Bob

I imagine a lot has changed in that regard anyway, especially with the way mainstream politics has gone in the intervening years, but it does indeed sound like you lived in a bit of a bubble at the time too!

I’m probably falling into the habits I caught when living in Britain and using the word “excellent” to mean what people in other countries think of as “good”

I’m British, and I know the British tendency is to understate rather than overstate, so I don’t know how you’ve landed there!

for areas with less demand…

That’s why I expressly mentioned that it was because they don’t learn Dutch: so you don’t have to wonder if there were any confounding factors at play.

Dutch is easy (a relative term, admittedly) if your mother tongue’s English because they’re so closely related. Many basic words are either very similar or spelt the same but pronounced differently. Bit like what Spanish is to Portuguese. I think it’s quite obvious that native speakers don’t learn Dutch quickly, if at all, because they have no one to practise with, and perhaps the idea of switching languages being rude plays a part too. I’ve met a couple of people who think it’s not worth it to learn and none of them were from the Anglosphere.

That said, most Dutch speak excellent English

That’s not true, not excellent English. Many speak enough to get by, except the elderly and the young, and some of them speak it well, fewer still excellently. Over four years, I’ve met probably a handful at most who could express their deepest thoughts and desires while pronouncing “th” correctly and their As not as Es.

Many banks won’t take you in if you don’t speak Dutch and it’s harder to find a job (this was in the news just recently, as it happens: nearly all international students are struggling in the job market because they generally don’t learn Dutch, despite there being so many vacancies). You can definitely get by with English, and I’ve heard of many people living here decades without learning Dutch too, but if you want to live well, that’s another thing altogether.

The good news is Dutch is easy if your mother tongue’s English or German but there is indeed a problem in the Randstad of it being hard to convince anyone to let you speak it with them, in part because they often overestimate how well they speak it. There’s a relatively famous quote from colonial Indonesia about how the Dutch colonisers would rather speak bad Indonesian than Dutch, which the Indonesians spoke fluently. I think it’s like a feedback effect with the reputation they have for knowing second languages.

Anyway, details details.

You’re not all too far from Hebden Bridge if you settle up them ways anyway. She’ll be sound. Best of luck to yous.

Please don’t tarnish our beautiful, antiquated British system with such names.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2P0X1oT30

No, I saw the screenshot in the article of “going to PRISON?!?!?!” and thought, you know, I don’t think that’s all that schocking in itself. Granted it had the look of Tumblr about it and Tumblr’s signature move is overreacting, in hindsight.

I’m laughing quite hard now but I do apologise. Hopefully this makes it clearer:

• "Is this how I find out that
  • "other people find
    • “finding out that someone’s going to prison”
  • less normal than I do?“”

Yes! Sorry!

Is this how I find out that other people find finding out that someone’s going to prison less normal than I do?

I’ve had the odd dream where I’ve vividly smelt something putrid, but I’d say every dream I have includes sound. I’ve had a couple of dreams where the world ended suddenly and I remember the almighty rushing noise and the sound of my never-ending sigh. I’ve dreamt a good few times about people I know speaking other languages they wouldn’t normally speak, too.

Objection! Does the baby on the bus not likewise go wah wah wah?

“Ladies and gentleman of the committee, I put it to you: thousands, perhaps millions, of American songwriters have written about missing their truck. How many have written about missing the bus? I rest my case.”

I didn’t expect such a positive reply, haha. Good luck with it, I’ve completely degoogled except for the odd Youtube sesh and I haven’t looked back so far.

Objective ways Openstreetmap is better:

• More regularly updated (one street I used to live on in Amsterdam – a cosmopolis – has only recently been added to Google Maps, whereas I used Openstreetmap to find my way there when I moved in four years ago).
• People who update it get credited rather than an already disgustingly rich company; you can submit edits to Google Maps but they often don’t get implemented, at least not with any alacrity, and they keep the intellectual property rights to the data you submit.
• Better for privacy (probably goes without saying).
• Open-source, for what it’s worth.
• The map is colour-coded and actually easily legible rather than every way being a white or light grey, sometimes hair-thin line on a white background.
• Actually useful for people not sitting in cars as it shows pedestrian ways, cycleways, parks in detail, crossings, gates, stiles, etc.
• Useful for non-navigation purposes, in fact it’s the map of choice for people gathering map data.
• The directions don’t send you the wrong way up one-way streets or along roads you can’t ride your vehicle on, among other mistakes.
• Openstreetmap shows public amenities like bins, water fountains, benches, etc. I’ve used it to help my dad who has Parkinson’s get a quick bit of rest while visiting cities, for example.
• Google Maps is admittedly quicker for looking for branches of big companies, but you can do that without a map, and Google Maps is chock full of random businesses registered at people’s homes and searches can be obfuscated because richer companies pay to come higher in the search results.
• Google Maps has public transport info, but the info is so often wrong that I would seriously advise against using it.
  • I used to work at a train station and people would come up asking why the train shown on Google Maps wasn’t showing on the departure board;
  • I’ve seen people miss the last train of the night because Google Maps said it was leaving later than it actually was;
  • it often doesn’t show the quickest or easiest route and you can’t refine the search the way you can on public transport apps,
  • etc. etc. I’d say the info on Google Maps is so bad that it makes Openstreetmap better because it doesn’t tempt you with the false promise.
• The other features Google Maps is garnished with aren’t really needed if you can read a map or if you just need a map, like:
  • street view (nice to have and has made Geoguessr possible (now pay-to-play in part thanks to Google’s closed-source APIs), but itself updated by volunteers who have to resort to things like holding signs with their company names to get credit and only updated every few years or so on average),
  • opening times (whether it’s correct information aside, you can just look that up otherwise and get it from the horse’s mouth), or
  • searching for something like cafés within a given radius (when’s the last time you went to eat out and thought, “any café will do, but I’m slightly pickier than to warrant just walking further up the road to find somewhere, and I can’t be arsed just looking at the local area on the map and picking out cafés”? And are those cafés even open when Google Maps says they’re open? Not necessarily!).
• I’m sure something else I can’t think of at the moment. You can see I’ve been asked this a fair few times.

Could’ve picked a better abbreviation for “no-bullshit games” than “nobsgames”, haha.

almost everyone would select Google maps and get a better experience.

Spoken like someone who’s never used a different map provider!

We call them spatulas moneysavers in the business.

Wolf is an old name for Lupus, which of course is Latin for wolf.

It’s such a common-sense rule that it’d never occurred to me that such a developped country wouldn’t have it.

One funny thing about the dictionary is that complex words are explained in simple language and simple words are explained in complex language.