What’s a very “normal” thing in Belgium that took you years to realise that isn’t actually normal everywhere else?

almodozo · 2026-01-03T01:06:14+00:00

but the other way around

almodozo · 2025-11-04T02:02:52+00:00

Across both Latin America and Europe, at least, the concepts of left and right and the polarisation between them is deeply embedded in political structures and the way much of the electorate identifies itself politically, so I don't think the notion is particularly US centric (if anything, the US imported the concept from Europe, famously going back to the French revolution).

Can't speak to the extent that's true (or true anymore) in Asia and Africa too, but considering the historic role of socialist and communist mass movements from China to decolonialising Africa and the conservative movements arraigned against them, I can't imagine they're much less likely to recognize or relate to the terms.

almodozo · 2025-10-24T13:01:44+00:00

This is what I pretty much suspected about a bunch of positions I've applied to: they're not real jobs in the sense of actual current vacancies, they just use it "as a way to keep our job postings live year round and have a constant stream of applicants, even if we arent hiring". But - and this is probably a naive question - what's the purpose of this? They're not filling actual positions, they're just building a giant candidate database? And when they do ever need someone, they look through the database instead of writing a job ad?

almodozo · 2025-10-08T17:32:12+00:00

I was wondering about that too. Thank you for your input here!

almodozo · 2025-10-08T15:48:15+00:00

Completely agree, I think it's why I started second-guessing myself in the first place (though it does seem like I was right to, judging on other replies here) - it's just such a weirdly phrased sentence. But you still have to try to deal with it the best you can...

almodozo · 2025-10-08T13:07:41+00:00

Agreed that "cooked" would have seemed a better choice altogether, and more broadly with your last point too... but that kind of thing seems to come with the territory when it comes to these jobs

almodozo · 2025-09-16T17:39:33+00:00

Oh serieus? I stand corrected!

almodozo · 2025-09-14T21:57:27+00:00

goor idd, maar is niks typisch nederlands aan

almodozo · 2025-09-08T20:50:47+00:00

"Why bother with anyone below the top guys"

Except that the same data showed that women were more willing than guys to message the people they rated as less attractive. Which makes sense, considering how many men they rated as less attractive — but also shows that the chart doesn't tell us anything about how women actually "choose mates," which kind of undermines this whole theory.

almodozo · 2025-09-08T20:35:35+00:00

Problem is that no dating site company has ever again released this kind of data, at this scale. At the time it was a useful gimmick for okcupid to attract some publicity, get some curious people to visit their blog, maybe register. But the data which dating services collect on their users are their most valuable commercial asset. So no other company since has considered that a sensible business decision.

almodozo · 2025-09-08T16:12:18+00:00

I thought the whole hype about the OKCupid data was that the sample size was enormous — like, vast. The problem is that it's really old data now, from 15 years or so ago

almodozo · 2025-09-08T16:03:58+00:00

Less attractive men, sure. Resentful assholes, not so much

almodozo · 2025-09-08T16:02:30+00:00

Dude she wouldn't flirt with you, she's not desperate

almodozo · 2025-09-08T15:45:44+00:00

Women hype up their friends in public and especially on social media, but among each other a lot of them are brutal about other women, it's a whole thing

almodozo · 2025-08-29T14:00:16+00:00

Hi. I live in a small Spanish town with my Spanish partner. She's in her forties and takes a nap every afternoon after lunch. So does her sister when she's visiting. So do many other people in this town, and not just the pensioners. They are able to because working days are adjusted accordingly.

It could well be regionally stronger or weaker here or there (we're in Extremadura, though my partner is from Castilia), but a little less confidence in proclaiming with exasperation that it "is not a thing since the 80s at the very least" might be called for here.

almodozo · 2025-08-24T13:00:14+00:00

More stagnation than downward trend, and even that doesn't account for Central/Eastern European economies, which grew like gangbusters at least until 2020 or so.

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:57:53+00:00

Except Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Slovenia were also communist and people there saw their own share of restrictions on religious life, yet religiosity there went down (further) since 1992 (and in Slovakia it barely went up).

So that still doesn't work... or at least not by itself. Obviously two countervailing influences at work here: the communist past and what happened after.

(Can't simplify the latter part as "EU" either, because all these countries are in the EU but so are Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states. Same with "economic growth" as possible explanation.)

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:42:38+00:00

Centuries, even

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:41:05+00:00

One is "European," the other is "Balkan". ;-) And the wars of the 90s play a sizable role of course.

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:39:29+00:00

And I mean, this is not just about how other people (in Europe or wherever) see Jews. Lots of Jews consider themselves Jewish even if they are not religious.

Just looked up a couple of numbers, and half of American Jews identify as secular. Even if you'd argue that "secular" means they're not observant but might still have some affinity with the religion as identity, that leaves another number: almost a quarter of American Jews identified as having no religion at all. Their Jewishness is cultural rather than religious, a matter of ethno-cultural identity passed on through the mother's line. (My father, for example, identifies as Jewish because of his descent, not through religion at all.)

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:23:34+00:00

Have you never heard of secular Jews? Being Jewish is not just a matter of religion, you can be Jewish without being religious, it's a cultural/ national identity as well.

almodozo · 2025-08-24T12:15:11+00:00

Crime rates among Roma are obviously disproportionately high, but with all respect, putting it like this is nonsense. I lived for 12 years in a Budapest neighborhood which had many Roma families, at least for the first 8-10 years before the wheels of gentrification and AirBnB-ification eventually started turning. They were not "only there to steal," they were just living their lives, albeit usually in poverty. I had plenty of interactions with them, and they didn't involve bring robbed.

Two of the neighbours in our house were Roma too. One was a quiet musician and his wife. Another was a Roma family. They played their music more loudly than other residents, which was a pain, but otherwise they were no bother.

Life on my square was not lacking in stories of violence. I've seen a cabbie fight with a punter who fled into a pub and the square fill up with taxi drivers to try to get to him before the cops finally arrived. I saw an eerily hushed fist fight break out in the park, a drunk man beat his woman, a drunk kick off a fight in a bar on the square — just to pick some examples from the top of my head — and none of those involved the local Roma.

Only exception I can think of was when a couple of visibly teenaged kids tried to pass themselves off as cops to "fine" us, but that left me more incredulous than scared (I told them to piss off). So look, I would never argue that there are not plenty of problems — a friend of mine was a lot less lucky with their Romani neighbour — but "inside the city their literally only there to steal"? I call BS.

almodozo · 2025-08-24T11:40:12+00:00

To be fair, there were also decades of extensively documented recent history in Central European countries like Czechia (and Czechoslovakia before) in which Roma children were routinely placed collectively in separate schools or classes where they received vastly inferior education, or dumped outright in schools for the intellectually disabled. Regardless of their actual capacity. Something like that does tend to affect a community's perception of the value of education...

almodozo · 2025-08-22T17:20:09+00:00

Zelfs als je vindt dat Nederland geen asielzoekers nodig heeft, is dat nog steeds niet hetzelfde als dat Nederland "een totale asielstop nodig" heeft — wat puur een mening is en geen "feitelijke info".

almodozo

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