I prefer watching foreign shows in their native language, not dubbed in English. English subtitles are fine.
But yeah, the world is homogenizing, and there's no way to stop it. Germany, England, etc., become more like the US every time I visit.
But yeah, the world is homogenizing, and there's no way to stop it. Germany, England, etc., become more like the US every time I visit.
Though I also wish they'd let me set better defaults. They let you give a list of languages you prefer, but that's too simplistic. E.g. I'd prefer to always get original audio, but subtitles matching the audio in a handful of languages I know well enough to follow if I can read but not only by audio, and falling back to English.
Instead you need to check for each series what is available, or set it broad and change it per program accordingly.
However, the language options offered beyond those already provided by Netflix are machine translated. This is good enough to follow along or fill in gaps in your knowledge of the officially subtitled language, but is a subpar representation of the program.
This happens fairly often on German Netflix. When the program's language is neither German nor English, often there are no English subtitles available.
International licensing is obviously complicated, so it's hard to say whose "fault" it is, but my suspicion is that some rights owners will only license the service to use the local language to prevent end users doing digital geo-arbitrage.
For example, the Swedish series "The Bridge" is available on German Netflix, and the trailer has English subtitles, but the actual episodes only offer German subs. AFAICT in the US market this show is only available for streaming as a purchase from Amazon.
It is very common for languages other than English. I'd say most Netflix content has the French audio and subtitles not matching each other. They have the same meaning but not the same wording.
Public infrastructure, decent wages, national health care, public transport, and such ain't "beyond the pale" guys...
Though, to be frank, European politicians are influenced by this and want to bring more of it here faster. Private profit of the few above people, and let the suckers believe in wealth "trickling down"...
By that logic it was most efficient with slavery? And the next best thing with serfs?
But Biden has the "once in a generation infrastructure plan"!
It is common for poor industrial areas to end up with large transient populations, but that’s a case of convergent evolution.
The banking runs were caused by the fixed exchange rate between gold and fiat money - in 1929 one could double one's wealth by buying gold from banks at the official exchange rate. This naturally caused endless runs until the banks either collapsed or FDR (correctly) suspended such sales. The banks remained crippled for lack of money because the Federal Reserve Bank (not a free market bank) failed to understand what the problem was.
The country came out of the Depression late in the 30's because of vast quantities of money flowing into the country from foreign countries buying arms.
Mind you, there's more to it than that; just setting the high-income-band taxes high won't do it. Efficacy of taxation and control of corruption is also important. Ireland's an interesting case; in the 80s its income tax was quite high (and it was a substantial net beneficiary of EU funding) but its GINI index was the worst in the EU (it was actually worse than the US for part of the decade). Today, income tax is still quite high (though not as high), and it's a donor of EU funding, but the GINI index is middle of the road European, far better than it used to be. The main thing that changed, beyond overall economic development, is reduction of corruption; there's no point in having big high-income-band taxes if no-one pays them.
They will always have incentive to movw money into a tax heaven, their rate is zero
it's not trickling down anywhere.
While it might be in most corporations best interest to have consumers that can afford to buy all the thing they are selling, it's also in their own immediate interest to squeeze as much money as they can, and keep it for them self.
And each year laws get passed (or reverted) that help corporations , and they get better and better at squeezing.
Look at the trends, middle class is disappearing, and more and more wealth is captured and kept at the top. (corporations are getting bigger and bigger, and rich people are getting richer)
and it's happening in USA even faster than in most of Europe. Pretty much the only place where middle class is growing is China (and other developing countries), but that is because they are still catching up.
So it can't be just the EU taxes.
Trickle down is nice theory, too bad it doesn't work in practice.
And no I don't even pretend to know what the solution is.
I just think that lowering taxes for corporations, will just make even more money for corporations, make them more powerful and not really help anyone else.
With this mindset soon there wont be any left.
>As someone whose parents grew up without electricity in their home that's nonsense and tone deaf. (...) You have no idea how positively we brown 1st and 2nd gen immigrants view America
It's easy to view the current status positively if you start from a low bar.
But sure, the US has electricy AND running water. I'll give you that. Well, mostly ( https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/26/how-texas-tough-winter-expos... ).
As a German: In what ways?
2. I recently was in a shopping mall in Stuttgart. The design, parking garage, mall exterior, interior, looked exactly like an American mall. The displays and signs inside were nearly all in English. You could not tell you were in Germany.
3. Germans have by and large quit smoking.
4. English everywhere.
5. More American style clothing. Less Lederhosen (in fact, I can't recall seeing any Lederhosen after 1970).
6. American brand names everywhere.
I'm not sure how long ago you were in the US, but it was ubiquitous here a couple generations ago, and the shift away from smoking seems to be a global trend associated with wealth - in Mainland china, I see much less of the younger generation smoking nowadays.
I was in Berlin recently and can attest to the English signage anecdote though, even if your experience seems to be an exaggerated version of mine.
Smoking largely ended in the US by the mid 70s. Not completely, but in the 1960s I recall every office building stunk of stale smoke. This disappeared by the mid 70s.
Those are just form Bavaria and nowhere else.
You woudn't see a cowboy dress in NYC.
Well, there's the Naked Cowboy. But I guess he's missing the "dress" part of it (aside of "keeping the hat (and boots) on").
Eh? How is stopping smoking a "US thing"? Surely it's a result of public health campaigns and regulations slowly introduced over decades?
USA has double the smoking rate (per capita) than in my country (2017).
Germany was very,very early with anti-tobacco campaigns: “in 1929 (presumably too late to be included in the handbook) the German physician, Fritz Lickint published a paper in which he showed that lung cancer patients were particularly likely to be smokers. He then went on a crusade against smoking, and antitobacco activism actually became widespread in Germany.”
Hollywood was one of the main proponents of marketing cigarettes.
See also the newish American trend of vaping.
America is the forth largest producer of cigarettes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigaret...
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-smoking-rate-what-wor...
It was starkly obvious if you traveled back and forth between the US and Germany in the 1980s. In the 80s US businesses had done a good job of pushing the smokers out on the porch.
I never thought that would work, but it did, and smoking became generally recognized as the filthy habit that it was.
My '72 Dodge hasn't seen a cigarette since the 1980s and still smells like smoke :-)
Besides, McDonald's are everywhere in Germany. I even ate at one at Checkpoint Charlie. An obvious triumph over communism :-)
I'm sure there is an IKEA around here somewhere, but I don't know where. I know where all the McD's within 10 miles are!
CC subtitle tracks often show up with the name "English (SDH)" (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of hearing).
When the CC is good it can communicate the mood of the music that is playing, sometimes it even shows the lyrics.
[ominous music], [workout montage music], [knocking on door], [Rachel clears throat], [music: Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd]