I don't think it is necessarily hypocrisy, there are several ways to tell the truth.

When one cannot be polite, soft spoken, considerate, or just lacks tact, one can always go the Dutch way. Why bother?

I can only point you to the famous British English - rest of the world conversion table:

https://bridgesandtangents.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/engli...

Go to the huisarts (general practicioner) and chat with him/her in the same way as you would with a doctor in the US.

You're going to experience the dutch directness firsthand.

I found that out very soon in NL where you see mostly Dutch cheese in the shelves and just a very tiny small section with "world" cheese. Cheddar cheese became rarity at home these days.

AH Tasty Tom are pretty decent too.

Tasty Tom is very nice, but they are 2.5x more expensive than these.

I tried that strategy here in the NL and got very nice looking tomatoes but still, watery and tasteless. There is just not that much strong sunlight during the spring months to bring the taste out. I guess it's worse in greenhouses which is where most (if not all) tomatoes are produced here.

tigers in the amazon? leopard maybe.

I think you mean jaguars.

weather, house prices (Ams), company food, expat friendliness, ppl mindset, etc, a lot could be a bit better I guess.

Check tax rate in countries like the Netherlands.

I cannot complain about what I get here for that money, though.

I think people coming from a "sunny", southern countries (like me) would mostly have other things to get used to rather than tax itself.

I use PIA and I can't complain. One issue I noticed that may affect others as well is that they are being blocked more and more around the internet. I don't think this is only a PIA problem though.

Yeah I love PIA, but i've found several sites that outright block you in very "opaque" ways (my favorite is one that says the site is down for emergency maintenance when you connect from a PIA VPN IP).

It sucks, but I think PIA (and others) are going to need to start using different IPs and getting around these blocks if they want to stay competitive.

It definitely is a problem with PIA. And furthermore, they have said they won't be circumventing the geoblocks, as they have done before.

I did just that.

Mac > Hackintosh > Linux. but....

In the end I found out it was far worse having to deal with the crappy alpha version apps for linux than fixing the hackintosh. If you are used to the quality of mac apps you will certainly miss them once on linux. I did.

This was until the day the Hackintosh died with an unknown freaky kernel issue and I made the best decision I ever made: bought a second-hand quad core mac mini.

I never want to hear about hackintoshes ever since.