I moved to the Netherlands ~6 months ago. It is really that good. But Dutch people don't value what they have and many are becoming carbrained assholes. Endless government funding for highways and roads, but less for public transit. People driving 400m instead of walking. It's disappointing to watch the Dutch be brainwashed by car advertising.
GRC has always been theater. Companies want to move faster than control operators can build and maintain, so there are inevitable gaps and shortcomings. And now with everyone feeding corporate data into AI platforms who are definitely not protecting the data, access controls are basically a moot point.
The US attorney general, whose job is to enforce the nation's laws, in a hearing about why she is protecting the Epstein abusers instead of prosecuting them, refused to answer questions on the substance of the matter. Instead, she started making personal attacks against members of Congress, and when that failed to stop the questions she proceeded to shout about how the Dow was at 50,000.
A huge problem is the incredibly low bar to receive a driving license. Read a booklet, pass a paper test that barely mentions non-autos, and maybe take a basic practical exam. And there are many ways around the practical exam portion.
I drink ground chicory coffee (but not like New Orleans, mine has zero real coffee in it). It's dark and bitter, just like the way I like my coffee. And it has no caffeine! Which is good because caffeine gives me tremors and panic attacks.
My fam and I are all O. Like you, they don't like me. They'll go for anyone else. I also find that they will land on me and not try to bite - or if they do, they don't put in a lot of effort and don't pierce the skin. Even if they do bite, my skin doesn't appear to react and they seem to quit quickly.
Meanwhile, my poor spouse and kid are delicious. And they have soft, sensitive skin. It's ok, I always remember the repellent just for them.
Incompetence of HR staff plays a huge role in this. Hiring teams have zero understanding of what they're hiring for. They subscribe to services that design a candidate profile for them, which then filters candidates based on that candidate profile. There's a lot of keyword matching, education grading, even resume format analysis, and of course some subtle forms of discrimination (inferring age, for example). They want someone who is likely expecting the lower end of the salary band, as well, which is calculated. There's also a personality scoring system based on language and public profile analysis. All of this happens before a single person sees your resume. If the score isn't 9/10, the resume is discarded.
BCIS degree and the tool filters for "Computer Science"? Instant-reject.
And then there are ghost jobs. Companies have learned that the markets infer their health based on job openings, so they put up plausible openings with no intent to fill them. They might even promise internal teams that they will fill them, but they won't.
My employer has had a position open for 9 months, I've referred 2 people to it who were really good fits, and both were rejected within 4 hours. It's a ghost job.
The only reliable path to having a human make any intelligent judgment on your candidacy is with a referral from an existing employee.
Nobody has a textbook career history, but that's all recruiting teams know to look for. Most internal recruiters are failed sales people, and sales people are already pretty clueless most of the time. They outsource all of the thinking to external services.
So Reefer Madness is true?