We love tourists. They pay our taxes for us.
What’s the difference between an American and an Englishman?
An American thinks 100 years is a long time and an Englishman thinks 110 miles is a long distance.
:smack:
That, of course, should be 100 for both numbers, not 100 and 110. That just ruins the joke.
Dear Freelancer,
As a neighbour of the USA, I can vouch for them. I didn’t have the time, or patience, to read all of the posts in this thread.
People are people: world wide. As a whole, I don’t even think the North Koreans are any different than me. They want to fall in love, get married, have children, and live in peace.
Now what the hell is with Hezbollah?
[Eddie Izzard] The American dream… to raise yourself up by the sweat of your brow and the swiftness of your mind… to have all the money in the world! And then you stick in your ears and go “Phhhhhhbbbb.” [/EI]
Actually, what Rodgers01 says is closer to what I think of when I hear the phrase “American Dream.” It’s probably a cultural difference, since my parents were Korean, but to me the American Dream is what immigrants come to the US for - to work their asses off so their children can have a better life. Or is that the Asian-American Dream?
Nah. That’s what my Irish great-grandfather did, too. And my other great-grandparents–Bertha, for example, ran a chuckwagon. They lived in a tent by a river for a while. And Mary Grace, another g-grandmother, worked in an orange juice stand on a California highway–one of the first roadside convenience-food stops, they were shaped like oranges with a window, you used to see old ones sometimes. They all did stuff like that, you’re just a generation or so closer to it. 
In some ways there is definitely social isolation here, probably more than in Europe. Those big cars everyone is talking about can be very isolating. Shagnasty, isn’t it a fact that often, suburbanites leave the suburbs sealed in their cars, and go to work in offices full of people similar in background, education, and (self-evidently) occupation, and who also live in suburbs? I’m not saying this is 100% true of course. But we do favor private life and property here more than many other places, and in many instances this does tend to limit contact with dissimilar people. In a city like NY or SF, where people of all classes tend to walk and take public transit, this is less true than elsewhere, but only a very small percentage of Americans live in such places.
Not that this is a reason to hate Americans, necessarily. I especially take issue with complaints about our gas guzzling ways because they are to a large extent synmptomatic of a structural problem, and not something that most of us do happily.
Yeah, but that one is true! 
This I take issue with. Most of us do do it happily. We could very easily have a far, far better public transportation system, but we have chosen to build one of the most car-centric countries on earth. What little public transportation we do have (with the very few exceptions of cities like New York or Boston) is woefully underutilized, and most of the people who do use it don’t seem to be able to afford any other options. Ridden a Greyhound recently?
That whole topic deserves a thread of its own…
I have a lot of difficulty believing the United States is the only country that can claim this, when Canada has all the forest and a tenth the people.
I can’t verify the claim, but remember that stable forests don’t fix nearly as much CO2 as a new-growth forest. If Canada was to wipe out their forests and then replant them they’d fix more than they do now.
Personally, I too have a hard time believing that the US is a net sink, but I don’t have the numbers to dispute it, and until I do I’m not willing to call anyone on it. Certainly not just because everyone knows that Americanians are evil.
I dunno . . . I’ve met a lot of people who are like that. Anyone who’s ever worked in the service industry can probably tell you a few stories about people who take great pains to demonstrate their superior status to the lowly waitress or clerk. The worst of this I ever saw was on a cruise ship-- many people seemed to take it as their chance to “act rich” by abusing the staff and making imperious demands.
Americans are no different than any other humans. Every culture on the planet has a system of social hierarchy. The only thing that varies is the factor on which the status is based. It can be education, or bloodline, or money, or the manner of employment or even skin color. People will find something which sets them apart, something that they consider a desirable quality-- and it must be one in which the majority of people do not share. (Exclusivity, or at least the perception thereof, is essential.)
People with higher-status jobs are thought of as “smarter” than, say, a gas station attendant. “Who would want to work as a gas station attendant unless they had to? That guy must be stupid or lazy.”
Yeah, and if you’re scared of kangaroos, don’t come to Australia. They roam the streets everywhere.
But this is exactly where I disagree with you. We didn’t make this country what it is today, it was our grandparents’ generation that really decided to move as much as possible toward rubber-tire transit, and the first principle in driving people from mass transit into their cars is to replace trains or streetcars with buses.
More people than you think are fuming at the wheel as they sit in traffic, wishing they could be anywhere else and putting their time and attention to more productive and entertaining use than attending to the traffic.
I’ve always heard a vague urban legend that automobile companies bought up the railroads/trams, or their tracks, or* something* along those lines to discourage people from using trains by making them less available.
Any truth to it? Did the automobile industry try to hamstring the railroads or was it simply consumer choice which brought them down?
That’s a bit off topic ( 
) but the simple answer is “No”. A good, succinct explanation of Los Angeles and her transportation system can be found in Sir Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization.
Upon rereading the question, “no” to the idea that the automobile industry destroyed the trams… at least in LA.
At least we don’t have to live in windmills and clump around in those horrible wooden shoes and wear tacky white bonnets on our heads. And my man does not smell of herring and onions.
And we have hills and trees and artists who know how to draw them, dammit!
I don’t know if it was our grandparent’s generation or the auto companies or both who ruined public transportation in the US, but I simply don’t agree that there is a significant number of people in this country clamoring for better public transportation (except for those who already use it in that handful of places like NYC and Boston). If it was simply a matter of infrastructure (rubber-tire transit instead of trains), it wouldn’t be a problem: all those people who supposedly support public transportation would be taking the bus, and complaining to their elected officials to get the rail lines back up and running. But that’s not the case at all: our bus system is a shambles. Greyhound stations are almost by default neglected, dirty, and in dangerous parts of town. The busses themselves are a mess. I rode a Greyhound last Saturday: there were backs missing on some of the seats, collapsed seat cushions, graffiti on the walls, and empty beer cans rolling around the floor. The bus smelled, and the fabric on the seats was dirty. Clearly, people who can afford cars are usually NOT lining up to ride the bus – and that’s if a bus station is even available! About two years ago Greyhound closed its station in my town of over 20,000 people, due to lack of business. We now have NO links to public transportation, whatsoever. In a town of 20,000 people!! It’s incredible to me – we used to have a bus and a train station, and now we have nothing.
I’ll stop there because this is OT enough already, but ultimately I think if there were sizable numbers of Americans who really wanted decent public transportation, we would have it, period. So I can’t blame anyone for criticizing Americans for being extremely wasteful with the system we’ve built up for ourselves.
I didn’t have to be persuaded to be female, I was born that way 
[quoe]Germans often view Americans with some suspicion because an American’s overt friendliness is often equalled to inherent shallowness. After all, you greet each other with “How are you?” and then DO NOT EXPECT TO HEAR AN HONEST ANSWER!!! I’ve had this conversation with German friends numerous times and tried to explain that this phrase basically means “Hi”. They started eyeing me with suspicion after that. Incidentally, none of them had ever been to America.
[/quote]
We do know that “How are you” is the AE equivalent to “How do you do?” in BE, which is a polite phrase. When you ask a German “Wie geht’s dir?” the answer is the equally formal, and polite “Danke, gut, und dir?” (Thanks, fine, and how are you?) But yes, the friendliness that’s directed at everybody without following up with commitment is considered shallow. Even taking into account the polite routine customary in every culture.
So somebody who at leasts visits other countries as tourist is in a certain mental state?
Why is it so important if somebody has visited the US or not before being qualified to talk about the culture and politics? This isn’t, after all, about individual Americans being nice chap (while voting for a president who started a war) or clueless idiots as every country has them. It’s about the general population, the general culture.
And again, does talking on the Internet with many Americans, reading their opinions on key topics, not count as knowing Americans? Do I have to meet them face to face? Would you consider me qualified if I had been to America?
The Perfect Master answers the question “Did General Motors destroy the LA mass transit system?”