Rapidly changing. Similar bans are in place in Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Scotland, for starters, and France and the rest of Britain are soon to follow.
Hmm. It’s just gone 11pm. Luckily, my local supermarket is open 24 hours
Most of the development of automatics was done by American manufacturers, which goes some way to explain the disparity. Also, many of us prefer to drive a manual. There’s added inertia (at least in the UK) that if you take your driving test in an automatic, you don’t get licenced to drive a manual transmission. Few driving instructors have automatics. Etc.
Ireland has a total ban on smoking in the workplace including all bars. England is just about to brin in the same. Scotland already has it. Holland, Germany and even France are playing with the politics of it at the moment. It won’t be too long before we all go non smoking in the workplace. There has even been stories of France starting to move on it.
In Germany nobody is enrolled at birth but if your parents are more or less active members of a church you will be enrolled at your baptism (if applicable, of course “church” tax is not just for christians.) Until you are 14 you have to live with your parents decision. However we haven’t had state churches since 1919 and actually the church tax was a reaction to internal migrations in the 19th century that diluted the old state church system.
British drivers stubbornly prefer manual shifts. We think automatics are for cripples and people who can’t drive properly.
With fuel taxed so heavily, the poorer fuel economy they deliver carries more weight with us.
I would include the drive to invent and perfect things. The fact that the U.S. drops so much $$$$$ into research universities is part of it but it goes way deeper than that. Even independent inventors have contributed a lot (Alexander Graham Bell, Marconi, the Wright Brothers etc). The fact that many of these people were immigrants that waited to achieve their dream until they got to the U.S. drives the point home. I want to start a Great Debate thread about why this may be. Think of a list of all the revolutionary inventions in the world since the late 1800’s. The U.S. is ridiculously overrepresented and can probably beat the rest of the world combined. U.S. inventions. Europe and the rest of the world certainly be backwards without those. I have no doubt that someone would have certainly come up with some of them given time but the trend remains extremely strong to this day.
That is what we call a gratuitous request for a cite. Perhaps you can tell me some inventions that Europe should be credited during the same time-frame and we can compare. You are correct in way though. The list of U.S. inventions in that Wikipedia link is far from complete. What the hell are you people doing over there?
Sorry. You are right about that one although he and the company he founded did some important work in the U.S. He was more of a European guy until the end.
Cars based on internal combustion engines were invented in Europe but it took Henry Ford to find a way to manufacture them cheaper and reliably enough for common use.
Linux is really just an open-source Unix variant and Unix itself was also invented in the U.S. at AT&T in the 1960’s.
You can have those for sure. If you have never thought about it before, the lopsidedness is tremendous when it comes to U.S. inventions versus European ones since the late 19th century and it even gets worse shortly after that. That wikipedia list I posted earlier was crap in that it is very incomplete.
Next time you walk around your house or your office, look at all the modern things around you starting with lights and moving on to almost all computer parts, audio equipment, etc. The list is tremendous. Make a mental note of the ones that are versus aren’t American in a fairly direct way and see what you find.
Yes, I noticed and appreciated the difference when I visited Ireland in 2004- the restaurants and pubs were much less smoky than they had been on my previous visits to Europe.
I think I had the biggest problem with things not being open late in Scandinavia. 24-hour businesses don’t seem to have caught on there Protestant work ethic, HAH!
We don’t have different licenses for automatic or manual- a driver’s license is a driver’s license, so there’s no real reason to take your driving test in a manual. I’m pretty sure that most driving instructors have automatics. Rental cars are all automatics. I can’t drive a manual (only tried once, with limited success) and it really doesn’t affect my life much- I buy cars with automatic transmission (it takes some doing to get a manual), if I rent a car, it has an automatic, and most other people have automatics, so it’s not too likely I’d be called on to drive stick.
I got the idea about people being enrolled automatically in a state church from (outdated and inaccurate) information about the Church of Sweden, though at least one of your parents had to be a member for you to automatically become a member at birth. Since 1996, though, they’ve changed things so that you only become a member when you are baptized into the church.
I think it’s funny (and I don’t mean funny ha-ha) that some have made mention of the apocryphal European “church tax” without making mention of the large amount of American federal tax dollars that are being funneled into religious charities.
Not that I have a complaint about that, really, but I do think it would be more efficient and less expensive for the federal govenment to take over certain functions it is currently paying non-profits (both religious and non-religious) to perform.
Not having health insurance does not necessarily equal not having access to health care. The U.S. social safety net — which includes community health centers, public and non-profit hospitals, any emergency room, and charity care by physicians — absorbs two-thirds of the cost of the health care consumed by the uninsured. This safety net, while not a single, unified, easy-to-manage system, essentially functions as a catastrophic health insurance policy. The more health care the uninsured need, the less they pay. Uninsured individuals pay a mere 9 percent of the hospital inpatient costs they incur.
It sounds to me like you are using definition 1, and the people who disagree with you are using 2 or 3.
No, you are saying that the rights and liberties of businesses are important.
Wrong. A lack of benefits reduces freedom; someone who can’t afford to take a vacation is less free than someone who can.
And America has less freedom, because more and more people’s lives are defined by work and financial necessity. You are using the ridiculous right wing assumption that government intervention is always bad, and always reduces freedom, which is pure nonsense. Without governemt, you’d be living like a hermit, unable to venture out for fear of being attacked, unable to do business with anyone because you’d be unable to trust them. Why do you think that we nowhere see a libertarian state ? Because such a think is unworkable, that’s why. Freedom comes from the government, otherwise we’d be the slave of the nearest fellow with more power than we have.
Protestant work ethic, HAH!