“Why do you call it ‘football’ when they use their hands?” is the least original, least funny joke you could possibly make to an American. Also, there are more kicks in an average American football game than there are in an average rugby game, and you guys call rugby “football”
Many of us I the US want to come there, and we’re willing to contribute, but the barriers of entry are too high. I likely won’t be able to until after retirement and that probably won’t be until I’m too old to move. And I have a lot to contribute if I could find a way to get on my feet. The US doesn’t allow for building enough wealth to start a business right out of the gate, unless you’re already born wealthy or get lucky and are willing to be exploitative, and in that case I could use a different visa to get in. Immigration isn’t all welfare cases and even with those who do need that help having a system in place to allow then to contribute while they get on their feet would benefit everyone. Dump the idea that you need to be extreme capitalists like the US and start embracing the people who need help to get started and most of them will contribute significantly as they will be so prideful of the place that took them in.
You all need to just start making English an official language across the EU. Yeah I know that’s very American imperialist of me to say, but most of you speak it already anyway and it would make travel and communication so much easier. It feels like you all are insisting on speaking different languages just to pretend you have unique cultures when let’s be real, once you welcome McDonalds that ship has sailed.
Smoking kills.
It’s always jarring to go to an otherwise gorgeous and cosmopolitan EU city and see the kind of cigarette litter the US has 30 years ago. Where I live in the US, cops actually write tickets for throwing butts on the ground, and people will yell at you for it. In Lisbon or Paris, there are entire parts of the city which just smell like an ash tray because of all the cigarette litter.
Why wouldn’t Europeans be ready to hear that? Pretty sure we’ve been hearing it on a regular basis since the 70’s
The numbers are a bit worse than I thought https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/smoking-rates-by-country.
As usual, Sweden is doing well. So are a lot of African countries.
Once years ago when I used to smoke, on was visiting Ghana and people were literally yelling at me for smoking in public. It’s illegal to smoke in public in a few African countries at this point IIRC.
Just came back from France it’s out of control there seemingly.
Most of us dislike it. But it’s also true that we have quite a lot of tobacco users. It’s just disgusting
Yall need ac. Get with the fucking times bro. Every summer yall just dying over there. We aren’t fixing global warming in this lifetime just buy an ac unit
The state of Western Australia is bigger than all of Europe.
Laicite is illiberal. Leaving aside that it explicitly favors Christianity over other religions, it still violates human rights, specifically free expression.
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
The culture of France stems from a long-standing Christian default. In language, dress, behavior, holidays, etc. There’s no need to ban “Christian” clothing, for example, because Christian clothing is everywhere. France can try to use the excuse that these material descendants of older, religious-compliant garments are now “secularized,” but Laicite precludes the potential normalization of other cultural influences entering that space in the name of some sort of French cultural purity.
If people want to wear a hijab not because of religion but because it’s trendy, would that be different? France says no.
But is that any different than a woman choosing to wear a “secular” skirt or dress long enough that you can’t see her ankles just because it looks nice? Do French offices chastise employees if they wear black after someone dies? Do they care as much if someone opts not to wear mixed fabrics, even for religious reasons?
This is why Laicite is flawed, because it only recognizes religions of the “other” as modes of expression while basically giving free reign to Christians to continue expressing their religion because their practices are “normal”.
Don’t even get me started on the church taxes in Germany.
It really does feel like online communities get more relentlessly xenophobic when they have more Europeans. It just seems like a lot of you can’t get by without mentioning where someone’s from. Like, no, someone not seeing the value in retro computing doesn’t say anything about “the intelligence of the average Scot.” And if you can’t tell where they’re from, American by default.
States in the system U.S. are often the butt of the joke too.
Wow that’s exactly the kind of thing a Scot would complain about
Really wish @notruescotsman was here right now
Well for one thing, there is that one obvious thing which Americans and everyone else are also unready to hear: You need to give up fossil fuels. No more coal, no more gas, no more petrol, no more diesel. Some parts of Europe like to think they’re well on the way to that goal but even there for the most part you’ve barely begun and are moving too slowly or in the wrong direction (e.g. biofuels). The hard part cannot be put off for much longer.
Why’s that?
Because otherwise, a horde of raiders in spiky leather armour will cross the radioactive wasteland, roll up to your place and rip your arms off.
Unbelievable
people being angry at nuclear and wanting to go back to coal are the worst
I’m sad for what’s happening over in Germany
Nuclear hater are braindead
Almost all of the nuclear power stations were already at the end of their lifetime anyway.
And it’s much cheaper and faster to build renewable energy than nuclear, so that’s what we are doing.
If you think nuclear is so great and cheap, look at france, who had to bail out the EDF (company operating all nuclear plants) because it was bankrupt. When the rivers are empty in the summer they have to shut down the plants. And a few years ago they would have had to shut down portions of the country if they hadn’t got electricity from other countries because a lot of their reactors were found to have cracks in their vessels.
Shure, we Germans as a whole are still using too much fossil fuels. But the state I live in (Schleswig-Holstein) already produces more renewable electricity than it consumes each year and I also have a lot of solar on my roof and batteries in my basement.
TLDR: Nuclear is a waste of money when renewables are so much cheaper.
I also forgot to mention the newest nuclear reactor that was built in France.
They needed 17 years to build it, 12 years over their initial estimate.
And the final costs (13.2 billion) were four times as much as was initially estimated.
Just imagine how much renewable power generation could have been built with that amount of money and time.
EU collaboration and integration is a joke. Politically, the EU is divided and bizarrely complex. There are movements to improve this but they are not as popular as the sloganistic alt right that essentially just want to give up and go back to separate countries
Yeah, we Europeans have to figure out how to work together better, because that’s the only chance we have of being independent from countries like Russia, China (or the US).
I spent three weeks in Belgium twenty years ago studying the EU’s structure, with a lot of time spent on the “Constitution” treaty that failed in 2005. The professors were all generally in favor of it, so maybe they overstated its benefits and definitely overstated its chances, but it sure seems like it would have helped.
Also, the pea soup at the university canteen was surprisingly good.
Europeans like to pretend they’re innocent, but they are the benefactors of most the damaging empires to have ever existed. They colonized nearly the entire world, extracting value from other cultures while destroying them. They pulled out once it was financially wise, keeping the wealth they extracted and leaving behind the destruction they created. They then blame everyone else for their issues while bragging about how awesome the EU is while overlooking that the EU is only possible due to the wealth they stole from everyone else. Europe likes to discuss that they had their social hardship discussing WWII, but the origin and impact of WWII there was internal to Europe. Had Europe been subject to colonization from elsewhere, it would be just as much a mess as other places. Look at the situation in former Soviet Pact countries that were practically colonized by Russia for maybe half a century. Now imagine if instead of half a century, it was hundreds of years and 5 times as brutal.
Fun fact: The term “colony” comes from Christopher Colombus’ name, which is Spanish is Cristobal Colon. Even the term colonization derives from a European.
tl;dr: Europe got to where it is by destroying the rest of the world while blaming the rest of the world for their issues. Their critique of USA is merely a distraction from their own responsibility.
Most Europeans still have a casual sense of arrogance and superior over the rest of the world. It’s not very heavy, but it’s there, even among some of the best people I know
Most of the world dislikes you, and are not happy when they run into you on the internet. Mostly because it’s been almost 600 years & y’all still haven’t gone home.
If war breaks out between NATO and Russia, Europe hasn’t kept up enough military power to hold the Russians back while waiting for America to come bail them out. Their countries are gonna get hardcore trashed in the process.
I thought America was racist until I saw a member of UK Parliament tweeting about a boat of migrants sinking with “Good riddance”.
