code for people of colour) were in an extreme minority, the paper reported.

According to a Metro article of 2011, sociologist Bregje Dijksterhuis explains the preference of women for judicial robes because an appointment as judge is for life and because it is a job that combines well with having a family. Men on the other hand prefer higher paying jobs as lawyers.

The Dutch Council of Women quotes De Groene from 1947 after the appointment of Johanna Hudig as the first female judge in the Netherlands: “Courts have the reputation of being bastions of conservatism. The greater is our satisfaction at seeing how the court of Rotterdam has stood as one man behind the candidacy of this woman, giving a shining example of a broad and modern vision towards the judicial office.”

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June 4, 2014

Women dressing up as men to ask for a pay raise

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

“Are you a woman? Then you deserve € 300,000 more”, says Women INC in collaboration with Loonwijzer, a site that helps people calculate what they should be making. Loonwijzer claims that a woman could make on average € 300,000 more — I’m assuming in their lifetime.

The YouTube film below (in Dutch) starts off with the statement, ‘Where is my € 300,000?’. The gist of the video is, as one of the women says at the beginning, “enough is enough, I’m asking for a raise!”. The rest is quite self-explanatory and looks like a Smack the Pony sketch, and in fact, one of the women, Margôt Ros, is well-know from a comedy show called ‘Toren C’ (Tower C), which is a bit of a Dutch equivalent. Basically, if women want a raise, they need a beard and a fake penis to get one, which is funny, but also quite sad. Employers and politicians are the ones being lobbied to close the gap between the earnings of men and women, something nobody has ever solved in the Western world. Of course, the reason why women are paid less come down to much more than a costume change.

Just remember that the Netherlands ranks in bottom 10 performing countries for women in business and Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep.

(Link: www.deondernemer.nl, Illustration: public domain version of the symbol of feminism, via Wikimedia Commons)

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June 2, 2014

Eric Slot’s murder atlas of Amsterdam

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:18 am

oudezijds-achterburgwal-taver

The idyllic scene you see above is part of what was the most murder-stricken street of Amsterdam in the 20th century according to Eric Slot, author of the book Moordatlas van Amsterdam, which was published in early May.

The street is called is Oudezijds Achterburgwal, located in Amsterdam’s red light district. It is the location of many a sex worker’s place of business which is why, when AT5 interviewed Slot about his book two weeks ago, the interview took place on the second most murderous street, Zeedijk—prostitutes are said to have an aversion to cameras.

The book is the culmination of two decades of studying murder in Amsterdam. It describes a thousand murders of the 1,800 or so that took place in Amsterdam since the year 1900.

According to the publisher the book “notes trends, characterises neighbourhoods, shows you which professions are dangerous and explains the popularity of the knife in Amsterdam Noord”, and more.

The Netherlands is one of the safest countries in the world when it comes to murder with ‘only’ one murder per 100,000 inhabitants a year, but Amsterdam is one of the most ‘dangerous’ capitals of Europe with 3.7 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

The interview of AT5 with Slot is full of interesting titbits, including the fact that the inhabitants of Amsterdam themselves aren’t very violent—the problem usually stems from outsiders coming to the city. If you understand Dutch and have 30 minutes to spare, I suggest you watch it.

(Photo by Flickr user Taver, some rights reserved)

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May 29, 2014

Dutch cities top drug use chart

Filed under: General,Science by Orangemaster @ 9:16 am

Out of 42 European cities in 21 countries, three Dutch cities show up in the top 10 for drug use, according to the European Drug Report 2014 of the EMCDDA.

The trio of Eindhoven, Utrecht and Amsterdam can be described as the ‘MDMA capital cities of Europe’, respectively in positions 1, 2 and 3. Eindhoven is off the charts as far as speed is concerned, probably because it is often dumped directly into the sewers by makers.

The number one cannabis smoking wonderland isn’t Amsterdam, although Amsterdam is number two. Number one is Novi Sad in Serbia. Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht are numbers two, seven and thirteen for cocaine use.

We told you a while back that Amsterdam’s sewers are full of hard drugs.

(Links: www.volkskrant.nl, www.nu.nl)

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May 28, 2014

Noise during exams and other complaints

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:10 am

Every year at exam time the media reports on how many complaints the LAKS (national action committee for students) receives because it’s always quite a lot. This year, the tally is currently at 108,000, as compared to last year’s 147,000, with one more exam to go today.

Besides thousands of legitimate complaints about exams being too long, too complicated or just badly written, there’s some funny bits mostly related to noise. One girl complained about the djembe lessons above the classroom where she was doing her exam, saying she couldn’t concentrate. Apparently noise from a music class is a classic complaint.

In a similar category, students have complained about screaming kids coming by the exam room window who were doing their cycling test outdoors (yes, children do cycling tests here). And then to really drive home a point about noise, some students had their thoughts drowned out by a Formula 1 racing car that was ripping through town during the making of a commercial.

Then there’s general weirdness like a student with a pimple on his neck that distracted another student, the exam monitor falling asleep and snoring really loud, and good old hay fever from open windows. The most controversial could be the male students complaining about the short skirts and shorts of the female students that distracted them.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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May 26, 2014

Man fined 237 euro for scratching his ear

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:11 pm

mobile-phone-when-driving-alx-chiefRobert Bloem, aged 65, from Sint Pancras near Alkmaar was fined 237 euro for making a mobile phone call while driving.

Mr Bloem was stopped by the police late in the evening on 23 April (Noordhollands Dagblad adds, “in other words, it was dark”) who fined him on the spot. The driver explained that he hadn’t been making his phone call, but was scratching his ear instead (where have I heard this before?). When he offered his phone to the police so that they might check the call data they declined on the grounds that he “might have erased them”.

The police report says that Mr Bloem was holding “an object similar to a phone”. Mr Bloem has hired a lawyer who told the newspaper the object was “therefore not a phone”.

Sint Pancras is the sort of place where people drive around with 60,000 euro in cash on top of their car (or so they claim), so I am not surprised Mr Bloem can afford the court case.

(Photo by Alx_chief, some rights reserved)

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May 24, 2014

Your phone has an auction room for spies

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:39 pm

bijenkorf-app-play_google_comReporter Dimitri Tokmetzis decided to find out what happens to your privacy if you install an app on your smartphone.

The manufacturers of operating systems for smartphones let you jump through a number of hoops whenever an app wants some private data from you, but are these hoops indicative of real privacy protection or do they only exist to give you the idea of privacy, while at the same time pushing you to give up your privacy by making protection a bit of a drag?

I tested 85 popular apps and followed thousands of data trails. I saw how my smart phone is part of a complex international web of commercial data streams, flinging my data all across the globe […]. It’s a process you can barely control. In the end you have little to no say over your own data.

Tokmetzis installed an app for Bijenkorf, and upmarket-ish Dutch department store. He used a web developer’s tool called Charles which intercepts network traffic. When he ran the app, a number of the usual suspects started following him around: Google Analytics, Google Doubleclick, Intershop and Bijenkorf themselves.

As I am looking at a black leather laptop bag (priced over 500 euro) my smart phone gets jumped by at least 18 different on-line advertising companies who send all kinds of data from and to their servers. It is a blitz. Within a single second contact is being made with servers in the US, Sweden, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands; servers owned by such companies as Improve Digital, Admeta, Adtech, Metrigo, Burst Media, Yieldlab, Switch Concepts, AppNexus, Sociamantic, Adscale, Rubicon Project, OpenX, Smart Adserver and Casale Media.

What all these trackers are doing in this app is a mystery to me. AppNexus turns out to be a platform for real-time bidding, a flash auction in which advertisers bid against each other in milliseconds in order to supply me with ads. […] But the Bijenkorf app doesn’t display ads from external parties.

It turned out that the app loads the mobile Bijenkorf website which includes all the trackers.

Tokmetzis finds it extremely worrying that modern phones are more difficult to secure than PCs. He points to the fact that phones are often used for much more intimate purposes than PCs.

(Illustration: Google Play)

May 17, 2014

Unions think up pension plan for the self-employed

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:33 pm

contract-branko-collinFour unions are planning to introduce a pension fund that is tailor-made for the self-employed, NRC reported last Thursday.

The fund called ZZP Pensioen allows for a variable contribution, as the self-employed have a variable income, and the money saved can also be used to cover extended sick leave. The initiators are Zelfstandigen Bouw, ZZP Nederland, FNV Zelfstandigen and PZO-ZZP.

According to NRC, only a third of the 750,000 self-employed in the Netherlands are saving for retirement.

The new fund is still looking for a provider. According to Z24, ZZP Nederland has been in talks with insurers but so far, the insurers want to bundle all kinds of unnecessary insurances with the pensions.

Why don’t the self-employed use existing pension plans? They are way too expensive (in Dutch).

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