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Living outside America

ryancarson.com

111–120 of 216 posts

Re: Living outside America

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have t…

> Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious. Citation please. "A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relat…

> Citation please.

I can't make a proper citation from home but if you're really interested those guys http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Crime-Correlates-Lee-Ellis/dp... have over a 100 studies on religious people being less criminal, and a handful on religious regions seeing less crime.

Also, "varied and contested" can describe all evidence ever gathered in social sciences.

Re: Living outside America

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have t…

Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious. Source?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/what-use-far-truth.htm...

For crime see my comment below (or above, remains to be seen).

Re: Living outside America

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an out American for 7 years now, first two in Switzerland, the last 5 in China. I still think America has a lot going for it. Switzerland is efficient and fair, but something is missing because of restrained competition and protectionism. China is the exact opposite, and its hard to believe the system works at all. For whatever troubles America has, our system still works and is rather effective; no one is…

Social mobility is actually very low in the US in comparison with other developed countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...

I'm mixed about this.

People are fairly comfortable in most developed countries, they are in some way too stable: oppurtunities are provided, for sure, but the urge for mobility is not as strong as in the states. The states is very different, however: oppurtunities are not as numerous (economically segrated educational system), but the drive is much stronger to take them when presented because it sucks at the bottom.

Re: Living outside America

#114
post #54
post #22

I've been able to do the first 3 without leaving (perhaps because I wasn't born here), and number 4 doesn't seem so certain. What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US. Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but t…

In some ways living abroad for a decade after school made me feel more like the US is the center of the world. I specifically looked for something as different and far away as possible, and I ended up meeting people who were learning English and familiar with the same music, television and movies I saw in college. Many of my European friends really could go weeks without seeing anything from home, but I couldn't. Tha…

I am an American living in Indonesia at the moment.

A lot of this is complicated. The US, as the only superpower (financial, cultural, and military) is not just one country among many. What happens in the US affects every corner of the planet. I am living right now in Indonesia and I see that every day. There are other countries which this can be said for, but they all are oil exporters and their impact is solely a function of those oil exports.

At the same time, I find a lot of Americans seem to think the other countries don't matter as much as they do. Consequently we have these bizarre discussions of how anti-American one country or another is, and, absent them calling America the great Satan or the like, one wonders how much of it is being intolerant of a level of dissent in foreign countries that would be perfectly allowed at home.

So the truth is very often more complicated than simple dichotomies.

The exception is that I would agree with #4. The US has a number of huge looming challenges which affect our country in a way no other country is affected. These include what I call "peak oil" (see below, not quite what peak oil theorists mean), the baby boomer retirement (this affects us differently than China or Japan, but Europe is going to feel the effects too), and a need to repair/replace much of our existing infrastructure. The infrastructure disrepair is becoming evident now, but I want to spend more time on the others.

Peak oil is usually defined as an absolute peak in production, after which production cannot rise to the same level. This is not what I mean. Instead I mean peak production relative to demand. We passed this peak in 1973 and after the oil crisis, oil supply never continued to grow in the way it grew prior to 1973. The crisis itself may have been political and the peak may be economic, but that doesn't make it any less real. Since 1973, oil production has gone up and down, but never continued to grow steadily as it had in the past.

Oil makes our economy work because it is a cheap source of energy. Unconventional hydrocarbons can help there, but they take much more energy to extract, and thus when energy is the limiting principle of your economy (and thus the primary cost), these are only profitable at high oil prices. Unconventional hydrocarbons thus act as a cushion against the sort of drastic decline we might see if we were only looking at light sweet crude. They are not a perfect substitute. And so I predict that oil production to the extent it increases, will not do so as fast as demand, and thus energy prices will continue to rise. The key driver of this demand is economic development in China, Brazil, India, and other countries. And thus any increase in production will not cause a collapse in oil or energy prices. Also note that most renewable energy has a comparatively low energy return on investment and so they are only really profitable when oil prices are high also, so they too act as a cushion. A transition from stored solar energy (fossil fuels) to current solar energy will not be economically pleasant.

The problem here is that higher energy prices, particularly oil prices, puts the brakes on all aspects of the economy and the US is particularly vulnerable. The US may already be past peak oil consumption as oil consumption has been falling off in recent years (how much is due to the Great Recession is hard to know however).

Retirement also affects different places differently. Europe and the US are likely to be hardest hit by the baby boom retiring, but the US is particularly vulnerable. In most countries in the world, retirement is not expected to be independent. When you retire, you move in with your kids, and help them raise their kids. They pay for your medical bills, and feed you, and you help them out as you can. In Europe and the US this is different. The expectation that we will have independent retirement means we have to save up vast amounts of money for that, and we also have to have programs like Medicare to provide the costs for caring for the elderly. However, the US is uniquely bad at cost control. Our public sector pays more per capita on medical care than any other country in the world and that's just the public sector (Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and state/federal gov. insurance pools). We can't control costs there and so the costs will be truly hard to bear. Entirely missing in the health care reform debate has been this incompetence of the federal government to control costs in any way.

The US has one significant advantage in all this but it is one that could go away suddenly and leave us stranded. The USD is the world's reserve currency. This means that the national debt can be eased by the US essentially printing money to get out of debt. However, if that changes, the US access to international credit will suddenly be very different and our debt will become difficult to sustain. Right now we are lucky because there are no real alternatives. The Euro was looking good for a while, but not anymore.....

tl; dr: The US has a number of significant and unique challenges which will erode our presence in the world over coming decades. How much erosion we suffer will depend on a lot of factors however.

Re: Living outside America

#115
post #95
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should also be noted that in most quality of life indexes, cities in the US rank far below many of those in Europe, Canada, and Australia... Having personally lived in two of the most recently top-ranked cities (Vancouver and now Melbourne) I'd say the indexes are mostly bogus. Evidently something as important to quality of life as the weather isn't much of a factor given that it rains for most of the year in Va…

It's true that in the US, rich people are really rich . But would he have been able to afford to study in the US? The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US: > Several studies have been made comparing social mobility between developed countries. One such study (“Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults?")[5][15][16] found that of nine developed countries, the United…

> But would he [Elon Musk] have been able to afford to study in the US?

Yes, because he did study in the US, at the University of Pennsylvania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Early_life). Granted he had a scholarship, but people like Elon Musk tend to get scholarships. For regular Americans state schools are affordable w/ government loans.

> The science says that social mobility is much higher in other countries like Denmark than in the US

No offence to Denmark but I can't imagine that many immigrants chose to immigrate there instead of the US because of social mobility scores.

By definition most immigrants are ambitious, or at least willing to risk leaving their country of birth for the possibility of greater opportunities elsewhere.

Re: Living outside America

#116
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have t…

I'm writing this on a computer produced in China, running an operating systeem developed by a Finn, delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.

Unless you are one of the 1% or so of the world who uses Opera, your browser is produced by an American organization.

As is the most important and expensive chip inside your China-produced computer.

And CERN had very little to do with the WWW; more on that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572

Re: Living outside America

#117

> I stopped calling myself a Christian Specific to this point as someone that has lived in England forever I find it really strange how on the reddit atheism subreddit all the (American) posters act as if they're persecuted for their Atheism whereas in England religion is just something people do in private if they do it at all, it's hard for me to understand the way r/atheism posters perceive their persecution, but…

As an atheist in Texas(one of those places where the churches are as big as the shopping malls), as long as you don't act like those assholes on r/atheism it isn't a big deal. The people on r/atheism aren't atheist because they are atheist, they are atheist because it is the cool, rebel against your parents thing to do.

Re: Living outside America

#118
post #77
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in UK, NL (well, for 2mo), Anguilla, Dubai, Thailand, 3mo in Japan, and visiting a bunch of other "good" countries is my basis for this. Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Horn of Africa, etc. are known to be write-offs. (and actually Afghanistan minus 100% of the people there would be a pretty awesome place, if inaccessible.) Hong Kong is the one place I've spent >2mo where I'd like to spend 5+ years, but it's too sm…

As a dutch citizen the idea that you would rank the states above and beyond our nation is offensive and idiotic. What on earth would make you qualify the situation like that?

The Netherlands, while a nice place to live, is a small country and not a world power (it was maybe during the time of the VOC, but not before or since). It's also a very difficult place to start a successful high-growth technology business, for a variety of reasons -- a culture of consensus and the "dutch disease" (natural resources curse) being primary.

Re: Living outside America

#119
post #25
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you need a metric, but mine is "place to start a world-changing technology business."

For various definitions of "world-changing" (i.e. one disruptive enough), the US is the worst possible place to do it. A fair example being how fucked all the bitcoin startups are going to be once the market is big enough for FinCEN to care about... or e-gold if you want a historical one. The US is fine and dandy... if you don't mind not having privacy, and keep your "world-changing" ideas within the lines of what th…

I'm curious: what country do you think would be better than the US for starting a bitcoin startup?

Re: Living outside America

#120
post #99
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. How can the US be exporting more culture than any other country, yet, have less of it? Something doesnt add up. There is lots of influencal US culture. From rap to mcdonalds. We may look down upon it now, but all of tat will age into cherished cultural relics when they stop being relevant. I think the point the OP wanted to make, is that the US has less dead culture, compared to say Europe.

Can you elaborate on what aspects of European culture you think are dead?

Well, everything from any of the previous empires, for starters.

I dont mean to suggest Europe has little culture, but unlike the states, it also has a lot of dead culture. Culture that may still inform our identity, and of which relics and remainders are embedded in the fabric of everything. Yet it is dead culture: most of us not even capable of imaging how life would be in such a culture.

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