Chris Medland picks out the biggest talking points as F1 heads to Austria for the eighth round of the 2026 season.

Veel mensen bereiden hun pensioen jarenlang zorgvuldig voor. Er wordt gespaard, belegd en gerekend. Maar één cruciale vraag blijft vaak liggen: waar kom je eigenlijk je bed voor uit als het werk wegvalt?

Volgens onderzoekers die zich bezighouden met zingeving en levensgeluk vormt pensionering voor veel mensen een kantelpunt. Niet vanwege geldproblemen, maar omdat vertrouwde structuren verdwijnen. De baan die jarenlang identiteit, sociale contacten en status gaf, valt plotseling weg. Wat blijft er dan over?

De Amerikaanse onderzoeker Alex Pattakos ontwikkelde daarom tien betekenisvolle vragen die mensen helpen nadenken over hun leven na het werk.

1. Denk je dat je te oud bent om nog te veranderen?

Veel mensen geloven dat grote veranderingen alleen zijn weggelegd voor jongeren. Maar klopt dat wel? Deze vraag confronteert je met een mogelijke beperkende overtuiging. Want wie denkt dat groei voorbij is, stopt vaak vanzelf met nieuwe stappen zetten.

2. Waar ben je eigenlijk ontevreden over?

Misschien had je verwacht inmiddels ergens anders te staan. Misschien knaagt er spijt over keuzes die je ooit maakte. Het erkennen van teleurstellingen kan pijnlijk zijn, maar is vaak de eerste stap naar verandering.

3. Wie ben je zonder je functie, titel of status?

Voor veel mensen is dit misschien wel de lastigste vraag. Als je jarenlang directeur, verpleegkundige, ondernemer of manager bent geweest, wie ben je dan wanneer dat visitekaartje verdwijnt?

4. Leef je jouw leven of dat van iemand anders?

Veel mensen ontdekken pas op latere leeftijd hoeveel keuzes zijn beïnvloed door verwachtingen van ouders, partners, collega's of de samenleving. Wat zou je doen als die verwachtingen wegvallen?

5. Kijk je uit naar de toekomst?

Sommigen kijken met nieuwsgierigheid vooruit, anderen vooral met angst. De manier waarop je naar de toekomst kijkt, zegt veel over je huidige levenshouding.

6. Kies je voor veiligheid of voor groei?

Verandering brengt onzekerheid met zich mee. Toch blijkt uit onderzoek dat nieuwe ervaringen bijdragen aan vitaliteit en levensgeluk. De vraag is: blijf je binnen de grenzen van het bekende of durf je nog nieuwe avonturen aan?

7. Welke dromen heb je onderweg achtergelaten?

Misschien wilde je ooit een instrument leren bespelen, een boek schrijven, reizen of een nieuwe studie volgen. Pensionering biedt soms juist de ruimte om oude verlangens opnieuw tot leven te brengen.

8. Hoe voorkom je eenzaamheid?

Een van de grootste risico's van ouder worden is sociale isolatie. Werk zorgt vaak ongemerkt voor dagelijkse contacten. Zodra die verdwijnen, wordt het belangrijk actief te investeren in nieuwe vriendschappen en sociale netwerken.

9. Hoe wil je bijdragen aan de wereld?

Zingeving ontstaat vaak wanneer mensen zich nuttig voelen voor anderen. Dat hoeft niet groots te zijn. Vrijwilligerswerk, mantelzorg of het delen van kennis kan al een sterk gevoel van betekenis geven.

10. Wat houdt je eigenlijk tegen?

De laatste vraag is misschien wel de belangrijkste. Wat vormt de grootste blokkade tussen jou en het leven dat je eigenlijk wilt leiden? Angst? Onzekerheid? Gewoonte? Pas wanneer je die hindernis herkent, kun je hem overwinnen.

Geld is niet genoeg

Volgens experts wordt de kwaliteit van het pensioen vaak overschat in financiële termen. Natuurlijk geeft financiële zekerheid rust. Maar een goed gevulde bankrekening garandeert nog geen gelukkig leven.

De beroemde psychiater Viktor Frankl waarschuwde daar decennia geleden al voor. Veel mensen hebben volgens hem wel de middelen om te leven, maar missen een reden om te leven.

Daarom draait een geslaagde oude dag niet alleen om vermogen, maar ook om betekenis. Om relaties, persoonlijke groei, nieuwsgierigheid en het gevoel dat je leven ergens over gaat.

De tien vragen bieden geen kant-en-klare antwoorden. Ze helpen vooral om stil te staan bij een ongemakkelijke maar essentiële gedachte: hoe wil je de komende twintig of dertig jaar eigenlijk doorbrengen?

Bron: Psychology Today

GRONINGEN (ANP) - Minister Pieter Heerma (Binnenlandse Zaken) snapt de "opgebouwde frustratie" bij Groningers over fouten die gemaakt zijn bij de veiligheidsbeoordeling van woningen in het aardbevingsgebied. Dat zei de CDA-bewindsman tegen journalisten na een bezoek aan de regio. Een rapport van het Adviescollege Veiligheid Groningen (ACVG) bracht vorige week nieuwe onvolkomenheden in de toch al uiterst stroef verlopende versterkingsaanpak aan het licht.

Heerma sprak onder meer met bewoners, bestuurders en maatschappelijke organisaties over het rapport. Hij erkende dat de bevindingen geen verrassing kunnen zijn. "Het ACVG heeft voor veel mensen duidelijk gemaakt wat zij al jaren zeggen", aldus de minister, die de gesprekken "indringend" vond. Hij komt later met een formele reactie op het rapport.

Duizenden gebouwen in Groningen voldoen mogelijk niet aan de veiligheidsnorm en moeten versterkt worden. Hoeveel precies en welke, is ook na jaren getouwtrek nog altijd onduidelijk. Dat komt ook doordat de overheid vaak tussentijds de spelregels veranderde.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Claude Guillemot, co-founder of French video game company Ubisoft, died Friday at the age of 69. According to French media (via Bloomberg), Guillemot died in a plane crash in the French resort town of La Baule. He was one of two people aboard the plane, both of whom died.

Guillemot founded Ubisoft with his four brothers in 1986. Since then, the company has published the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Tom Clancy video game franchises, as well as many other titles. The family retains control of Ubisoft, and Guillemot's brother Yves is still CEO. Guillemot was also chairman of Guillemot Corp., which makes gaming and audio accessories. "Ubisoft was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and chairman of Guillemot Corp., in an accident," Ubisoft said in a statement. "Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Expected successor to Keir Starmer has promised to understand voters outside London and those who feel unheard

• UK politics live – latest updates

In the story that Andy Burnham tells about himself, “the turning point” in his political life came in 2009 when he was booed at a football ground in the north-west of England. He had been an ideologically reliable middle-ranking minister under Tony Blair, the centrist New Labour prime minister between 1997 and 2007, and had gone on to be appointed as secretary of state for culture, media and sport under Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.

On the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster – the fatal crowd crush that killed 97 Liverpool fans in 1989 – Burnham was representing Brown’s administration at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous stadium. But as he began to offer his words of condolence into a microphone on the pitch, the then 39-year-old minister’s speech was interrupted by loud and angry calls from the stands for justice for those who had been killed due to no fault of their own. A series of British governments had refused demands for a public inquiry into the disaster.

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Keir Starmer won power but never explained Britain’s crisis. The new MP for Makerfield offers a sharper diagnosis – and one that voters can understand

Political careers often end when circumstances demand qualities that a politician cannot supply. That seems especially true of Sir Keir Starmer. On Monday, he stepped down as Labour leader, hours before Andy Burnham arrived at Westminster to take his seat as MP for Makerfield.

Sir Keir’s achievements were real. He won a large parliamentary majority in 2024, provided more cash for the NHS and was steadfast in his support of Ukraine. He undoubtedly restored a measure of seriousness after years of Tory psychodrama. But the 2024 victory was always more brittle than it seemed: Labour’s vote actually fell from 2019 and Nigel Farage’s decision to stand candidates in 2024 fractured rightwing votes. Sir Keir won power; he did not change the political weather.

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The white working class knows the American project isn't working. Here's why that will never matter to them. An excellent essay from the Guardian arguing that white racism is the driving force behind the dysfunction in US politics. Many links worth following in it as well.

FEATURE Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least. If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”). The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term "open source" was even uttered. In a sense, “Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation,” Stonebraker said. Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker’s revolutionary extensible architecture. Three decades later, this stubbornly-independent database has become the bedrock of modern cloud infrastructure. Data should be relational When it comes to relational database systems, British computer scientist and then-IBM employee Ted Codd got the ball rolling in 1970. A database is where you store your data so it can be queried in a predictable way. A database system is the software that manages the database (don’t confuse the two). That year, Codd decreed that all data should be stored in tables and accessed using a high-level query language. IBM implemented Codd’s idea in System R, and created SQL as the query language. The results were eventually rolled into IBM's DB2. Stonebraker, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, also implemented Codd’s ideas. Stonebraker and his team of grad students created not only a working prototype, but a full-scale implementation – he later cofounded a startup, Relational Technology, to sell Ingres commercially. Ingres did not use SQL, but instead employed another query language, QUEL (Query Language), although the fundamentals were similar. A relatively primitive version of Ingres was even released gratis for academic research. But by the early 1980s, Stonebraker had “pushed the code off a cliff” and started building something new. Thus, Postgres was born. Beyond Ingres: Postgres At the time, Stonebraker explained, the business world was pushing for databases to hold additional data types beyond the integers, floats, and character strings required for basic business accounting. There was complicated CAD data and GIS data, with multiple data points that needed to be stored and reasoned against. It was clear to Stonebraker and his colleagues that the ideal database system needed to be extended with more data types, user-defined data types, user-defined operators, and user-defined functions. Adding more data types and such might seem simple enough, but the “devil is in the details,” he noted. “You need to be able to teach the query optimizer about new types, and that's not exactly easy.” Commutative rules had to be worked out, and they had to be optimized. This led to what was probably Postgres’ most successful feature: support for abstract data types (ADTs). Stonebraker had other ambitions for Postgres as well. He also wanted to incorporate new work from Chris Date on referential integrity, which brought “semantic consistency between foreign keys and primary keys” to the relational model. He wanted to add in a rules engine, which would continually monitor for changes and make decisions based on those changes. Also, he wanted crash recovery. The crash recovery and the rules engine never quite worked out, but the ADTs took root, and now most database systems support this extensibility, pretty much exactly like they were devised by Stonebraker and Co. in 1983. “We pretty much got it right,” he said. In fact, he reckons that his work on ADTs was probably the major reason he landed the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2014 A.M. Turing Award. Stonebraker and his mates were eager to make money from their creation. So they rolled Postgres into a start-up, Illustra, which was eventually purchased by Informix, which promptly digested the technology into its own database server. But they also maintained an open source version…barely. It wasn’t even called open source (which wasn’t a formal term until 1998). It was considered freely available academic software, something for fellow researchers to tinker with. And it was based on the very-permissive BSD license. The architecture that refused to die In 1995, two Berkeley graduate students, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen, resurrected Postgres from the last 4.2 academic release. They jettisoned the poorly-running rules engine and disaster recovery features, and, most importantly, swapped out QUEL for the then industry standard of SQL, releasing the software as Postgre95 (and later PostgreSQL). “I didn't know any of these people,” Stonebraker said of this all-volunteer development crew. They were “a collection of super programmers who picked up this open source project and started shepherding it forward, and they've been shepherding it for the last 30 years.” This sovereignty made Postgres safe for anyone to use and modify. Postgres’ wire interface has been widely used as the base for building other database systems, including CockroachDB, YugoByteDB, and TimeScale. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each have their own database-as-a-service built on Postgres. Chief selling point? Each is fully Postgres compatible. “The elephants have basically bet the ranch on Postgres,” he said. Even AWS’ graph database service is built on Postgres (“the relational implementation of [a graph database] is almost always faster, usually substantially faster, than doing it natively,” Stonebraker quipped.) Top of the heap These days, Postgres sits near the top of the DB-Engines ranking of the world’s most popular database systems, just below Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Unlike those rivals however, Postgres continues to steadfastly gain market share. Tom Kincaid helped organize the PGDay meetup – and is a vice president of EDB, a Postgres service company. He offered several reasons why Postgres made such a big impact, despite its initial lack of support from any of the IT giants (unlike the fellow open source MySQL, now managed by Oracle, which many open sourcerers distrust for that reason alone). Extensibility was a major help in adoption, especially as the role of databases expanded beyond basic business accounting. ADTs gave the database system an easy entry into an expanding geospatial market, and later, document databases. “Postgres was quickly able to provide developers exactly what they needed for storing, retrieving and searching JSON documents,” Kincaid told The Register. “The fact that you could combine SQL with many different data types allowed it to thrive with every new trend in application development.” Also helping was the quality of the codebase (“It is held to the highest standard of review,” Kincaid said) which attracted top developers, as did the quality of the optimizer. The permissive licensing also helped, allowing start-ups and project leaders to build derivative products without fear of legal repercussions. Why Postgres still doesn’t have file-level encryption Despite all the love from the open source community, Postgres is still missing features that it might need to maintain parity with commercial database systems. This was the focus of another illuminating PGDay talk by long-time Postgres contributor (and always dapper) Bruce Momjian. He ran down a long list of missing features, most of which the development team are currently grappling with. The database system could use 64-bit transaction IDs to accommodate very large databases. It could also use support for columnar storage, which is all the rage for large-scale data analysis. Global indexing, server-threading, internal connection pooling and sharding are also features in various stages of assembly. The major feature Postgres currently lacks, however, is file-level encryption, or “transparent data encryption,” as it is called in the industry. TDE is supported by all commercial database vendors, and it is required by the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS) specifications for storing financial transaction data. Currently, Postgres lets the operating system handle the encryption. Current development on Postgres file-level encryption is stalled “in many ways,” Momjian said. “The code changes became too heavy for the value of the feature,” he said. Not only would the functions touching the data files themselves need modification, but all the other functions scattered through the system that write temporary files must be altered as well. This would be a “monstrous” job, he said. Still, missing features allow commercial entities to fill in the gaps. Percona, for instance, offers the feature as part of its own Postgres commercial distribution. Commercial database companies are very sensitive to customer requirements, whether those requirements are truly necessary in a practical or technical sense, or if they are merely external or regulatory in nature. It’s the latter set of requirements that don’t make it to the top of the Postgres to-do list as quickly, Momjian said. “We don't want to add a feature unless it really has technical value,” he said. Momjian pointed out that the PCI mandate itself also has questionable value purely from a technical view. Once the contents are copied into the server’s memory, the encryption protection vanishes. If an attacker can bypass a system’s file system permissions, they can probably read the raw working memory and get the encryption key. “If we're trying to lock down the file system, we'd also have to lock down memory. We don't know how to do that,” he said. But the missing TDE may not even be a bug at all, but an actual feature of Postgres's fundamental philosophy. “While proprietary databases target the workloads of their largest customers, Postgres targets the workloads of general users,” he said. And that may be the best kind of success for an open source project. ®