Viewing profile — michieldotv

I get that in the West we are generally conceiving at a later stage in life than before, and that this does not improve odds of conception. However, with fertility, just as with so…

From speaking with others, I will say that, on average my peers seem not to have learned from the energy crisis following the invasion of Ukraine. It's business as usual. Consequen…

This EU free-rider behavior is unfortunately typical of French public sector policy. European energy markets were famously liberalised in 1996, allowing French state-owned EDF to a…

I don't have an answer for you, because I haven't found it myself. I have been struggling with burnout for a while now, but I was unable to really put my finger on what was wrong. …

I've been going through another episode of sleeplessness lately. Just like it had before, it has serious detrimental effects on my overall wellbeing. I'm less trusting of others, m…

I feel you. I was on escitalopram in my twenties too for a depressive episode. It wrecked my libido and 10 years down the line there is hardly any sign of improvement in sight. I h…

PFOS/PFAS are such a shit fest. An unholy coalition politicians, gov't administration, scientists and corporate interest tried to cover up historical PFOS pollution around the 3M p…

Talking about Belgium, 40.000 additional homes are being connected to the gas grid every year (2020/2021). That's astounding. We stopped mandating new connections. Great. Insidious…

Electricity price (A) + Distribution network fees (B1) + Transmission network fees (B2) + Excise taxes on electricity (C) ──────────────────────────────── Subtotal + 21% VAT (D) ──…

> What is it that would make it so expensive? I know €200K sounds like a lot, but if you strip out unavoidable costs such as VAT, architect's fees, misc hidden fees, what you are l…

Belgium chiming in. For the longest time, the electricity bill was this kind of back door for politicians to sneak in stuff they wanted to keep out of the General Budget. It starte…

Quite expensive? That's understated. My understanding now is that it comes at the cost a modest new house. Our family bought a house in the immediate periphery of a smaller city. S…

As a Belgian having worked in Denmark, my access to Danish e-government services through NemID was revoked pretty soon after I left the country. This was quite a frustrating experi…

I see two reasons: Increased nuclear safety. Proponents often tout nuclear's relative safety. Good, but that safety is hard won through regulation. Compliance is costly, and improv…

This coal spiel is getting so old. This shift to coal in the German energy mix hasn't materialized. This is counter to what many predicted (or hoped?) would happen as the nuclear s…

Atmospheric nitrogen is a big source of environmental and human harm in the Low Countries. The nitrogen deposits are literally smothering what little nature is left. It already led…

As far as I know, there's only one nanobody-based drug on the market today, caplacizumab, and it isn't administered through aerosols, but rather subcutaneously. I know Ablynx was w…

The PDF spec has everything on board to support text reflow. A good PDF library will typically have the option to output what is called a Tagged PDF. Annotating the structure of th…

It's called just that: Tagged PDF. It was added to the ISO spec quite some time ago and allows you to annotate your documents structurally.