April 7, 2012

Dutch pension system is broken, says Management Team

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:27 pm

We Dutch like to pride ourselves in our pension funds.

“The best in the world,” our politicos holler. We may not have the money printing machine the Norwegians have with their oil reserves, but we still have the highest pay-outs in the world, not to mention that the combined funds have 800 billion euros in the bank.

A mere smoke screen, business magazine Management Team warns. It lists 10 myths that the partners of the polder model like to spread, and counters with its own worrisome truths:

  • Seventy percent of the built up reserve will be paid out in the next 20 years.
  • You only get back what you put in if you started paying when you were 20.
  • Expect to receive at best only 35% of your last earned salary if you start paying into a pension fund now.
  • There is 800 billion euro in the bank, but that is a shortage of 240 billion euro.
  • Re-indexed pensions are payed from premium hikes, not from investment yields.

The pension funds claim that ‘on average’ they are healthy, but Management Team points out that they calculate an unexpected average. Instead of looking at the total coverage, they add up the coverage percentages of all the small, healthy funds with those of the huge unhealthy funds.

Oddly enough, our pension reserve could be used under European rules to calculate a lower national debt, but instead the current government prefers not to do that. The Eamelje.net blogger thinks this is so that its constituent partners can keep fear mongering, as fear begets power.

Tags: , ,

April 4, 2012

Dutch authorities make identity theft easy

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:19 pm

As of late, many journalists have turned finding out how badly privacy is protected by government institutions into a kind of sport.

Reinier Vermeer, a journalist from Webwereld, rang up the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) to find out about the data they had on him, and a few days later he got a letter from them with all the details of his neighbours.

The letter contained the complete names, dates of birth and social insurance numbers of his next-door neighbours, all of which is enough to ask for an online ID code, for doing taxes and even request a new passport using your own picture. It’s like Christmas for identity thieves and it goes against everything the Data Protection Law stands for.

And if said journalist was a real baddie, he could run around for a long time posing as his neighbour and commit all kinds of atrocities. The police in the journalist’s area are currently trying out a system where if you lose your passport, you don’t need to file a report with the police anymore, you just show up at some municipal office and file for a new passport. And unless his neighbour recently ordered a new biometric passport, there is no way of checking whether the journalist is who he says he is. And imagine the neighbour’s fun of trying to prove he is who he is.

So you’re a a hardcore baddie (think terrorist), you have a proper though technically illegal European passport, and the Dutch authorities would probably investigate the neighbour’s claim of having had his identity stolen for months before you’d get caught for anything, all because some stupid employee at the Employee Insurance Agency is too stupid/lazy/unmotivated to follow the rules or even learn them.

See also: Man harassed by police for 13 years after identity theft

Tags: , , , , ,

April 2, 2012

Automated Lego robotic lab

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:15 am

Anika Brandsma (17) from the Netherlands built this automated Lego robolab by combining the Lego Friends’ Olivia’s invention workshop set with Lego Mindstorms NXT.

Also check out her flying Lego, and her Lego duck, which quacks, walks and lays eggs. The entire Brandsma family is into Lego, and uses the pseudonym Vuurzoon Family (it’s a pun—Vuurzoon means ‘fire son’, and Brandsma means ‘fire mother’).

Lego Friends is Lego marketed purely at girls. This makes the hitherto gender neutral other Lego suddenly appear ‘boys only’, or so some people fear. That is why it is interesting to see kids, or in this case teenagers, just mix and match them.

Link: Wired.

Tags:

March 18, 2012

Orphans castrated in Catholic boarding school in the 1950s

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:47 pm

NRC reports that the Roman Catholic church has been castrating minors in the 1950s.

In one case the victim was a boy who had been sexually abused by a priest in a Roman Catholic boarding school. The paper says there are indications that the church castrated dozens of more boys. The church had hoped to ‘cure’ the boys from ‘homosexual behaviour’.

In 2010 the church appointed a committee led by former education minister Wim Deetman to study sexual abuse of minors within the church. In its report, the committee somehow failed to make any mention of the castration cases, even though it knew about it.

The current right-wing government has always blocked a parliamentary enquiry into widespread sexual abuse by the Catholic church. Coalition partners VVD, CDA and PVV claim that this is because an enquiry would be of no use to the victims.

According to the optimistic Deetman report, the rape machine that is the Catholic church made tens of thousands of victims among children in the Netherlands alone between 1945 and 1985.

Last week Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) cheerfully reported at a congress for fundamentalist Christian youths—it is still anybody’s guess what he was doing there—that for him as a liberal, judeo-christian principles are very important. Somehow I doubt this government will do much to stop the criminal practices of white religions.

Tags: , , ,

March 16, 2012

Cops fine pregnant woman having a miscarriage

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:00 am

A 21-year-old pregnant woman trying to avoid a little girl tripped out of a bus in Groningen and fell flat on her stomach. An ambulance was called to bring her to the hospital. She was in pain, and realised that she was losing her unborn child. The police showed up and asked her for ID, which she wasn’t carrying at the time, something that is required by law at all times. She gave her details to the police, but they decided to fine her for not having any ID. She yelled at the police in pain, waiting for the ambulance. “If I could have stood up, I would have kicked them”, the woman said.

The police didn’t even wait for the ambulance and left. The panic was probably even greater, since this was apparently her second miscarriage. The police didn’t confirm the story, saying they don’t check who they hand out fines to (huh?) and the woman has lawyered up.

I’m wondering if there’s any CCTV footage or witnesses to corroborate the story, and if this is true, my general opinion of the police is not getting any better.

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl, Illustration by Leonardo da Vinci)

Tags: ,

March 15, 2012

Judges punish ‘foreign looking’ criminals harder

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 7:26 pm

Dutch judges are five times more likely to send a criminal to jail if the suspect has a foreign appearance, researchers from Leiden University found out.

That likelihood increases to 20 times if the suspect does not speak Dutch.

The researchers checked for expected variables such as the features of the crime, the likelihood of the suspect to commit further crimes, and the location of the court.

Judges not only discriminated against foreigners with a non-Dutch appearance, but also against men. Women are three times less likely to end in jail than men who committed the same crimes. Only lighter crimes, including theft, assault, battery and traffic violations were studied.

A factor that did not influence the weight of the punishment was whether suspects showed they were sorry.

The researchers expressed concern that people receive a prison sentence when community or a fine would have sufficed, because prison sentence are known to kick-start criminal careers.

(Via: NRC. Link: Leiden University)

Tags: , , , , ,

March 12, 2012

Littering before the Dutch Supreme Court

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:35 am

In a glorious display of bullying, barratry and plain old pettiness, the Dutch justice department has decided to take a littering case to the Supreme Court.

It started in October 2009 when a man was fined 120 euro for dropping an empty can on the Neringweg in Lelystad. Rather than paying the fine, the man decided to wait for the court case, which he lost. His lawyer appealed for two reasons, namely that the offence was too small to warrant such a heavy handed response from the state, and that the justice department failed to actually prove the man had broken the law.

The judge quite rightly ruled that it is the justice department’s prerogative to pick its battles, but then awarded the case to the defendant. The local ordinance of Lelystad stipulates that litter needs to be put into a rubbish bin. The man successfully argued that the justice department had provided no proof that there were bins in the street (which there were, by the way).

Spokeswoman for the justice department Kiki Plugge said that the department wants to create clarity for municipalities: should they amend their ordinances? The question seems moot, as the justice department lost because they messed up, not because the ordinance is unclear. The spokeswoman then continued to say that “we do not want people to litter”, which seems an odd thing to say. Of course the justice department gets to pick its own battles, but one would hope that it does not base its choices on its own, undoubtedly narrow minded tastes and interests.

Quite frankly I hope the justice department is taught a lesson on its obligation to perform due diligence, and on suspects’ rights and due process.

Lelystad is a young city of 70,000 souls, built in a place where in the 1950s, a sailor would only be able to see the sea around him. The Dutch Supreme Court doesn’t perform trials. Instead, it only checks to see if the law has been applied correctly given the facts of the case.

(Link: De Pers. Photo by Jos Faber, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , , ,

March 8, 2012

Dutch women are unequal, change is slow

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 5:38 pm

Women make 20,8% less than men in the Netherlands. They work in sectors that pay less because more women work in them, causing a vicious circle. They work less and earn less because they have to take care of their children, as men apparently don’t and it’s cheaper if they do it because they get paid less anyways. Bosses know they can offer women less money at the start of a job because women don’t negotiate. Sectors where more men work actually pay better. Some 75% of women work part-time and do not stand up for their rights, resulting in less pay and fewer rights. Foreign women are easy to discriminate against because they don’t know the rules or the law (been there, done that). Women’s jobs have less social status. Women aren’t usually bosses and prefer to be more low key, earning less. Older women earn a lot less than older men and female students earn less than male students even in their first job.

If you still think International Women’s Day is fluff, think again.

(Link: www.loonwijzer.nl, Photo of Birthday cake by C J Sorg, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

24 Oranges goes mobile

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:38 am

Starting today 24oranges.nl has a mobile version of its website.

You can access this version using the same address as always. The mobile version is much leaner and is optimised for small screens. We use the very popular WP Touch plug-in for this.

If you are reading this on a mobile device and still see the old design, tell us which device you are using in the comments and we’ll see what we can do. The desktop version of this site should work well on tablet-sized screens and bigger, while the mobile version is intended for phone-sized devices.

Tags: ,

March 6, 2012

Hospital in Arnhem has separate ER for children

Filed under: Dutch first,General,Health by Orangemaster @ 11:27 am

The Rijnstate hospital in Arnhem, Gelderland now has a separate ER (Emergency Room) for children, following demands from paediatricians that children would be better served by not coming into contact with wounded adults.

Only in children’s hospitals do they have ERs for children obviously, and paediatricians probably felt the pressure of finding a better way to reassure their small patients admidst big world chaos.

A quick Google search in English leads me to believe that this seems like a good idea and quite common in other countries. There is also a growing number of ERs for the elderly as well, something I can imagine this country either should have or could really use.

Why is this news in the Netherlands? I’m sure budgets play a role, but again it seems this country is lagging behind world trends. I say ‘seems’ — someone enlighten us: have doctors been pleading for years to get this set up and finally someone listened?

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl)

Tags: