In the end it's subjective, but SF gets 24% more sunshine year-round, and 42% less rain, so they balance each other out. Can't go wrong with either IMO!
I visited the supercomputer centre at UEindhoven back in the 1990s. All the hardware was up on the first floor, which of course meant serious load bearing construction. But this is why.
> Not just the Netherlands, most of Europe counts floors like this: ground, first, second, etc.
I think it wildly differs all around Europe.
In Spain for example, if someone says "1st floor" it can be two or three floors above the actual ground floor, if there is a "Entresuelo" or "Principal", and you start counting after those. Actual ground floor is "bajo".
On the other hand you have the "atico" (attic) which is the top level floor, unless there is a "sobre atico" ("above the attic"), so just because you live in the attic doesn't mean you live on the top floor.
Then every region can have their own convention, or even difference in neighborhoods in the same city.
I'm not sure how many countries in Europe count like that, the online information is totally unreliable. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/mvnkja/floor_numbe...
That map is absolutely incorrect for a bunch of countries, e.g. the Nordic ones.
I would say it's not counting from zero but it's a "ground floor" (that's basically were your door is) and the floor above is the first floor. There's no "zeroeth floor".
Why though? Eindhoven is about 17 meters above sea level, and the Dommel seems hardly big enough to pose a serious flood risk. (It obviously does flood every once in a while, but usually not near the university area)
Ironically enough the parts that flood the most in the Netherlands are the parts which are not below sea level. Just this week Doetinchem experienced some high water due to heavy rainfall [1]. In the south-east and east they sometimes also have problems with the amount of water the rivers over there have to process. In both cases the problem is the river can't process the water fast enough.
The parts below sea-level are mostly all in the delta area. Meaning there is little risk of rivers overflowing since they are at their widest in the delta. And as for rainfall; That just means pump water harder out of the "tub" then normal. As for the threat of sea-water in these areas, that's were the Delta Werken[2] are for.
Drove a rented Kia in Central Australia recently that had this. It was fine: just stick below the speed limit. "Dangerous" to someone who continuously rides the speed limit perhaps.
We’ve a fairly new car with a similar system (that can be ignored/disabled thankfully). It seems to have both a some GPS/location based awareness of what the speed is meant to be that it falls back to as well as a camera based detection. I find it useful as a reference incase I don’t know what the speed is and missed the previous sign, but it’s also regularly wrong and not to be entirely trusted. For example the on ramp to the closest freeway near us it consistently reports as 10km/h when it’s actually 100km/h. I don’t know what it is about that sign specifically it can’t read as it looks fine to the human eye, but it would try to cap our speed on the freeway to >=90 km/h slower than the rest of the traffic (most are traveling slightly above) if we were to have the system enabled. As others in the comments have suggested it also can’t be trusted to get the speed right in school zones or for the correct distance for variable recommendations (e.g., speed bumps, roundabouts, etc.)
The worst in my previous car was trucks bearing stickers indicating their max speed was 80 kph, and the car spotting this as the new limit and beeping me for leisurely passing at 120...
The speed limit is the speed you should be driving in most circumstances, and is set far below the maximum safe speed for the road. Driving significantly below the pasted speed is as dangerous driving significantly above it.
Some roads have ridiculously low posted limits. Everyone goes well over, yet those roads are not noted for accidents. If they set the speed limit according to how everyone drives there, then I'd be in more in favor of alerting those who go even 1 km/h over that.
Driving significantly below the pasted speed Without good reason will get you failed in the UK driving test for not making adequate progress.
As my office colleague found out recently.
The hire bikes are great but if you don't have a North American phone number you can't sign up in their app! (I relied on a friendly stranger who offered her phone number for the confirmation code.)
Great city to ride around! Surprisingly good facilities.
This is an interesting question; Netherlands has a similar law, and the general guidelines for stuff like ovens is, depending on the purchase price:
≤ € 199 2 years
€ 200 - 299 3 years
€ 300 - 399 4 years
€ 400 - 499 5 years
€ 500 - 599 6 years
€ 600 - 699 7 years
≥ € 700 8 years
Note these are just guidelines and not fixed rules.
On one hand this seems rather short to me, on the other hand, it's kind of a "you get what you pay for" affair. I don't really know what profit margins manufacturers have, but when I worked for a store profit margins for us really weren't all that big for us (and also didn't scale as much with price as many people assume).
Note that this table comes from "Techniek Nederland", which is a business association of (among others) technical retailers. They've an interest in lowering the expected lifespan of appliances, as that means their members have less warranty to provide. They actually note (probably for legal reasons) along with their table that it contains average usage, not expected lifespan (i.e. how long people use things before they replace it, as opposed to how long you could use it before it breaks).
Courts will, and have in the past, throw this table out, if you make a reasonable argument why you could expect a longer lifespan.
It was linked from the ACM or consumentenbond, or some such consumer website. I don't have the tab open, but it wasn't just a random link from Google.
But yeah, it's just a guideline like I said. Some people here are throwing out numbers such as a "15 years" or "decades" with no qualifiers, and I'm not sure if that's reasonable for a €230 oven (cheapest in a quick check).
Aside on retailers: I haven't worked in a store in 15 years, but back then a lot of manufacturers just said "lol fuck you" when you tried to claim warranty above their stated warranty period. It was typically up to the retailers to bear the costs. One (of several) reason we left the consumer business: it's hard to compete as a small independent store for many different reasons, and this just made it that much harder. You can't spread out the costs, and you have almost no leverage against Asus or HP.
In short, at least back then the manufacturers could just keep shipping wank without really suffering too much damage to their bottom line, and the retailers with essentially no power to change anything were getting screwed. I don't know if that's changed, but probably not.
> It was linked from the ACM or consumentenbond, or some such consumer website. I don't have the tab open, but it wasn't just a random link from Google.
Yes, it gets often quoted, but things don't become true by being often repeated. It probably wasn't the Consumentenbond, as they actively call out the list from Techniek Nederland (previously Uneto-VNI) as being too short on their website.
An oven should last way longer than 2 years even if it's just 200 euro. These price/lifespan things are cow manure and made by trade associations and have no value in law.
200 euro also says nothing: 200 euro for a small tabletop oven is extremely expensive, for a large build-in one it's cheap. Considering as well it's usually a build in one, you can expect to not have to change it every two years.
Note that this doesn't mean you get 8 years of warranty on an expensive oven. Just that if it fails in 4 years you still can claim 50% of the purchase price.
This is not true. You have the right to a "deugdelijk product" (good product) for the entire expected lifespan of the product, and if it breaks in that, they do have to fix it (or provide a comparable replacement).
If, however, for whatever reason you don't want that, you can't demand all your money back, but only 50%. That's only if you agree to the money though, the seller can't unilaterally choose to give you 50% back instead of repairing it.
Warranty is not the same as reasonable expected lifetime. Under warranty, the burden of proof is at the manufacturers side. The 2 years is typical for electric appliances, but it is from jurisprudence only. The law actually states that it should last as long as can reasonably expected. Intentionally vague, but yes, I would expect an oven to last longer than 2 years!
In fact, we should be able to build ovens that last a lifetime. And not only ovens, there are many appliances and gear that can easily be made to last a lifetime, except for some wearing parts. However, many companies that did this were competed to bankruptcy by cheap low quality competing products.
With the abundance of low(er) quality products, we tend to expect a shorter lifetime.
I recently replaced an element on our oven. It's 5 years old. Honestly, if manufacturers could make some of that stuff standardised I'd be quite happy to replace or pay to have them replaced. As it happens there are thousands of different shapes of "heating elements shaped to go around the fan". Same with the brushes in our washing machine I changed a while back. Finding the right replacement took more work than actually doing the replacing.
I think you've been conditioned by anti-consumer companies who want you to BUY BUY BUY to expect that. Ovens should last 20 years or more, and if you're sold a faulty product, it's fair to expect it to be fixed.
Luckily there are still a few countries at the bottom of the world with good consumer legislation.
Yes, they'll increase per-unit prices to do a longer warranty.
But that price increase will go into longer-lasting parts, because that costs a lot less than needing to replace every unit halfway through the warranty period.
And since the 20 year oven is a lot cheaper to build than two 10 year ovens, the per-year price to the consumer will go down.
How will moving production to low wage countries help? The importer and/or the retailer still have to comply with the law of the country they sell in.
The only exception is when people buy from a foreign retailer online. However that is a problem regardless of where the retailer is as long as they are not in your country. My daughter (in the UK) currently has a problem with Boox (in the EU) refusing to replace a product that was delivered with a faulty screen claiming that she must have damaged it.
I'm pretty sure that manufacturers have some room to include a 9-year reliability in the design of a +700€ oven.
That's why consumer laws have differents warranties.
> It‘s extremely difficult to predict the lifetime of a consumer product as it also depends on how it’s being used.
That's actually false. Almost all of the engineered goods are engineered to a certain lifetime. Usually companies have internal endurance testing results for every item. The ones who care about will release their expectations.
Ninety percent of manufactured goods are ultimately trash, pride in craftsmanship has gone by the wayside. Things are shoved through production with little to no f*cks given in regards to quality, if the S.O.B is just a gnats ass within tolerance, just send it, and pump out as many more as you can because we have quotas and due dates to meet.
Considering the cost of sending a lawyer attend the hearing and the potential risk of creating a precedent, it may simpler and cheaper to send an engineer when someone complains too loudly...
That's the point. If customers don't complain strongly enough, the manufacturer is incentivized to develop products prone to malfunction. If the cost of malfunction is raised, the incentives change.
If they got invited to a hundred cases at the same time, they'd send a lawyer and perhaps even would tweak the design to include some extra $1 parts which actually work.
It's a trade-off. People don't want appliances that break down after a few years but they also want cheap appliances...
In this case it seems to boil down to: "In the end he replaced the light bulb (which hadn't worked for years, we hadn't bothered replacing it) and the message had gone away anyway."... i.e. the guy could have replaced the light bulb when it broke and perhaps nothing would have happened in the first place. So this article comes across as complaining too much, frankly.
There is already a precedent - the law. These go to court all the time, and the consumer almost always wins, hence why the companies want to avoid the lawyer fees, since they know they'll lose.
These cases do not go to court, they go to a tribunal. They are not heard by a judge (or at least a judge in their capacity as a court justice) and the results are not entered as judicial cases and do not set precedent.
It’s designed so a lay person can represent themselves without having to understand the justice system.
I know in New South Wales companies have to apply for special leave to have a lawyer represent them, and they need to supply a reason why. In New Zealand lawyers are not allowed in the tribunal, a company must be represented by a manager.
He sued for defamation against the media organisations who exposed him and he lost _hard_. So all the facts that might ordinarily be in dispute and have tiptoe-around language to avoid being sued for can be stated plainly.
Have you ever been to SF? Cold, damp and grey. In June.
Weather in Sydney is GLORIOUS. Mild and short winters and summers where you can wear shorts and t-shirts from September to March.
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