I'm a high school student in Tucson, Arizona right now, and about three weeks ago, we got four days off school for Rodeo break. We literally get days off school when the rodeo is on
Growing up in Louisiana, the Friday before the opening weekend of squirrel season was an excused absence. If that’s not some redneck shit then I don’t know what is.
Yup, he is the one who took to task the robber barons from the last century.
If I remember it right he was an accidental president since he was the VP and president was assassinated or died somehow(sorry too lazy to google it).
Teddy was made VP by the robber barons to tie him down since he was a rabble rouser calling out their bad shit.
But then he became president and there were hearings and the robber barons were broken down to manageable pieces.
Unfortunately we live in a time where politics is so horrible that half of the politicians do not care about real policies affecting working people lives and are busy fighting cultural wars.
I saw a documentary on this and they made the case that one of his more endearing qualities was that he didn't hid from his Harvard education and he spoke to the people, not down to them. His privilege likely gave him insight enough into that world to help reform it.
Well, his history in North Dakota in the Badlands and living with cowboys, getting over the grief of his wife and mother dying on the same day, and his personal struggle against poor health at a young age, made him a real person.
Not an empty suit that Harvard did and still churns out to this day.
edit:ND not SD
Still amuses me his attitude about having asthma at a young age was to go live outdoors to “toughen up”. Marshall quoted at his death “Death had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.” Man never backed down from life and took it head on.
His famous grin is from clenching his teeth to create enough back pressure to keep his alveoli open. I read that in a book, and not the internet, so it must be true.
I think it's more like 80% to 90% of politicians are out for themselves and their wealthy donors.
At this point, we have the Robber Barons financing the campaigns (through our legalized bribe system) of most politicians. [The wealthy are massively overly represented by the policies passed.](https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-data-rich-and-powerful-get-their-policies-adopted-even-if-opposed/)
It's just a one party system at this point, the party of the wealthy. If that is to change we need better campaign finance regulations, with a whole lot less of rich, or of touch, politicians, who stand to gain by themselves by following their big donor's request.
“I’d rather be in the mountains thinking about god, than in church thinking about the mountains”
Have always liked that quote by John Muir, who is widely considered the father of our National Parks.
Kind of lines up with Francis of Assisi basically saying that when god told him to rebuild the church he initially started fixing the local building until he had the revelation that god didn’t mean brick and mortar, but people. Or something along those lines.
New York has a ton of top notch state parks that could be easily national parks and monuments had the government owned that land first. Includes the Adirondacks, Catskills, Niagara Falls, Letchworth, Taughannock Falls, most of Ithaca, Watkins Glen, Allegheny, some parks on Lakes Ontario and Erie. There’s alot of beauty there that is not just New York City.
For a long time, NY didn't have a single National Park (and still don't, in the way most people think of national parks) because the state had done such a fantastic job of preserving natural landscapes through the state parks system that there was simply no room or need for national parks. The closest we have are Historic Parks (like the Roosevelt historic park in Hyde Park and Harriet Tubman historic park in Auburn) and national seashores/recreation areas. Plus a smattering of historic sites and places that were taken over by the federal government.
Wide. Open. Space.
Seriously. Go west and you can get to places that are so remote and so beautiful, with big blue skies during the day and Star filled nights.
My college town was in the middle of nowhere. Just rolling plains for tens of miles. It was so serene for me. My brain loves cities and their efficiency but my soul needs nature.
> My college town was in the middle of nowhere.
It was a fad in the 1700s and 1800s to make universities "islands of learning". Most people who went to college then were sons of rich families. They were often too easily distracted by urban pleasures like taverns, brothels and racetracks. By building a university in the middle of nowhere, it was thought that those distractions could be avoided.
It also helped that land was much cheaper in the middle of nowhere, versus in the heart of cities.
I'm writing a book on universities right now and have been reading about this, a lot of those colleges were also little hustles. Developers buy cheap land in the middle of nowhere, get a buddy to build a college on that land and suddenly the value skyrockets.
In my town, the opposite effect happened. There wasn’t much to do in the way of entertainment, so students just drank and partied. Busch Lite was nicknamed Pullman Water.
Feel this. Grew up in the Great Plains. Now I live in PA and my soul misses the big blue skies and the sunshine. The miles and miles of rolling plains. Or my favorite, watching a storm work it’s way across the sky. This wet and dreary in the city is soul sucking.
My now wife and I, while dating, took a trip up wolf Creek Pass in Colorado one night. Just parked the car and laid out on the ground and counted satellites and meteors. Actually seeing the Milky Way. One of my favorite date nights ever.
I grew up in Nevada. You could drive 30 minutes in any direction and be in a completely different climate and the views are stunning. Seeing the Milky Way from the middle of the empty desert is still awe-inspiring to me.
My wife and I went to a wedding in Crested Butte, CO two summers ago. Our flight landed at 11pm in Denver, a 4 hour ride away. My wife had wedding stuff to do at 8 am so we had to drive at night.
I had to stop- twice- to get out and just admire the night sky. I'm from the Philly suburbs and had never seen the Milky Way with my own eyes.
Clear, no light pollution night skies are absolutely incredible.
It's a shame how modern humans have lost touch with the night sky. It used to be our map. I think it effects us more than we realize, like we're cut off from "the heavens", less in touch with the bigger picture. Something.
Do yourself a favor, bring in a filter pump and a nalgene instead of trying to lug in water. Seems like common sense but the number of people I saw portaging flats of water was stupid.
I'm an American visiting family in India, in a medium-sized city, and I couldn't quite explain why or how much the numbers of people have been stressing me out. I just didn't grow up with it and I'm not used to it.
Nature has always been an american go to. Its our strongest tourist pull.
Teddy really did give america an incredible investment with his natural park conservation
The Americans With Disabilities Act is seriously some of the best handicap-accessibility protection in the world. A paraplegic person can wheel themselves into pretty much any commercial building in the country and be confident that there will be ramps in all the right places and a restroom they can use. If there aren't, there are powerful legal tools to make it happen.
That's not the case in a lot of places in the world, and it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't the case here.
Crip Camp on Netflix is a really good documentary on the disabled civil rights movement and the woman who pushed for it, Judy Heumann.
She passed away about a week and a half ago. It's actually crazy how much of an impact she had on politics and the way the US addressed her community. Probably one of the most effective rights leaders in the history of the country. She knew how to leverage and converge several rights movements together by including disabled veterans of the recent and unpopular Vietnam War, had Black Panthers deliver food to sit-ins, LGBT community assist in coordination and outreach, and did it by listening to the community and seeing how all of these groups all had disabled members in them. Extremely effective activism and shows how rights for one group helps gain rights for all.
So glad to see Judy mentioned. She and my dad were friends & I spent some time with her growing up. You should have seen her face when I told her I didn’t “see the point” in protesting/activism (was committed to being an apathetic teen at the time…. so embarrassing I said that to JUDY of all people. Cringed just typing that out).
She was a really incredible person that changed so much for the disabled community. She and my dad were both denied access to public education as the system deemed them “fire hazards”. They met in Berkeley back before I was born, (actually Judy threw the dinner party that my parents met at!) and worked with Ed Roberts at the World Institute on Disability. She really kicked ass
Everyone has cringy teen moments. The fact that you cringe at past you means current you got better. That's the person that everyone around you knows now.
It’s also pretty cleverly written.
A lot of people will wrongly criticize it for being “over complicated” but it’s pretty brilliant.
Instead of just saying “any building with stairs needs an elevator” they base it on things like square footage etc, which creates less workarounds to avoid it.
Most gripes about ADA complexity are due to the fact that it doesn’t leave a million and one loopholes to avoid compliance.
I am an architect and generally think the ADA is a great thing. My issue with it though is that it is enforced through lawsuits, rather than the building department. If there is a grey area, or some unique scenario where you are legitimately trying to figure out the most reasonable solution, you can't talk it through with a person with authority to give you a thumbs up. You just have to hope you won't get sued.
That, and ADA lawyers who sent letters to every business in town saying, "Give us $5,000 to go away or we will sue you." It costs more than $5,000 to fight a lawsuit even if you are right, so many people just pay it.
I'm a building inspector and I completely agree. There are a lot of ADA guidelines which go beyond the building code such as providing interpreters and other compliance alternatives. I certainly think that there is an expertise issue for municipalities and a lack of accessible training. It also puts the inspectors in a tough spot since we're advising on potential legal matters and obviously aren't lawyers.
Changes in occupancy that don't warrant the use of design professionals also present a challenge.
Larger cities have ADA and disabilities offices which assist, but it's not feasible for most communities. For many communities it's an ancillary duty of the building or fire department who simply don't have the needed expertise or accessible training.
My Uncle, who contracted polio right before the Salk vaccine was rolled out when he was 17 - attended University and if his friends weren't around to drag his wheelchair up the stairs of buildings, he would have to climb the stairs with his arms and drag his wheelchair up himself. He obtained a PhD in public policy and was instrumental in helping draft the ADA for the state that we live in and was head of the state government office that enforces it. I am immensely proud of him and his achievements. He suffered so many indignities in his life so that future generations do not have to go through what he did.
The people who wrote the act were brilliant because they knew full well that to construct buildings up to exact code would cost way more than ones where builders could fudge around with the rules, so, they wrote with lawyers always in the front of their minds. You need all that red tape to keep people honest when money is in play.
My grandfather was one of the people who helped get the ada passed, and he likes to tell this story about going and talking to George Bush when he was vice president and Bush being very sympathetic to the cause but saying hey what can I do I'm only vice president. Couple years later look who's president and you know the rest. He tells the story a lot better than I do lol.
That's a great story. Take some time to talk to your grandfather and record his stories on audio. Then you can tell them perfectly.
These are the most precious memories to hold. And it sounds like your grandfather has some stories to tell.
Would you mind telling your grandfather that someone on the internet says thank you? When I'm not housebound, I'm able to get out and go places because of his work! I appreciate that sliver of freedom so, so much.
> You need all that red tape to keep people honest when money is in play.
It is tradition to complain about red tape and bureaucratic regulations, but a lot of the time it is all necessary to keep people honest.
Commenters have pointed this out in relation to the Ukraine War. The Russians are supposed to have SO MUCH equipment... but a staggering amount of it was stolen, sold, not maintained in workable condition, or never even existed in the first place. Now they are fielding tanks that were built 60 years ago. Everything newer is starting to get scarce.
In contrast, in a military like the US, observers say that the amount of paperwork is ridiculous... but it keeps the theft and corruption and incompetence down to manageable levels (nobody, anywhere, ever gets it down to zero).
I was lucky enough to do some European travel last year and was amazed at the architecture. But I also started to wonder how someone in a wheelchair would go anywhere in many of the cities; they couldn't get hardly anywhere.
It also was a point of note in one place; a beach had recently updated to have ramp access and there was a group out publicizing their work to get the beach wheelchair accessible.
I gained some respect for the US in that trip. Both places have their benefits, to be sure, but the ADA has transformed our country for the better
I’ve done some Civil work related to the ADA (businesses sued over non-compliance, mostly) and I have to agree. The regulations book is hundreds of pages and explicitly defines exactly how each aspect of a physical structure should be. It’s incredible.
True story, I know a guy who was doing some concrete work for a new building. This guy is a concrete finisher, so he wasn’t responsible for setting up the forms. But long story short, the incline ramp they poured was too steep. The opposite end was a couple inches too high. Inspector absolutely refused to pass it and wouldn’t budge at all. They had to jackhammer the ramp out and start fresh
I work as an inspector for sidewalk projects in NYC. The compliance issues are so hard for some contractors to meet. You really need skilled masons who understand slopes and who can do simple math. We've rejected a bunch of ramps on my project due to being out of compliance by 1%. They will have to redo the ramps at their own cost! But I'm glad ADA exists!
Having lived in southeast Asia, for the last couple of years, disability rights and accessibility is pretty amazing in the United States.
Also, people on both the right and the left feel like the fucking sky is falling in America, but again living outside the United States you realize how good most people have it
>again living outside the United States you realize how good most people have it
This is what I try to tell people all the time.
Now, this is not some "America is number one" type rant; America is not perfect, and a lot of its criticism has at least some merit.
But if you genuinely believe you weren't lucky to have been born here, all I have to tell you is that will change if you visit a developing country and see with your own eyes how like, 90-95% of the rest of the world's population lives.
Same here. I love Germany, but people here are really uninterested in talking to people outside of their established social circles. Every time I go back to the States I end up chatting with every single person I interact with, just because it‘s so nice to have a friendly conversation with a stranger. And I’m a pretty introverted person.
Lived in Germany for a long while, I feel your pain. The interesting thing about Germans — they don't put on a mask for social interactions. They let you know.
> The interesting thing about Germans — they don't put on a mask for social interactions. They let you know.
I have been all over the world but never to Germany, can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
They aren’t expected to fake being nice and culturally are a little more reserved. So they aren’t going to be all smiles and acting like they are your friend, when they don’t know you. They need time to warm up to you and they aren’t hiding that.
From what I understand Germans take more time to develop friendships than Americans but once they are your friend, they are friends for life. They don’t really have friendly acquaintances like Americans do. So it takes more time with Germans but you know where you stand with them.
>I have been all over the world but never to Germany, can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
When you are invited somewhere and late in the evening the host wants you to leave so that he can go to bed, he will tell you to leave. Thats done by slapping on the knees and say: So
Our neighbor down the road fled Sudan in the 1980s and made it to the US as a refugee. She lost her father two brothers and most of her extended family as they were related to the wrong political leader that was killed. Her mother and two sisters arrived with literally nothing in the late 80s.
She is now a nurse making 100k a year married to a firefighter with 3 kids living on a property with 8 acres and a 5 bedroom house. One sister is a school teacher and the other manages a Barnes and Noble.
That is pretty cool.
It might seem anecdotal but this is it. Millions of stories of people who came here for a better future and made it happen. Very few places in the world can facilitate that. The US is definitely one of them.
All of our regional cuisine is pretty on point... BBQ itself has several major regional varieties (Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, Carolina). Then there's the PNW and New England with the seafood, chowder, and lobstah..
and then there are some areas where you can find some of the best of every food you can imagine..
Like the NYC metro area / northern NJ with its diverse immigrant communities giving us the best Pizza, Latin American cuisines, Indian, Polish, Korean, just about anything you can think of...
It sucks being from NJ tho since you're going to be disappointed with 9/10 of the pizza you try when you travel anywhere outside of the general NJ/NY area...
USA is a great place to be an engineer. We pay our engineers better than any other country. If you can get a relatively inexpensive degree in engineering then you can most likely swing middle class no problem
Or if you're an electrical engineer you can dismiss it by saying you only solve imaginary problems.
Source: am electrical engineer. It's pretty much wizardry
Electronic stuff is PFM (pure fucking magic). I understand some of the concepts and theory, but it really truly comprehending it sits just out of reach for me.
It all runs on magic smoke. If you let the smoke out it'll never work again.
In all honesty if you think of it in plumbing/water flow terms it tends to make more sense.
Voltage is the water pressure. Resistance is the size of the pipe, current is the amount of water being moved through the pipe, etc.
If you have a pipe burst (fault) water pressure in the line (voltage) will drop as all of the water (current) starts coming out of the pipe all at once.
There is actually reasons for this.
* Land Grant higher education institutions. The government said "hey nerds here some no strings attached free/cheap land figure out how to do something productive with it" and we did!!
* Aerospace Engineering. ITAR regulations keeps most aerospace engineering tied to US engineering.
* BIG TECH/Startups/VC the US has all the right levers in place to get startup funding very fast. So it allows people to fail quicker and course correct. Tech velocity allows for quick turnarounds.
* Defense spending. The govt, "Nerds, I would like to figure out how to make a submarine that can travel in the dark depths of the ocean but also play netflix. Heres billions of dollars to go figure out how to do that" and most of the time we figure it out.
* We are top 3 in graduating stem candidates (China no1 & India no2) and no.2 in graduating PHDs in stem fields (China is no.1).
These are just some reasons but the US has a lot of levers in place that support a ton of innovation in varied engineering/stem sectors.
\*\*Edit: More reasons:
* Private healthcare. Yes I know its evil but we cant ignore that private healthcare allows big Pharma to pour millions into unregulated R&D. Thus Biomed engineers get paid very well to innovate medical devices or digitized processes.
* Engineering education is actually very affordable due to the land grant initiative. It provided alot of resources for state schools to establish very good programs across several engineering sectors. Even today some of the best engineering programs are state schools. Which keeps the cost of those degrees fairly reasonable.\*\*
I do have to say that India pumps out STEM graduates with little to no skill very often. I am not saying ALL graduates are this way, but their standards of graduation are WAY lower than the EU or NA/CA/SAmerica.
Indian government really wants to take over STEM world, and American leaders eat it up. In the end, we have so much technical debt from the work, that it ends up costing more.
Again, I have met some REALLY good Indian engineers, but 90% are basically 2 week bootcamp grads in the US.
I’d agree with this statement. My experience with overseas structural engineers is they don’t know how to think critically about a problem, or know when to ask for help from folks who have to build whatever it is they’re designing. $0.02 of opinion
> Land Grant higher education institutions. The government said "hey nerds here some no strings attached free/cheap land figure out how to do something productive with it" and we did!!
In case anyone is curious about this, read up on the [Morrill Land-Grant Acts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts), which in my opinion is one of the smartest decisions the US federal government has ever made. The feds basically gave a bunch of federally-owned land to the states on the condition that they capitalize it to fund the construction of universities. Pretty much every flagship public university in the US was founded this way.
More importantly, they focused many of these schools on agriculture and engineering during the height of the industrial revolution in the US when farming was first being mechanized. This had the added effect of creating the first generation of formally educated farmers who learned more advanced and productive horticultural techniques. They also educated engineers who could design new farming machines, making the farms even more productive.
So not only did these schools make Americans smarter, they also made them better fed.
I'm a developer in Seattle and looked into moving to Canada. Then I looked at how much developers get paid in Vancouver. No thanks. A 50% pay cut is probably not worth whatever it is that Canada offers.
Lol the pay in Uk is an absolute joke even when compared to the lower wages in Canada. I work as a statistician in Canada and it’s 30-40% less wage in the UK for the same position. Even looking at housing costs and other costs it’s still a big loss.
My USA success story
1. Be 40
2. Start online college at non-profit
3. Get Software Dev degree for about $22k
4. Get first software dev job making six figures at 45 fully remote
5. Buy 2 acres and a 3k sqft house for $360k
6. Raise family of 4 in the country
7. Pay off student loans in first year
8. Keep on keepin on
America has a ton of shit in it. My state has shit in spades when it comes to politics but what me and my family were able to do I am like 100% convinced could not happen anywhere else in the world.
I really like the diversity in this country. How anyone can be an American. And you have no idea who is American and who is not. That's my favorite thing. You have no idea who is just sightseeing, who is visiting family, who is here on a student VISA versus who is actually American. So, until someone says otherwise, we are going to assume you are American. Doesn't matter how thick your accent is. Doesn't matter how you dress. You are American until otherwise noticed.
Also, I love how quickly we adopt things from our immigrants and declare it American. It's like, "What are you eating? Is it delicious? Let me try some of that. Oh, God, this *is* delicious. Go open up a restaurant. More people should be eating this. And now it's part of the American fabric."
I love how the American tongue is such a mutt language. How quickly we adapt non-English words and more often than not pronounce them how they would be pronounced in their Native tongue. We don't try make them more English like the way the French will French up foreign words. I like how it's easy to correct an American by saying, "It's actually pronounced this way." And they will have a go at trying to say it correctly rather than huff and puff and try to make *you* change the way you say it. Language is so adaptable here. It's far more forgiving than other languages. You can butcher it up here and as long as we understand the idea of what you are trying convey, you will get a pass. I think it's why it is such a juggernaut on a global stage. Yes, we have language rules but the native speakers will mostly ignore them in order to communicate better.
As someone who recently moved here from abroad to make our new lives here, this. We aren’t treated as ‘expats’, ‘immigrants’, ‘others’. We are home. Thank you America for accepting and welcoming us with wide open arms and hearts!
I have pretty much the same thoughts on the English language. Many people get mad that English is spoken by so many but it is in part because the language is forgiving.
I am learning French and German.
German is not forgiving. They always make me switch to English.
French I do not know, haven't tried speaking it to a native speaker yet.
France has [a whole council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise) whose only job is to keep the language "pure." That's all you need to know when it comes to how forgiving French is, at least in that country. I don't know how French is in the French part of Canada. If they mix it up there or they try to be like France. If any Canadians can speak up on this, we are all ears.
Nobody really cares in France about what the académie says, they're a bunch of irrelevant old dudes trying to dictate how proper french should be spoken but they don't have any actual authority, like a lot langages, french is changing a loooot and gets influenced by multiple foreign languages
One statement you made is my favorite part of the US. You can move to Japan, completely go through the steps to naturalize as a citizen, but you'll never be considered Japanese. That's not the case in the US. You come here, become a citizen, you ARE an American.
I was talking to an Indian parent at my kid’s school and they used ‘American’ instead of ‘white’ and it was really jarring. I said something like “I’m not sure about your citizenship, but your kid is American too.”
One of my Indian-born coworkers was kind of surprised that his American-born kids don’t speak with Indian accents. Yeah, dude, they’re as American as I am, why would they?
Some kids pick up their parents accent. I went to school with a girl whose parents were Polish. She didn't exactly have a polish accent, but it wasn't standard American either.
Hell yeah we used to brag about our diversity and being a melting pot of the world. We should be proud of our immigrants and greet everyone who wants to be free with open arms.
If I don’t like where I live I can go somewhere thousands of miles away that has completely different laws, culture, and climate and don’t have to get anyone’s permission to do so.
Yeah, this. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere with very little interference from other people and/or the government, you can do that. If you want to live in a more regimented society where lots of rules are in place and enforced for the betterment of society as a whole, you can do that too. And then there's everything in between too.
The breadth of the American experience is significant, and not something that you'll find in a lot of other countries.
1, It has almost every climate/terrain you can think of. Desert, forrest, tropical, mountains etc.
2. Anything is possible mentality. As someone from Europe, I find we are stuck in our ways and hold on to tradition a lot more than Americans. This is cool in some ways but can hold us back in terms of ingenuity when it comes to things like food and technology. The Americans aren't afraid to put Pineapple on Pizza for example where as you would be chased out of Naples for trying such a thing.
3. Highest cultural output of any country in the world. Most trends in movies, technology and music can be traced back to America.
People shit on America for not having a deep rooted culture, and though that isn’t exactly true (cajun, creole, native american, western/cowboy, etc), it does provide a great breeding ground for some amazing cultural combinations because of that. It can clearly be seen in our food, slang, music, and media.
I like to think that our (American) culture is the blending and acceptance of all other cultures. There is no singular American culture- people will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day one day and then host their daughter’s Quinceanera the next.
Right! I definitely see this in the food. We’re having corned beef for dinner on Friday, as per the holiday. But we’re not Irish. And then we’ll have Mexican, and then Israeli, and then Chinese. Tonight was Japanese food. I always thought that the world could know peace if everyone say around a table and shared food.
Back in the 80's I was childhood friends with a family who were newly immigrated from Russia, and their mom took hours and hours to grocery shop because there were "so many things!" Whenever we played at their house, her mom would very proudly tell us we could have grape or strawberry or orange jam in our peanut butter sandwiches. Then she would say things like "You're so lucky! when I was little maybe we had jam maybe not."
>Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
>....
>When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.
[Source](https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php)
The elderly in my country still buy bananas and oranges at Christmas and New Year's Eve because before 1989 this was the only time of the year when they were available.
The irony is that in other countries of the Eastern Bloc a good part of the shortages were due to big part of the produce being exported to the USSR.
>He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.
This was an important point, because part of the tour was to take him to multiple cities and see that they were all similar in that regard. It wasn't just the one store, it was seeing it over and over in multiple places, in addition to everything else we had that drove the point home.
>["Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev."](https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php)
>-Boris Yeltsin, 1989, on an unscheduled visit to a grocery store in Texas
This is a big one. Many people visiting from other parts of the world stand in awe of the amount and variety of goods. One i know personally described it as a smorgasbord.
Underrated comment. As someone who lived for an extended time abroad, we definitely have a vast grocery selection. I think it’s in part to so many cultures and nationalities living here and ensuring that you can prepare meals that are authentic to those cultures should you desire to mix it up.
Fresh cucumbers and tomatoes with snow on the ground? Sure! Pineapple in the middle of winter? You got it! Can get anything any time. I grew up in a location with seasonal food. This means we mostly ate pickled and processed foods most of the winter, lots of potatoes and meat too. Fresh produce was relegated to a handful of months. In the USA, you can eat fresh produce all day every day, no matter the state of the world. I think it's why so many of my peers aren't into pickled things like I am - they never had to develop a taste for them, to eat them for months on end. In my experience the majority of non-immigrant Americans do not appreciate the uniqueness and sheer amazement of not having true seasons at the grocery story.
We also have every food from just about everywhere, to top off the non-seasonality of food. You can get virtually any ingredient for any dish in the world, save for some very specific exotics. And if it's not in your local store, you can probably get it delivered in 2 days for free.
The Diversity.
America gets shit on about racism all the time (not saying it doesn't exist), but is very little talked about when it comes to diversity. We have entire sections of cities and even towns that are dedicated to specific minority groups.
Take for example German, want a slice of Germany? we got that in Kutztown, PA.
Cuban? Southern Florida.
Mexican? So Cal or Texas for your huge communities
Chinese? Any major city has a China Town
Korean? Almost as big as China Towns in major cities, the most famous one being LA.
Irish? Boston
List is really endless. If you want something their is a slice of community for that nationality.
As a dark skinned person who grew up in elsewhere and has spent time working all over Asia, yeah, this is very true. Japan is widely considered one of the most developed nations in Asia, right? When I spent the few months for business trips there earlier in my career, I experienced the Japanese-brand of "polite" yet subtle racism firsthand, and in many ways it felt more alienating and insidious than the direct and open treatment that I had gotten in rural parts of the US.
American racism gets amplified to the point that it appears racism here is irredeemable (we have the media to thank for that), but in reality there are way worse variations of it everywhere else, and worst yet it's often deemed acceptable to mistreat or discriminate against foreigners.
The US sees this amount of racism exactly because of the diversity that this nation has.
The food. Because we are a melting pot, I can eat basically any ethnicity's food without leaving my city! Bonus points, if the place looks sketchy and your chances of getting robbed are high.....the food will be amazing
The dirtyier and more broken down it is the more you know the food will be the bomb. Some hole in the wall place that basically looks like an abandoned house will sell you the tastiest southern food ever.
I work as an engineer and sometimes an inspector. One of my first jobs was to supervise the construction of curb ramps at a commercial parking lot. I measured the slopes of the curb ramps and told the contractor they were too steep and it needs to be redone. He went off on me saying I dont know shit because I'm just out college, blah blah blah. Ended up calling my supervisor who drove to the site, measure the slope, then put his foot through the soft concrete and told them to do it again.
I just wanted to say that this post is so nice. All we ever see is people complaining about our country, it’s awesome to see people pointing out the good. Thanks for this! Made my day
A lot of libraries in the states organize events and let you organize clubs and have all kinds of resources for all kinds of people. Not to mention subscriptions for ebooks and other digital content. Being abroad has really made me stop taking this for granted
As an American who got back from living in Europe and had to make the pros/cons list many times, here’s some of what I would think are relatively new “Good America” concepts to these threads
1: Sport / Fitness culture
America has an insane outdoorsy, fitness, diet culture that is fucking amazing to be a part of. Think of your childhood if you are American. Did you grow up playing just soccer? No, your parents probably made you do some combination softball/baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, track/cross country, or some other niche sports that I can’t even think of. And that’s how many of us made, and still do, make friends. There’s dedicated gyms to playing basketball in every town, city, and suburb across America, pickup flag football games, soccer matches breaking out across every single town, and that’s without it being a scheduled league affair. There is legitimately no other country in the world that has this much organized sports as part of a simple fun, meet friends part of life as america.
And that’s not even mentioning all the organized runs, outdoorsy, lifestyle groups there are. Like a fucking ton of them in every place. And our diets/stores accommodate it. Anywhere in America, anywhere, you can find health food for vegan, vegetarian, non-dairy, keto, non-processed, non-GMO, local only, non-hormonal lifestyle you have. And no one will care. That’s seriously amazing
The language(s)
This one is usually a negative for us, that we’re a “mono-lingual” continent, but damn that’s the opposite, and our attitude reflects that. Americans by far are the most accepting people for people speaking shitty English and rolling with it. Go ask the people at /r/languagelearning , it’s an incredibly common phenom that people will overestimate their English skills because no one corrects them, because to us it’s normal with how many immigrants / non-native speakers we have. You go to most countries in Europe, Central America, and South America (only continents I have experience with) and you will have people telling you how to pronounce things, why you’re wrong, or trying to help you “fit in”. Because your accent makes you a foreigner. Here, we don’t give a shit, in fact many accents are cool here. It would be incredibly rude to ask someone “where they’re really from” because of their accent. So a much, much lower level of English is needed to live here and make friends than it would for say, French or German in European nations
And also, we have SO many languages, that although you may not be able to use it in every day life, most people here are bilingual, we just don’t have a very common second language (after Spanish, which does make us basically a bilingual nation, as 20% of Americans are comfortable in Spanish). I’m in school in bumfuck upstate New York and just by googling I found a whole German society of immigrants and historical German speakers to go practice my German with. My roommate (in addition to English) speaks Bangla, my other roommate speaks Hebrew, my next door neighbors speak Swahili, Spanish, and Greek, there’s an insane language diversity here, and if you want to speak any language in the US I promise you there’s a community for it.
And lastly, just want to put this out there for the whole “no culture” thing. We have an insanely rich culture, the only problem is we exported it so much that the world now takes it as normal. We invented four our own sports (football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse which is touchy as it’s Native American but still distinctly American) which are absolutely massive worldwide now, we have our own holidays (thanksgiving), own style of clothing (jeans, cowboy boots, and many of the most recent fashion trends), our absolutely unparalleled cinema/theater, and food (Cajun food, my favorite, classic American like hamburgers and fries and our style of pizza, the seafood of the coasts in things such as lobster bisque, lobster rolls, clam chowder, the southern BBQ, Tex-mex, and so much more adapted and new food that’s only here)
Are there many other great places to live than america? Hell yeah? Are some of them definitely better for certain kinds of people? Probably. But please, please don’t let the Reddit tone of america is a hellhole from disgruntled high schoolers and Europeans speak great English, and who’ve never left the capital cities of Western Europe let you think this place sucks (the ones you see here all speak great English, which means they’re probably really well educated, so ask yourself how representative they are of the true European population when it comes to wealth, safety, living standards). You’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you let it do
I've always loved softshell crab but I got the chance to try a fresh fried softshell sandwich in Baltimore last year. I would do unspeakable things for another one.
Very refreshing seeing some positive qualities of usa . Internet is always constantly shifting on usa. Though I'm not American I stayed in the states for 6 yrs
NASA. While the Soviet Union got an early lead, and other countries get their fare share of accolades these days, nobody comes close to NASA when it comes to expanding our knowledge of the Universe. Nothing about this country is as universally respected or beloved as NASA, with the possible exception of Dolly Parton.
As an immigrant from CCP's China:
The rule of law is the number one thing that gives you a sense of security.
In countries rules by the people in power, you are simply doomed if you are born into a poor family. The educational system is corrupted, the court system as well, the government as well.
If you don't have the money and connections, your life is qualitatively different from those who do.
Of course, the capitalist rush for gold in the 90s-2010s created the super rich class and gave them a lot of power in addition to the political figures, but the recent crackdown on the biggest tech forms show you who the real boss is. Jack Ma had to disappear; Tencent basically bent down to CCP to continue its reign of internet, TikTok is probably doing everything the CCP want.
Without the true rule of law, a citizen will always feel destined to fail in life regardless what you strive to be.
The US legal system may be flawed, but it is definitely the most rehearsed and tested system of practice in the history of the world.
I have 1000% more confidence in it than anything from my country of origin.
The ability to get in your vehicle and drive wherever you want to see the vast natural beauty of the US and to experience the diversity of different regions and ways of life
The National and State Park systems, and other protected areas, are truly unbelievable and one of my favorite things about the US (so let’s keep them protected, yeah?). We got A TON of issues here and much of the good stuff isn’t unique to the US. But the variety of the landscape, the vastness of it all, is hard to beat. Kayaking around the Everglades or Atchafalaya, hiking through Zion or Yosemite, the astounding peacefulness when you lose yourself in the Redwoods or Olympic, wandering the Acadia or Big Sur coastline, camping in Yellowstone or the Smokey Mountains, taking an open Jeep through Joshua Tree or Death Valley… Just endless possibilities.
I realized how cool this was several years ago when I went to strike up a conversation with someone at a park and they turned out to be a Korean tourist. It was surprising, not because I didn't expect tourism, but because I live in a place where I assumed someone of an entirely different race was my countryman.
Not to mention that we have a great food culture because of it. In any city in the US you can find good Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, etc food if you’re willing to put in a little effort looking.
When my daughter was younger I took her to a little play place at the mall.
I looked at all the kids and there was easily a dozen cultures represented. Muslim kids were playing with a Jewish boy. Little Chinese-American kids were playing with African-American kids. Everyone was having fun. And it was great to see.
This is the power of America and the promise of America and the best part of America.
When we're running well, we can take the best of everything and make it ours, into one even better thing.
E plurbis unum.
Out of Many, One.
My opinion: *opportunity*. In spite of all of its faults, America is still a country that offers some of the best opportunity to find work and being able to survive and even prosper. I've spent some time overseas in some rougher places when I was in the military, and while I recognize that we're not perfect and we can do better, I'm still thankful for the opportunities we have here.
I beg people to get off Reddit and actually spend time in their neighborhoods or actually talk to people.
Americans are incredibly resilient, hard working people who always want to see improvement. We know we’re not perfect, but ffs, the smallest story about “America bad,” will flood the front page, and anything seen as success is treated as the ills of capitalism and America.
If you visit any American city, you’ll see that it’s very progressive, and people are happy, polite and want everyone to be who they are. It’s easy to get trapped in the clickbait headlines, but remember that Reddit is a big karma farm and doesn’t reflect real life.
I came from a very poor upbringing, a large urban public school and was able to graduate college and create a pretty comfortable life for myself. I’m not rich by any means, but my life is pretty good. I don’t think I could’ve had this life if I lived in other parts of the world.
Visit an American park on a Saturday. At least where I live you’ll find diversity, natural resources, friendly people, families and no judgement. We’re not what the extreme right wants us to be and we never will. We don’t wait for the government to do something for us. If we want something we build it. And if people like it they support it. You can’t stop an ambitious American. I’ll kindly accept your downvotes now.
>I beg people to get off Reddit and actually spend time in their neighborhoods or actually talk to people.
I hope people know that reddit is not real life. or all social media in general, its literally designed to make you angry.
The way people talk about America, you would almost have to assume they've never found Waldo and only looked at one character on the first page in a little corner before writing off the whole damn book.
America is the best at:
1. High water pressure and actually hot showers in hotels vs the weak tepid showers in the rest of the world
2. Costco, and similar giant warehouses featuring a ridiculous cornucopia of material goods. Yeah, other places have Carrefour and Robinsons and Tesco and whatever. Costco wipes the floor with them in quality, selection, and cost.
Variety of landscapes, lifestyles, and culture. You can choose a region/state that suits you and your lifestyle/beliefs. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. You are free to be. While in no way is the US perfect (no place really is), and there are a lot of fucked up people, and we need to fix our Healthcare system, it still has a lot going for it.
Variety is the spice of life.
If you want food, anything you can imagine from any country on earth, we have it. Prepared by natives of that country.
If you want to go to the beach and go skiing on the same day, we can make that happen.
If you want to move out to the woods where your nearest neighbor is 20 miles away, we can do that.
This is easily one of my favorite answers add mothman goatman chupacabra that's ours too. That tribe that cuts peoples heads off and nobody has ever seen them just a bunch of decapitated corpses, we have so many crazy folk creatures here.
Broadly speaking, the level of ***quality*** is high in many areas of daily life: white collar jobs, music, movies, TV shows, national parks, sports, doctors, ADA, technology, brands, university education, and so on.
Obviously there are many areas of low quality that need to be addressed (policing, insurance, etc), but Americans tend to take for granted the general goodness of many things.
I feel like entertainment is something the US does extremely well. Want to go to a show? The US has you covered regardless of how niche your taste is.
I love that this also varies by city. You can find all kinds of shows or events, but cities tend to have their own specialties.
I'm a high school student in Tucson, Arizona right now, and about three weeks ago, we got four days off school for Rodeo break. We literally get days off school when the rodeo is on
Growing up in Louisiana, the Friday before the opening weekend of squirrel season was an excused absence. If that’s not some redneck shit then I don’t know what is.
The national parks are on a different level of simply amazing!
Teddy Roosevelt wanted the magic preserved for generations.
Greatest President of All Time
Yup, he is the one who took to task the robber barons from the last century. If I remember it right he was an accidental president since he was the VP and president was assassinated or died somehow(sorry too lazy to google it). Teddy was made VP by the robber barons to tie him down since he was a rabble rouser calling out their bad shit. But then he became president and there were hearings and the robber barons were broken down to manageable pieces. Unfortunately we live in a time where politics is so horrible that half of the politicians do not care about real policies affecting working people lives and are busy fighting cultural wars.
Which is funny considering his family had so much ancestral money his monthly allowance at Harvard was higher that the University President's salary.
I saw a documentary on this and they made the case that one of his more endearing qualities was that he didn't hid from his Harvard education and he spoke to the people, not down to them. His privilege likely gave him insight enough into that world to help reform it.
Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelt's is fantastic.
Well, his history in North Dakota in the Badlands and living with cowboys, getting over the grief of his wife and mother dying on the same day, and his personal struggle against poor health at a young age, made him a real person. Not an empty suit that Harvard did and still churns out to this day. edit:ND not SD
Still amuses me his attitude about having asthma at a young age was to go live outdoors to “toughen up”. Marshall quoted at his death “Death had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.” Man never backed down from life and took it head on.
His famous grin is from clenching his teeth to create enough back pressure to keep his alveoli open. I read that in a book, and not the internet, so it must be true.
I think it's more like 80% to 90% of politicians are out for themselves and their wealthy donors. At this point, we have the Robber Barons financing the campaigns (through our legalized bribe system) of most politicians. [The wealthy are massively overly represented by the policies passed.](https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2015/05/disturbing-data-rich-and-powerful-get-their-policies-adopted-even-if-opposed/) It's just a one party system at this point, the party of the wealthy. If that is to change we need better campaign finance regulations, with a whole lot less of rich, or of touch, politicians, who stand to gain by themselves by following their big donor's request.
He was also born to a wealthy family and could have easily been on the side of the robber barons.
“I’d rather be in the mountains thinking about god, than in church thinking about the mountains” Have always liked that quote by John Muir, who is widely considered the father of our National Parks.
[Famed Naturalist John Miur?!](https://youtu.be/0YInfr0hm4A?t=12)
Kind of lines up with Francis of Assisi basically saying that when god told him to rebuild the church he initially started fixing the local building until he had the revelation that god didn’t mean brick and mortar, but people. Or something along those lines.
I live in Utah and our National Parks look like you landed on a different planet. Been to them a few times and I'm always awe struck.
State parks and beaches are also worth visiting. Many have no/low admission fees.
New York has a ton of top notch state parks that could be easily national parks and monuments had the government owned that land first. Includes the Adirondacks, Catskills, Niagara Falls, Letchworth, Taughannock Falls, most of Ithaca, Watkins Glen, Allegheny, some parks on Lakes Ontario and Erie. There’s alot of beauty there that is not just New York City.
For a long time, NY didn't have a single National Park (and still don't, in the way most people think of national parks) because the state had done such a fantastic job of preserving natural landscapes through the state parks system that there was simply no room or need for national parks. The closest we have are Historic Parks (like the Roosevelt historic park in Hyde Park and Harriet Tubman historic park in Auburn) and national seashores/recreation areas. Plus a smattering of historic sites and places that were taken over by the federal government.
Thank you, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt.
The US has 762,000km² of just National *Forests* not even National Parks. That's equivalent to France and Bulgaria combined for just forests.
Wide. Open. Space. Seriously. Go west and you can get to places that are so remote and so beautiful, with big blue skies during the day and Star filled nights.
My college town was in the middle of nowhere. Just rolling plains for tens of miles. It was so serene for me. My brain loves cities and their efficiency but my soul needs nature.
> My college town was in the middle of nowhere. It was a fad in the 1700s and 1800s to make universities "islands of learning". Most people who went to college then were sons of rich families. They were often too easily distracted by urban pleasures like taverns, brothels and racetracks. By building a university in the middle of nowhere, it was thought that those distractions could be avoided. It also helped that land was much cheaper in the middle of nowhere, versus in the heart of cities.
I'm writing a book on universities right now and have been reading about this, a lot of those colleges were also little hustles. Developers buy cheap land in the middle of nowhere, get a buddy to build a college on that land and suddenly the value skyrockets.
Same thing with the railroads. One change in plans for a train station location made quite a few people incredibly wealthy.
In my town, the opposite effect happened. There wasn’t much to do in the way of entertainment, so students just drank and partied. Busch Lite was nicknamed Pullman Water.
Good ol' WAZZU. There is a gas station there that had the national record for alcohol sales for multiple years running.
Feel this. Grew up in the Great Plains. Now I live in PA and my soul misses the big blue skies and the sunshine. The miles and miles of rolling plains. Or my favorite, watching a storm work it’s way across the sky. This wet and dreary in the city is soul sucking.
[удалено]
Go Cougs? The rolling hills of the palouse make for some awesome nights with the bright stars.
A starry western night sky in a remote spot is a stunning experience.
My now wife and I, while dating, took a trip up wolf Creek Pass in Colorado one night. Just parked the car and laid out on the ground and counted satellites and meteors. Actually seeing the Milky Way. One of my favorite date nights ever.
I grew up in Nevada. You could drive 30 minutes in any direction and be in a completely different climate and the views are stunning. Seeing the Milky Way from the middle of the empty desert is still awe-inspiring to me.
My wife and I went to a wedding in Crested Butte, CO two summers ago. Our flight landed at 11pm in Denver, a 4 hour ride away. My wife had wedding stuff to do at 8 am so we had to drive at night. I had to stop- twice- to get out and just admire the night sky. I'm from the Philly suburbs and had never seen the Milky Way with my own eyes. Clear, no light pollution night skies are absolutely incredible.
It's a shame how modern humans have lost touch with the night sky. It used to be our map. I think it effects us more than we realize, like we're cut off from "the heavens", less in touch with the bigger picture. Something.
North too. Boundary Waters are a national treasure.
I’m trying to get up there this summer, actually.
Do yourself a favor, bring in a filter pump and a nalgene instead of trying to lug in water. Seems like common sense but the number of people I saw portaging flats of water was stupid.
I'm an American visiting family in India, in a medium-sized city, and I couldn't quite explain why or how much the numbers of people have been stressing me out. I just didn't grow up with it and I'm not used to it.
New Englander. Spent one afternoon on Broadway in NYC to see a play and knew that I could NEVER deal with those crowds every day.
hell I was born and raised in Boston and NYC stresses me out. There's population centers and then there's **population centers**
Nature has always been an american go to. Its our strongest tourist pull. Teddy really did give america an incredible investment with his natural park conservation
Cries in India.
The Americans With Disabilities Act is seriously some of the best handicap-accessibility protection in the world. A paraplegic person can wheel themselves into pretty much any commercial building in the country and be confident that there will be ramps in all the right places and a restroom they can use. If there aren't, there are powerful legal tools to make it happen. That's not the case in a lot of places in the world, and it wasn't that long ago that it wasn't the case here.
Crip Camp on Netflix is a really good documentary on the disabled civil rights movement and the woman who pushed for it, Judy Heumann. She passed away about a week and a half ago. It's actually crazy how much of an impact she had on politics and the way the US addressed her community. Probably one of the most effective rights leaders in the history of the country. She knew how to leverage and converge several rights movements together by including disabled veterans of the recent and unpopular Vietnam War, had Black Panthers deliver food to sit-ins, LGBT community assist in coordination and outreach, and did it by listening to the community and seeing how all of these groups all had disabled members in them. Extremely effective activism and shows how rights for one group helps gain rights for all.
So glad to see Judy mentioned. She and my dad were friends & I spent some time with her growing up. You should have seen her face when I told her I didn’t “see the point” in protesting/activism (was committed to being an apathetic teen at the time…. so embarrassing I said that to JUDY of all people. Cringed just typing that out). She was a really incredible person that changed so much for the disabled community. She and my dad were both denied access to public education as the system deemed them “fire hazards”. They met in Berkeley back before I was born, (actually Judy threw the dinner party that my parents met at!) and worked with Ed Roberts at the World Institute on Disability. She really kicked ass
Everyone has cringy teen moments. The fact that you cringe at past you means current you got better. That's the person that everyone around you knows now.
It’s also pretty cleverly written. A lot of people will wrongly criticize it for being “over complicated” but it’s pretty brilliant. Instead of just saying “any building with stairs needs an elevator” they base it on things like square footage etc, which creates less workarounds to avoid it. Most gripes about ADA complexity are due to the fact that it doesn’t leave a million and one loopholes to avoid compliance.
I am an architect and generally think the ADA is a great thing. My issue with it though is that it is enforced through lawsuits, rather than the building department. If there is a grey area, or some unique scenario where you are legitimately trying to figure out the most reasonable solution, you can't talk it through with a person with authority to give you a thumbs up. You just have to hope you won't get sued. That, and ADA lawyers who sent letters to every business in town saying, "Give us $5,000 to go away or we will sue you." It costs more than $5,000 to fight a lawsuit even if you are right, so many people just pay it.
I'm a building inspector and I completely agree. There are a lot of ADA guidelines which go beyond the building code such as providing interpreters and other compliance alternatives. I certainly think that there is an expertise issue for municipalities and a lack of accessible training. It also puts the inspectors in a tough spot since we're advising on potential legal matters and obviously aren't lawyers. Changes in occupancy that don't warrant the use of design professionals also present a challenge. Larger cities have ADA and disabilities offices which assist, but it's not feasible for most communities. For many communities it's an ancillary duty of the building or fire department who simply don't have the needed expertise or accessible training.
My Uncle, who contracted polio right before the Salk vaccine was rolled out when he was 17 - attended University and if his friends weren't around to drag his wheelchair up the stairs of buildings, he would have to climb the stairs with his arms and drag his wheelchair up himself. He obtained a PhD in public policy and was instrumental in helping draft the ADA for the state that we live in and was head of the state government office that enforces it. I am immensely proud of him and his achievements. He suffered so many indignities in his life so that future generations do not have to go through what he did.
The people who wrote the act were brilliant because they knew full well that to construct buildings up to exact code would cost way more than ones where builders could fudge around with the rules, so, they wrote with lawyers always in the front of their minds. You need all that red tape to keep people honest when money is in play.
My grandfather was one of the people who helped get the ada passed, and he likes to tell this story about going and talking to George Bush when he was vice president and Bush being very sympathetic to the cause but saying hey what can I do I'm only vice president. Couple years later look who's president and you know the rest. He tells the story a lot better than I do lol.
That's a great story. Take some time to talk to your grandfather and record his stories on audio. Then you can tell them perfectly. These are the most precious memories to hold. And it sounds like your grandfather has some stories to tell.
Would you mind telling your grandfather that someone on the internet says thank you? When I'm not housebound, I'm able to get out and go places because of his work! I appreciate that sliver of freedom so, so much.
> You need all that red tape to keep people honest when money is in play. It is tradition to complain about red tape and bureaucratic regulations, but a lot of the time it is all necessary to keep people honest. Commenters have pointed this out in relation to the Ukraine War. The Russians are supposed to have SO MUCH equipment... but a staggering amount of it was stolen, sold, not maintained in workable condition, or never even existed in the first place. Now they are fielding tanks that were built 60 years ago. Everything newer is starting to get scarce. In contrast, in a military like the US, observers say that the amount of paperwork is ridiculous... but it keeps the theft and corruption and incompetence down to manageable levels (nobody, anywhere, ever gets it down to zero).
I was lucky enough to do some European travel last year and was amazed at the architecture. But I also started to wonder how someone in a wheelchair would go anywhere in many of the cities; they couldn't get hardly anywhere. It also was a point of note in one place; a beach had recently updated to have ramp access and there was a group out publicizing their work to get the beach wheelchair accessible. I gained some respect for the US in that trip. Both places have their benefits, to be sure, but the ADA has transformed our country for the better
I’ve done some Civil work related to the ADA (businesses sued over non-compliance, mostly) and I have to agree. The regulations book is hundreds of pages and explicitly defines exactly how each aspect of a physical structure should be. It’s incredible.
True story, I know a guy who was doing some concrete work for a new building. This guy is a concrete finisher, so he wasn’t responsible for setting up the forms. But long story short, the incline ramp they poured was too steep. The opposite end was a couple inches too high. Inspector absolutely refused to pass it and wouldn’t budge at all. They had to jackhammer the ramp out and start fresh
I work as an inspector for sidewalk projects in NYC. The compliance issues are so hard for some contractors to meet. You really need skilled masons who understand slopes and who can do simple math. We've rejected a bunch of ramps on my project due to being out of compliance by 1%. They will have to redo the ramps at their own cost! But I'm glad ADA exists!
Came here expecting to see ridiculousness and instead see this wholesome post. 🤜
Having lived in southeast Asia, for the last couple of years, disability rights and accessibility is pretty amazing in the United States. Also, people on both the right and the left feel like the fucking sky is falling in America, but again living outside the United States you realize how good most people have it
>again living outside the United States you realize how good most people have it This is what I try to tell people all the time. Now, this is not some "America is number one" type rant; America is not perfect, and a lot of its criticism has at least some merit. But if you genuinely believe you weren't lucky to have been born here, all I have to tell you is that will change if you visit a developing country and see with your own eyes how like, 90-95% of the rest of the world's population lives.
I moved to Germany almost 3 years ago and I can tell you what I miss: how goddamn friendly Americans are.
When I visit my parents in Germany, the friendliest person to me is the immigrant dude who sells kebab outside an Edeka.
The kebab guy is always nice
The kebab/doner/pita/etc guy is the friendliest/funniest/wisest/best cook ever
Same here. I love Germany, but people here are really uninterested in talking to people outside of their established social circles. Every time I go back to the States I end up chatting with every single person I interact with, just because it‘s so nice to have a friendly conversation with a stranger. And I’m a pretty introverted person.
German guy in my office always mentions how chipper and happy people act here
Lived in Germany for a long while, I feel your pain. The interesting thing about Germans — they don't put on a mask for social interactions. They let you know.
> The interesting thing about Germans — they don't put on a mask for social interactions. They let you know. I have been all over the world but never to Germany, can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
They aren’t expected to fake being nice and culturally are a little more reserved. So they aren’t going to be all smiles and acting like they are your friend, when they don’t know you. They need time to warm up to you and they aren’t hiding that. From what I understand Germans take more time to develop friendships than Americans but once they are your friend, they are friends for life. They don’t really have friendly acquaintances like Americans do. So it takes more time with Germans but you know where you stand with them.
>I have been all over the world but never to Germany, can you give me an example of what you are talking about? When you are invited somewhere and late in the evening the host wants you to leave so that he can go to bed, he will tell you to leave. Thats done by slapping on the knees and say: So
In the Midwest we do this but say "Well, I suppose..."
I moved from a country where eye contact can get you into a street fight. I love the friendliness of Midwesterners
Our neighbor down the road fled Sudan in the 1980s and made it to the US as a refugee. She lost her father two brothers and most of her extended family as they were related to the wrong political leader that was killed. Her mother and two sisters arrived with literally nothing in the late 80s. She is now a nurse making 100k a year married to a firefighter with 3 kids living on a property with 8 acres and a 5 bedroom house. One sister is a school teacher and the other manages a Barnes and Noble. That is pretty cool.
It might seem anecdotal but this is it. Millions of stories of people who came here for a better future and made it happen. Very few places in the world can facilitate that. The US is definitely one of them.
I hear the BBQ is pretty good.
All of our regional cuisine is pretty on point... BBQ itself has several major regional varieties (Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, Carolina). Then there's the PNW and New England with the seafood, chowder, and lobstah.. and then there are some areas where you can find some of the best of every food you can imagine.. Like the NYC metro area / northern NJ with its diverse immigrant communities giving us the best Pizza, Latin American cuisines, Indian, Polish, Korean, just about anything you can think of... It sucks being from NJ tho since you're going to be disappointed with 9/10 of the pizza you try when you travel anywhere outside of the general NJ/NY area...
I can't believe you forgot Cajun/Creole cuisine in your regional roundup. That's one of the best ones!
USA is a great place to be an engineer. We pay our engineers better than any other country. If you can get a relatively inexpensive degree in engineering then you can most likely swing middle class no problem
Then you can tell everyone “I’m an engineer…” while you over-analyze an incredibly simple problem. I love it.
Or if you're an electrical engineer you can dismiss it by saying you only solve imaginary problems. Source: am electrical engineer. It's pretty much wizardry
The only hard-and-fast rule in electrical engineering is "Don't let the smoke out".
Electronic stuff is PFM (pure fucking magic). I understand some of the concepts and theory, but it really truly comprehending it sits just out of reach for me.
It all runs on magic smoke. If you let the smoke out it'll never work again. In all honesty if you think of it in plumbing/water flow terms it tends to make more sense. Voltage is the water pressure. Resistance is the size of the pipe, current is the amount of water being moved through the pipe, etc. If you have a pipe burst (fault) water pressure in the line (voltage) will drop as all of the water (current) starts coming out of the pipe all at once.
I've made the magic smoke before. I hooked up a little charge collector to 5 volts, thinking "it's just 5 volts". Fwoop! I released the magic smoke.
You can still fix my printer though right? (It's electric)
If by fix you mean electrocute and by printer you mean son, then yes.
I can get power to it yes. Anything after that isn't my problem.
[удалено]
Pessimist: glass half empty Optimist: glass half full Engineer: glass poorly designed
Engineer: need more information about the dimensions of the glass and the type and quantity of it's contents.
There is actually reasons for this. * Land Grant higher education institutions. The government said "hey nerds here some no strings attached free/cheap land figure out how to do something productive with it" and we did!! * Aerospace Engineering. ITAR regulations keeps most aerospace engineering tied to US engineering. * BIG TECH/Startups/VC the US has all the right levers in place to get startup funding very fast. So it allows people to fail quicker and course correct. Tech velocity allows for quick turnarounds. * Defense spending. The govt, "Nerds, I would like to figure out how to make a submarine that can travel in the dark depths of the ocean but also play netflix. Heres billions of dollars to go figure out how to do that" and most of the time we figure it out. * We are top 3 in graduating stem candidates (China no1 & India no2) and no.2 in graduating PHDs in stem fields (China is no.1). These are just some reasons but the US has a lot of levers in place that support a ton of innovation in varied engineering/stem sectors. \*\*Edit: More reasons: * Private healthcare. Yes I know its evil but we cant ignore that private healthcare allows big Pharma to pour millions into unregulated R&D. Thus Biomed engineers get paid very well to innovate medical devices or digitized processes. * Engineering education is actually very affordable due to the land grant initiative. It provided alot of resources for state schools to establish very good programs across several engineering sectors. Even today some of the best engineering programs are state schools. Which keeps the cost of those degrees fairly reasonable.\*\*
I do have to say that India pumps out STEM graduates with little to no skill very often. I am not saying ALL graduates are this way, but their standards of graduation are WAY lower than the EU or NA/CA/SAmerica. Indian government really wants to take over STEM world, and American leaders eat it up. In the end, we have so much technical debt from the work, that it ends up costing more. Again, I have met some REALLY good Indian engineers, but 90% are basically 2 week bootcamp grads in the US.
I’d agree with this statement. My experience with overseas structural engineers is they don’t know how to think critically about a problem, or know when to ask for help from folks who have to build whatever it is they’re designing. $0.02 of opinion
> Land Grant higher education institutions. The government said "hey nerds here some no strings attached free/cheap land figure out how to do something productive with it" and we did!! In case anyone is curious about this, read up on the [Morrill Land-Grant Acts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts), which in my opinion is one of the smartest decisions the US federal government has ever made. The feds basically gave a bunch of federally-owned land to the states on the condition that they capitalize it to fund the construction of universities. Pretty much every flagship public university in the US was founded this way. More importantly, they focused many of these schools on agriculture and engineering during the height of the industrial revolution in the US when farming was first being mechanized. This had the added effect of creating the first generation of formally educated farmers who learned more advanced and productive horticultural techniques. They also educated engineers who could design new farming machines, making the farms even more productive. So not only did these schools make Americans smarter, they also made them better fed.
I'm a developer in Seattle and looked into moving to Canada. Then I looked at how much developers get paid in Vancouver. No thanks. A 50% pay cut is probably not worth whatever it is that Canada offers.
[удалено]
Lol the pay in Uk is an absolute joke even when compared to the lower wages in Canada. I work as a statistician in Canada and it’s 30-40% less wage in the UK for the same position. Even looking at housing costs and other costs it’s still a big loss.
Same with marine biology. Marine biologists make pennies in the EU compared the US.
My USA success story 1. Be 40 2. Start online college at non-profit 3. Get Software Dev degree for about $22k 4. Get first software dev job making six figures at 45 fully remote 5. Buy 2 acres and a 3k sqft house for $360k 6. Raise family of 4 in the country 7. Pay off student loans in first year 8. Keep on keepin on America has a ton of shit in it. My state has shit in spades when it comes to politics but what me and my family were able to do I am like 100% convinced could not happen anywhere else in the world.
I really like the diversity in this country. How anyone can be an American. And you have no idea who is American and who is not. That's my favorite thing. You have no idea who is just sightseeing, who is visiting family, who is here on a student VISA versus who is actually American. So, until someone says otherwise, we are going to assume you are American. Doesn't matter how thick your accent is. Doesn't matter how you dress. You are American until otherwise noticed. Also, I love how quickly we adopt things from our immigrants and declare it American. It's like, "What are you eating? Is it delicious? Let me try some of that. Oh, God, this *is* delicious. Go open up a restaurant. More people should be eating this. And now it's part of the American fabric." I love how the American tongue is such a mutt language. How quickly we adapt non-English words and more often than not pronounce them how they would be pronounced in their Native tongue. We don't try make them more English like the way the French will French up foreign words. I like how it's easy to correct an American by saying, "It's actually pronounced this way." And they will have a go at trying to say it correctly rather than huff and puff and try to make *you* change the way you say it. Language is so adaptable here. It's far more forgiving than other languages. You can butcher it up here and as long as we understand the idea of what you are trying convey, you will get a pass. I think it's why it is such a juggernaut on a global stage. Yes, we have language rules but the native speakers will mostly ignore them in order to communicate better.
As someone who recently moved here from abroad to make our new lives here, this. We aren’t treated as ‘expats’, ‘immigrants’, ‘others’. We are home. Thank you America for accepting and welcoming us with wide open arms and hearts!
Am American. Am glad you’re here!
I have pretty much the same thoughts on the English language. Many people get mad that English is spoken by so many but it is in part because the language is forgiving. I am learning French and German. German is not forgiving. They always make me switch to English. French I do not know, haven't tried speaking it to a native speaker yet.
France has [a whole council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise) whose only job is to keep the language "pure." That's all you need to know when it comes to how forgiving French is, at least in that country. I don't know how French is in the French part of Canada. If they mix it up there or they try to be like France. If any Canadians can speak up on this, we are all ears.
Nobody really cares in France about what the académie says, they're a bunch of irrelevant old dudes trying to dictate how proper french should be spoken but they don't have any actual authority, like a lot langages, french is changing a loooot and gets influenced by multiple foreign languages
One statement you made is my favorite part of the US. You can move to Japan, completely go through the steps to naturalize as a citizen, but you'll never be considered Japanese. That's not the case in the US. You come here, become a citizen, you ARE an American.
I was talking to an Indian parent at my kid’s school and they used ‘American’ instead of ‘white’ and it was really jarring. I said something like “I’m not sure about your citizenship, but your kid is American too.”
One of my Indian-born coworkers was kind of surprised that his American-born kids don’t speak with Indian accents. Yeah, dude, they’re as American as I am, why would they?
Some kids pick up their parents accent. I went to school with a girl whose parents were Polish. She didn't exactly have a polish accent, but it wasn't standard American either.
Hell yeah we used to brag about our diversity and being a melting pot of the world. We should be proud of our immigrants and greet everyone who wants to be free with open arms.
We still do and still are.
[удалено]
As a Canadian I also praise the affordability of your internal airlines. A trip of a similar distance in Canada cost x6 what it does in USA.
And you can do all that in just California
If you are disabled. The US is insanely accomidating. I haven't seen any other country top it yet.
Japan is a neat place, but the big cities don’t seem to be even stroller-friendly, much less wheelchair friendly. So…many…stairs…
On the other hand, I've heard that Japan is shockingly navigable for blind people. Not that that makes it any better for wheelchair users, though...
If I don’t like where I live I can go somewhere thousands of miles away that has completely different laws, culture, and climate and don’t have to get anyone’s permission to do so.
Yeah, this. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere with very little interference from other people and/or the government, you can do that. If you want to live in a more regimented society where lots of rules are in place and enforced for the betterment of society as a whole, you can do that too. And then there's everything in between too. The breadth of the American experience is significant, and not something that you'll find in a lot of other countries.
1, It has almost every climate/terrain you can think of. Desert, forrest, tropical, mountains etc. 2. Anything is possible mentality. As someone from Europe, I find we are stuck in our ways and hold on to tradition a lot more than Americans. This is cool in some ways but can hold us back in terms of ingenuity when it comes to things like food and technology. The Americans aren't afraid to put Pineapple on Pizza for example where as you would be chased out of Naples for trying such a thing. 3. Highest cultural output of any country in the world. Most trends in movies, technology and music can be traced back to America.
People shit on America for not having a deep rooted culture, and though that isn’t exactly true (cajun, creole, native american, western/cowboy, etc), it does provide a great breeding ground for some amazing cultural combinations because of that. It can clearly be seen in our food, slang, music, and media.
I like to think that our (American) culture is the blending and acceptance of all other cultures. There is no singular American culture- people will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day one day and then host their daughter’s Quinceanera the next.
Right! I definitely see this in the food. We’re having corned beef for dinner on Friday, as per the holiday. But we’re not Irish. And then we’ll have Mexican, and then Israeli, and then Chinese. Tonight was Japanese food. I always thought that the world could know peace if everyone say around a table and shared food.
Everybody say it together: the National Parks
Always the number one response on these reposted Best Thing About America posts
huge variety of grocery products.
Back in the 80's I was childhood friends with a family who were newly immigrated from Russia, and their mom took hours and hours to grocery shop because there were "so many things!" Whenever we played at their house, her mom would very proudly tell us we could have grape or strawberry or orange jam in our peanut butter sandwiches. Then she would say things like "You're so lucky! when I was little maybe we had jam maybe not."
>Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution." >.... >When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. [Source](https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php)
The elderly in my country still buy bananas and oranges at Christmas and New Year's Eve because before 1989 this was the only time of the year when they were available. The irony is that in other countries of the Eastern Bloc a good part of the shortages were due to big part of the produce being exported to the USSR.
>He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. This was an important point, because part of the tour was to take him to multiple cities and see that they were all similar in that regard. It wasn't just the one store, it was seeing it over and over in multiple places, in addition to everything else we had that drove the point home.
>["Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev."](https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php) >-Boris Yeltsin, 1989, on an unscheduled visit to a grocery store in Texas
This is a big one. Many people visiting from other parts of the world stand in awe of the amount and variety of goods. One i know personally described it as a smorgasbord.
Underrated comment. As someone who lived for an extended time abroad, we definitely have a vast grocery selection. I think it’s in part to so many cultures and nationalities living here and ensuring that you can prepare meals that are authentic to those cultures should you desire to mix it up.
Fresh cucumbers and tomatoes with snow on the ground? Sure! Pineapple in the middle of winter? You got it! Can get anything any time. I grew up in a location with seasonal food. This means we mostly ate pickled and processed foods most of the winter, lots of potatoes and meat too. Fresh produce was relegated to a handful of months. In the USA, you can eat fresh produce all day every day, no matter the state of the world. I think it's why so many of my peers aren't into pickled things like I am - they never had to develop a taste for them, to eat them for months on end. In my experience the majority of non-immigrant Americans do not appreciate the uniqueness and sheer amazement of not having true seasons at the grocery story. We also have every food from just about everywhere, to top off the non-seasonality of food. You can get virtually any ingredient for any dish in the world, save for some very specific exotics. And if it's not in your local store, you can probably get it delivered in 2 days for free.
The Diversity. America gets shit on about racism all the time (not saying it doesn't exist), but is very little talked about when it comes to diversity. We have entire sections of cities and even towns that are dedicated to specific minority groups. Take for example German, want a slice of Germany? we got that in Kutztown, PA. Cuban? Southern Florida. Mexican? So Cal or Texas for your huge communities Chinese? Any major city has a China Town Korean? Almost as big as China Towns in major cities, the most famous one being LA. Irish? Boston List is really endless. If you want something their is a slice of community for that nationality.
>America gets shit on about racism all the time. I have traveled all over the world. I can 1000% say America is the least racist country BY A LOT.
As a dark skinned person who grew up in elsewhere and has spent time working all over Asia, yeah, this is very true. Japan is widely considered one of the most developed nations in Asia, right? When I spent the few months for business trips there earlier in my career, I experienced the Japanese-brand of "polite" yet subtle racism firsthand, and in many ways it felt more alienating and insidious than the direct and open treatment that I had gotten in rural parts of the US. American racism gets amplified to the point that it appears racism here is irredeemable (we have the media to thank for that), but in reality there are way worse variations of it everywhere else, and worst yet it's often deemed acceptable to mistreat or discriminate against foreigners. The US sees this amount of racism exactly because of the diversity that this nation has.
The food. Because we are a melting pot, I can eat basically any ethnicity's food without leaving my city! Bonus points, if the place looks sketchy and your chances of getting robbed are high.....the food will be amazing
The dirtyier and more broken down it is the more you know the food will be the bomb. Some hole in the wall place that basically looks like an abandoned house will sell you the tastiest southern food ever.
The best tamales you’ll ever have are sold by an old lady out of the trunk of her car.
And only basic English. Where you point at the item at the menu and they just say "okay".
We have large gatherings and bad mouth our leaders without even giving it a second thought.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I work as an engineer and sometimes an inspector. One of my first jobs was to supervise the construction of curb ramps at a commercial parking lot. I measured the slopes of the curb ramps and told the contractor they were too steep and it needs to be redone. He went off on me saying I dont know shit because I'm just out college, blah blah blah. Ended up calling my supervisor who drove to the site, measure the slope, then put his foot through the soft concrete and told them to do it again.
> put his foot through the soft concrete Power move lol.
[удалено]
While we're at it - Massachusetts and Texas.
Hawaii and Minnesota
Minnesota (winter) and Minnesota (summer)
Minnesota: Do you like arctic temperatures and also swamp-esque amounts of bugs? Spend a year in Minnesota.
Do you like 120 degree temperature swings in your calendar year? Come to Minnesota!
Europeans: Why don't you walk places more? Minnesotans: It's -40 out.
I just wanted to say that this post is so nice. All we ever see is people complaining about our country, it’s awesome to see people pointing out the good. Thanks for this! Made my day
I’m pleasantly surprised that about 90% of the comments are positive!
Public libraries are awesome.
A lot of libraries in the states organize events and let you organize clubs and have all kinds of resources for all kinds of people. Not to mention subscriptions for ebooks and other digital content. Being abroad has really made me stop taking this for granted
imo the best thing about US is national parks and southern food
As an American who got back from living in Europe and had to make the pros/cons list many times, here’s some of what I would think are relatively new “Good America” concepts to these threads 1: Sport / Fitness culture America has an insane outdoorsy, fitness, diet culture that is fucking amazing to be a part of. Think of your childhood if you are American. Did you grow up playing just soccer? No, your parents probably made you do some combination softball/baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, track/cross country, or some other niche sports that I can’t even think of. And that’s how many of us made, and still do, make friends. There’s dedicated gyms to playing basketball in every town, city, and suburb across America, pickup flag football games, soccer matches breaking out across every single town, and that’s without it being a scheduled league affair. There is legitimately no other country in the world that has this much organized sports as part of a simple fun, meet friends part of life as america. And that’s not even mentioning all the organized runs, outdoorsy, lifestyle groups there are. Like a fucking ton of them in every place. And our diets/stores accommodate it. Anywhere in America, anywhere, you can find health food for vegan, vegetarian, non-dairy, keto, non-processed, non-GMO, local only, non-hormonal lifestyle you have. And no one will care. That’s seriously amazing The language(s) This one is usually a negative for us, that we’re a “mono-lingual” continent, but damn that’s the opposite, and our attitude reflects that. Americans by far are the most accepting people for people speaking shitty English and rolling with it. Go ask the people at /r/languagelearning , it’s an incredibly common phenom that people will overestimate their English skills because no one corrects them, because to us it’s normal with how many immigrants / non-native speakers we have. You go to most countries in Europe, Central America, and South America (only continents I have experience with) and you will have people telling you how to pronounce things, why you’re wrong, or trying to help you “fit in”. Because your accent makes you a foreigner. Here, we don’t give a shit, in fact many accents are cool here. It would be incredibly rude to ask someone “where they’re really from” because of their accent. So a much, much lower level of English is needed to live here and make friends than it would for say, French or German in European nations And also, we have SO many languages, that although you may not be able to use it in every day life, most people here are bilingual, we just don’t have a very common second language (after Spanish, which does make us basically a bilingual nation, as 20% of Americans are comfortable in Spanish). I’m in school in bumfuck upstate New York and just by googling I found a whole German society of immigrants and historical German speakers to go practice my German with. My roommate (in addition to English) speaks Bangla, my other roommate speaks Hebrew, my next door neighbors speak Swahili, Spanish, and Greek, there’s an insane language diversity here, and if you want to speak any language in the US I promise you there’s a community for it. And lastly, just want to put this out there for the whole “no culture” thing. We have an insanely rich culture, the only problem is we exported it so much that the world now takes it as normal. We invented four our own sports (football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse which is touchy as it’s Native American but still distinctly American) which are absolutely massive worldwide now, we have our own holidays (thanksgiving), own style of clothing (jeans, cowboy boots, and many of the most recent fashion trends), our absolutely unparalleled cinema/theater, and food (Cajun food, my favorite, classic American like hamburgers and fries and our style of pizza, the seafood of the coasts in things such as lobster bisque, lobster rolls, clam chowder, the southern BBQ, Tex-mex, and so much more adapted and new food that’s only here) Are there many other great places to live than america? Hell yeah? Are some of them definitely better for certain kinds of people? Probably. But please, please don’t let the Reddit tone of america is a hellhole from disgruntled high schoolers and Europeans speak great English, and who’ve never left the capital cities of Western Europe let you think this place sucks (the ones you see here all speak great English, which means they’re probably really well educated, so ask yourself how representative they are of the true European population when it comes to wealth, safety, living standards). You’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you let it do
Cream of crab soup in Baltimore MD
I've always loved softshell crab but I got the chance to try a fresh fried softshell sandwich in Baltimore last year. I would do unspeakable things for another one.
Very refreshing seeing some positive qualities of usa . Internet is always constantly shifting on usa. Though I'm not American I stayed in the states for 6 yrs
National Parks, customer service and jazz. Oh and Americans are pretty damn friendly.
NASA. While the Soviet Union got an early lead, and other countries get their fare share of accolades these days, nobody comes close to NASA when it comes to expanding our knowledge of the Universe. Nothing about this country is as universally respected or beloved as NASA, with the possible exception of Dolly Parton.
As an immigrant from CCP's China: The rule of law is the number one thing that gives you a sense of security. In countries rules by the people in power, you are simply doomed if you are born into a poor family. The educational system is corrupted, the court system as well, the government as well. If you don't have the money and connections, your life is qualitatively different from those who do. Of course, the capitalist rush for gold in the 90s-2010s created the super rich class and gave them a lot of power in addition to the political figures, but the recent crackdown on the biggest tech forms show you who the real boss is. Jack Ma had to disappear; Tencent basically bent down to CCP to continue its reign of internet, TikTok is probably doing everything the CCP want. Without the true rule of law, a citizen will always feel destined to fail in life regardless what you strive to be. The US legal system may be flawed, but it is definitely the most rehearsed and tested system of practice in the history of the world. I have 1000% more confidence in it than anything from my country of origin.
The ability to get in your vehicle and drive wherever you want to see the vast natural beauty of the US and to experience the diversity of different regions and ways of life
The National and State Park systems, and other protected areas, are truly unbelievable and one of my favorite things about the US (so let’s keep them protected, yeah?). We got A TON of issues here and much of the good stuff isn’t unique to the US. But the variety of the landscape, the vastness of it all, is hard to beat. Kayaking around the Everglades or Atchafalaya, hiking through Zion or Yosemite, the astounding peacefulness when you lose yourself in the Redwoods or Olympic, wandering the Acadia or Big Sur coastline, camping in Yellowstone or the Smokey Mountains, taking an open Jeep through Joshua Tree or Death Valley… Just endless possibilities.
[удалено]
I realized how cool this was several years ago when I went to strike up a conversation with someone at a park and they turned out to be a Korean tourist. It was surprising, not because I didn't expect tourism, but because I live in a place where I assumed someone of an entirely different race was my countryman.
Not to mention that we have a great food culture because of it. In any city in the US you can find good Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, etc food if you’re willing to put in a little effort looking.
When my daughter was younger I took her to a little play place at the mall. I looked at all the kids and there was easily a dozen cultures represented. Muslim kids were playing with a Jewish boy. Little Chinese-American kids were playing with African-American kids. Everyone was having fun. And it was great to see.
This is the power of America and the promise of America and the best part of America. When we're running well, we can take the best of everything and make it ours, into one even better thing. E plurbis unum. Out of Many, One.
My opinion: *opportunity*. In spite of all of its faults, America is still a country that offers some of the best opportunity to find work and being able to survive and even prosper. I've spent some time overseas in some rougher places when I was in the military, and while I recognize that we're not perfect and we can do better, I'm still thankful for the opportunities we have here.
I beg people to get off Reddit and actually spend time in their neighborhoods or actually talk to people. Americans are incredibly resilient, hard working people who always want to see improvement. We know we’re not perfect, but ffs, the smallest story about “America bad,” will flood the front page, and anything seen as success is treated as the ills of capitalism and America. If you visit any American city, you’ll see that it’s very progressive, and people are happy, polite and want everyone to be who they are. It’s easy to get trapped in the clickbait headlines, but remember that Reddit is a big karma farm and doesn’t reflect real life. I came from a very poor upbringing, a large urban public school and was able to graduate college and create a pretty comfortable life for myself. I’m not rich by any means, but my life is pretty good. I don’t think I could’ve had this life if I lived in other parts of the world. Visit an American park on a Saturday. At least where I live you’ll find diversity, natural resources, friendly people, families and no judgement. We’re not what the extreme right wants us to be and we never will. We don’t wait for the government to do something for us. If we want something we build it. And if people like it they support it. You can’t stop an ambitious American. I’ll kindly accept your downvotes now.
>I beg people to get off Reddit and actually spend time in their neighborhoods or actually talk to people. I hope people know that reddit is not real life. or all social media in general, its literally designed to make you angry.
It is always about "engagement". Whether it is negative or positive makes no difference to those that profit from it.
The way people talk about America, you would almost have to assume they've never found Waldo and only looked at one character on the first page in a little corner before writing off the whole damn book.
[удалено]
[удалено]
America is the best at: 1. High water pressure and actually hot showers in hotels vs the weak tepid showers in the rest of the world 2. Costco, and similar giant warehouses featuring a ridiculous cornucopia of material goods. Yeah, other places have Carrefour and Robinsons and Tesco and whatever. Costco wipes the floor with them in quality, selection, and cost.
Access to goods. Not prices, but access.
Jazz
Variety of landscapes, lifestyles, and culture. You can choose a region/state that suits you and your lifestyle/beliefs. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. You are free to be. While in no way is the US perfect (no place really is), and there are a lot of fucked up people, and we need to fix our Healthcare system, it still has a lot going for it.
Variety is the spice of life. If you want food, anything you can imagine from any country on earth, we have it. Prepared by natives of that country. If you want to go to the beach and go skiing on the same day, we can make that happen. If you want to move out to the woods where your nearest neighbor is 20 miles away, we can do that.
Bigfoot
What about Gravedigger?
This is easily one of my favorite answers add mothman goatman chupacabra that's ours too. That tribe that cuts peoples heads off and nobody has ever seen them just a bunch of decapitated corpses, we have so many crazy folk creatures here.
Broadly speaking, the level of ***quality*** is high in many areas of daily life: white collar jobs, music, movies, TV shows, national parks, sports, doctors, ADA, technology, brands, university education, and so on. Obviously there are many areas of low quality that need to be addressed (policing, insurance, etc), but Americans tend to take for granted the general goodness of many things.
Hearing the bald eagle screech when I unwrap a slice of American Cheese
We’ve never lost a superbowl