Heidi Abeloos

@puckingdiva Full gaz

if this makes any sense mackinnon’s skating is the equivalent to verstappen’s driving

@johnloeber Same with legal advice. I tend not to pick up the phone anymore for those ´ friends´

Sometimes, an acquaintance will reach out to me to "catch up" casually. There's nothing I like more than a nice wide-ranging conversation with no agenda, so I usually say yes. Then, 30 or 45 minutes in, they try to be very sneaky about this, they bring up -- oh-just-by-the-way -- some commercial request: an intro to so-and-so, maybe I'll consider buying their product, funding their company, whatever, and it's so disappointing: the last half hour was a fake conversation, a plying motion to prepare for some sale, none of the personal interest was real. I understand that there's a certain school of thought in favor of doing this, but I don't like it at all. I much prefer when people reach out straightforwardly with their commercial request and none of the social fakery or time waste.

@davetroy It´s Patrick Duffy in the shower level insanity

Becoming increasingly difficult to take this show seriously. The writers really need to wrap it up.

@Microinteracti1 Was watching play-off hockey, and on came an advertisement for a weed killer, that has long been prohibited in the EU, because of the health risks involved, I was in shock

In Praise of Being Told What We Can’t Eat I used to find European regulations mildly embarrassing. The endless directives, the committees, the solemn deliberations about cucumber curvature. It seemed like a continent-wide exercise in missing the point. Then I looked at what was actually in my food. More than 10,000 chemicals are permitted in the American food supply. Nearly 99 percent introduced since 2000 were approved not by the FDA, but by the food industry itself.  Companies writing their own permission slips, essentially. The GRAS loophole, created in 1958, allows manufacturers to self-certify that their ingredients are safe. The EU has no equivalent.  The results are specific. BHT, used to extend shelf life in cereals and crackers, is banned in Europe over endocrine disruption concerns – which is why you will never find Wheat Thins here.  Bovine growth hormone, linked to elevated cancer markers, is injected into American dairy cows and banned across the EU. Standard American milk contains it unless the label says otherwise. Potassium bromate, a probable human carcinogen, is still used in American bread.  This is not accident. Three of America’s biggest lobbying firms work for the food industry. Pepsi alone spends nine million dollars a year on lobbying. Incentives, working exactly as designed. Europe chose the precautionary principle. Prove it is safe before it goes in. America chose the reverse. Things are safe until enough people are harmed to prove otherwise. Throw in the right to repair, universal charging cables, and food labels a human being can actually parse – and what emerges is not bureaucratic overreach. It is a regulatory culture that decided to represent the person eating the food rather than the company selling it. Critics can call that excessive. I call it civilization. Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

@anishmoonka Soft power 💪

Your iPhone has a USB-C port because Europe passed a law. Europe is only 7% of Apple's sales. That 7% rewrote every iPhone on the planet, including the one in your pocket. In October 2022, the European Parliament passed a law requiring every new phone sold in Europe to use the same plug, USB-C, by the end of 2024. Apple had fought this idea for years, arguing that forcing one standard would slow innovation. Three weeks after the vote, Apple's marketing chief Greg Joswiak sat on a panel at the Wall Street Journal's tech conference and gave up the fight: "We'll have to comply." Eleven months later, Apple launched the iPhone 15. It had a USB-C port. The model sold in Berlin, Chicago, Mumbai, and Shanghai was the same phone. Apple could have built a USB-C iPhone for Europe and kept the old Lightning plug (in iPhones since 2012) for every other country. That would have kept Lightning alive, and Lightning was a real business. Apple ran something called the "Made for iPhone" program. If you wanted to make a Lightning cable, a dock, a car charger, or a speaker that actually worked with an iPhone, you paid Apple $99 a year to join, plus roughly $4 on every connector you sold. Thousands of companies paid in. But making two different iPhones is expensive. Apple sold about 247 million of them in 2025. Two designs means two factories, two parts orders, two boxes, two spare cables in the box, two warranty pipelines. Cheaper to copy Europe's rule and ship one phone to the whole planet. A law professor named Anu Bradford wrote about this pattern in a 2012 paper and a 2020 book. She called it the Brussels Effect. Europe has about 450 million people who buy things. Big enough that companies set the rules for everyone, everywhere, to match whatever Europe says. Your cookie pop-ups come from Europe, a law called GDPR. Safer chemicals in your shampoo and sofa come from Europe, a law called REACH. The new App Store rule that lets you install apps from outside Apple's store comes from Europe, the Digital Markets Act. The USB-C plug on your phone is the same story. The ripple is already spreading. India said every phone sold there needs USB-C by March 2025. California is working on the same law. Apple kept selling one last Lightning iPhone, the iPhone 14, outside Europe until September 2025, then quietly dropped it when the iPhone 17 came out. Lightning is gone from every store in every country. 7% of Apple's money rewrote 100% of Apple's phones.

@mcnuggetmel Had to read that hashtag twice...

#whoremembers whole squad was cheering! One of my favorite memories this season!

@hockeyjtm Gefeliciteerd met je artikel. Belgische hockeyfan hier (Red Wings, het is niet gemakkelijk...)

nobody in this entire country gives a single shit about hockey so i am counting this as an achievement

omg!!!!

Which Rockstar had the best hair?

@HQNewsNow share.google/DYBWio73dyaSih…

Trump: While I'm up here I'm looking around. I love construction. You see all those nice Caterpillars and John Deeres. In fact, if you don't mind, I'll walk over there and look for a little while, then I will come back and I will continue to speak

@hockeyjtm What platform do you use to watch from Belgium?

i'm the only person in the world that is watching the sharks flyers game from la grande place in brussels

@meowbrini Mack 3 anyone?

the mc-mac-mack line will feed families for generations to come x.com/acervosharks/s…

@MikeNellis Why is she so angry? Take a chill pill lady

Megyn Kelly just shouting “FOOTBALL IS OURS” at Piers Morgan about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show is the perfect example of this moment in time. Put it in a time capsule and send it out into space.

@thomas_spaas Mensen die maatschappelijke meerwaarde willen realiseren en niet alleen voor hun eigen/financieelbelang gaan, kiezen vaak voor een publieke werkgever. Werkgeluk, een zeer interessant takenpakket en mooie arbeidsvoorwaarden, wat wil je nog meer?

Hoe kan je nu een heel lang leven voor je hebben liggen, waarin alles mogelijk is, en dan tegen jezelf zeggen: "Weet je wat, ik word ambtenaar" (vaak: zoals mijn mama en papa) "want die hebben een vet pensioen, kunnen niet ontslagen worden, en moeten niet te hard werken"?

If there were words on which to build the foundations for ‘Truth Matters’, it would be this monologue from one of my British literary heroes. The inimitable Mr Stephen Fry. May these words never fade from all our minds. 🎥. TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNdL8xe2a/

@PeterDeKeyzer @vokavzw Zijn die landen met lange loopbanen misschien beter in de work-life balance, met meer ruimte voor deeltijds werken of ouderschapsverlof?

De Belgen hebben zowat de kortste loopbanen van heel Europa. Heel veel systemen maken dit mogelijk. Dan dringt zich toch de onderliggende culturele vraag op => Waarom werkt de Belg niet graag? Waarom wordt werk gezien als iets om te vermijden? #dtv Bron: @vokavzw

It’s wild that the American VP is criticizing European countries for stifling freedom of speech. In the Press Freedom Index, the US ranks 55th, while Sweden is 3rd and Germany 10th. Russia, meanwhile, sits at 162.

@donaldtusk MEGA?

Europe, are you ready to get back on the road of greatness and strength? Poland is ready! 🇵🇱🇪🇺

@bouwspiegel Wend u tot de Vlaamse overheid, die al die regels uitvindt die op lokaal niveau moeten gehandhaafd worden. Geloof mij, ook de lokale dienst Omgeving wordt er niet blij van.

Weigering omgevingsaanvraag uitbreiding woning (+/- 40m²) omdat de WADI fout ingeplant zou zijn. Ze zijn helemaal gek geworden op die lokale administraties. In plaats van even te overleggen, weigeren ze. Zonder meer. Ivoren torens zonder voeling met (financiële) impact.

Harris or Trump? Some claim that the future of Europe depends on the American elections, while it depends first and foremost on us. On condition Europe finally grows up and believes in its own strength. Whatever the outcome, the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over.