People in the Netherlands are usually not at all proud of their cuisine, but the cheese is definitely a nice aspect (as someone who eats the >1 year ripened stuff almost daily)

Although for me some of the French cheeses are the best. Just what you're used to I guess :D

It seems like the advice is primarily relevant if you are already very talkative and/or complaining too much about everything wrong. In that case, it will not hurt to take a step back sometimes: this is also leadership.

This is what I could see with my camera in the east of the Netherlands, and even with the naked eye I could easily see some red at times: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

Very nice! Thank you for sharing!

Around 1 AM at night this was the view in the east of the Netherlands: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

With the naked eye I could see moving bright "clouds", and sometimes see streaks of red inside them. After 1:30 it died out quite rapidly for me.

In the east of the Netherlands I was seeing something similar to what you describe, but when particularly active I also saw a reddish glow in places. This is a timelapse I made around the same time: https://imgur.com/a/kloWEOl

Well, if you produce crops instead of livestock, you are not emitting any nitrogen compounds so would in theory be totally unaffected by regulation.

The "local nature" (barely anything left), has already been sacrificed for decades to this. For example, a large drop in insect populations has been recorded, likely because of intensive farming practices. So continuing to do this (apart from EU regulation) does not seem to me like it is very wise. Agriculture is also very dependent on some kind of local nature existing (think pollinators). If you don't care about nature at all, it will be a very dead place soon enough. We are also part of nature, after all.

Note that some of the nature areas are very much man-made. Generally they are the result of either over-farming or over-logging which really reduced the soil quality and gave space for species that can handle poor soil. That is making the impact of nitrous compounds much bigger because it fertilizes the soil which displaces the species used to very poor soil.

As for insect population, that is to do with pesticides, and horticulture. The farming problem causing these protests is nitrous compound emissions caused by keeping livestock. That is a totally different group of farmers.

The reduction in farm animals isn't going to happen within a year (there are not even very concrete plans yet), this will likely be a very long process.

The Netherlands simply has too many farm animals and overfertilization has been a problem for decades. This is especially visible on this map from 2011 [1]. The overfertilization will lead to biodiversity loss, as plants that prefer nutrient poor soils will be outcompeted by plants that can harness the excess nitrogen and/or that prefer acidic soils [2]. Due to EU regulation and court orders only recently did this become a real mess, where building projects couldn't even continue because of the limits on nitrogen emissions.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_Global_Fertil...

[2] https://www.wur.nl/en/Dossiers/file/Nitrogen.htm

Why is that “simply”? Why should we care more about biodiversity than construction and farming? I think really nothing is simple about this trade off.

Even with the proposed reduction in the amount of farm animals the Netherlands will still produce more than enough meat and milk to meet domestic demand, and the reason that construction can't continue is precisely the excess nitrogen emissions produced and the physical space consumed by by the farms. The country simply isn't large enough to not make this tradeoff. And if you don't care about the biodiversity, sooner or later you'll find out that you can't continue with agriculture at all because there are no pollinators left.

I have a similar experience with stainless steel pans. We use them for everything (also eggs, which people seem to find especially hard on the internet). After getting used to the pans (especially cooking on the right temperature), I just don't get the obsession people have with non-stick pans and seasoning.

Additionally, there is something else I wonder about: people often seem to be recommended those pans "requiring" seasoning from a health-conscious perspective, but to me it seems like everything that is involved in seasoning could be worse than just using a non-stick Teflon or ceramic pan to begin with. I mean, isn't seasoning basically burning oil and making a layer of burnt stuff at the bottom of your pan? Can't this stuff flake into your food? I can't find much about this on the internet, so maybe I'm wrong, but it just doesn't feel right to me.

I assume it's a similar thing to "non-GMO" being presented as more healthy. The more clearly artificial something is, the worse it's supposed to be for you.