This is a sort of administrative post I guess.  First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.  I can’t possibly send email greetings to everyone I know any more, there are just too many of you, so I’ll assume if you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll hear it from me here.

Blogroll

The second thing is you may have noticed my blogroll disappeared again.  If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll notice every once in a while I delete or completely rearrange it.

The problem is basically this.  As a blogger I really put a lot of value in operating independently, speaking my own mind and not having any commercial influences.  The reality is however, as free of commercial influences as I am, I’m hugely dependent on Google and other search engines for a large portion of my readership.  Most people first encounter this blog in search engine results, and sometimes go on to become a regular reader.  The more visible I am in search engine results, the more seriously people take this blog and the more it becomes a familiar name to them.

Search engines like Google count links and value of links when it decides how important a site is.  If Google thinks I’m an important site, then when I link somewhere else it thinks this is unusually important too.  In this way I am able to help other bloggers or websites improve their position in Google, and I see this as an important part of what I do.  We all want to help make one another important.  We all want what we feel is important to be more visible to others.

Unfortunately, all this ‘link love’ comes at a price.  If I put up too many links, especially in my blogroll, search engines notice this and deduct ‘points’ from me.  If you’re a smaller and less known site or if you have too many links yourself especially of a commercial nature, Google probably thinks you’re a low valued site, wonders why I’m linking to you and deducts even more points for my link to you.

Search Engine Optimization

I routinely do what’s called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  I’ve written some posts about this before, and if you search on Google you will find them.  I make this blog more friendly for search engines.

I changed to a new domain name recently, bifurcatedcarrots.eu and at the same time changed the structure of my site a little.  Part of the reason for doing this was SEO.

Anyway, it’s clear the next step in SEO is a blogroll cleanup.

I’ve removed the blogroll completely for now, and in the coming weeks and months I’ll be experimenting with returning some entries.  Unfortunately, the entries most likely to come back are those of well established websites!  It’s not that I’m too special to include links to smaller sites, or I prefer the big ones.  In fact the opposite is true.  I usually think the smaller more personal sites are more interesting to read, and I would prefer to promote them.

I’m sorry if I end up deleting your entry in my blogroll.  I’ll try to make up for it a bit by mentioning more blogs in posts.  To the extent I think I can within the guidelines of SEO, I’ll try to put back some of the entries over time.

As unfriendly and cold as this advice might seem, if you want to make it more likely I will put you in my blogroll, you need to do SEO yourself and get other bloggers to link to you first.  You have to become important, before I can help make you important!  If you have any questions about this, please send an email and I’ll try to offer some more suggestions specific to your situation.

Hopefully you won’t notice any other changes, and everything should work as before.  As far as I’m aware, I haven’t broken any old links and it’s not necessary to update anything on your webpages or bookmarks.  Everything should just work as before, except you’ll see a new domain name in your browser.  We have no plans for deleting the old domain name or old links.

I hope the new domain will be easier to remember when typing the URL by hand, and it will seem more normal and intuitive.

We’ve had the old patnsteph.net domain for 15+ years now, and the Internet has changed a lot in that time.  In the beginning we imagined putting a lot of stuff online, and organizing it into subdirectories under that domain, for example pictures and the like.  We thought we’d be using the domain mostly for ourselves and friends, and we thought a personal blog might be part of that.  Never did we imagine Bifurcated Carrots taking off in the way it did, and building the network of wonderful people you’ve all become!

Anyway, times have changed, and it’s time to move this blog off onto it’s own domain.  If we’ve broken anything, please let us know.  Our email addresses are all unchanged for the time being.

I use several different tools, none of which are very good or give a complete picture, but here is a list of what they are and in general terms what they tell me.

RSS Subscribers

This is the one number I publish on the front page of this blog.  You can find it on the right hand side, down a little ways on the page.  As of the time of writing this post, the number it gives is about 3000.

The ‘secret’ of this number, that many blogs publish, is it can cover any number of days in which the RSS feed was last accessed.  I currently have this set to 6 months, so any unique IP address that accesses the RSS feed in this time was counted.  I reserve the right to change this time by the way.

This number is not really a good indication of the true number of people reading the blog in this way.  Many robots and search engines use the RSS feed as a way of collecting statistics, and so get counted.  Also many services like Google News Reader use the RSS feed, but then in turn have many people reading it who may not be properly counted.

What this number tells you, in a very vague way, is the trend in the number of people reading this blog.  After I make a lot of posts, you’ll probably see this number go up.  In the northern hemisphere winter you’ll probably see the number go down, with the lowest point around the new year.

This tool also gives some other statistics which I don’t publish, like links that people click on in posts and the number of times individual posts are read.  I don’t usually find any of these numbers useful, and the tool doesn’t present them in a very useful way.

Piwik

Unlike the RSS Subscribers tool, this tool shows statistics about people who read the blog in an ordinary web browser.  The statistics it gives are totally different from the RSS statistics, so no useful comparison is really possible.

This tool also gives a lot of information about the visitors themselves, like country, ISP, operating system — even screen shape and resolution.  If visitors come via a search engine, it will show what the person searched on.

The two most interesting conclusions that can be drawn from this tool are first the number of people reading the blog in a normal browser is about 300 per day, and secondly about 2/3 of all of these visitors come via search engines like Google.  The remaining 1/3 come by either following links elsewhere on the Internet, or from the bookmarks/favorites list on their browser.

Many search engine visitors, come for something very specific, for example find an old post on growing tomatoes or fava beans, then go away.  Others can sometimes spend quite a lot of time here and read hundreds of archived posts.

One of the most astonishing things this tool shows are the different countries people who read this blog live in.  The UN recognizes 197 different countries, and in any given month there are usually visitors here from around 100 different countries.  Here’s the list of countries for March 2011, roughly in descending order of the number of visitors.  Remember this is only people who use a browser, and there may be others who use the RSS feed:

United States
United Kingdom
Netherlands
Canada
Australia
Unknown
France
Germany
New Zealand
Italy
Greece
India
Belgium
Turkey
Sweden
Ireland
Spain
Denmark
Romania
South Africa
Finland
Hungary
Switzerland
Slovenia
Mexico
Poland
Norway
Portugal
Korea, Republic of
Russian Federation
Brazil
Singapore
Japan
Trinidad and Tobago
Serbia
Thailand
Bulgaria
Indonesia
Taiwan
Malaysia
Czech Republic
Peru
China
Croatia
Colombia
Lithuania
Israel
Estonia
European Union
Ukraine
Slovakia
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Iceland
Macedonia
Austria
Argentina
Philippines
Guyana
Egypt
Latvia
Iran, Islamic Republic of
United Arab Emirates
Ecuador
Tuvalu
Hong Kong
Cyprus
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
Azerbaijan
Georgia
Fiji
Uruguay
Syrian Arab Republic
Albania
Gibraltar
Madagascar
Luxembourg
Samoa
Chile
Ghana
Vietnam
Guatemala
Mozambique
Moldova
Lebanon
Solomon Islands
Mongolia
Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of
Panama
Bermuda
Sri Lanka

Global Statistics

If any, these are probably the ones you can use to compare my traffic with your own.  The problem with these numbers is they include absolutely everyone and everything.  They include every spammer that tries to leave a comment on the blog, every robot trying to hack the web server, every search engine and so on.  There’s really lots of nonsense out there on the Internet!

Anyway, the current raw figures are roughly as follows:

Distinct hosts served (daily): 1,516   (April 25, 2011)
Distinct hosts served (monthly): 27,955  (March 2011)
Distinct hosts served (yearly): 300,000 (estimated 2010)

Several years ago, before Facebook and when the Internet was otherwise a simpler place and I didn’t have so many readers, I spent quite a bit of time trying to analyse exactly who were real readers and what was everything else.  My conclusion then was that the number of ‘real’ people in these figures, was a little more than half, perhaps 60%.  Using this as a basis, my working estimate of the number of ‘real people’ reading my blog is as follows:

People daily:  +/- 800
People monthly:  +/- 15,000
People annually:  +/- 150,000

If anyone has any opinions about these numbers and conclusions, I’d be interested in hearing.

Some other statistics in case you’re interested.  In the preceding 12 months:

Successful requests: 8,501,683  (hits)
Data transferred: 221.89 gigabytes

See here for more details.

Check out the view from his community garden! It looks out on the San Francisco Mission neighborhood, Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, parts of the Civic Center with a glimpse of the upper parts of the of the Golden Gate Bridge towers.

One of the nice things about his blog is he makes the connection between gardening and food, which of course some other blogs do too, but it’s still nice to see.  He and his partner eat mostly vegetarian, so this is emphasized in the blog too.

I’ve been helping with the planning for this, and will be sharing a table at the seed swap with the Danish Seed Savers.  I would love to meet some of you!  To be clear, the seed swap means FREE SEEDS.  You don’t have to offer anything in return, and there are no per packet costs or entrance fees like some other seed swaps.

More than 50 organizations have registered to attend, from at least Germany, Denmark, France, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland and Poland.

Farmers from India and Turkey will be present to explain the seed saving situation in their countries, and how intellectual property rights legislation interferes with their rights to do this.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter will also attend via video conference.

The truth is I don’t really use either of these!  Not enough time or interest I guess.  This means I don’t have a good way of configuring or testing these buttons, because I don’t really know what they’re supposed to do.

Do they do what you expect when you press them?  Would you like them to work a different way?  Please let me know.

Steph who does use both Twitter and Facebook said especially with Facebook she wouldn’t particularly press any buttons she came across, not knowing for sure what it would do.  She says she would manually add things to her profile page she found interesting.  Do you feel the same way?

What about just the commercial nature of Facebook and Twitter, do you object to me having their buttons on my blog?  Do you feel the buttons clutter the posts too much?  I’m still debating these issues myself.

I like to keep my readers happy, so please let me know what you think!

Landscape is the new square!

I’m not going to give any details until it actually appears, not a big deal really, but I was asked to provide a ‘landscape’ picture of myself for Internet publication.  I’m not really used to landscape pictures.  I guess like everything else wide screen, it’s what’s trendy now.

Since the picture is so wide you can only be in so much of it.  It really puts you under pressure to make the rest of the picture worth looking at!

Anyway, they didn’t tell me it had to be an exclusive picture, and since I don’t often post pictures of myself I thought I would share it with all of you too…

It’s a little difficult to explain this in English when everything happened here in Dutch, and it’s hard to explain all the technicalities on a blog with an unrelated topic and not make it too boring for my regular readers.  If you want me to explain something in Dutch or you want any other specific information, don’t be afraid to contact me via the contact tab on the front page of this blog.

I’m sorry, this is a very long post.  Many of my regular readers will choose not to read it!

I’ve written about Duyts before.  They are a firm of what in English we might call building engineers.  In Dutch this is called a constructeur.  In other words, for my foundation repair, they are the ones who would make the basic design and do the mathematical calculations of the underlying support.  This is an impressively complex task, and while my foundation repair is under way and it could still change, right now these mathematical calculations are about 100 pages long.

In short, I asked for some quotes from different firms, and their quote was the lowest, so I choose them.  This was really a big mistake.  After two years of trying to work with them to make useful drawings and calculations, I finally concluded this was never going to happen.  I refused to pay them, they refused to do any more work, and I engaged another engineering firm which had to start over again from scratch.

Duyts then sued me for payment of the work they didn’t do, and won.  Amazingly the quality of the work was not a part of this legal procedure in the Netherlands, only the fact that I signed a quote and Duyts claimed that they completed the work.  As well as having to pay Duyts, my legal costs were significant, in a large part due to the technical complexities of the situation.  There’s little question Duyts understood this in advance and has certainly gone through this same thing with other clients.  Save yourself the trouble and avoid them!

Amsterdam Building Mafia

Anyone doing any work on their house in Amsterdam will certainly dread getting involved with a contractor here.  They are all a little bit criminal, and in many cases they work together as a cartel.  Firms like Duyts play an important part of this.

It starts with the general terms and conditions that all contractors use.  There are a number of building organizations that do things like lobby the government for laws and policies, and various organizations publish terms and conditions that are used by the different contractors and suppliers that put the consumer at a strong legal disadvantage.  Some consumer organizations also publish terms and conditions that more favor the consumers, but contractors all refuse to use these.

What this means, in effect, is all work orders start with the consumer signing a contact that says they will pay for everything, without limit, regardless of what goes wrong.  These terms and conditions often have clauses that for example require arbitration with very builder friendly organizations, as an alternative to regular lawsuits.  My current contractor mentioned he was expelled from one of these organizations for speaking out against a fellow contractor in an arbitration hearing.

Beyond the terms and conditions, the big way to rip off consumers are with encountering ‘unexpected’ problems.  Basically, you sign a work order describing the work that needs to be done, and there is a clause that says ‘excluding unexpected situations’.  This means, once your house is torn apart, the contractor can find something ‘unexpected’ that requires more work, and charge you whatever they want for it.  If you refuse to pay, then the work doesn’t get done and you are still liable for paying the full costs of the original quote.  By finding lots of ‘unexpected’ problems, they can demand quite large sums of money, and your costs can end up being multiples of what you originally thought they would be.

When there are more than one firm involved, for example an engineering firm like Duyts and a contractor, they can make ‘unexpected’ problems for one another, and push your costs higher and higher.  This is clearly what Duyts does.   When you consider the reason I picked Duyts was because they made the lowest original quote, as most people would probably do, you can see how honest firms get overlooked and firms like Duyts get richer and richer at the expense of their customers.

The obvious solution to all of this, especially in the age of the Internet, would be for people to communicate this kind of thing to others.  In part, it’s just not part of the culture here to do this.  I’m not completely sure why, but I’ll explain it a bit in the next section below.  This is of course the main reason for this post.  I hope others will share this kind of information too.

The Racist Element

Part of how this all works has it’s underlying cause in racism.  Something that’s often hard for people from countries like America to understand, is the sense of being an outsider here.  For a long time people in this part of Europe mated with one another, and the genepool here is really quite small.  To some degree, Dutch people know one another on sight, based on appearance.  The way you speak is also important, as few people learn Dutch as a second language and speak it without an accent, most people find it very difficult to learn Dutch and many just never succeed.

Because it’s possible to so easily tell native Dutch from outsiders, this makes it possible for Dutch people to work together against outsiders if they choose to.  It’s what makes it possible to have political parties that oppose the presence of foreigners.  It’s something that just can’t happen in modern America, because everyone is from somewhere else originally anyway!  Most Dutch people are not racist, but society here often works in a way where they have to play along.  Sometimes Holland is compared with Japan in this way.

Anyway, most Dutch people will emphasize working and associating with other Dutch people.  These are the ones who speak the same language which they are most comfortable with, but also associating a lot with ‘foreigners’ can often draw criticism from others and lead to being excluded from social circles themselves.  In short, associating with foreigners can just cause problems or harassment, and in general it’s better not to.

In this way, most companies consider hiring foreigners a risk.  High-tech firms that need knowledge workers have no choice, but construction firms that depend on unskilled workers will generally only hire Dutch people for all but the worst jobs.

Unofficially, there are businesses allowed to be run by native and non native Dutch people here.  Fast food places tend to be run by foreigners, but more up-scale businesses like art galleries or trendy shops are almost exclusively native Dutch run, simply because many native Dutch will refuse to shop there otherwise.

Government agencies tend to work the same way.  Hiring foreigners for government jobs is a risk.  Dutch voters are in the majority, and they don’t want to upset them.  Cities like Amsterdam, until very recently, were almost exclusively staffed with male native Dutch workers.  A government study commissioned a few years ago, showed a huge discrepancy in salaries and promotions between native Dutch and non-native Dutch in city workers.  You have a situation where native Dutch decide who to hire and promote, and it’s simply a risk in that situation to do anything but favor native Dutch.

Except for the woman who serves coffee, as far as I’m aware, Duyts is staffed and owned exclusively by native Dutch men.  I was at their office once, and spoke with several of them on the phone.  Without any exception, all of the contractors I discussed my foundation repair with and asked for a quote were native Dutch men.

If you’re doing any sort of expensive work, or indeed spending any significant amount of money on something where you think cartels are involved, choosing someone who is not native Dutch, or a company that works with both native and non native Dutch, is a very good way of avoiding cartels!  This is also a way of supporting the part of the Netherlands that’s disadvantaged in terms of employment and business opportunities.  The problem is always finding a company run by a non-native Dutch person, because these tend not to be able to become established and may lack necessary skills and relationships with other companies.

It’s also just a part of the way these native Dutch dominated cartels work, is they are often disproportionate in their efforts to rip-off non Dutch.  This certainly seems to be the case with Duyts!  This is also a good reason for writing this in English, because foreigners need to especially be aware of this kind of problem here.

The Way Duyts Works

When I started this I had no idea why I needed an engineering firm like Duyts, or what they would actually do.  I don’t think anyone really understands this when they get started on a project like this.  What I could see was compared to the total cost of my foundation repair, the quote I received from Duyts was relatively small.  I knew they had to do some design work for the foundation, but that was all.  I was also expecting them to do 3 distinct things; basic foundation design, support structure to be used during the work to support my house, and a ‘stability portal’ (if the city decided I need one).  I think hardly anyone getting started on a repair like this understands what’s going on, and Duyts is very good at using this misunderstanding to their advantage!

After I signed the original quote and gave the drawings of my house they needed to use as a basis for the foundation repair, they gave me back a draft foundation design.  They also requested a quote for something called a sondering from a company called Fugro, which Fugro sent me.  The sondering is a ground stability analysis, used to determine the depth and diameter of the piles used, and is necessary in the general design of the foundation.  This was a bit of a rip-off already, because the quote from Fugro was unnecessarily high, but I felt I needed to accept it because they were the company Duyts choose.  In fact a sondering can come from any company you want, and if you are in this same situation you should ask for more quotes from other companies.

The draft foundation design had the notation on it that it was just a draft, and would probably change depending on the results of the sondering.  I was advised to arrange for the sondering to be done, and also told I could use the draft foundation design to ask for quotes from contractors.  I got started on all these things including asking a number of contractors for quotes.

The Sondering

I contacted Fugro for an appointment for the sondering, and a guy came to my house to do it.  When he got there, he had this long list of reasons why it couldn’t be done.  They were mostly very extreme statements like:

You know your piles need to be about 21 meters deep, and I need to send a probe into the ground to check that!  That’s very deep!  This isn’t easy to do!  The equipment I need to use is very heavy!  I need to attach it to something very solid, like your floor, but I’m not sure that’s heavy enough! I’m not sure your house is solid enough!  It might not be possible, or it might all go wrong!  I don’t want to damage your house!

I have to put a hole in your floor you know!  It might go wrong and I might break your floor!  How is it going to be to live in your house with a hole in the floor?  Maybe you should wait and do it closer to the time of the foundation repair.

Then lots of reasons why it might not be necessary:

You know, other sonderings have also been done in the neighborhood.  If they are close enough, maybe you can use one of those and don’t have to do it yourself.  You neighbor is also repairing his foundation, maybe you can get together with him and only do one.  It might not be necessary, who don’t you check with Duyts and see if they really need one.

In the end, he didn’t do the sondering, and it wasn’t clear if it was necessary.  I followed it up with Duyts who explained they weren’t completely sure if it was necessary, and yes the equipment needed to to it was heavy.  Yes, they had the results of a sondering one of my neighbors did, because this is a matter of public record, and my sondering probably wouldn’t be much different.  They said after the foundation work had started it wouldn’t be any problem to do the sondering and I could easily wait until then, if I would only sign this piece of paper promising to pay all the costs of changing the drawings and calculations if necessary…

This went on for months and months.  My position was there were two possibilities, either the sondering was necessary or it wasn’t.  If it was necessary, then it must be done, and in this case there was no reason to pay the extra costs of redoing the drawing and calculations and it should be done as soon as possible.  If it wasn’t necessary, then it wasn’t necessary.  If it wasn’t possible, then it wasn’t possible.  No one would give me a straight answer if it was necessary or possible.

What I found out much later was it’s no problem to do a sondering.  It takes a couple of hours.  The machine is very lightweight, and can be carried easily by one person.  It has telescoping poles that go between the ceiling and floor.  Yes, the probe has to go down 21 meters deep, but it is only a few millimeters in diameter, so it’s no problem.  Yes a hole has to be made in my floor, but it’s only a few centimeters in diameter, and can be easily covered or patched when they are done.

It’s also a requirement of the city that every foundation repair needs it’s own sondering, and while special arrangements might have been possible to do a sondering together with my neighbor who was also do his foundation at the same time, my neighbor didn’t agree to this.

Basically Duyts was lying, and all this nonsense that went on for months was just Duyts trying to get me to sign an agreement to pay for additional costs, without limitation.  So much for choosing the lowest original quote!  Fortunately I didn’t sign this.

Finalizing the Drawings

Finally the sondering was discussed over and over again, I refused to accept the extra costs of changing the drawings and was determined to see the results of the original quote I had signed before I paid for any extra work.

I asked Duyts to submit a ‘final drawing’ to the city for approval, together with the support construction needed during the work and the ‘stability portal’ the city said I needed.  Duyts made clear the sondering must be done eventually, so I asked they wait until the sondering was done before finalizing the drawings, and I would get on the phone with Fugro and make a hundred appointments with them if it was necessary, to finally get them to do the sondering.

I had also at this point received a number of quotes from contractors, been through months of negotiations with them, and told all but one of them I was sorry but I wasn’t interested in them.  The one I had selected to do the work, I told them in principle they were chosen, but since the drawings might change in the next few days, I wanted a final quote first based on the latest drawings.

By the way, what I discovered later is there is an agreement between contractors that do this kind of work to make quotes based on the number of square meters.  In the way they can all makes quotes that are about the same, and don’t really need to compete against one another.

Duyts didn’t wait for the sondering, and submitted the drawings to the city anyway for approval.  They were submitted with the notation Pending, with an explanation the sondering hadn’t been done yet and the design might change.  The drawing were totally changed, from 19 piles down to 10 and a number of other major structural changes.  I also had a number of outright complaints with these drawings, as they had apparently made some mistakes and done a number of things without my approval.

This left me in an enormously bad situation with the contractors I had asked for quotes from.  All the quotes I received were obsolete at this point, and I had told most of them I wasn’t going to do business with them anymore.  Once you tell a contractor no, it’s pretty hard to go back to them and say you’ve reconsidered and would they make another quote for you of a totally different design.

I then got a letter from the city saying my drawings were approved.  Based on this approval, Duyts demanded payment.

What ensued after this was months more spent on getting new quotes from new contractors, discussions with Duyts on fixing the drawings, writing letters, finally arranging the sondering.

What I Uncovered Later

Like I mentioned before, I finally walked away from Duyts.  We were simply at a stalemate where I had refused to pay them and they refused to continue with the work.  I had to start all over with a different engineering firm, who explained some very important things about the drawings from Duyts.

First of all, the approval from the city was based solely on the fact the drawings had the notation ‘Pending’.  With this notation, the city of Amsterdam will approve anything.  In fact the drawings were obviously wrong and could never be used to build a foundation!

The reason Duyts changed the drawings from the draft version was intentionally to put me in the bad situation I had asking contractors for quotes.   Duyts works with contractors to create ‘unexpected’ problems, so the contractors make money by demanding extra payment for these changes, and Duyts makes money by redoing the drawings.  The different companies just bounce their work back and forth, finding more problems and demanding more payments.  In fact, for Dutys to redo the drawings is not a lot of work, because they are already in the computer, but Duyts asks almost the full or maybe half the price of making new drawings, over and over again.

The foundation design drawing I had was visibly wrong.  Most importantly, Duyts left out a row of piles.  This would have been very visible to any contractor who had looked at the drawings and given me a quote, because there is a maximum distance possible between piles, and this missing row left some piles too far apart.  All experienced contractors would have seen this, and not a single one I asked for a quote said anything about this!

Duyts also made drawings of the support structure to be used during the work to support my house, and the ‘stability portal’ the city said I needed.

The support structure was also impossible.  It had heavy horizontal steel bars, 150 cm off the floor (about chest height), 50cm apart.  It simply would not have been possible for workers to work in the house with such a structure in place, the ergonomics of carrying heavy machinery would have been impossible.  It also would have been unnecessarily expensive.

The stability portal was also unworkable.  It was placed in the front of my house, installed from the outside.  It would have been visible from the street on the front of my 350 year old house, and required major redoing of the old brick work on the front.  Duyts picked what was probably the worst possible place, in the expectation it would need to be redone later.

However much money I lost from being sued by Duyts, I saved it by not having to pay for the drawings to be redone over and over.

Being Lied To

Do you notice how this has changed?  Before we were told CFLs were 80% more efficient than ordinary incandescent bulbs.  In my earlier post I explained how, even based solely on electricity consumption, this figure was an outright lie.  By the time you took into account things like manufacturing and transportation costs, as unlike standard bulbs CFLs are pretty much only made in China, and disposal costs because these bulbs need special handling and transportation due to the toxic materials they contain, it’s unlikely there was any energy savings at all with these bulbs.

Not to mention being told by the manufacturers that it was safe to have mercury in our homes!  Can you imagine that, someone else telling us this?  Who wants toxic heavy metals in their home in any amount?  And for what reason exactly?

Can you believe this, they almost got away with putting toxic materials in nearly every home worldwide?  Are people gullible or what?!  But this is okay, isn’t it — now we know CFLs are a piece of crap, we can throw them all away and buy the next round of consumer products.

Do you notice they’ve stopped with all the propaganda?  At least in the shops here in Amsterdam, they’ve quietly moved the bulbs made from toxic materials to the side in favor of other technologies.  They’ve also stopped telling us in such a deceitful way the newer bulbs are so extremely efficient like they used to.

Now it’s more like, here, buy this bulb because it’s the law.

They’ve also quietly stopped telling us the newer bulbs last longer.  What they’re now doing is making standard light bulbs that burn out much faster than they did a few years ago.  We just discarded a bulb purchased 15 years ago, and have been using daily in a floor lamp for about the last 5 years.  How long has it been since we could buy a standard light bulb that lasted 5 years?  There’s no reason standard incandescent bulbs can’t be made for a longer life, in fact if you search the Internet with Google you will see a number of places selling these bulbs in countries like China where they’re still legal.

To be very clear on this, there is absolutely no evidence beyond wild claims from from manufacturers that expensive bulbs pay themselves back in energy savings.  Remember when cigarette companies used to claim their products were safe and not addicting?  As long as no one can come up with absolute proof to the contrary, they can claim whatever they want.

The Demise of the 15w Bulb

Supposedly they started with the phasing out of 100w and 75w bulbs, as well as all frosted bulbs.  They also assured us stores would continue to be able to stock older bulbs, and they would continue to be available for a while.

Boy, I haven’t seen any stores stocking older bulbs, have you?  If you ran a store, would you want to keep low value stock like that laying around?

It’s this frosted bulb bit that’s the hidden detail.  This seems to have a number of unexpected consequences.  The first is 15w bulbs have totally disappeared from the stores, apparently because they can’t be made unfrosted.

Well we can all understand, at least from an emotional point of view, why they would ban 100w and 75w bulbs, right?  Because they use so much electricity?  Why do they need to ban the one incandescent bulb logical for someone who needs a small energy efficient light for a small space?  After all, for someone who does want to lower their electric bill, and wants to replace a higher wattage bulb with a more efficient cheap one, a 15w bulb would be the logical way to do it.  Is this too much competition for other supposedly energy saving light bulbs?

The Big Consumer Ripoff

Ten years ago light bulbs could be had for 10 or 20 cents, purchased in a package of 20 or so bulbs from a discount retailer.

Especially as the price of oil is going up, the true manufacturing and transportation costs of these new bulbs is really showing itself!  These days it’s hard to find a light bulb for less than about €1 (around US$1.35), about a 500% mark-up from a few years ago.  These prices are only going to go up if the manufacturers of the newer technologies are given a monopoly on the market.

It’s not acceptable to just lower the price a bit now, and take a loss, maybe put them on sale.  Maybe a government subsidy here and there to distribute free or discounted bulbs.  As consumers we have the right to access to cheaper technologies, as protection against future prices rises or market manipulations.  If the new lighting technologies are so great, let them stand the test of time!

It’s not just incandescent bulbs that are becoming unavailable, it’s fixtures and devices like timers, switches and motion detectors.  These are now becoming packaged with newer bulbs and fittings, forcing you to use a particular brand or type of bulb.

The problem is I use a program called Akismet to delete spam comments, and it sometimes makes a mistake.  If you tell me your comment didn’t show up, I can hunt it down and bring it back.  If I didn’t use Akismet, I would get around 1600 spam comments a month!  So I have to use it, and I have to accept sometimes it makes mistakes.  Every real comment here is important however, so I don’t want to lose any.

Akismet learns from mistakes, so if I find a comment it deleted by mistake, it’s less likely to happen again.  In this way, if you tell me about a lost comment, you are doing me a favor as well as others who leave comments on Akismet blogs.  Your future comments will also be less likely to get lost on other blogs in this way as well.

General Comment Policies

Since I’ve been around 5 years now, I have a pretty set policy on comments that probably isn’t very different from most other blogs.  For the sake of clarity, I’ll just explain it a bit here.

Anonymous comments are welcome.  The name, email address and URL fields are all optional.  It’s always nice however if you choose some name, even if it’s not your real one.

In general everything goes except spam.   You do however have to address the topic at hand.

While you can say anything you want, you can’t be intentionally disruptive, especially in a repetitive way.  In particular, if you have a very strong disagreement with me, this isn’t the place to get into a long discussion about it.  It’s better if you find some place else on the Internet to talk about it and leave a link from here.  While your opinions are welcome, most people who read this blog are in general agreement with me on most things, and they would find a very long and rambling statement opposing me disruptive.  This happened once for example when I posted about the relationship between eating meat and climate change, and someone wanted to spend a lot of time here talking about the virtues of an all-meat diet.  I generally won’t delete comments like this, but will ask you to move on.

This isn’t the right place to talk about very divisive and emotional issues like guns, abortion or religion.

Both myself and others have the right to leave their opinion here.  Requests to remove what I’ve written or comments from others will not be honored, and you won’t make any friends here this way either.

Within reason swearing is okay.  I don’t much myself, but if you care to you’re welcome.

If you post something illegal, I might have to delete it.

While spam is not allowed, I offer a little more latitude to hand typed commercial comments that address the topic at hand.  For example this Chinese company that produces a seeder that competes with one I posted about:

http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/2006/09/earthway-seeder/

If you hand type something that’s creative and relevant, I’ll probably allow it.  Entertainment value is extra credit.  This is completely at my discretion.

What’s not allowed is a commercial comment that’s in stride with the topic at hand, or one that’s just a link or otherwise is not in any way creative or useful.  Of all the comments I ever delete, they almost all fall into this category.  Again, if you leave a valid email address I’ll get in touch and explain why I deleted your comment.

Comments anyone?

The websites are run by their close friend, Chinese agronomist Bi Jihuan.

It’s a pretty special and rare thing when a plant breeder offers part of their own seed collection for sale.  Please consider supporting their work by buying and growing their seeds!

The city of Amsterdam recently launched a new ‘brand’, called I Amsterdam.

This is a registered trademark of the city, and is supposedly used for companies or other organizations that present the city in a good light.  In particular an important part of the marketing efforts are to attract so-called knowledge workers to the city, and help with their relocation by promoting businesses that can assist them with things like housing, banking and the like.

Beware of Racism!

An important part of the history of the Netherlands is after WWII a large number of migrants came here to help with the reconstruction of the country.  These migrants kept coming, and in recent times turned into more educated knowledge workers.  In fact, in light of the fact there were large numbers of knowledge workers the governments has significantly cut back on educational spending and let immigrants fill the gaps, causing other problems I won’t get into here.

The view has always been maintained that those coming to the country are doing so to serve the native Dutch and their descendants.  In other words, knowledge workers come here to create jobs, and these jobs are for ethnic Dutch.

The demographics are now such that about half the city’s population is not ethnic Dutch, and if you move here you will also not be ethnic Dutch.

There’s a long running custom for ethnic Dutch to only hire or offer promotions to other ethnic Dutch.  In fact, to hire or promote someone who is not ethnic Dutch is considered to be taking a risk.  This might create discontent in the workplace, a clash of cultures or attract complaints from customers — much in the same way it used to be with black workers in America.

There is no such thing as affirmative action or reverse discrimination here, and certainly not in the city government!  The vast majority of city workers are ethnic Dutch, and nearly all of those in positions of importance are.  Most city contracts go to companies who only hire ethnic Dutch.  Certainly for the purposes of this new marketing logo, if you do business with the companies involved, you will see they are almost all exclusively staffed with ethnic Dutch.

If you do business with them, you will be leaving out the half of the city that is not ethnic Dutch.

Housing

This is a good example, and since I am not ethnic Dutch and am offering an apartment for rent, let me explain a little bit how this works.

Largely speaking, there are three kinds of housing in Amsterdam.  There’s social housing, where you have to meet certain income, employment and pre-existing residence requirements.  There’s free sector housing, which is more expensive and easier to find.  Now there’s this new category called Short-Stay housing, especially intended for expats.

There’s lots of grey areas in housing, for example people who have social housing illegally subletting it to expats for a huge profit, or landlords illegally renting out social housing as free sector.  Lots of people will warn expats about ‘illegal’ housing, but actually there’s nothing to worry about.  There are no penalties for you to rent and live in illegal housing.  The risks are almost exclusively for property owners.  If you find yourself in the wrong kind of accommodation, you may have to move out eventually or pay a higher than expected rent, you might find yourself swamped with a bit of red tape, but there are no other risks.

The one issue for some is if you are non-EU and living here on a residence permit renewed on an annual basis, you will need to register your residence with the city and be allowed to live wherever that is.  This is easy.  If you fall into this situation, ask your potential landlord if you’re allowed to register?  If the answer is no, you have to look elsewhere.  Your landlord will not want you to try to register if you’re not allowed to, and it will create a lot of problems for them if you do.  If you aren’t required to register because of a residence permit, it’s no problem to come to an agreement that you won’t register, if this is what you want to do.

There is nothing illegal about renting an apartment from me or any other private party!  Most places are okay to register with the city.  If you rent from me, you can certainly register if you want, no problem.

Short Stay housing was created because there are a lot of empty apartments in the city now that don’t meet the requirements of free sector rental housing, and can’t be sold because the real estate market is too depressed.  Licenses were granted to large housing corporations to use this excess housing as ‘Short Stay’ housing, in limited numbers so the market would not fill up with expat rentals, bringing prices down.  These licenses were granted ‘per unit’, with entire apartment blocks considered as a single unit, meaning the cost for someone like me with a single apartment was unrealistic, and only pre-existing housing corporations would qualify.

If you move into an official ‘Short Stay’ rental, you will get housing licensed by a city government dominated by ethnic Dutch, with the intention of keeping it in short supply in an otherwise flooded real estate market with artificially high rents, as well as with the intention of benefiting ethnic Dutch owners running a company who only hires ethnic Dutch workers.

This isn’t the right kind of housing for expats!

Whatever you do, and however you find housing, the best thing to do is avoid official Short Stay housing and official housing companies.  If you’re looking for housing, leave a comment on this post and I’ll try to offer the most current advice I have at the moment.

Work Ethic

One of the things that happens with the active promotion of ethnic Dutch is one of the most atrocious work ethics I have ever seen.  Nothing is a better example than when the city was licensing taxis in a similar way as the new Short Stay housing!  By searching on TCA or Taxi Centrale Amsterdam, there are probably lots of stories on the Internet, but basically the city turned all of their taxi drivers into thugs.

The taxi drivers all knew they had a right to drive their taxi, pretty much charge whatever they wanted and could do what they wanted because the city had given them a permanent license and weren’t issuing new licenses to others.  This basically meant they were ripping off any tourist who entered their cabs, charging whatever they wanted, and many became involved in organized crime.  For a time it was known if you wanted pirated software, you could buy a CD from most taxi drivers.  Many would transport drugs on request.  It was a real mess, and it took a long time to sort out.  Nowadays, the taxis aren’t nearly as bad, certainly nothing to be afraid of, but there are still a few bad drivers floating around and taxis are still best avoided if possible.

Later I’m going to do a post on my recent house renovations, and the story is similar with this.

Any time you do business with a completely ethnic Dutch company, you risk the same sort of work ethic and desire to charge the highest price for the least amount of work.  By the way, this is often the case with ethnic Dutch people trying to buy goods and services too.  Since employment is harder to come by for non-ethnic Dutch, as a rule they are much more motivated and honest.

I’m not in anyway encouraging anyone to discriminate the other way, and refuse to do business with ethnic Dutch, but rather use common sense.

If you’re an expat coming to Amsterdam, beware half of the city is like you — from somewhere else.  Look out for and pay attention to them!  Look for colored skin, a funny accent or native English speaker.  The day will come where you expect the same from others.

If you come here and work for a foreign company, it may take a long time before you notice it, because you’ll be working in a pretty sheltered environment.  It’s also normal when you come here to look on everything with a positive light, and for example justify this kind of discrimination on the basis of a lack of appropriate language skills.  The truth is with something like language skills, the expectations are generally just so high, that no non-native speaker is good enough.  Almost no one learns to speak Dutch as a second language without an accent.  It can take a long time living here before you see just how undeniable the discrimination is, but you’ll see it eventually.

A desire to purchase goods and services from non-ethnic Dutch is really the most important first step to ending the discrimination that goes on here.

His forum is a part of the Helpful Gardener forums, that won a Business Week ‘Best of the Web’ award in 2008.  Mike mentioned his tomato forum is a friendly place that doesn’t allow the negative attitudes typically found on other forums. So be nice!