If you read the Wikipedia article on the matter though, the long form given here does not seem to be “the original” by any means.

The “short” proverb is many hundred years old. The “long form” first appeared in the 1990s by a specific author.

It’s more an interpretation to negate an old proverb that the author disagreed with than anything.

Nice description. I enjoyed your argument. Just a small correction from my side, neutrinos aren’t massless. They are very, very low mass though, and so naturally move very close to c.

What you are referring to is absolute poverty. However, even if you can cover the very basics, such as rent, food and healthcare, if you have a lot less than most people that is known as relative poverty. Both are important to combat. I am assuming the definition is made as it is because it is quite simple to compute. Finding a good measure for cost of living is a lot more complex and easy to get stuck arguing what is an acceptable standard of living.

I don’t understand why you claim it would be impossible to reach the definition?

A simple constructed example: if the median income is € 20 by hour. A minimum wage of, say, € 15 would be considered safe. Why is that impossible?

A quick Google search shows me Destatis.de claims the median wage in April 2023 was € 24.59. Then 60% of that would be € 14.75. I would assume the median has increased a bit from 2023, and will increase further towards 2027, but I would from these numbers expect € 16 to for example be high enough to be considered safe from poverty, which isn’t that much higher than the proposed number.

The neat thing about using the median instead of the mean is that increasing the minimum wage only affects those earning the least, and thus doesn’t directly affect the median.

I wish we had 3 phase, but the fact is many European homes only have 1 phase. The distribution is 3-phase, but the residential wiring is only set up to use only 1 phase and upgrading the whole electrical system of our home is simply too expensive. This is in Norway, but it’s similar in many countries.

We recently installed a charger, and the electrician put in a 32A breaker. He told us you should never run continuous draw above 80% of the breaker, which gives us 25A * 230V = 5.75 kW as our max charging speed. Not fantastic by any means, but means we can go from 10 to 80% overnight, which is good enough for us. If we need a fast charge, the local gas station has a 250 kW charger anyways, so we could top of if need be - though we have never needed that so far.

What are you talking about? The BBC article references the research paper directly?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4503401/

Yeah, it’s not an issue for most people. I think the system works well. And the annual taxes are very simple to fill out. The report comes filled out for you, and you just need to make adjustments or approve it as is. Never had any issues with tracking or reporting my taxes.

I really enjoy living in Norway. I feel the culture and the way of life suits my preferences very well. There are of course always things one hope improves over time and things that could be better. But overall, life is good here I feel.

Employers deduct a part of your salary as taxes on every paycheck (usually monthly). But how much they deduct is based on your tax profile which is created by the tax authorities. It’s typically based on expected yearly income. However, you are allowed (and encouraged) to update this number yourself.

So say you swap to a lower paid job, or work less overtime than you planned, you can change your expected annual income to reflect this in taxes paid. If you don’t however, then you effectively pay too much taxes as your employer is basing the taxes on too high numbers.

Another reason is that you may have tax deductions that only gets computed into the total when you fill out your full tax report. So if you didn’t bake those into your tax profile at the start of the year, you might get returns on your taxes (with interest).

You can also downplay how much taxes to pay through salaries, in which case you will owe back taxes when the full tax report is made.

In the Norwegian tax system, if you pay too much taxes trough the year from your paycheck, you get interest on the amount you paid to much. Likewise, if you pay too little taxes throughout the year, you will have to pay interest on the amount you have yet to pay. So the system is supposed to be balanced in that regard. The interest is on the level of a savings account (3.51% annual atm), so you could make an argument that saving that in a index stock or good bond is a better ROI though, so still recommended to try to not pay too much during the year.

The goal of pasteurization is to kill of harmful pathogens. If you do this early and package and store the milk in the right conditions it can be stable and safe for a long time.

If you don’t pasteurize the milk and leave it for a long time, pathogens in the milk, such as bacteria, can potentially produce toxins. Boiling it at that point might not help, no, as it kills the bacteria, but can leave behind the toxins.

So pasteurization is very effective if done early, but you can’t do whatever you want to the milk and then pasteurize it right before using it and everything is good.

If all things are equal except for mass. Then the object of higher mass will fall faster.

Hi. Physicist here. You are absolutely wrong. The mass of an object does not affect the magnitude of force of air resistance which acts upon a falling object. But the acceleration that object will have is given by Newton’s second law as Force divided by mass. So a heavy and a light ball with the same shape will experience the same air resistance, but the heavy ball will “care less” and thus fall faster.