I really do hear you on the housing quality - it's ridiculous what people are willing to put up with over there. We have friends living in the southern bay area who pay 3.5k for a 2.5 bedroom apartment in an apartment complex - the whole thing calls itself "Luxury Residencies". Ain't no luxury there. Like you describe everything is built extra cheap: from the walls, to the kitchen appliances and the plumbing. There is a massive top-loader in their supply closet that sounds like it runs on it's own ICE, built in the 50s. In Europe this would be considered a very basic apartment but it's already considered 1-2 levels higher than average and not even 3 years old.
I do think there is something to your Galapagos syndrome theory.
Million dollars houses would be regarded as unliveable in other parts of the US.
The first time one of these places sells (with black mold still in the basement, asbestos in the walls, and lead paint the children's room) the value of the nearby houses goes up and everyone starts looking to sell THEIR old beat up black mold and asbestos special. It starts a boom and suddenly a whole neighborhood of 300k$ houses become 1million$ grey monstrosities.
This all drives up the cost of new construction as well (which is always a little more pricey than buying an older home) and so you get overpriced mansions that you describe as well, but the root cause is the removal of the entire "bottom" of the market. It is now almost impossible to find what Americans call a "fixer-upper" in some cities.
I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastructure is better than in San Francisco or any other part of the USA I've visited. I'm originally from Canada, and I'm sad to say that, although some things are better than the USA (like the roads and the trash), it's not by much, and it's still terrible compared to the rest of the first world.
Thank the market: the food companies have prioritized durability, yield, and appearance over taste.
https://www.npr.org/2011/07/09/137623954/the-troubled-histor...
> On top of that, the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. "As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — 'I don't get paid a cent for flavor,'" Estabrook says.
Similarly for universities, the quality differs. Go to Munich's technical university and you'll see buildings in the top percentiles. Go to other universities and the substance is easily going to be much older - but then again, Germany sets its priorities to a good quality education without student debt, and the buildings themselves don't matter much for the education.
Generally, I feel like all these complaints need to be measured against what the alternative is. Which cities have a busy subway system where commuters aren't complaining?
Literally any city in Asia (or at least Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, whose subway company has now branched out to run subways in many parts of the world like Stockholm). In one year of living in Nagoya the subway was late once.
That said it has a way more sensible layout than Munich where one failure in a central point does not cascade to paralyze the entire rest of the network. It is not the worst of course, since it is pretty extensive, but routing nearly every single line through Hbf or Sendlinger Tor couldn't ever have been a good idea.
That is true to some extent. However, the noise of the rainwater dripping into many buckets at the central library of the University of Regensburg made it hard to concentrate on anything.
That was around 2010. Not sure if the leaky roof has been fixed since. Wouldn't be surprised if the answer is no.
At least there is public transportation at all, unlike in the US.
Now if the public transportation didn't exist you'd just shrug and go by your car saving yourself a whole bunch of stress and fist clenching and cursing.
[0] https://www.mvg.de/dam/mvg/ueber/unternehmensprofil/mvg-imag...
I used to hate public transport in munich, but compared to US (e.g. SF or NYC) it seems incredibly good.
Even in NY, the traditional "American" food carts sell hotdogs, pretzels, ice cream or $1 pizza. All of which are IMO, pretty sub-par for street food. It is only since halal carts became a thing, that NY street food has started becoming alright. There are some other great food carts, but 1 off carts get overshadowed by the dozens of familiar NYC foods.
US's culinary strength lies in the diversity of cuisines. However, most affordable international food places are not opened by aspiring chefs. Rather, it is usually struggling immigrants who use it as a way to survive in the absence of other employable skills. While I respect the hustle, these people can obviously not cook at the same level as ones that run their operations in their country of origin out of more passion driven reasons.
When American born people with a passion for cooking start affordable restaurants in the cuisine of their roots, it is often heavily colored by their American upbringing. (which for me ends up meaning more sugar, more fat and less intense flavors) Not gate keeping, but at the end of the say the experiences of someone fully immersed in a culture will always be richer than those who've vicariously experienced them.
That being said, for every cuisine in every big city in the US, there is a gem. They can be hard to find, are often not the most accessible (non-commercial area, language barrier, sketchy hygiene), but damn are they worth it. The ability to have a gem for each cuisine of the world, is a trait possibly unique to the US metro cities and their biggest strength.
I enjoy the street food scene in London, but I'd choose Portland over it any day.
In China, street food might cost 20 yuan for a dish of something. The median income for all of China’s is 18,000 yuan.
In Portland, the median income is $53,230. A street dish might cost $10.
In China, street food is actually a lot more expensive than Portland, adjusting for median income levels. Even if you bought a dish for 10¥ it is still more than twice as expensive as Portland.
Are we to say that China’s street food ain’t street food? Because that’s what you are suggesting which basically means that no street food is street food.
A number of popular food carts in Portland have a median price of $10 or above. For things like Mediterranean food I've often found restaurants charging the same or less. At the end of the day, I'm paying for the privilege of standing in the cold/rain.
What makes you say that Europe has a better food quality?
Japan has a huge problem with counterfeit fish meat (substituting inferior, sometimes toxin tainted, different species meat).
Japan's non-seaweed vegetables are generally watery and not as nutrient rich as what you can get in Europe (rucola & feldsalat, for example). Their staple "vegetable" tends to be a nasty variety of cabbage, and daikon and pumpkin.
Bread in Japan is blanched wheat flour. In Europe there are dozens of grains to choose from. Even grau brot tastes amazing. Japan's XYZ pan couldn't even compare. Home cooked food in France was a truly magical experience.
Bio (organic) is very popular and very strictly regulated in Europe. In Japan they don't care as much, and in the USA its a joke.
It's relatively easy in Europe to get prepackaged foods (such as canned goods/soups & frozen foods) made strictly from first ingredients (there's nothing in the ingredients list you can't pronounce, or that you wouldn't add yourself if making it from scratch).
More space to grow food and a large open market between EU countries, whereas Japan grows a lot of rice on the very limited space they have and is very restrictive wrt. importing foods from abroad. Which is why you can good food in Japan but sometimes fruits are ridiculously expensive. Also, bread in Japan is terrible (but then again, good Japanese food in Europe is tricky too).
If you're from Canada you probably realize that it's a big place, and impossible to draw sweeping generalizations about. Saying Canadian infrastructure is terrible "compared to the rest of the world" is an ignorant statement.
After a tedious search, we wound up buying $2.60 "Sara Lee Artesano Style Bread" which is still less good than a 70c loaf of Hovis in the UK, and certainly less good than fresh made French bread (which in my opinion is world class). But it is very notable that it has a 7~10 shelf life, not one month like other supermarket breads, is actually soft, and not overly sweet.
It is kind of unfortunately that in the US basically passable bread is called "Artesano" and earns a price premium. Many living in the US haven't had the opportunity to try elsewhere to compare. The strangest thing about this is that you'd expect the US's bread to be much cheaper (given the quality reduction) but that wasn't at all my experience (in fact fresher bread in Europe was substantially cheaper than long-shelf-life-bagged bread in the US).
For better or worse, a lot of Americans like fluffy white bread that’s loaded with preservatives to give it a long shelf life. That’s what they ate as kids & they’ve never branched out.
I’m not defending US mass market bread, but I do think it’s largely a matter of differing tastes and values. Your comment (and much of this thread) comes off as “I have different values, I don’t understand mainstream American values in this or that regard so let me tell you why they suck and why we’re better than you”.
So yeah, it’s flame-baity & perhaps even unkind. Even if you’re right. A gentle reminder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490714
If supermarkets don't offer good products, that may also be a discussion worth having.
> I have different values, I don’t understand mainstream American values in this or that regard so let me tell you why they suck and why we’re better than you
But this critique doesn't address why the price is higher. You can call it "values" if you want but ultimately we're talking about a lower quality product at a higher price and shoppers that likely don't know they have other choices/are getting a worse product.
> So yeah, it’s flame-baity & perhaps even unkind.
I feel like attempting to place words into my mouth ("why they suck and why we’re better than you") that don't remotely match my tone or substance of my post and then calling it "unkind" is a much larger departure from expected decorum than anything I actually posted above.
To quote the site's guidelines:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Re-stated my argument in a much more negative and judgemental way then attacking it doesn't feel like a good faith argument or trying to argue the strongest interpretation but YMMV.
Every major supermarket I've ever been to in the US and Canada has a million styles of bread, including many freshly baked right there at the store.
>but ultimately we're talking about a lower quality product at a higher price
Do you have evidence for lower quality, outside of the roundly debunked "shelf life" argument? Or are these your preferences?
What would you consider objectively lower quality anyway? Is use of preservatives and corn syrup lower quality, or is that a preference for shelf life and sweets? Is a McDonalds burger low quality or is that just preference? I can take you to a generic bakery in my old rural small town in Germany where the 25-cent pretzel would blow the socks off any pretzel you can find for any price in any store in the US, but maybe you'd call that preference.
Reminds me of coffee discussions. “Peet’s is good coffee!”, “No it’s shit, you don’t know good coffee!”, “You just have an unsophisticated palate!”.
If your "values" are medically unhealthy... I'll let you draw your own conclusions ;-)
So yeah, there's that thing again where they don't know that better is possible.
P.S. This advice was hyper-local (near Boston). Just a few miles away, I'm sure there are great Armenian bakeries and I would have suggested those. In some other city, who even knows? Local patterns vary, but there always seems to be someone filling this niche.
But, it's down to volume and consumption; in my country (NL), bread is a daily staple, often featured in two meals a day - so a family will easily go through a loaf a day. It makes more sense to optimize the production and logistics for a shelf life of days instead of weeks. We can get reasonably fresh (factory-produced) bread daily, and a lot of grocery stores have an in-house bakery as well nowadays if you want to go super fancy. (I'm sure that's a logistical optimization as well, that is, dough or its components are easier to transport than ready-made bread, especially because some (like croissants) are very fragile).
From my experience, Americans often do grocery once every couple of weeks, because the super market is usually a non-trivial drive away.
I can see how a lot of their foods developed to accommodate that shopping cycle, and forced preservatives that make things last those 2-3 weeks while compromising on freshness and taste.
Overwhelming majority of Americans live less than 20 minutes drive from a proper grocery story (i.e. not a gas station convenience store), and most probably live 10 minutes drive. In my metropolitan area of 4 million, I can't think of a place that's more than 10 minutes from a large supermarket.
Americans don't do grocery shopping very often simply because it's such a waste of time: there are 5 large supermarkets (two Safeways, one QFC, one Whole Foods and one local chain) 5 minutes drive from my home, and there's also Costco 10 minutes drive. Despite that, I go grocery shopping once a week, because it usually takes an hour. Doing this more often would replace one hour-long trip with three 45 minutes trip. Since the drive is only 5 minutes, living literally next to them wouldn't change my habits much.
Also, let me assure you that most Europeans don't live in 5 minutes walking distance from grocery stores, so the travel time here is not what makes the habits different.
And even though we have a selection 2 to 3 stores in 20 minutes drive ( one we could walk to if we chose to forego convenience of one trip a week ), I remember living in locations where access was not as simple.
The bread they bake is genius it has just the right amount(little) sourness and never tastes soaky, crispy around but soft inside.
But the point being is that some of the couchsurfers would hilariously laugh at the strangeness of having bread that isn't white fluffy toast. I got that reaction from Brits and South Americans. The French would appreciate it and the cheese choices with it.
The UK is an interesting little phenomenon IMHO. Not quite the US but also not quite Europe. In a lot of ways more similar to the US(not always in a bad way). You also get plenty of HFCS there
FWIW brown bread in the UK has been "a thing" since well before I was born, so there there is not just an expectation for white.
I would wager that the typical couch surfer is the sort of person who as well as focusing on value on where they choose to sleep probably also subsists on fairly cheap basic foods.
Certainly in the past decade or two the UK you'll see a lot more variety in what you can get even in convenience stores in London: white, brown, granary, soda, rye, sourdough, bagels, barbari, boule brioche, baguette, challa, chapati, ciabatta - you name it. It all seems to get sold and presumably eaten. Not saying it is any good of particularly authentic or "correct" but there is a lot of variety in the most common of shops.
I don’t recognise your statement on most bread being made for a toaster.
Edit: admittedly not as good as some other European countries.
So if the Polish baseline is super fancy for NL, NL is better than UK and UK baseline is artisanal US bread, I wonder what baseline US bread looks like. It's made of sponge and sugar?
Yes, pretty much. It’s very bad.
It’s popular to characterize American stuff as “bad,” but America is a huge country.
Tortillas in France are pretty terrible and good luck finding a Jalapeño or a Habenero, but in any grocery store in the US, I can find high quality ingredients to make almost anything. Try finding a spice in the average French grocery store any stronger than “hot” Paprika.
These “other countries are better than the US” arguments are ridiculous. In the US, you have access to pretty much anything you want. Mostly not true in many European countries and definitely not true outside the capitals.
Outside of New York City area, I wouldn't think of doing groceries more than once a week. The place I've lived at are all terrible in terms of how grocery stores are walkable.
I'm more leery of manufactured breads that keep forever.
Once you get into the swing of it, you can whittle it down to 10 minutes of preparation in the morning, set it on automatic timer, and have fresh, hot bread waiting for you when you get home from work. Just make sure the yeast is in a pile on top so that it stays dry during the day.
(in case anybody wonders what that is, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_machine)
(Source, traveling around Europe now, with recent experience of French, Portuguese, and Spanish grocery stores)
https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/product-finder?category=ecce-...
Nothing local has a crumb anything like https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/product/multi-grain-boule/
Good chocolate is even rarer. I’m from belgium and chocolate abroad is almost always disappointing. Most of the time if you look at the composition it wouldn’t actually be allowed to even call it chocolate when selling it in belgium.
I have had American visitors marvel at the (German built) windows in my French home, calling them something you'd see on a space station. On the other hand they think I must be having money problems for not having a tumble dryer (only poor people hang their laundry to dry) or not having airco.
I find it amusing that from a climate change point of view, both their comments are basically negative:
* good windows provide better insulation and reduce the need to heat/cool down a building, plus their reduce dampness since they keep moisture out
* while a tumble dryer uses electricity for something which is not much of a chore (it takes like, 5 minutes, to hang the laundry and 5 more minutes to pick it up when it's done)
There's also an issue with general social cohesion, inequality, and safety in American urban environments: many people are afraid people will steal their clothes if they just hang them up for a while. This is less of an issue in small rural towns, and indeed, hanging your clothes out to dry in your yard is considered more socially acceptable in small towns.
Personally I never liked the smell of clothes that had hung dry, much preferred them "done properly" in the drier :)
It's almost like countries like Germany (350k sq km area) and the US (10 million sq km) have different climates and needs. This thread is filled with Europeans saying, "I went to the US once, and their grocery store didn't have produce like my French neighborhood market!"
- I'm not German and most of my points apply in quite a bit of the EU
- the EU is about 4m sqkm, which while smaller than the US, puts them in roughly the same ballpark (they'd both qualify as "huge countries")
- the EU as a whole has at least as diverse climates as the US
- I'm not even sure what to respond to the "needs" part
- I've been to the US more than once, to different places
Let's track back a bit and find out what exactly your argument against high quality German windows is.
Is it that you don't need them in hot climates? You do, to reduce the need for cooling.
Is it that you don't need them in cold climates? I don't even know what to reply to this :-)
Is it that you don't need them in Mediterranean climates, a la California (stable relatively warm and dry climate)? Even there, there is variation, houses do need heating and cooling and it can't hurt to have better windows. I'll grant you this, but that's probably an area which is 1/30th or less of the US territory.
Or was it about normal drying vs tumble drying? The only solid argument against normal drying that I can find is that normal drying requires more space (and a bit more time, but you can easily plan around that). But US homes, on average, are way bigger than EU homes. So Americans could easily find room to dry their clothes. If I can do it in 65sqm, an American definitely can do it in 120+ sqm.
It's laughable to talk about "the EU" as if it's in any way homogeneous. It's an economic union, not a country. We are talking about France and Germany, which are tiny and far less diverse in their climate than the US.
>I'm not even sure what to respond to the "needs" part
Perhaps you're unaware that there are places in the US that have frigid winters, and others that have debilitating summer heat. But please, tell us about how you don't need air conditioning in France. That fact is relevant to those in Arizona.
>Let's track back a bit and find out what exactly your argument against high quality German windows is.
My argument here is that it's ridiculous to think that we don't have or use "high quality windows" in North America because you once had friends over to your home that were impressed.
That is indeed ridiculous, I agree! You're the one inferring that story though. I'm not about to write an essay with quotations of industry figures and national polls here.
I'm not the original poster :-)
No, this is not true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
From the Guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Also:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I am American. I grew up in Texas and generally feel at home with other Americans (to a degree, politics is weird).
At times in my life I’ve thought about moving back to the US and I still thought that it was easier to pay the quality of life costs of being a foreigner in other countries (being half illiterate and having a hard time with banking and real estate) rather than deal with the quality of life gap in the US.
My life would not be bad in America, but I feel like it would be less comfortable. In the future the feeling of belongingness might outweigh this, but right now that’s not the case, and it makes me sad
There is a reason they call them modern conveniences.
Do you always have dry non-freezing weather? If the humidity stays high, the clothes will get moldy before they dry. If the temperature is low, you'll get ice in your clothes. There may even be rain.
The clothes dry on a rack next to the washing machine. I have a large enough house with wooden floors and high ceilings that the humidity is not an issue.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/germ...
They really made a difference in terms of inside temperature.
Also the ability to tilt windows and even doors (vertically) was an amazing feature.
I didn't know it wasn't common all over Europe.
The most recent example - Vaillant vs Honeywell heating controllers. Vaillant looks fancy with decorative, smoothly flowing elements, knobs and fancy backlight, and the Honeywell unit is, well, spartan: big LCD letters, primitive graphics. Vaillant is crazy - it is too slow to react on temperature changes, the interface is just horrible: imagine no escape or back button - you just have to idle a minute to go back to the "main screen." It takes 30 seconds or so to connect wirelessly to the boiler, sometimes it fails or even freezes and requires a reset, and I can go on forever. I hate the fucking thing. Honeywell... Well it just works.
I have this a bit uneasy impression[1] that a really significant chunk of US is basically a developing country with bigger cars.
[1] Based only on visiting a few developing countries as well as a few states of US. Not on any statistics or data whatsoever.
Ignoring Super-PACs for a second, we don't need to grease some palms to get things done in this country. USA does not rank that high in corruption. It's not that big a part of day to day government compared to countries that have a serious problem. We have effective government institutaions. Fox news is not state run, it panders to one political party that happens to be in power.
The metric system is not the best example or even a good one. I'm not going to defend the decision, but it's simply a tough thing to handle politically. Depite the issues that it causes, it's not a good indicator of living conditions in a country. It's a costly nuisance more than anything.
I can definitely agree we have our issues. Specifically, high incarceration rates, medicare, and infrastructure. These are issues I'm very upset about. That doesn't make us a third world country though. Just below average (amoung developed countries). You have to be delutional or out of touch if you think living in the USA is like living in a third world country.
Still doesn't stop the nutters from opposing it because it's supposedly a tool by the NWO to take over the world, with the US remaining as sole resistance [1]
The FPLA requires metric units to be included on labeling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac...
https://www.nist.gov/standardsgov/compliance-faqs-packaging-...
But even if you haven't read any of the text on a milk jug over the past half-century, surely you've seen one of these before?:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71x5rVYbJUL...
"I want a pound of sugar, not 453g!"
Turns out the world didn't actually burn down. The containers mostly stayed the same size, but I think they slowly gravitated towards logical sizes (so e.g. that 453g package became 500g or 400g at some point)
Is this because of lack of diversity or actually accommodating masses ? Genuine question.
I think this is one of America's problems: living far apart from each other has a lot of disadvantages and inefficiencies. Homes are much more expensive to build and maintain (just think of the road infrastructure and all the utilities alone). In a typical suburban there can be virtually no public areas other than shopping malls, which are owned by someone.
There's also research that confirms people are more productive in higher density areas from the point of view of economics.
We'll have to see if America can fix itself by moving to bigger cities, which seems to be the current trend among the millennials and younger, I hear.
What all the metrophiles advocating for the abolishment of suburbia either willfully forget or misunderstand, is that people like the suburbs. Especially people raising families.
Car dependence, massive maintenance costs, density that's too low to support any social or public programs....so many problems created by an idea that is described as the American dream.
There's no space for a farmer's market in the park, but there is a dedicated space on main street.
It is a very nice park, and is quite large. In addition to the above, there are tennis courts, a relatively modern kids playground, a pavilion, accessible fishing piers, a basketball court, sand volleyball courts, a softball backstop, many picnic tables and grills and benches, a disc golf course, a few miles of multiuse trail, a public beach that is guarded during the summer, a boat launch, a decent marina and a sledding hill. There's also a historic lighthouse and small museum.
This is just a normal small town on Lake Michigan (the members of the Yacht Club have medium sized sail boats...). I guess the density matches up with lots of older suburbs, more dense than a lot of newer stuff, but not a lot of large apartment buildings either.
A more charitable interpretation is "American consumers care more about price than quality."
Or perhaps it's a market for lemons. American consumers don't know which products are of good quality, and don't want to pay extra for the same quality, so they buy cheap to not be taken advantage of.
There is nothing stopping people from making good bread and chocolate in the US, and many do. They would/will succeed in the market if the demand is there. Trouble is, even though people will tell you they're willing to pay a bit more for nice things, for the most part those preferences don't come out where it matters -- in supermarket aisles.
I've had others from overseas comment on this. The nice restaurants with the freshest, highest quality foods, and really talented chefs take a back seat to cheap lowest common denominator choices. The "mexican" place with $1 tacos and $2 margaritas is packed, and the great spanish restaurant next door is empty.
Or you know, it could just be differences in tastes!
Meanwhile, they are rioting over gas taxes and speed limit changes.
Where in the US? First mistake is acting as if a house built in northern California is representative of a house built in rural Maine, or suburban Texas.
If you think it's remotely monolithic, it absolutely isn't. But there's definitely a pattern of lower quality building in very high-growth, high cost of living areas where the property's value isn't related much to the building, but mostly reflective of the land and it's location.
My apartment in the Netherlands is 100% drywall but I need to run into it at full force to even make a dent. To make a hole in it I need tools.
Did that last year. Went to stretch and pressed my palms firmly on the wall and one side punched in. Apartment complex made me fix it too. You could also easily hear neighbors and whatever domestic dispute they were having that week. I live in a nice place now. Advertised as "luxury", but everything still seems cheaply built
If foreigners are willing to give Americans stuff for paper there is a real pressure for Americans not to bother making stuff and printing more paper instead. That probably influences a lot of the decisions behind American made consumer goods.
> The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California.
I live a long way from California, but the first stop should always be to check the local tax code, financial incentives and regulations. Most countries I've been to end up having strange tax incentives that influence how much money gets spent on primary residences; and taxes can put a real dampener on what gets done. I speak mainly from experience in Australia where there are massive tax incentives for a person to spend money on their primary home.
What are the tax incentives to spending money on my home?
1) Put it in your primary residence. Wealth is stored, no future tax liability, you are more comfortable
2) Buy a productive asset. Wealth stored, you will pay capital gains tax on the asset price rises due to asset inflation.
The most tax-effective place to store money long term is capital improvements to your primary residence, mainly due to how inflation and CGT interact. And the capital value of the property could reasonably rise more than the cost of the work done.
There are risks but there is also a lot of incentive to remodel the kitchen or upgrade something if money is available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
It seems like a pretty useful metaphor that I wasn't familiar with.
Those of us “of a certain age” will remember that this is not new at all.
I can’t speculate on the reasons, but I agree about standard quality levels being higher in Japan and Western Europe; but so are costs.
That may sound overly simplistic but I think there's an element of truth to it. Foreign vehicle companies needed to fight to gain market share in the US, often needing to be much better just to be compared as equals. Look at KIA recently doing so, now they're doing very well reliability wise and offer a substantial free warranty, but ask random people and they'll be described as unreliable foreign cars.
The real mystery is why Americans still buy American made cars. The foreign competition has eclipsed them for whole generations at this point, but yet demand remains.
The US imposed a 25% tax on imported light trucks and has for decades (the "chicken tax"). I think that this has resulted in a weird distortion where American auto makers focus heavily on that one more profitable market segment, and advertise most heavily on that one market segment, and have done so for generations.
There's a reason that Musk is building a Tesla truck.
1.) Much of the housing in Silicon Valley was built in the 1950s and 60s by a wave of migrants coming to work in the nascent defense & semiconductor industries there, sometimes with their own hands. They'd go to the hardware store, buy some lumber and build a house, something you definitely can't do today. Oftentimes they were in a rush to do so because they'd just taken a job in the area and were otherwise living in a tent. Of the ones that are professionally built, they were often quickly mass-produced to keep up with the flood of new migrants.
2.) There are a variety of disincentives to upgrading your house from the original build: you have to bring it up to the (now vastly upgraded) building codes, you need to deal with the year-long permitting process, you often need to get written permission from your neighbors if you're doing something big like adding a second story or rebuilding the house, you may lose your Prop 13 grandfathering if the value changes significantly. That's why you end up with ridiculous situations where the land under your house is worth $1.5M and the structure is worth $100K.
3.) California has forgiving weather. You can get away with stupid stuff like having doors & windows that don't completely seal, no heating (let alone air conditioning), no basements, etc.
4.) California has unforgiving natural disasters. Between earthquakes, wildfires, termites, mudslides, and floods, it's often not worth sinking a lot into your primary residence if it's just gonna get destroyed with the next earthquake anyway.
I lived in Massachusetts before California and there were houses in my town still standing from the 1700s. They were a bit drafty since they still had the original windows from then, but the build quality was a lot better than what you see in California.
This is a strange comparison, housing prices depend on many different factors and you can get really crappy small apartments (including the plumbing) in expensive parts of London or Monaco for that kind of money.
If the $2m home in California has mediocre doors and plumbing, it's probably just due to lack of attention/clue by previous owners, possibly also from abundance of crappy plumbers because everyone in the business makes plenty of money from rich people in the area.
Tiles misaligned, not sealed off, some bathrooms have no tiles but a bulge-ridden plastic ground cover. All the cupboards are loose. Doors don’t close. I have to manually fuck around with the boiler to get water for my shower. And it still has low pressure. It’s atrocious.
No idea where that comes from. I have a feeling that there’s a disregard for craftsmen. Plumbers, joiners, painters, are all looked down upon. There’s no pride in doing a good job in these areas.
I wouldn't bundle the UK in with the rest of Western Europe. We're much more interested in the American model.
Third Sydney apartment block abandoned
The OP's comments remind me of how much nicer everything seems on the continent, groceries included (though increasingly everyone shops at Aldi/Lidl anyway)
Landlords especially don't care about quality so long as the yield is good. Who gives a shit if you can hear the neighbors behaving sex or taking a piss if you are not living there, but someone else is paying you £1500-3000 a month for the pleasure? A fancy "luxury" apartment with a flash looking kitchen worktop and fashionable bathroom allows charging a premium.
Any damage or breakage of the low quality construction comes out of the tenants' deposit at the end of the tenancy, and repairs are tax deductible too.
I lived in a very expensive, up scale apartment in Japan, and everything in it was very poor quality in comparison to the quality of my (not mcmansion) house in the US. My doors are good quality, plumbing works fine, furniture is much nicer and less expensive by an order of magnitude.
I do most of my grocery shopping at Aldis, and certainly you can get fresh fish more easily at the corner grocery in Japan, but otherwise the selection is better even at Aldis than at most groceries in Japan. There's nothing like a Wegmans or a Harris Teeter in Japan at all that I ever saw -- maybe somewhere upscale in Tokyo or something.
Wait, what UX does a fridge need? Mine just has a scroll wheel which goes from cool to cold.
The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman, had a nice example of how even the wheels for regulating the temperature can be very confusing (and indeed, in basic fridges you don't regulate the temperature, you set a number on the scrollwheel e.g. between 1-7. But is 7 a higher temperature or higher cooling power?).
- The drawers are all basically impossible to use without fully opening the door, but (see above) fully opening the door makes it swing back super hard as well so now you're fighting two different parts of your fridge at once
- It's huge but somehow the space inside the fridge is super small compared to comparable fridges. Probably a shelf thing.
- Some of the design leads to little cracks that are hard to clean up without pinching yourself with the door.
It's basically door-related stuff but it's also stuff I don't experience with my ... $200? Fridge from Hitachi. I feel like my own fridge is fine. It's a fridge. Nothing to write home about. It would probably get a wirecutter recommendation if they did "small-ish fridges for 1-2 people"
1) The door glides smoothly on its hinge toward the body.
2) The door connects with the body and provides haptic feedback that it is closed
3) The door remains closed.
The last one is the most important because user will likely walk away and stop monitoring the state of the fridge. If it changes to an open-state, it could remain open and thereby let the food inside spoil.
It not having a touch screen doesn't mean there is no UX.
I think there’s truth in this, but the factors behind it are tricky. Unlike something like bread, it’s not easy for consumers to actively choose good plumbing over bad plumbing.
Installing new plumbing is something you do very rarely. Most often it’s done by a developer rather than the person who will actually live in a property. And when you’re buying or renting a property, plumbing quality is lower priority than other factors, notably price and location.
So developers go for the cheapest option they can get away with, property owners don’t necessarily like it but don’t push back enough because they have bigger concerns, and the result is that most plumbing is low quality.
Even if you yourself are the developer, it’s hard to ensure decent quality unless you spend a lot of money, do a lot of research, have a lot of time available, or ideally all three.
I’ve learned this to my own cost - on a renovation project, we ended up with some crappy fittings and crappy installation because we didn’t manage it closely enough and the builders don’t care. I would like nice stuff, but how do I get it?
Edit to clarify: I think building standards are driven much more by builders than by homeowners. I’d like to know more about the driving factors - is it purely a matter of cost? I hope not, because that suggests everything everywhere will inevitably become crap.
My thesis on this is that people do what they can get away with. If you think you can get away with really low quality stuff, you do that.
Definitely helps to have a housing shortage, where there's probably no other choice anyways. So everything is cheap (since there's no incentive to make a nice place. You're gonna get someone in the apartment anyways!) and so nobody actually knows what "nice" is and just assume it's normal to be able to punch through your door.
While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingredients such as flour are available in huge variety (try finding something as simple as peanut oil at your local Lidl). Even the quality of "junk" food is comparably fantastic, as you won't find a frozen pizza like DiGiorno anywhere else. This is all before you visit a Whole Foods, which takes quality and variety to a point which organic supermarkets elsewhere in the world can't compare.
Europe, on the other hand, is so obsessed with the discount model, so disinterested in variety, and so opposed to GMO's, that their supermarkets are downright frustrating. Yes, the meat, cheese, and chocolate is great, but it stops there.
And "colorful" doesn't mean tasty with produce, unfortunately.
The only better one's I've seen are local 1-off stores and sometimes kirkland brand stuff from Costco for good VFM.
There are two problems with this statement. One is that the availability of plentiful and colorful produce is very much dependent on where you are in the US, and there are a large number of people who really don't have convenient access to it.
The other is that while produce is generally inexpensive, it is hardly generally delicious. Perfect looking tasteless hothouse tomatoes and peppers etc. are the rule, not the exception in a typical grocery store. Lot's of 'convenience' packaging (e.g. "baby spring mix" boxes), mountains of last years apples, not so much flavor.
If you have the means and live in the right places, you can buy very good produce from farmers markets and specialty stores, but it is expensive; the baseline is often pretty mediocre. And if you don't have the location and time and money to use these alternative sources, that's often what you are stuck with.
The silver lining on all this is that the industrial food system in the US has proven to work well as a very large scale optimization algorithm; unfortunately it's been optimizing on thing like shelf-stability, appearance, shipping convenience and food-science inputs while mostly ignoring flavor and nutritional content (see also why there are so many Holstien cows and so little decent butter). If the consumer demand is there for better food though, it should respond to that also.
What I suspect is happening is that the "variance" of America is much higher - the nice neighbourhoods are full of vast houses and plentiful food, while down the road the not-so-nice areas are way below what would attract some sort of social intervention in Europe.
The UK has a smaller version of the same effect, containing some of the poorest (well, lowest GDP) regions in Europe. https://fullfact.org/economy/does-uk-have-poorest-regions-no...
It is really not.
Nobody goes to LIDL to buy food, unless has some real money problem.
You have to make a different comparison: buy quality food from a local farmer and the same food from a local European farmer.
You will notice that in Europe is much more common than you think, it can usually be found in the local market in your neighborhood and it's much cheaper than in the US.
> the meat, cheese, and chocolate is great, but it stops there.
Basically every kind of raw food, except maybe for raw meat, in Europe taste better.
Including vegetables and fruit.
Sorry, not trying to be disrespectful, I was referring to where I live: Italy.
They usually don't even sell fresh food here and when they do, they are not much cheaper than the better alternatives.
Then I guess most of Poland has "real money problems", as LIDL and equivalents is where we shop. However, I think it's just that we don't like to overpay for stuff.
If you compare it to other western supermarket chains like Carrefour, or Auchan, their food is of a lower quality, despite being not much cheaper.
LIDL is convenient for packaged or canned food or "everything not related to food", but it's a discount, not exactly popular for quality.
Even Simply, the discount branch of Auchan, sells better food than LIDL. At least in this part of Europe.
And they are all of lower quality than Esselunga or Coop or Conad (but that could just be the Italian in me talking).
But honestly I've never been at LIDL in Poland, maybe it's better over there.
On a side note: many Polish people have a real money problem.
The average Polish salary is below 1k euros, while in Germany is over 2.5k euros.
I was always left with the impression that everything in Europe except for trains and windows (why do Europeans have such nice windows and we do not?!?) is rundown crap.
I’m not saying I’m necessarily objectively correct. But I’m definitely not endorsing your subjective impression, either.
Less profit, though still plenty of it, can be made from high-quality goods. It's not that profit is inherently wrong, rather it's widespread business and corporate attitudes. An obsession with numbers and statistics rather than any pride in work.
Don't think so. My family moved to the US in the early 80s and all the same observations applied back then.
These differences shape all of our opinions, whether it's you visiting the US, or me visiting the EU. Don't assume that your values are as equally important to someone in the US as they are to you, though. Many of our cultural preferences are just that -- preferences -- which all come with an associated set of pros and cons.
One person's "crappy hollow-core door" is another persons "ADA accessible, 2018 IRC-compliant, lead-free, contemporary-style door".
You hear people wanting stainless steel appliances...but never discussing their quality.
What's next? Comparing an American ivy league university building to a newly built apartment somewhere in Brussels and prove that not everything is older in Europe?
Of course every place has all kind of extremes. I look down on West European cheese too because they don't have proper white cheese that is available in the Balkans and Turkey and when abroad I have to rely on low quality feta as a substitute and get depressed. That said, I am not going to claim that Balkans and Turkey have the best chease, it's just that the kind of the cheese I like is not available in western Europe in good quality and I am better of to stick with the local cheese(which is superior to the versions found in the Balkans and Turkey).
All those "country X is superior to the country Y" is inherently flawed unless you talk about specifics. Otherwise, all you do is some kind nationalistic masturbation.
I think quartirolo (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartirolo_Lombardo) is the closest to the white cheese you're looking for and also salty ewe's ricotta is pretty similar.
I live in Western New Zealand (Tasmania), and we have to adjust the temperature too.
I think most US showers have just a single faucet where you can control the temperature but not the pressure/flow. You always have to go from cold to hot (it looks like this: https://www.americanstandard-us.com/-/media/sites/asus/image...)
I've seen the thermostatic faucets before (I assume those're the ones where you twist to adjust temperature & pull to adjust pressure). They show up in more modern upscale hotels, and in people's homes when they've remodeled their bathroom. I think they tend to be an aftermarket add-on rather than a typical part of construction, though - no idea why, they're much more convenient than the alternatives.
You should try Arizona in the summer next time you're in the USA - we have instant hot water 24/7 - even our cold water is hot.
Yes - I'm serious. In the summertime, our water from the "cold side" is typically luke-warmish at best. From the hot side, we can actually turn the temperature down on our water heaters and save some money.
It gets a bit better during "winter" (in quotes because right now, the temperature is around 32C - yep, shorts weather in the middle of November!).
Anyhow - you can purchase the tankless circulation system you describe, but it isn't cheap so you only usually see it on new houses, and only as an upgrade. Retrofitting old houses just isn't really possible without a complete interior teardown. The only other option is tankless water heaters, but those require a decent electrical circuit to each sink. So, most of us just have the central water heater tank, and when we want hot water, we turn it on and let it run (ain't like the water is going to disappear, thanks to the "water cycle"). Or we deal with the cold water (except here in Arizona - where again, our cold water is warm).
Electricity and gas are relatively expensive in Australia compared Europe or US, so I’m lead to believe. Might be better in a new house with good insulation on the pipes.
https://www.hanakat.fi/sites/default/files/imce/oras_sekoitt...
Europe, especially its non-Mediterranean part, is boring in this sense (everything is kinda OK but mostly not that fun)
I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in Western Europe or Japan ends up with better infrastructure than the $2M duplex in California
Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad.
My dad has a really expensive american-made fridge. It sucks. The UX is awful and it basically just looks shiny.
Maybe this is the result of 30 years of wage stagnation. I like to think it’s the result of people not really traveling abroad (reasonable! It’s expensive and far away). People don’t get that so many other places are just nicer and have higher quality things for cheaper.
There’s some quote about how somebody was super poor when growing up but was fine about it because they didn’t realize it. I think about that all the time when looking at some stuff in the US.