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 War Drone wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 War Drone wrote:
Nothing earth-shattering or politically edgy here, but having recently moved to UK after 10 years in Japan, I really wish we'd adopt the whole "remove your street shoes when entering a home" thing...

You can easily adopt that for yourself.

Obviously have done, and it's not been a problem for anyone yet. Of course the homeowner/tenant has the duty to provide clean slippers.
Wasn't aware Russians do the same.

Its done in the Netherlands to an extent, I would say 50/50. How that came to be I don't know. Might have a colonial legacy from the East Indies occupation.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
the engineering behind the Autobahn

Trust me, you don't. German highways are horrible. It is nothing but mile and mile of parts closed of for completely useless maintenance which just lasts for months and months without any apparent progress made. In the Netherlands meanwhile, they get much more work done in a single night, usually without bothering traffic and creating miles of jams, and Dutch highways are virtually always in a better condition to boot. You want Dutch highways, not German ones.

Mate, I lived in Germany for 3 years. Yeah, I do. . . Specifically, I want the depth of material which can withstand the loads it bears for 30 years. I want the angle of the road as it is there in Germany, where water runs off at the "perfect" rate that there's very little standing water on the road, but there's also basically no risk of hydroplaning. On the standpoint of maintenance, sure it created some "problems" for motorists, but it was planned maintenance all the time and it actually did move quite a bit.

At any rate, this is all better than the US interstate system. The road constructors use the thinnest amount of materials to get the job done quickly (and maximize profits) with there usually being ruts and/or potholes within weeks precisely because of how thin the driving surface is.

It can only bear those loads for 30 years because the damn things are closed for 20 of those due to all the Baustelle.
I agree with Iron Captain on this one. Dutch highways are superior, and I'm pretty sure they angle the same way. Both are better than Belgian highways, which are just atrocious. I've seen highways in Brasil better than the Belgian ones.

Edit: damn my thick fingers.

In Romania whenever I'd visit a mall, they had a business on site that was just a giant kids play area, with paid staff to supervise the children. Parents could drop the kids off, pay a fee, and conduct all their shopping while their kids ran wild and played.

I'd love to see something like that here in the US.

I've not been to many malls in UK yet ... 3 IIRC ... but they all had them ... I also got the impression they were free.

Could well be wrong on that ... It's not like I hang around outside kiddies' play areas long enough to read anything...

 War Drone wrote:
I've not been to many malls in UK yet ... 3 IIRC ... but they all had them ... I also got the impression they were free.

Could well be wrong on that ... It's not like I hang around outside kiddies' play areas long enough to read anything...

Maybe it's a European thing. Romania was the only country I got to get into the culture on during my 6 month "vacation".

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 War Drone wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 War Drone wrote:
Nothing earth-shattering or politically edgy here, but having recently moved to UK after 10 years in Japan, I really wish we'd adopt the whole "remove your street shoes when entering a home" thing...

You can easily adopt that for yourself.

Obviously have done, and it's not been a problem for anyone yet. Of course the homeowner/tenant has the duty to provide clean slippers.
Wasn't aware Russians do the same.

Its done in the Netherlands to an extent, I would say 50/50. How that came to be I don't know. Might have a colonial legacy from the East Indies occupation.

I think it is common sense everywhere, isn't it ? I have never been in a house without someone not asking me to take off my shoes

I'd really like to see more European/Japanese style mass transit in the US. The road system in the US is a mess in most major cities, having to drive everywhere really causes lots of city planning/land/etc issues (lots of land wasted just for parking lots) and would dramatically decrease the cost of living for many people.

More to the point, the roads simply cannot be expanded through major cities in most instances, when you've got 8 lanes each way (with an HOV lane in the middle to boot) and both sides of the freeway are lined with expensive homes or shopping centers, what can you do to add capacity? Not much. Alternative transport mechanisms will have to be found.

Politically, I'd really like to see an overhaul of the US elections system. The two-party system clearly isn't working, and the Electoral College has thus far proven disastrous and has no connection nor capability to fulfill the role it was originally intended for. A single transferrable popular vote system and substantial changes to allow third parties would be amazing.

I'd also love to see truly cutting edge high speed internet and wifi deployed on the scale it is in say, South Korea.

 godardc wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 War Drone wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 War Drone wrote:
Nothing earth-shattering or politically edgy here, but having recently moved to UK after 10 years in Japan, I really wish we'd adopt the whole "remove your street shoes when entering a home" thing...

You can easily adopt that for yourself.

Obviously have done, and it's not been a problem for anyone yet. Of course the homeowner/tenant has the duty to provide clean slippers.
Wasn't aware Russians do the same.

Its done in the Netherlands to an extent, I would say 50/50. How that came to be I don't know. Might have a colonial legacy from the East Indies occupation.

I think it is common sense everywhere, isn't it ? I have never been in a house without someone not asking me to take off my shoes

Sorry for massive nested quotes ... @Godardc: I agree with you ... it should be common sense everywhere ... but before my 10 years in Japan I lived 10 years in Germany, which (unlike Japan) has a HUGE culture of house/home parties ... and taking your shoes off really wasn't a thing ... this was ca. 1996 - 2006 ... might be different now.

I'd like the U.S. to do away with four way stops and adopt the priority road system.

We need to adopt Aussie killer drop bears.

Bran Dawri wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:
the engineering behind the Autobahn

Trust me, you don't. German highways are horrible. It is nothing but mile and mile of parts closed of for completely useless maintenance which just lasts for months and months without any apparent progress made. In the Netherlands meanwhile, they get much more work done in a single night, usually without bothering traffic and creating miles of jams, and Dutch highways are virtually always in a better condition to boot. You want Dutch highways, not German ones.

Mate, I lived in Germany for 3 years. Yeah, I do. . . Specifically, I want the depth of material which can withstand the loads it bears for 30 years. I want the angle of the road as it is there in Germany, where water runs off at the "perfect" rate that there's very little standing water on the road, but there's also basically no risk of hydroplaning. On the standpoint of maintenance, sure it created some "problems" for motorists, but it was planned maintenance all the time and it actually did move quite a bit.

At any rate, this is all better than the US interstate system. The road constructors use the thinnest amount of materials to get the job done quickly (and maximize profits) with there usually being ruts and/or potholes within weeks precisely because of how thin the driving surface is.

It can only bear those loads for 30 years because the damn things are closed for 20 of those due to all the Baustelle.
I agree with Iron Captain on this one. Dutch highways are superior, and I'm pretty sure they angle the same way. Both are better than Belgian highways, which are just atrocious. I've seen highways in Brasil better than the Belgian ones.

Edit: damn my thick fingers.

Cut the Belgians some slack. They really tried to build a good highway, but all of their construction equipment broke down due to the potholes.
Still not as bad as the potholes in some Russian highways though:

Some highways are so remote they virtually never get repaired.

 Frazzled wrote:
We need to adopt Aussie killer drop bears.

This was touched on in the Australia thread. We don't need any of their wildlife. We are safer that it is isolated on an island on the other side of the world.

That said, I posted earlier in the thread without adding my thoughts. I like most of the additions most of the other Americans have made, but I do have one thing that hasn't been mentioned:

Maternity/Paternity leave. Right now it is not a right. We can legally take unpaid leave for up to 6 months, and most companies offer some form of maternity leave, but nothing serious for mothers (who are juggling being a parent after passing a bowling ball out of their bodies), and nothing at all for fathers. I'd like to see us adopt Sweden's policy. Mothers get 68 weeks, and fathers get 18, at 80% pay. I'd be ok with shortening paternity leave to 10 weeks or so, but most day cares are insane as far as cost, and charge more for newborns and infants.

 Nostromodamus wrote:
UK street number system. There are 8 houses on my street yet somehow my house number is 5 digits.

If where you live is marked out like where I live, there is actually a really good reason for it. Way easier to find 1104 N Wilson Street when you know exactly how many blocks it is from the main roads. They are 11 blocks north, 3rd house on the right. Really helps with emergency vehicles.

Edit: Also, I would like to adopt the Aussies policy of exporting bad beer (Fosters) and Importing good beer (Literally any other beer). If we could just start shipping all Budweiser and Coors abroad, we would have room for so much better beer!

 Dreadwinter wrote:
If we could just start shipping all Budweiser and Coors abroad, we would have room for so much better beer!

But .. then .. everyone would hate America? Oh .. wait ..

 jhe90 wrote:

 Breotan wrote:
The USA's system of residential addresses could be useful to other countries with breathtakingly archaic and complex systems. Seriously, some places' addresses can take up to five or seven lines.

Southern Ireland has no post code or zip code system....

Hmmmm, how does your mail system work then

 Vaktathi wrote:
I'd really like to see more European/Japanese style mass transit in the US. The road system in the US is a mess in most major cities, having to drive everywhere really causes lots of city planning/land/etc issues (lots of land wasted just for parking lots) and would dramatically decrease the cost of living for many people.

It used to be pretty good ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

 Techpriestsupport wrote:

 jhe90 wrote:

 Breotan wrote:
The USA's system of residential addresses could be useful to other countries with breathtakingly archaic and complex systems. Seriously, some places' addresses can take up to five or seven lines.

Southern Ireland has no post code or zip code system....

Hmmmm, how does your mail system work then

A combination of using the street and town address, having a population of only 4 million, everyone knowing each other (the Irish strongly refute this, but they do.) and stuff getting lost quite regularly.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Nostromodamus wrote:
UK street number system. There are 8 houses on my street yet somehow my house number is 5 digits.

The US system has its benefits (as does your freeway exit numbering); the house numbers go up by 100 each block, don't they? Or something like that? That gives you an idea of how far away a property is. In the UK, if one side of the road has loads of small ouses and the other has one or two mansions or big commercial properties, you'll get the one side being numbered 1,3,5,... up to 29 or something, while the other side will be 2,4,6,8.
Still, at least it's not Japan.

Depends. Sometimes house numbers go up by 10s, sometimes by 100s. But one side of the street will always be even numbers and one will be odd numbers. So you'll always know which side of the street your destination will be on. At least most of the time. If you are in an area that had overlapping developments it might get weird.

In theory, in the UK, house numbers are even on one side, odd on the other, and increase in number as you move away from the town centre. This gets muddled in the case of roads with spurs, roads which curve back on themselves and roads with more properties on one side than the other - or with no properties at all on one side.

Also, property developers have a nasty habit of theming new streets - you'll get, say, Riverside road, drive, avenue (with no trees, so it's not really an avenue), walk (although you can drive down it), lane, etc, all next to each other. Which means posties and pizza delivery drivers get awfully confused. AFAIK, Sweden has a rule that you can only have one name in a given town or neighbourhood, to prevent that sort of thing.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
In theory, in the UK, house numbers are even on one side, odd on the other, and increase in number as you move away from the town centre. This gets muddled in the case of roads with spurs, roads which curve back on themselves and roads with more properties on one side than the other - or with no properties at all on one side.

Also, property developers have a nasty habit of theming new streets - you'll get, say, Riverside road, drive, avenue (with no trees, so it's not really an avenue), walk (although you can drive down it), lane, etc, all next to each other. Which means posties and pizza delivery drivers get awfully confused. AFAIK, Sweden has a rule that you can only have one name in a given town or neighbourhood, to prevent that sort of thing.

This is also bad in my area, not because there's a Maple Street next to Maple lane and Maple avenue (for example). . . but because planners developed a grid system a long time ago, and "cannot" deviate from it now. Where I live, streets orient one way, and avenues the other (as in E-W and N-S), but there's no indication whatsoever that a street runs all the way through. For instance, I live off of 22nd avenue, but my street number also has streets connecting to 84th avenue, 96th Ave, and so on. . . they are not one solid street. Things get further complicated when bigger roads, due to following terrain end up in different places on the grid. For instance, I can usually go down 152nd street to the game shop. However, the light that I turn at to turn into the shopping center where the shop is, is 160th street (and I did not change roads).

Things are further complicated by the fact that at some invisible line, the next town over from us does their street/avenue system the opposite of us (so avenues are E-W and streets are N-S, the opposite of my area).

Every other country on earth should import the sense of life and freedom of individuality from the U.S..

Well.... even though it has been dead here for 60 years.... It's a nice thought.

The world could use some economic freedom that Switzerland, New Zealand and Hong Kong enjoys. Export that BACK to the U.S. please!

 Grey Templar wrote:

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

 Nostromodamus wrote:
UK street number system. There are 8 houses on my street yet somehow my house number is 5 digits.

The US system has its benefits (as does your freeway exit numbering); the house numbers go up by 100 each block, don't they? Or something like that? That gives you an idea of how far away a property is. In the UK, if one side of the road has loads of small ouses and the other has one or two mansions or big commercial properties, you'll get the one side being numbered 1,3,5,... up to 29 or something, while the other side will be 2,4,6,8.
Still, at least it's not Japan.

Depends. Sometimes house numbers go up by 10s, sometimes by 100s. But one side of the street will always be even numbers and one will be odd numbers. So you'll always know which side of the street your destination will be on. At least most of the time. If you are in an area that had overlapping developments it might get weird.

Well, it and the American system do go the same way on the last point.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
In theory, in the UK, house numbers are even on one side, odd on the other, and increase in number as you move away from the town centre. This gets muddled in the case of roads with spurs, roads which curve back on themselves and roads with more properties on one side than the other - or with no properties at all on one side.

Or roads that have changed names, or just got mucked about at some point, so randomly change sides, or 1 is in the middle because someone extended the street in the "wrong" direction, or strange sub groups of counting, with a bunch of houses added in the middle in the place of a large house. Or one of the many other oddities when you have street layouts that can be 1500 years old..

Well, that's true. That's why the capital city of a major world power has streets based on Celtic cattle paths. Every other Eurpoean capital had someone with the clout to get things done (Haussmann and Napoleon in Paris, for example) - or got free urban clearance provided by the RAF and USAAF - so they've got some nice wide, straight roads. In London, there were great plans for a renewal of the city after the Great Fire, but all the uppity middle classes stubbornly refused to surrender their old plots, and rebuilt everything as higgledy piggledy as it was. Edinburgh compromised by simply building a nice new town* right next to the grotty old one.

*still called the New Town, despite being slightly older than the USA

On a related note,

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss.

Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Is there an idea (law, custom, practice) in another country that you wish yours would adopt?

There are so many....

Germany has a smart law that scales traffic offence tickets to the wealth of the driver receiving them. So a ticket costs the same percentage of the violators wealth in each case.
In America all tickets are the same. Germany does that better than we do.

I think in some scandinavian countries they do it like this. I like this system. But this is not how it works in Germany. There is a certain amount of money you have to pay for certain violations.

I like the tax system they have in Denmark.

And swedish education system.

No. Stop. You do not want the current Swedish education system, you want the old one that's the same as the Finnish current one. Even the people who implemented the change to the current one are slowly coming around.

 nordsturmking wrote:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Is there an idea (law, custom, practice) in another country that you wish yours would adopt?

There are so many....

Germany has a smart law that scales traffic offence tickets to the wealth of the driver receiving them. So a ticket costs the same percentage of the violators wealth in each case.
In America all tickets are the same. Germany does that better than we do.

I think in some scandinavian countries they do it like this. I like this system. But this is not how it works in Germany. There is a certain amount of money you have to pay for certain violations.

IIRC, isn't it Finland that has scaling traffic offense fines?? There was one of those chain email things making the rounds years ago about the CEO of Nokia being pulled over and having to pay a million dollar ticket.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 nordsturmking wrote:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Is there an idea (law, custom, practice) in another country that you wish yours would adopt?

There are so many....

Germany has a smart law that scales traffic offence tickets to the wealth of the driver receiving them. So a ticket costs the same percentage of the violators wealth in each case.
In America all tickets are the same. Germany does that better than we do.

I think in some scandinavian countries they do it like this. I like this system. But this is not how it works in Germany. There is a certain amount of money you have to pay for certain violations.

IIRC, isn't it Finland that has scaling traffic offense fines?? There was one of those chain email things making the rounds years ago about the CEO of Nokia being pulled over and having to pay a million dollar ticket.

Only if tge autobahn runs thru Finland. The example I heard involved 2 drivers. On the autobahn. Same offenses way different fines.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:

Only if tge autobahn runs thru Finland. The example I heard involved 2 drivers. On the autobahn. Same offenses way different fines.

Based on my experience living in Germany, ya don't get pulled over by police, and instead only get fined via traffic cameras. The fines scale based on speed and offence, not on your personal income. Hence why I brought up the oft cited CEO of Nokia being ticketed in Finland (IIRC).

Obviously, a lot can change in 6 years, but I doubt Germany has started using patrol cars on the Autobahn the way us Americans use highway patrol


EDIT: one of the things I do "like" about the camera ticketing system in Germany is that it gets way more expensive if you try to fight the ticket. We had a soldier in my unit try it, despite literally everyone telling him not to. He had a 30 or 40 Euro ticket turn into about 250 Euro.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:

Only if tge autobahn runs thru Finland. The example I heard involved 2 drivers. On the autobahn. Same offenses way different fines.

Based on my experience living in Germany, ya don't get pulled over by police, and instead only get fined via traffic cameras. The fines scale based on speed and offence, not on your personal income. Hence why I brought up the oft cited CEO of Nokia being ticketed in Finland (IIRC).

Obviously, a lot can change in 6 years, but I doubt Germany has started using patrol cars on the Autobahn the way us Americans use highway patrol


EDIT: one of the things I do "like" about the camera ticketing system in Germany is that it gets way more expensive if you try to fight the ticket. We had a soldier in my unit try it, despite literally everyone telling him not to. He had a 30 or 40 Euro ticket turn into about 250 Euro.

That sounds kinda messed up. but maybe its a euro thing

you should be able to contest a ticket. making financially restrictive just makes people compliant :/

dunno that part rubs me the wrong way.