BTW, you cannot compare a country ("USA") with a whole continent ("Europe"). The countries in europe aren't all in EU or EEC and are much, MUCH more different than US' states are.

"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.

Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.

Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.

"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.

"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...

Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.

If you have a collection of children tales from the Grimm brothers... then this is already watered down.

These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.

The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.

Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.

In Germany it's often not IN cities, but around. Example for Frankfurt:

The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.

Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.

First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.

And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.

If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.

So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.

Well at least on NRW, I can say that there are enough P&R around here.

However compared with European countries like Portugal, this is a complete different reality.

This was my main point, because there are these "in Europe public transport is so great" remarks, yes it is, provided one is lucky to be on the right parts of Europe, as you also kind of refer to by your no all roses scenario.

Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.

Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.

The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.

And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.

Well, some of the non-centralized social media is quite left-wing. If someone favours the SED or other parts of the ex-GDR regime (like FDGB etc) then it's IMHO already bordering on left extremisms. After all these guys enslaved a hughe population to make people do their biddings. If that is not extreme, I can't say.

That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.

Perhaps you mean the reunification day :-)

Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.

  Spotted the US-american

Really? Where?

We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.

Wow, you brought many facts that escaped me so far. That why I still read HN these days.

Are 850000 millions muslim refugees are soooooo many more than over 5 million "Gastarbeiter".

I'm not saying those 850.000 millions are negligibe. They increase the scarce housing situation even more. They have antique idealisms (like that woman aren't equal, that woman showing their hairs are whores, that all jews must be bad). So they create a bit of trouble here, like antisemitism or even from time to time an "Ehrenmord".

But still... the millions of turkish Gastarbeiter actually changed german culture, think Döner Kebab. Which we can't say from the 850.000 recent refugees.

"Muslims are in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and the West either started"

That's an interesting claim. The biggest muslim community in Germany is from Turkey. They came all here because of economic reason.

I'd even go so far that it's their religion that holds muslim states in a terrible economic situation. If you look down at 50% of your population (females), treat them unequal because of some ancient sharia feelings, sometimes even keep them away from good education ... then surely your car doesn't go fast, because the hand brake is still set!

The islamic culture was once renowned for education (e.g. look at Ibn Sina or why we today use "Algorithm" as word, or our numbers). But that's long gone. Even before islamists took over in Iran they seized the oil industry before they had the educated people to run it. In essence the country destabilized itself in the Mossadeqh time. But todays islam ... is more often than not demagocial instead of scientific. They dislike knowledge. The more islamic a country is, the more this is visible. Nothing of this creates good living condition to people, I'd say. And nothing here is in influence from "the west". Or Russia or China.

Now, the civil war in Syria ... I'm quite unsure if that has been instigated mainly because of the west. If anything, I'd say that the east (Russia) bolstered the syrian dictator. That most syrian people hated the torturing regime has IMHO nothing to do with "US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria".

On your point that the US and USSR inventions only created destabilization with their wars... on this I agree. I can see the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam as a worthy war. But not the others.

"And noone stops US/israel" because no one has love the the Iranian regime, which kills its own people, allows Hamas to rain rockets on Israel (even when I don't like the israel government, the israel people don't deserve these attacks either!). It supports Yemenitic pirates. So it's an awful government, not righteous at all -- not even in a spiritual sense. There's a german saying: how you shout into the forest it will come back.

"and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine"

That is a rather absolute state and easy to falsify. Just 2 days ago I heard a report in "Deutschlandfunk" about how israel settlers killed palestinians (basically: they let their cows go onto the fields the palestinians owned. Which come from their village to chase the cows away. And then a settler in a israel military uniform used his storm rifle to kill one, injure one heavily and one lightly).

We also seen the fields of rubble the israel armed forces produced in the Gaza strip.

What we however can see: the media coverage of the Hamas attack where they killed and abducted so many people was extensive (rightfully so, as it was an abhorrent act). However, the systematic destruction of lifing quarters into huge fields of rubble by the IDR was mostly only mentioned. It got coverage, but not really that extensive.

And yet, in "Tagesschau" and "Zeit" you could all the time hear about the issues the reporters had about actually reporting from there, since Israel controlled most information channels.

What also is a very german thing: any critic on the israel governments doing is sooner or later "conquered" with some "this is antisemitic" claim. However, few are actually antisemitic (yep, there are yew haters here, especially after we've got so many arab immigrants). But there are also many people that can separate between a religio, the very diverse people groups living in Israel and the current israel governement.