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Why this European never wants to live in America

fluentin3months.com

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Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#21

Post by nsxwolf »

I had to throw my hands up in frustration almost immediately. Obese people are fat because no one tells them they are fat?

Obese children are brutally savaged by other children as well as adults. Adults who creep into obesity in their later years damn well know it.

I think it's a sign of good manners that we don't go around pointing out unpleasant things about other people's bodies that they are constantly aware of. It makes people feel like shit, and it doesn't do anything positive to encourage them to fix the problem (like it's just sooo easy, anyway, Mr. skinny European)

Reminds me of this Onion video:

http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-should-we-be-shami...

Anyway, I agree with a lot of the rest that was said - especially about sales tax and tipping.

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#22

Post by Zikes »

nagisa wrote: post #19
Zikes wrote: post #13

> 1. Americans are too sensitive This is a common misconception, which colors a few other items in the author's list, but the real reason they don't see many people speaking their mind is because for the most part nobody cares. Which brings me to: > 2. Everything is "awesome"! So the USA is the only country in the world that has mindless small talk? Really? We don't ask "how are you?" and expect a literal answer, we…

> 3.794 million square miles (9.827 million km²) That's only area of USA. He was talking about the cities which have terrible conditions for transport by feet. Or maybe should I give a counter-example of Russia (17 million km²) which is comparably fine albeit not being designed for cars?

Some cities are better for this than others. Unfortunately many of them were built in the automotive boom where futurists predicted compact roads would dominate the ground level and everyone else would walk underground or in sky bridges between buildings.

Maybe we'll grow into a reasonable solution for pedestrian traffic in cities, but the population distribution outside of those cities absolutely necessitate a car to get around.

The Russian counter-example may be valid. Offhand I would wonder how much of that 17 million km² is actually habitable, but even halving that still puts it on roughly equal footing with USA. Having never visited Russia I have no idea how it compares with pedestrian traffic vs vehicular, except the craziness I see on the dashcam videos that have been popping up everywhere lately.

Maybe we have a few things we could learn from them, but the point I was trying to make was that one 9.827 million km² country has to be architected rather differently from one at 84,421 km².

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#24

Post by devgutt »

lomegor wrote: post #10

I agree with some of the points, but the first one really put me off with reading the article. I've never suffered over sensitivity from Americans, and in fact, I see just the opposite. This could be my biases crawling in, but it really bothered me (and I'm not American) reading "(oversensitivity with not telling obese people to get their act together is a major contributor in my opinion to why there are so many of t…

All points in my opinion are cheap shots. With over 300 million people, over generalization is silly.

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#26

Post by claudius »

bladedtoys wrote: post #16

The article mentions sales/VAT/IVA tax. Perversely I think the US actually does this right: In the EU, VAT tax is included in the displayed price while in the US, sales tax is not. As the article mentions this is convenient for EU consumers who clearly know the price of their purchase in advance. But I think it has a bad side effect: consumers do not notice the size of the vat/sales tax as strongly and as a result, I…

VAT is explicitly listed on every receipt I have (and you are legally required to list it, I believe), so I know perfectly well that it is 19% at the moment (while it was 16% just a few years back…).

But even if it was not listed, I check the menu or price tag to learn how much I have to pay for an item, not to be educated on taxes on checkout.

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#27

Post by irishpolyglot »

Hi there Hacker News! Thanks for the interest in my article :) My site went down an hour or so ago because I'm making database changes - I'm actually HN proof, since I had an article do very well here years ago that is much more positive than the one linked to this time. Check it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2780067

Some of you might have noticed that I changed the post title - this was coincidentally something I was doing just before I found out HN was linking to me. This article of mine from years ago sends me lots of traffic, but I do wish that my less controversial articles encouraging language learning would get more exposure too ;)

Along those lines, I hope you'll check out my TEDx talk (60k+ views): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x2_kWRB8-A

Thanks for all the comments, and I hope not too many arguments come about! I was only thinking out loud in that post, as you can see written at the end.

I loved the new readers I got from HN when my Life Lessons post went viral here, so I hope a few of you will stick around. Thanks again!

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#28

Post by sentenza »

moron4hire wrote: post #23

I read most of these points as, "Your culture is different than mine and it makes me uncomfortable."

Actually, for me personally, there are some parts of American culture that scare me because they are so similar to things that were once found in mine.

A personal favorite is this: Do you trust the police or fear them?

In cozy central Europe, where I live, I can trust the police more than I fear them (althoug, unfortunately, this slowly becomes less the case). The US-Police, as anybody who has read the "how to act around police"-part of a travel guide knows, is to be feared.

Bad sign.

BTW: The next stage, which is significantly worse, is when the typical member of the police and his family have only other policemen and their families for friends. Fortunately, this seems not at all to be the case in the US.

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#29

Post by paglia_s »

claudius wrote: post #26
bladedtoys wrote: post #16

The article mentions sales/VAT/IVA tax. Perversely I think the US actually does this right: In the EU, VAT tax is included in the displayed price while in the US, sales tax is not. As the article mentions this is convenient for EU consumers who clearly know the price of their purchase in advance. But I think it has a bad side effect: consumers do not notice the size of the vat/sales tax as strongly and as a result, I…

VAT is explicitly listed on every receipt I have (and you are legally required to list it, I believe), so I know perfectly well that it is 19% at the moment (while it was 16% just a few years back…). But even if it was not listed, I check the menu or price tag to learn how much I have to pay for an item, not to be educated on taxes on checkout.

it depends from the country, here in italy from the 1st of october is 22%

Re: Why this European never wants to live in America

#30

Post by jafaku »

Zikes wrote: post #13

> 1. Americans are too sensitive This is a common misconception, which colors a few other items in the author's list, but the real reason they don't see many people speaking their mind is because for the most part nobody cares. Which brings me to: > 2. Everything is "awesome"! So the USA is the only country in the world that has mindless small talk? Really? We don't ask "how are you?" and expect a literal answer, we…

- Someone on the internet says Americans are too sensitive.

- American is hurt so he writes a thousand lines comment trying to prove him wrong.

See the irony?

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