• 0 Posts
  • 2.46K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle








  • The good old Mythical Man Hour.

    (In simple terms, as the number of people increases, the communications overheads also increase, generally faster, so if you have more people a greater proportion of time is wasted, hence work done doesn’t increase proportionally to the number of people. Or if you just want to inform management that more people won’t simply mean the work gets done much faster just give the example of “If takes 9 months for a woman to make a child, it doesn’t mean you can get 9 women and make a child in one month”)


  • It really depends on the country and people’s personality.

    In my experience in Southern Europe people tend to love share stuff about themselves (and will easilly go into their life story) whilst in Northern Europe getting anything about them without having a long acquaintance with them is very hard if not impossible.

    Apparently the Finnish are very averse to small talk (pretty much the opposite of Southern Europe).

    Then there are also other variances - in Britain they’ll tend to portray themselves as better than they really are feeling, in Portugal they’ll tend to complain about life and things and in The Netherlands, if you do get them to open up, they’ll be very matter of fact.

    After language, it’s maybe the hardest kind of thing to get used to when going to live in another country.




  • In the opposite direction, when I moved to England it took me a while to get used to compliment “inflation” over there.

    For example when somebody’s opinion on something is:

    • “interesting”, it means it’s shit
    • “ok”, means it’s bad or mediocre
    • “good” and “great”, means it’s average
    • “wonderful” and “amazing”, means it’s good

    I once asked one of the natives how did they transmit the message that they trully believes something was a 10/10 and was explained that’s done by going into details on how something is so great.


  • Well, the language is generally different, which is a big barrier to moving (though you can get away with just English in a most countries, but some stuff - often public services - is only in the local language). There is also a cultural element in that people behave and expect slightly different things in different countries, which can be a bit of an adjustment.

    Even bigger than that is that most people aren’t comfortable with big changes and tend to stick to their own country - at the very least the first big move takes a significant amount of courage.

    Then if you have your own house with lots of stuff you have to arrange for the move, which will probably cost you maybe €1500 - €3000 depending on the distance and how much stuff you have.

    And finally, in my experience no country is all good or all shit - they generally have some good things and some bad things. Also, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence until you move there, were after a while it’s the grass on the other side of the fence that starts looking greener.

    That said, some people - mainly the so-called Digital Nomads - do spend their life moving from country to country whilst working remotelly, which works especially well if you spend different Seasons in different places in Europe (some places are much better in the Summer and others in Winter). This is not new: I’ve met people whose life was working as Scuba Diver instructors in Summer in a country and as Ski Instructors in Winter in a different country.



  • EU countries are allowed to, by Treaty, expel EU citizens who moved there without the means to live there or a job.

    However it’s incredibly rare and there really isn’t any general procedure to do it: each country does it (or not) it’s own way. This tends to be used for people caught sleeping or begging on the streets.

    Further, for countries in the Schengen Area, they don’t even know you’re there unless you register, since you haven’t passed any border controls and thus aren’t in any database as having arrived but not departed.


  • I’ve literally done that inside the EU, though to the UK (back before Brexit) rather than Germany - I flew to London and stayed about a month in a hotel whilst looking for a contract there (I’m a freelancer) and more permanent accommodation.

    Years later I did the same to Germany, though I only stayed 3 months.

    The only requirement is that you either have a job or have the money to pay for the costs of living there (so you can still go without a job, as long as you have the money to pay for a place to stay, food and so on). The reason for the requirement that you can pay your way (either from a job or savings) is because people can’t just move to another EU country to do things like living on the street and begging or living of the local Social Security.

    Some countries also have a requirement that you register after 3 months there (for example, Germany), though it’s not any kind of applying to stay, it’s simply registering as living there. This is usually because there are associated obligations for residents in that country, not just in terms were do you pay tax, but in some countries (for example, Germany and The Netherlands) there are things like mandatory health insurance.

    In practice as an EU citizen, if you have the savings or the kind of job which you can do in 3 month stints or remotely, you absolutely can hop from country to country every 3 months without having to register with anybody (though I’m not sure how taxes would work - I suppose you would pay them in the last country you registered as a Resident).

    If you know the language, if it weren’t for taxes being per country and the rights and duties of Residents being different in different countries (such as the Mandatory Health Insurance for Residents in some countries but not others) hence the requirement to register after 3 months in some countries, the whole thing would be as easy as moving within your own country.




  • Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.

    Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.

    Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid “for Google” ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don’t really have to use the air-mouse stuff).

    Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don’t want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.

    The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.

    It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for “personal” media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.