futatorius

They don't want to serve up their articles if they can't do intrusive tracking. It's a scummy practice that breaks the Web.

If you want to read the article, go to archive.is and paste in the URL.

There's much more to culture than artifacts. Besides a few encounters in London, I've seldom encountered "terrible examples of humanity" here. Mostly, people are friendly, or at worst, indifferent.

I live in southwestern England, and make it clear that I have no ancestral ties to the place, I just like living there. People seem OK with that answer.

That seems to be a hard thing for many Americans and Brits to do. I have a couple American friends living in Europe who've learned the language and immersed themselves in the culture, but they're exceptional. One even learned both the national and regional language. Not too many Americans who can converse in Catalan.

I really enjoy visiting Poland. Polish people are often warm, talkative, creative and many have travelled outside Poland. I've had infrequent encounters with belligerent drunks, but it never got to the point of being threatening.

If I were to move there, though, I think it'd take a lot of effort to learn Polish.

I call myself a cultural refugee, if anyone asks.

I have American friends who emigrated to the Netherlands and I go there a lot on business too. There are a few other things that are worth considering: Dutch people are generally friendly, but they also tend to take a strong line on assimilation. If you want to live there, learn Dutch and learn how Dutch culture works. Otherwise you won't fit in. As with any society, there are unwritten rules and norms of behavior that might seem strange at first. For example, the Dutch value frankness more than diplomacy. That can make them seem blunt, even to Americans.

Dutch is not far from English, both are on the same branch of the Germanic languages, but it's very idiomatic, so fluency can be hard to achieve. Also, the fact that everyone's so good at English reduces the pressure to learn Dutch. Language learning's quicker when it's the only way you can communicate.

And the previous poster's comment on the housing shortage is no exaggeration: it's a crisis. Expect difficulty and predatory middlemen when seeking housing.

Also, the weather can be intense: freezing North Sea winds and sideways rain.

Leave your phone at home. Ride a bike or walk, don't drive (defeats giar recognition, ANPR and in-car tracker software). ANPR cameras can also be disabled with black spray paint. Wear a hoodie. Use a VPN and an adblocker when you are online. Practice skeet shooting so you can shoot down drones. Also jam them if you can.

An ankle weight is less damaging. I doubt if gait recognition is all that valid anyway.

the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line

They're aligned with the Liberal party, which is a centrist party which is seldom if ever progressive. The Guardian does put up some articles by progressives, on occasion, but they also publish articles by conservatives. When the Labour Party was led by Corbyn, the Guardian was consistently critical of Labour policy and bought into the rightwing press's phony accusations that Corbyn was antisemitic. Overall, the Guardian's core politics are those of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, as can also be seen by their lifestyle and media commentary, as well as their general smugness. And on economic matters, their coverage is utterly useless. On that, the Economist and the FT are far superior, despite their occasionally odious politics in their editorial pages.

I still read the Graun, though, since the rest of the British press is far, far worse.

A couple of years late, but OK.

An even better alternative is to replace it with nothing. The Twitter-like messaging paradigm is only good for trivia and rumor-mongering.