Retiring in Europe

We were talking about retirement today at lunch.

Retirement benefits in France are calculated on a point system.

For each year that you work you earn a 'point', with your total number of points maxing out at 40. For each point you have, you get better benefits upon retirement. If you max out, you will earn in retirement some percentage of your best annual Salary (people debated as to whether the number was 40%, 50% or 80%).

Points are earnable any where in the EU, and a certain number of points are transferable from other Countries including America (I'm not sure about Canada). Additionally, you can spend your points in any other country in the EU. This means that it's possible that you could work in Germany your whole life, where wages are quite high, and then retire in France, where wages are low but retirement and medical benefits are high.

An interesting fact that I learned today: You get 3 points for each child that you bear. So, normally a woman can retire with full benefits after 40 years of work. However, if she has three kids, she can retire 9 years early!

The Boat that Rocked, and the movie that may not have.

I just got back from seeing The Boat that Rocked (or, Good Morning England, as it's known here in France). Despite the generally mediocre reviews that it got, I thought it was outright hilarious, and is the an excellent laugh-out-loud movie; unfortunately, I was the only one doing so. In what was one of the stranger movie going experiences I've had, I was the only person in the entire theatre that laughed at all. There was the odd chuckle here and there when the movie poked fun at the British - but for the most part I was alone in a crowd of a hundred or so people who just sat still and quietly munched on popcorn.

My hypothesis here are three:

• They mixed up the subtitle reel before showing the film.
• The French have a strange sense of humour.
• I have a strange sense of humour.

While I'm willing to conced to Option 3, I'm going to believe Option 1 until proven otherwise. If anyone else does watch it, let me know what you thought, I'm a little concerned at the difference between the crowds perception of the film and my own.

Geoblocking

There's an excellent post over on the CBC that talks about the practice of Geoblocking, what it is, and why broadcasters insist on doing it. For those that don't know, Geoblocking is a way for a company to limit access to particular parts of their website based upon the physical location of the person coming to the site. For example, I can't watch re-runs of Star Trek on the CBS site because I'm not in the USA (which is annoying; but understandable), and Sarah can't look at Jeans on the Canadian guess website (which is just dumb), presumably because they charge more if you live in Europe.

Without a doubt, my favourite part of the article was this gem from the comments section.

There's a simple way to get around any geoblocking fence. It's called reverse urling. if you are being denied access to a site, just type the url backwards, character for character, eventually ending with :ptth.

What this does is tell the server to come to you rather than you go to it. The only danger is if the website is huge, by inviting it into your computer you stand a chance of overloading your machine, and, under rare circumstances, this can cause the cpu the short out and catch fire.

The best thing to do, should that happen, is to quickly type the url again but forwards. The sudden reversal in direction in the flow of electrons from your computer to the server should bring things back into equilibrium.

Should you find it impossible to type due to electric shocks from the keyboard, very common in pre 2004 keyboards which are not properly grounded against reverse urling, you should try to cut power to the computer. Electrical problems from the short have been known to spread within a house, or sometimes even to a whole neighbourhood., depending on whether the houses are connected serially or not in the powergrid (I never remember which one is bad).

Note to readers, I'm pretty sure this won't work, although I'm not will to test on my laptop for fear of damage to my pants (and the contents thereof).