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.
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.
It’s straight up propaganda and ignorance. They think 15 minute cities are gonna be some sort of commie block that you’re not gonna be allowed to leave unless it’s under surveillance. Nevermind that it’s actually a design choice so you have all the necessities at a more convenient reach if you choose to use them but other than that you can still go wherever you want.
That’s a bit exaggerated. “Corner” stores of any kind are rare in suburbs as they are zoned for residential use only. However, there are often small areas zoned commercial scattered around where a small number of shops are located. I’m pretty sure land use planning requires these things to avoid exactly what you were describing.
I’ve never been more than 10 minutes from groceries or gas in the suburbs. Now rural life, that can mean some planning if you need anything at all. And if you want to do anything remotely interesting you’re almost always going to be traveling some distance. And with very few exceptions cars are practically mandatory.
Edit: times based on car travel, not walking.
And with very few exceptions cars are practically mandatory.
Edit: times based on car travel, not walking.
That’s the crazy thing to Europeans. Pretty much everywhere you can walk 10 to 15 minutes or drive a few minutes by bike to get to a grocery store or restaurant. From the smallest town to the big cities.
No stores, markets, and services also translates to a low availability of jobs.
As a high schooler, you almost inevitably need some kind of “boost” to get out on your own. Maybe college, but at least a car or help signing for an apartment. Without at least some kind of help, it’s easy to get literally “stuck” at age 18 or 19. No money for a car or apartment, but no close access to employment without one of those tools.
I see parents moving to the suburbs to give a safe life for their kids away from “bad things” in the city. Meanwhile, parents may not be home until 6 or 7 pm due to leaving the city in traffic, and bored suburban teens can get into just as much trouble as their urban counterparts. Unless the parents are also able to commit some serious money to other involvement for their teenagers, the suburban life may not play out well for them.
Something that really struck me, particularly in Northern Europe, was that the young adults seemed to be a lot more self assured. There are probably a lot of reasons for this that I do not notice, but I wonder how much results from having a practical path to an independent and productive life. This in turn opens up so many other doors socially.
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.
You’re talking about a stereotype of a very small subset of Americans. You’re basing your fears on the extremist online postings that aren’t really indicative of Americans in real life in the majority of the country. If you have legitimate reasons to be afraid to leave your house, then I strongly urge you to move. I can’t imagine you’d have much tying you to the area if you never even go outside.
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.
I understand it in rural regions. There is more wild nature in the US. In Europe most wolves have names. In Germany at least.
I still agree with you in general though. It seems weird that guns are a symbol of freedom for many there.
If you ask me it must be some sort of escapism. Owning and firing guns is an outlet, makes them think “I could totally overthrow this tyrannical government if I wanted to”.
But of course a government that’s had an armed population for hundreds of years knows how to deal with it and if anybody ever tried anything remotely resembling an insurrection they’d come down on them like a ton of bricks.
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.
Lifelong American here - I do love it here, though as you point out there are definitely some stressful flaws.
Healthcare here is messed up. Not the quality (which is typically very high), but the price. Having insurance tied to employment never made sense to me either.
Personally, I actually love driving and owning a car. I just think cars are really cool and I like wrenching on them. Everything I could need is within a 10-15 minute drive and I never have to worry about there not being enough parking. That said, you are correct that car ownership is basically required - although I have been to cities in the US that have decent public transportation. Not European level good, but decent.
At my job I get 4 weeks paid vacation and “unlimited” sick days (they say unlimited but of course they have the ability to deny them if they find you are abusing them). My bosses will actually hunt people down who HAVENT used all their vacation days and encourage them to do so. They have realized that productivity is tied to employee happiness so they try to keep us happy. Now, none of that is government mandated but I just mention it to prove that not everyone here has a job that treats them like crap. I agree that this stuff should be guaranteed though. For reference, I work in IT and make less than 100k.
Tipping is definitely a weird thing and I would be glad to never have to think about it again.
As someone who spent roughly half my life in the US and the other half in EU, this is very accurate as to my experience in each place. In the US my life constantly felt balanced on a knife edge like everything could fall apart at any moment. When I moved to the EU, even though I didn’t speak the language or grow up there, I breathed a big sigh of relief. I felt like my life was finally manageable.
I think this causes a ton of mental illness in the US that we just don’t see in the EU. Most people I know in the US are on the constant verge of a breakdown and basically just disassociating themselves from reality (usually using drugs, alcohol, religion, or some combination thereof). I think this is why Americans so badly need to put on a happy face. If they didn’t, they’d all have a simultaneous mental breakdown.
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.
On the other hand, my last vacation was paid for almost entirely with credit card points.
Or, in other words, by people who are less wealthy than you.
On the flip side, without establishing some kind of credit record, nobody will ever give you a loan for a house or even a used car.
That’s the part I don’t get at all. How come is not having any credit history a bad indicator? If anything, it should tell that the person is financially stable to afford things without needing credit.
Where I live (and I think in other European countries too, with exceptions) it works other way around. Having a clean credit record is a good thing and only if you neglect your payments you get negative marks on your record. Having any negative marks generally prevents you from taking any new loans or financing (a good thing!) but negative marks will be cleared after debts have been paid off and some time has passed.
clean history wont prevent you from getting a loan in the usa, it just prevents you from getting a big loan at a low interest rate. Smaller amounts won’t be much of a problem if its a clean. Also, bad marks are removed in time just like anywhere else.
I think the reason why clean reports may be a little bit more of an issue in the us than elsewhere is because of how easy it is to get an kind of loan or credit and how uncommon having a blank credit score can be as a result. Between student loans, credit cards, car loans (atleast cheaper loans for used cars) etc its pretty unlikely, by the time someone goes to try and take out a big loan, like say for a house, that they would have zero credit history or not have someone like a parent cosign who also has zero history (if someone cosigns it goes on both people’s credit history) And, businesses, looking for any excuse to avoid risk on an investment, would be less likely to give a big loan to someone with no history when there are so many people with good credit history to still make plenty of money.
All that said, credit cards seem quite a bit less common than they used to, especially since debit cards became a thing. Most people i know, myself included with credit cards are either for business expenses that are paid off immediately, or for the extra safety provided by the ability to charge back on purchases that debit cards don’t often provide.
I don’t disagree with you, I’m just saying how it is here and the reasons why Americans use credit cards so much.
I have major problems and concerns with how credit scores work here, as well as the mysterious and flawed algorithms that determine them. The way credit scores are calculated sometimes incentivizes bad credit behavior, like maximizing your total available credit and keeping lines of credit open even when you don’t want/need them anymore. It’s deeply flawed. You’re right about that.
However as just a matter of fact, in America at least, if you show up to your bank asking for a $500,000 USD home lone (which sadly is the average house cost where I live on the west coast), they will perceive a total lack of credit history as a big question-mark, and a sign of uncertainty and risk. I’ve known people who struggled to even open a credit account in their late 20s simply because they didn’t already have an existing credit history to point to, which goes without saying is a total catch 22.
In other words, it’s definitely a flawed system, but one that many of us have basically no choice to participate in. I have a good credit score because I have almost always paid for just about everything on my credit account, and then pay off the entire balance each month (sometimes twice per month). But like you said, a lot of people get into real problems with credit card debt because they either never learned how to responsibly use one, or they simply struggle to live within their means based on how little they make.
Consider two potential creditors:
- Person A has no credit history at all.
- Person B has had a credit card with a $20k limit for ten years, generally has a balance of less than $2k, and has never missed a payment.
Can you see how B is a less risky client than A? A is essentially an unknown risk, but B has demonstrated the ability to manage their debt. A could still get, for instance, a car loan, but likely not a mortgage. And B will get a lower interest rate.
TBH it’s not the absolute worst way to figure out if someone is responsable enough for “big credit”, basically the industry is saying “here’s more than enough rope to hang yourself with, choose wisely.”
Of course, there is no financial or credit education provided to help with making those wise choices…
