Oof, you’re probably as out of luck in Drenthe as I am in Nijmegen. In Amsterdam I can recommend La Condesa and Tacoteca as pretty good. I’ve heard rumors of places in Den Hague but I haven’t gotten there yet.

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.

Haha sorry, I managed to submit that comment waaay too early.

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.

Moved from the US to the Netherlands, it’s been great.

Upsides:

Downsides: Decidedly less pay (compared to American amounts, but pretty good by Dutch standards)

Medicine is full of specialization, and pharmacists are more well trained in how drugs work and their interactions. Doctors may default to “blood needs thinned, take blood thinners” without considering how all of the patients other prescriptions may interact with blood thinners.

They also act as another layer of oversight, preventing issues caused by typos and verifying the dosage is correct for the patient.

Omg thank you! I was just starting to look for alternatives

Unfortunately OpenKeyChain is now no longer being developed. It still works… for now.

Followed by: “well it’s my library, so I and my kids should be allowed to check things out when we want to”

A small amount of cream cheese.

All of your descriptions are hardly unskilled, those take a good deal of education, practice, and in the case of plumbers legal certification that probably involves an apprenticeship. It’s absolutely a skilled profession.

In my youth I briefly worked for a temporary agency and did a bunch of odd tasks to fill in when needed. The least skilled thing I did was for a newspaper: sliding racks of newspapers from a conveyor belt onto a long table, watching this massive table vibrate the newspapers for a solid couple of minutes (to prevent pages from getting stuck together as the ink dried), then throwing in the day’s collection of laminated ad inserts into each set, and then pushing the boxes onto the next conveyor belt down the line. Training was thirty seconds of instruction.

I would call it ‘labor’ because it doesn’t need any adjectives or qualifiers. It’s just work, somebody laboring at a task.

30 euro for gigabit up/down, Netherlands

He wrote Altair Basic, which is more than just repackaging. I can only assume he tended towards more business related tasks after that though.

He also once thought every home would have a dedicated ISDN line.

I saw this attitude growing up around evangelicals. “God gave man sovereign control of the earth to benefit us” kind of nonsense.

These assholes see a beautiful park like Yosemite and are disgusted that it’s full of people relaxing and enjoying the scenery; because all they see is a forest of trees to cut down and a mountain range just waiting to be mined.

They don’t care about the long term consequences at all because they’re also convinced that Jesus is going to return any day now, and when he does the entire planet is getting incinerated as all physical reality of the universe is summarily disintegrated as god sends all the good people to heaven and the rest of us losers to hell for all eternity.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the argument that NOT clear cutting the world’s forests was actually bad stewardship of the planet that their god ‘gave’ us.

I have to nitpick slightly; Holland is not a country. Amsterdam is in the North Holland province of the Netherlands.

Source: I’m on the train from Amsterdam to my home in Nijmegen, Netherlands, which is not a part of either Holland.

Not a teacher, but my mother is a retired professor.

It would absolutely work on a large percentage of students, especially the type that are so lazy they are plugging their assignment into an ai. She retired in 22 and had students that had never used a desktop computer with a mouse and keyboard, only phones, tablets, and ChromeOS laptops. Text formatting, beyond the very basics of bold and colors, were a new concept for them.

They’re just not the same for me, unfortunately. They have a place, but I prefer reading.