I don't know the exact situation in the Netherlands, but if it's anything like in Belgium the employer pays taxes on top of the employee's gross income. The total cost to the employer is therefore significantly higher than what the employee gets, even gross.
Employers pay taxes, but this calculator puts it as roughly 14k€ of costs for a 100k€ gross salary for the employee (Compared to 44k€ of costs in Belgium, which is why I left)
As someone that moved a bit through the EU, that's actually a pretty complex calculation, that's hard to distill into a single number.
My second biggest recurring expense is childcare. Having a child is something you are in control of, so the weight you might give to childcare benefits is something that wildly depends on your life plans.
Same with unemployment benefits. Would you rather a strong safety net and 8% unemployment (Like France), or a weaker net and 4% unemployment, like the Netherlands?
But that's the same as thinking "This bar is selling a cocktail for $15. I could make it at home for 30 cents. They're making $14.7 dollars of profit per cocktail, the owner must be a millionaire now!"
Pretty much every country has a concept of benefit in kind. Some countries will allow some expenses to be covered (Part of your phone/internet subscription if you work from home, meals vouchers. Some countries codified some WFH arrangements) but you absolutely won't be able to pay for everything tax free.
You'd be far better-off jumping between countries to leverage the 30% ruling/Beckham Law/HSM tax arrangements if you can.
You're missing that the impact is not evenly distributed. It doesn't mean everyone gets 25% less petrol, tighten the belt a little bit, take one fewer trip to starbucks, and all is well.
It means rich countries get the 75% while the poor countries get nothing and starve. What happens when a nuclear power like India starts to lack food?
> What happens when a nuclear power like India starts to lack food?
Personally I think that actually seems a bit unlikely. Most of India's energy doesn't come from oil and doesn't go to agriculture. It seems plausible that the global economy will be able to overcome the food and fertiliser issues even in the short term, there is a lot of food out there.
I'm expecting the threat to be more complex economic goods like construction, manufactured goods, leisure and general logistics. I don't want to downplay the risk, famine in India is a scary thought, but I don't really see how we'd get there from closing the Strait of Hormuz without a lot of bad luck. The problem is it is going to materially impoverish a number of people and collapse complex supply chains rather than make it hard to get food to them.
Food quantity has never been the issue. The logistics are. Food is the most direct issue, but "just" the economic turmoil alone is reason enough to worry. No one was starving in the Weimar republic, yet ...
The logistics of food don't seem to be under any particular threat. The petrol required to get someone survival calories is not so much and the vast majority of traffic on the road is not about getting basic calories to people. I don't think any of the world's nuclear states would struggle to overcome that problem right now.
I cancelled my subscription two days ago. I was a customer since October last year. I could get a decent bit of work done on just the 20$ subscription, but since this monday, I can barely get two prompts in before hitting my limit.
Same codebase, same sort of prompt, same scale. I was already on the fence. Models like Qwen, Kimi, or GLM5 already go a very long way while being vastly cheaper, and the new openAI models feels equivalent but with higher limits.
This is getting to the point where the right harness makes a bigger difference than the right model. I've been experimenting with some planner-executor-reviewer setup in opencode, and I'm starting to feel like multiple smaller models working together are netting me better results.
Men are stronger, faster, have more dense bones, have bigger lungs, bigger hands, etc, etc, etc. Men and women are different in hundreds of ways it's not just 'lean body mass'. Men are better at sports than women. Do you even live in reality? Have you ever completed in anything in your life?
For what conceivable reason would you want to recreate the male and female division using a dozen or more proxies for sex instead of just using sex, to wind up with people being placed into the same buckets they would have been if you just went by sex in the first place? This seems ideologically motivated.
The controversy in these comments answers that question nicely. It seems likely that such a change would obviate these edge cases, though they may introduce their own; that seems worthy of consideration.
Really, the question seems better turned around: why use a known bad proxy for physical ability when another one might be better?
Those divisions already exists. Most sports have different leagues. There are international leagues, national leagues, regional leagues, all the way down to hobby leagues or beer leagues. If we assign everyone into a league independent of gender, the highest leagues (the most popular and most lucrative ones) will be exclusively men and women will only be present in the lower leagues. No one can want this outcome.
And then you get a situation with as many divisions as there are people and everyone get a gold medal, everyone is a winner. The true woke paradise.
Fortunately, most people don't like to live in this hell and are against clear attempts to destroy women's sports by the clueless and/or purposefully malicious activists.
Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.
Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.
Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.
I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.
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