Many know him as Ron Swanson from Parks & Rec, but that’s a character. He’s a dynamic actor, a hilarious comic, eloquent author, and an outstanding woodworker. I like his honesty and pragmaticism. I enjoy the way he brings his characters to life. His writing transports me in my mind. His woodworking is inspiring to me. His comedy makes me feel seen in this human experiment. I love his laugh; he clearly likes to be goofy, much like myself. He came through my town on his American Ham comedy tour and that’s when I got a real feel for who he is as a person. He loves his wife enthusiastically. He’s a connoisseur, whether it’s words, whisk(e)y, wood, what-have-you. He’s inclusive; understanding that we’re all just individuals living our lives and wanting to do our best. You’ll find a wide swath of genders working and managing his woodshop which means a lot to me as a woodworker because it’s often a male dominated industry. I’m white, cis, male, and shoot, even southern (Appalachian) American, but I staunchly believe in accessibility and inclusiveness. The more I learn about Nick, the more I like the guy, and I’ve learned a good deal about him. I’ve had this dream for a while about reaching out to see if he’d want to go paddling with me down the oldest river in North America which starts in my area, but I’m just some guy, and he’s probably pretty busy.
I’ve the that confusion, too. I saw someone saying AI shouldn’t be controversial because we’ve already had AI in video games for years. It’s a broad and blanket term encompassing many different technologies, but people act like it all means the same thing.
Netherlands here. We’re dealing with a couple of difficult problems, each of which making each other worse:
Nitrogen oxide emissions crisis
Nitrogen oxide emissions are a serious problem for biodiversity, and as a consequence the EU has put limits on how much nitrogen emissions can be emitted close to Natura2000 areas (which are a form of official nature reserve).
However, the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and also has a lot of these Natura2000 areas.
Now it turns out that basically all human activity emits nitrogen oxide in some form, and it’s completely paralyzing the ability for anything to get done.
This problem is core to a lot of the other problems my country is dealing with right now.
The government is trying to limit nitrogen emissions, for instance through means such as buying out animal farms, but this is not very popular.
Housing availability crisis
About a decade ago the government abolished the ministry of people’s housing, because it was believed at the time that such a ministry was no longer necessary to provide enough housing. This coincided with the after effects of the 2008 housing crisis.
As a result, every year since too few houses have been built to meet demand, and now we are dealing with a crippling shortage in the housing supply.
The government has since realized the problem and is attempting to tackle it, but the aforementioned nitrogen oxide crisis also makes it very difficult for new housing development to obtain the necessary permits.
So instead the government tries to push hot-fixes like rent-caps, which ultimately just reduce the supply of rental properties even further. This is because land-lords cannot make a profit renting out these properties with the proposed rent-caps, so they just sell the property instead.
High inflation / High cost-of-living / High interest rates
Last year, like much of Europe, we were dealing with pretty high cost-of-living and inflation rates.
This is a direct result of our prior dependence on Russian gas, and the war in Ukraine disrupting the supply of that gas.
I stand with Ukraine, and I think it is good we quit cold turkey on our addiction to cheap Russian gas, but it had a lot of serious knock on-effects on the cost of living and the inflation rate.
The ECB (European Central Bank) has tried to fight the inflation rate with interest rate hikes (and it would appear they are succesfull at doing that). But by raising inflation rates, they do slow down the ability to invest in the economy. This in turn affects things like the ability for property investors to build housing, which worsens the housing crisis again.
Full electricity net
On top of all this, we are also running out of capacity on the electricity net.
This is going on at the same time that we are trying to eliminate our natural gas consumption for environmental reasons, as well as the need to reduce our reliance on potentially hostile foreign powers (see Russia).
This is causing numerous issues with regards to businesses switching away from gas, new businesses opening, new housing construction, etc…
Severe employee shortages
Despite everything, the Dutch economy has been running pretty well, and as a result there has been very low rates of unemployment. It’s gotten to the point that there are significantly more jobs available in basically every field, than there are people to work those jobs. That is causing other serious problems in turn.
As an example, public transit cannot find the necessary workers to get all the trains to run reliably on time.
Another example is a shortage of workers in the construction industry, which worsens the aforementioned housing availability crisis, and the electricity net being at capacity.
Another example is a shortage of engineers able to plan out extensions for the electricity net
This shortage can pretty much be extended to every industry right now.
Asylum crisis
On top of the other stuff going on, we also have a large amount of asylum seekers trying to obtain refugee status in the Netherlands.
Under normal circumstances these asylum seekers would apply for asylum in Ter Apel, which is an asylum processing center. They would stay there until they obtain refugee status, after which they would find a regular place to live elsewhere in the country.
However, the severe housing shortage is making that last step impossible, which is causing refugees to stay in Ter Apel for far longer than they reasonably should be. This is clogging up the system with people to the point where Ter Apel has long since exceeded capacity.
This causes numerous problems, and politically it’s very difficult to get other parts of the country to carry their weight in dealing with this crisis.
The main concern is that refugees take away houses from the Dutch people who are also unable to find housing.
14 years of a mainly liberal-conservative government (VVD), and a future mainly populist government (PVV)
While I think the VVD (liberal conservatives) is not as bad as some people make the party out to be, they are liberals… And liberals seem to be allergic to interfering with market forces, even if those market forces are actively making things worse.
Because of this, government action on all of these crises over these past 14 years has largely been too little, too late.
The people are fed up with the inability of the government to solve these issues, and have voiced their displeasure in last year’s general election.
But instead of voting for a party which will tackle the fundamental issues mentioned above, they largely voted for the PVV (populists) who blames all problems on the refugees and migrants.
They propose to significantly reduce the number of people coming into the country.
However, they seem to ignore that our economy is highly dependent on skilled migrants coming in to work for companies such as ASML. They also seem to ignore that reducing the number of people coming into the country will worsen the general employee crisis we are already dealing with.
So while I hold out hope that they might be more effective than the VVD, I’m not holding out hope for any meaningful change in the next term.
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I probably forgot a few things, but these are the main issues my country is dealing with right now.
Sorry for the long post, but there is just a lot we are dealing with.
i keep seeing comments like this. i want to point out texas has a LOT of poor and uninsured people, but the state economy is pretty decently sized with a lot of business investment.
that’s not really a bad thing for preventing secession. you think those with energy and tech money want their shit fucked up by Abbott and MAGA?
!trendingcommunities is a good place to check out to find which communities are on the rise jn terms of posts and subscribers, and to discover those communities.
Most farming gets subsidised. This is a good thing. You want excess in the system. You’ve seen what the free markets did to housing. You don’t want that happening to food.
The slavery-in-all-but-name isn’t such a good thing, but hey-ho.
Dumb take, the housing prices isn’t caused by the free market, it’s caused by the lack of it. There’s a huge demand for new houses in this country, but developers literally cannot build them because of our shitty zoning and some of our brain dead regulations.
If you want to use userscripts, definitely install Violentmonkey instead of Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey, as Tampermonkey is proprietary and steals user data and Greasemonkey hasn’t been updated in years
Stop suggesting Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey. Tampermonkey is proprietary and steals user data, and Greasemonkey hasn’t been updated since 2021. Use Violentmonkey, it’s completely FOSS and up-to-date.
Hey I’m also using Violentmonkey and always recommend it over other options. But your comment got me wondering and I’ve checked. Turns out Greasemonkey actually dropped a new version a month ago. Not that this changes anything for me, just wanted to correct the statement.
No problem. Unfortunately Tampermonkey is recommended in many articles, guides, blog posts, etc. because people are unaware of what it does. Violentmonkey should be far more popular, so users stop downloading proprietary crap, simply because it’s the best known userscript extension.
New York is incapable of hiring a mayor who doesn’t suck ass. That’s just what they do. It’s like asking why Louisiana or New Jersey elects corrupt politicians. It’s just a way of life.
Jokes aside, though, crime was way higher back in the 90’s and he was a prosecutor who was “tough on crime” even though he was friendly with the Russian mob. The police union (which is unusually political in NYC) was behind him. No one knew that one day, he would beclown himself every day for the rest of his natural life
Q: When does the copyright on the next version of Mickey Mouse expire? (Steamboat Willie has no gloves and is black and white, I expect that will be how Disney protects the more modern versions of Mickey.)
asklemmy
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