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> When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst.

I remember a sign at a Mac Donald's in New York that said something like "if the waiter doesn't smile, you get a free burger". In Europe you may not get the forced smile, but it doesn't mean the service is worse. Overall, I'd say the service is slightly better in the US, but you can see it's totally fake and I find it a little bit disturbing.

Most of the time I feel like US or UK people are fake, because of all the forced smalltalk.

Yes, this is their culture and I respect it, but I just don't feel comfortable with it :/

I must live in a different part of the UK than you, because I rarely get any small talk. Yes, they do come and ask if everything's okay, but that's it really.

When I visited the US it was like every 5mins asking if I wanted anything else, a drink, etc., etc.

I thought small talk was illegal in the UK.

Never heard the UK accused of forced small talk before.

The US on the other hand...

Having to wait a much longer time till waiters acknowledge you in the German-speaking countries is certainly a bigger part of it than the smiling or lack there of.

Is that just "design" of the culture though? If you're working 20% less of the time you've more time to relax; perhaps then you don't need to stress if you've a little more time to chat before your strudel arrives.

Personally I hate it when you've only just sat down and the waiter is asking what you want, especially if it's a big menu and you've arrived at a meal time.

And I hate when you have to wait 20 min for the "garcon de cafee" to even notice you have finished and want the bill.

Right, you can tell an early waiter you need a couple more minutes, but you can't (easily) tell a late waiter to come early.

What's even more annoying than them not coming on their own is that they actively try to avoid eye contact.

> When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst.

This varies dramatically within Europe. From personal experience, customer service is decent, polite and timely in the UK and Ireland, and generally awful in Germany. It's difficult to generalise across a continent with 700mil+ people (500+ mil in the EU), with enormous cultural variations and expectations of good service (much greater variations than in the US).

There is a great variation in the United States. A country of 300 million people, where each state has a unique culture and identity. For some reason, "American" is often generalized to be a caricature that I, having lived in the Pacific Northwest my entire life, have never encountered.

You'll find the same level of cultural variation in almost any country. It's nowhere near the same level of variation you find between countries of Europe.

For example: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have unique cultural differences; distinct identities. The same goes for counties within England, e.g. Cornwall or Devon versus, say, Yorkshire.

"great variation"?

Really?

Show me a state that speaks 4 major languages.

Show me a state that is majority Catholic. Majority Muslim. Majority Atheist.

Show me a state where euthanasia is legal. Or where abortion is banned outright. Or where all drug consumption is fully decriminalized.

Show me a state that is led by a monarch. Or one that is a direct democracy.

Those are just some of the examples of variations between Europeans countries, and I would not even consider Europe particularly varied compared to other parts of the world.

have you ever actually traveled Europe? I mean really visited say 15 countries or more? It doesn't seem so. The diversity when comparing east to west, or north to south is striking.

I am not saying US is a monolithic culture all over, I've seen for example the difference (and lived for months) in LA vs small tourist/fishing place in Maine and quite a few places in between, but man... scale of differences in US is much, much lower compared to what we have here (indian reservations might add up a bit, but still - and those are just reminders of proper evil done by US not so long ago).

I've visited 5 continents and tens of countries, europe ain't my favorite place (that would be south east asia), but man we are way more diverse than anything I've ever seen or heard about considering size of this place (maybe one of the reasons EU will probably fail in long term)

wow, are u saying states in usa have same level culture difference like european countries?

just in spain alone we have 4 different OFFICIAL languages

If I walk into a government building in my state, I will pick up a pamphlet which has notices in English, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese and Arabic. I can walk down a street and hear each of those languages being spoken. Are you really going to tell me that the Vietnamese experience in the United States is basically the same as the English experience?

If so, please come visit on of the top 30 cities in the United States and spend a few days walking around different districts and interacting with different people. Don't believe what our exported media is telling you, we are far from a monoculture.

There is a huge distinction between an official language and a language that is in common use by an immigrant community. Within the UK there are far more than five commonly used immigrant languages, and many are not European - Health and Safety documents come in 18 languages - mostly not EU languages.

To compare your five supported languages with a country that has four official languages, and significant cultural diversity within those - and then the immigrant communities from many more equally varied nations - which is just one part of the 28 nation polity that was originally mentioned (which combined have 24 official languages at the EU level, and many more at the national level) - is just really quite silly.

I guess it cant be compared at all since the US doesn't have any official languages. De jure != de facto

You seem to be missing the majority of my point, but I agree it's an arbitrary distinction as a technicality.

However, 32 US states do declare English as their official language. That's certainly more homogenous than the EU, the original point of contention. Just 2 of 28 EU states declare their official national language as English, and only one of these has English as their only official language (indeed, only the UK has English as their official EU language, which means English may no longer be an official language at the EU level after the UK leaves).

In the US, half of all states have English as their only official language.

This is all barely to the point, though (language is only a small part of culture). While the US may not be homogenous, it is clearly more homogenous than the EU, and by a large margin. The attempt to suggest otherwise was just absurd.

In the Brexit threads, it was discussed that the EU language selection is not really representative of populous or culture. Each country could only select one, and multiple entries didn't add anything. So many countries who may have potentially selected English didn't, because it was already selected by another country and it would be a "wasted" selection. For instance, Ireland has more English speakers than Irish speakers, yet it declared Irish as its EU language. It may very well switch to English when Brexit completes.

Your definition of "many" may need a revisit - this is simply not common. Ireland is the only egregious case, and I covered that in my comment. The Maltese population really does speak Maltese, as well as English. Every other language I can see in the official EU list is genuinely a primary tongue of one the nations in the EU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

Just in Switzerland (which has only 8 million people) there are 4 official languages. Only 30k people speak Romansh, so let's ignore that one. But if you go to the German part, most people don't even understand French. Likewise, if you go to the French part, most people don't understand German. The Italian part is quite a bit smaller than rest of Switzerland, and most people there choose to learn French as a second language.

People from the north of Belgium don't speak the same language as people in the south of Belgium. The dialects of German spoken in the north vs. the south of Germany are so different that they struggle to understand each other. If you want an example of people speaking English, compare accents in Scotland or Wales to that of London, which is a melting pot of everything from Cockney to Received Pronunciation. Now, imagine what it is like in between countries.

Seriously, trying to say that the difference between the accents of Louisiana, Socal, New England and Chicago are a big deal, throw in the Mexican accent, hell even a good dollop of Spanish, it is still really homogeneous. Compared to Europe where there are places two hours drive away from you which share none of the languages you speak, and where you will find nobody who speaks any of the dominant languages in the area you currently are. And not just a village, or a suburb or cultural enclave, but whole cities of people.

It's absurd to use languages spoken as a proxy for cultural diversity. That being said, according to wikipedia there are 430 languages spoken in the US. There are 32 languages used by 100,000+ people.

And implying that simply because people speak the same language they have the same culture is nuts. People in Utah have the exact same language and accent as people in California but the two populations have very different attitudes about family, education, marriage, religion, and government.

In fact you don't even need to cross state boundaries. Compare Park City, Utah with St. George, Utah. Different cultures. Compare any metro area with any rural area.

You and salmon30salmon are missing the point. Language is an indicator of 4000+ years of local cultural differentiation. The rest of us europeans are just trying not to say something about 200years worth of adopting cultures. That does indeed create a unique multifaceted community, but surely you realise how much in common you have with most of the rest of the US population? In Europe these language barriers correspond to sometimes dramatic changes in climate, environment and lifestyle. Finns have very little in common with Italians as far as weltanschauung or culture goes, for instance. I doubt you could find as drastic and systemic difference on your side.

(Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply EU>US, just underlining the difference's depths)

But the point is that the US is 100-200 years of homogenization veneer on cultures ranging from Asian to African to European to indingenous.

In that sense, the US has a broader base of those enclaves within the country and less time to have built a coherent cultural identity between those populations.

Europe, by contrast, hasn't forced the veneer over all of the enclaves (eg, single language), but the enclaves share a more similar historic background.

It's different kinds of diversity, really. Stable multi-components versus broader partial fusion.

> Finns have very little in common with Italians

Yup. Consider that in the last world war italians and finns didn't even fight on the same side until a certain point in time.

Europe is a melting pot of cultures and to be quite honest I like it that way.

Right, which is why I am _not_ saying that the EU is in any way homogeneous. What I am saying is that _neither_ the EU or the US are homogeneous. And the same treatment that is applied to the EU when claiming that a certain culture describes "Europe" needs to be applied to the US.

No, it is not comparable by any measure. If I move 30 km from my home to the South, I won't be able to understand people and the culture is totally different, the meal hours are shifted by two hours, the food is different, the work times are different, the social system is different, the wages are vastly different, the prices are different, the family organisation is totally different, the religion could be different.

Why? Because there is a bloody border in between. These are different countries, they have evolved separately for centuries. Don't you get it? Those are not two states of the United States of Europa, those are countries forged with a millennium of historical evolution.

we have all sorts of people from all over the world in europe too, it is not an argument....

No but there is enough regional difference, between East Coast, South, West Coast and Pacific North West. Even though most of the suburbs look alike thanks to mono-cultures and business franchises. The general regional vibe if you observe has some stark contrasts.

Again USA is 300 million people, from Rio Grande Valley to Seattle. Spain has 4 different official languages, but more languages are spoken in US than Spain.

edit: I am not even counting the contrast of Native American Reservations to Metropolis like NY, LA.

New Mexico contains just as many languages and vaguely sovereign states as Spain, including our own language isolate.

> When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst. People to try as hard to make the extra effort, etc.

When you call customer support in the US, you get someone in India who barely speaks English. If you call customer support in the Netherlands you get a Dutch person because no one outside the Netherlands speaks Dutch.

Also, due to better consumer protection laws the actual results are often way better too.

Honestly, most times, the Indian representative does just fine. In all my time here, I can count on one hand the times that a customer service rep was ineffective. Larger companies especially (Amazon, WalMart, etc.) will bend over backwards to please the customer. My experiences in NL dealing with customer service has been bad on average.

Disclaimer: lived in the Netherlands for 20 years, living in the US for 12 years now.

I actually never thought of that. We have the same "problem" in the UK with support, although I've noticed more companies trying to get support back into the UK and these are the companies I try and do business with.

>When you call customer support in the US, you get someone in India who barely speaks English.

They usually speak excellent English in my experience. Holding a phone conversation in a second language is very difficult.

> it's harder to move from a class to another compared to the US.

Not true: social mobility in US is lower than in Europe and Canada.

There's at least two Americas.

If you are born middle class or with an intact family structure or immigrate, opportunity is unlimited. If you're born here poor/without a family structure, or were born in the wrong place, you're stuck in a feudal-like system.

Anecdata: It can be escaped. I grew up in a divorced household. Poor. In the middle of nowhere. I even had a kid early, at 15. I'm now firmly in the middle class. I feel that if I were less risk adverse, I could find myself moving even higher up.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/dec/19/...

> Not true: social mobility in US is lower than in Europe and Canada.

I can't speak about Canada but I seriously doubt that social mobility is higher in Europe. Again, you can't generalize. It may be far easier to move from a class to another in Germany than for example Italy or France.

It's a difficult thing to compare, so I wouldn't totally believe the absolute comparisons, but generally most countries in Europe are considered to have higher social mobility than the US. The exceptions are Italy & the UK, with maybe France level pegging with the US.

e.g. https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/NERO-22-June-2015-income-ine...

Another comparison of social mobility:

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81/1/WRAP_Naylor_twerp_781.pdf

Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to t he Nordic countries. Persis- tence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularl y high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile . This is a challenge to the popu- lar notion of ’American exceptionalism’.

Can you back your doubts with numbers from a credible source?

Probably harder but social class in Europe is mostly unrelated to wealth, while in the US the two are closely knit, which is what is often measured.

This is only because "social mobility" is in terms of percentiles, which doesn't account for differences in income variance between countries. The US has anomalously high income variance, so large changes in absolute income can equate to relatively small changes in the percentile.

To put it another way, if everyone made the same wage, an increase in salary of $1 would check the box for "social mobility" because it would move you into the top percentile.

On the other hand, the incentive to rise above your parents' percentile is much less if that next percentile doesn't feel much better.

At the end of the day, the difficulty with these comparisons is that social mobility measured in percentiles may be the same in a country where it is next to impossible to rise above your parents' social class as in a country where it is completely pointless to even want that.

I'd claim in many european nations rising is motivated by percieved better chances to have a psychologically fullfilling career, rather than considerable improvement in finances - since the increases are not that thrillingly high. But does this make the urge to rise pointless?

In my country (Finland), for instance we don't force anyone to live in the streets. IMO, this creates huge amount of value from second order network effects - better childhoods, better social stability, people are more employable (if we only had jobs). I hope we can still afford this amount of social wellfare after a few decades.

I agree completely. But doing something _only_ for the purpose of moving into a higher income bracket may indeed be pointless (or less desirable) in a more equal society.

In such a society, any meaningful definition of social mobility has to include more than just income percentiles.

Personally, I would love to live in a communist society unless the workings of it were not proven completely impractical and incompatible with basic human instincts.

So, we probably need prices and actual money for resource optimization, with human-sized goals for individuals to aspire to. But how to optimize human condition is partly a separate question and requires placing some value on the life experiences of individuals disrespective of their economic status.

Not sure about this kind of rationalization. Social mobility is a more sophisticated measure.

That might be true in the aggregate, but I imagine it's not for specific groups. Why else would so many people move to the US for job opportunities?

The number of immigrants per capita in the US is not especially high. It's lower than in Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Germany and similar to most Western European nations.

1. Because US is big. 2. Because it is more welcoming for immigrants. 3. Because of broken H1B system.

Because it had great (and I mean multi-generational enduring American Dream great) PR from after WWII thru at least the late 60's.

The post-WW2 soft power strategy by the US was awesome and extremely effective. Sadly, it seems that by the 70s the pentagon had become solely obsessed with the projection of hard power. I personally reckon this has a huge amount to do with the decline of the US's popularity around the globe in the subsequent decades.

As an outside observer and frequent critic of US foreign policy I would agree.

[Citation needed]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/the-mobility-my...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/05...

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...

A little Googling seem to suggest that this figure is somewhat representative: the US has slightly more mobility than the UK, which have less mobility than most of Europe:

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

Wait a second. That data just measures correlation between father and son in terms of income. Thinking through it, if you had more sons do worse than their fathers economically, they would show up better in this data.

It's not measuring upward mobility, but mobility in general. Seems suspect.

Yes, this is true - a short article with more data on Canada goes a little deeper:

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2016059-eng.ht...

The rich stay rich, more than the poor stay poor (in Canada).

But the number is about [relative change in income across] the population - if most people are poor (which they are) high mobility across the population likely means poor people are moving up (or indeed getting much poorer - halving your income when you're already in the lower quartile would probably be as big a shift as doubling it - if not more).

You're right to ask for more detail, though.

Yeah, it baffles me when people bring this up.

US social mobility and wealth inequality are among the worst in the developed world.

Source?

First hit on Google:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

Graph down the bottom.

A bit disappointing to see you're being down-voted, based on a glance at that wp article, it links to a lot of relevant research (and the gp's statement can hardly be seen as controversial to anyone that's paid even cursory attention to social (in)equality and social studies in the past decades?).

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of the UK on the various countries though.

That data is a proxy for income mobility. It's measuring the correlation between generations. As I mentioned in another reply, it's not measuring upward mobility, but mobility in general. If a country had a future generation do worse economically it would show up as having better mobility.

> People seem to try harder at lower scale jobs in the US There is often the excuse of the tips for waiters etc.. but it's the same for customer support and things like that. When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst. People to try as hard to make the extra effort, etc.

As a person from a third country talking about the USA and Europe (lives in US, traveled in EU), this absolutely rings true. At grocery stores in the US people have been unfailingly polite and courteous to me (even though they don't get any tips or anything). So at my job, if I have to interact with customers I always try to maintain that attitude.

Meanwhile in Europe they are usually grim faced and have a "get on with it" attitude, and have occasionally yelled or grimaced at me for minor errors like using a chip card wrong.

My own analogy is USA and Thailand.

in terms of geopolitical differences, I think the "Protestant work ethic" tradition is a large driver of USA perceptions on work.

Conversely in Thailand, the emphasis on hierarchy and workplace harmony (no critical conversations) disincentives sticking one's head out, including working longer to work on a perceived deadlines.

Where in the US and where in Europe...? It is very hard to generalize

San Fran vs Toronto vs Paris or Cleveland vs Vancouver vs London

Completely agreed having lived and worked in all 3. Canada is the sweet spot.

Can you be more specific? Quality of life in Europe can vary greatly :)

I've considering applying for Canadian residency last year as I was looking for a new job but I quickly gave up.

There are many places in Europe with similar or even lower CoL all things considered, better social benefits, and a lot more opportunities.

Unless you specifically want to join an early stage startup, I don't see where Canada wins. But I might have missed something.

If you're well educated. If you're not then you'll find yourself working much harder in Canada to stay afloat than in Europe.

It does not match my own experience. I worked a few years in Canada (Québec) and liked it very much. I found that the work-life balance was much better than in France. It was more constant throughout the year. People have fewer vacations than in France 3-4 weeks/year with a few sick days vs 6-8 weeks/year but the daily working hours are lower (9-5) with quick lunch break where in France it is more 9-7 with a long lunch break (only in the private sector and in IT). The more constant working pace is much better for work. In France it is very complex to schedule a meeting when everybody can attend (there's always someone in vacation) and in summer it is nightmare for managers to find people to make a project going forward. The mood at work was much better in Canada, people were more friendly, less stressed due to a better organization (easier than in France) and also to be fair due to a lower unemployment rate. I did not have the impression to work more than in France to stay afloat, but maybe because because it was going smoother.

At a guess you were living in the cities?

Yes 3,5 years in Montreal (I really miss that city). I am sure that the experience is very different from Toronto and Vancouver.

I have a lot of relatives in Alberta. And it seems like the oil industry there is providing a lot of opportunity for people without college degrees to make a good living. But of course, that's just Alberta. I can't comment on the rest of the country.

Yes, but that's very hard work and quite a few of the people that moved to the territories to participate in the boom there already lost their shirt due to the prolonged drop in the price of oil. Alberta is a bit different because the extraction is easier.

You can make money in lumber, oil, mining, fishing and lots of other industries but it will not be 'easy' money by any definition, and if you get out without injury then you should consider yourself lucky. Long days, very hard work.

Yes, logging and fishing are the most dangerous professions by far according to [1].

[1] http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/

I'm in the process of moving to Toronto from the US. Any tips on good tech companies to work for. :)

Be ready to take a big salary haircut. Toronto is not SF or NY, but it's still expensive, and you'll earn about 50% less in USD terms.

As a Canadian, I heartily recommend to anyone in the tech business - work remotely for EUR, USD, GBP, or CHF or relocate to the US. You can make good friends anywhere, but a 50% salary difference plus higher taxes takes a lot more to overcome.

Take a look at: Shopify, Wattpad, Pager Duty, Uken Games, Opencare, Quandl, The Score (ESPN), Wealthsimple, Top Hat, Event Mobi.

Freshbooks or Shopify.

Head to New York or California.