I definitely agree about the big companies. They have style guides for this and it’s definitely about perception. However, the formal you sounds very stiff and official to me coming from people who are very friendly and informal on the phone and who are in many cases older than me. At the same time I realize that some of their clients might appreciate the formal form and they’re just using it by default instead of overthinking it.

In my experience many small businesses use it in written communication. Even if you just had an informal phone conversation with them, they will follow up with a formal email. GPs do it too in online written consults. I find it slightly annoying, because it forces me to consider doing the same, which I rarely do otherwise.

Sometimes younger people (strangers) address me in the formal form, even though I’m in my 30s.

Big companies usually use the informal form in their communication.

Het staat op de pagina van NOS uitgelegd in het uitklapmenu:

IPSOS heeft in opdracht van de NOS een representatieve groep van ruim 3500 Nederlanders gevraagd naar hun stemgedrag bij deze en vorige verkiezingen. Op basis daarvan zijn deze grafieken gemaakt. Bij voldoende respons tonen we uitslagen van partijen. Als een partij er niet bij staat, waren er te weinig gegevens. Selecteer bij ‘kies een partij’ van welke partij je de bewegingen wil bekijken. Bij het verversen van de pagina wordt een willekeurig gekozen partij getoond.

What I meant was not so much to keep it from happening, but rather to recognize that it’s happening and to give up and move on. Don’t even try to finish the sentence, just start over and explain it in a different way. Yes, you will still have the awkward gap, but at least you can recover from it and keep the conversation flowing.

Actually this is also something that language learners need to cope with to reach fluency. Language learners often have a lot of gaps in their vocabulary that they need to circumvent in realtime. To do so, they instinctively learn to use filler words and to rephrase.

Yes, this happens to me too. I don’t know about you, but for me there might be a component of slight social anxiety that makes my brain go blank in that situation.

A long pause mid-sentence is awkward, so you feel time pressure, but at the same time you realize that the word isn’t close to the surface and you can’t seem to detach from the situation and start digging. You end up waiting for the word to magically appear, but at the same time you’ve already given up looking for it.

I think the key is to recognize this situation and start rephrasing way sooner. Just accept that you won’t be able to be as precise in your phrasing. You can always fix that later.

This is a specific type of chili pepper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_piri.

I’m not sure about that, but it does have motion blur in the background, so unless it’s a fancy setup that tracks the movement of the subject, it was not an automatically triggered shot.

The way I read your post, I interpret it as saying that you can’t have diabetes type 2 if you’re eating such that your blood glucose levels are maintained within acceptable levels. However, I’d argue that you have type 2 diabetes if your body is incapable of regulating your blood sugar without dietary adjustments. It might very well be the case that eating low carbs, apart from treating the symptoms type 2 diabetes, might protect you against developing type 2 diabetes, but that doesn’t mean that the reverse is true: that carbs are the direct cause of type 2 diabetes. It might be true that low carb diets are one way to avoid becoming obese and therefore protect you against the effects of obesity on your organs, or that it might increase insuline sensitivity, but we can’t conclude from this information that carbs are the primary cause of developing diabetes type 2, even though it can (indirectly) contribute to it.

The chronically elevated blood sugar is mainly caused by insulin resistance. Insuline resistance isn’t necessarily caused by eating too many carbs. One of the known risk factors is obesity, and seems to stem from the fat tissue itself and not from the food that has caused the obesity. I’m not saying that eating too many carbs is harmless, but I’m just pointing that it’s more complicated than that.

Some people just like to complain. If they’re really bothered by it, they can easily rip it off and screw it back on when they’re done instead of whining about it. The net effect is still positive.

I think you might have missed it, but they mentioned 35% unrefined cane sugar.

In your situation I would probably order my weekly groceries online, if that was an option. I would still visit the grocery store occasionally, in which case I would walk and/or go by bus. Well, in reality I would probably own a bike, but that also depends on your infrastructure over there. I’ve never lived that far from the nearest grocery store, though. There are many options here within that radius, the nearest ones being basically next door.

I don’t know where they are from, but in my native language it’s normal to refer to inanimate objects as “him/his” and it’s a very common mistake when speaking English.

Y

That makes sense, it’s usually not the hairs that people are allergic to. It’s a protein in their saliva, urine and skin flakes. Hairs could be covered with saliva and/or skin flakes, so in that sense I guess people might still react to the hairs, but a naked cat can trigger an allergic reaction too.

You said Amsterdam, though. I know Arnhem, so I don’t have to look it up. Arnhem is less than 30 minutes from the border. Amsterdam is about 1.5 hours from the border, but doesn’t give any information about which part of the border, since it’s about as far to the west as you can be.

That being said, I meant it lightly, it wasn’t important for what you were saying.

Not very convenient if a date change happens during your typical workday and that your meeting is from Monday 23:00 o’clock until Tuesday 1:00 o’clock. I mean, sure, we could deal with it, but locally it only adds new complexity.

Sure, you could talk with anyone in the world and agree on a time without misunderstandings, but as soon as you want to know if people in the other country are even awake at that time, or if it’s during business hours, you need to do the same calculations as before and need to look up how many hours the schedule is shifted in that country, similar to before.

My Anki deck (flashcards app) would like to know when it’s the next day. It now uses a standard (configurable) value worldwide (4:00 o’clock, to allow for late nights). If we used UTC everywhere, a standard value wouldn’t make any sense, and you would have to know the local offset, and change it when you are traveling.

Taking about traveling: instead of just changing the time zone on your devices and be done with it, you need to look up what time you should go to sleep and wake up and at what time the stores open to fit the local schedule and none of the hours that you’re used to would make any sense. Let’s have dinner at 19:00 o’clock. No, wait, that’s in the early morning here.

We already have UTC as a standard reference, and we don’t need to adopt it for local time, as long as the offset is clear when communicating across borders. Digital calendars already take time zones into account, so when I’m inviting people from overseas, they know at what time in their local timezone the meeting starts.

The issue is not the time zones, but the fact that we live on a sphere revolving around a star and that our biological system likes to be awake when it’s light outside.

Amsterdam is not close to any border. On the other hand, the Netherlands is very small, so in that sense you’re always close to a border :)

I’ve been using the DS620slim for 4.5 years now without any issues. It’s small (2.5” drives) and produces little noise (with SSDs).

I’m pretty sure that they’re going to let consumers worldwide pay for it, though. That means that the price increase will be lower than expected for American consumers, subsidized by the rest of the world. Of course I’m not just talking about Apple here.