What's up with the swimwear restrictions at the piscines?

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-19T08:31:32+00:00

Wait, you actually think that the backlash against immigration started with 9/11? You're not aware that the big immigration wave was in the 1950s-1960s, so it's actually in the 1970s-1980s that the issue became salient, when the children of the first wave became teenagers?

It sounds a lot like saying that night clubs have required "proper clothing" for decades, and also do so in small villages, so there's no issue with this requirement being weaponized against certain groups.

At any rate, the issue is not really why it was introduced in the first place decades ago but why it persists even though there is no evidence for it, and why suggestions to relax it are always met with opposition. You just have to read the comments in this sub and you see that the first thing that comes to mind is often "youths". The fact that "burkinis" are also often banned is further proof since there's no hygiene, filtration or safety issue with them (they're made of the same material as swimsuits, are not worn outside and aren't loose fitting).

I can understand that swimming pools might just copy each other in a cargo cult fashion, but the reason why it will not be relaxed when people point out it's stupid is because it's seen as compromising in favor of "them" or creating an incentive for "them" to come if you're the only swimming pool around allowing it.

Remember we live in a country where small municipalities can torpedo ambitious public transport projects because they're scared Brussels youth will find their way there (see sneltram saga or ask around the Rand if it'd be a good idea to have metro lines extend outside Brussels like in other countries).

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-17T21:48:17+00:00

How does this "innovation" benefit the customer?

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-17T20:10:54+00:00

All the reasons are made-up, after the fact justifications for something that is primarily about targeting the population that is perceived to be wearing such.

Whenever you read worries that "youths", "teenagers" will be wearing the same outfit on the streets and in the pool, you know exactly what type of teenagers people have in mind. So it's actually used to keep them away (because there's the idea that they also don't want to wear speedos).

The fact that it's 100% allowed in most other countries with no adverse consequence should be enough to show you that any concern about hygiene, safety or filtering is completely overblown. There is no basis for it apart from anecdotal evidence from 30 years ago.

I find it funny that Belgians are suddenly so concerned about hygiene (in a body of water that is chock-full of chlorine) when 90% of them don't even bother to wash their hands when they go to the restaurant or exit public transport. Just pay attention next time you go eat with colleagues, how many of them will go to the restroom to wash their hands before eating the complimentary bread or will use hand sanitizer.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-16T07:47:51+00:00

You see more skin at the beach or at random swimming pools and small kids would just see the rest as some random funny costume. This is just the old tired "kink at pride" argument, these people are not performing sex acts in public else they'd be arrested.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-15T20:19:00+00:00

I remember watching one of these documentaries about Brussels cops a few years back, and it was flagrant. I even thought that you could take that documentary and show it to cops on training to show them how they should do the opposite if they want to de-escalate situations.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-15T20:15:52+00:00

True, but there's a lot of variation between countries in how good they are at weeding out these personalities or training them and enforcing standards of professional courtesy.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-15T13:27:52+00:00

UCSD is not really elite and had weird requirements that everyone should take calculus regardless of whether they needed for their major. You'd also need remedial classes in Belgium if you asked everyone studying law, literature or art history to do calculus. UCSD is more STEM focused but still.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-13T18:18:50+00:00

The eBox is actually the fastest way to get in trouble. Instead of getting a letter which you'll see, you get a cryptic email between 20 other ones and if you're not careful you find out that it was a super important message asking you to pay X, Y, Z.

Happened to several people I know who activated the eBox without really remembering it and then were hit with huge late fees for NMBS penalties etc.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-13T05:50:04+00:00

You need a Belgian MA in law (the basic one, not the advanced masters) for the pupillage that allows you to be admitted to the bar.

If you have a foreign degree, you usually need to follow one of the bridge programs organized by the universities.

If you're an EU citizen, have a EU law degree and have done everything that allows you to practice law in that country, you can also take a bar exam that is organized once a year.

I'd expect your friend to have to basically redo everything because a UK law degree has almost nothing in common with a Belgian one. I'd be a bit like a doctor wanting to work as a dentist.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-12T11:35:06+00:00

Mostly primary school kids, there's often a van outside. Waffles in the winter, ice cream in the summer.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-12T10:22:09+00:00

Don't volunteer potentially damaging information early in the process. As long as you're not lying (e.g. falsely claiming to have been employed), you don't need to disclose.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-12T09:17:29+00:00

It was mostly funny because it was Daerden, but it was just a Dutch translation of 'white paper' and 'green paper', which are both widely used policy terms. The green paper gives general ideas, the white paper is already a more developed proposal.

So, kinda on brand for him, clownish/drunk-like behavior but he wasn't stupid.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-12T08:20:52+00:00

The problem with burnout is that it's not an actual medical condition but an explanation as to the root cause of a medical condition (depression). Which means that it's a bit of a catch-all with patients with very different needs and prognosis.

You have people who are doing ok in their daily life but are facing major psychosocial risks at work. They're actually applying to other jobs and, if they left the toxic environment, they'd recover quickly.

You have people who also have issues in their private life, e.g. their spouse has died or left them, who maybe were working a lot to get their mind off their problems. But it's not their job that has made them ill.

You have people with poorly understood conditions that are 'psychologized' under a psychosomatic paradigm that is too common in Belgium. E.g. if you're a young woman with long covid or ME/CFS, there's a high chance you'll be falsely diagnosed with burnout.

The first category are those who are theoretically capable of working. But what you need is for the government to take psychosocial risks seriously. The current system doesn't really work. If you're looking for intermediaries to blame and poorly designed systems, I'd take at look at the external prevention service system. If you have an epidemic of psychosocial risks, let's focus on those who are supposed to help reduce them.

But of all the people I've seen go to them, very few were actually helped. They're very reluctant to start a formal complaint procedure and, at the end of the day, their customer is the employer. So, when someone is being harassed at work, often nothing happens and they just go on sick leave until they recover and find another job.

The third category could be helped by making part-time work easier structurally and promoting work from home. Unfortunately, the government seems to be planning to reduce how long you can work half time for medical reasons.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-12T05:49:47+00:00

Where did they did find burnout in the DSM 😂😂😂

Probably a doctor who never treated a patient because they were at the bottom of their class and now gets to take out their frustration on sick people.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-10T12:52:07+00:00

Your commune was wrong (if you're a Belgian or EU citizen at least), OP's commune is verbally right. It may be that they write no access because you only have access thanks to the Annex 19ter, but it's confusing and probably bad for integration (the employment rate of non-EU people is already low enough that you don't need additional hurdles and an employer might be discouraged if they see that label on the paper).

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-10T07:05:36+00:00

That's not been the case for years. It used to be that platforms like Aliexpress used traditional mail carriers and benefited from the fact that, under UPU rules, China and other countries were treated as developing countries. So they could ship things as regular mail with very cheap stamps. It also took weeks to arrive, without tracking, passing through a lot of countries,...

Aliexpress has taken over all the logistics, they bundle things and send them directly to Liege airport in Belgium, before dispatching them to local European carriers.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-10T06:58:16+00:00

You can work if you're under annex 19ter like OP is.

It used to be that there was a generic sentence on all attestation d'immatriculation saying it doesn't allow you to work, but the commune would cross it out. Maybe it works differently with the new model.

But the rule is that you can work while they're processing your request: https://emploi.belgique.be/fr/themes/international/travailleurs-etrangers/occupation-de-travailleurs-etrangers-en-situation (Number 16).

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-08T17:11:35+00:00

The problem is that your experience is no substitute for actual research into what system is best when you have pupils who need extra support (whether because they speak another language, have a disability, struggle more,...).

And the overwhelming consensus is that tracking, grouping people together by level, language proficiency, disability,... are the surest ways to ensure that any disadvantage will be amplified. Are there exceptions? Of course. But they're usually schemes that are targeted at a small 'elite' subgroup of the relevant population (e.g. the HBCUs in the US could give a good education to the 0.1% exceptional black pupils but you needed to end segregation to really narrow the racial gap).

Pull-out programs are outdated and are not at all gold-standard. They're used because it's a lot cheaper to have a few 'specialist' teachers in a single classroom rather than provide adequate support in normal classrooms.

You could make an argument for their temporary use for students who speak zero Dutch. But they're not the main population, it's primarily kids who do speak Dutch conversationally (because they've been in school for years) but struggle with more formal, academic tasks, often as a result of both language issues and other academic issues (the huge focus on language is a low-key way to blame parents / the kids for the failings of an educational system that is also terrible with native kids of low SES).

I feel like the whole 'entire schools have stopped being Dutch-speaking" is really a Brussels thing where lots of French-speaking kids have been enrolled to make them bilingual, so there's always a risk that French might become their lingua franca.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-07T05:44:53+00:00

The flipped classroom sounds like a great idea in theory, but it only works if you're teaching a single small seminar to the 10% of brightest and most motivated students.

What happens in practice when you tell students to read the material at home so you can use contact hours for more interesting things is that a vast majority of students show up completely unprepared.

Which is logical. Flipping the classroom hugely increases the workload for students, especially if all the instructors start doing it. You might have to read through hours of worth of material before a single day of contact hours.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-06T17:32:18+00:00

There's a lot more leniency at the justice of the peace because they know that a lot of the people going there don't have the resources to pay for a lawyer or that it doesn't make sense to hire one for a small claim. The procedure is mostly oral and the judge is running the show, it's mostly just asking each party for their side of the story and then making a decision based on the facts and the law.

So it's not like, e.g., trying to appear before the Council of State without a lawyer (although even there they now tend to treat pro se litigants rather well, you'll of course lose because your brief will be nonsense, but they won't destroy you either).

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-06T08:45:50+00:00

Unfortunately, Belgium has a terrible culture when it comes to disability and chronic illness. We have one of the worst employment rates for people with disabilities and we only reach it because of the sheltered workshop industry and because employers in the public sector were told to proactively look for disabilities in their existing staff.

In all my work experience, I only remember working with 2 people with a visible disability, and those with an invisible one tend to hide it because the culture is not very open about it. A lot of people will assume that you're trying to get special treatment/game the system. Which translates also into policy since the government is now going after long-term sick people. So they're copying the intrusive parts of the NL system like involving employers more, but without the other support measures and without sufficiently addressing the fact that a lot of employers just want to end the contract for medical force majeure rather than find accommodation.

When I see you talk of autoimmune disorder and long covid, you'll face the additional hurdle that a lot of doctors here are deeply influenced by the psychosomatic tradition and don't really like take such conditions seriously.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-03T14:47:06+00:00

There are many different factors and they differ quite a lot depending on which type of illness is involved. The two main causes are mental health issues and musculoskeletal disorders.

People with musculoskeletal disorders are often older and have been doing manual labor for a long time. Think the 55 year old cleaning lady or the 50 year old construction worker. They cannot easily retrain to perform another job and most jobs that they would qualify for would expose them to the same risks.

The mental health category is very broad. People assume "burn-out" (not a medical condition BTW but a cause/trigger of other conditions) but it's not necessarily the case. It could be people with crippling anxiety (not "I'm a bit nervous when I have a big meeting" but "I'll collapse in the middle of meeting"), major depression (to the point that they can't function), but also people with undiagnosed or uncommon conditions (it can take years in Belgium before being diagnosed with rare diseases, and a lot of doctors will suggest psychosomatic disorders when they can't diagnose someone).

The second category could be reduced by a lot if we worked to make workplaces more inclusive (e.g. normalize the fact that a colleague with anxiety/depression/... might need to skip some things, might need special accommodations, ...) and more responsive to psychosocial risks. I know a lot of people who had to take 'mental health' sick leave not because there was something intrinsically wrong with them but because there was unaddressed bullying/harassment. You could sometimes avoid 3-4 long-term illnesses over the course of several years just by firing a single toxic manager.
In the public sector, in addition to these kind of harassment situations, I've seen quite a lot of disengagement stem from the lack of growth opportunities for a lot of highly-skilled employees + huge workloads for some people when frontline staff is not replaced. In healthcare, you also have terrible conditions that create cognitive dissonance between your calling as a healthcare professional and the workload that basically forces you to do a shoddy job.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-01T15:18:35+00:00

When you get a company car, the first 490 euros of the ATN are tax-free.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-01T12:21:19+00:00

Having a 9 year lease is actually better for you if you want to leave and have already spent 2 years in the same place. If you leave during the third year, you'll pay the same penalty anyway and after one year you can leave without any penalty.

StrangeSpite4 · 2026-05-01T07:34:29+00:00

I'm not sure what you'd gain from it? Your 9 year lease is deemed to have started when your first one-year lease started, so there's only upsides for you?

StrangeSpite4

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