As a Dutchie, I can attest to this. Most people I know are VERY much reliant on their cars and would rather die than give them up. Our non-car transportation is okay outside of the the big cities (where trams pick up a lot of the slack), as long as you go to another bigger city / town. Once you want to go somewhere outside of that, the cost and travel-time racks up quickly. Also, companies and governments are very much supporting car ownership.

A personal example: I travel to work by car (it's around 80 km door to door). I know, wrong community to admit something like this but I have a very simple reason for it: I get paid more to do so and it's faster. Going by car means I get to work in just under an hour. If I try to do the same thing using public transport, it will take me an hour and 45 minutes.

I get compensated €0,25 per km of driving. My car is quite fuel efficient (a Toyota corolla hybrid which uses around 4 l of fuel per 100 km) which means this easily covers my fuel (and most other expenses that come with driving my car). So when I take the car, I end up getting paid more salary each month.

If I take public transport, my work covers this for me. A one-way trip door to door would cost around €22,00 so that's €44,00 round-trip. It's great that they do this but it doesn't benefit me to do so. I don't get extra salary and spend more time traveling, for which I am not reimbursed. Therefore, I end up driving instead.

And like I said, the "amazing public transport" you see represented online is usually only the big cities. Outside of those we heavily rely on our trains and buses, which aren't anything to boast about. I've taken the train in other European countries and had very similar experiences for a much lower price. On top of that, if you live in a town that doesn't have a train station, you're dependent on taking a bus from that town to a bigger town with a train station in order to get anywhere. And once you need to start doing that you're going to have a really rough time getting anywhere without a car.

I live in a bigger (left-leaning) city with good connections elsewhere through our train station. Our local public transport isn't great, we just have buses. I wish our municipality would explore other transport options as well but they don't seem eager to do so. I live fairly close to the train station but that doesn't change the fact that the different in travel time is so significant.

I'm not going to move for this job, I've never moved for my job since jobs come and go. I search for them in a specific radius from my house and my current job was definitely on the edge of what I feel comfortable with. That all aside though, moving there (Utrecht area) is basically impossible with how expensive housing is nowadays.

I fully agree there should be less subsidies for driving and more for public transport. I understand being able to drive is a privilege and if public transport felt like a solid alternative I would use it more often. I like being in the train, it's quite relaxing. I was just trying to highlight that the Netherlands isn't perfect either and that people sometimes idealize our public transport and infrastructure.

Lol maybe all the people he's trying to get rid of should do this, just say "no lol" and stay. Let's see what happens then.

The American reaction in the second frame should've been: cool, here's more weapons.

As an outsider I honestly just don't get what people see in this idiot. How can you take someone that talk like that seriously? He sounds like a nutter that is promising crazy stuff that would literally mean the end of the USA as we know it.

If he'd get his way with this and the other project 2025 stuff it'd honestly be the end of America I think.

I mean, I'm not an expert by any means but haven't the republicans been able to very efficiently stifle democrat majorities before? If they just follow that playbook (delaying things, being pains in the ass, constant insistence on funky rules) they can at least annoy the shit out of them and hopefully slow things down. They're way too polite for that tho, they'd rather just let it happen and hope they come out okay in the end then to risk the wrath of the annoying orange and his minions.

Please China, slap back with an even higher number. See if you can out bluff the annoying orange. I feel like American consumers are way more reliant on Chinese stuff than China is relying on American goods.

Well apparently he doesn't do that, news outlets are saying that all of his kids are from ivf.

Lol if only it worked like that and there weren't a bunch of MAGA idiots still backing him. That being said though, I don't think DeSantis would be any better...

He also incorrectly tried to correct Zelensky on when his fucking country was invaded... Clown

I'm still happy that I went through the effort to delete all my old posts when I left Reddit a while back. I periodically check if they've restored them and luckily it hasn't happened so far. I do miss some of the bigger communities but overall I'm having a good time on Lemmy.

As a Dutch person, I'm very glad we've made this decision. After reading about Ireland doing the same I didn't think we would but I'm glad that we did and also that we've decided on this somewhat early instead of waiting to see what the "bigger" countries are doing like we usually do with these things.

This could have been me. For the longest time I was watching right wing YT channels without really realizing it because they were hiding their messaging well under legitimate critique of the movies and shows I was no longer enjoying. My girlfriend and I got into multiple arguments over this and I could tell that this was something we'd never agree on, which makes sense of course. Eventually I managed to pull myself out by unsubscribing from these channels ocne the messaging became a lot more clear (around 2021, you can probably guess why) and since then things have been much better between us and in general.

Besides the amount of content (and the occasional server issues) on Lemmy I haven't missed anything about Reddit after switching.

Speaking as a Dutch person, our infrastructure just isn't made for cars this size. People basically need to enlarge their driveways to park something like this. So if you need to park a car like this it's almost impossible. That would stop most people from getting one, except the type of person that does buy one...

If only our public transport was affordable. We pay way more than other European countries (besides maybe Germany and the Scandinavian countries), especially when you consider how little distance you're really travelling. As an example, to get from Eindhoven central station to Amsterdam central station you take 1 train, it takes you 1 hour and 20 minutes and you pay €22,70 for a one way ticket. If we're looking at distance, this is about 120 km. This means that to get there and go back home you pay €45,40.

If you travel by yourself you can argue that it's worth it to take the train there since parking + fuel isn't that cheap here either. However, as soon as you have more than 1 person the car quickly becomes the cheaper option, even with parking included. As long as they don't solve this issue I don't see any success in their push to get people to use public transport. And I know the solution will probably be to make everything even more expensive but that's not going to help in the long run either...

People would freak the fuck out if he was holding a Koran instead but because it's a Bible it's socially acceptable... Silly stuff.

Okay, so if the uncertainty about tariffs are a factor in the price then why aren't the consoles cheaper everywhere outside the US? If you look at it, they're (taking exchange rates into consideration) even more expensive elsewhere. In Europe, it's €450 which translates to almost 500 dollars. And Europe is not even the worst one, the homies in Canada and Australia are getting screwed even harder.

I think it's more or less just a cash grab. They know people will buy it even at this premium price and they don't care if they lose some sales. The increase is so big that even if you lose some sales, you'll make more money in the end anyway. It's gross.

Haha it's so ridiculous that these articles never take into consideration that people in the office don't have a lot of productive time.

I had the same, I would have a somewhat easy first hour, then spend 2 to 3 hours really focusing and then I'd basically be done for the day and would spend some time idling after lunch until I deemed it was an appropriate time to leave and "work some more from home".

My best year billability wise was the first year of the covid lockdowns, I managed to generate something like 25% more just because of being able to work from home and cutting back on the travel time to customers and being able to multi-task occasionally when I had a quiet day for a customer. I'm glad I live in the Netherlands, hybrid/remote working seems like it'll remain over here at least.

Imo it doesn't matter in what way he said it, it's a baller move either way. No other country leader has mentioned this when having to deal with the annoying orange even though they should have. Even when the NATO summit was going on everyone was just brown nosing the whole damn time, ridiculous.