Aceticon

The local TV here in Portugal also did the whole saying "that some consider a Nazi salute" thing in their news segment about this ...

... and then showed Elon's salute and a bunch of Nazis doing Nazi salutes as examples, leaving nobody in the audience but the blind in any doubt that Elon's salute was the same as the salutes that the Nazis did.

Yupes.

My problem is that for me as a customer their chosen "solution" (me using my phone to see their easy to change menu) provides me no gain whatsoever whilst adding hassle. There are various possible options they could've gone with (blackboard, digital system with tablets for customers, printed piece of paper) with various balances of cost and ease-to-change and they chose the one that maximizes their advantages, minimizes their cost (and maybe it doesn't even do that properly compared to, say, a blackboard) and increases hassle for customers.

In other words, in their requirements for the solution they've chosen to use, they focused entirelly on what was best for them and screw the customer, and if I have a choice I'm not going to bring my custom to a business which has activelly chosen to make my life more of a hassle purelly for their own gain.

Even though they're using Tech for what they're doing, the actual problem for customers is a Tech-agnostic "they did what was best for themselves and made the customer experience worse", and maybe because of my immense familiarity with Tech I really don't get dazzled by there being lots of Tech in their choice and just look at it from a "what does it do for me" point of view (a way of looking at business practices which itself derives from my professional experience: since I both worked on and implemented Business Requirements I got used to look at systems from a "what does this provide to the user" angle as part of the work of designing such systems).

I've worked in Tech for 30 years, done software development in enough areas and at a sufficient senior level to be able to implement the whole QR code support, both coding and systems design, all the way from an App in a smartphone taking a picture and translating into a URL, to the webserver and if needed database on the other side including if needed an ordering system integrated with some internal order request system.

If I was faced with this I would ask for them to bring me or show me a menu. If they said "no" I would literally get up and leave.

I'm not going to be spending time mucking about with my phone to read in it's comparativelly small screen something they could have available on an A4 piece of paper or an even larger format hanging from somewhere in the restaurant just to, at best, save them a few cents or, at worst, satisfying somebody's totally misplaced idea that any Tech is cool just for being Tech. I'm even less going to enshittify my smartphone experience with some app that demands access to my Contacts and wants to pester me with notifications entirelly for the benefit of somebody else.

If there is one thing 3 decades in the Industry, often at the bleeding edge, have taught me is that Tech isn't necessarilly the best solution for everything and that being newer doesn't make something better and I'm not interested in being the beta tester for some half-arsed solution which serves most customers' requirements worse than the older solution and I'm even less interest in installing a software agent doing the will of somebody else on my phone.

It's exactly because I know Tech so well that I just judge Tech tools as I would any other tools and, damn, so much of it out there are just horrible ill-adjusted unstable tools worse than the old-Tech or non-Tech versions.

We're currently conducting a vote on dbzer0 for it via a pinned post.

Last I checked the count was overwhelmingly for banning links to X.

When one's ideological architecture if reliant on the idea that people are defined by ethnicity, whole ethnicities are good/victims and others are bad/aggressors and the ethnicity of a person determines how he or she should be treated, Fascism is but a miniscule distance away.

This applies to Israel (whose constitution very literally says the country is a nation of a single ethnicity and all those of that ethnicity are its nationals) and its sockpuppets around the World, as does in Germany where the authorities have once again revealed their black heart in connection to the Israeli Genocide.

I suspect a lot of those pseudo-idologies and organisations just served to hide those with a Fascist heart during the period when Fascism was "unfashionable" and now that it's on the rise again they're coming out in support of Fascists but using the language of the pseudo-ideology that so successfully made them seem movements for good rather than just another variant of Racist.

Well, if you end up working in an office environment most people you will come across consider themselves middle class because they're white collar workers rather than blue collar workers even if (like most other places, it seems) most of the British middle class tend to live paycheck to paycheck same as the working class.

Also who you'll meet in social situations will depend a lot on where you live, since last I checked most city centers in England had become way too expensive for even young white collar workers to live in, much less blue collar ones.

Anyways, in my own experience going to live in other countries, whatever happens will be a good learning experience.

It's pretty common in most countries for things like waiting for the bus to not queue and in some countries people won't even queue when the bus arrives and they're trying to go in, and instead just try and jostle their way in.

I lived in The Netherlands for 8 and a half years between the late 90s and the late 00s.

My experience whilst living in The Netherlands was that most people spoke pretty good English in terms of vocabulary, accent aside (which, as I myself am not a native English speaker, was not high on my list of priorities). Certain it qualified as "excellent" compared to people in my homeland (Portugal) back at the time. Then again I mostly knew people who had a higher education qualification so probably more likely to use English at work and follow English-language media. (Note that in my metric, "excellent" is bellow having "fully mastered the language" - basically I meant it as can easilly hold a conversation on common topics. 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")

As for the banks dealing with you in English, I still have a bank account with a Dutch bank and they always send me documents in English and still do, even though I don't actually need it anymore. Maybe other banks won't do it by the big ones do.

As for the impact of not knowing Dutch, for job seekers in The Netherlands, in my area - Software Development, which when I moved to The Netherlands I only had 2 years professional experience of doing - that was only a problem for me in the 2 years immediatelly after the Tech bubble crashed in the year 2000, whilst not for the rest of the time I lived there (and as I worked as a freelancer - specifically a contractor - for half of my time in The Netherlands I did change jobs much more often than normal so had quite a lot of experience with it). Can't really speak for how things are now, for areas with less demand for professionals or for people in that hard period of one's career which is trying to get into the work market as a recent graduate with no professional experience.

Also, speaking very good English (as in, better than what I meant by "excellent" in my previous post), I never felt that it helped me in learning Dutch. Agree with the rest that the Dutch tend to reply back in English if they think the other person can understand it, which for me as a Portuguese was seldom a problem whilst for my friends and colleagues from English speaking countries that was commonly a problem (I suspect the difference is because Dutch people couldn't just tell from my accent that I could speak English). My advice for any foreigner stuck in this situation there, is to persist in speaking Dutch even if the other person switches to English.

PS: By the way, my point that being a native English-speaker does not help with learning Dutch is consistent with what I saw with my immigrant work colleagues and friends, were the native English speakers would take longer and not get as far when learning Dutch than those who were not native English speakers. Maybe the Dutch-English works fine but I did not see that happenning the other way around, plus even in my mind my language knowledge has somehow ended up with Dutch and German in the same bucket, English in a totally different bucket, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian in yet another bucket and French also in its own bucket (kinda, as some things are the same as in other Romance languages) - might just be the product of my language learning experience though.

Yeah, it's a bit of a headache to figure out all those details if you have nobody to help you, though generally you can figure out a lot of those things by talking to coworkers - as a saying from my country goes "Those who have a mouth can get to Rome"

However the "expectations" I was talking about are more the nitty gritty details of interacting with others in everyday life one isn't really aware are social conventions (because everybody follows the same version of it as you do in your country, so one naturally thinks that's just the way people behave in general) until moving to a different country and finding out those things aren't actually universal.

Things like saying "it's interesting" when an English person asks you your opinion about something is actually being very critical (you can literally use it as an insult), you're supposed to stand on the right side of escalators if you're not walking (especially in a Tube station) or that, unless indicated otherwise, you're supposed to queue for things if there are other people waiting for it.

Figuring this kind of stuff out is actually quiet an interesting personal growth experience, IMHO.

The concept of "appearences" I'm talking about is much broader than just how people look, and definitelly covers how people talk and behave.

We're talking about a country were rich people have their very own accent, which is not regional - something which I so far have yet to see anywhere else.

If over there you mix with people who are English middle class or above, you'll see what I mean soon enough.

In my personal experience, learning Dutch as foreigner can only happen by a method akin to being pushed into the deep end of a wimming pool and learning to swim - in other words, you have to be in a situation were your only option is to know how to speak Dutch - and I say this as somebody who can speak 7 languages (though 2 of them are at a "just getting away with it" level).

That said, most Dutch speak excellent English and even the State (not the local but the central one) and the Banks will communicate with you in English if you want, so people can live in The Netherlands for decades without speaking Dutch (some of my Brit colleagues when I lived over there were like that).

The Netherlands is certainly a far safer place for a lesbian teenager than Britain and will remain so simply because seeing an sexual orientations as absolutely normal happens at the level of Dutch Society itself, to the point that their first large Far Right party was led by a guy who from the start openly admitted to being a homosexual.

Having also lived in Britain I would say they're "complicated" when it comes to tolerance because unlike the Dutch, Brits are big on appearances and judging people, so tolerance its not a natural part of the social posture over there IMHO, whilst gedogen is something the Dutch are actually proud of.

Hey, congrats for taking that big leap, even if it is to the UK (having lived in a couple of places in Europe including over a decade in the UK, my opinion of the UK is pretty low).

It takes a lot of guts to take yourself out of the environment you know (with all it's implicit expectations of "this is how people behave") and move into a different environment were people don't value the same things, expect the same or behave the same.

Good luck!