This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
> be me
> be downtown on bicycle
> actual protected bike lanes
> zipping past hundreds of people that decided to drive for some reason
> bumper to bumper traffic
> road capacity literally maxed out
> honking and yelling at almost every intersection
pic related
My job is 15 mountainy miles away, and when I show up drenched in bicycle sweat everyone in the office says I smell bad
> be me
> live in a relatively new part of town in the Netherlands
> bike 20 minutes to the city center
> no hills or mountains because netherlands
> See almost no cars because most bike routes are completely seperated and shorter than car routes
> Park my bike in a surveilled parking area funded by the city
> Do all my shopping for the day and return
> MFW my friends and family don't even realize how good we have it
So how easy is it for an American to move to the Netherlands? Asking for myself
If you are skilled labor, yes: https://www.expatica.com/nl/finance/taxes/the-dutch-30-ruling-explained-101641/
But what @abbadon420 said is equally true. Housing market's fucked beyond belief. Now, if you want to WFH and live out in the sticks, you'd be set.
1 gal of gas: ~29k calories - $4.609
~29k calories of rice: ~$600 <-- sus math btw 🤔
It's simple: drink the gas.
okay, update:
my math was wrong. new cost of rice: ~$11.5 (ordering in bulk)
CONCLUSION
Drink the gas.
Be American
Living paycheck to paycheck
Need job
Good worker
Work overtime when needed
Trying to pay off car
Smug biker does a driveby near open car window
Rethink my life
Realize U.S. infrastructure often requires vehicles
In middle of daily 40min commute, one way
Realize the same distance on bike would be two hours
Depresso
This is why we need good public transit on top of good biking infrastructure. The two working together let's you get anywhere a car can go while not taking a lot longer.
You're not wrong, but that's not going to work over the entire country. There's just too much space to cover; the country would go bankrupt trying to provide mass transit everywhere that it's needed. So while this could be, if you could convince people to actually do it, a solution in urban areas, it's never going to work out in the thousands of miles of country and they have the exact same problems. They just have less traffic and more empty space to cross.
We didn't go bankrupt making a car-centric infrastructure, we won't go bankrupt building adequate mass transit and micromobility infrastructure. In fact, we will probably profit greatly in myriad ways.
Have fun commuting 30 miles to work on that thing. Especially when there's 8 or 10 inches of snow, -10 wind-chill, or there's a thunderstorm rolling in. I've seen people do it; they look absolutely fucking miserable and it's a miracle it doesn't kill them.
sees happy person
gets mad
Respect to those folks. A miserable ride is often rewarding because it's one of those lows that is eminently temporary and gives you an appreciation for the highs, especially if you are dressed appropriately so as not to catch a cold or some such. Kind of like shoveling snow for that sweet sweet mug of hot chocolate on the sofa afterwards. But yeah, also a good city will provide alternative options for its citizens, trains, buses, rideshare even. If a 30 mile bike ride is the only alternative to driving from place A to place B, your government doesn't want you to have any kind of freedom to choose how you get from place A to place B, if there are no affordable housing options or good job opportunities that change that equation, your government is working on behalf of the big car manufacturers and dealers to keep you enslaved in debt to them, which is pretty fucked up
Bruh I will literally just stay home if there is that much snow I'm not fucking stupid