you aren't quite right, as someone living and working abroad (and have done it quite a bit), you have to declare ALL your income abroad, even if it is less than 90k, BUT:
You get about a ~95k foreign earned income deduction. From this, it means if you earn less than this amount, your US federal tax liability goes to 0. If your tax liability is 0, you can fine whenever you want (filing late, if you had no taxes owed, is not penalized) but you will have to file at some point, usually when you get back to the US. But it's trivially easy to back file all those years if you earned less than 95k. Now as soon as you earned more, it gets a lot trickier.
Really? transistors, to name one, was not a government funded research project. Hell, the basic research that set out how you create a packet switching network was done without any government funding. Government funding and involvement only came after the initial private sector led research (I"m not saying government funding wasn't helpful, I'm just saying it was by no means some magic bean that sprouted the bean stalk).
Even within solar power, there were already huge private investments and work that had been done long before solyndra. 500 million to Solyndra wasn't because the company had some incredible new technology (like say, far more efficient panels) that needed help getting off the ground. It was purely to help one of many manufacturers in the world to compete. It is exactly the equivalent of the US Government giving money to K-Mart to compete better with Wal Mart. Just because it's solar power, doesn't make it any more reasonable or beneficial for the US. That is pointless. If the government wants to do something, it should act like Darpa and put out a 200 million dollar bounty on a panel that can compete on price with coal. Hell, make it a billion just so every private sector company will throw money into that research pot. That would have been a hell of a lot more helpful than what they did, and if there weren't any results, it would have cost the US nothing. DARPA did more to get us self driving cars than basically any other actor, by simply providing a carrot for private groups to produce them. The loan guarantees and many of our other government subsidies are just payoffs to buy votes and support.
well, seeing as how no power company could ever survive the financial ruin of a meltdown at a power plant (vs a coal fire or LNG explosion), there is a good reason for government regulations being strict. Frankly, any company doing nuclear power will not be around to clean up its own mess ever, as its mess will be too big. When externalities like that exist, it's a good idea to consider quite a bit of regulation.
How is it that so many educated people can convolute solar energy, petroleum drilling companies, utility companies, and middle east stability for oil?
These 4 things are barely related. We do not go to war in the middle east for Exxon Mobile. We go to war in the middle east and pressure Iran to make sure Saudi, UAE, and Kuwait sell their oil to us. This DOES NOT HELP EXXON. Exxon would prefer less competition from the biggest drillers in the world. We want to make sure we have a wide variety of oil sources.
Oil, though, is mostly irrelevant to our utility power generation. We use oil for petroleum based products (plastics, etc) and vehicle transport. We do not use it for electricity generation almost at all (0.75%). So Oil companies are not trying to shut down solar power. As long as there are billions of people in the world who will use gas powered engines and are working in economies that are growing very fast, Oil companies don't care about the US slowly moving towards electric vehicles. US Oil consumption peaked 8 years ago, and yet oil companies continue to make good money.
Solar is trying to compete with coal and natural gas, NOT OIL. The only thing oil,coal, and LNG have in common is they are fossil fuels.
can you tell me about any subsidies or tax loopholes that are unique to the oil industry? I've never heard of one. I have heard of things like accelerated depreciation on capital spending that all companies get to use, including solar power related companies.
I'm seriously wondering about this, because this kind of stupidity is said all the time by people with an agenda and I've never heard of a single piece of the federal tax code that favors oil companies uniquely (or even semi-uniquely).
actually, this is like saying why do democrats feel the need to call for injunctions on duly passed restrictions on abortion before the court actually hears arguments and makes a ruling.
Their argument, as the republican argument line could reasonably follow, is that it would take 10 years to realize how big of a failure obamacare is, and at that point the damage to our already dysfunctional healthcare system will be extreme, making putting in place a real solution hard.
btw, the argument on abortion is that the several year shutdown of the clinics made illegal by new abortion restrictions will cause these areas to be permanently unserved, as it is difficult for such a business to turn back on after years of being turned off.
I'm not saying I agree at all with either argument (doctors love money, especially cash business that abortion clinics represent, so doctors will stream back in; and on obamacare, as nothing as done to address why we pay our medical practitioners from doctors to drug companies multiples what they earn for the same services anywhere else in the world it will fail to do what actually is required, curb costs in a market that is effectively dictated by suppliers).
you really don't know much about high performance cars do you? The last tesla roadster time I saw was 3.7 seconds, with a quarter mile time around 12 seconds. This isn't faster than the best italian cars. This is slower than basically every high performance car on the road, including several american, Japanese, and German cars that provide far higher performance at that price. Tesla now, has a lot of very cool things going for it. And it's performance compared to general cars is respectable, but don't imagine it would hold up well against the best.
And by the way, if you are actually interested in high performance, it would do you some good to do some research. Basically all the italian cars are now all show for 2-3x the price of far superior performing Japanese(GT-R) and American(ZR1 or Viper) cars on proper tracks, not just 0-60 and quarter mile times.
kind of hard in a country that basically is at risk of a tsunami across most of its area (or earthquakes, or volcanoes).
It's always a tradeoff, and it's not like the US with a huge inland that can be used for these purposes along with a tectonically stable east coast which isn't prone to severe events (like duke energy outside Charlotte). Countries with less land area have to make much more difficult decisions, and it's telling that the only reason they won't be down 25% (even with a larger economy both in absolute terms and per capita by a lot) is that they turned off 30% of their generating capacity. If they even turn on half if it, they will be further along the accords' path than basically every other developed country.
Americans who are informed won't be angry at you for saying something against America, we'll just pity your ignorance. At the end of the day, your physical person, and to a high degree, your financial person is safe. And your family and friends don't get tortured for your perceived slights.
In China, Snowden's family would be in a secret jail, not traveling to Russia to see him. If you can't see the vast chasm that separates the two, it's an issue with you.
I'm not legitimizing what the US does or coming down against it, just pointing out your equivalence could only be based on two things: 1.ignorance of what happens to dissenters in China or 2. you believe that the government reading your email is such an incredible travesty, you can't discern a noticeable difference between someone reading your email and someone torturing your family to punish you.
agreed, but that is the exact same situation as any vendor. If I go to dell and try to buy a ram upgrade from them, it's super expensive. It's not a unique apple experience (at least for me). Anyways, I get my components from amazon for 1/4 the price and apple has never complained about non-apple sold parts in my computer when it goes in for work. So it hasn't caused me an issue yet.
yes, but monitor quality is a huge difference. I have a cheaper 25**x 1440 display and a 27 inch mac display, and without the doubt, while the apple display cost about 300 dollars more, the quality of the is far superior (and the cheaper display is being driven by a much more powerful machine).
And if you work in a world where super high quality displays are in high demand, you pay up. there are other sellers of equivalent quality, but it turns out they price to within 5% of the apple display. I'm never certain where the talk of the apple tax comes from. For phones, mp3 players, monitors, and laptops I found them very competitively priced.
really? tell that to my downstairs neighbor who is half blind, it could be fixed for a cheap lasik surgery but can't get it from the NHS simply because he is too old (I live in the UK, I suppose the NHS qualifies as socialist). In socialist medicine, the government does not take responsibility for your health.
In socialist medicine, the middle class gets steamrolled because taxes are far too high too afford your own care when the government doesn't feel you qualify for it. If you are poor, you take what you get because you pay for nothing anyways and the rich are still rich, and get the care they want.
that is basically the only benefit of fully socialized medicine, compared to certain government limitations in the medical market (usually quasi-price controls).
ah, wow. yes, so you are still stuck in the days when someone can advertise something like dual core and you immediately think it is equivalent quality? next you'll tell me core clock is a primary determinant of of processor performance on a modern CPU.....
who is even close to that price point yet? anyways, you can (if you own an apple device) spend 5 bucks on a converter so you can fit a microUSB, if that is what matters.
I keep myself healthy but still like to bake cakes or cookies or make pancakes in the morning for my family. Why should I pay more so the actual fat slob can get cheap insurance while not taking care of his health?
That is ridiculous. But that is what we have come to. At the end of the day, medicine is complicated, and there are things that you can't control (and most societies decide to cover) and those you can. I prefer what a friend was told in Japan when he went complaining about knee and lower back pain "When you lose enough weight to get to a healthy level and we can figure out if it's more than you being fat, come back and we will look at what else we can do. Until then, deal with it"
it goes to show you how easy it is to beat back someone when they literally limit themselves to only the most difficult of tactics. The old way woudl have been to bomb the entire seaside area and call it a day. No americans in harms way, and we move along.
But for the last 30 years, that has been been a politically incorrect strategy. I'm not going to get into a long discussion of the ethics and relative value of human life along with the relative damage to our economy and international relations with each strategy, but literally the world seems to have forgotten what all out war looks like.
The US, nor any other country for that matter, has EVER help prisoners of war or enemy combatants as criminals to go through our justice system. This is not about the presumption of innocence or right to a fair trial.
There never were nor will be trials for every enemy confronted in a war. Why would you ever expect or hope for such a thing? Unless something about war has changed, I'm not certain there are even valid charges to be brought against someone who is fighting you on non-US soil by our government.
Ever since Obama foolishly started campaigning on the "let's bring them to justice and try them in courts of law" foolishness, US military policy has been hopelessly confused. Even he was quickly set straight when faced with reality about how idiotic such a statement was, and you no longer hear him talking about ridiculous solutions.
What would hte charges even be? you planned, on foreign soil where this planning was completely legal, to blow up a US embassy. You neither actually committed the act nor were present at the bombing. How do you plead for charges of murder even though we can't show you were doing anything illegal unless we convince the court our laws actually hold everywhere in the world?
US citizens or those acting on US soil are one thing. But this was neither and was an exercise of our military power. Don't confuse it with unrelated things like innocent until proven guilty.
while we are dispelling myths, it's good to not perpetuate the stupidity that just eating protein is somehow muscle building, and that eating more is a requirement to build large muscles.
I have no clue who Dr. House is, but I do know with work on using viruses to genetically resequence people to cure problems and they are now genetically sequencing cancers to target them with drugs that haven't traditionally been matched to a cancer in that area of the body, and finding in some cases seeming in curable cancer is curable when you realize the cancerous gene is not the same as is normally seen in that cancer but the same as one seen in another, curable cancer.
And I also know that idiotic mystics who contribute little to the advancement of science have been trying to take credit saying that this was Ayurvedic practice from thousands of years ago.
when did he point out any old knowledge science (or scientists) lack? he made some hand wavy assertions about discoveries made in the last 100 years being recreations of work from thousands of years ago. He neither backs this up with any reference to the original work (note he only states that Descartes could be attributed, not a single piece of work by descartes that can even begin to approximate the work Planck did) or, frankly, without a rigorous understanding of the work that is now being done.
I could equivalently say: Modern medicine is really just a rehash of thousands of years old Ayurvedic medicine practiced in India since time immemorial. "Modern" doctors are only just now coming to the understanding that every disease in each person can be caused by quite a different vector and are now attempting to treat the underlying cause rather than the symptoms. Imagine how much further along our medical knowledge would be if doctors and the medical science field didn't waste time reinventing and rediscovering ancient issues over and over with new tools designed to solve different problems in ways that require different efficiencies.
My statement is equally BS, based on only the most trivial understanding of the current state of medical science which I then ignorantly equate to some random writings from thousands of years ago that only from a modern interpretation (i.e. after we have the medical science) are people equating with modern biology and medicine.
wait, isn't it 4x4 because ht eworld is 4 dimensional (in the model)? If we were in a 5D world, the metric tensor would be generalized to 5x5 (this was done back in teh 1920s or 30s IIRC, that showed some nice things that I can't recall)
And to put this map in perspective, Chicago in 2012 made up about 4 pct of all gun homicides in the US (435 out of about 11k)
On the other hand the violent crime in the UK and Australia are very diffuse. I looked this up before moving here, but they release crime stats for violence across the country and its quite similar.
Not trying to defend gun violence in the US. It's pitiful Chicago is so bad, but my only point is crime stats are complex and each type of crime isn't de facto more prevalent in the US simply because of our gun statistics, and even our gun statistics say a lot more about inner city gang violence (which exists in the UK but has fewer guns) than a generally more violent culture vs similar countries.
Yes, so at the very least it is better to look at the UK, which defines it similarly though I don't have the legal definition of violence against a person and what that may include or exclude compared to assault in the US.
It's never perfect comparing crime stats across countries but the standard talking point that the US is somehow multiples more violent is pretty obviously not true, else it would be hard to find a definition that flips the numbers so egregiously.
Slashdot Mirror
you aren't quite right, as someone living and working abroad (and have done it quite a bit), you have to declare ALL your income abroad, even if it is less than 90k, BUT:
You get about a ~95k foreign earned income deduction. From this, it means if you earn less than this amount, your US federal tax liability goes to 0. If your tax liability is 0, you can fine whenever you want (filing late, if you had no taxes owed, is not penalized) but you will have to file at some point, usually when you get back to the US. But it's trivially easy to back file all those years if you earned less than 95k. Now as soon as you earned more, it gets a lot trickier.
Really? transistors, to name one, was not a government funded research project. Hell, the basic research that set out how you create a packet switching network was done without any government funding. Government funding and involvement only came after the initial private sector led research (I"m not saying government funding wasn't helpful, I'm just saying it was by no means some magic bean that sprouted the bean stalk).
Even within solar power, there were already huge private investments and work that had been done long before solyndra. 500 million to Solyndra wasn't because the company had some incredible new technology (like say, far more efficient panels) that needed help getting off the ground. It was purely to help one of many manufacturers in the world to compete. It is exactly the equivalent of the US Government giving money to K-Mart to compete better with Wal Mart. Just because it's solar power, doesn't make it any more reasonable or beneficial for the US. That is pointless. If the government wants to do something, it should act like Darpa and put out a 200 million dollar bounty on a panel that can compete on price with coal. Hell, make it a billion just so every private sector company will throw money into that research pot. That would have been a hell of a lot more helpful than what they did, and if there weren't any results, it would have cost the US nothing. DARPA did more to get us self driving cars than basically any other actor, by simply providing a carrot for private groups to produce them. The loan guarantees and many of our other government subsidies are just payoffs to buy votes and support.
well, seeing as how no power company could ever survive the financial ruin of a meltdown at a power plant (vs a coal fire or LNG explosion), there is a good reason for government regulations being strict. Frankly, any company doing nuclear power will not be around to clean up its own mess ever, as its mess will be too big. When externalities like that exist, it's a good idea to consider quite a bit of regulation.
How is it that so many educated people can convolute solar energy, petroleum drilling companies, utility companies, and middle east stability for oil?
These 4 things are barely related. We do not go to war in the middle east for Exxon Mobile. We go to war in the middle east and pressure Iran to make sure Saudi, UAE, and Kuwait sell their oil to us. This DOES NOT HELP EXXON. Exxon would prefer less competition from the biggest drillers in the world. We want to make sure we have a wide variety of oil sources.
Oil, though, is mostly irrelevant to our utility power generation. We use oil for petroleum based products (plastics, etc) and vehicle transport. We do not use it for electricity generation almost at all (0.75%). So Oil companies are not trying to shut down solar power. As long as there are billions of people in the world who will use gas powered engines and are working in economies that are growing very fast, Oil companies don't care about the US slowly moving towards electric vehicles. US Oil consumption peaked 8 years ago, and yet oil companies continue to make good money.
Solar is trying to compete with coal and natural gas, NOT OIL. The only thing oil ,coal, and LNG have in common is they are fossil fuels.
can you tell me about any subsidies or tax loopholes that are unique to the oil industry? I've never heard of one. I have heard of things like accelerated depreciation on capital spending that all companies get to use, including solar power related companies.
I'm seriously wondering about this, because this kind of stupidity is said all the time by people with an agenda and I've never heard of a single piece of the federal tax code that favors oil companies uniquely (or even semi-uniquely).
actually, this is like saying why do democrats feel the need to call for injunctions on duly passed restrictions on abortion before the court actually hears arguments and makes a ruling.
Their argument, as the republican argument line could reasonably follow, is that it would take 10 years to realize how big of a failure obamacare is, and at that point the damage to our already dysfunctional healthcare system will be extreme, making putting in place a real solution hard.
btw, the argument on abortion is that the several year shutdown of the clinics made illegal by new abortion restrictions will cause these areas to be permanently unserved, as it is difficult for such a business to turn back on after years of being turned off.
I'm not saying I agree at all with either argument (doctors love money, especially cash business that abortion clinics represent, so doctors will stream back in; and on obamacare, as nothing as done to address why we pay our medical practitioners from doctors to drug companies multiples what they earn for the same services anywhere else in the world it will fail to do what actually is required, curb costs in a market that is effectively dictated by suppliers).
you really don't know much about high performance cars do you? The last tesla roadster time I saw was 3.7 seconds, with a quarter mile time around 12 seconds. This isn't faster than the best italian cars. This is slower than basically every high performance car on the road, including several american, Japanese, and German cars that provide far higher performance at that price. Tesla now, has a lot of very cool things going for it. And it's performance compared to general cars is respectable, but don't imagine it would hold up well against the best.
And by the way, if you are actually interested in high performance, it would do you some good to do some research. Basically all the italian cars are now all show for 2-3x the price of far superior performing Japanese(GT-R) and American(ZR1 or Viper) cars on proper tracks, not just 0-60 and quarter mile times.
kind of hard in a country that basically is at risk of a tsunami across most of its area (or earthquakes, or volcanoes).
It's always a tradeoff, and it's not like the US with a huge inland that can be used for these purposes along with a tectonically stable east coast which isn't prone to severe events (like duke energy outside Charlotte). Countries with less land area have to make much more difficult decisions, and it's telling that the only reason they won't be down 25% (even with a larger economy both in absolute terms and per capita by a lot) is that they turned off 30% of their generating capacity. If they even turn on half if it, they will be further along the accords' path than basically every other developed country.
the Hajj finished almost a month ago, is the summary implying a >1 month gestation for the virus or are we just horribly out of date?
Americans who are informed won't be angry at you for saying something against America, we'll just pity your ignorance. At the end of the day, your physical person, and to a high degree, your financial person is safe. And your family and friends don't get tortured for your perceived slights.
In China, Snowden's family would be in a secret jail, not traveling to Russia to see him. If you can't see the vast chasm that separates the two, it's an issue with you.
I'm not legitimizing what the US does or coming down against it, just pointing out your equivalence could only be based on two things:
1.ignorance of what happens to dissenters in China
or
2. you believe that the government reading your email is such an incredible travesty, you can't discern a noticeable difference between someone reading your email and someone torturing your family to punish you.
agreed, but that is the exact same situation as any vendor. If I go to dell and try to buy a ram upgrade from them, it's super expensive. It's not a unique apple experience (at least for me). Anyways, I get my components from amazon for 1/4 the price and apple has never complained about non-apple sold parts in my computer when it goes in for work. So it hasn't caused me an issue yet.
yes, but monitor quality is a huge difference. I have a cheaper 25**x 1440 display and a 27 inch mac display, and without the doubt, while the apple display cost about 300 dollars more, the quality of the is far superior (and the cheaper display is being driven by a much more powerful machine).
And if you work in a world where super high quality displays are in high demand, you pay up. there are other sellers of equivalent quality, but it turns out they price to within 5% of the apple display. I'm never certain where the talk of the apple tax comes from. For phones, mp3 players, monitors, and laptops I found them very competitively priced.
really? tell that to my downstairs neighbor who is half blind, it could be fixed for a cheap lasik surgery but can't get it from the NHS simply because he is too old (I live in the UK, I suppose the NHS qualifies as socialist). In socialist medicine, the government does not take responsibility for your health.
In socialist medicine, the middle class gets steamrolled because taxes are far too high too afford your own care when the government doesn't feel you qualify for it. If you are poor, you take what you get because you pay for nothing anyways and the rich are still rich, and get the care they want.
that is basically the only benefit of fully socialized medicine, compared to certain government limitations in the medical market (usually quasi-price controls).
ah, wow. yes, so you are still stuck in the days when someone can advertise something like dual core and you immediately think it is equivalent quality? next you'll tell me core clock is a primary determinant of of processor performance on a modern CPU.....
and how do you expect the doctor to do that? gastric bypass on the public dime?
who is even close to that price point yet? anyways, you can (if you own an apple device) spend 5 bucks on a converter so you can fit a microUSB, if that is what matters.
I keep myself healthy but still like to bake cakes or cookies or make pancakes in the morning for my family. Why should I pay more so the actual fat slob can get cheap insurance while not taking care of his health?
That is ridiculous. But that is what we have come to. At the end of the day, medicine is complicated, and there are things that you can't control (and most societies decide to cover) and those you can. I prefer what a friend was told in Japan when he went complaining about knee and lower back pain "When you lose enough weight to get to a healthy level and we can figure out if it's more than you being fat, come back and we will look at what else we can do. Until then, deal with it"
it goes to show you how easy it is to beat back someone when they literally limit themselves to only the most difficult of tactics. The old way woudl have been to bomb the entire seaside area and call it a day. No americans in harms way, and we move along.
But for the last 30 years, that has been been a politically incorrect strategy. I'm not going to get into a long discussion of the ethics and relative value of human life along with the relative damage to our economy and international relations with each strategy, but literally the world seems to have forgotten what all out war looks like.
The US, nor any other country for that matter, has EVER help prisoners of war or enemy combatants as criminals to go through our justice system. This is not about the presumption of innocence or right to a fair trial.
There never were nor will be trials for every enemy confronted in a war. Why would you ever expect or hope for such a thing? Unless something about war has changed, I'm not certain there are even valid charges to be brought against someone who is fighting you on non-US soil by our government.
Ever since Obama foolishly started campaigning on the "let's bring them to justice and try them in courts of law" foolishness, US military policy has been hopelessly confused. Even he was quickly set straight when faced with reality about how idiotic such a statement was, and you no longer hear him talking about ridiculous solutions.
What would hte charges even be? you planned, on foreign soil where this planning was completely legal, to blow up a US embassy. You neither actually committed the act nor were present at the bombing. How do you plead for charges of murder even though we can't show you were doing anything illegal unless we convince the court our laws actually hold everywhere in the world?
US citizens or those acting on US soil are one thing. But this was neither and was an exercise of our military power. Don't confuse it with unrelated things like innocent until proven guilty.
while we are dispelling myths, it's good to not perpetuate the stupidity that just eating protein is somehow muscle building, and that eating more is a requirement to build large muscles.
I have no clue who Dr. House is, but I do know with work on using viruses to genetically resequence people to cure problems and they are now genetically sequencing cancers to target them with drugs that haven't traditionally been matched to a cancer in that area of the body, and finding in some cases seeming in curable cancer is curable when you realize the cancerous gene is not the same as is normally seen in that cancer but the same as one seen in another, curable cancer.
And I also know that idiotic mystics who contribute little to the advancement of science have been trying to take credit saying that this was Ayurvedic practice from thousands of years ago.
when did he point out any old knowledge science (or scientists) lack? he made some hand wavy assertions about discoveries made in the last 100 years being recreations of work from thousands of years ago. He neither backs this up with any reference to the original work (note he only states that Descartes could be attributed, not a single piece of work by descartes that can even begin to approximate the work Planck did) or, frankly, without a rigorous understanding of the work that is now being done.
I could equivalently say:
Modern medicine is really just a rehash of thousands of years old Ayurvedic medicine practiced in India since time immemorial. "Modern" doctors are only just now coming to the understanding that every disease in each person can be caused by quite a different vector and are now attempting to treat the underlying cause rather than the symptoms. Imagine how much further along our medical knowledge would be if doctors and the medical science field didn't waste time reinventing and rediscovering ancient issues over and over with new tools designed to solve different problems in ways that require different efficiencies.
My statement is equally BS, based on only the most trivial understanding of the current state of medical science which I then ignorantly equate to some random writings from thousands of years ago that only from a modern interpretation (i.e. after we have the medical science) are people equating with modern biology and medicine.
wait, isn't it 4x4 because ht eworld is 4 dimensional (in the model)? If we were in a 5D world, the metric tensor would be generalized to 5x5 (this was done back in teh 1920s or 30s IIRC, that showed some nice things that I can't recall)
Absolutely, but the difference is more a beating with a bat or stabbed with a knife and alive vs shot dead.
Luckily it's pretty easy to avoid being shot in the US as long as you aren't living in the in a city. At the very least this map will help you avoid it:
http://m.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/
And to put this map in perspective, Chicago in 2012 made up about 4 pct of all gun homicides in the US (435 out of about 11k)
On the other hand the violent crime in the UK and Australia are very diffuse. I looked this up before moving here, but they release crime stats for violence across the country and its quite similar.
Not trying to defend gun violence in the US. It's pitiful Chicago is so bad, but my only point is crime stats are complex and each type of crime isn't de facto more prevalent in the US simply because of our gun statistics, and even our gun statistics say a lot more about inner city gang violence (which exists in the UK but has fewer guns) than a generally more violent culture vs similar countries.
Yes, so at the very least it is better to look at the UK, which defines it similarly though I don't have the legal definition of violence against a person and what that may include or exclude compared to assault in the US.
It's never perfect comparing crime stats across countries but the standard talking point that the US is somehow multiples more violent is pretty obviously not true, else it would be hard to find a definition that flips the numbers so egregiously.