Arjando Ooms

Vraag voor een geopolitiek deskundige. Zullen dit, over zeg 200jaar, de jaren zijn die het einde van van de westerse dominantie markeren? Ik bedoel het onvermogen waarmee we de coronacrisis aanpakken en het onvermogen om het democratisch bestel te beschermen?

Aldus de man die het prachtige monumentale ABN AMRO-gebouw in Rotterdam mocht 'verrijken' door er een scheve stapel Tupperware-bakjes tegenaan te plakken...

@j0risverhoeven Zie dat je Gemini gebruikt. Voor mij werkt Co-Pilot vaak beter omdat deze projectspecifiek toegang heeft tot onze bedrijfsdata. En ben nu begonnen met Struck.eu dat lijkt veelbelovend.

@ArjandoOoms Ik ga er morgen nog even induiken. Vind het wel curieus.

En zo mag je dus een "slaapkamertje" maken van 1,8 meter in het vierkant waarbij je de overloop aanduidt als onderdeel van dat verblijfsgebied. Een kamertje waar dus geen bed in past. #schietmijmaarlek

@WellitHappened1 Hardest part is to know what needs to be replaced.

My dryer broke, instead of going out and buying a new one, I bought a 16$ replacement part and fixed it myself. How many people out here today can say honestly they are fixing there things instead of tossing them and buy a new one.

Approximately 85% of the world’s refugees are Muslims. But for some reason they don’t seek asylum in over 50 Muslim countries. They only want to go to non-Muslim countries. Any ideas why?!

A perfect visualization of the enshittification of Google search. linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

@DieTukkerfries Indrukwekkend. Is dat gebied zo verstedelijkt?

Was een behoorlijke zoektocht. Maar volgens mij heb ik de juiste kleuren voor deze nieuwe kaart te pakken nu.

Hard to believe it’s been 8 years since Pillars of Eternity II: #Deadfire set sail! To celebrate, @Obsidian and Beamdog are launching the CRPG Classics Bundle on Steam: ☠️ #BaldursGate I & II Enhanced Editions 🏹 #PillarsOfEternity I & II Save 20% and dive back into the golden age of isometric role‑playing!

@thijszonneveld @LeesDeMuur Ik vond dit een van de beste wieleralpodcasts in tijden. Wat een schitterende anekdotes en wat vullen die gasten elkaar geweldig aan. Ook de rol van jou en Nando vond ik erg goed. Kritisch en bescheiden. Daadwerkelijk een participerend platform voor de renners.

In samenwerking met @LeesDeMuur maken we een nieuwe podcastserie. Met Sam Oomen, Koen Bouwman, Fabio Jakobsen, Nando Boers. Niet over de actualiteit, maar over de vraag wat het beroep wielrenner nu eigenlijk inhoudt. #indewaaier Eerste aflevering: open.spotify.com/episode/7B7QxO…

A lesson on social democracy that is not from a lying billionaire.

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen. American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint. The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed. The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second. So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse. Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands. MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed. And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with. Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack: @gandalv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@gandalv

Pijn aan de pomp? #olie Pak eens de fiets! eenvandaag.avrotros.nl/artikelen/auto… 40% woont binnen 10km, 60% binnen 15km van werk "Prima te doen op de e-bike!" #eenvandaag #noodpakket

@ManvandeZaak Hoe kwam je hierbij?

Ik vroeg ChatGPT om de stijging van de prijs van een #BigMac, de loonstijging en inflatie even in een grafiek te zetten. Als je bedenkt dat de lonen meestal iets achterlopen, gaat het toch redelijk gelijk op.

@GodPlaysCards That windmill isn't very dutch. It has a stone (not brick) base. That's not how the did build them.

Every other colonial power (🇬🇧🇪🇸🇵🇹) had a king behind it. The VOC 🇳🇱 had a republic of merchants, windmills, ships, and a monopoly they seized from the world. It became on of the most powerful companies in history. And it didn't start in a garage, but in a swamp. Here's how. 👇 🔸The year is 1600. The Dutch Republic is a nation that shouldn't exist. Built on reclaimed swampland, constantly threatened by Spain, it has no king, no empire, just canals, windmills grinding grain, and merchants who refuse to accept the world as they found it. 🔸The spice trade is the oil industry of the 17th century. Nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon. Whoever controls them controls the wealth of the world. Portugal and Spain have carved it up between themselves. The Dutch want in. 🔸Dutch merchants are already sending ships to Asia. But competing companies are undercutting each other, driving up costs and driving down profits. The windmill builders have a problem: they are too good at competition, even against themselves. 🔸In 1602, the States-General makes a decision that changes history. They force the competing merchant companies to merge into one. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the VOC, is born. The most powerful corporation in history starts as a forced marriage. 🔸The charter they issue is unlike anything before it. The VOC is not just allowed to trade. It is allowed to build forts, raise armies, wage war, and sign treaties. A private company is handed the powers of a sovereign state. The merchants of the swamp now have teeth. 🔸They invent something else in 1602 that reshapes civilization. To fund the VOC, Amsterdam opens the world's first stock exchange. Ordinary citizens can buy shares. The Dutch built the architecture of modern capitalism. 🔸The ships leave Amsterdam in fleets. Built in the shipyards powered by those iconic windmills (the same we used to pump water out and create land). They sawed timber and ground materials for the Dutch war machine of commerce. The wind that drained the bogs now built the vessels that ruled the oceans. The difference is that the Dutch built one of the best and first assembly lines in the world. Quality and speed of production increases rapidly. 🔸The VOC's first major target is the Banda Islands. A tiny volcanic archipelago in Indonesia, the only place on earth where nutmeg grows. The Portuguese are there. The VOC arrives with cannons. The spice monopoly stays Dutch. 🔸Jan Pieterszoon Coen (I'm working on a Card on him) becomes the VOC's enforcer in Asia. Brilliant, ruthless, and completely without mercy. When the Bandanese resist the monopoly, he orders a massacre. Of the 15,000 inhabitants, only about a thousand survive. The spice monopoly is secured in blood. 🔸At its peak the VOC operates over 150 merchant ships and 40 warships, and employs 57,000 people directly. It governs millions. No king commands more tonnage on the world's oceans than this company of Dutch merchants born in a bog. 🔸From Cape Town to Nagasaki, the VOC flag flies. Trading posts, forts, and colonies stretch across two oceans. Japan closes itself to all Western nations and makes one exception: the Dutch. The VOC is the only Western entity permitted to trade with Japan for over 200 years (Shogun anyone?) 🔸Back in Amsterdam, the windmills keep turning. The wealth flowing in from Asia transforms the city. The canal houses go up. Rembrandt paints. Spinoza thinks. The Dutch Golden Age, one of the greatest flowerings of art, science, and philosophy in history, is funded by pepper and nutmeg. 🔸But power at that scale corrupts at that scale. VOC officials in Asia grow rich through private trading, bribery, and theft. The company that invented the shareholder dividend begins quietly bleeding out. Corruption eats the hull from the inside while the ships still look magnificent from shore. 🔸VOC's decline was slow and multi-causal. Corruption was real and significant, but so were external factors: the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War in the 1780s badly damaged Dutch trade power, competition from the British East India Company intensified, and demand for spices in Europe had been declining. The corruption accelerated a decline that had structural causes too. 🔸By the late 1700s the VOC is effectively bankrupt. Two centuries of dominance, undone by mismanagement, war with Britain, and an empire too vast to control. On December 31, 1799, the charter expires and the Dutch government formally dissolves the company. The most powerful company in history simply closes. 🔸The VOC is gone but its fingerprints are everywhere. The stock exchange it invented still exists. The legal framework of the corporation it pioneered still governs modern business. Cape Town, Jakarta, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, all shaped by its presence. It started in a swamp. It ended having remade the world. History remembers the VOC as the greatest (or one of the greatest) commercial enterprise ever built. Every dominant power in history built its position through force. The Romans. The British. The Ottomans. The Spanish. The VOC was not an exception to that rule. Commerce has always required violence to protect it. True in the Golden Age and also true now. I'll spare you a paragraph on the Strait of Hormuz. With that final note, I want to thank you for sticking with me. Tomorrow I've got another fantastic story lined up for you. Honored to have you on board.

Is UAE Team Emirates buying followers on Instagram? You know, I am chronically online on social media and I always knew how Visma was ahead of the UAE in the numbers of followers on Instagram. The reasons were many, Visma is posting better content, Vingegaard is not using Instagram, so for info you have to follow the team and generally they are a more likeable team. And Visma after Wout’s win, finally got to the 1 million followers marker. And I checked the UAE page to see how many they have and they didn’t have 1 million. But since then, things have been happening. The UAE started to gain daily more followers than ever. Even after Pogačar’s Giro, Tour or Worlds wins. And this all without a single Pogačar race day. While Visma earned in days after a Roubaix about 5000 followers in average, UAE in a random day earned more than 30 000. And since Saturday is just four days away, they went from 936 000 followers to a current 1 024 000. Outside of the days of sharp increases, there were also significant drops when the number of followers dropped. This is also a typical sign of buying followers. So why to do this? The answer is simple. To not to look being behind Visma. You can check this data publicly on Socialblade, so you don’t think I am just creating numbers. Plus under this post, I also put the comparison between the UAE and Visma on how their followers count grew.

@defiantsmartass Liever gewoon gratis geld uitdelen en geen steekt verder komen toch?

1) Onbelaste kilometervergoeding van 23 naar 25 cent. Wat heeft die alleenstaande bijstandsmoeder die drie kinderen opvoedt daar aan? 2) De wegenbelasting voor ‘grijze kentekens’ wordt vanaf juli gehalveerd. Wat heeft die alleenstaande bijstandsmoeder die drie kinderen opvoedt daar aan? 3) Aanschaf van elektrische auto’s wordt aantrekkelijker gemaakt. Wat heeft die alleenstaande bijstandsmoeder die drie kinderen opvoedt daar aan? Gaat lekker zo hè @MinPres met je groene agenda?

@DylanMalyasov Try this? hilti.nl/c/CLS_HEALTH_S…

This is something Ukrainian artillery crews can only envy—not so much for protecting their backs, but for the ability to operate two large combat vehicles in an open field without the constant threat of being detected by enemy drones and struck by ballistic missiles. Europe still isn’t preparing for a real war.

@HappyMotorhead Might as well get comfortable around those people if you spend half you waking hours there.

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@Theo_Roy33 Voedselbank?

And just like that cobbled season is over. Intense, but far too compressed. Roubaix in autumn, with Denain and similar races as build-up, would make for a much more balanced calendar. One injury, like Pedersen or Powless, and your cobbled season chances are gone