> 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.
You can drive though the Netherlands in 3h, for Americant’s that means there are no sticks.
The Netherlands is less than half the size of my state. There is nowhere in the Netherlands that is more rural than where I live right now, lol.
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.
100 grams of raw white rice is 365 calories, meaning that it’s about 3650 calories per kg. 29k calories of rice is 8 kilograms.
Where are you buying rice that it costs $75/kg???
If you drink a whole canister of gas, that’s enough to cover your nutritional needs for the rest of your life!
Yeah but I don’t have to carry an actual ton of weight on my bike.
Except when I’m taking yo mama home after date night
Taking this further, that $4.60 of gas will power the most efficient car for about an hour.
That $12 of rice is enough energy for you to power your bike for like 50 hours.
Conclusion: Just drive your car. Do you really want to waste 49 hours on your bike? /s
But that’s because that fuel is used to do much, much more work. if you scale down the unit to, say, a scooter (50cc) it will last much longer. Most scoots have 1gal tanks and they can get over 100mi per tank.
That being said everyone will think you lost your license due to drunk driving so to prevent this you should replace alcohol in your life and simply drink gas.
Real ones will switch to drinking biofuels because they’re better for the environment.
Ethanol is a good option.
Pro-tip: make sure it’s not denatured and is purified—it’s less dangerous for consumption that way.
Wait a second…
simply drink gas
No, drink diesel - more calories per gallon, even though it costs more per gallon, too. The calorie difference is more than enough to offset the cost difference.
If you bike regularly, you actually don’t spend more calories. You only see calorie burn uptick when first taking on new exercise, which falls off over time back to your usual normal calorie cost. Because of this, that calorie cost for a biker is calorie intake they’d already consume even if they didn’t bike. It’s essentially free, in contrast to the gas of the car which is always a cost.
Checkmate liberal. /s
There was a Kurzgesat video about this a couple weeks ago. Apparently if you don’t spend calories exercising/biking, your body will find other ways to burn it like increasing your immune system activity (which can have poor long-term effects). There’s an adjustment period when you do start exercising where energy is still spent on sedentary things and the actual exercise before the former is reduced to mostly match the latter.
I have also read that regular exercise can lead to an increase of base metabolic rate by ~5% though, which is like an extra 100 calories per day.
One thing to account for is that humans are very inefficient at converting food into energy output. Only about 25% efficient to be precise. So you need to eat about 4 times more calories than you end up outputting into the bicycle.
The same thing applies to ICE cars, their engines are also very inefficient. EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%, they only end up using more energy than a bicycle because of how much faster you usually drive them. But if you drove an EV at the same speed you would ride a bicycle they would be vastly more efficient. And that’s not even accounting for the amount of energy used to produce food in the first place, which is a lot higher than the energy content of said food.
The superior choice is obviously an electric bicycle though when you want to have the most sustainable transportation, you get all of the efficiency gains from a battery operated motor, whilst still having the low weight and drag of a bicycle
EVs however reach an efficiency of 80-90%,
That’s not accounting for the inefficiency of turning heat into electricity in the first place (turbine generation is about 90% at utility scale) or turning photons into usable electricity (photovoltaics are at about 20%). And with turbines, you have to account for the inefficiencies in processing the fuel to get it to that point.
The whole universe is just an entropy generator and we’re gonna lose a lot of useful energy as we try to manipulate it.
Actual unironic gigachad moment
And park directly in the immediate front of the building I’m visiting. No circling around and around without finding a space to park my overly expensive rust box. Just arrive, lock the bike to a post and be there.
Totally different experience in that aspect alone.
Hm… Is there any law that says I can’t ride my bike in the store? 🤔
Sure would make shopping faster.
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.
I miss Japan’s public transport. Never felt like I needed a car while in the city.
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.
I was specifically addressing people commuting to their job and traveling within their immediate area. That kind of stuff could definitely be covered by biking and better bus/light rail investment without having to go everywhere. The only people who wouldn’t be covered by that are people living in the country and they are a minority compared to those living in suburbs or near big cities and could still be served by public transit using park and ride stations if they have to travel to a bigger city. They would just drive to the closest park and ride station and then use the public transit to travel within the metro area. Of course if they’re traveling entirely within less populated country areas then public transit won’t serve them that well but at that point you can just use cars as a backup. But public transit investments could easily serve the majority of people for their daily travel needs and even if they do have a high cost the economic benefit of making it easier for people to commute to work and to cities for fun day trips will create more economic value over time being a net benefit in the long run.
Get a closer job or move closer to your job if it’s a good reliable job. I did and it’s fucking wonderful! Riding gets easier and easier as you get stronger and better cardio too.
Took me a long time, a lot of work, and some luck but I can’t recommend it enough. Most days I ride my bike or skateboard, but even walking doesn’t take long. I only resort to a car if I’m too injured to ride/skate/walk far or the weather makes it too dangerous (which is rare, I’ve ridden through more storms than I can count lol, icy conditions suck though).
Damnit, now I want to go for a ride.
>just get a job closer to your home
>just move
Idk man, not sure either of those are the easy solutions you’re implying them to be.