With oil prices soaring and stock markets falling, economists warn that a prolonged conflict in the Middle East risks knocking growth worldwide and boosting prices

• Middle East crisis - live updates

Oil prices continued to surge on Monday, triggering a stark sell-off across some of the world’s leading stock markets amid growing concern that the US-Israel war on Iran could set the stage for a global economic shock.

The Middle East conflict has sparked an energy supply crisis that could risk driving up inflation and interest rates, according to economists, who believe growth is set to weaken while prices rise. Fears of stagflation – where economic activity stagnates, but inflation increases – loom large.

Continue reading...

TOKIO (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in Tokio en Seoul gingen maandag hard omlaag door de aanhoudende oorlog van de Verenigde Staten en Israël met Iran, die de tweede week is ingegaan. Door de strijd in het olierijke Midden-Oosten zijn de olieprijzen hard gestegen en landen als Japan en Zuid-Korea zijn erg afhankelijk van de import van olie uit de regio.

De Nikkei in Tokio zakte maandagochtend ruim 5 procent en de Kospi in Seoul kelderde meer dan 6 procent. Ook andere Aziatische beurzen verloren terrein. De beurs in Taiwan verloor ruim 4 procent en in Hongkong en Shanghai werden verliezen geleden van respectievelijk 1,7 en 0,6 procent.

De Amerikaanse olieprijs steeg voor het eerst sinds de zomer van 2022 tot boven de 100 dollar per vat en naderde zelfs de 120 dollar per vat. De stijging volgde op het besluit van grote olieproducenten in het Midden-Oosten, waaronder Koeweit, Iran en de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten, om de olieproductie te verlagen door de sluiting van de Straat van Hormuz.

LONDEN (ANP) - De ministers van Financiën van de G7 gaan maandag praten over een gezamenlijke vrijgave van strategische olievoorraden. Dat meldt zakenkrant Financial Times op basis van bronnen bij de G7. Door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten en verstoringen van de productie in de regio zijn de olieprijzen zeer hard gestegen. De prijs steeg maandag tot boven de 100 dollar per vat, het hoogste niveau sinds medio 2022.

Door die strategische voorraden vrij te geven zouden de prijzen gedrukt kunnen worden. Volgens Financial Times zijn drie G7-landen voorstander, waaronder de Verenigde Staten. De G7 bestaat verder uit de grote industrielanden Frankrijk, Duitsland, Canada, Italië, Japan en het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Ook de Europese Unie doet mee aan de bijeenkomsten.

De ministers zullen dan een videocall hebben met topman Fatih Birol van het Internationaal Energieagentschap (IEA). Dat bureau speelt een coördinerende rol bij het aanspreken van strategische voorraden.

Our anonymous submitter relates a tale of simplification gone bad. As this nightmare unfolds, imagine the scenario of a new developer coming aboard at this company. Imagine being the one who has to explain this setup to said newcomer.

Imagine being the newcomer who inherits it.

David's job should have been an easy one. His company's sales data was stored in a database, and every day the reporting system would query a SQL view to get the numbers for the daily key performance indicators (KPIs). Until the company's CTO, who was proudly self-taught, decided that SQL views are hard to maintain, and the system should get the data from one of those new-fangled APIs instead.

But how does one call an API? The reporting system didn't have that option, so the logical choice was Azure Data Factory to call the API, then output the data to a file that the reporting system could read. The only issue was that nobody on the team spoke Azure Data Factory, or for that matter SQL. But no problem, one of David's colleagues assured, they could do all the work in the best and most multifunctional language ever: C#.

But you can't just write C# in a data factory directly, that would be silly. What you can do is have the data factory pipeline call an Azure function, which calls a DLL that contains the bytecode from C#. Oh, and a scheduler outside of the data factory to run the pipeline. To read multiple tables, the pipeline calls a separate function for each table. Each function would be based on a separate source project in C#, with 3 classes each for the HTTP header, content, and response; and a separate factory class for each of the actual classes.

After all, each table had a different set of columns, so you can't just re-use classes for that.

There was one little issue: the reporting system required an XML file, whereas the API would export data in JSON. It would be silly to expect a data factory, of all things, to convert this. So the CTO's solution was to have another C# program (in a DLL called by a function from a pipeline from an external scheduler) that reads the JSON document saved by the earlier program, uses foreach to go over each element, then saves the result as XML. A distinct program for each table, of course, requiring distinct classes for header, content, response, and factories thereof.

Now here's the genius part: to the C# class representing the output data, David's colleague decided to attach one different object for each input table required. The data class would use reflection to iterate over the attached objects, and for each object, use a big switch block to decide which source file to read. This allows the data class to perform joins and calculations before saving to XML.

To make testing easier, each calculation would be a separate function call. For example, calculating a customer's age was a function taking struct CustomerWithBirthDate as input, use a foreach loop to copy all the data except replacing one field, and return a CustomerWithAge struct to pass to the next function. The code performed a bit slowly, but that was an issue for a later year.

So basically, the scheduler calls the data factory, which calls a set of Azure functions, which call a C# function, which calls a set of factory classes to call the API and write the data to a text file. Then, the second scheduler calls a data factory, which calls Azure functions, which call C#, which calls reflection to check attachment classes, which read the text files, then call a series of functions for each join or calculation, then call another set of factory classes to write the data to an XML file, then call the reporting system to update.

Easy as pie, right? So where David's job could have been maintaining a couple hundred lines of SQL views, he instead inherited some 50,000 lines of heavily-duplicated C# code, where adding a new table to the process would easily take a month.

Or as the song goes, Somebody Told Me the User Provider should use an Adaptor to Proxy the Query Factory Builder ...

OVERWERK

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌫️ - 09-03-2026 07:15 CET

In één oogopslag:
• 3.7°C · Mist 🌫️ | Min 3.8°C / Max 17.5°C | Kans op neerslag 1%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 3.8°C, Max 17.5°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.0 mm, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1019.5 hPa ↘️ -1.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 8.3 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ↙ 31°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 08:00: 3.9°C (Mist) 🌫️, 🧭 1020.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.0 km/u (1.1 m/s), richting: ↓ 8°
• 09:00: 5.2°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, 🧭 1021.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 1.8 km/u (0.5 m/s), richting: ← 68°
• 10:00: 8.0°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, 🧭 1021.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 1.1 km/u (0.3 m/s), richting: ← 89°
• 11:00: 10.8°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1021.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 2.5 km/u (0.7 m/s), richting: ← 104°
• 12:00: 13.0°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1020.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.0 km/u (1.1 m/s), richting: ← 70°
• 13:00: 14.7°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1020.3 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 3.6 km/u (1.0 m/s), richting: ← 103°
• 14:00: 16.0°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, 🧭 1019.8 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 3.6 km/u (1.0 m/s), richting: ↖ 122°
• 15:00: 17.0°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, 🧭 1019.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 2.9 km/u (0.8 m/s), richting: ↖ 143°
• 16:00: 17.5°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, 🧭 1018.8 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.7 km/u (1.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 180°
• 17:00: 17.4°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1018.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.1 km/u (1.7 m/s), richting: ↑ 181°
• 18:00: 17.0°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1018.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 2.9 km/u (0.8 m/s), richting: ↗ 226°
• 19:00: 15.3°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1018.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: ↓ 339°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• dinsdag 10 maart: Min 9.6°C, Max 12.2°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 4.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 10%, 🧭 1016.5 hPa ↘️ -3.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 15.8 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↗ 213°
• woensdag 11 maart: Min 5.8°C, Max 10.1°C (Lichte regen) 🌧️, Neerslag 8.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 41%, 🧭 1012.3 hPa ↘️ -4.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 27.7 km/u (7.7 m/s), richting: ↗ 215°
• donderdag 12 maart: Min 4.4°C, Max 11.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 10%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ↗️ +2.6 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 27.3 km/u (7.6 m/s), richting: ↗ 209°
• vrijdag 13 maart: Min 5.0°C, Max 10.6°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 7.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 58%, 🧭 1001.8 hPa ↘️ -13.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 28.3 km/u (7.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 222°
• zaterdag 14 maart: Min 3.6°C, Max 9.3°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.9 mm, Kans op neerslag 34%, 🧭 1004.9 hPa ↗️ +3.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 17.7 km/u (4.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 240°
• zondag 15 maart: Min 1.8°C, Max 10.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 25%, 🧭 1016.3 hPa ↗️ +11.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 11.1 km/u (3.1 m/s), richting: → 277°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 07:15): 3.7°C (Mist)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 1.7°C (-2.0°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 5.4 km/u (1.5 m/s), richting: ↓ 349°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 11.2 km/h (3.1 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 94%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1020.9 hPa ↗️ +0.5 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 0.4 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.1
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 07:09 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 18:35

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 105 🟠 (Ongezond voor gevoelige groepen)
• PM2.5: 45.3 μg/m³
• PM10: 59.6 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Tech-adjacent Dyson, Epson, and Whoop also have a crack

World War Fee  Tech companies have started suing the US government to seek repayment of tariffs that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional.…

banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

Marugame, Kagawa Prefecture, Shikoku, Japan
日本四国地方香川県丸亀市

Marugame Castle was built high up on a hill overlooking the city as a means to help control the area. The castle is one of only twelve so-called "original castles" in Japan, i.e. castles whose keeps have survived the post-feudal period (since 1868) intact.
Source: www.japan-guide.com/e/e5465.html

Marugame Castle has one of the highest and most beautiful stone walls of any castle in Japan.
Source: www.japan.travel/en/japans-local-treasures/marugame-castl...