Because Belgium didn't have capital gains tax it was actually common to (fake) retire to Belgium for wealthy individuals. There's supposed to be a capital gains tax from 2026 though.
There should be a law forcing ride hailing apps to give anonymized ride data to local governments so that they can plan public transport better. If they sell it to marketers they must be able to do this technically.
> New York City has released data of 173m individual taxi trips – but inadvertently made it "trivial" to find the personally identifiable information of every driver in the dataset.
Interesting read, thanks. The related article shows that even more robust anonymization techniques may still be insufficient (in the case of the taxi rides, spatial-temporal analysis could still lead to de-anonymization). More reason to reduce data collection. Unfortunately the trend is the opposite for governments all around the world.
That example only demonstrates leaked information of the drivers, not the passengers/customers. And the "anonymized" driver and license data wouldn't need to be released in any form at all to produce a dataset useful for public transportation planning purposes: approximate time of day and approximate location are sufficient to estimate demand, and there's no need to keep track of who is making which trips.
Well, there are pitfalls, and it's easy for an "anonymization" scheme to leak more detail than it would seem at first glance. But I agree that motive plays a big role. If your purpose in sharing data is to make money off it, then you'll be trying to share as much data as possible, and will try to convince yourself that your anonymization is "good enough".
If you're sharing data for a specific purpose, then it's much easier to limit the data sharing to suit that purpose: omit irrelevant data, aggregate where possible, and anonymize individual data points only when you actually need to share that level of detail.
Sadly almost no local governments would be equipped to process the data. This would probably benefit firms like Streetlight and Replica but not materially improve public transport. Written by someone turned cynical after years of working in this space.
Surprisingly mobile networks seemed to stay up in Portugal. I'm not sure to what extent and if they lasted for the whole duration of the blackout.
They definitely limited consumer use though.
Most mobile base stations have a limited backup battery and some have generators on site. I'd expect telephone infrastructure to have 24-48 hours of backup in the USA and I don't know why Europe would be much different.
Population density is pretty high in many European inner cities. Most of the cell sites around here are on top of apartment buildings and I doubt they have a genset. Here in central BCN the mobile network was completely offline within an hour or two of the power going out.
You can book a seat for an instrument. I've seen EXTRA, ITEM SEAT mentioned as name for one particular airline but maybe it can get more specific with others?
Oh, I know singular they is used/exists. I'm only pointing out that there is more precise language available most of the time, should it be needed - either she/he or adding details elsewhere in the conversation.
Even if they were high enough they would just fall back to earth. There are lots of videos explaining orbit, this one looks good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcvnfQlz1x4
I think if you tried them out you'll find these bike paths are not unsafe (and I bet the accident numbers back that up), because it's a whole system. Design like this will have features to force drivers to take slow turns when crossing the bike paths, and they are raised so that it's clear to drivers they don't have right of way.
NL always goes for the transit stops that poke out like you mention as well when possible.
That's probably an Amsterdam thing, smaller Dutch cities are lovely and awesome to cycle in. Rotterdam was also not enjoyable to cycle due to aggressive drivers when I visited.
I like that they do it this way. The bins always had plenty of space when I took the option, and otherwise you travel with a backpack which fits under the seat in front of you for the lowest ticket price.
The boarding and disembarking procidures are also much faster with Ryanair in part thanks to this policy, the other being air stairs boarding from both ends of the plane.
They offer a cheap 10kg hold luggage option in case the overhead bins have been sold out or you need to take a small suitcase with forbidden items.
