So if you check-in at 3.59 pm in the north of the Netherlands, and go to the south to arrive around 7.00 pm in the south of the Netherlands and you only use trains from 1 company (like NS) the whole journey will be considered off-peak hours. Even if by the time you arive in the south the peak-hours will already be over.

Most trains run with NS but some regional lines have Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) or Keolis (SCNF).

Additionally there is a 5 minute grace period in your favor, so if you check-in at 4.04 pm it will stil be off-peak.

And because the whole thing is rather confusing for those not already familiar with the system there you get to do it wrong once a year and get your fine waived if you call the train company.

And yes there's little queues just before 06.25 pm every day of people waiting in front of the check-in gates for their pass to become valid (especially on fridays when the weekend-pass will become valid).

I'll say this much, our justice systems in western Europe (with the exception of the UK) are based on civil law you could find more about this on Wikipedia to find sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

When it comes to contractors, yes they have less rights (at-will employment, no PTO, no sick-days etc. etc. etc.) So yes it does side-step labor protections but it's more expensive, also in my country at least contractors are required to get disability insurance and not everyone can be considered a contractor. If a judge finds that a contractor actually more resembles an employer (so not being independent of the company hiring), they will retro-actively be considered an employee. (This has happened with Uber drivers for instance)

Some of the protections employees enjoy over here are:

- Not being fired unless the labor board approves (which required documentation from the employees, and them to follow strict labor rules).

- At least 4 weeks PTO.

- Up to 2 years of continues sick-days, (with a doctors note) (after which you'd get fired and get social security)

- After being fired you'd get 1 month of continued salary for each year you were employed, until you find new work

- Paid Maternity/paternity leave

- The right to bargain for a collective bargaining agreement which allows for additional minimum rights/salaries to be applied to all workers within a field

- The right to ignore your boss after hours unless additional consideration (salary) is offered and time schedules are agreed upon

- The right for employees to have a employee-board whenever there's at least 50 employees within a company/org

- The right for employees to keep their jobs if they become disabled (if possible, judged by the labor board not the employer)

When it comes to costs/salaries, I reckon it'd highly depend on the region/job market/sector.

It's nothing personal, it's business.

As a start-up you'd hire contractors which you'd pay a much higher fee for, as these wouldn't have the labor protections of employees.

Salaries for contractors are I guess similar to the US maybe a bit lower, for salaries employees definitely lower than the US (for tech at least).

But then again my rent is cheaper, and my insurances are cheaper too, I get PTO and unlimited sick-days, stuff like that. At the end of the day, if I want to make more money and not have many protections (like in the US) I'd become a contractor. (which does come with some strings attached to prevent employers from hiring normal employees like contractors).

You have a choice over here for both models essentially.

Imagine the horror not having to worry over not being able to pay your mortgage or rent whenever your boss or some power tripping middle manager decided they want you to start juggling bowling pins while riding a unicycle while you were hired to develop software.

Won't someone please think of the poor employers? /s

Talk about toxic, this kind of garbage is why workers need strong labor laws and unions protecting them.

In reality China is just "greener" (in CO2 emission) than the USA if you measure more reasonable metrics like CO2 emission per capita.

‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

AFAIK a personal to-do list would be "relating to an identifiable natural person" as the database will have a relation from this data to the account, which will likely have a name, email address or other PII (directly or indirectly).

IANAL

But this article isn't about legal tender or how debts can be repaid it's about anti-trust and coupling commodities (like bread, and phones) with exclusive services without a service contract at the moment of purchase.

Which should be illegal (as we democratically decided to have these laws), having no choice in services is not a feature it's an additional price to pay for the product and customers legally didn't agree to that simply by buying a commodity phone (no contract, no consideration whatsoever for this additional price).

> People should just leave if they don’t like the rules. This is correct, Apple should just get out if they don't like the anti-trust rules of our market.

PHPixie thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/php-fig/cjLBp2weYaA

If companies choose to comply with EU law because they want to do business in the EU that's up to them, they don't have to.

Bad: 0.0005 - Good: 0.9995

It's not arbitrary banning from foreign countries on your client's request if there's actually good reasons to take precautions with these nation-states.

And why not? They're a private company they can choose to employ whomever they want as long as they're compliant to local labour laws. There's no "due proccess" in business.

"Finally - it actually looks like Gitlab's security practices are truly lacking. That an employee is Chinese/Russian shouldn't be a consideration - the systems should be tight enough to make sure absolutely no-one has access to customer data without consent - and that any actions taken are logged for auditing. Whenever necessary - pass your employees through a background-check. In sensitive (government) scenarios - restrict to employees with government clearance."

Don't improve HR security practices because you're vulnerable in different ways anyways?

If you as a company simply don't trust the government your employees work under, you cannot trust them with sensitive information, even if they're outstanding trustworthy people.

Without knowing the methodology this statistic isn't really that useful at all.

EN: DeGiro is a dutch broker which is known for it's low costs, however they can short your stocks unless you're willing to pay an additional fee and they sometimes trade stocks on their own "internal market".