I don’t mean this to sound crass but 2% unemployment sounds lovely. The United States is normally around 9 to 12% unemployment.

You’re right we definitely do have more open positions and a lot of those jobs, But ultimately I think it kind of washes out by the fact that everything here is so expensive and that unless you’re paid extremely well in your field it’s really hard to make it.

Anyway this has been really interesting hearing about some of the issues going on in the netherlands. I have some research to do. Your government tends to be a lot better at governing in mind so I’ll be interested to hear what the solution that y’all come up with.

Little mini pond with rice fish sounds awesome! That’s when I’d like to do. They don’t need a heater because they’re cold water. They breed on their own and they’re beautiful to view above. I really like fish that are kind of understated like Japanese rice fish. Although I’ve seen some really gorgeous ones that beat out even the prettiest Guppies.

As far as advice goes for your little mini Pond I would recommend using the walstd method. I keep a tank that’s unheated and with no filter myself and really the only two things that are required in my opinion are a sand or gravel bed. If it’s gravel it needs to be deep enough to hold nutrients underneath it.

I typically prefer sand. Then you can add snails like Malaysian trumpet snails or assassin snails which I think can handle the cold. You could probably even get away with nerities but they turn the substrate and help pull mulm underneath it and it keeps the tank cleaner.

If you’re doing a mini Pond you can get away with using all sorts of terrestrial plants, I’ve seen videos of people using peace lilies as like the main Center Point and Main vegetation filter, I really want to try something like a money tree because in the wild where they’re grown they actually grow in a bog like a mangrove and can be grown in straight up water without rotting. Plus the fish will eat whatever rot’s there and so will the snails if you choose to add them.

A lot of people are going to be like don’t add Malaysian trumpet snails, they’re pests, yeah they can get out of control if you overfeed the tank but I find they control themselves really really well and if you have something they can dig into like a sand substrate you don’t hardly see them they’re normally underneath the substrate. They’re awesome nocturnal so they don’t come out at night and they’re super good at cleaning algae and turning your substrate. So for me they’re one of my favorite snails to include in a tank that has a sand substrate because it helps keep the tank clean.

Past that it’s a lot of fun and I think you’re going to really enjoy it. Just get ready to do a lot of testing and have a way to react if you do need to change something about the pond. So you know get good aquarium test kit. You only needed to check ammonia, nitrates and nitrates, but the pH test is necessary and can inform a lot. And I find the gh/kh test also be very helpful for diagnosing what’s going on. You be surprised how often it’s not the ammonia causing problems it’s the ph and the lack or excess of GH.

I’ve had my cold water tanks set up for about 6 months which is kind of like a mini pond. It doesn’t have a heater. It doesn’t have a filter it only has a light. I did add a small AirStone just to keep scum from forming on the top. I really didn’t have to do much after I planted it and put on the sand cap and let everything settle. It’s been going strong. I have had to correct some things because my water is damn near distilled and that’s causing issues with some of the fish I want to keep which need much harder water than what I keep. So if your water is very low on GH or KH make sure you get argonite which you can get at any Petco or PetSmart to help buffer your water. It’s the same thing as crushed Coral but you don’t have to order it online and it’s easy and accessible.

You can also save a ton of money by going and getting a lot of your supplies from the hardware store instead of From aquarium stores so You can get like black diamond blasting sand if you want a black substrate. A lot of people use pool filtering stand for a pure white substrate. I like to use coarse sand that people use in concrete. Where I’m at it’s $6 for a 50 lb bag. The equivalent aquarium substrate is over $100 for a 50 lb bag. Generally it’s $30 for a 20 lb bag. Just make sure to rinse it well before you use it. This is also the place where I get my lava rocks and then if I need bigger forms of lava rocks I glue them together with super glue. You can fill in the gaps the with sphagnum Moss and superglue. It works a lot like the paper towel method but looks a lot cleaner. Huge bag of lava rock is like $5/$6.

You will hear some people complain about how rocks can interact with the water and cause pH changes. And I will tell you that I have tried to use this on purpose and it is a lot harder to do than you think one or two rocks that may mess with your pH isn’t going to really have an effect on your pH even over a long period of time. Think of it this way your tank will consume the GH and KH of the tank and you need some way to replenish that over time otherwise the pH of the tank will crash and you could lose some of you’re more weak or sensitive tank inhabitants. By the way these rocks that can interact with the pH are typically white rocks. It’s marble, limestone, argonite, different forms of calcium carbonate. If you were to just buy the random rocks from the hardware store that aren’t white the likelihood they’ll interact with your water is practically zero. If your super worried about it that’s why you have the KH/GH test and you can test daily if you want.

I’m sure you know about Gathering materials from nature too so I’m not going to go into that. But I do find that the hardware stores often overlooked as an excellent source of cheap resources.

Last bit of advice is that sometimes when you’re getting fish initially it can feel really awful if they pass away but a lot of the time these fish are very sick and you don’t have a good way of treating them. If you’re in the US you have access to a lot of medications you can start them on kanaplex which is a really good General antibiotic for initial use if your fish look sick. If they have parasites you can use Metroplex and a combination of prazipro. It’s really good at treating most parasites but if they have worms you need to get another medication called Expel-P. That medication is light sensitive so you need to turn off your lights after you give it and it’s best given at night.

If they’re not getting better on kanaplex or you think you need to boost it mix neoplex into some frozen food that you can get at Petco/Petsmart.

Just used one scoop for one Ice Cube. Most of the frozen foods that you can get at Petco or PetSmart are in ice cubes about the same size.

After you get your fish in through the quarantine. And they’re about 2 months old you can stop worrying about if they’re going to die from infection at that point the only thing that will kill them is tank stress. So just worry about keeping a good tank and they’ll be fine. Obviously when you’re dealing with live readers you’re going to have a lot of these little fish and you’ll notice that some of them just die. That’s not anything you can do the sometimes just have bad genetics because they’re just aren’t predators that are able to eat these fish and they use large broadcast rates. Since you’re trying to keep these fish I’m sure you know this and I don’t want to sound patronizing I just want to reiterate it because I have wild type guppies Which do really good but occasionally I do lose one or two here and there.

Have fun friend if you’re not having fun in this hobby you’re doing it wrong 🤘

Ah yes we should just swallow everything any NATO country tells us as an objective fact.

Understood.

Ugh.

• Omar Khadr: Pled guilty to spying in Canada in 2010 was held in gitmo Bay before being transferred to Canada

Seriously I don’t know why I’m I’m even dignifying this with a response because we both know that they hold people there that they accuse of being terrorist or Spies of terrorists without any due process and so we don’t know their names typically and we don’t know why they’re in there other than what the US government will tell us which isn’t much.

We also have multiple officials from that time admitting that the president and most the administration from that time knew that most of the people put in gitmo Bay were innocent And kept there because it was politically expedient. And that’s just according to Wikipedia.

Still it’s not a far stretch to imagine that United States has imprisoned foreign spies in places like gitmo Bay without informing the public.

Sorry I read something else and got confused I’ll go correct the information later.

hurr durr none of these were spies. They were only accused of spying

Duh

Ahmed al Halabi

This guy was actually acquitted of the charges but was still horribly abused inside the prison: Captain James Yee

Mohammed Hashim

Omar Ahmed Khadr

I mean these are just a few. This wasn’t even hard to look up. Did you not expect that there would be actual spies in one of the US terrorist torture camps?

~~That’s an interesting part of the story but in this case this Canadian tourist hadn’t live in the country at all. I feel like the speed at which he entered the US and then died indicates a problem with us custody and handling.

Like I feel like it’s more egregious if you lived in the country for 30 years and then you know were prosecuted as a spy but to just die from being detained is total bullshit~~

Misread something not valid.

Someone’s never heard of Gitmo Bay 🤣

From my personal experience people in the US don’t have a lot of different jobs to choose from but we really don’t. Unless you have the education and connections for the most part you’re relegated to retail. It’s hard to even get into management nowadays. Sure there’s job growth but for the most part it’s for minimum wage retail jobs or salary jobs that are for Dollar General where your work 80 hours to the Bone.

Most of my family Works Blue Collar construction jobs because they pay more consistently and they’re easier to get into then the white collar stuff that I work in

Would you mind expanding on how there’s a limited job market in the EU? I have the standard American perspective of the EU of being this nigh utopian place of freedom and competition even though I know it’s actually not like that. The EU does definitely help with those type of regulations. The United States answers to the people with the most money typically the companies. That’s why the iPhones would never be USB C if it was up to Americans.

Iran has not confirmed that they have him in detention and this was a spy. They literally caught a US spy. Do you know what we do to people we catch spying in the US?

This is quite literally not the same thing. The US has accidentally killed a Canadian tourist. If a part of Iran’s government killed a US citizen we’d use that to launch War today.

I mean that’s kind of the Crux of the issue though. The mom and pop shops really want minimum wage to stay low so they can stay competitive with the big box stores.

But those same big box stores also drive out the mom and pop shop by driving prices much lower than the little shops can and then they suffer because people stop going to the shops because they’re more expensive.

Regardless voting with your wallet is not necessarily a viable choice and I don’t generally think works well. United States has been pushing to buy from small business for over 20 years and yet small businesses still keep on failing. The United States only really helps out big business. Small businesses are left to fend for themselves and often don’t make it. Honestly even if the public is really small business oriented unless the government is also small business oriented it’s kind of like swimming against a tidal wave.

The United States right now has a a social system that’s threatened very close to Bare Bones and is often non-existent for the poorest. Even to make it work it’s a bureaucratic nightmare that involves multiple departments and could involve months of legal business wrangling.

So I can see for you why maybe this minimum wage doesn’t make a lot of sense for the Netherlands but in the material circumstances surrounding the United States I think this minimum wage increase makes a lot of sense especially considering that we haven’t had a significant wage increase since 2009. The median minimum federal wage should be $22 and that allows the poorest communities in the poorest parts of the United States to have a living wage. For anybody else that’s living in poverty that’s still not enough especially in the blue states where most of the social services are located. Even in New York City $30 an hour for minimum wage it’s going to be hardly a drop in the bucket.

I’m not sure about the Netherlands housing crisis but what adds insult to injury and a lot of Sting that ours is that ours is self-induced. It’s literally being created by companies like Black Rock and other hedge fund in stock portfolio businesses buying up residential houses and keeping them empty until the time is right to rent them out to maximize their profits. Currently there is roughly 2 million or so empty houses in the United States and there’s only 600,000 homeless people at Last count.

No I appreciate what you’re trying to get at though and the perspective you offer even if the rest of the community did not. I’m not saying it’s your job as a foreigner to worry about any of this. United States politics is complicated and honestly it really it shouldn’t be up to people outside the country to fix it. Perhaps the Netherlands will show us a way out of the mess that we’ve dug ourselves into with solutions to the problem that you guys have because we also have those problems. I kind of feel like they’re more Universal problems though at this point

😭

Oh I’ve seen some people keep these things in some really cool tanks with plants like the peace lily in small outside ponds. I think these would look gorgeous like that and I think they would do really really well. As long as I could keep the temperatures correct in the water in good condition.

Thanks for the advice friend!

Oh I see so we’re coming from a very different places. We don’t have nearly the type of safety net that you guys do out in the Netherlands. I’m sure you guys definitely have your problems and your fair share of issues but to Americans it feels like the United States is literally collapsing around us.

Like most of us if we lose our job we’re probably going to lose the place we live as well. It’s not uncommon to have to move back with your parents to couch surf after you lose a job. The minimum wage in America doesn’t even cover like a car payment for a decent car. It’s not nearly enough to live on it’s being basically given change all day and then ask to live on it on top of the fact that you’re treated like absolute crap. You have zero say in your work and how it’s done and if you have problems with your boss your boss can just fire you because they feel like it. As long as it’s not one of the discriminated categories with of which there are only five they can fire you for anything up to and including the color of your shirt at any time without notice. And in many places in the United States if you get fired you may not qualify for unemployment or any of the state assistance.

The absolute only way to make it out here is to get a job that pays enough money so that you can find a place to live and have Private health insurance. If you can get on the Medicaid system it’s actually not bad but they’ll take it away from from you over getting things like a bonus or maybe a dollar in raise.

We live in a capitalist hell hole where we can’t hold anybody to account. We can’t hold our politicians to account. We can’t hold our police to account. Nor can we hold our justices to account.

The government has determined we all just have to grin and bear it and pray they don’t alter the deal any further to take more from us.

That’s why you’re going to see a lot of business apathy from those in America because we’ve been screwed most of our lives and are tired of it. It’s very blatant and very obvious

Ooh I’ll definitely be looking into these when I have more room. Not for breeding I just like looking at fish. I’d be a terrible breeder I’m so forgetful.

Big oof. India seems to be doing much better on their minority policy than even United Kingdom is. Seems the West may not be the Bastion of so-called Freedom anymore

Eh nothing of value was lost

I was going to say that’s still better than the Lemmy scene.