I just finished my domains from them; absolutely ridiculous to charge almost $40 to renew a domain that was $6 the year before.

I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.

They were right.

Meanwhile, when I ask my mother her opinion about this: “but Hunter Biden made so many corrupt deals and he was doing crack!”

American living in the Netherlands, and I knew of him before moving to Europe. I like some of his music, “Tripping” has a fun video.

Programmer and systems admin

In the Netherlands my electric prices have remained steady but gas went up substantially.

As far as I (a non-British person) can tell the actual proposal hasn’t been released yet so: nobody knows.

I do know that I wouldn’t count on them doing a good job of defining what “social media” is; and if we’re being honest then IRC, Usenet, forums, and Lemmy should all be included in that definition as they are all forms of it.

I started coding when I was 10 (yea, I know, that’s earlier than usual, but still!) and I learned so much from programming forums and mailing lists that I think it’s safe to say my entire career would be on a very different or VERY delayed path if I wasn’t allowed access to those until I was 16.

Sorry, you must be old enough to pilot a multi-thousand-pound vehicle at highway speeds before we let you learn about the dark magic that is Perl and awk.

Should we attempt to regulate how social media companies operate, educate children and parents on the possible harm and how to avoid it, or do anything with the goal of just improving the way technology is used?

No, we’ll just ban it. Something that has famously always worked well.

In a way this makes me a little sad. I met my wife via IRC, I built long lasting relationships with random people I met online when I was a teenager; I learned so much about programming and Linux/BSD/Solaris from online forums of people that took time to help my dumb ass out. All of that same potential to be swept under the rug because of trash like TikTok and Facebook.

Living in the Netherlands, I do a Grandpa Simpson and walk right back out the door.

But uh, being from the US and having not lived there in a few years… 40% tip now? Growing up it was 5%; 10% if it really good and 15% to be generous. The whole practice is so weird to start (there’s no difference in the effort involved serving an expensive steak vs serving a glass of soda, so why the hell does one demand a higher tip?) but saying the prices on the menu come with an invisible 40% markup… wtf?!

So it turns out most of my youtube subscriptions are history related, but…

• Kings and Generals for historical battles because I’m a giant nerd.
• Miniminuteman for fun debunking of archaeology myths
• Mark Felton for WWII history
• toldinstone for Roman history
• History Matters for short introductions to historical topics with amusingly drawn characters
• The Tim Traveller for slightly odd and very nerdy travel destinations
• History With Hilbert because… uh… look, I like history okay?
• Atun-Shei Films for US civil & revolutionary war history
• WorldWarTwo for a documentary of WWII that advances one week per episode (originally recorded in real time)
• TimeGhost for general history done by the same people that make WorldWarTwo
• antichef is some guy that started as a pretty bad amateur chef trying to make Julia Child recipes. Now he’s a decent amateur chef doing the same.
• Dr. Glaucomfleken for medical jokes
• Townsends for early American history and recipes
• Primitive Technology to just chill and watch a shirtless guy in the Australian outback build housing and tools from absolute scratch
• UshankaShow for Soviet history and discussion of life in Soviet Ukraine

I was the sysadmin for a local company that mainly did custom ecommerce & CMS site building for local companies. Way before I started they also provided email addresses to local residents, and the first like ~100 people to sign up got a free account for life. We offered like 250MB storage, which was pretty awesome in the pre-gmail days.

Anyway, one of the lucky residents to sign up was a very interesting guy. In and out of homeless shelters, he ran for mayor every election, and at one point built his own three-wheeled Segway-like thing that he decorated to look like a Roman chariot that he would ride around during the weekly farmer’s market.

So yea. One day we get a call and the usual tech support bump it up to me because they don’t understand it. I answer the phone and am met with a barrage of rants about how my company is in league with the satanic monsters at AOL trying to stop him from becoming mayor and how once he’s elected he’ll blow our cover and expose us all.

Dear reader, he was trying to send an email to an @aol.com account that didn’t exist, and was getting a “no such address” reply from their “mailer daemon” - their mail server software.

I didn’t know who he was before then, but that’s how I learned.

One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.

I read (no citation here, I forget where I saw this now) a while back somebody involved saying that their procurement policies require they accept the lowest bid tended, as long as its legally submitted and not obviously a scam.

So yes, typical neo-liberal right-wing mentality is very much at fault I suspect.

Since the article is in Dutch, let me try to provide a little extra context:

1. It’s not actually the company that runs DigiD, that’s Logius, who is part of the ministry of the interior.
2. It’s about the cloud-hosting company that DigiD runs on. The DigiD code was open sourced, though it looks like the GitHub repository is now archived (https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app)
3. It really is used for everything related to authentication with government services. Doing your taxes, scheduling an appointment with the city government for <insert anything>, scheduling a doctors appointment, getting a prescription refilled, on and on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t DigiD created by Logius, which is part of the “Interior Ministry” to roughly translate into English?

It’s not all that remarkable for being in Europe, but… five weeks vacation per year.

The only places without a housing crisis at the moment are places where nobody wants to live.

There is, nationwide.

But also everywhere else in Europe, and everywhere in the US that I would be willing to live. What can you do eh?

Good food does exist, it just takes some time and effort to find out where to go and where should be blacklisted. And there’s like three good Mexican restaurants in the whole country.

Moved from the US to the Netherlands in 2023 and regret nothing. The opportunity came in the form of the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty. It makes it ridiculously easy for Americans to move to the Netherlands, if you are self employed. It worked for me to move, and when my business went sideways due to my main client screwing me over, I got a normal Dutch job as a highly-skilled migrant.

Downsides:

• Pay is decidedly lower compared to American salaries (but pretty good compared to Dutch standards)
• Spicy food is rare
• Korean food is also pretty rare
• Good Mexican food is borderline nonexistent. My coworkers saw nothing wrong with “cheese flavored yogurt” being applied to nacho chips instead of actual cheese. I once tried a local restaurant’s nachos and got a plate of chips covered in a really sweet ketchup.
• While everybody speaks English pretty well, you WILL want to learn basic Dutch to better understand important legal or medical meetings. But you should be learning the native language anyway, no matter where you go.

Benefits:

• Everything I need is within walking or a short bicycle distance
• Nobody is going to shoot me here
• I can get medical treatment without going bankrupt
• Health insurance doesn’t cost as much as rent
• My asthma inhaler doesn’t cost 1/4th of my rent
• High fructose corn syrup is rarely found here (it gives me migraines)
• The cities are more attractive (more appealing architecture)
• The roads are damned near immaculate. I don’t drive here because I don’t need to, but on the rare occasion I’m in a car it’s impossible to not notice how good the roads are. I have crossed the country from Schiphol to Nijmegen and didn’t see a single pothole anywhere, in roughly two hours on the road. Seriously, they could spend 10 or 20% less on the roads and still have what would be the best roads anywhere in N.America by comparison.
• The work-life balance is insanely better (I get 35 paid days off a year, starting from the moment I started working). I can tell my boss I’m sick and that’s that. If I move to a new home I get a free day off.
• Trains are much more enjoyable for traveling between cities than driving; I’ve been reading so much lately
• Dutch is a pretty accessible language if you’re a native English speaker that already understands some basics of German
• Nearly everybody speaks English better than the people I grew up with in the mid-west
• A huge amount of Europe is only a single day’s travel away
• Store workers here aren’t obviously beaten and ground into a raw bundle of nerves and depression like in the US. Of course it’s not a workers paradise by any means, but people generally seem more genuinely happy.
• So many restaurants have patios or tent covered tables to enjoy a drink or meal while staying outside to enjoy the weather when it is good
• Food from Suriname is really good, as are frikandelbroodje and kaassouffle
• Nijmegen’s Vierdaagse can be a blast, the whole old/inner city becomes a giant festival

There’s probably more benefits, but those are the highlights for me. All around though, the biggest advantage is that I can easily see a much better future for myself and my wife in the Netherlands than I can in the US.