I expected this to be a relatively harmless and lighthearted laugh-at-the-euros post, but the idea that I would have to go before some governmental busybody to justify the purchase of my own f**king air conditioner for my own f**king home--it's legitimately shocking.
Is this North Korea? Do I have enough Chairman Xi Social Credit Buxx to get party-level access to the strategic heat pump stockpile in the back room?
Another thing is that much of Europe is a lot more pleasant to travel around than much of the US because they don't have endless, ugly urban sprawl everywhere. I know this is to some degree the flip side of housing shortages (in some countries anyway). But everything is a tradeoff, and this is the positive side of the ledger, and one can acknowledge it for what it is.
It's clearly not all asphalt and concrete. There's a reason. Our local cities are pretty anal about cutting down tree. It's annoying when you need to remove a tree, but it's hard to argue with the results.
I love air conditioning, too, but I'm a little more skeptical of American norms on some of the other stuff.
* Fahrenheit vs. Celsius: Pretty neutral on this one; I think it's mostly just what people are used to. I could make a similar convenience argument for Celsius where it's easy to remember that 0 is freezing and comfortable temperature range for humans is roughly 20 to 30 (humidity concerns aside).
* Automatic transmissions: I hate them! I don't want my car shifting when I didn't tell it to, the way they creep forward in Drive without you putting your foot on the gas is weird, and to the extent that I have to drive a car, I at least want to have some fun while I'm at it. It's nice that automatics are available for people who have different priorities, but it's annoying how hard it is to find a car with a manual transmission in the United States.
* Clothes dryers: American clothes dryers DO destroy clothes! It's not a myth. Americans I talk to, especially men, generally acknowledge this and accept that they'll either need to replace clothing more often, or deal with it being faded and fuzzy. I don't consider the typical item in my closet to be fungible, so I prefer to make them last as long as possible and that's why I hang dry everything except for sheets and towels.
* Ice: Ice is good, but the common American convention of filling a beverage cup completely full of ice before adding the drink, so that the drink just fills the spaces between the ice cubes and it becomes watery and disgusting if you don't drink it all right away, is mystifying to me. Some of my more cynical friends have told me that restaurants to this to get away with giving people less actual beverage product. I'm not sure of that, but I find it very strange and over the top.
* Text messages: SMS is an outdated technology, tied to whichever mobile device is active on your cellular carrier, and I find it very annoying that it's still the de facto standard for written interpersonal communication in the US. I don't care if you use LINE, WhatsApp, Telegram, AOL Instant Messenger risen from the dead, or what have you, but give me something that supports account profiles, that I can use on a computer (or multiple devices in general) without platform-specific workarounds like iMessage.
With respect, this kind of gives away the whole game. The freedom of movement associated with a private vehicle is something that the typical American cannot imagine going without. Driving rocks.
No, it really depends on the trip and where you live.
Remember that most Americans live in places where the population density is spread out. Where I grew up, I could reasonably walk to my neighbors house, but my grandparents were about a 20 minute walk away. The nearest town would take an hour to walk, but only about 5 minutes to drive. A real grocery store was a 30 minute freeway drive way. Now there is a bus, it come about 3 times a day. Of course everyone drives everywhere.
Now I live in the bay area in an a city of about 100,000 people I'm about 40 miles from San Fransisco and 20 miles from San Jose. When I go to San Fransisco I usually take public tranportation because dealing with a car in the city is a royal pain, and many San Fransisco residents don't own a car, or they have a car they use when they want to leave the city. I can walk a a local grocery store for that odd item I need right now and forgot, but if I want to do grocery shopping, of cource I drive because I don't want to haul 50-80 lbs of groceries by hand (and the store I would normally shop in is far enough not to drive). When I didn't work at home, I would use public transportation because it's the same trip everyday and I could adjust my commute to match the light/rail bus service.
Population density matters on how much you need a car for freedom. Remember the US has about 1 1/2 times the population of Western Europe with 3 times the area, and standard deviation of our population density is much higher than Europe.
Sort of. I think there's limited utility in talking about US population density as a monolithic unit. The density that determines people's lifestyles is regional, and the population isn't evenly distributed. "It's a big country" is often brought up as if to softly imply that the normative American lives on the outskirts of a small town in Iowa, but in reality most Americans live in some kind of metropolitan area, many of which have local geographic constraints. Much of Europe is covered in plains and isn't exactly jam-packed with people. The second largest city in France has about the population of Cincinnati.
The question for someone like me is why the typical American urban experience is so deliberately low density, even somewhere like Los Angeles or Chicago, and why that kind of lifestyle has come to be seen as so quintessentially American that merely preferring something else makes my American-ness suspect. I think San Francisco proper is about the only place outside of New York in the entire country where it's not unusual for someone to not drive regularly, and the Bay Area as a whole is a cautionary tale about what happens when you force low density. I don't want to be one of those annoying progressives Josh likes to needle who thinks everything is better in Europe, but I can't be a booster for American car culture. It makes no sense to me why a place like San Jose, with amazing weather and a formidable economic engine, should look the way it does, with people connected to the regional economy being asked to consider driving in from Livermore or Tracy, because the ranch house and the strip mall are sacrosanct.
This country pioneered technology like skyscrapers, elevators, and passenger rail, among many other things. The modern city as we know it is in many ways an American invention. They once represented one of several normative modes of life in a big, diverse country, but now they're seen as a kind of foreign imposition, an elite affectation for wealthy people with an inferiority complex. When it's implied that I'm less American simply for not being into driving, it really makes me feel like I'm not invited to the party and that this country isn't nearly as "something for everyone" diverse as people want me to believe.
Re: groceries, my deal is that I want the store to be close enough that I'm not buying 50 lbs of stuff at a time, because I can get it as I need it in the course of doing other things, instead of planning a trip every week or so.
Compared to a bus or train, which travels on somebody else's timetable and on somebody else's predefined route? Yes lol for god's sake, that's transportation freedom.
Walking is conveniently being left out here. And the number of Euros vs Americans who can walk to do their daily shopping is absolutely a point in their favor.
One thing I've never understood as a European is drinking and driving in the States. I love the flexibility of driving my own car, but when I go out to grab a drink I prefer public transport (or, indeed, walking distances). Of course, a functional public transport system with high service frequency helps, but AFAIK you guys don't really have that in the suburbs or out in the country, so what's your strategy?
People take their chances; it's kind of an open secret. In my experience, the more conscientious will either throw money at rideshares or pointedly have only one drink and wait for it to wear off before leaving, but most people just drive anyway and hope for the best.
A big reason why I don't like mandatory driving is that all of these options sound terrible to me. I like social drinking and I don't want to have to plan out all the logistics of where I'm going in advance, turn down a spontaneous drink with someone because I have to drive, tediously ration my consumption, or spend the cost of a nice dinner on hiring a car to go a couple of miles down the road. Some local friends do a dinner/drink outing at a different bar/restaurant each month, but I've stopped going unless it's close to my house, because it can easily cost $60 or $70 just to get there and back in rideshares. Everybody else drives. That's not freedom!
"This is a reason I’m proud to be American: the American right loves to complain about the American left promising “free stuff,” but at least our right and our left are both in favor of stuff."
Think it's worth noting that "degrowth" as a concept apparently unites right and left in Europe. You had Andrew Sullivan on Central air last week. Caveat that Sullivan himself would call himself "idiosyncratic" so I don't want to make the mistake of thinking his views are perfectly aligned with now dominant conservative party in the UK. But while he hasn't come out and said it, listening to him on the podcast and reading his substack recently, seems pretty clear he's in favor of the Reform party gaining enough votes to occupy Number 10. So it was so so enlightening hear to that Sully is basically a "degrowth" NIMBY. The most exercised (and hostile) he got in your conversation is when you suggested a) UK should consider building more housing near train stations b) relaxing "greenbelt" rules c) anemic economic growth is contributing factor to the rise of the Reform party itself*. It was just really amazing to hear that he basically was saying that sacrificing any economic growth at all is "worth it" to preserve some rose tinted version of UK that existed in the past*.
This is all related in that the anti-air conditioning stance and the current power of Reform party (and similar populist right wing parties like AFD) have something that ties it together; that it's somehow necessary to sacrifice economic growth if you want to have the country address non-economic concerns. You can both become more green and address climate change AND embrace technological change and economic growth. You can do a better job of keeping immigration under control AND take steps to improve economic performance so large swaths of the public aren't so anti-immigrant. I actually think it's a reasonable point that Boris Johnson campaigning on getting "Brexit done" (which came about in part due to fears of immigrants from Eastern Europe) and then enacting policies that means immigration from Africa, India and other parts of the world explodes means the Tory party kind of reaps what they sow**. But boy oh boy, would doing anything at all to help fix the UK housing crises have helped a ton to stem the backlash that occurred. But more important, poor economic performance creates the conditions for these bigoted populist movements to take root.
* You and I both know that inflation was a) about supply chain snarls post COVID b) the 2021 stimulus being one stimulus too much (in that order of importance). But I really don't think I'm going out on a limb much to suggest that not only was 2024 the "it's the inflation stupid" result, but that inflation meant that the surge in asylum seekers created a toxic stew for the asylum issue to create a much bigger immigration backlash then might have happened if inflation had remained at or near 2%
** Think the closest equivalent in America to Boris doing what he did is GHWB saying "read my lips, no new taxes" and then...raising taxes. The thing is both policy turns are absolutely defensible. Raising taxes in 1991 was key to helping get the deficit under control. And in UK, I don't know how they deal with their pension issues with out more immigration. At least US still has solid GDP growth to help deal with the social security issue looming. I truly don't know how UK keeps "triple lock" without a) more immigration b) much more economic growth (the two are tied obviously).
The American left's "AC is a human right" juxtaposed with the French left's insistence on killing their most vulnerable citizens in the name of marginally improved C02 emissions is so darkly hilarious. Marine Le Pen is now poised to become France's next progressive hero when she implements her Air Conditioning New Deal plan.
Even here in Sunnyvale, California, AC is relatively prevelent even though the climate only requires AC about 5-10 days a year. When it's 72 degrees outside all the time, you don't need special equipment to make it 72 degrees inside.... but we have them just in case.
It's a bit annoying that we can't get cars without automatic transmission any more. Sure, our transmissions are good enough that we no longer *need* them for our low end, under powered cars (one of the last holdouts for manual transmission up until the 80s), but for our sports cars a good manual transmission is fantastic (the other hold out into the early 2000s). If you know how to use them, driving is much more fun when you have a manual transmission on a good sports car... and it limits the number of friends who want to borrow your car (to be fair to Josh, this only works because automatic transmissions are so ubiquitous it's no longer worth it for Americans to learn how to drive manuals).
Europe will get there, though. EV's have no transmissions (electric motors have full torque throughout the RPM range and no longer need them). And driving an EV, where you have power throughout the whole RPM range, is just as fun as driving a sports car with a manual transmission.
Fahrenheit vs Celsius - It depends on what you are measuring. For engineering work Celsius is preferred. It's easier to calibrate measuring equipment for precise measurements. It's just a number that you plug into get get other things (like caloric energy), though really you should be using Kelvin so you don't accidentally get confused by the artificial zero both Fahrenheit and Celsius have. For normal everyday temperatures, having a scale where most temperatures on earth fall between 0 and 100 is a good thing. Where 1 degree is about the amount a human can distiguish (people can usually tell if one thing is warmer or colder than another by about 1 degree F), Fahrenheit is clearly the rationally better scale for humans to use when talking about the temparture of their environment.
If I lived in a small town in Iowa I might like a manual transmission, but when you have to stop and go and stop and go and change your speed constantly, as in any urban or suburban are, I’ll go with automatic.
It's really annoying to learn how to use a manual transmission in the urban setting versus a rural one, but once you've learned, the start and stops are automatic muscle memory. The fun comes when downshifting a car with power at the right moment, other than that, there is no reason not use use the automatic, which is why it's almost impossible to get a manual in the US these days.
I have traveled to Europe many times. The first time was in 1976. Then again in 1983, 2007, and almost every year since 2017. I'm heading to Switzerland for two weeks in late July. I loved this piece because it's so spot on! The comment about ice especially - although it's much easier to get ice now than in the 70s and 80s. Like you, I am hoping this heat wave has passed before I get there. Of course, the hotels are airconditioned, as are most of the places tourists go, like museums. Anyway, thanks for the laugh!
Automatic transmissions are steadily gaining ground in the last couple of decades, because those are both convenient and fuel-efficient. That said, I like driving stick, it allows me a level of control over dynamics and performance I wouldn't otherwise have.
In Uganda text and voice are charged by usage, but data is free. WhatsApp is pervasive even for voice calls, which also means that they make international calls on WhatsApp. When I travel I make sure our group has WhatsApp and/or Signal on our phones and we can usually communicate with each other anywhere (including on the cruise ship using wifi).
I expected this to be a relatively harmless and lighthearted laugh-at-the-euros post, but the idea that I would have to go before some governmental busybody to justify the purchase of my own f**king air conditioner for my own f**king home--it's legitimately shocking.
Is this North Korea? Do I have enough Chairman Xi Social Credit Buxx to get party-level access to the strategic heat pump stockpile in the back room?
Another thing is that much of Europe is a lot more pleasant to travel around than much of the US because they don't have endless, ugly urban sprawl everywhere. I know this is to some degree the flip side of housing shortages (in some countries anyway). But everything is a tradeoff, and this is the positive side of the ledger, and one can acknowledge it for what it is.
One man’s ugly urban sprawl is another man’s dream six bedroom, 5,000 sq ft house on a 2 acre plot
Nah. One man's urban sprawl is another man's Wal Mart/ strip mall/ convenience store complex surrounded by 20 acres of asphalt.
And that’s bad?
Yes
right - that's good!
OK here's a view of the bay area, population of 7.7 million in an area of 400 square miles (not counting water) from the hills https://photos.app.goo.gl/6y9NU6DQYTxNVFDJA
It's clearly not all asphalt and concrete. There's a reason. Our local cities are pretty anal about cutting down tree. It's annoying when you need to remove a tree, but it's hard to argue with the results.
Sprawl is good, actually. I love having my own house with my own four walls and a garden and yard that are my private space.
Freedom is good and sprawl is Communism.
I love air conditioning, too, but I'm a little more skeptical of American norms on some of the other stuff.
* Fahrenheit vs. Celsius: Pretty neutral on this one; I think it's mostly just what people are used to. I could make a similar convenience argument for Celsius where it's easy to remember that 0 is freezing and comfortable temperature range for humans is roughly 20 to 30 (humidity concerns aside).
* Automatic transmissions: I hate them! I don't want my car shifting when I didn't tell it to, the way they creep forward in Drive without you putting your foot on the gas is weird, and to the extent that I have to drive a car, I at least want to have some fun while I'm at it. It's nice that automatics are available for people who have different priorities, but it's annoying how hard it is to find a car with a manual transmission in the United States.
* Clothes dryers: American clothes dryers DO destroy clothes! It's not a myth. Americans I talk to, especially men, generally acknowledge this and accept that they'll either need to replace clothing more often, or deal with it being faded and fuzzy. I don't consider the typical item in my closet to be fungible, so I prefer to make them last as long as possible and that's why I hang dry everything except for sheets and towels.
* Ice: Ice is good, but the common American convention of filling a beverage cup completely full of ice before adding the drink, so that the drink just fills the spaces between the ice cubes and it becomes watery and disgusting if you don't drink it all right away, is mystifying to me. Some of my more cynical friends have told me that restaurants to this to get away with giving people less actual beverage product. I'm not sure of that, but I find it very strange and over the top.
* Text messages: SMS is an outdated technology, tied to whichever mobile device is active on your cellular carrier, and I find it very annoying that it's still the de facto standard for written interpersonal communication in the US. I don't care if you use LINE, WhatsApp, Telegram, AOL Instant Messenger risen from the dead, or what have you, but give me something that supports account profiles, that I can use on a computer (or multiple devices in general) without platform-specific workarounds like iMessage.
> to the extent that I have to drive a car
With respect, this kind of gives away the whole game. The freedom of movement associated with a private vehicle is something that the typical American cannot imagine going without. Driving rocks.
For every single piddling trip, by necessity? I don't hate cars, but that doesn't sound like freedom to me.
No, it really depends on the trip and where you live.
Remember that most Americans live in places where the population density is spread out. Where I grew up, I could reasonably walk to my neighbors house, but my grandparents were about a 20 minute walk away. The nearest town would take an hour to walk, but only about 5 minutes to drive. A real grocery store was a 30 minute freeway drive way. Now there is a bus, it come about 3 times a day. Of course everyone drives everywhere.
Now I live in the bay area in an a city of about 100,000 people I'm about 40 miles from San Fransisco and 20 miles from San Jose. When I go to San Fransisco I usually take public tranportation because dealing with a car in the city is a royal pain, and many San Fransisco residents don't own a car, or they have a car they use when they want to leave the city. I can walk a a local grocery store for that odd item I need right now and forgot, but if I want to do grocery shopping, of cource I drive because I don't want to haul 50-80 lbs of groceries by hand (and the store I would normally shop in is far enough not to drive). When I didn't work at home, I would use public transportation because it's the same trip everyday and I could adjust my commute to match the light/rail bus service.
Population density matters on how much you need a car for freedom. Remember the US has about 1 1/2 times the population of Western Europe with 3 times the area, and standard deviation of our population density is much higher than Europe.
Sort of. I think there's limited utility in talking about US population density as a monolithic unit. The density that determines people's lifestyles is regional, and the population isn't evenly distributed. "It's a big country" is often brought up as if to softly imply that the normative American lives on the outskirts of a small town in Iowa, but in reality most Americans live in some kind of metropolitan area, many of which have local geographic constraints. Much of Europe is covered in plains and isn't exactly jam-packed with people. The second largest city in France has about the population of Cincinnati.
The question for someone like me is why the typical American urban experience is so deliberately low density, even somewhere like Los Angeles or Chicago, and why that kind of lifestyle has come to be seen as so quintessentially American that merely preferring something else makes my American-ness suspect. I think San Francisco proper is about the only place outside of New York in the entire country where it's not unusual for someone to not drive regularly, and the Bay Area as a whole is a cautionary tale about what happens when you force low density. I don't want to be one of those annoying progressives Josh likes to needle who thinks everything is better in Europe, but I can't be a booster for American car culture. It makes no sense to me why a place like San Jose, with amazing weather and a formidable economic engine, should look the way it does, with people connected to the regional economy being asked to consider driving in from Livermore or Tracy, because the ranch house and the strip mall are sacrosanct.
This country pioneered technology like skyscrapers, elevators, and passenger rail, among many other things. The modern city as we know it is in many ways an American invention. They once represented one of several normative modes of life in a big, diverse country, but now they're seen as a kind of foreign imposition, an elite affectation for wealthy people with an inferiority complex. When it's implied that I'm less American simply for not being into driving, it really makes me feel like I'm not invited to the party and that this country isn't nearly as "something for everyone" diverse as people want me to believe.
Re: groceries, my deal is that I want the store to be close enough that I'm not buying 50 lbs of stuff at a time, because I can get it as I need it in the course of doing other things, instead of planning a trip every week or so.
Compared to a bus or train, which travels on somebody else's timetable and on somebody else's predefined route? Yes lol for god's sake, that's transportation freedom.
Walking is conveniently being left out here. And the number of Euros vs Americans who can walk to do their daily shopping is absolutely a point in their favor.
One thing I've never understood as a European is drinking and driving in the States. I love the flexibility of driving my own car, but when I go out to grab a drink I prefer public transport (or, indeed, walking distances). Of course, a functional public transport system with high service frequency helps, but AFAIK you guys don't really have that in the suburbs or out in the country, so what's your strategy?
People take their chances; it's kind of an open secret. In my experience, the more conscientious will either throw money at rideshares or pointedly have only one drink and wait for it to wear off before leaving, but most people just drive anyway and hope for the best.
A big reason why I don't like mandatory driving is that all of these options sound terrible to me. I like social drinking and I don't want to have to plan out all the logistics of where I'm going in advance, turn down a spontaneous drink with someone because I have to drive, tediously ration my consumption, or spend the cost of a nice dinner on hiring a car to go a couple of miles down the road. Some local friends do a dinner/drink outing at a different bar/restaurant each month, but I've stopped going unless it's close to my house, because it can easily cost $60 or $70 just to get there and back in rideshares. Everybody else drives. That's not freedom!
America does need more roundabouts! Please bring one back with you!
"This is a reason I’m proud to be American: the American right loves to complain about the American left promising “free stuff,” but at least our right and our left are both in favor of stuff."
Think it's worth noting that "degrowth" as a concept apparently unites right and left in Europe. You had Andrew Sullivan on Central air last week. Caveat that Sullivan himself would call himself "idiosyncratic" so I don't want to make the mistake of thinking his views are perfectly aligned with now dominant conservative party in the UK. But while he hasn't come out and said it, listening to him on the podcast and reading his substack recently, seems pretty clear he's in favor of the Reform party gaining enough votes to occupy Number 10. So it was so so enlightening hear to that Sully is basically a "degrowth" NIMBY. The most exercised (and hostile) he got in your conversation is when you suggested a) UK should consider building more housing near train stations b) relaxing "greenbelt" rules c) anemic economic growth is contributing factor to the rise of the Reform party itself*. It was just really amazing to hear that he basically was saying that sacrificing any economic growth at all is "worth it" to preserve some rose tinted version of UK that existed in the past*.
This is all related in that the anti-air conditioning stance and the current power of Reform party (and similar populist right wing parties like AFD) have something that ties it together; that it's somehow necessary to sacrifice economic growth if you want to have the country address non-economic concerns. You can both become more green and address climate change AND embrace technological change and economic growth. You can do a better job of keeping immigration under control AND take steps to improve economic performance so large swaths of the public aren't so anti-immigrant. I actually think it's a reasonable point that Boris Johnson campaigning on getting "Brexit done" (which came about in part due to fears of immigrants from Eastern Europe) and then enacting policies that means immigration from Africa, India and other parts of the world explodes means the Tory party kind of reaps what they sow**. But boy oh boy, would doing anything at all to help fix the UK housing crises have helped a ton to stem the backlash that occurred. But more important, poor economic performance creates the conditions for these bigoted populist movements to take root.
* You and I both know that inflation was a) about supply chain snarls post COVID b) the 2021 stimulus being one stimulus too much (in that order of importance). But I really don't think I'm going out on a limb much to suggest that not only was 2024 the "it's the inflation stupid" result, but that inflation meant that the surge in asylum seekers created a toxic stew for the asylum issue to create a much bigger immigration backlash then might have happened if inflation had remained at or near 2%
** Think the closest equivalent in America to Boris doing what he did is GHWB saying "read my lips, no new taxes" and then...raising taxes. The thing is both policy turns are absolutely defensible. Raising taxes in 1991 was key to helping get the deficit under control. And in UK, I don't know how they deal with their pension issues with out more immigration. At least US still has solid GDP growth to help deal with the social security issue looming. I truly don't know how UK keeps "triple lock" without a) more immigration b) much more economic growth (the two are tied obviously).
I’m an American reading this post from Paris, because my long planned summer vacation happened to coincide with the heat wave.
Needless to say I could not agree more
The American left's "AC is a human right" juxtaposed with the French left's insistence on killing their most vulnerable citizens in the name of marginally improved C02 emissions is so darkly hilarious. Marine Le Pen is now poised to become France's next progressive hero when she implements her Air Conditioning New Deal plan.
Some observations:
Even here in Sunnyvale, California, AC is relatively prevelent even though the climate only requires AC about 5-10 days a year. When it's 72 degrees outside all the time, you don't need special equipment to make it 72 degrees inside.... but we have them just in case.
It's a bit annoying that we can't get cars without automatic transmission any more. Sure, our transmissions are good enough that we no longer *need* them for our low end, under powered cars (one of the last holdouts for manual transmission up until the 80s), but for our sports cars a good manual transmission is fantastic (the other hold out into the early 2000s). If you know how to use them, driving is much more fun when you have a manual transmission on a good sports car... and it limits the number of friends who want to borrow your car (to be fair to Josh, this only works because automatic transmissions are so ubiquitous it's no longer worth it for Americans to learn how to drive manuals).
Europe will get there, though. EV's have no transmissions (electric motors have full torque throughout the RPM range and no longer need them). And driving an EV, where you have power throughout the whole RPM range, is just as fun as driving a sports car with a manual transmission.
Fahrenheit vs Celsius - It depends on what you are measuring. For engineering work Celsius is preferred. It's easier to calibrate measuring equipment for precise measurements. It's just a number that you plug into get get other things (like caloric energy), though really you should be using Kelvin so you don't accidentally get confused by the artificial zero both Fahrenheit and Celsius have. For normal everyday temperatures, having a scale where most temperatures on earth fall between 0 and 100 is a good thing. Where 1 degree is about the amount a human can distiguish (people can usually tell if one thing is warmer or colder than another by about 1 degree F), Fahrenheit is clearly the rationally better scale for humans to use when talking about the temparture of their environment.
Yeah, Celsius really serves no purpose for me. If you're going to use a "better" scale than Fahrenheit, just go all the way and hit K.
If I lived in a small town in Iowa I might like a manual transmission, but when you have to stop and go and stop and go and change your speed constantly, as in any urban or suburban are, I’ll go with automatic.
It's really annoying to learn how to use a manual transmission in the urban setting versus a rural one, but once you've learned, the start and stops are automatic muscle memory. The fun comes when downshifting a car with power at the right moment, other than that, there is no reason not use use the automatic, which is why it's almost impossible to get a manual in the US these days.
I have traveled to Europe many times. The first time was in 1976. Then again in 1983, 2007, and almost every year since 2017. I'm heading to Switzerland for two weeks in late July. I loved this piece because it's so spot on! The comment about ice especially - although it's much easier to get ice now than in the 70s and 80s. Like you, I am hoping this heat wave has passed before I get there. Of course, the hotels are airconditioned, as are most of the places tourists go, like museums. Anyway, thanks for the laugh!
Actually the damn ice cubes drive me nuts, and I’m American.
Automatic transmissions are steadily gaining ground in the last couple of decades, because those are both convenient and fuel-efficient. That said, I like driving stick, it allows me a level of control over dynamics and performance I wouldn't otherwise have.
As an European I strongly approve this message.
Every. Word. Of. This. The WhatsApp slayed me!!
In Uganda text and voice are charged by usage, but data is free. WhatsApp is pervasive even for voice calls, which also means that they make international calls on WhatsApp. When I travel I make sure our group has WhatsApp and/or Signal on our phones and we can usually communicate with each other anywhere (including on the cruise ship using wifi).
Just flew through Dulles and was extremely whelmed by the amount of air conditioning in the terminal. Is that normal?
What I don’t like is the 20C, not the air conditioning.