For Norway, NRK started releasing viewership numbers since 2018. So not that many years, 2022 was the best year so far with 1.22 millioner concurrent viewers on NRK. Then 2023 saw a decline and 2024 saw a decline and became the weakest year in the tracking with 861.000 concurrent viewers. So still quite a lot of people though it’s a 30% decline.

Would assume this year is also weak, as I haven’t seen to much hype about the Norwegian song, nor much Eurovision hype in general tbh. Would guess 800-850 thousand Norwegian viewers.

What are you talking about? The BBC article references the research paper directly?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4503401/

Yeah, it’s not an issue for most people. I think the system works well. And the annual taxes are very simple to fill out. The report comes filled out for you, and you just need to make adjustments or approve it as is. Never had any issues with tracking or reporting my taxes.

I really enjoy living in Norway. I feel the culture and the way of life suits my preferences very well. There are of course always things one hope improves over time and things that could be better. But overall, life is good here I feel.

Employers deduct a part of your salary as taxes on every paycheck (usually monthly). But how much they deduct is based on your tax profile which is created by the tax authorities. It’s typically based on expected yearly income. However, you are allowed (and encouraged) to update this number yourself.

So say you swap to a lower paid job, or work less overtime than you planned, you can change your expected annual income to reflect this in taxes paid. If you don’t however, then you effectively pay too much taxes as your employer is basing the taxes on too high numbers.

Another reason is that you may have tax deductions that only gets computed into the total when you fill out your full tax report. So if you didn’t bake those into your tax profile at the start of the year, you might get returns on your taxes (with interest).

You can also downplay how much taxes to pay through salaries, in which case you will owe back taxes when the full tax report is made.

In the Norwegian tax system, if you pay too much taxes trough the year from your paycheck, you get interest on the amount you paid to much. Likewise, if you pay too little taxes throughout the year, you will have to pay interest on the amount you have yet to pay. So the system is supposed to be balanced in that regard. The interest is on the level of a savings account (3.51% annual atm), so you could make an argument that saving that in a index stock or good bond is a better ROI though, so still recommended to try to not pay too much during the year.

The goal of pasteurization is to kill of harmful pathogens. If you do this early and package and store the milk in the right conditions it can be stable and safe for a long time.

If you don’t pasteurize the milk and leave it for a long time, pathogens in the milk, such as bacteria, can potentially produce toxins. Boiling it at that point might not help, no, as it kills the bacteria, but can leave behind the toxins.

So pasteurization is very effective if done early, but you can’t do whatever you want to the milk and then pasteurize it right before using it and everything is good.

Volvo was not “offered half of Norway’s oil”. But there was indeed a large collaboration in the works. Norway would trade cash and the rights to three unprospected regions of the North Sea to Volvo, and would get 40% of the shares of Volvo.

The deal was declined by the Volvo general assembly. Even if it had been approved by the assembly, it would also need to be approved by the Norwegian Parliament afterwards, and it’s not a hundred percent clear that would happen.

Here is one article on the matter. It is a bit confusing, because the main proponent for the deal (CEO of Volvo at the time) says the deal would have been worth $85 Billion. While the main opponent of the deal thinks Volvo made the right call because only one of the three regions had gas, and none of them had oil. Both sources are biased though, so it’s a bit hard to know how true these statements are.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-made-85-billion-mistake-2016-6?r=DE&IR=T

So it’s true there was a major deal in the works which would trade rights to natural resources for Volvo shares. But it was a much more technical deal than simply “half of the oil for half of Volvo”.

Well, this is simply incorrect. And confidently incorrect at that.

Vision transformers (ViT) is an important branch of computer vision models that apply transformers to image analysis and detection tasks. They perform very well. The main idea is the same, by tokenizing the input image into smaller chunks you can apply the same attention mechanism as in NLP transformer models.

ViT models were introduced in 2020 by Dosovitsky et. al, in the hallmark paper “An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929). A work that has received almost 30000 academic citations since its publication.

So claiming transformers only improve natural language and vision output is straight up wrong. It is also widely used in visual analysis including classification and detection.

The ad is from the Israeli real estate company Harey Zahav. They posted this on their Instagram account. After criticism and backlash they claimed it was posted as a joke.

The Norwegian journalist collaborative fact checking service Faktisk.no has done a deep dive on this ad with a lot of detail if you want to check it out. You can read it using google translate (or similar tools) you are interested.

https://www.faktisk.no/artikler/jdplr/kraftige-reaksjoner-etter-spok-om-boligprosjekt-i-gaza

Some interesting facts from the article: the ad text says they are working to prepare for a return to Gush Katif, an earlier Israeli settlement in Gaza. The company is responsible for the development of settlements on the West Bank. The owner of the company lives in Moscow and seems to be an oligarch.

So based on the info in the linked in the article the ad is very real. And while the company behind it claims it was all a joke, that does seem a lot like damage control.

They are talking about .gov websites. Any website operated by the US government should, at least according to their own standards, develop for and test for users using Firefox. If this is followed in practice the article doesn’t really cover.