Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't even know where to start.

I mean first of all "great weather and culture", debatable as that is, isn't diversity. Diversity =/= good. It means different. Again I'd debate that the states even has the best weather (what is the best weather anyway?), culture, pay (certainly not from many of the horror stories sometimes told on here, but I guess if your upper middle class theres no need to worry about that), entertainment and food, but that's just subjective.

There's also this idea that europe is just one big country, which it obviously isn't. It's 44 countries, all with very different cultures. I don't really know how you'd define culture, it seems to be very loosely measured, but one easy way of doing so is language, in which europe has 24 official languages, and the states has 1. Switzerland alone has 3 official languages.

I don't hate the states or anything, if you enjoy living there then good for you, but yeh, theres a difference between "I like the culture here" and "here is the worlds greatest culture"

Switzerland even has four official languages :)

If the US had as many official languages per capita, it would have over 150.

This factoid ignores the fact that french and Italian are spoken outside Switzerland too :)

I wanted to make a funny comment about how you missed German being in the same boat. But then I remembered that what the Swiss call German is... special

> but one easy way of doing so is language, in which europe has 24 official languages, and the states has 1.

The US has no official language at the federal level, but some states have official languages other than English, e.g. Spanish, Hawaiian or some other native language (Alaska has quite a few).

There's more than 30 languages in Europe.

US feels like a capitalist monocolture, where every city looks pretty much like the others.

>where every city looks pretty much like the others.

If you're going to make a criticism of the US, this is easy to flip around - every city in Europe looks exactly like the other. A city centre with narrow streets and a central church or cathedral surrounded by blocks of flats. The specific architectural styles change but the idea is almost the same throughout.

Well, except for Paris, Berlin, Venice, Madrid, etc etc

"Has big streets" or "car dominant" isn't the monoculture of the US that people from Europe notice. It is the exact same chain of shops, restaurants, same style of clothes, same TV shows, same music, same brands of cars. If I go to a nearby city all this stuff is the same.

If I'm in Belgium and drive 3 hours I end up with different language, food, styles of dress, music. Apart from a few token multinationals the shops and restaurants are all different. Architecture is different. And the same story if I'm in Vienna, or Zurich, or Berlin, or Lisbon. Language, food, restaurants, shops, work culture, all different.

No. You have octagonal blocks of Barcelona, wide streets of Haussman's Paris and canals of Venice. And that's not even touching the postcommunist part of continent.

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