From time to time, important news gets overshadowed by other headlines, even though it could have a profound impact on our (online) world. To most of us, few things are more bothersome than the dreaded cookie banners. On countless websites, you’re confronted with a pesky pop-up urging you to agree to something. You end up consenting without really knowing what it is. If you try to figure out what’s going on, you quickly get lost among the often hundreds of “partners” who want access to your personal data. Even if you do give your consent, it’s questionable whether you truly understand what you’re agreeing to.
Random side note: how is Belgium to live in and what would it look like to live there right now? Asking for a friend.
Edit: thanks for al the information. I’ll move onto learning more about the country and it’s people’s history.
We have better access to healthcare than France, generally good work-life balance, access to education is cheap (1000 eur for one year at a good university ). People are welcoming but also reserved. It’s raining a lot and we spend a lot of time complaining about it.
Hey, that’s our brand!
Sincerely, a dude from Hamburg
I have friends who live there, and they report the same. They visited us for the first time here in London recently, and were quite shocked by the stark differences.
It’s literally between France, Germany and the Netherlands, I mean geographically yes but roughly culturally too. Arguably Brussels is a mix of all that and other cities again match where they are.
So… it’s a Western European country with good quality of life
despitethanks to having one of the very highest taxes rate. You don’t have to be a socialist to be here but if you want to become a rich entrepreneur it’s going to be challenging.Source : immigrated there from France ~10 years ago.
Edit: s/despite/thanks to/
“Despite”? Try, “because”
I think they’re actually right about this one, taxes tend to cover things that give you high standard of living more than quality of life.
Curious what the distinction between “standard of living” and “quality of life” here is… I’m sure there are subtle differences, but surely taxes contribute to both (which themselves are interrelated).
Actually they’re very well defined economic terms. Standard of living measures how well your basic needs as a member of a given society are filled by that sociey. Quality of life measures how nice your shit is.
Pretty simple.
So yes, taxes effect both, but standard of living more directly.
You’re right obviously, you dirty communist! /$
Post updated accordingly.
I think you can reap the benefits from just using a VPN and set the country to Belgium?
Depends on how many sites comply, most will likely block Belgian IP’s due to this.
Huh, according to the logs, the population of Belgium increased by ~10x, and most people seem to be moving to this area with loss lots of data centers. Checks out.
Expensive and gray.
Going down with the rest of Europe economically