First of all, let’s try to avoid American-bashing, and stay respectful to everyone.
I’ll start: for me it’s the tipping culture. Especially nowadays, with the recent post on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world with the 40% tip, it just seems so weird to me to have to pay extra just so that menu prices can stay low.
I recently found out that the suburbs in the US have NOTHING other than single family homes.
No small grocery store, no hair salon, no post office, no pub, no tiny kebab place around the corner, nothing. There are areas where you have to drive 30 minutes just to buy bread.
Now I understand why 15-minute cities are such a buzz among Americans.
This is not the norm really. I drive < 10 minutes to everything I need on a daily basis. I’m sure there are places like this but it’s not the norm.
I drive < 10 minutes to everything I need on a daily basis.
Driving is the important thing here. In Europe in most places you don’t need to car to reach basic necessities in a reasonable time. Over here we can walk or drive by bike and have everything basic we need within a 10 to 15 minute range.
I can reach everything I need in 10min by walking.
My GP is a bit further, 10min by bike, but I’ve been there for 20 years. I might as well go to the doctor around the corner.
Can you believe it that some go batshit crazy and call 15-minute-cities a conspiracy? I laughed real, real hard when I first encountered that.
I’m glad that one didn’t stick too much. Covid and all that stuff I still see a lot, but decrying 15 minute cities as a bad thing is really too much mental acrobatics.
I’ve never understood why the drinking age is higher than the driver licence age.
And taking away voting rights from felons.
Both baffle me.
I’ve never understood why the drinking age is higher than the driver licence age.
Because driving is a necessity and drinking is not.
And taking away voting rights from felons.
That’s an instrument of oppression. Our right-wing party wins by stopping people from voting.
With some infrastructure near your housing and a working public transport, driving isn’t a necessity.
How? If you live in a suburb, even with working public transport, there could be dozens of stops between home and work.
why would the number of stops be a problem?
when i went to secondary school there were 13 bus stops (15 minutes) and when i went to university there were 12 train stops (30 minutes). And i wouldn’t classify either of those as a long commute
The stops, and the indirect route the bus must take to reach all of those stops, greatly increases travel time, and by “greatly increases” I mean by a factor of 2 to 3.
For example, Google Maps estimates that, to travel from the suburban apartment complex where I live to a business building in the next town, it would take 12 minutes by car or 42 minutes by bus. And yes, there are bus stops close to both the start and end points of this route; that time is actually spent riding a bus, not walking.
Outside of densely-packed cities, public transit is, by its nature, slow. Very, very slow. More public transit doesn’t change that. It might decrease how long you spend waiting for a bus to arrive, but the bus still has to make the same stops along the same indirect route, so it’s not going to be any faster once you’re aboard.
Cars are popular for a reason. It’s not just some anti-competitive car-industry conspiracy. Public transit very much exists where I live, and whenever I see a bus on the road, there’s almost never more than a few people aboard. Buses are quite clearly viewed as transportation of last resort.
rural areas here have buses with stop-on-demand. the bus continues on when no one is in the stop AND no one on board has pressed the stop button. very convenient.
With some infrastructure near your housing and a working public transport, driving isn’t a necessity.
When I read about people being frugal, there’s always something like “I now go to restaurants only once a week”, “I’m driving the same car for 5 years”, “you don’t really need 10 subscriptions for x”. Do people really not cook their own food and spend money that much? My only subscriptions are internet and rent, and my savings would be gone if I’d get a car 🤷♂️
You also wouldn’t spend hours commuting to work every day. Cars are fast. I don’t know how it is in Europe, but in America, commute time is unpaid and cost of living is obscenely high, so cars are pretty much mandatory if you want to keep a roof over your head and get a full 8 hours of sleep.
Here, cars are not fast. Cities are congested. When I worked on the other side of my small town, getting there by bike or by car cost the same amount of time. In bigger cities there is public transport.
We generally also don’t live hours away from where we work. I got rejected for a jobs because they didn’t believe I’d commute for an hour by car while looking for a new place
But then you have to live in a tiny apartment in the city. Housing in cities is extremely expensive (in terms of cost per square foot).
An expensive apartment in the city might still be cheaper than a rural place plus the cost of a car (which you don’t need in the city).
Well, yes.
That’s not okay.
Dignified living is a suburban house with ample open floor space, a yard for the kids and pets to play in, and no HOA or building manager threatening you with homelessness and catastrophic debt unless you bow to his every whim.
That’s how I grew up, it was a hell of a lot nicer and less scary than the apartment I’m living in now, and housing costs have stolen that life from me. Now you’re telling me I should be happy with what my life has been reduced to? No, I am not happy about it. I am angry.
In Germany HOAs aren’t a thing and by law you have quite good tenant rights. for example once you have an open ended rental contract, your landlord can’t really throw you out on their whim.
Around here, they may not be able to arbitrarily throw me out, but they can decline to offer a new fixed-term lease when the current one expires, and rent automatically doubles if a fixed-term lease is not signed. Is that not a thing in Germany?
education.
while supercharged in one specific field during education, general knowledge of the world outside of said field is near zero.
and then education even ends. no real vocational training.
The fees are crazy too. Considering how many fail out of a course and have to deal with this large debt.
boggles my mind. buuuut europe is on a great way to fail there too. I think the swedish fully privatized school system is an utter failure…but it will take time to come to full effect. sweden is doomed.
I know it’s a clichee but guns. I regularly watch some youtubers from a lot of backgrounds. Science, engineering, music, you name it. And the casual way they talk about guns, even carry them, is deeply disturbing to me.
Yeah I guess it happens that you shoot a gun once or twice in your life. From military service to the plain old “Schützenverein” in Germany. But having them in everyday life is… just… dangerous.
They in-part have open carry in malls. And plazas. I don’t get why everyone carrying in a public space isn’t classified as a danger.
Many years ago, I was chatting with a friend from California and she told me her family votes Republican. As in, by default. No matter the policies or political needs of the country.
Aside from the US parties being very similar back then (pre-Trump), I’ve also learned since then that this may have to do with party affiliation programs.
In the US, you need to register to vote and the parties basically offer to do the registration for you, if you promise to vote for them. So, you end up being ‘affiliated’ with them, even without being actively a member.I was really surprised that quite a few states have a minimum marrying age of 0. And apparently, it’s more common than you’d expect for girls as young as 14 to get married, often to far older men.
What?!
There is so much that screams “stress” to me when I think of living in the US that makes me uncomfortable. To just mention that your job can fire you at will and your health care might be attached to your job, or that a person who can not drive a car for health reasons, like me, is basically fucked. Or no sick days and a very low amount of vacation days that you might have to take when you are sick and on top taking them at all is looked down on, while my boss reminds me to tell him when I prefer to take my vacation days, because by law I have to take them.
I could make a very long list of things that come with American life that I find stressful. Just one more tiny thing: I do not have much money, so I have to be careful not to overspent. In Germany the prices on the shelf in the grocery store are the total I will have to pay. In the US the total can be whatever, you just have to be really good at doing math in your head, have enough money to not care or walk around with a calculator. So it is not just the big things that add onto each other. If I am sick I can walk to the nearest grocery store and drug store in less than 3 minutes from my flat, the doctor’s office is inbetween both and the visit is free and medication either free or costs 5 Euro each for what I usually need. My gall bladder surgery was all in all 100 Euro, including ambulance transport on a Sunday because it was an emergency and aftercare with my doctor. My days in the hospital and at home afterwards were fully paid by my employer.
I wonder what America would look like if everyone would live on an European stress level. We do not have no stress of course, but the base line for many Europeans is way lower. On top there is a base line of feeling safer (less shooting, except for Ukraine of course) and more social secure.
It surprises me that despite all that, Americans do rarely complain and are as happy as they are. I admire them for that, but also wish they could have less stress in their lifes.
America is a developing country with a Guccu bag.
There are some rich areas, but even there, the vast majority of people are poor and live under not-great conditions.
I think the “pursuit of happiness” mindset is still very strong over there. You’re only poor because of yourself, not because rich people fucked you over. So you can’t really complain, because it’s your fault.
And their own justice system for some weird reason.
That there are long stretches of road where you can’t get somewhat healthy food. I have been on a road trip across Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona, and outside the big citys you only get junk food at petrol stations, but no fruits, no vegetables. I guess it makes sense because salad or fresh food spoils quick and is expensive to deliver to each and every petrol station, especially if they don’t have a reliable power supply in the middle of nowhere. Never thought about it before. In Germany you can get ice cream, chocolate, cake, salad or a full meal (at gas station prices, and lower quality) on the Autobahn.
The massive dependence on cars. I don’t understand why people put up with this nonsense. I just walk everywhere.
Have you seen the size of America?
You have large cities separated by vast empty lands. A good train network would be much faster and much more efficient.
In cities it’s even worse. Cars are the least efficient way to organise a city or travel in it.
The only thing you optimize with cars is individualism.
This doesn’t take into account the amount of suburbia in the US though. European cities are way more dense. If you’re in a neighborhood out in the suburbs the only option is really to drive.
Even in small cities you are kinda dependent on a car but you are able to drive to the closest train station and use the train to get to the next bigger city. In North Carolina (USA) I made the experience that the train is often not an option to get to the next bigger city or so expensive it is not worth it on a travel budget.
I enjoyed the speed limit on your highway’s.
Europe is bigger than the US, but how often do you travel all across? The radius of movement might be a bit bigger in the US, due to bad design (urban sprawl). That’s a choice. You can plan cities better if you want to.
I don’t go from Sicily to Finland every week (but if i wanted to, I could easily do so by train). The size doesn’t matter in my daily life.
The expectation of everyone having a credit card as soon as they can get one and paying everything with credit to somehow “build” credit. Sounds such a great way to get people into financial trouble at a young age.
In Germany the system is shit too. There is a private monopol company that calculates and stores a score for you. The calculation method is secret, but we know several things can lower your score, such a having too much bank accounts/credit cards, moving too often, if you ever had debts and how fast you paid them and so on. When you ask a bank for a loan, they check this score and may decline if it’s too low. There are some people who have problems getting a loan because they have no records for their score.
First, I need to confirm if it’s true or just a television trope.
Do North Americans really keep their shoes on while lounging on their beds, or is it something directors do for whatever technical reason?
If true, then I can’t get over it - and I come from a outside-shoes-indoors culture.
I’m always surprised at the huge taboo about nudity. A while ago I read some comments about a Swedish TV show and some people were complaining how unnecessary it was that you could see a guy’s naked butt for a moment. I hadn’t even noticed when watching.
It’s surprising because at the same time US media is often labelled as (over-)sexualised.
I know that opinions on nudity also vary a lot across Europe, some might even be very close to opinions on the US. But for me personally it comes as a surprise because there is often controversy about something I wouldn’t even have noticed.
