Yeah well, bycicle lanes in Paris are really under developped. It's pretty sad to see and although it is slowly changing i wouldn't brag about it.
My impression of France in general is that it's not nearly as bike-friendly as many other European countries, despite the appreciation there of biking as a sport (i.e. the Tour de France). I was once riding with a group on a trail that runs between Saarbruecken in Germany and Sarreguemines in France. We started in Germany, where the trail was in fact paved with asphault, smooth, clean and well taken care of. At some point on the ride, the road turned to pitted concrete, often covered with mudd and I asked a friend "Why did the road get change and get all cruddy?". To which she responded "Oh, we're in France now."
But seriously, even in a city like Paris or London, you don't get that feeling like in a city like Amsterdam that bikes are everywhere. The former two felt very much automobile-focused to me. Driving in Paris is scary because of the other drivers. Driving in Amsterdam is scary because of the bikes, the trams, and the pedestrians.
Honestly, out of all the places I've been in the world (at least where people actually live) Germany and NYC have to be polar opposites noise-wise.
Four years ago, I was sleeping on a friends couch in Manhattan while visiting during a heat wave. Since it was so hot, the window needed to kept open at night. However, it was impossible to sleep, not because of the heat, but because there was jack hammering from road construction going on at like 2 or 3am!
This in comparison to many (all? most?) German cities, where noise is restricted not just after 10pm, but also during the middle of the day for people to eat lunch in peace.
I've heard about universities as much as ten years ago banning even just having a refrigerator because the wiring couldn't keep up with every room having a refrigerator.
I lived in a building like that 5 years ago. I think it was built sometime in the 30s. We were allowed to have refrigerators, but microwaves, toasters, and space heaters were strictly forbidden. You could get in trouble (written up and somehow punished) if any authority figure saw your contraband.
However, that didn't really stop a lot of people from not owning a microwave. All that it meant was that people would keep it in their closet and only take it out when they needed to use it.
My impression of the problem wasn't so much that running a heater or microwave would cause fire or damage to the wiring in your room (there was 1 microwave in the building we all could use), but that if several happened to run at once there would not be enough power coming into the building. The legend we were always threatened with was that if the building loses power, university workers wouldn't come until the next business day to turn it back on!
Apparently, there's an interesting story about why the building was not significantly upgraded at some earlier point. Originally, it was part of a school for the blind and deaf, which needed major renovation to meet some sort of building codes. Because this was going to be too expensive, the school sold the property to the nearby university and built an entirely new school in another city. The (state) university then (or so the story goes) lobbied the government to *change* the necessary building codes (or at least get some exception), so that the building could be converted into student housing for a lower cost. This combined with the fact that the buildings lie on an earthquake fault...
Yeah, but isn't that 50% of *eligible* voters who bothered to *register* to vote voted, not 50% of eligible voters? I believe the turnout of eligible voters who vote is closer to the 15-20 percentile.
http://www.fec.gov/pages/htmlto5.htm
The chart on that page explicitly says "% T/O of VAP=Percent Turnout of Voting Age Population". That has nothing to do with the registered population. It's just (# of voters) / (approx. # of citizens over 18).
Interestingly enough, the percentage of registered voters who actually vote is typically much higher (around 80%+).
Some info from the
2000 election.
The article says Ms. Gordon has been studying this for 20 years.
But seriously... I thought computer viruses haven't even been around that long. It was my impression that the first one was Pakistani Brain, written in 1986 and not really becoming widespread until the late 80s. 2003-1986 = 17 years.
Maybe 20% doesn't seem like a lot, but that doesn't mean that the US and Europe are not dependent on middle eastern oil. Just look at the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. If I recall correctly, back then the US relied *less* on middle eastern oil than it does today.
so, yes, it will detect your letters. though right now, it takes 10 minutes per scan, and we all know that is not a workable speed throughput for postal services.
Actually it won't, at least not with this system in its current form. The article says "the detection limit of the system is estimated at around 3 mg/cm^2". LSD doses are on the level of tens of micrograms.
I read some newspaper article about this very thing
years ago (maybe when those towers in Malaysia opened?).
At some point in the past, a group of architects (I don't remember the details) agreed that the height of the entire building, including ornamental spires would be used.
Granted the largest structure in the world still remains the CN Tower in Toronto.
Why are there even federal controls on the power of computers that can be exported anyway?
Keep in mind that one of the first major uses for supercomputers (or any computers for that matter) was for breaking cryptography (ie, German codes during WW2). I'd imagine the restriction was done in the name of national security.
While that is entirely possible, but I can't image telemarketing companies going for that approach. The toll charges would eat up their profit margin.
This is already going on though. I have a friend from Toronto, who had worked a telemarketing job there a couple of years ago. He said all he did was call people in the US. According to him, a lot of students actually work these types of jobs because they're fairly abundant, have flexible hours, and pay decently. Apparently it was horrible dealing with all the irrate callees. Add to that the guilt of trying to sell things to people who really didn't want any. He worked there for a couple of days tops and got out before it destroyed his soul.
But is it really worth the international phone charges for them to telemarket to the US from outside of it?
The price of international calls (particularly between countries in Western Europe and North America) have plummeted in the past several years. Currently, in Germany I pay about 0.05 euro/minute (~$0.06) for international calls to EU countries, the US, and Canada. This has the amusing result that it costs me the same to call France (about 3 miles from my apartment) as it does to call Hawaii (12 time zones away, so literaly on the other side of the world). In fact, I think that price is cheaper than when I used pay to call my parents in southern California when I was living in northern California.
I don't know what the exact prices are from Canada to the US, but I'm sure it's cheap enough.
Apparently, my Indian and Pakistani friends tell me that this is often a source of social awkwardness when first meeting somebody from the subcontinent. They often just start speaking in English until they can figure out if they speak their language or Hindi/Urdu.
In general, people from northern India and Pakistan use their native Indo-European language (Punjabi or Hindi or Urdu for example) at the very beginning of school, then soon learn Hindi (or the Urdu variant in Pakistan), and then learn English. In the south, students start with their Dravidian native language (ie, Tamil) and then learn English (no Hindi or other common language).
Dravidian and Indo-European languages are not related and are not mutually intelligable, which has made English really the only widely-spoken language across all of India.
Universities (at least for technical fields) overwhelmingly use English as the language of instruction. Many students also do all of high school in English too.
Well, here's the loooong list: Lybia and Cuba. US Passports are not valid for travel to Lybia, but my impression was that is a Lybian (not US) regulation.
For Cuba, Americans are supposed to get permission from the US gov't, which will be granted for most valid purposes (visiting family, journalism, academic research, official business). Technically, you can go without that permission, so long as somebody else pays for your entire travel there. The actual ban is not on travel, but on US citizens engaging in any sort of commercial transactions in Cuba. If you get caught spending money in Cuba without permission, there are criminal penalties when you return to the US.
There are a lot of countries (about 17 or so last time I checked), where Americans are strongly encouraged not to go, but they are not banned from doing so. Yes, you can go to North Korea or Iran or Afghanistan and the US gov't won't do anything to stop you. Those countries grant visas to Americans.
So ya, one country which does not allow Americans to enter and one the US gov't restricts (not bans) its citizens to visit. That's a pretty long list.
As for trade, here is the list of countries which have US economic sanctions: Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Liberia (diamonds only), Lybia, North Korea, Sudan, western Balkans (only transactions with violent groups), Zimbabwe. Out of the ~150 countries in the world this is not a loooong list.
Well, I must say the first time I went to Europe (back before the Euro came out), this whole idea of differently sized, multi-color money was very novel. However, later I lived in Germany got very used to identifying the various Mark bills by color and size (and not necessarily reading the number). The best part about the old German money though I think was the people on the bills. The 10 Mark bill had Gauss on it along with the formula for the Gaussian distribution even! Anybody know if any money today still has mathematical formulas on it?
Even with the Euro today (living in Germany again), I still correlate the color and size with the value: grey-blue is 5, red is 10, blue is 20, and 50 is orangish-brown. Now the Euro is just covered with pictures of bridges and boring stuff like that. I guess that was a necessary sacrifice though. Imagine all the countries fighting over who gets to be on the 500 euro bill.
They've got Dollar coins, IIRC. Just don't use them. Why???
Two big reasons:
1. Everybody is used to the paper one dollar bill. They see no reason to change.
2. I've never seen a vending machine that takes them. I hear even the post office machines (the only place anybody ever gets a dollar coin) don't take them.
Of course problem 1 leads to problem 2, which further leads to problem 1, ad infinitum.
You're right, the old 20s are very rare to find any more. The last time I saw one was when I got a counterfeit bill out of Bank of America ATM at LAX. Of course at the time I didn't even notice it was counterfeit, but when I went to pay for dinner with it later that day, the cashier told me it was fake.
She gave it back to me and I paid with another new bill that was ok. Afterwards, I looked closely at the bill. It was a reasonable fake, but the more I examined it, the more I realized it was totally fake.
It was supposed to be from 1950 I think, before most modern security feauters were added. However, the chance that a bill from that time would still be in circulation would be very small. The big things that gave it away were that there was no microprinting around the photo, the green ink was a bit too bright, and the whole printing was slightly off center.
Personally, I was quite surprised that it came out of a bank's ATM machine. You'd think the bank would have spotted the note when they first got it and removed (or not accepted) it. I thought about calling the bank to complain, but really there was no way to prove to BofA that I got the bill out of their machine. Maybe if I was a customer of theirs, they might exchange the bill. However, I wasn't, so the chances of getting a real 20 dollar bill replacement looked slim.
Well, at least now I have an interesting souvenier...
I had a similar experience in Germany (I live in the Netherlands). Germans have a way of expecting you to speak German if you're in Germany. Crazy isn't it?
I'm an American and I've lived in two smallish cities in Germany. In those two places hardly anybody spoke English except if they were university educated. Even in Berlin, I've had problems where nobody spoke English. However, the thing with Germans is that usually you would be addressed in German first. If you look confused and ask them if they speak English, they'll speak English with you (so long as they know it). But everything is in German by default.
In the Netherlands, I think it's totally different. Once when I was in Leiden there was a waitress who didn't speak English. Every other time when I've asked somebody if they spoke English there, they give you this look and say "Yes, I speak English". However, that look makes it seem more like "WTF? Do you think I'm a bumpkin and don't speak English or something?" I think it's also the only place I've ever been where if I try to speak in the official, native language of the country (and I speak fairly decent Dutch) people immediately pick up on my accent and start responding in English. The French or Germans will usually suffer through a butchering of their language for quite a while before asking if you'd rather speak in English. It's sorta annoying, but at the same time really captures the practicality of the Dutch I think.
"The city and county of San Francisco" is like that too. There are some other local governments where the city and county (or equivalent) are the same (Nashville maybe?), but those are more recent changes I think.
I believe that the native-born population of the United States is shrinking (though not by much!). The current population increase is due to net immigration. And that Europe is experiencing the same phenomenon.
Believe it or not the native born population of the US is still increasing. Here
it gives the following statistics (estimated for 2003) for the US:
- birth rate: 14.14
- death rate: 8.44
- migration rate: 3.52
- fertility rate: 2.07 children per woman
In much of Europe though, things really are much different. In Italy and
Germany the death rate is higher than the birth rate, while the average woman has much less than two children. Some countries like Bulgaria have it even worse with a death rate almost twice the birth rate in addition to a net negative migration. The populations of all of these countries look like they will either drop or remain stable for the foreseeable future.
Even from just my personal observations (I grew up in California, but live in Germany), it's noticable that there are a lot more elderly people here. In the US, it's not unusual at all to see families with 3 kids. Here, it's rare for anybody to have more than 2 and I would guess it's most common to just have 1 child now.
I've heard different reactions to this from all sorts of different people. Several Germans told me it's expensive to have kids or that a lot of people feel they have to either choose a career or a family. I remember this Pakistani guy saying something like "You know, they must really not like children in Germany. In Pakistan, everybody loves kids; they're everywhere". I don't think that Germans hate kids, but I think his comments show that the perception of children and their role in life is different in Europe than in North America or the rest of the world.
The big difference as I see it can be broken down to 2 big points:
1. Verisign is NOT the only company through which you can register a com or net domain. Many of these other smaller domains (small islands in the south Pacific,.museum, etc) usually have one government sanctioned registrar. Leading to the registration site in those cases is in many cases helpful. Although there are no links to their registration forms, what's to stop them from doing that later?
2. Verisign is running a search engine on SiteFinder, which they control. I don't believe they do it now, but they could very easily commercialize this search engine: ads, charging for high results in the search.
3. com and net are much larger than other obscure domains that have already done this. Just because other TLDs have done it does not make it right! There are apparently some standards laid down by ICANN that have been broken by doing this.
Bottom line though: just because they manage the TLDs, does not give them the right to break things for their own commercial gain.
Ya, it might be a great place to live tax-wise, but 1) it's freaking COLD in the winter and 2) despite the taxes, the cost of living there is much higher than any other state with low population density.
I remember reading about this on Apple's site once, so I went and found the link again.
Q: Will I have to pay sales tax?
A: Yes. Because it has a physical presence in all 50 states, Apple is required by law to collect applicable sales tax on all orders from the Apple Store. Sales tax is also collected on downloadable software purchases if required by law in the jurisdiction where the purchaser resides.
Most big retail companies (Walmart, Target, etc.) that allow online purchases as well, typically have to pay all these taxes as well, since they have stores just about everywhere.
The amount of sugar you eat affects your teeth very little. I eat tons, and I haven't had a cavity in a while. Now, before I moved to the US and started drinking flouridated water, I used to get them all the freaking time. So I do think flouride makes a difference.
I asked my dentist about this once and his response was that this has a lot to do with chemistry (PH I think?) of each person's mouth.
You're anecdotal evidence is nice all, but studies have shown there's not really a correlation between tooth decay throughout a population and whether or not fluoride is in its water (at least today).
For what personal anecdotes are worth, both I and my parents grew up in Anaheim, CA, which at the time did NOT have fluoridation.
Both my parents had lots of childhood cavities (I think around 10 each). I had none until I was 17 (3 very small ones) and had been living in a city WITH water fluoridation for 5 years. The more frightening part of all of this was that I remember when I was a child my parents talking about how the reason I must have less cavities is because the water was now fluoridated (which in fact, it was not). One account doesn't prove anything, but I think it's interesting to point out that the real reason was probably improvements in dental care. My mother did go to a dentist until she was in her teens, while I went every year since early childhood.
It's also important to point out that not all municipal water systems in the US are fluoridated. I think I read a CDC statistic that said currently about 2/3 is though. In California even, its more like 1/3. Los Angeles only recently started fluoridating its water, mostly because of some changes in state law.
Oh yeah, and here's another bit of news for you. Water companies actually add chlorine and sometimes ammonia in significantly greater concentrations than fluoride. Chlorine is from the same chemical group as flouride and is about as poisonous. Yet I haven't seen a single complaint about chlorination.
Ya, but the motivations for adding chlorine (I don't know anything about ammonia) are completely different. Chlorine is added to water to reduce bacteria. The damage on your body from chlorine is counterbalanced by the risk you'd face from nasty diseases like cholera and typhoid. These diseases can KILL people (especially infants and maybe the elderly too). The only effect leaving fluoride out of the water these days would be (debateably) more dental work. The fact is, we're not living in the middle ages anymore, where dental problems were one of the leading cause of death. Modern dental medicine is quite capable of fixing these problems without a major risk to life.
I'm sorry, but I have to call BS on this. First of all, lots of people (even today, when there's a hightened level of anti-American sentiment) immigrate to the US. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people coming every year for said polical, religious, economic, and prosperity reasons. Granted in the past couple years the economy has gone down, unemployment is up, DMCA bullshit is going on, John Aschroft et al are gnawing away at our civil liberties. However, the situation in the US is still much better than in the majority of the nations of the world, which is why people keep coming.
It has been my experience that when you talk to various people from around the world, all of them either a) know somebody who left their country permanently to move to the US or b) know somebody who knows somebody who did. Now, if you go ask Americans, how many of them would know fellow Americans that did the same thing? I'm not talking about people who move somewhere for a couple of years either. I'm talking about true permanent immigration. It's a rare phenomenon, especially for anybody who's family has been in America for more than a generation.
I've only known one person who has moved out of the US with the intent to never move back. She's been living in Britain now for about 3 years, but still she might come back someday, since for now she's not a permanent resident there. There are certainly other people like her, but like I said they're rare. They're not however moving to places like Russia or China and certainly not places like sub-sarahan Africa. I'll bet you almost anything that 99%+ of the people who do move permantently to a place like Russia or China, either originally came from there or have close family connections there.
As much as we bitch about how the US going down the tubes, Americans still enjoy a good deal of economic and political freedom, while living one of the highest qualities of living in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
My impression of France in general is that it's not nearly as bike-friendly as many other European countries, despite the appreciation there of biking as a sport (i.e. the Tour de France). I was once riding with a group on a trail that runs between Saarbruecken in Germany and Sarreguemines in France. We started in Germany, where the trail was in fact paved with asphault, smooth, clean and well taken care of. At some point on the ride, the road turned to pitted concrete, often covered with mudd and I asked a friend "Why did the road get change and get all cruddy?". To which she responded "Oh, we're in France now."
But seriously, even in a city like Paris or London, you don't get that feeling like in a city like Amsterdam that bikes are everywhere. The former two felt very much automobile-focused to me. Driving in Paris is scary because of the other drivers. Driving in Amsterdam is scary because of the bikes, the trams, and the pedestrians.
Four years ago, I was sleeping on a friends couch in Manhattan while visiting during a heat wave. Since it was so hot, the window needed to kept open at night. However, it was impossible to sleep, not because of the heat, but because there was jack hammering from road construction going on at like 2 or 3am!
This in comparison to many (all? most?) German cities, where noise is restricted not just after 10pm, but also during the middle of the day for people to eat lunch in peace.
I lived in a building like that 5 years ago. I think it was built sometime in the 30s. We were allowed to have refrigerators, but microwaves, toasters, and space heaters were strictly forbidden. You could get in trouble (written up and somehow punished) if any authority figure saw your contraband. However, that didn't really stop a lot of people from not owning a microwave. All that it meant was that people would keep it in their closet and only take it out when they needed to use it.
My impression of the problem wasn't so much that running a heater or microwave would cause fire or damage to the wiring in your room (there was 1 microwave in the building we all could use), but that if several happened to run at once there would not be enough power coming into the building. The legend we were always threatened with was that if the building loses power, university workers wouldn't come until the next business day to turn it back on!
Apparently, there's an interesting story about why the building was not significantly upgraded at some earlier point. Originally, it was part of a school for the blind and deaf, which needed major renovation to meet some sort of building codes. Because this was going to be too expensive, the school sold the property to the nearby university and built an entirely new school in another city. The (state) university then (or so the story goes) lobbied the government to *change* the necessary building codes (or at least get some exception), so that the building could be converted into student housing for a lower cost. This combined with the fact that the buildings lie on an earthquake fault...
http://www.fec.gov/pages/htmlto5.htm
The chart on that page explicitly says "% T/O of VAP=Percent Turnout of Voting Age Population". That has nothing to do with the registered population. It's just (# of voters) / (approx. # of citizens over 18).
Interestingly enough, the percentage of registered voters who actually vote is typically much higher (around 80%+). Some info from the 2000 election.
But seriously... I thought computer viruses haven't even been around that long. It was my impression that the first one was Pakistani Brain, written in 1986 and not really becoming widespread until the late 80s. 2003-1986 = 17 years.
Maybe 20% doesn't seem like a lot, but that doesn't mean that the US and Europe are not dependent on middle eastern oil. Just look at the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. If I recall correctly, back then the US relied *less* on middle eastern oil than it does today.
Actually it won't, at least not with this system in its current form. The article says "the detection limit of the system is estimated at around 3 mg/cm^2". LSD doses are on the level of tens of micrograms.
I read some newspaper article about this very thing years ago (maybe when those towers in Malaysia opened?). At some point in the past, a group of architects (I don't remember the details) agreed that the height of the entire building, including ornamental spires would be used.
Granted the largest structure in the world still remains the CN Tower in Toronto.
Keep in mind that one of the first major uses for supercomputers (or any computers for that matter) was for breaking cryptography (ie, German codes during WW2). I'd imagine the restriction was done in the name of national security.
This is already going on though. I have a friend from Toronto, who had worked a telemarketing job there a couple of years ago. He said all he did was call people in the US. According to him, a lot of students actually work these types of jobs because they're fairly abundant, have flexible hours, and pay decently. Apparently it was horrible dealing with all the irrate callees. Add to that the guilt of trying to sell things to people who really didn't want any. He worked there for a couple of days tops and got out before it destroyed his soul.
The price of international calls (particularly between countries in Western Europe and North America) have plummeted in the past several years. Currently, in Germany I pay about 0.05 euro/minute (~$0.06) for international calls to EU countries, the US, and Canada. This has the amusing result that it costs me the same to call France (about 3 miles from my apartment) as it does to call Hawaii (12 time zones away, so literaly on the other side of the world). In fact, I think that price is cheaper than when I used pay to call my parents in southern California when I was living in northern California.
I don't know what the exact prices are from Canada to the US, but I'm sure it's cheap enough.
In general, people from northern India and Pakistan use their native Indo-European language (Punjabi or Hindi or Urdu for example) at the very beginning of school, then soon learn Hindi (or the Urdu variant in Pakistan), and then learn English. In the south, students start with their Dravidian native language (ie, Tamil) and then learn English (no Hindi or other common language).
Dravidian and Indo-European languages are not related and are not mutually intelligable, which has made English really the only widely-spoken language across all of India.
Universities (at least for technical fields) overwhelmingly use English as the language of instruction. Many students also do all of high school in English too.
There are a lot of countries (about 17 or so last time I checked), where Americans are strongly encouraged not to go, but they are not banned from doing so. Yes, you can go to North Korea or Iran or Afghanistan and the US gov't won't do anything to stop you. Those countries grant visas to Americans.
So ya, one country which does not allow Americans to enter and one the US gov't restricts (not bans) its citizens to visit. That's a pretty long list.
As for trade, here is the list of countries which have US economic sanctions: Burma, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Liberia (diamonds only), Lybia, North Korea, Sudan, western Balkans (only transactions with violent groups), Zimbabwe. Out of the ~150 countries in the world this is not a loooong list.
Even with the Euro today (living in Germany again), I still correlate the color and size with the value: grey-blue is 5, red is 10, blue is 20, and 50 is orangish-brown. Now the Euro is just covered with pictures of bridges and boring stuff like that. I guess that was a necessary sacrifice though. Imagine all the countries fighting over who gets to be on the 500 euro bill.
Two big reasons:
1. Everybody is used to the paper one dollar bill. They see no reason to change.
2. I've never seen a vending machine that takes them. I hear even the post office machines (the only place anybody ever gets a dollar coin) don't take them.
Of course problem 1 leads to problem 2, which further leads to problem 1, ad infinitum.
It was supposed to be from 1950 I think, before most modern security feauters were added. However, the chance that a bill from that time would still be in circulation would be very small. The big things that gave it away were that there was no microprinting around the photo, the green ink was a bit too bright, and the whole printing was slightly off center.
Personally, I was quite surprised that it came out of a bank's ATM machine. You'd think the bank would have spotted the note when they first got it and removed (or not accepted) it. I thought about calling the bank to complain, but really there was no way to prove to BofA that I got the bill out of their machine. Maybe if I was a customer of theirs, they might exchange the bill. However, I wasn't, so the chances of getting a real 20 dollar bill replacement looked slim.
Well, at least now I have an interesting souvenier ...
I'm an American and I've lived in two smallish cities in Germany. In those two places hardly anybody spoke English except if they were university educated. Even in Berlin, I've had problems where nobody spoke English. However, the thing with Germans is that usually you would be addressed in German first. If you look confused and ask them if they speak English, they'll speak English with you (so long as they know it). But everything is in German by default.
In the Netherlands, I think it's totally different. Once when I was in Leiden there was a waitress who didn't speak English. Every other time when I've asked somebody if they spoke English there, they give you this look and say "Yes, I speak English". However, that look makes it seem more like "WTF? Do you think I'm a bumpkin and don't speak English or something?" I think it's also the only place I've ever been where if I try to speak in the official, native language of the country (and I speak fairly decent Dutch) people immediately pick up on my accent and start responding in English. The French or Germans will usually suffer through a butchering of their language for quite a while before asking if you'd rather speak in English. It's sorta annoying, but at the same time really captures the practicality of the Dutch I think.
"The city and county of San Francisco" is like that too. There are some other local governments where the city and county (or equivalent) are the same (Nashville maybe?), but those are more recent changes I think.
Believe it or not the native born population of the US is still increasing. Here it gives the following statistics (estimated for 2003) for the US:
- birth rate: 14.14
- death rate: 8.44
- migration rate: 3.52
- fertility rate: 2.07 children per woman
In much of Europe though, things really are much different. In Italy and Germany the death rate is higher than the birth rate, while the average woman has much less than two children. Some countries like Bulgaria have it even worse with a death rate almost twice the birth rate in addition to a net negative migration. The populations of all of these countries look like they will either drop or remain stable for the foreseeable future.
Even from just my personal observations (I grew up in California, but live in Germany), it's noticable that there are a lot more elderly people here. In the US, it's not unusual at all to see families with 3 kids. Here, it's rare for anybody to have more than 2 and I would guess it's most common to just have 1 child now.
I've heard different reactions to this from all sorts of different people. Several Germans told me it's expensive to have kids or that a lot of people feel they have to either choose a career or a family. I remember this Pakistani guy saying something like "You know, they must really not like children in Germany. In Pakistan, everybody loves kids; they're everywhere". I don't think that Germans hate kids, but I think his comments show that the perception of children and their role in life is different in Europe than in North America or the rest of the world.
The big difference as I see it can be broken down to 2 big points:
1. Verisign is NOT the only company through which you can register a com or net domain. Many of these other smaller domains (small islands in the south Pacific, .museum, etc) usually have one government sanctioned registrar. Leading to the registration site in those cases is in many cases helpful. Although there are no links to their registration forms, what's to stop them from doing that later?
2. Verisign is running a search engine on SiteFinder, which they control. I don't believe they do it now, but they could very easily commercialize this search engine: ads, charging for high results in the search.
3. com and net are much larger than other obscure domains that have already done this. Just because other TLDs have done it does not make it right! There are apparently some standards laid down by ICANN that have been broken by doing this.
Bottom line though: just because they manage the TLDs, does not give them the right to break things for their own commercial gain.
Ya, it might be a great place to live tax-wise, but 1) it's freaking COLD in the winter and 2) despite the taxes, the cost of living there is much higher than any other state with low population density.
Somebody even did a linguistic study on this.
I asked my dentist about this once and his response was that this has a lot to do with chemistry (PH I think?) of each person's mouth.
You're anecdotal evidence is nice all, but studies have shown there's not really a correlation between tooth decay throughout a population and whether or not fluoride is in its water (at least today).
For what personal anecdotes are worth, both I and my parents grew up in Anaheim, CA, which at the time did NOT have fluoridation. Both my parents had lots of childhood cavities (I think around 10 each). I had none until I was 17 (3 very small ones) and had been living in a city WITH water fluoridation for 5 years. The more frightening part of all of this was that I remember when I was a child my parents talking about how the reason I must have less cavities is because the water was now fluoridated (which in fact, it was not). One account doesn't prove anything, but I think it's interesting to point out that the real reason was probably improvements in dental care. My mother did go to a dentist until she was in her teens, while I went every year since early childhood.
It's also important to point out that not all municipal water systems in the US are fluoridated. I think I read a CDC statistic that said currently about 2/3 is though. In California even, its more like 1/3. Los Angeles only recently started fluoridating its water, mostly because of some changes in state law.
Oh yeah, and here's another bit of news for you. Water companies actually add chlorine and sometimes ammonia in significantly greater concentrations than fluoride. Chlorine is from the same chemical group as flouride and is about as poisonous. Yet I haven't seen a single complaint about chlorination.
Ya, but the motivations for adding chlorine (I don't know anything about ammonia) are completely different. Chlorine is added to water to reduce bacteria. The damage on your body from chlorine is counterbalanced by the risk you'd face from nasty diseases like cholera and typhoid. These diseases can KILL people (especially infants and maybe the elderly too). The only effect leaving fluoride out of the water these days would be (debateably) more dental work. The fact is, we're not living in the middle ages anymore, where dental problems were one of the leading cause of death. Modern dental medicine is quite capable of fixing these problems without a major risk to life.
It has been my experience that when you talk to various people from around the world, all of them either a) know somebody who left their country permanently to move to the US or b) know somebody who knows somebody who did. Now, if you go ask Americans, how many of them would know fellow Americans that did the same thing? I'm not talking about people who move somewhere for a couple of years either. I'm talking about true permanent immigration. It's a rare phenomenon, especially for anybody who's family has been in America for more than a generation.
I've only known one person who has moved out of the US with the intent to never move back. She's been living in Britain now for about 3 years, but still she might come back someday, since for now she's not a permanent resident there. There are certainly other people like her, but like I said they're rare. They're not however moving to places like Russia or China and certainly not places like sub-sarahan Africa. I'll bet you almost anything that 99%+ of the people who do move permantently to a place like Russia or China, either originally came from there or have close family connections there.
As much as we bitch about how the US going down the tubes, Americans still enjoy a good deal of economic and political freedom, while living one of the highest qualities of living in the world.