I'm dutch as well and travel relatively frequently to the US (just came back from Washington DC). I'm not sure I see the impact of this "decline" you seem to notice. Perhaps this is also why the "media narrative" is not reporting on it, since it is not really felt that way?
Housing is expensive and we built far too little in the last decades, but this is also extremely expensive the the areas of the US where you actually want to live (The coastal cities, usually). Besides, this seems to be a global issue you read about everywhere.
I feel that, on average, most things in the Netherlands are of a higher standard — from public infrastructure and transportation to healthcare and the overall quality of everyday things, whether it’s food, trains, hotels, or even the items in your bathroom. Every time I travel back and forth I notice this.
Sure, salaries for certain jobs are much higher in the US, but I wouldn't want to switch except to begin a startup, maybe. I like doing business in the US and would visit for the amazing national parks, but prefer actually living in NL. That said, a rise in salaries and perhaps a more business and capital friendly environment are things I support.
FCC doesn't regulate cable stations. Local municipalities do have contracts with cable companies for enforcing community standards. Would be funny if blue cities just started forcing Faux News to be dropped as a matter of preventing dissemination of harmful lies and distortions.
As much as I dislike Faux News (I dislike CNN too, and I lean left), I feel like silencing "fake news" is a slippery slope because for one reason or another, the US population doesn't understand what "facts" are, so red cities would probably just drop CNN on the pretense of it being "fake news," and then everyone just gets forced into their little bubbles and everyone loses.
why wait for travel until you are retired? Retirement should not be "the" goal in life.
I've been traveling for holidays every year since I was 25 for at least 3 weeks every year, loving it so much. First it was backpacking, now it transitioned into a bit more luxury as I got older.
You don't know if you'll be hit by a bus next year, retirement is a silly milestone to focus on.
Fox News is less a news outlet and more a performance art piece in which actors, costumed as journalists, deliver carefully scripted outrage to an audience so thoroughly conditioned they believe they're watching journalism—when in reality, it’s more akin to a soap opera written by a political strategist and directed by the ghost of Joseph McCarthy.
Proving reviews are fake is hard indeed. A few years back I fell for fake reviews. I was booking a trip and saw a fairly new "boutique hotel" with good reviews (on booking.com). Once we arrived, it was nothing of the sort. The hotel was grimy, the room was small, things were broken etc etc.
Once home I looked at the reviews again and I noticed a pattern: each review had only a few sentences and, in hindsight, odd language. For example, it was praising the management in quite a few of them. I don't know about you, but I've never considered the quality of "the management" of a hotel, let alone that I would be inclined to write about it in a review.
I'm sure they paid a shady company to post those reviews in order to boost their rating. I complained to booking.com, but of course they never did anything with it. I imagine it is hard for a platform to do, but I'm also sure they can do more than they do now.
It's never going to be perfect, because then you get into the arguments about exactly what a "fake" review is. But it could be better.
Because as you say, it's pretty common for companies to just go out and buy reviews. You see it all the time on places like Amazon - where a new product suddenly has hundreds of 5* reviews, all saying similar things, from accounts that just go round giving 5* reviews to all kinds of products. It's blatantly obvious to anyone who ever takes a cursory look at the reviews, let along to the company who has all the backend and analytical data about them.
Hopefully this means that companies are required to start doing something about that, or at the very least to respond to complaints like yours rather than just ignoring them.
I read "Atlas Shrugged" but I found it to be a frustrating read, mostly because of how simplistic its worldview is. When I read it, I felt like the complex issues it tries to tackle—capitalism, government, individualism—were reduced to black-and-white moral arguments, without much room for nuance or ambiguity.
The characters didn’t help either. They came across as one-dimensional: the so-called heroes are always right, always rational, while anyone who disagrees with them is portrayed as either stupid or evil. That kind of writing makes it hard for me to take her "philosophy" seriously.
You are right. However, I think I agree with the vision, too bad its Musk+Tesla. I do think in the end we won't each own a car.
It's so incredibly inefficient to have individually owned cars just rotting away on the side of the road and in car parks waiting for their owner.
It would be so much better for everyone if no one, except enthusiasts, would own a car. And you could just grab an "auto taxi" wherever you are within a few minutes instead. Perhaps someday...
I think Musk should be more bold in his vision here. What if instead of a cybercab that seats just two people, we could come up with an even bigger one that seats many people at once? And then maybe we could have it drive on a predictable, efficient route that covers multiple popular destinations, instead of just going from point A to point B. Has anyone considered building something like this?
Driving labor is a significant cost for running a taxi fleet, so automating it allows taxis to become much cheaper to operate. Taxis can charge higher fares than buses because people overwhelmingly prefer “going from point A to point B” over walking to, waiting for, and riding on buses.
Buses are already cheap and removing the cost of the driver would offer only a marginal reduction in cost.
They literally did this in the announcement for the cybercab. Look up the “Tesla Robovan”. It was clearly a proof of concept, but in theory it’s a good idea. Claimed to be able to seat 20 people.
part of the problem is wasted space and money in cities for parking (and, to a certain extent, gridlock). i do own an old, bottom of the line car which i drive rarely - mostly on weekends out of the city as i usually cylce or take public transport. so it often occupies a parking spot 24/7 for a week or longer. on-street parking takes away a lot of spaces that's urgently needed for bike lanes, bus/tram exclusive lanes, walking and green spaces.
there's a good option for car sharing in vienna (car2go), but that's mostly inner-city iirc, so not my use case.
i guess, car sharing wouldn't reduce grid lock but ride sharing would. i suspect, ride sharing would be more acceptable if it wasn't your own car.
We develop and deploy dotnet on Linux at my shop, it works great. I can recommend it to everyone, the dev experience is wonderful. With Rider as a development environment my team couldn't be happier really. I did a lot of development in C, java and python, but C# feels a lot more solid and developing with it truly is a joy.
Can confirm, dotnet works great on Linux. We have a lot of dotnet production systems running on Linux and Docker for many years now with zero issues. Also recommend Rider in Linux for development, even our Windows folks prefer it over VS nowadays.
This was maybe a problem on the early days of .NET Core, but from .NET 6 or so they have reimplemented (almost) all the stuff from the old .NET Framework and that in turn enabled relatively easy porting of third party libraries, so most of them are ported as of today (atleast more or less maintained ones).
Housing is expensive and we built far too little in the last decades, but this is also extremely expensive the the areas of the US where you actually want to live (The coastal cities, usually). Besides, this seems to be a global issue you read about everywhere.
I feel that, on average, most things in the Netherlands are of a higher standard — from public infrastructure and transportation to healthcare and the overall quality of everyday things, whether it’s food, trains, hotels, or even the items in your bathroom. Every time I travel back and forth I notice this.
Sure, salaries for certain jobs are much higher in the US, but I wouldn't want to switch except to begin a startup, maybe. I like doing business in the US and would visit for the amazing national parks, but prefer actually living in NL. That said, a rise in salaries and perhaps a more business and capital friendly environment are things I support.