

Why this European never wants to live in America - nether
http://www.fluentin3months.com/no-usa-for-me/

======
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...](http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-should-we-be-shaming-
obese-children-mo,14157/)

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

------
owenjones
I "lived" in Europe for three months and have spent time in almost all the
western European countries. Would you guys be interested in my anecdotal
stereotypical sweeping generalizations?

~~~
Zikes
Only if it's in an easily-consumed numbered list!

------
general_failure
[http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3ee_1381017749](http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3ee_1381017749)
is a copy of the article. Please correct if I am wrong.

~~~
heyalexej
That's correct. I know this article very well. It's like one or two years old
and had something like 2000 comments.

------
bladedtoys
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 conjecture, there is less
resistance to hikes in that tax (which is roughly 20% now). Being a regressive
tax, it is quite uncharacteristic of the EU. So I conjecture it may have
gotten that high partially because it is not annoying consumers at every
purchase.

~~~
claudius
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.

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

------
nether
The article was very different from what I expected, and as an American I
agreed with pretty much all of it.

~~~
VLM
One thing that I did catch that was pretty funny is he only spent time in our
biggest most urbanized cities, yet he thought those were a bit too car
oriented. His head would explode with surprise if he visited an area that
wasn't one of the 10 largest cities. If he thought Chicago was a little too
car dependent, try rural ... anywhere.

Several of his comments boil down to a fanatic root belief in proceduralism.
Who cares if the food sucks as long as the checkbox "waitress smiled" is
checked. Also applies to a bunch of other examples, like you can be a jerk and
thats OK as long as you go to church on Sunday, obsession with money, annoying
advertising, consumerism/all you need for happiness is the latest iDevice,
etc. The core belief being that success just means having the right checkboxes
checked. That observation would shorten his list considerably.

A couple of his other comments dance around Americans being the most ignorant
western culture out there (what you say Ireland has airports, and you're not
all potatoe farmers?) Several of his other comments fit into this category. We
really do encourage stupidity as a culture to keep the consumerism and
gullibility toward advertising going. Whole classes of people who basically
only exist to be milked as cash cows. Just kinda how we are, I guess.

So for those who can't get thru, these three above themes summarize his
observations reasonably fairly, or at least I hope fairly.

~~~
bct
Rural areas come with other benefits. Urban and suburban areas that are too
car-centric are the worst of both worlds.

~~~
VLM
Suburban areas come with benefits too, lack of traffic congestion, no parking
hassles, plenty of places to go, everything nearby.

A car in the city, is mostly just a pain.

------
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](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](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!

------
lomegor
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 them in the states)" because it was just a
cheap shot, especially since it may very well be the opposite from the truth:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/weight-discrimination-
linked-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/weight-discrimination-linked-to-
obesity-2013-8)

~~~
mahyarm
Talking about someones weight really offends people. Or weight loss in
general. People mentally shut down about this bad habit vs many other habits,
especially women. If people weren't overly sensitive about fatness, that
behavior effect you linked about would probably NOT happen.

It's extremely frustrating, because you understand people's eating habits just
regress to the mean, and if the 'mean' set by a countries food culture to be
absolute shit with huge portions, then a country will get predictably fat.

When I go to a gas station in the USA, every single food is basically candy,
high calorie nuts or expensive beef jerky. In south east asia, there are
healthier options in the gas station, and often there is some person in a food
cart selling home cooked healthy small portion food cheaper than McDonalds
will ever be in that country. That is just one example.

------
jinushaun
Whenever I see Europeans complain about Americans smiling all the time, I
wonder why I never hear the same complaint about Southeast Asians (i.e., Land
of a Thousand Smiles). People always talk about it positively.

I'm American and SE Asian. Sorry Europeans, but my face rests smiling.

------
moron4hire
I read most of these points as, "Your culture is different than mine and it
makes me uncomfortable."

~~~
sentenza
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.

------
Aaronontheweb
Didn't take long for that website to 503...

~~~
x0054
Because this happens on occasion, maybe HN should add a feature that takes a
snapshot of a website when it starts inching to the top of the list and delete
the cache when it falls off.

~~~
javert
It seems like somebody could create a pass-through site (e.g.
whatever.com/<url>) which forwards to <url> if it is available, and if it is
having problems, just presents a cached version with advertisements inserted
(because hosting would, by definition, be expensive). Probably been done
already though?

~~~
greyfade
You mean like nyud.net?

Above link as an example:

[http://www.fluentin3months.com.nyud.net/no-usa-for-
me/](http://www.fluentin3months.com.nyud.net/no-usa-for-me/)

------
Zikes
> 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 just want to hear
"fine" and have you acknowledge our existence just as we've acknowledged
yours. It's a simple greeting, not an offer for your autobiography thus far.

> 3\. Smiles mean NOTHING

I honestly find it difficult to imagine you ran into an overabundance of
smiles. I live in a fairly "southern" region where smiles are quite common,
but even then I don't see everyone just walking around with a big toothy grin
all day.

Still, kind of a silly criticism, isn't it? Who are you to say a smile isn't
genuine, after all?

> 4\. Tipping

Yeah, it's pretty stupid when places tack on "mandatory gratuity", usually
hidden in fine print on a restaurant menu. Fortunately you can usually argue
your way out of that if you were caught off guard, otherwise you learn what
places charge it and what places don't, and everywhere else you can just make
up your own mind about whether or not you want to tip.

> 5\. False prices on everything

Our sales tax system is complex and different, and I think a lot of Americans
would agree it's in dire need of an overhaul of some sort. That said, I don't
see any issues with not including it on a price tag, because that's the
established convention and what you see on the tag is representative of what
the business is charging, not what you will pay.

> 6\. Cheesy in-your-face marketing

[http://reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago](http://reddit.com/r/wheredidthesodago)

We're aware of this. Get a DVR or cancel cable and use Netflix, like a normal
American.

> 7\. Wasteful consumerism

Feel free to keep your 15 year old Nokia flip phone, if you want. Some of us
have the means and the desire to experience the latest in modern technology,
and quite frankly that's our business.

> 8\. Idiotic American stereotypes of other countries

Your experiences are just as anecdotal as anyone else's, and your points are
just as stereotypical.

> 9\. Heritage

Most of us can trace our lineage back to another country, if we tried hard
enough. That doesn't invalidate your own.

> 10\. ID checks & stupid drinking laws

Short of a government issued ID there is absolutely no way for you to make an
accurate assessment of someone's age. That's actually highly circumspect,
still, but at least you can say you tried, which is half the point. The other,
of course, being not to serve underaged persons alcohol which is against the
law.

As for the nature of the laws themselves, yeah there's a few silly points, but
I find it hard to believe there aren't equally silly laws regarding other
matters in any of the other countries you've visited. Hardly a reason to rule
out a country entirely, especially when you're not a drinker and those
particular laws don't apply to you.

> 11\. Religious Americans

I'm not religious. I know lots of people that are, and I know lots of people
that are not. For the most part, if a person's religious beliefs clash with
mine or I'm uncomfortable with the manner in which they express their
religion, I simply choose not to associate with that person.

As we so often like to say, it's a free country.

> 12\. Corporations win all the time, not small businesses

Sorry, this is a pretty long list, and I've found that actually reading your
reasoning for these inane headlines doesn't really do anything to persuade me
to your opinion. Suffice it to say that anecdotal accounts will not do, and
while there are a number of large corporations that need taken down a peg they
certainly don't win "all the time".

> 13\. A country designed for cars, not humans

3.794 million square miles (9.827 million km²)

I'm open to alternatives.

> 14\. Always in a hurry

Anecdotalism. Stereotyping.

> 15\. Obsession with money

I'm so glad that greed is purely an American issue. I'll sleep better tonight
knowing no other country in the world (or at least none you've been to) suffer
from this problem.

> 16\. Unhealthy portions

Try an unhealthy diet overall. Yes, we're well aware of the "obesity
epidemic". Come back in a few years, see if we make any progress on that.

> 17\. Thinking America is the best

Everybody knows that North Korea is Best Korea.

~~~
nagisa
> 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?

~~~
Zikes
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.

------
krylonkid
A Euroweenie is his natural state, whining. Whilst they whine the rest of the
world builds useful things.

