will the US military power dominate the world

Wow, talk about cultural ignorance! For nearly every American, having their
own
transportation is a benifit, not a burden. I drove two hours last weekend to
visit my sister in college. I *loved* the drive! The scenary was beautiful, I
cranked up my car stereo, bought a 20 oz. soda (which eventually caused me to
stop on my trip) and relaxed. It was me, my 8 cylinder car and a fairly open
highway. I didn't have to make multiple stops (one to redeposit my soda),
didn't have to sit next to a guy smoking one cigarette after another while
listening to a screeming 2 year old. Even if I had the option of public
transportation, I would have driven. Your ignorance of Americans, our
passions
and our way of life is glaring.


I'll also add that I rented a car when I visited Europe earlier in the month
and if you're sticking with public transportation you're missing some great
scenary as well. I drove from Stuttgart to Verdun on the major highways, not
much to see. However, I drove from Verdun to Mons on small back roads. What
great scenary and as a 20th Century European history student (one BA, finishing
MA) I was fasinated by the scenary and the historical signifigance of the sites
I was viewing.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"

"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message
om...
(BUFDRVR) wrote in message
...
If Europe was as dispersed and involved the same routine travel
distances as much of the US seemed to... but it doesn't.

So you choose not to travel. This could be for personal reasons, or it
could
be fuel prices.

It's largely due to a much smaller country

If its the former, than high fuel prices don't impact your
quality of life, but if its the latter, than they do.

The former. I think there's a mutual incomprehension between many
North Americans and Europeans about the relative densities of their
countries, and the different viewpoints that suggests. It's not _just_
cheaper fuel that pushes North Americans into huge, lazy-engined
roadsters: it's the frequent necessity for much more travel.

To give an anecdotal example, a friend of mine spent a year in the US
working near Chicago: an hour each way on the freeway was 'routine
commuting' there. Here, it would be 'serious travel - do you really
like that job so much?' Not money so much as time.


A one hour commute really isnt that unsual, when I worked
in London around 1/4 of my co-workers were commuting
much further.

Go to my local rail station (1 hour from Kings Cross) any morning
and you'll see packed trains heading for London every 10 minutes.

Keith

Marcus Andersson wrote:
yeah... this is probably the clearest example for Europeans of the
low standard of living for Americans... you simply cannot live
without a car...
You are forced to sit in your home without being able to go anywhere.
Unless you want to make yourself the trouble of bringing your car with
you, that is.

Marcus, obviously you have never spent much time in the US, or, if you
did, it was on the East coast.

One of the amazing things I noticed when visiting Europe was the smaller
scale. Cities and distances there are much, much smaller than in the US,
primarily due to history.

It's a lot easier to do effective public transportation when your scale
is lots smaller and your people come into a central location in the
morning to work and go back out in the evening to go home. That's also
why public transportation works so well on the US East coast like New
York City.

When you're dealing with groups of cities and suburbs that are literally
a hundred kilometers across (or more), and your house and your work
place can be anywhere within that circle, you can't create a
cost-effective public transportation system. I know lots of people whose
daily commute is well over 50 kilometers (each way) and they only
consider it mildly long. And they're all going in different directions
-there is no "center centre" to which all business people go.

Look, for example, at maps of Los Angeles, San Francisco/Silicon Valley,
Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth. Compare the scale of those metropolitan
areas to London and Paris. I took the Eurostar from London to Paris; it
was lovely. Take that same distance and draw a circle from the major US
cities listed above; you'll not get very far, certainly not to another
large city.

Where I live everyone has a house set on a lot with a reasonable amount
of land around it (typically a half acre -sorry, don't remember the
conversion). The nearest grocery store is a couple of kilometers away,
as are restaurants, shops, etc. We think nothing of going 10-20
kilometers for an errand. It's just that things are more spread out,
whereas whilst I was in London you'd walk by a dozen of those places
between the Tube stop and your walk-up flat.

It's not that one or the other is a lower standard of living, it's that
in one case (Europe) public transportation is cost-effective given the
local topology and in the other case (most of the US) it's not.

Chad Irby wrote in message . ..
In article ,
(Marcus Andersson) wrote:

yeah... this is probably the clearest example for Europeans of the
low standard of living for Americans... you simply cannot live
without a car...
You are forced to sit in your home without being able to go anywhere.

Wow. Talk about odd perceptions...

Unless you want to make yourself the trouble of bringing your car with
you, that is.

Not a horrible problem for almost anyone. When "taking your car with
you" is about a third of the cost of doing the same in Europe, it's a
much different situation.



Say that you're going into town for some shopping... if you have your
car you must remember not to walk too far from where you've parked it
unless you want to walk several miles when it's time to go home again.

And you can't pop in to a restaurant or pub and have a couple of beers
unless you have some designated sober driver.

*horror*

BUFDRVR wrote:

Wow, talk about cultural ignorance! For nearly every American, having their
own
transportation is a benifit, not a burden. I drove two hours last weekend to
visit my sister in college. I *loved* the drive! The scenary was beautiful, I
cranked up my car stereo, bought a 20 oz. soda (which eventually caused me to
stop on my trip) and relaxed. It was me, my 8 cylinder car and a fairly open
highway. I didn't have to make multiple stops (one to redeposit my soda),
didn't have to sit next to a guy smoking one cigarette after another while
listening to a screeming 2 year old. Even if I had the option of public
transportation, I would have driven. Your ignorance of Americans, our
passions
and our way of life is glaring.

I'll also add that I rented a car when I visited Europe earlier in the month
and if you're sticking with public transportation you're missing some great
scenary as well. I drove from Stuttgart to Verdun on the major highways, not
much to see. However, I drove from Verdun to Mons on small back roads. What
great scenary and as a 20th Century European history student (one BA, finishing
MA) I was fasinated by the scenary and the historical signifigance of the sites
I was viewing.

Transport is one area I'd say we Americans have missed the boat on.

Every time I'm in Europe, I grow to love the public transport system
more and more, and wish we Americans hadn't destroyed our public transport
infrastructure.

You don't have to wait long for a train or a bus; stations are usually placed
right in the heart of tourist attractions and accommodation, just as it used to
be in the US until post-WWII.

A car is a wonderful gadget, but it is responsible for a lot of social
destruction in the US IMHO. Never mind pollution concerns, just the social
ones. Suburbia, destruction of city centers, traffic congestion,
depersonalization and even fostering of anti-social behavior.

No doubt the car is a wonderful mode of personal transport freedom. Go when
you want at your own pace. Too bad we could not have merged Euro and American
transport paradigms into one. Use the train or bus for our normal, day to day
work/living needs, then hop into the car and head out to Monument Valley or
visit the sis' at college when the opportunity arose.


SMH

It's not jealousy but a frustated desire of independance.

Chad Irby wrote in message om...
In article ,
(Rob van Riel) wrote:

Chad Irby wrote in message
om...
In article ,
"IO" wrote:

In spite of the mounting HATE against Bush and the American way of life?

The word you're looking for is "jealousy."

If jealousy were the issue, it would have pre-dated Bush and his
stuntdriving.

Jealousy, then.

It's gotten somewhat worse since the current President has taken office,
but it's certainly been an issue.

It hasn't gotten 'somewhat worse' recently, it has gone from mild envy
to outright hatred. Also, it is no longer limited to traditional
opponents of the US, but has spread to what used to be its allies.
Quite an accomplishment for one man (I leave it to you to decide if
that man is Bush or Bin Laden)

Rob

In article ,
Keith Willshaw wrote:

"ANDREW ROBERT BREEN" wrote in message
OTOH the car tax in .uk on my car and its 3-litre engine is zero (0).
Pre-'73 and thus tax-exempt
OT, I know..

Really ?

If it was first registered before 1st Jan 1973 then it's exempt from
VED (road tax).

Maybe its time to buy a Rover 3.5 Coupe after all

Go on, you know you want to...



--
Andy Breen ~ Interplanetary Scintillation Research Group
http://users.aber.ac.uk/azb/
"Who dies with the most toys wins" (Gary Barnes)

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:03:43 +0100, ess (phil hunt)
wrote:

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:48:08 +0100, Greg Hennessy wrote:
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:58:48 +0100, ess (phil hunt)
wrote:


I vehemently disagree, privacy is a fundamental human right.

If I do something illegal, do I have a fundamental human right for
others not to find out?

That's a logical fallacy.

What is?

The false dilemma you constructed above.


What about if I do something that's not illegal, but which many
people would be concerned about if they knew it? Do they have a
right to know?

If its none of their damned business they have *no* right to know, no
matter how 'concerned' these interfering busybodies may be.

Ah, but how do you decide who has a "right" to know?

Its not for *me* to decide. Its none of my business period.

No, I don't know it; AFAICT that's what you meant. To clarify, let
me ask you:

[Snip another false dilemma]

It's not a dilemma, it's a genuine attempt to find out what you
think on the subject. Evidently you don't want to tell me; possibly
you don't want to have to work out what your opinions actually
entail.

My opinions on the subject are as plain as the nose on your face. Govts do
*not* have the right to pry using 'the innocent have nothing to fear' as an
excuse.


You cannot claim that campaign contributions are morally equivalent to the
corrupt taking of bribes and overt attempts to destroy evidence and any
attempt at investigation of it.

Maybe I can, and maybe I can't -- I can think of lots of arguments
both ways; but that's rather beside the point since I wasn't
claiming such a thing in the first place.

Oh yes you were, your elaborately constructed 2nd fallacy was clearly
drawing an equivalence between the two.





greg

--
$ReplyAddress =~ s#\@.*$##; # Delete everything after the '@'
The Following is a true story.....
Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

car is a wonderful gadget, but it is responsible for a lot of social
destruction in the US IMHO. Never mind pollution concerns, just the social
ones. Suburbia, destruction of city centers, traffic congestion,
depersonalization and even fostering of anti-social behavior.

Its almost impossible to disagree.

Use the train or bus for our normal, day to day
work/living needs, then hop into the car and head out to Monument Valley or
visit the sis' at college when the opportunity arose.

Unless you you visit your sister or head out to Monument Valley everday,it
would be a very expensive investment.