Yeah absolutely. My job requires me to travel between the US and Canada almost every week. The places are a 1,100 km (~680 mi) drive apart. Takes 10 hours or so to drive (plus a couple of rest stops).
Flying is quicker obviously, but not by as much as you'd think. Even if there are no delays/cancellations and I get as tight a connection as possible (there's no direct flight), it's still a 7 hour trip, once you factor in getting to the airport 2 hours early, immigration lines, security lines, connecting at ORD/DTW, etc. And a good 1/3rd of the time, there ARE cancellations or delays.
The places are a bit too far apart for me to consider driving regularly, but it's led me to the conclusion that anything under 800 km/500 miles in the US you are probably better off driving. Flying may be marginally quicker, but only if everything goes smoothly (which it doesn't half the time), and flying is way less comfortable/pleasant.
It took me a while to realise "Pre" and "PreCheck" were the same thing. Reason being in the English speaking world outside of N. America, that mark that they use in the logo is called a 'tick', not a 'check'. "Ticks and crosses" for yes/no, right/wrong. So to me reading it, it just looked like "Pre" with a tick mark after it, and I would never have parsed it as "PreCheck" until I later became aware of what Americans call that symbol...
Yeah it's weird. Toronto USCIS preclearance has a shiny new hall with like 60 terminals... and never more than about 10 people actually working at a time. Friday afternoon peak with lines snaking out the door? Nope still only 3 officers working the visitors line and maybe 5 on the US citizens line...
As an Australian citizen living in the US, you know what's super annoying?
- I can use the automated entry in Australia. - US citizens with GE can use automated entry in the US and in Australia too, as you rightly pointed out. - But Australian citizens cannot use automated entry in the US.
Or put another way, Australia is nice enough to let you use your GE in Australia, but the US never reciprocated. Not only that, they don't even allow Australian citizens to manually apply for the American GE program either - it's only open to Americans and a random handful of other people: South Koreans, Germans and the UK I think. Grrrrrrr...
Actually, if you can, get NEXUS. It costs half as much ($50) and inherits all the same benefits as GE, PLUS gives you these same benefits entering Canada too. The only downside is that there are fewer NEXUS interview locations (they are all in Canada or northern US states), so if you live in the south, signing up is probably too difficult to make it worthwhile. But if you live in the north it's effectively the same program as GE for half the cost.
Australia's is bad? Maybe you had an unlucky experience or something because I think Australia's is super easy.* There are no liquids restrictions, shoes stay on, simple X-ray machine only. It's nothing like the US.
I'm an Australian living in America and last time I went back to Oz for a visit I was on cloud nine. I actually started taking my shoes off in the security line because I was so used to it from flying in the US, and the guy is like "mate, you're in Australia now leave those on". There were no lines at all - literally dumped my bag on the belt, walked through the Xray, picked the bag up on the other side, done (this was SYD domestic BTW).
--- *(I'm talking about domestic travel here - international is subject to the same ordeal as American security because many international flights go to or pass through America, and they don't have separate terminals for flights to America. It wasn't always that way... but they were forced to do this to all international flights once America introduced its new requirements post-911).
You're probably a US citizen then. Your fingerprints are taken every time you enter the US if you aren't a citizen.
Even if you are a legal permanent US resident who's lived in the US for years and holding a valid permanent resident card (like me), they STILL take your fingerprints every time. The US is the only country that does this. I find it ridiculous that the US is the only entity on earth that has a record of my fingerprints - not even my actual country of citizenship has such a record!
You are a lucky guy then. Immigration/customs lines at US airports are often hours long if you don't have Global Entry/NEXUS. Depends on the time of day you arrive, but even that isn't always true - two Thursday afternoons at the same airport at the same time can be wildly different.
It's not a problem that's even restricted to US soil - USCIS performs 'pre-clearance' at some foreign airports, which allows aircraft from those places to land directly at a regular domestic gate in America (i.e. it's treated as a domestic arrival, since the passengers have already passed through US immigration before leaving the foreign country). Those can be just as bad as the USCIS sites actually in America. For example, Toronto (Canada) US pre-clearance on a Friday afternoon is utter torture - can easily be 2 hours. They have this shiny new facility with like 60 desks/booths there, but even in peak periods they are only using a quarter of them.
Step one should be to get both your immigration officers and TSA staff to STOP YELLING AND BARKING OUT ORDERS AT PEOPLE. Seriously, you get off a 14 hour flight from some far off country and you have these people screaming "get in this line, US residents over there, have your passports out" etc. at the top of their lungs. If you are confused by something and have the gall to ask them a question, no matter how friendly you are when asking, they look at you with disdain and answer as if you are the dumbest person in the world (perhaps pointing to some tiny and/or ambiguously worded sign somewhere that might be vaguely relevant to your question).
It is an incredibly bad first impression of America.
It seems to be a problem mostly at the large airports though. I've seen the screaming treatment at ORD and LAX, for example. But I've travelled through some smaller American airports (I'll name names: Buffalo, NY, Madison, WI, Minneapolis, MN, Portland, OR) where the TSA people are great. Happy, helpful and they talk to you in a softly-spoken, casual, friendly manner. I wonder if it's less of a 'TSA' problem than a 'culture at big airports' problem, since it seems to extend to airline staff too!
The judge deemed them to be doing business in Australia because:
A) Valve had CDN's in Australia, a fair number of them B) Valve allowed Australian customers to access support channels C) Steam had 2.2 Million Australian Users D) Valve knew the users were in Australia E) Steam prices games differently in Australia, or sometimes doesn't make them available at all F) Valve pays for it's Australian servers from an Australian bank account
You must live in a very different world than me. You said it yourself - people use iMessage. Well WhatsApp is basically like iMessage + FaceTime, but cross-platform. How is that not useful? There are alternatives out there but I've worked in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK and WhatsApp is the closest thing out there to a 'standard' app for this kind of stuff. With over a billion users people are more likely to have it than any other messaging app.
SMS and MMS work but they are not as secure or reliable as proper messaging apps like WhatsApp (or iMessage for that matter). Plus they cost more in most countries. Even in the US, many 'unlimited SMS/MMS' plans are only for domestic messages and they'll still charge you for sending to a foreign number. Etc.
Basically when I message someone, I try in iMessage first. If it pops up as a blue 'bubble' that means they have iMessage and I'll continue to use that. If it doesn't, I'll switch to WhatsApp and more often than not, I'll be able to message them there instead. (It'll tell you if someone in your phone's address book has WhatsApp or doesn't, you don't need to explicitly ask them).
The rest of the world may still usually pay for SMS, but their monthly plan fees are usually also far lower. So you can argue the US is ahead because you don't have to pay for SMS, but then, you're also paying 3x as much per month just to have the plan in the first place.
I'm in Australia and I do have to pay a hefty amount per-SMS (which is why no-one sends SMS anymore - they use iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, etc.). But then, I'm only paying ~15 USD a month for calls and data...
Yes it is different than regular text messages, in that it allows photos, videos, messages longer than 160 characters etc. Oh and voice calling (VoIP). It's basically like iMessage + FaceTime, but not restricted to iOS only. Most people I know use their 'native' messaging (iMessage or Android equivalents) first, but fall back to WhatsApp to message those with a different type of phone.
I find it hard to believe the US has no use for a cross-platform instant messaging app. It's a lot more versatile than SMS, in that you can send pictures and videos etc. You can also make voice calls (so it's essentially like iMessage + FaceTime, but not restricted to iOS only).
I'm in the US and I find it useful. Not all my friends have the same type of phone, after all.
You know as well as I do that you'd have to go out of your way to do that (i.e. stating it to the cashier beforehand, every time... and even then half of them would probably give you weird looks). That in itself is 'dealing with it'. It's an inefficiency that exists because of the penny. A small inconvenience each time, but add that up over hundreds of transactions a year, millions of people - it's significant.
Sure, I throw extra coins in those little jars if they have one, but often they don't. And they still had to hand me the useless change, and I still had to put it in the jar.
Yep, and in Australia they ditched the 1c coin (and 2c coin, which there is no US equivalent of) way back in 1990. No one misses them. New Zealand has also got rid of the 5 c, too.
I live in the US currently and having to deal with pennies again sucks monkey balls:(
The anthem, sure. A lot of countries sing that at sporting events.
But it's true that the pledge of allegiance is kinda creepy and has no equivalent in other Western, free countries. It is hard not to see the parallel with the kind of childhood indoctrination seen in places like NK (though obviously it's nowhere near the same scale in the US).
Same with the flags EVERYWHERE. I'm sure those that grew up in America simply don't see it as they've been immersed since birth. But as someone who first came to the US in adulthood, it's immediately noticeable and was one of the biggest 'I didn't expect that' things. In most similar countries (Western Europe, Australia, NZ, etc.) you'd only see national flags on government buildings and monuments, not every third person's front yard and every single Perkins/McDonalds/Wendy's etc.
There's a lot to like about the US, don't get me wrong, but there's a grain of truth to the GGP's post.
They probably were the most modern, advanced nation with the best quality of life in the post-WW2 era, through the 50s, 60s, arguably 70s. They then rested on their laurels and have done virtually nothing 'big' for the last few decades in terms of infrastructure, reforming the tax system, education, healthcare, etc etc. Other countries have caught up and overtaken them, as evidenced by their falling rankings in HDI or any number of 'quality of life' or 'where to be born' indices.
The big problem as I see it (as someone who has lived in several countries but has lived in the US for the last 3 years or so) is that everything in the US is a patchwork. Everything is super-locally governed... cities and counties have their own police forces, road construction funds, school curricula, etc...things that in most countries would be governed at a Federal or State/Provincial level. So you get this inconsistent, inefficient mish-mash of standards, laws and regulations. Makes it more difficult for different regions to work together or get big-picture things done. Their system of government doesn't really allow much 'top down' lawmaking - getting anything major done is hard and requires an unreasonable amount of consensus (which will never happen in the current hyper-polarised political environment). When my home country did major things - switched to the metric system, introduced universal health care, changed the coinage, completely rewrote the tax code - a political party said they'd do it as part of their election platform, they were elected, and then it actually happened. Can't see major reform like that happening in the US these days.
This 'patchwork' effect shows in the physical world too. You can be in a nice area with manicured lawns, shiny clean office blocks and nice houses... then cross a road or some 'invisible' line (which might be some obscure town or district boundary) and be in what looks like a third-world shanty town. It really did amaze me when I first came to America - you simply don't see that in other developed/OECD countries. The very fact that you can gerrymander electoral districts in the US and that there isn't an independent body that sets the boundaries based on population/census data (and that most people don't see a problem with this) says a lot.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a BAD place to live (if you have money). But it's no longer the world-beater it was. It's 'just another country' these days.
Not a ~complete~ lack of guns, sure. But it is significantly more difficult (and expensive) for criminals to get guns in places that have had long-standing gun bans in place. The police sometimes post pictures of seized weapons here in Australia (taken from criminals who were using them illegally) and they are usually (a) very expensive to acquire and (b) ancient (WW2-era pistols etc.), falling apart or otherwise in very in poor condition. Only ever rusty old pistols or shotguns. Hardly the sophisticated, modern rapid fire weapons available in the US.
It's true that if you ban guns only criminals will have them. But as the decades roll on and more of the few remaining illegal weapons get discovered and removed from the market by police, they get more and more expensive - out of the reach of the vast majority of petty criminals.
Australia is lucky of course that it's an island which makes it comparatively easy to stop new weapons getting into the country too (since there's only a finite number of places where goods can come into the country, all of which are monitored). Gun bans would be significantly less effective in a country with a more porous border I imagine (i.e. long land borders like the US and Europe).
Hell, the first mobile phone I ever owned (~1995) was digital! GSM launched in the early 90s after all.
By 2005 most phones were so-called 2.5G (GPRS/EDGE) and many had internal antennas. I had a clunky rudimentary smart phone at that point (don't even remember the brand)... it had a web browser but it was so unusable (small, low resolution screen) that email was about the only thing you'd actually want to do with it. It took the rise of the iPhone and Android phones a few years later to make the mobile web something you'd actually want to use.
I think the last phone I owned with an external antenna (which was just a little nub, rather than a long extendable thing) was the Nokia 7110 in the late 90s. But yeah, that phone could hold a voice call where many phones today probably couldn't. It was more important back then though as mobile towers were fewer and further between - I rarely find myself in a place with a super-weak signal these days, except for deep inside large buildings (and really, there's not much you can do about that - I often just connect to Wifi and use Skype/FaceTime/etc instead).
Yeah this is a pet peeve of mine too. I think it's just an American thing though. I grew up in Australia and it was always just lego. As in, "go and pick up all your lego". Etc. I never heard the 'legos' thing until I moved to the USA in my late 20s... at first I thought I was hearing things but no, they really say it that way.
I'm curious - anyone from outside North America that also says "legos"?
Oh, I remember them. I agree that the cost of living is lower in the US overall (though not as much as you'd think - health insurance costs a huge chunk each month in America that you wouldn't have to pay at all in Australia. Land taxes/rates are also much higher in the US... at least in my state/county).
But we're purely talking about tax burden here and the idea that America has much lower taxes than other developed countries. That's true if you're comparing to Norway or something, but not if you're comparing to Australia, NZ, UK, Canada etc.
Yep - that's the great thing about this concept. It allows countries to get rid of unemployment allowances, low income benefits, old age pensions/security, student allowances, food stamps, all that stuff and replace it with a basic amount that everyone gets.
In many countries you effectively have a minimum income already, made of of some combination of government benefits, tax offsets/credits, etc. If you get rid of all that, and have a simple system where everyone gets a standard payment, and all income from the first dollar above that is taxed (with no random credits/offsets claimable due to low income or family situation etc.), you'd make billions in efficiency gains. As someone that works in IT delivering social services systems to governments, I have seen how ridiculously complex some of these programs are and the amount of money and manpower spent in administering them.
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Yeah absolutely. My job requires me to travel between the US and Canada almost every week. The places are a 1,100 km (~680 mi) drive apart. Takes 10 hours or so to drive (plus a couple of rest stops).
Flying is quicker obviously, but not by as much as you'd think. Even if there are no delays/cancellations and I get as tight a connection as possible (there's no direct flight), it's still a 7 hour trip, once you factor in getting to the airport 2 hours early, immigration lines, security lines, connecting at ORD/DTW, etc. And a good 1/3rd of the time, there ARE cancellations or delays.
The places are a bit too far apart for me to consider driving regularly, but it's led me to the conclusion that anything under 800 km/500 miles in the US you are probably better off driving. Flying may be marginally quicker, but only if everything goes smoothly (which it doesn't half the time), and flying is way less comfortable/pleasant.
It took me a while to realise "Pre" and "PreCheck" were the same thing. Reason being in the English speaking world outside of N. America, that mark that they use in the logo is called a 'tick', not a 'check'. "Ticks and crosses" for yes/no, right/wrong. So to me reading it, it just looked like "Pre" with a tick mark after it, and I would never have parsed it as "PreCheck" until I later became aware of what Americans call that symbol...
Yeah it's weird. Toronto USCIS preclearance has a shiny new hall with like 60 terminals ... and never more than about 10 people actually working at a time. Friday afternoon peak with lines snaking out the door? Nope still only 3 officers working the visitors line and maybe 5 on the US citizens line...
As an Australian citizen living in the US, you know what's super annoying?
- I can use the automated entry in Australia.
- US citizens with GE can use automated entry in the US and in Australia too, as you rightly pointed out.
- But Australian citizens cannot use automated entry in the US.
Or put another way, Australia is nice enough to let you use your GE in Australia, but the US never reciprocated. Not only that, they don't even allow Australian citizens to manually apply for the American GE program either - it's only open to Americans and a random handful of other people: South Koreans, Germans and the UK I think. Grrrrrrr...
Actually, if you can, get NEXUS. It costs half as much ($50) and inherits all the same benefits as GE, PLUS gives you these same benefits entering Canada too. The only downside is that there are fewer NEXUS interview locations (they are all in Canada or northern US states), so if you live in the south, signing up is probably too difficult to make it worthwhile. But if you live in the north it's effectively the same program as GE for half the cost.
Australia's is bad? Maybe you had an unlucky experience or something because I think Australia's is super easy.* There are no liquids restrictions, shoes stay on, simple X-ray machine only. It's nothing like the US.
I'm an Australian living in America and last time I went back to Oz for a visit I was on cloud nine. I actually started taking my shoes off in the security line because I was so used to it from flying in the US, and the guy is like "mate, you're in Australia now leave those on". There were no lines at all - literally dumped my bag on the belt, walked through the Xray, picked the bag up on the other side, done (this was SYD domestic BTW).
--- ... but they were forced to do this to all international flights once America introduced its new requirements post-911).
*(I'm talking about domestic travel here - international is subject to the same ordeal as American security because many international flights go to or pass through America, and they don't have separate terminals for flights to America. It wasn't always that way
You're probably a US citizen then. Your fingerprints are taken every time you enter the US if you aren't a citizen.
Even if you are a legal permanent US resident who's lived in the US for years and holding a valid permanent resident card (like me), they STILL take your fingerprints every time. The US is the only country that does this. I find it ridiculous that the US is the only entity on earth that has a record of my fingerprints - not even my actual country of citizenship has such a record!
You are a lucky guy then. Immigration/customs lines at US airports are often hours long if you don't have Global Entry/NEXUS. Depends on the time of day you arrive, but even that isn't always true - two Thursday afternoons at the same airport at the same time can be wildly different.
It's not a problem that's even restricted to US soil - USCIS performs 'pre-clearance' at some foreign airports, which allows aircraft from those places to land directly at a regular domestic gate in America (i.e. it's treated as a domestic arrival, since the passengers have already passed through US immigration before leaving the foreign country). Those can be just as bad as the USCIS sites actually in America. For example, Toronto (Canada) US pre-clearance on a Friday afternoon is utter torture - can easily be 2 hours. They have this shiny new facility with like 60 desks/booths there, but even in peak periods they are only using a quarter of them.
Step one should be to get both your immigration officers and TSA staff to STOP YELLING AND BARKING OUT ORDERS AT PEOPLE. Seriously, you get off a 14 hour flight from some far off country and you have these people screaming "get in this line, US residents over there, have your passports out" etc. at the top of their lungs. If you are confused by something and have the gall to ask them a question, no matter how friendly you are when asking, they look at you with disdain and answer as if you are the dumbest person in the world (perhaps pointing to some tiny and/or ambiguously worded sign somewhere that might be vaguely relevant to your question).
It is an incredibly bad first impression of America.
It seems to be a problem mostly at the large airports though. I've seen the screaming treatment at ORD and LAX, for example. But I've travelled through some smaller American airports (I'll name names: Buffalo, NY, Madison, WI, Minneapolis, MN, Portland, OR) where the TSA people are great. Happy, helpful and they talk to you in a softly-spoken, casual, friendly manner. I wonder if it's less of a 'TSA' problem than a 'culture at big airports' problem, since it seems to extend to airline staff too!
The decision: https://www.documentcloud.org/...
The judge deemed them to be doing business in Australia because:
A) Valve had CDN's in Australia, a fair number of them
B) Valve allowed Australian customers to access support channels
C) Steam had 2.2 Million Australian Users
D) Valve knew the users were in Australia
E) Steam prices games differently in Australia, or sometimes doesn't make them available at all
F) Valve pays for it's Australian servers from an Australian bank account
You must live in a very different world than me. You said it yourself - people use iMessage. Well WhatsApp is basically like iMessage + FaceTime, but cross-platform. How is that not useful? There are alternatives out there but I've worked in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK and WhatsApp is the closest thing out there to a 'standard' app for this kind of stuff. With over a billion users people are more likely to have it than any other messaging app.
SMS and MMS work but they are not as secure or reliable as proper messaging apps like WhatsApp (or iMessage for that matter). Plus they cost more in most countries. Even in the US, many 'unlimited SMS/MMS' plans are only for domestic messages and they'll still charge you for sending to a foreign number. Etc.
Basically when I message someone, I try in iMessage first. If it pops up as a blue 'bubble' that means they have iMessage and I'll continue to use that. If it doesn't, I'll switch to WhatsApp and more often than not, I'll be able to message them there instead. (It'll tell you if someone in your phone's address book has WhatsApp or doesn't, you don't need to explicitly ask them).
The rest of the world may still usually pay for SMS, but their monthly plan fees are usually also far lower. So you can argue the US is ahead because you don't have to pay for SMS, but then, you're also paying 3x as much per month just to have the plan in the first place.
I'm in Australia and I do have to pay a hefty amount per-SMS (which is why no-one sends SMS anymore - they use iMessage, Viber, WhatsApp, etc.). But then, I'm only paying ~15 USD a month for calls and data...
Yes it is different than regular text messages, in that it allows photos, videos, messages longer than 160 characters etc. Oh and voice calling (VoIP). It's basically like iMessage + FaceTime, but not restricted to iOS only. Most people I know use their 'native' messaging (iMessage or Android equivalents) first, but fall back to WhatsApp to message those with a different type of phone.
I find it hard to believe the US has no use for a cross-platform instant messaging app. It's a lot more versatile than SMS, in that you can send pictures and videos etc. You can also make voice calls (so it's essentially like iMessage + FaceTime, but not restricted to iOS only).
I'm in the US and I find it useful. Not all my friends have the same type of phone, after all.
That's not particularly high for a large western country though. That percentage is 21% in Canada and 28% in Australia, for instance.
You know as well as I do that you'd have to go out of your way to do that (i.e. stating it to the cashier beforehand, every time ... and even then half of them would probably give you weird looks). That in itself is 'dealing with it'. It's an inefficiency that exists because of the penny. A small inconvenience each time, but add that up over hundreds of transactions a year, millions of people - it's significant.
Sure, I throw extra coins in those little jars if they have one, but often they don't. And they still had to hand me the useless change, and I still had to put it in the jar.
You've just created Australia/NZ's currency (10/20/50c and $1 and $2 coins, notes 5/10/20/50/100 with differing sizes).
Yep, and in Australia they ditched the 1c coin (and 2c coin, which there is no US equivalent of) way back in 1990. No one misses them. New Zealand has also got rid of the 5 c, too.
I live in the US currently and having to deal with pennies again sucks monkey balls :(
The anthem, sure. A lot of countries sing that at sporting events.
But it's true that the pledge of allegiance is kinda creepy and has no equivalent in other Western, free countries. It is hard not to see the parallel with the kind of childhood indoctrination seen in places like NK (though obviously it's nowhere near the same scale in the US).
Same with the flags EVERYWHERE. I'm sure those that grew up in America simply don't see it as they've been immersed since birth. But as someone who first came to the US in adulthood, it's immediately noticeable and was one of the biggest 'I didn't expect that' things. In most similar countries (Western Europe, Australia, NZ, etc.) you'd only see national flags on government buildings and monuments, not every third person's front yard and every single Perkins/McDonalds/Wendy's etc.
There's a lot to like about the US, don't get me wrong, but there's a grain of truth to the GGP's post.
They probably were the most modern, advanced nation with the best quality of life in the post-WW2 era, through the 50s, 60s, arguably 70s. They then rested on their laurels and have done virtually nothing 'big' for the last few decades in terms of infrastructure, reforming the tax system, education, healthcare, etc etc. Other countries have caught up and overtaken them, as evidenced by their falling rankings in HDI or any number of 'quality of life' or 'where to be born' indices.
The big problem as I see it (as someone who has lived in several countries but has lived in the US for the last 3 years or so) is that everything in the US is a patchwork. Everything is super-locally governed ... cities and counties have their own police forces, road construction funds, school curricula, etc...things that in most countries would be governed at a Federal or State/Provincial level. So you get this inconsistent, inefficient mish-mash of standards, laws and regulations. Makes it more difficult for different regions to work together or get big-picture things done. Their system of government doesn't really allow much 'top down' lawmaking - getting anything major done is hard and requires an unreasonable amount of consensus (which will never happen in the current hyper-polarised political environment). When my home country did major things - switched to the metric system, introduced universal health care, changed the coinage, completely rewrote the tax code - a political party said they'd do it as part of their election platform, they were elected, and then it actually happened. Can't see major reform like that happening in the US these days.
This 'patchwork' effect shows in the physical world too. You can be in a nice area with manicured lawns, shiny clean office blocks and nice houses ... then cross a road or some 'invisible' line (which might be some obscure town or district boundary) and be in what looks like a third-world shanty town. It really did amaze me when I first came to America - you simply don't see that in other developed/OECD countries. The very fact that you can gerrymander electoral districts in the US and that there isn't an independent body that sets the boundaries based on population/census data (and that most people don't see a problem with this) says a lot.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a BAD place to live (if you have money). But it's no longer the world-beater it was. It's 'just another country' these days.
Not a ~complete~ lack of guns, sure. But it is significantly more difficult (and expensive) for criminals to get guns in places that have had long-standing gun bans in place. The police sometimes post pictures of seized weapons here in Australia (taken from criminals who were using them illegally) and they are usually (a) very expensive to acquire and (b) ancient (WW2-era pistols etc.), falling apart or otherwise in very in poor condition. Only ever rusty old pistols or shotguns. Hardly the sophisticated, modern rapid fire weapons available in the US.
It's true that if you ban guns only criminals will have them. But as the decades roll on and more of the few remaining illegal weapons get discovered and removed from the market by police, they get more and more expensive - out of the reach of the vast majority of petty criminals.
Australia is lucky of course that it's an island which makes it comparatively easy to stop new weapons getting into the country too (since there's only a finite number of places where goods can come into the country, all of which are monitored). Gun bans would be significantly less effective in a country with a more porous border I imagine (i.e. long land borders like the US and Europe).
Hell, the first mobile phone I ever owned (~1995) was digital! GSM launched in the early 90s after all.
By 2005 most phones were so-called 2.5G (GPRS/EDGE) and many had internal antennas. I had a clunky rudimentary smart phone at that point (don't even remember the brand) ... it had a web browser but it was so unusable (small, low resolution screen) that email was about the only thing you'd actually want to do with it. It took the rise of the iPhone and Android phones a few years later to make the mobile web something you'd actually want to use.
I think the last phone I owned with an external antenna (which was just a little nub, rather than a long extendable thing) was the Nokia 7110 in the late 90s. But yeah, that phone could hold a voice call where many phones today probably couldn't. It was more important back then though as mobile towers were fewer and further between - I rarely find myself in a place with a super-weak signal these days, except for deep inside large buildings (and really, there's not much you can do about that - I often just connect to Wifi and use Skype/FaceTime/etc instead).
Yeah this is a pet peeve of mine too. I think it's just an American thing though. I grew up in Australia and it was always just lego. As in, "go and pick up all your lego". Etc. I never heard the 'legos' thing until I moved to the USA in my late 20s ... at first I thought I was hearing things but no, they really say it that way.
I'm curious - anyone from outside North America that also says "legos"?
Oh, I remember them. I agree that the cost of living is lower in the US overall (though not as much as you'd think - health insurance costs a huge chunk each month in America that you wouldn't have to pay at all in Australia. Land taxes/rates are also much higher in the US ... at least in my state/county).
But we're purely talking about tax burden here and the idea that America has much lower taxes than other developed countries. That's true if you're comparing to Norway or something, but not if you're comparing to Australia, NZ, UK, Canada etc.
Yep - that's the great thing about this concept. It allows countries to get rid of unemployment allowances, low income benefits, old age pensions/security, student allowances, food stamps, all that stuff and replace it with a basic amount that everyone gets.
In many countries you effectively have a minimum income already, made of of some combination of government benefits, tax offsets/credits, etc. If you get rid of all that, and have a simple system where everyone gets a standard payment, and all income from the first dollar above that is taxed (with no random credits/offsets claimable due to low income or family situation etc.), you'd make billions in efficiency gains. As someone that works in IT delivering social services systems to governments, I have seen how ridiculously complex some of these programs are and the amount of money and manpower spent in administering them.