Last Monday I published another story. It's about a boy, Ravi, who's the only one in his family without a smartphone while his sister and his parents are positively unseparable from theirs, fully ignorning him, except I've replaced smartphones with the Plato's cave. Building on the idea of an earlier post in this blog, the idea is that while Ravi, like any 2025 kid without a smartohone, thinks he is missing out, it is really the smartphone users who are.
There is a lot to do these days about smartphones. While I see eight years olds in the streets with their eyes glued to comparatively huge glass slaps between their tiny fingers, not seldomly while riding fatbikes, more and more experts write how these evil devices rewire children's brains precisely at emotionally and intellectially their most vulnerable age. Thousands of Dutch parents have pledged not to give their kids one before they reach the age of fourteen. Why fourteen? I haven't the foggiest.
All this is riding the bandwagon of Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation (Allen Lane (2024). “Haidt asserts that the great rewiring of children’s brains has taken place by “designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears”. And that “by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”. Such serious claims require serious evidence,” states Candice L. Odgers in her review The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?.
Odgers states that this evidence is nowhere to be found: “(...) findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use.” Worse, social media and smartphones in general form an easy target when looking to blame something for the current mental-health crisis in young people, and will distract from looking for the real causes.
The actual science in this context is, as always, a lot more complex an nuanced than something that can be solved easily by witholding smartphones or forbidding the use of social media when not. But this is not what my story is about. As a parent of three young children, I see lots of children who look at phones as magical devices that will make their lives complete when they obtain one and parents whose behaviour is the very cause of that idea. That is what this story is about.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, or if you don't, let me know.
I grew up as a Sega enthusiast, with a deep passion for the Sega Genesis. Classics like *Altered Beast* and *Golden Axe* still hold a special place in my heart. Excitingly, a new game titled *ZPF* will be released for the Sega Genesis in 2024, and I had the privilege of reviewing a prototype version.
Upon starting the Genesis, I was greeted with vivid colors and exhilarating music reminiscent of classics like *Thunderblade* and *R*Type*. Since *ZPF* is still in development, some characters and bosses may change, but my various playthroughs showcased a delightful and addictive gameplay experience. I certainly recommend grabbing this game if you’re a fan of the 16-bit era.
The final version promises to feature three playable characters and over six stages, ensuring plenty of excitement for shooter fans. As I write this in early July, *ZPF*’s Kickstarter campaign is an impressive 878% funded, guaranteeing the game’s production.
*ZPF* is being crafted for the classic SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis consoles by the creative mind behind Tänzer.
The game is best described as a traditional horizontal shooter, affectionately known in the community as a horizontal shmup (or STG).
A thing that bugs me about a lot of watercolour video tutorials is they only show the part where the brush hits the paper. That leaves more than half of the process out and too many unanswered questions, like what colours did they use, and how much water? What does the palette look like? What kind of brush, and how much did they dunk it in their mixture?
Lately I have been practicing painting clouds, and I'm gratified by the results so far. I thought I would make a record of how I did them. Despite beginning by complaining about videos, I'm going to forget that altogether and describe it in the form of a (this) blog. I'll try to describe the whole process, including the obvious bits.
The paint and water mixture
I have been using Winsor and Newton Cotman paints, replacing them with higher-quality brands when I run out of a colour. The cloud practice paintings were done with Cotman Intense Blue (Phthalo Blue), a colour I have up until now been entirely ignoring in favour of pretty much every other blue in the paint set.
But now I am changed—I think Intense Blue looks great and really pops against the paper white. I also used a tiny bit of Payne's Grey, a shade that I use all the time. Both are transparent colours, and one day I will understand the significance of that fact.
I mixed a generous amount of the blue, and tried not to be shy about how much paint I used. I didn't want it to be pale and insipid. I also definitely don't want to run out while painting, so I made a generous puddle.
I also made a weak mix of Payne's Grey. Not too much of this is needed.
The brush
I used one of my larger brushes, a size 10 Micador round taklon brush. Sizes are not standard, but a Micador 10 is about the same as a Winsor and Newton Sceptre Gold II 10, though the Micador has more of a point at the tip.
I probably also used some smaller brushes after slopping around the blue. I have a size 6 Micador round sable brush (my favourite) and a little Sceptre Gold II rigger whose size is no longer legible.
The water
I needed two jars of water. One was used to rinse the paint off the brush, and the other kept clean. I always have two jars of water when I paint, but I needed to be more fastidious than usual in this case. Don't put the brush in the clean water unless it's been rinsed well in the dirty jar.
Hitting the page
I aimed to make the sky very uniform with no visible brushstrokes. For this, I loaded up the brush with plenty of the blue mixture, as much as it would carry, to make sure it stayed wet while I was working. That way I could expand the area of blue without leaving any edges in it. It's important to keep working and not let the edges of painted area dry until they are told to.
For the clouds, I created ragged edges of blue against the paper white. For this I was a bit mean to my brush, using the butt and scraping about with the tip so my edges were as messy as possible. I also took care to brush out any bubbles that formed on the page from my enthusiastically ragged brushing. For edges that looked too neat, I worked them again until I got a ragged, messy edge.
You can see in the image, the bottom left iteration, I completely failed to paint the blue nicely. I think I left some bubbles behind which popped and left a cauliflower, or I did something else silly that dropped too much water in and pushed the blue away. Mistakes are good as long as you know what went wrong.
I aimed to leave the tops of the clouds sharp against the white, but blend the bottoms of the clouds into the white of the paper. This is where the clean water comes in. Wet the white area of the cloud—not much water, or it will push the blue in unwanted directions—and then move the brush towards the blue underneath the cloud to soften its edge and blend it. The blue should fade to white before it runs out of wet white, so that it doesn't create a new edge.
For most of the iterations above I didn't really succeed in blending the blue upwards into the cloud beautifully. Except for the top right one, which is pretty good in that regard. I put too much clean water on the page and it pushed the paint down away from the cloud. But clouds are unpredictable things so I can probably claim I meant to do that, right?
While the bottom of the cloud was still a bit wet, I added a teensy bit of the Payne's Grey mix to give a bit of shade and volume. The sun is probably above the clouds relative to the viewer after all, so the bottom of the cloud should be darker. Again, it's important that the grey is wet enough to blend but not so wet it travels. It would be fun to add other colours here and give the clouds some golden hour qualities or the impression of holding rain, things I will try another time.
Stop and look
The final thing is to stop! It's best to practice clouds one iteration at a time, taking a few moments to look at the dried painting, think about what did and didn't go well with the process, and improving on the next attempt.
My final note to myself is to start really looking at clouds and skies more. What shape are the clouds? What unexpected colours appear? How does the sky change between the horizon and up? What does it mean?
If you didn't like 24H2, you're probably not going to like 25H2
Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 25H2 is almost here. However, the upgrade will be little more than an exercise in feature enablement since Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 share the same source code.…
Monday marked five years since Hong Kong's Security Law came into effect, chilling pro-democracy efforts. We talk to a former protester and our correspondent there about the mood on the ground.
#hongkong #china #security #politics
More stories on Asia: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/58/
Server shipments surge 70% in 2025, still shy of datacenter dominance goal
Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year.…
Too much vRAM and too many Instinct accelerators per server is causing system hibernation to fail on some high-end AMD AI Linux-powered servers. Having eight accelerators each with 192GB of device memory can in turn cause system hibernation to run into problems if the Linux server has only 2TB of system RAM... But a new patch series was posted today in working to address this problem with the Linux kernel for high-end systems failing to hibernate. A similar issue is that when thawing the system the process can take nearly one hour due to the amount of memory...
You hear a lot about Sinclair and Amstrad and Acorn computers. But when it comes to British brands, it seems like we don’t hear a lot about Apricot. But thanks to a television program that aired in early 1990, we
Fierce battles between Japan and the US raged across the Pacific in WWII. 80 years on, people are still menaced by tons of unexploded ordnances.
#japan #wwii #usa #security
More stories on Japan: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/2/
You may have read about my new-found fondness for Plasma’s Clock app. Following the development of a “Picture in Picture” protocol for Wayland, I remembered how I once saw someone put up a little timer window during a lunch break while screen-sharing a presentation. I figured, I wanted that, too!
KClock showing a timer popped out in a PIP window
A key difference between X11 and Wayland is that Wayland is descriptive, not prescriptive. For example, a drop down menu under X11 is a window with no border that is placed in a very specific location determined by the application. It then grabs all the input so that up and down arrows work and clicking outside will dismiss it. That also means that global shortcuts won’t work while the menu is open. You can’t take a screenshot of it, you can’t even lock your screen. In 2025, this is embarrassing.
Under Wayland on the other hand, such a menu is an XDG Popup. The application tells the compositor what button it came from and what to do when it can’t fit (flip to the other side, scroll, etc). The compositor then gets to decide where to put the menu (not crossing display boundaries, for example) and to make sure it goes away when you click elsewhere or switch to a different application.
This also means that an application is a lot more restricted when it comes to – let’s say – creative window behavior. Take the picture-in-picture feature for example: an application can’t just decide to keep its window on top of everyone else. Normally, that’s a good thing! But it likewise prevents implementing a little overlay video player in your Web browser under Wayland. Enter xx-pip-v1.
Measure lap time while watching a fantastic talk
It’s a protocol very similar to XDG Shell but instead of managing desktop-y windows and popups, it creates floating picture-in-picture windows. KWin recently gained support for it. As indicated by the “xx” prefix it’s an experimental protocol and therefore guarded by a KWIN_WAYLAND_SUPPORT_XX_PIP_V1 environment variable. As with most protocols, having a test case is nice but a proper application making use of it will uncover gaps and oversights in the protocol much better. Therefore, I took the opportunity to allow KClock to pop out timers and the stopwatch into a little PIP window.
While it can and does take time to sketch a Wayland protocol to realze a new use case, the end result will be generally better than anything we had before. Rather than an application deciding how PIP should behave, the compositor is in full control and subsequently you, the user. We could offer an option for which corner the window should be placed by default, or to not show it at all, and do it consistently for all applications.
Many thanks to Vlad Zahorodnii for his work on the xx-pip-v1 protocol and whose demo application the KClock implementation is based on and to David Edmundson for implementing window move/resize in the PIP window.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here.
Today the amount information that we get using various information streams is at massive overload. Thus one needs to focus only on what is important without the need to grep(1) the Internet everyday. Hence the idea of providing such information ‘bulk’ as I already do that grep(1).
The Usual Suspects section at the end is permanent and have links to other sites with interesting UNIX/BSD/Linux news.
Past releases are available at the dedicated NEWS page.
this website's PostgreSQL installation is now on version 17 ( insert champagne emoji here )
the search function now works properly with non-ASCII characters ( there was an embarrassing oversight which went unnoticed until someone kindly pointed it out )
PostgreSQL 18 changes this week
This week there have been a couple of renamings:
psql 's meta-command \close was renamed \close_prepared
pg_createsubscriber 's option --remove was renamed to --clean
Both of these items were added during the PostgreSQL 18 development cycle so do not have any implications for backwards compatibility.
There have also been some fixes related to:
comments on NOT NULL constraints
virtual/generated columns
Released three months ago was the first AerynOS ISO release for that Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty and from there plans were laid to provide "accelerated delivery of milestone ISOs." But now Q2 is ending without any further announcements from this interesting Linux distribution formerly known as SerpentOS...
Help publish the book about Houten!
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Suppor this channel on Patreon:
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---
Relevant videos
Car-free Streets are Amazing (and we need more of them) - Autoluw
https://nebula.tv/videos/not-just-bikes-car-free-streets-are-amazing-and-we-need-more-of-them
https://youtu.be/GlXNVnftaNs
How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed
https://youtu.be/j2dHFC31VtQ
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-how-american-fire-departments-are-getting-people-killed
Business Parks Suck (but they don’t have to)
https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-business-parks-suck-but-they-dont-have-to
---
References & Further Reading
Waarom 'de hele wereld' komt fietsen in Houten
https://www.rtvutrecht.nl/nieuws/3875045/waarom-de-hele-wereld-komt-fietsen-in-houten
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkyeMHaOta8
Nearly Car-Free Areas (A View from the Cycle Path)
https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2013/02/nearly-car-free-areas.html
Robert (82) ‘bedacht’ het dorp Houten: ‘Trots is niet het goede woord. Ik ben vooral blij’
https://www.ad.nl/utrecht/robert-82-bedacht-het-dorp-houten-trots-is-niet-het-goede-woord-ik-ben-vooral-blij~ac3b3b6f/
Houten is relatief verkeersveilig, maar elk ongeval is er één te veel
https://www.houtensnieuws.nl/lokaal/verkeer-en-vervoer/954333/houten-is-relatief-verkeersveilig-maar-elk-ongeval-is-er-een-#closemodal
Historical photos of Houten from Het Utrechts Archive
Public domain or CC/BY:
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/840CA54571E38187E0534701000AAB1C
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/C03381F519EA566B974FBBD91028DA7F
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/79666BC6E00A5D4E980430B7E869D3A8
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/119B82E056E55553A984C48CB009B65E
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/4F97C35AC1A85804B7ED8166A8C7B762
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/40858864BBFD51BEA3DB81B3A0FB2FA5
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/52915A26122A5A4F961CE7B20DA451E2
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/8EC693301C655AD09E952483BC9A6E1A
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/ECA62A8B3D0852B6A27EB542EA13B121
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/E3982DB6DA51565BBFD4D50DB8B41273
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/37092E42A9815783A98D94CC022CEA8B
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/2EA67B58B88D579C84E101C5B2DCF6A4
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/D9DFFBE4936FA018E0538F04000AB4D4
https://hetutrechtsarchief.nl/beeld/03742848034755EEA1245BDFC7DE4665
Houten Tram
Door Mauritsvink - Eigen werk, Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5493396
Door T Houdijk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1810526
Door Steinbach (overleg · bijdragen) - zelf gefotografeerd, Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=820183
Door T Houdijk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1810530
The vast majority of the content in this video was filmed on location by Not Just Bikes, with some images licensed from Getty Images and other sources.
No generative AI or AI voices were used in the making of this video
---
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:41 Houten history & context
2:57 Autoluw
4:30 Getting there from Amsterdam
5:13 The train station
5:52 Houten centrum
6:56 Linear parks
7:29 Houses bordering the bicycle paths
8:34 Different housing types
9:38 Quiet suburban residential streets
10:58 Modal filters
11:50 Fast and efficient cycling
13:15 Independence for children
13:55 Commercial spaces
15:21 Interesting architecture
16:09 The old villiage
16:27 The book about Houten
17:01 Is Houten ... perfect?
18:04 Public transit
19:09 Nitpicking
19:33 Those @#$*ing mopeds
20:34 Returning to Amsterdam
21:00 We need actively restrict cars
22:33 What we should learn from Houten
23:39 The future of Houten
24:17 How to support Not Just Bikes
It looks like Linux 6.17 could end up enabling experimental support for large data folios that could help with bringing some performance improvements under real-world workloads for this copy-on-write file-system...
A proposal raised last week for Fedora 44 was to drop i686 support with ending multi-lib and x86 32-bit packages support. But following a fair amount of opposition to the idea, this matter isn't going to be pursued for next spring's Fedora 44 release...
An expert on Middle East affairs says prospects for negotiations between the US and Iran are not good, and there could be further military confrontation ahead. #iran #usa #israel #analysis #security #middleeast
More stories on Middle East: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/56/
The basic promise of a query optimizer is that it picks the “optimal”
query plan. But there’s a catch - the plan selection relies on cost
estimates, calculated from selectivity estimates and cost of basic
resources (I/O, CPU, …). So the question is, how often do we
actually pick the “fastest” plan? And the truth is we actually
make mistakes quite often.
Consider the following chart, with durations of a simple SELECT query
with a range condition. The condition is varied to match different
fractions of the table, shown on the x-axis (fraction of pages with
matching rows). The plan is forced to use different scan methods using
enable_ options, and the dark points mark runs when the scan method
“won” even without using the enable_ parameters.
It shows that for selectivities ~1-5% (the x-axis is logarithmic), the
planner picks an index scan, but this happens to be a poor choice. It
takes up to ~10 seconds, and a simple “dumb” sequential scan would
complete the query in ~2 seconds.
CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight
The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources.…
Eoplatypleura messelensis is the oldest known true cicada ever identified in Europe. For the first time, a fossilized true cicada has been identified from the Messel Pit deposits. Eoplatypleura messelensis is among the oldest known representatives of modern true cicadas in Eurasia and marks the earliest record of the subfamily Cicadinae worldwide. This discovery, made [...]
Watch the full episode of Where We Call Home on NHK WORLD-JAPAN!
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2087145/?cid=wohk-yt-2506-workpedia145-hp
Learn more about Japan at NHK WORLD-JAPAN!
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/?cid=wohk-yt-2506-workpedia145-hp
Nepalese front desk clerk Nandeshwar Mahato Tharu strives to provide warm hospitality to every guest staying at a Shimane hot-spring inn.
Shipments are to restart after a pause of about 2 years. NHK World's Nakamura Genta in Beijing says economic concerns and upcoming campaigns to promote patriotism drove the decision. #china #japan #trade #analysis
More stories on China:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/tags/30/
Across 540 million years, fossil shell records show marine biomass rising hand-in-hand with biodiversity, dipping only during the planet’s great extinctions. Stanford scientists stitched together 7,700 limestone samples to reveal that more diverse seas recycle nutrients better and build bigger food webs—an ancient trend now threatened by human-driven species loss. Half-Billion-Year Ocean Life Trends In [...]
Deep beneath Ethiopia’s Afar Rift, scientists have detected rhythmic surges of molten mantle rock—geologic heartbeats powerful enough to thin Earth’s crust, pry Africa apart, and seed a future ocean. Chemical “barcodes” in volcanic rocks reveal that these pulses rise in waves, guided by shifting tectonic plates and varying with plate thickness and spreading speed. The [...]
On 11 June, engineers at OHB’s facilities in Germany joined together the two main parts of ESA’s Plato mission.
They used a special crane to lift Plato’s payload module, housing its 26 ultra-sensitive cameras, into the air and carefully line it up over the service module. The supporting service module contains everything else that the spacecraft needs to function, including subsystems for power, propulsion and communication with Earth.
With millimetre-level precision, the engineers gently lowered the payload module into place. Once perfectly positioned, the team tested the electrical connections.
Finally, they securely closed a panel that connects the payload module to the service module both physically and electronically (seen ‘hanging’ horizontally above the service module in this image). This panel, which opens and closes with hinges, also contains the electronics to process data from the cameras.
In the coming weeks, the spacecraft will undergo tests to ensure its cameras and data processing systems still work perfectly.
Then it will be driven from OHB’s cleanrooms to ESA’s technical heart (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. At ESTEC, engineers will complete the spacecraft by fitting it with a combined sunshield and solar panel module.
Following a series of essential tests to confirm that Plato is fit for launch and ready to work in space, it will be shipped to Europe’s launch site in French Guiana.
ESA’s Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) will use 26 cameras to study terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone of Sun-like stars.
Plato's scientific instrumentation, consisting of the cameras and electronic units, is provided through a collaboration between ESA and the Plato Mission Consortium. This Consortium is composed of various European research centres, institutes and industries, led by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The spacecraft is being built and assembled by the industrial Plato Core Team led by OHB together with Thales Alenia Space and Beyond Gravity.
Sensible CEO wouldn’t let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap
Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences.…
At its base, slop is the cause and the symptom of a fundamental alienation in our society. A procedurally-generated ambient track, a second-screen TV show, an AI image, a meme: all place us in a passive relationship with the world, objects acted upon by outside phenomena, rather subjects possessed of inner will. They encourage us to be reactive, self-oriented, incurious, they present us with mechanisms to not think, not engage, not act with regards to ourselves and others. from Slop Demos by Richard Rubsam [Liberties]
Yes. No. Maybe. Look, it’s complicated… When I started freelancing, I asked around to get at least a vague idea of what I was getting myself into. While the possible reasons for doing so became increasingly clear, one important thing remained: nobody gave a satisfying answer when I asked them how much they made compared to when they were working as en employee. Or maybe they didn’t want to. I did what any other numbers obsessed person would do: create a sheet full of formulas to arrive at a prediction. Now that the first accounting year has passed, at least I can thoroughly inspect the end result myself.
I want someone else to make a better informed decision than I did based on this report. Up to a certain point, finances are important: no money equals no bread on the table for the family, yet I feel that a lot of people are reluctant to talk openly about this—including myself. Jamie Tanna’s public salary history page on his blog and Cory Zue’s open solopreneurship reports that include numbers are grand exceptions to the rule, and while I’m not quite ready to do the same, I do want the financial distinction between working as a freelancer and employee to become more obvious.
I work in IT; one of the better paid service industries.
I am not an accountant; oversights or mistakes are bound to creep in.
These numbers are estimations based on my personal experience, not real ones. Please do your own math.
Again, comparing this with results from say the 2024 Stack Overflow Salary Survey is near-meaningless, even if you filter data on the closest match, Germany. A median year salary is a useless number.
Ok then. Let’s get to it. The question I asked myself was quite simple:
How much do I see coming in, on a monthly basis?
That means I am not interested in a brut salary or a mean yearly salary: they are useless, especially in Belgium. How much do I earn is a dubious question: is that brut or net? Is that pure salary or with extra benefits? Are we talking company car as well? My question should encompass them all, not provide a very fragmented answer that still does not give a clear overview.
The Wage
As an employee, this is the most important variable. Unfortunately, as mentioned, if you’re living in Belgium, the more you earn, the more you’ll be taxed, up to a staggering 52.6%! My father was tenured for the national telecom company and during a particular raise his net income was even reduced because the brut wage fell in a higher tax scale. Ouch.
A couple of local job ad sites offer simple brut-to-net calculators such as this one from Jobat that, based on my own experience, provide a surprisingly accurate number. I poured everything into a chart to summarize this:
Brut to Net salary comparison graph (src: jobat.be, 06/2025). Red upper line: brut/net break. Blue line: net values (y-axis) compared to brut wage (x-axis) in EUR.
As you can see in the red upper line depicting the brut/net break, things start falling down rapidly once you reach about the brut wage of €3500/month. Some painful examples in the upper range: €5500 brut = €3248 net; and an increase of a thousand EUR (which you’ll never be able to pull of without quitting your current position) only marginally increases what’s coming in each month: €6500 brut = 3652 net. Again: ouch.
Remember that for a company, you cost 6.5k (plus even more pension taxes paid by the employer), not 3.6k. That’s why the invention of the grey area is there. You’ll rarely hit 6k as a software developer: instead you’ll be paid in extra benefits. Yet that brut number is important for the government to calculate your pension wage.
In a typical IT function, on top of the wage, you’ll get a company car, a daily allowance if you’re going to be outsourced, meal vouchers, various health insurances, a telecom subscription, holiday pay, and an end of year bonus (the “13th month”). The last two ones are extremely heavily taxed portions of your monthly wage.
For brevity, let’s ignore the company cars for now. My last employer, a university, did not hand out one and we now own one privately. You need to take into account that owning a car costs at least €300 a month (fuel, maintenance, taxes) excluding the purchase price.
Suppose you earn €5000 brut. For the two yearly bonuses we’ll assume they’re about €1500 net each, which is on the lower side. So that’s:
Type
Income
Brut wage
€5000
+ Net wage
€3036
+ Meal vouchers
€160
+ Est. telco value
€20
+ Holiday/12
€125
+ End of year/12
€125
= Total
€3466
If you have a company car, add at least €300—but subtract your personal contribution that results in a lower net wage. These calculations are ridiculously complex to get right. At the university, I didn’t have a company telco subscription, meaning I’d have to pay for it myself. For me, those little things are the crucial missing parts of the puzzle. And we’re skipping things like bicycle allowance as well here. Let’s just say you get about €3500.
As a freelancer, you are also an employee: of your own company. That also means a remuneration can be handed out following the same rules as above. However! As you can judge from the graph above, in Belgium, a brut wage is heavily taxed, and there are other ways to get that profit out there. In practice, most freelancers give themselves a relatively low wage to reduce tax pressure, and then add stuff like a expense allowance, a rental agreement for your home office, … Let’s say we want to aim for €2500 net including expenses:
Well that’s a rather disappointing figure. But we’re not there yet. I let my company pay the ISP provider but have to pay a hefty amount of social taxes each quarter because of the way the wage is calculated. I could let the company do that as well and remove it from the equation, but that means less profit, and I’ve been told this is “the better way”. Confused yet? I know I am. I also try to make use of mileage allowances to cover the personal car expenses. In theory, I could also let the company pay my holiday and end of year bonuses, but as mentioned, because of the ridiculous taxes, they’re not worth it like this.
The Profit
What’s left at the end of the year after deducting costs from that sweet sweet turnover is called profit. As an employee, you’re sometimes given a share of the profit depending on how good a position the company is in. In my experience, this never exceeded €1000 a year, but I’ve never worked for highly volatile companies that can suddenly boom. Depending on the sector, you could cautiously add say €85 to that net wage. Similarly, I’ve never worked for a company that handed out shares, so I guess things can get wilder as an employee if you do go looking for them.
However, as a freelancer, this is where most of the juice is coming from. Since you provide services, company expenses are very low compared to for example veterinarians that require specialized equipment. That means you don’t need to build up a reserve that stays in the company in case of bigger upcoming investments: that new MacBook Air is never going to cost +10k. Let’s assume you want to liquidate the entire profit, eaning it will end up in your pocket—after, of course, the needed tax reductions. Isn’t Belgium great?
Suppose your daily rate is €650—a nice rate many of my freelance senior software development acquaintances are at, depending on the client. €700 and up enter the architect/management role. The site Freelancers in Belgium posts the following in a recent article:
In our Freelancing in Belgium survey (yet to be published) respondents typically range from €50-€150 with €70-€99 most common. The average hourly rate for a freelancer in general is €84. Most freelancers indicate a day rate ranging between €400 – €1000. The approximate average day rate is €715.
They rate the IT & Software professional at €96/hr or €722.5/day, so €650 is not unrealistic. Say you manage to work on average full-time for 10 months: 4*5*650*10 = €130.000:
Type
Income
Turnover
€130.000
- Expenses
€25.000
- Remuneration
€32.000
= Taxable profit
€73.000
- Company tax 25%
€18.250
= Taxed profit
€54.750
- Liquidation tax 15%
€8.212
= Liquidated profit
€46.538
A lot of wild guesswork is involved in these numbers: costs change every year and depend on whether you like a shiny leased company car; company tax can be 20% the first three years and stays that way if you increase the remuneration to at least €45.000—thus increasing wage taxes; and liquidation taxes will change to 15% in 2026. Also, while that brut taxable profit of 73k looks very high, private limited companies are obligated to publish their annual accounts, meaning you can look them up. The above example is comparable to what people I know make.
Anyway, what does liquidated profit even mean? It means that that 46k is yours—after five years of waiting, that is, although that’ll very likely change to three years in 2026. That means an extra monthly amount of €3878 on top of that net wage of €2651, now suddenly cashing in €6529 a month! Woah! But wait for it, we’re not just there yet.
Days Off
This probably goes without saying, but the biggest question mark in the above calculation is the turnover: are you sick? Nothing to invoice. Are you taking days off to spend with the family? Nothing to invoice. Are you switching clients and did the rate change? Adjust accordingly. When freelancers say “I do not get paid when I’m on leave” they are wrong. Their monthly remuneration—the wage from above—keeps on going, but the profit keeps on decreasing. Of course, if there’s no reserve, the wage cannot be paid either. It’s a thin line.
Last year, our toddler was often sick, and day care closed regularly for various reasons, so I barely reached a turnover of 120k.
You’d think that employees are in the advantage here, but they can only take 32 days a year off (20 is the legal minimum here + 12 if you’re working eight hours a day; one a month as a compensation), while freelancers can go YOLO and take two months off again and again. Until they’re fired. I feel this is a bit of a myth: if you’re working for a client in a team for a longer period, you still need to get your holidays approved and dance to the same rules. Also, some contracts I signed explicitly noted the maximum amount of days to invoice a year to prevent workaholics from racking in big numbers. I dislike the capitalistic philosophy embedded into those monthly invoices, nudging you to keep going.
Invoicing 10 months means 2 months off or forty days, but that includes sick days, and that includes social leave days when your kid is sick. Perhaps 9 months is more accurate, meaning a turnover of €117.000 or an extra amount of about €3100 instead of about €3800. Just to err on the safe side, let’s just reduce it to 3k.
The Retirement
A very difficult but often neglected part of the wage is what you’ll be getting once you retire—given that by then the government still has a reserve to cash it out. The way the pensions are calculated for self-employed folks is completely different to that of employees. There’s no point in accurately calculating it as the minimum and maximum are close by: €2009 and €2179 (as head of a family and with enough years of experience).
For employees, this is the reason why a high brut wage is important as that’s taken as the base in the equation. The handy tool mypension.be can produce a nice forecast if you want. This one’s limited as well, but to about €6500—three times as much as the freelancer!
What does this mean? Well, that those liquidated profits should also be put aside as part of your retirement plan! Since you’ll be needing at least twice as much as the average employee, let’s cut that 3k in half to €1500 in the pocket for now (in five years) and €1500 to invest for when we’re old and wrinkly.
Did you see what I did there? The employee earning 5k brut has €3466 net, and now the freelancer invoicing €650 suddenly “only” has €4151. I told you, it’s complicated. This again is erring on the safe side; you probably need much less by then: hopefully the kids are able to stand on their own two legs and the mortgage is paid. Also, my company pays for supplementary pension insurances, even though that’s very little.
The following bar chart summarizes all the discussed net wage figures:
Net wage comparison by type employee (blue, two first bars) vs. freelance (red). The blue dotted horizontal line represents the employee + benefits type.
By tracing the horizontal dotted line in blue that represents the employee + benefits net wage, you will notice that after taking all advantages/disadvantages into account, freelancers still do earn more than their employee counterparts—but it’s getting damn close. There’s your answer.
I have the feeling that I still missed a bunch of things. Perhaps the biggest of them all: even though the numbers are very impressive, the instability of them has to be stressed. Freelancers are among the first to be laid off when the tough gets going. Freelancers are among the last to get a raise because re-negotiating an already solid daily rate is extremely difficult. This includes a mere indexation modification that usually comes for free for the employee.
Additionally, remember that those liquidated funds are not available throughout the year, nor at the end of the accounting year. You could opt for yearly dividends instead but they have their own downsides as well.
Oh, and let’s cross those fingers and hope you’ll never get a disability, as freelance health insurance benefits are low even with the optional added insurances that I signed up on.
I told you. It’s complicated….
The VPS server, books, magazines, the occasional dinner, whatever. Things you pay for anyway, with or without independent statute. ↩︎
For this month’s IndieWeb Carnival Nick has picked the topic of do-overs and the more I think about this topic—in the context of going back and doing something differently—the more I can’t find an instance where I’d want to give something a crack a second time. Not because my life’s perfect mind you, that’s far from it. There are many, many things I wish were different but going back and doing something again to get a different outcome doesn’t look appealing to me. Because however imperfect, however messy and unsatisfying, my life is my life.
There are two quotes that come to mind that are somewhat related to this. One is from Jobs' famous 2005 Stanford speech:
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
And the other is from Watts:
Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
Looking backwards, wishing things were different, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Because life’s unfolding right in front of you at this very moment and opportunities to do things differently are waiting ahead.
In the midst of all this glorious sunshine, Drisky and Garron revisited the Gameboy, curating a list of 8 deep-cut classic hidden gems for your enjoyment.
So, relax in the sun, tune in, and experience these fantastic titles.
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Good way to get the best deals in town, just not the freshest deals.
Japanese supermarkets usually have a section filled with bentos and other freshly cooked foods like pizzas, croquettes, and spring rolls. But foods like these are only sellable for a limited time and when that clock starts to run down, the supermarkets often start slashing prices to cut their losses. Some regular shoppers get wise to this schedule and deliberately hang around until the stickers come out before buying something.
But in our increasingly online society, there really ought to be a better way to handle this situation and a service called Tabesuke might just be it. This app lists shops in your area where certain items might be nearing the time they become unsellable but still edible. You can find stuff either by searching or just perusing a map of your surrounding area.
The pins are color-coded and red pins mean those stores have something to unload cheaply before it’s too late.
▼ 80 yen for some anpan? Hell yeah!
You can then click on whatever item you want to put a hold on and set a time when you’ll come to buy it. It’s a win-win for both parties as the customer gets some great deals and shops can reduce wasted inventory. It’s also a great way for small businesses to promote themselves and the whole world benefits too with an overall reduction in food waste.
However, Tabesuke is managed by local governments and only a handful across Japan have signed up for it to date, so it’ll require a little luck for your area to have Tabesuke coverage.
For example, in Osaka where I am, there’s unfortunately no data at all, but one big exception for the time being is the 2025 Osaka-Kansai World Expo. A separate program called Banpaku Tabesuke is being held exclusively in the venue of the Expo where guests can get some really sweet deals on the perishable food merch there.
▼ 30 percent off snake-shaped cakes at the time of this writing
It’s been very successful too, with over 11,000 registered users in the first month and a half, and over 80 percent of the 875 listed products finding homes without having to be discarded. Banpaku Tabesuke will be available for the entire run of the Expo.
Although recent efforts have been effective at reducing food waste in Japan, current estimates are still well over four million tons per year. If Tabesuke could bring that 80-percent magic to the rest of the country, it could lead to a remarkable improvement in Japan’s food self-sufficiency.
By the way, the makers of Tabesuke, G-Place, came up with some other handy apps for daily life in Japan. Gomisuke is a neat browser-based app where you can learn all about your area’s garbage collection rules. It’s supported by 150 local governments and also multilingual. They even designed an evacuation system that lets governments give real-time disaster shelter information such as location and occupancy so people know the best place to go.
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