Comments by "John Gottschalk" (@JohnGottschalk) on "​​Why The Netherlands Is Insanely Well Designed" video.

  1. In the Netherlands I can start biking and basically bike from town to town, without hardly being in the middle of nowhere. In the US I could easily bike hours from some places before reaching the next nearest town. This is a huge difference.
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  2. Netherlands exports agricultural products, not only veg, but in fact tons of meat and dairy products. Unfortunately these are heavily reliant on imported feed with additional nitrogen, artificial fertiliser and grass monocultures. This along with parasitic bank loans, that require farmers to double their amount of animals. This has lead to a massive excess nitrogen problem in the soil, along with the heavily machined processes, the soil is practically dead, dutch farmers pump nutrients into the soil to try and get any product out, but it is a very fragile system. Fragile to insects and diseases which leads to more ways to kill insects,, and fragile to frosts and downpours. Most small farmers can't keep up and are being priced out by massive cattle farms and fertiliser companies. Bad for the soil, bad for the food, bad for the farmers, bad for the climate, bad for the Netherlands. The only people benefiting from this process are the bankers, the lobbyers, and a few mass-corporate farm owners. Most farmers regret it now, but are stuck in their loans and with their destroyed soil. There were huge strikes just before covid in 2019.
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  3. Oh did I mention most of the feed is Soy grown in farms from Brazil, farmed on burnt-down sections of the Amazon? Oh yes, the Netherlands exported their efficiency and ability to design roads right up and into the Amazon to accomplish all this. The Dutch Amazon Soy Corridor / Soy Belt. What a modern wonder to destroy other people's nature, after destroying your own.
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  4.  @somegoofystuff  In fact the way we got such good bike roads in the netherlands was not just complaining but a very strong public protesting. "Stop de Kindermoord" campaign in the 70's, along with new city grid planning that included: (from smallest scale to largest) paths only for pedestrians, paths for bicycles and pedestrians, roads with cars, bike paths and sidewalks, roads with cars and separate bike paths and sidewalks, and finally highways just for cars.
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