This is topic I am America and so can you in forum Karp Park at The Azure Heights Forum.


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Posted by Psybro (Member # 290) on 10-07-2010, 08:04 PM:
 
I've been in the US for a month now and will be here until December but it never occurred to me to tell anyone here about it. Am currently catching a bus from Indianapolis to Cincinatti, like any European tourist would.

Why don't the Coke machines take my money?
 

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Posted by Face (Member # 1916) on 10-08-2010, 09:05 AM:
 
Did you use a crisp dollar bill? Machines don't take dollar bills that are old and falling apart.
 

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Posted by Psybro (Member # 290) on 10-08-2010, 10:34 PM:
 
They seem to define 'crisp' as 'direct from the desk of the Secretary of the Treasury'.

Also why does the food make me shit so bad.

[ 10-08-2010, 10:35 PM: Message edited by: Psybro ]
 

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Posted by MewtwoSama (Member # 12) on 10-09-2010, 01:13 AM:
 
High fructose corn syrup
 

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Posted by Face (Member # 1916) on 10-12-2010, 05:48 PM:
 
It's America for a reason, the food here is greasier than most parts of the world, I swear it is. We have Wendy's and a lot of other fast food places that make you gain tons of pounds if you're not careful.
 

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Posted by starCaliber (Member # 268) on 10-18-2010, 07:59 AM:
 
Sorry about our horrible wireless networks.

A guy from Europe once told me "I didn't know what you yanks were talking about when you mentioned 'dropped calls' until I visited America and had to use an AT&T SIM card for a week. It's like, the call literally just quits with no explanation."

quote:

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Originally posted by Face:
It's America for a reason, the food here is greasier than most parts of the world, I swear it is. We have Wendy's and a lot of other fast food places that make you gain tons of pounds if you're not careful.

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quote:

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Originally posted by starCaliber:
Sorry about our horrible wireless networks.

A guy from Europe once told me "I didn't know what you yanks were talking about when you mentioned 'dropped calls' until I visited America and had to use an AT&T SIM card for a week. It's like, the call literally just quits with no explanation."

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quote:

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Originally posted by Dragonite21:
Psybro why did you leave the UK

is it because of the ConDems

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I had planned it for the second half of 2010, that was just a glorious coincidence that gave me added impetus.

I literally elected Nick Clegg as my MP
 

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Posted by Mr. K (Member # 2) on 10-25-2010, 06:55 PM:
 
We apologize for our shitty public transportation. Had you visited one of the few hubs of civilization over here, such as NYC or DC, you would not have had this problem.

Yokels from the flyover states find public transportation scary because sometime you have to sit next to a brown person. At least Obama is working on getting our magic train going in Florida.

We voted for it ages ago, but Bush Junior Junior sabotaged it.

Americans are nothing if not fearful of change. And brown people.
 

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Posted by Psybro (Member # 290) on 10-25-2010, 11:56 PM:
 
I did actually go to both cities. The subway in New York is confusing because of all the express train crap, in London trains stop everywhere until you get out into the sticks. DC's, however, was up to continental European standards of logic and comfort. I like DC a lot.

I spent today at Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia, learning about how the brown people he owned sold him farm produce because they were better at growing it than he was.

edit ahaha oh my God I just saw this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM

[ 10-26-2010, 12:14 AM: Message edited by: Psybro ]
 

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Posted by Mr. K (Member # 2) on 10-26-2010, 04:19 AM:
 
I haven't made it out to Monticello yet, since it's so far away from the main city, and once I get to DC, I don't want to leave.

It's like a monument to all the smart people that real Merkins claim to love and revere, but don't actually understand and would hate if they were around now. I actually feel good about my country there...or rather about the really, really smart people who set it up and defended it for a while.

Real Merkins, of course, become enraged when we try to keep the place looking nice, because God forbid we should have any pride or want to put the best face on our nation's capital...a symbol to ourselves and everyone else in the world.

Anyway, between the museums, the monuments to smart people, the history, the architecture...I can pretend for a little while that I don't live in a nation of frightened has-beens who resent education and intelligence and treat ignorance and hate as though they are patriotic traits to celebrate.

U-S-A! U-S-A!
 

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Posted by Face (Member # 1916) on 11-05-2010, 12:10 PM:
 
In America, the thing you have to watch out for is the laid back folk here. You see, in my town, there's a lot of business on the street where I live and you can get to know some of the folks here. Of course, when I was younger, the town where I live now was quite the same as it is now.

Some kids who I went to high school with have moved out of state, you know the social rejects and drug users, are now out of town. I live in NJ, and it seems to me to be a place of decent, fun, hard-working people everywhere you go, but in the cities you have to be careful of crime in parts of them, high crime that is plagued by gangs and the like. America is notorious for having crime infested cities and NJ is at the top of the list.

[ 11-05-2010, 03:04 PM: Message edited by: Face ]
 

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Posted by starCaliber (Member # 268) on 11-08-2010, 05:13 PM:
 
high crime that is plagued by gangs and the like.
 

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Posted by Face (Member # 1916) on 11-08-2010, 05:17 PM:
 
Yeah, you know thugs, prostitution, drug dealing, etc.
 

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Posted by Psybro (Member # 290) on 11-10-2010, 12:28 PM:
 
People have been keen to warn me about 'bad neighbourhoods' and how I should avoid 'bad neighbourhoods'.

The 'bad neighbourhoods' tend to have two common factors. One is a lack of investment, the other one I'll leave to your imagination.
 

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Posted by Slade_64 (Member # 804) on 11-20-2010, 08:14 AM:
 
Also, don't fall for the old baby-on-the-street-corner trick.
 

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Posted by Psybro (Member # 290) on 11-23-2010, 02:44 AM:
 
Have any of you guys ever noticed how much of this country is abandoned?
 

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Posted by Thom Burr (Member # 1267) on 12-26-2010, 01:43 AM:
 
The United States is much larger than most countries, with a much lower population density. The whole of the UK is maybe just 40% larger than my own home state of Florida. (This should explain why European-style public transportation doesn't really work well here. At all. Economics don't allow it.)

We don't have barriers to population migration inside the fifty states. Russia has an internal passport--it tells you where you can live. Not here. And there are relatively few constraints on new construction and development, so new cities pop up in better places all the time.

In the past, when people needed to go, they left. Most of New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine) used to be farmland. Not so much of that any more. You can find the old homestead foundations, boundary walls, and overgrown farm roads all over the place if you look. Plans are on paper to make that region into a giant National Forest. Ghost towns used to litter all the states west of the Mississippi. I've a 5-inch book on the subject sitting before me on my bookcase. (Although, I should note that nearly all of these old Western ghost towns have been destroyed by vandals, these days...)

Nobody makes you stay anywhere here when you want to leave. And nobody may want to buy your place on your way out. Depending on where you lived, it may or may not have been easy to get the permits to build your place, but there's not so much they can do if you just abandon it. Unlike the UK, we (generally) don't have QUAGOs watching ever single hut to declare them historically protected, and the kind of personality type that migrated to the US and left their entire family behind the first time isn't really the kind of personality type that's going to flinch too hard about doing it again.

Don't forget, there's nearly always somewhere else to go, and that's where people head out to. If you want to live in a theocracy, there's Utah. If you'd like an anarchist commune, there's San Francisco. And everything in between. If that's not enough for you, until recently, you could just tear up your passport and leave the country. Tons of early immigrants arrived here in steerage, took one look, and headed right back. Many Americans have moved back to the UK, and still do to this day. Nothing new about the American Expat community, either. All over the globe. Pick your place, buy your ticket, goodbye.

The results of all this migration are sad sometimes, true enough. All through the Southeast (The Old South), if you drive the rural roads, you'll find abandoned gas stations, crumbling farm houses, burnt out motels, and worse. As the interstates went through and the area urbanized, the sticks were, well, abandoned.

The opposite is happening these days. I'm sure everyone has heard of the decline of the Northeast and Great Lakes Industrial Belt, but most of the biggest urban centers managed to hold on--see Pittsburg. On the other hand, the hardcore hardheads in Flint, Michigan (Michael Moore's home town), lost over half their population of 200,000 and they are making plans to demolish and reforest the most hopeless areas (probably 66% of the present metropolitan area--if you can still use that phrase). Meth addicts seem to be beating them to punch, though. At least on the demolition part.

Detroit is headed the same way. But, burning down Detroit has always been a hobby of its citizens, so I rather doubt government intervention will be necessary there.

On the bright side, improved cities and towns are built in more productive areas all the time. If you read the last Census results, Florida gained two House seats, and New York and New Jersey each lost one. My next-door neighbors are all those people that left. When I was younger, we used to call my county the Sixth Borough.

And for everyone that heads back to Europe, there's my another five or ten still headed here. My mother was a British citizen, but hardly anyone can notice. She thinks the problem here is that we take too many immigrants.

[ 12-26-2010, 01:53 AM: Message edited by: Thom Burr ]
 

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