What you are referring to is absolute poverty. However, even if you can cover the very basics, such as rent, food and healthcare, if you have a lot less than most people that is known as relative poverty. Both are important to combat. I am assuming the definition is made as it is because it is quite simple to compute. Finding a good measure for cost of living is a lot more complex and easy to get stuck arguing what is an acceptable standard of living.

I don’t understand why you claim it would be impossible to reach the definition?

A simple constructed example: if the median income is € 20 by hour. A minimum wage of, say, € 15 would be considered safe. Why is that impossible?

A quick Google search shows me Destatis.de claims the median wage in April 2023 was € 24.59. Then 60% of that would be € 14.75. I would assume the median has increased a bit from 2023, and will increase further towards 2027, but I would from these numbers expect € 16 to for example be high enough to be considered safe from poverty, which isn’t that much higher than the proposed number.

The neat thing about using the median instead of the mean is that increasing the minimum wage only affects those earning the least, and thus doesn’t directly affect the median.

I wish we had 3 phase, but the fact is many European homes only have 1 phase. The distribution is 3-phase, but the residential wiring is only set up to use only 1 phase and upgrading the whole electrical system of our home is simply too expensive. This is in Norway, but it’s similar in many countries.

We recently installed a charger, and the electrician put in a 32A breaker. He told us you should never run continuous draw above 80% of the breaker, which gives us 25A * 230V = 5.75 kW as our max charging speed. Not fantastic by any means, but means we can go from 10 to 80% overnight, which is good enough for us. If we need a fast charge, the local gas station has a 250 kW charger anyways, so we could top of if need be - though we have never needed that so far.

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

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