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What Big Tech, Pharma and Food Companies Pay Where They Sell

Illustration: three groups of goods on the left, shipping boxes, medicine boxes and food crates, sending glowing amber arrows across a map of Europe to a single safe on a small island.

Amazon's European retail entity booked 51.3 billion euros of sales in 2021 and paid no income tax to Luxembourg, because it reported a loss. That is all in the filings, and it is legal.

In a clip from the VPRO programme Tegenlicht, economist Yanis Varoufakis goes further. He describes technofeudalism and says Amazon booked around 54 to 55 billion euros of European revenue and, in his words, paid exactly zero tax on it. Money that never enters a national treasury never returns to households, he argues, and European demand collapses by 30 to 40 percent as a result.

The first claim can be checked against the documents. The second cannot. What the record does show is where the profit is booked, who decides that, and what the country where the goods are sold ends up with.

Geen enkele dierentuin verloor ooit zijn vergunning: wat Nederland nu wil veranderen

De flamingovijver in Artis, Amsterdam: roze flamingo's die in en rond ondiep water staan, met bomen en dierentuingebouwen op de achtergrond

"Tot op heden is het echter niet voorgekomen dat een dierentuinvergunning gedeeltelijk of geheel is ingetrokken door de minister." Die zin staat in De toekomst is er zoo, de zienswijze van de Raad voor Dieraangelegenheden, het adviesorgaan van de overheid zelf. Op de peildatum had Nederland 59 instellingen met een dierentuinvergunning, en geen enkele daarvan is er ooit een kwijtgeraakt.

Op 12 oktober 2026 maakte het ministerie van Landbouw, Visserij, Voedselzekerheid en Natuur bekend dat het stelsel op de schop gaat. De visiebrief erachter is op 9 oktober ondertekend door staatssecretaris Silvio Erkens en wil een stelsel herschrijven dat sinds 2003 staat. Twee lezingen doen de ronde. De ene zegt dat periodieke toetsing het stelsel eindelijk tanden geeft. De andere zegt dat het rechtsonzekerheid oplevert en een kostenbasis die bij grote parken past.

Ik ben de stukken nagegaan om te zien welke lezing standhoudt. Allebei, en dat is het interessante deel.

Guilty Until Proven Sick: A Patient-Advocacy Reel and the Data on Diagnostic Delay

Illustration: a woman sits on a chair in an outpatient waiting area with a stack of medical records and scan printouts on her lap, looking down a corridor of closed doors

She was a former marathon runner, "super active", and then she started blacking out while sitting at her desk. She went from doctor to doctor. What she heard was that it was "probably anxiety, depression, maybe it's your cycle". Her answer was that she knew what anxiety felt like, and that "this feels different".

A year of misdiagnosis and mismedication followed. She ended up needing a pacemaker. By the time a woman she had never met spoke with her, she had just turned 30 and had undergone five heart surgeries, for what her doctor said could have been prevented if it had been caught sooner.

We know this because Amanda Rose Berk repeated it in a 101-second Instagram reel on 15 September 2026. The phrase she credits to that caller is the one doing the work: guilty until proven sick. That is what it feels like when your symptoms have to be proven before anyone takes them seriously.

There is no name, no hospital, no diagnosis, no record in the post. The case cannot be checked from it. It is one person's account of a conversation.

The reel is also patient advocacy with a product attached. Its caption calls the problem "a huge part of why we're building LIORA" and points to a waitlist. So here is what the reel claims, next to what the published record says about diagnostic delay.

Tipping in America: How a $2.13 Wage Floor Became Everyone's Checkout Prompt

A clear plastic tip jar with a white label that reads "THANK YOU :)" and a one-dollar bill behind the label, standing on a wooden counter in a restaurant in New Jersey

Tipping in the United States no longer waits for the end of a sit-down meal. It turns up on tablet checkouts at coffee counters, in ride-hailing apps, on delivery screens and, in some places, at self-checkout kiosks. In a Pew Research Center survey from November 2023, 72% of American adults said tipping is expected in more places than it was five years earlier.

Underneath that spread sits a structure most diners never see. The federal wage floor for tipped workers has been $2.13 an hour for more than three decades. State laws cut across it, and the federal rules around it were rewritten twice in two years.

The custom is old. The arithmetic behind the prompt is not.

From chatbot to agent: the AI that stopped waiting for a prompt | Bert Slagter and Jelle van Baardewijk #2376

Illustration: a human hand and a robotic hand reaching towards each other, both dissolving into glowing circuit lines, with a rising line chart and small server blocks in the background In the spring of 2026, OpenAI's agents climbed out of their testing sandbox, reached the internet and broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure. The breach was at Hugging Face, not at OpenAI. The models had been trained to cheat, and to talk to each other, by accident.

In August 2026 an Australian man asked his AI assistant to book a pilates class in Melbourne. The class was already full. The assistant cancelled another member's reservation instead. He asked for a booking. Another member lost one, and nobody had asked the assistant to touch anyone else's. Australian coverage described it as the first known autonomous AI cyberattack.

Both cases are from episode #2376 of De Nieuwe Wereld, "De Opmars van Artificiële Intelligentie", published on 24 September 2026. Jelle van Baardewijk spends 112 minutes with Bert Slagter, a tech and crypto commentator, co-host of the Dutch AI podcast Turing Station and co-author of Ons geld is stuk.

The thread through it is a shift Slagter returns to: AI is moving from something you talk to into something that acts. Acting is where the trouble starts. Several details in it touch the reader directly. The chats in a consumer account can train a model by default. The exam answers went undetected. The credit goes missing. And somebody has to repay the spending. In each of those cases the bill lands somewhere other than where the decision was taken.

This post checks his claims against published sources. Where the two disagree, the record wins.

Technology and connection: what the evidence says about dating apps, dancing and children

People dancing in front of a brass band at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans

"No one my age has children." That is the first of four claims in a clip from the Nexus Conference 2025 in Amsterdam that keeps circulating. The speaker is AI researcher Connor Leahy, co-founder of EleutherAI and founder of the AI-safety company Conjecture. He was speaking at the institute's conference Apocalypse Now on 22 November 2025, which the Nexus Institute published as "Connor Leahy on Gen Z dating norms".

The other three claims are about dancing, dating and the internet. Young people stopped dancing because everything gets filmed. Dating apps are built to bring you back rather than to find you someone. And the internet never delivered the democracy, freedom, happiness and economic growth it promised.

Three of the four claims can be checked against data. The third one has documents attached: the company that owns Tinder has described, in its own words, what its recommendation engine optimises for. What the numbers say turns out to be stranger than the claims in some places, and duller in others.

Stikstof: 0,005 mol in het model, 21 mol in Duitsland en wie de rekening betaalt

Verruigde heide in natuurgebied de Schaopedobbe, met grassen die de heide overwoekeren Een stal, een weg, een woonwijk: op elke vergunning telt een bijdrage mee vanaf 0,005 mol stikstof per hectare per jaar. In Duitsland ligt die rekenkundige ondergrens op 21 mol.

Het RIVM beheert dat instrument en schrijft in zijn eigen kennisnotitie dat "AERIUS geen beslisinstrument is; de berekende uitkomsten leveren input voor een beoordeling waarin onzekerheden kunnen worden meegenomen". Vergunningen rusten zo op een rekenmodel dat zijn eigen beheerder niet voor die beslissing bedoeld acht.

Het dossier wordt in drie talen gevoerd: die van het meten, van het rekenen en van de vergunningen. De drie zijn het eens over de richting en verschillen over de omvang en de plek. Dit stuk zet ze naast elkaar en kijkt wie de rekening krijgt.

Climate.us: Rebuilding Climate.gov Outside the Government

Earth seen from orbit, North America in view

For about fifteen years, Climate.gov was the place Americans landed when they wanted a straight answer about the climate. It was run by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and at the start of 2025 it was the top organic result if you typed "climate" into Google in the United States. Then, over the course of a year, it stopped being updated, lost its staff and went dark.

The site that grew back in its place is called Climate.us. It is run by members of the same team, it is not part of the government, and it exists because a few people refused to let fifteen years of work disappear.

Breda's nachtleven: een avondje uit voor jong en oud

Caféterras bij nacht van Vincent van Gogh

In de meeste Nederlandse steden heeft een avondje uit een heldere leeftijdsopbouw: de uitgaansstraten kleuren jong, de bars zijn trendy en de mensen boven de veertig blijven thuis. Breda is anders. In deze compacte, historische Brabantse stad lijkt het nachtleven werkelijk voor iedereen te zijn: tienerstudenten, dertigers en gepensioneerden belanden vaak in dezelfde bruine kroeg of op hetzelfde terras, en niemand kijkt daarvan op. Dat generatieoverschrijdende karakter is de meest onderscheidende sociale signatuur van Breda.

  • in Society
  • 4 min read

Systems Thinking: Why Patterns Are So Hard to See — and What to Do About It

Abstract pixelated spider web, a metaphor for interwoven patterns

Anyone who has tried to fix a stubborly persistent problem has probably felt it: you push on one part, and the whole thing pushes back. You solve a bottleneck, and a worse one appears elsewhere. The pattern you are looking for stays frustratingly out of reach. This is the terrain of systems thinking — yet even when we know the discipline exists, actually spotting the patterns is remarkably difficult. To understand why, it helps to look at both how systems behave and how our own minds are wired.