Ask Lemmy

Commas are for separating thousands, periods are decimal points. Stop trying to be unique, you're not.

The American South equals the European East

Europeans are really fucking racist. Asians and Jews are cool and yet yall are really weird about them. and don't get me started on how badly Islam is vilified...

yall need to get off the high horse and take a joke sometimes. you terrorized the entire world via colonization for hundreds of years through modern day, if people harmlessly stereotype the german or french, make fun of british people, or tease the dutch language, yall can handle it

for context, im american. we get bullied all the time, and while not all americans are fat and stupid, the combination of that many are and that we've terrorized the world plenty make me think a lil teasing is fair

You guys should start bulking up your militaries. At best, the US will completely abandon you, and I really don't want to think about worst-case scenario as I live in the US.

Based on the comments it looks like Europeans weren't ready to hear some of these things. 😉 Let me pile on...

Innovation in Europe is stiffled due to a risk-averse culture, complex regulatory environments, fragmented markets across different countries, limited access to venture capital, and a tendency for established companies to be less receptive to new ideas from startups, making it harder for innovative companies to scale up (compared to the US).

Idolizing the past (and long gone) 'grandeur' of some European countries is not the best way to prepare for the future.

edit: as a disclaimer, I'm European from one of those once important countries.

How would people who live outside of Europe know what Europeans are not ready to hear? As someone who lives in the U.S. I know only a couple of people IRL who live in Europe.

The thing my European friend was not ready to hear was that all his complaining about the social programs in his home country and the high taxes and so on comes across as entitled and spoiled. Because he's never lived without the benefits of a state that will provide healthcare and so on, he is free to complain about his privileges and glorify the U.S. as a place where individual citizens fill in the responsibilities that the government should fulfill. He sees this as an unmitigated good, because he thinks it means more civic engagement.

What he doesn't understand is that this results in most people falling through the cracks, and until he falls through one of those cracks himself it won't be real to him how bad it is to not be able to afford losing wages because you are sick or injured, or what it's like when you can't afford to see a doctor when you break a bone or get so sick you can't leave your house.

That said, I'm not sure every European needs to hear this, or that they're not ready to hear it - just this one person seemed to be a little delusional and to have idealized the U.S. as some kind of right-wing libertarian utopia.

The sound from my portable bluetooth speaker. But that's mostly because it's a shitty speaker and you can barely hear it when it's sitting 3 feet away let alone when there's at minimum an ocean between you and it.

EU institutions are just as regulatory captured as everywhere else. The EU bureaucracy is horribly inefficient with tons of unfirable "human drones" making 2x for the same role one does in the the private market, where they just do 1/10x of the work. The only reason EU is not quite as corrupt as USA is ironically because all the competing rich fuckers of each nation are competing with each other's lobbying