24 Nov 2010, 5:08 am
Orwell wrote:
CaptainTrips222 wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Except behind the wheel of car! Europeans are supposed to be agressive maniacs who consider traffic lights and speed limits to be a fascist plot and so ignore them. Or thats what ive heard.
Not in Germany. Not at all. They're very courteous especially toward cyclists.
That sounds nice. Miami drivers will not hesitate to run over pedestrians or cyclists, even if you have the right of way.
Oh, are you in Miami? To hear that sort of surprises me. I used to live in the Bradenton/Sarasota area (and my folks still do). The biggest problem I have with the traffic there is... well... having a lot of older drivers on the roads necessitates ridiculously low speed limits. I'm not even sure I've experienced Tampa drivers as being that aggressive.
marshall wrote:
Jacoby wrote:
So American culture is inferior because we value working hard?
If we value it to the detriment of other things. The problem is the way the whole protestant work ethic is used to pee on the legs of working people and then tell them it's only raining. Work is not automatically good for people. Americans are not as healthy as their European counterparts.
Or even their Canadian ones.
As I've said before, that was one of the big deciding factors behind me moving to Canada in the first place. In my case, I wanted to be an artist. I went to art college in Florida for a couple years, studying to be a computer animator. I really didn't want to work for Pixar or DreamWorks. Honestly, I was just interested in picking up some skills with an interesting looking piece of software which I thought I might be able to use to produce some cool artwork. But they didn't see it that way. They pushed so hard for the students to get recruited by big name studios. What's more, the work schedule they had us on barely gave any of us any time for a good night's sleep or three square meals, let alone any free time. When I began the curriculum, I wondered why so many of the instructors at the college were ex-Pixar employees who left while still in their late 20s and early 30s. The reality is, it's just such a grinding factory sort of lifestyle that people in that industry regularly burn out that young. At some point, I just decided, "I'm sorry, I actually enjoy eating lunch and dinner everyday, and sleeping 8 hours a night, and getting some time to relax and go outside occasionally." It just wasn't for me at all. Then I came up here to complete my studies, and the workload was so much more reasonable. The work ethic was totally different-- not nonexistent, just much more relenting. I really do believe the American sort of work ethic, that places productivity and monetary reward above all else, is truly detrimental to people's happiness and well-being. I know it is, because I've seen it firsthand. By the end of each semester at that first college, students started getting mass illnesses because they'd worked themselves so hard that people were sleep-deprived and malnourished.
Nothing wrong with working hard, really--unless, of course, you work so hard that you work yourself to death.
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