Feeling Depressed because I spend too much money and unwisely

[jacobolus]

You guys are mixing things up and giving examples that don't even make sense.

Well our conversation is off topic for sure.

Berserkfan’s specific issue seems to be buying from people who misrepresent what they have and are trying to cheat him. Whereas what fohat and I are talking about is something quite different.

[Novus]

And as to your political analogy, as horrific and unconscionable as the recent US elections turned out to be, the Chinese, who might be considered the "best negotiators" in the world, certainly have one of the the worst political structures. But would that be because the "good negotiators" have utterly squashed the "bad negotiators?" You may be right, and I fear that is where we are headed, if we are not buried first.

Just my opinion, of course.

Just to nit pick a little.
This is what I mean by cultural bull****.

China is the best negotiator because they're a new rising power.
They hold most of our debt and they can use that to leverage concessions out of us.
The US on the other hand can't get it's **** together so the EU, which is in financial shambles, is looking to China to borrow some moolah.
China is also trying to soft power Africa as the cherry on top.

This has nothing to do with culture. China wants to explain its influence and is more willingly to lend out money. The USA on the other hand
It's more like we're entering the game with our hands tied behind our back and China just has a better hand right now.

[Lain1911]

Discipline Daniel san!

[jacobolus]

China is the best negotiator because they're a new rising power.
They hold most of our debt and they can use that to leverage concessions out of us.
The US on the other hand can't get it's **** together so the EU, which is in financial shambles, is looking to China to borrow some moolah.
China is also trying to soft power Africa as the cherry on top.

You’re talking about different things, but this is also pretty wrong. China doesn’t have nearly as much leverage over the US as you are claiming here. Indeed, China’s economy is hopelessly dependent on foreign demand for Chinese products, and the Chinese government buying up US debt mostly implies greater faith in US bonds than other places they could park their money instead plus Chinese interest in keeping pressure on currency exchange rates to benefit their exporters, and doesn’t give them particularly much leverage. China absolutely does not “hold most of our debt” (They own about 10% of total U.S. public debt). Most US bonds are owned by Americans, and there are also substantial amounts owned by people all around the world. Recently, China has been trying to reduce the amount of US bonds they own, in an effort to diversify their holdings.

If you think China has more influence in the world overall than the US does, you’re delusional. (At least currently... I have no idea what the story will be like in 20 or 50 years.) Anyway, that’s mostly unrelated to what fohat is talking about.

Fohat: I don’t think the rise of Chinese ruling business/political class has much to do with negotiating prowess or cultural attitudes toward negotiation per se as much as just inheriting a very centralized and undemocratic state, where the folks in charge figured out a couple decades ago that by privatizing national industry they could turn political connections into private fortunes. This is less about negotiating skill and more about being in the right place at the right time, and having little organized effective opposition. I think the Chinese governing style is mostly about hard material realities of political power, wealth, and ownership of capital.

People try to do the same **** in the US (some very successfully), but on the whole there’s much less of this than in China because in the US economic and political power is more broadly distributed, the US is overall richer, regulatory and political institutions which try to curb abuses are much better developed, and there’s much better press freedom, freedom of association, etc. in the US. Unfortunately, in my opinion the US is moving in the wrong direction on a lot of this stuff, and our society is becoming more politically and economically unequal and power is becoming more centralized. I don’t have any idea how to reverse these trends, and I find them very scary. I think if we don’t see a big correction life could get really really hard for a large number of Americans in another 15 or 20 years, much harder than today.

[hwood34]

(At least currently... I have no idea what the story will be like in 20 or 50 years.)

Well, that booming economy of theirs should slow down now that their workers are actually demanding (and starting to get) liveable wages, which will hurt factories abilities to shovel junk out the door for next-o-nothing

[fohat.digs]

Jacobolus -

I very much agree with you on the macro level. Ever-increasing concentration of wealth and power has never been successfully sustained in the long-term, and the short-term consequences can be devastating, especially as the back side of the curve slides down.

On the personal level, as a 10th-generation middle-class American myself, your observation:

The biggest problem is when people of differing cultural expectations interact with each-other and end up with severe misunderstandings of each-other.

There are plenty of aspects of American middle-class culture that people from Japan, or the Middle East, or West Africa, or even England, find to be unusual, confusing, distasteful, or in some cases morally reprehensible, “ugly and evil”.

is absolutely true.

I am generally "soft" on immigration and do not have much problem with people coming to America with the intention of becoming Americans. Until recently, assimilation was usually looked upon as an ideal to be accomplished swiftly and efficiently.

But even as a proud "bleeding-heart liberal" I am disturbed when I see immigrants bring their (mostly primitive, ignorant, in my opinion) third-world values here and wear them on their sleeves for generations.

And if I feel this way, it comes as no surprise that the "white backlash" of the real haters is 2+ orders of magnitude worse.

But the real poison that escalates something like this from being a socio-political debate is the injection of religion, which each faction uses to legitimize their own attitudes, and sometimes even empower them to go to any lengths, up to and including murder, to assert their worldview and "cleanse" society of people who are different.

[jacobolus]

Here are some aspects of mainstream middle-class American culture that I think various other cultural groups find odd/distasteful/ugly (all of these are huge generalizations/stereotypes which obviously don’t apply to everyone, and also can be said about other places):

* We work ourselves to death, even those who make all the money they need. There’s a pervasive cultural idea that “any time I’m not working is being wasted”, and so Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacation days than anyone, and when they do vacation, they bring their work along. We have the least parental leave of anyone in the developed world.

* We buy all kinds of **** we can’t afford. We buy houses that are too big, cars that are too big, all kinds of furniture and clothing and gadgets that we don’t need. We take debt we can’t afford and pay for everything with credit cards. We’re terrible at financial planning and saving money.

* We have a very weak concept of family, especially extended family. Many families hardly spend time together except to watch TV, or hang out in the same space working or playing on their own screens. Kids are sent to daycare from a very young age or in rich families are cared for by nannies because parents don’t have the time to raise them. Our families disperse widely around the country, rarely to come together. We leave our elderly relatives to rot away first in lonely houses and later in retirement homes / assisted living communities / hospitals. Many of them barely get visited.

* All of our infrastructure is designed around the automobile. We never walk anywhere, because it’s almost impossible in many places. Owning a car in most of the US is an economic necessity, and people without cars (kids, old people, poor people, disabled people, visiting foreigners, etc.) are screwed. We have almost no real transit infrastructure, and our cities are seas of parking lots and highways.

* We sexualize young children, especially young girls, starting from when they’re toddlers. All of our toys are gendered and many are designed to reflect and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. We have sexualized beauty pageants for children. Even very young girls get their ears pierced, and have their hair and makeup done, and wear clothing designed to be sexy. In a broader way, we sexualize women’s bodies and fetishize a very particular body type, and constantly bombard everyone with images of sexualized women’s bodies in our media and advertising. The great majority of women feel like they are required to wear makeup daily, often to wear high heels, etc. Many women, especially young women, suffer low self esteem or sometimes severe depression based on their bodies, sometimes resulting in eating disorders.

* All of our cultural traditions are either designed as marketing tools, or have been coöpted by marketers, and are now crassly commercial. Every American holiday is now at heart a celebration of consumerism, shopping, and eating piles of candy.

* We eat an incredibly unhealthy diet, with ridiculous portion sizes, to the point that a huge percentage of people are obese.

* We have a broken healthcare system (yes, even after ACA) which is simultaneously the most expensive in the world, and one of the least effective in a developed country. People who get sick or injured can easily bankrupt themselves and their families.

* We make people pay ridiculous amounts for higher education, and as a result a large number of young people have crippling debt which they can’t ever erase.

I could keep going, but you get the idea...

[fohat.digs]

I agree with everything you said there, 100%

But those are all the things that we do to ourselves.

The off-topic / topic that was running before concerned how we treat strangers in business confrontations.

And whether it is more virtuous to strive for fairness and transparency or to gain maximum benefit to self (at the probable expense of others).

[jacobolus]

The off-topic / topic that was running before concerned how we treat strangers in business confrontations.

You started talking about how “immigrants bring their (mostly primitive, ignorant, in my opinion) third-world values here and wear them on their sleeves for generations” and then about how they use religion to “empower them to go to any lengths, up to and including murder, to assert their worldview and "cleanse" society of people who are different”, neither of which has anything to do with business dealings with strangers. I think (a) you’re really mischaracterizing most, nearly all, all immigrants in the US in a very offensive way, and (b) calling people “primitive” because their value system differs is totally unhelpful. I was just trying to point out that there are some aspects of US culture that other people find similarly ugly.

[fohat.digs]

I think (a) you’re really mischaracterizing most

This really needs to stop. Your points have been well taken and I have been courteous, but I do not appreciate the way you surgically transformed your last two quotations to remove my carefully-placed qualifiers.

Leaving out my "I am disturbed when I see" condition made it sound like I was making a very general statement rather than a very specific one.

And to replace "and sometimes even empower them" with "to empower them" is more egregious.

*   *   *   *   *
And why is it that you can quote me, but I can't quote you, anyway?

[jacobolus]

“I am disturbed when I see immigrants bring their (mostly primitive, ignorant, in my opinion) third-world values here and wear them on their sleeves for generations.” isn’t a narrowly qualified statement. I suppose in a logical sense, this means that there is one immigrant somewhere who meets these criteria and you are disturbed about it. But in regular plain conversation, this implies a sweeping generalization about some substantial portion of immigrants, something caused by their immigrant-ness that causes them to be disturbing. I am not trying to twist you words or misquote you, I was just shortening to fit it into the grammatical structure of my sentence.

I think first-generation immigrants, or later-generation immigrants, for the most part share similar flaws and foibles to everyone else. There are some unique things about them (for instance, immigrants tend to work really hard, are often a bit more materialistic, and often put greater pressure their children because “we came to give you a better future”, etc. etc.), but “primitive ignorance” isn’t in any of my experience more common among immigrants than among folks whose families came to the US in the mid-19th century.

Anyway, this is all neither here nor there.

As for why you can’t quote me, perhaps it’s some kind of bug in your web browser? Or it could just be that the forum software is broken.

[digi]

[fohat.digs]

isn’t a narrowly qualified statement.

this implies a sweeping generalization



This conversation is making me feel the way I do when I am haggling over a price against my will.

I used the word "when" to narrowly define my feeling - when I see a certain thing, I feel one way, and when I am not seeing that thing, I am not feeling that way.

My problem is trying to understand [existentially, mind you], why a person would immigrate to a country but try to bring the "old country" there with them. I know that there are strong memories and emotional ties that take a couple of generations to fade away, and that is fine, but, to quote Edison: "tradition is the greatest obstacle to progress"

[jacobolus]

This conversation is making me feel the way I do when I am haggling over a price against my will.

Heh, fair enough. The internet is pretty bad for conversations. Sitting over a table with a couple of beers works much better.

My problem is trying to understand [existentially, mind you], why a person would immigrate to a country but try to bring the "old country" there with them. I know that there are strong memories and emotional ties that take a couple of generations to fade away, and that is fine, but, to quote Edison: "tradition is the greatest obstacle to progress"

There are as many reasons to immigrate as their are immigrants. Many are trying to escape the “old country” for one reason or another: for example because they can’t find a job, can’t support a family, don’t like the political system, don’t like the city organization, etc. But others just go traveling for the experience and fall in love with the new place or fall in love with a person, prefer the food/music, feel like the new place is somewhere they can do the most good, etc. etc.

The American expats that I know (who live in Japan, Mexico, France, Hong Kong, Germany, England, ...) are there either because they prefer the way cities and society is organized, or they moved to follow a boyfriend/girlfriend, or they found a good job located overseas (often a foreign branch of a company they started working at in the US), or are just abroad temporarily for a few years, because they’re still in their 20s/early 30s and don’t yet know what they want or where they want to end up.

The immigrants to the US that I know are mostly here for economic opportunity: undocumented Mexican migrants fleeing an economy there that has been in shambles for decades, and various other folks from all over the world I’ve talked to now and then, like West African taxi drivers, Egyptian and Lebanese restaurant owners, a Russian guy who owned a laundromat, a French dance teacher, etc. I know a whole bunch of Indian, Chinese, and European programmers and IT guys who are here because the Bay Area is where the computer jobs are. I also know a few folks who fled as refugees, because they felt their lives threatened in their home countries.

In general, I don’t think very many immigrants are trying to turn the US into their own countries or bring the old country with them, exactly. But people’s cultural expectations are hard to change. I know that as an American kid in Mexico, I often found parts of the culture there to be uncomfortable. To take a trivial example, every middle-aged female stranger wanted to kiss me and pinch my cheeks &c. in a way that I found very invasive, because the US has a lot less cultural expectation of physical touching than mainstream in Mexico. (By contrast, in East Asia, there’s very little touching at all, much less hugging or handshakes than in the US, either among acquaintances or family..) When I would push those women away and offer a handshake instead, I wasn’t trying to bring the old country along, but just enforcing my own conception of my personal space, which differed from the norm there. There are all kinds of other differences from place to place, such as when you should offer gifts, whether it’s acceptable to turn down invitations, how to signal that you want to stop eating or whether it’s acceptable to not eat something you find unpalatable, how much you should smile and in which situations, etc., which seem like relatively trivial things but end up causing big misunderstandings.

Or if by bringing the old country along you mean immigrants moving to neighborhoods with people who speak their language, eat their food, know their customs, etc., that’s just an entirely natural thing: people have been settling in foreign enclaves of cosmopolitan cities for thousands of years. (For instance if you look at the ruins of Maya cities from 900 AD you can find neighborhoods full of architecture and artifacts that are similar to the style found 1000 miles away. Or I’m sure you could find similar in ancient cities in Italy, Turkey, or China.)

[vivalarevolución]

This conversation is making me feel the way I do when I am haggling over a price against my will.

Heh, fair enough. The internet is pretty bad for conversations. Sitting over a table with a couple of beers works much better.

My problem is trying to understand [existentially, mind you], why a person would immigrate to a country but try to bring the "old country" there with them. I know that there are strong memories and emotional ties that take a couple of generations to fade away, and that is fine, but, to quote Edison: "tradition is the greatest obstacle to progress"

There are as many reasons to immigrate as their are immigrants. Many are trying to escape the “old country” for one reason or another: for example because they can’t find a job, can’t support a family, don’t like the political system, don’t like the city organization, etc. But others just go traveling for the experience and fall in love with the new place or fall in love with a person, prefer the food/music, feel like the new place is somewhere they can do the most good, etc. etc.

The American expats that I know (who live in Japan, Mexico, France, Hong Kong, Germany, England, ...) are there either because they prefer the way cities and society is organized, or they moved to follow a boyfriend/girlfriend, or they found a good job located overseas (often a foreign branch of a company they started working at in the US), or are just abroad temporarily for a few years, because they’re still in their 20s/early 30s and don’t yet know what they want or where they want to end up.

The immigrants to the US that I know are mostly here for economic opportunity: undocumented Mexican migrants fleeing an economy there that has been in shambles for decades, and various other folks from all over the world I’ve talked to now and then, like West African taxi drivers, Egyptian and Lebanese restaurant owners, a Russian guy who owned a laundromat, a French dance teacher, etc. I know a whole bunch of Indian, Chinese, and European programmers and IT guys who are here because the Bay Area is where the computer jobs are. I also know a few folks who fled as refugees, because they felt their lives threatened in their home countries.

In general, I don’t think very many immigrants are trying to turn the US into their own countries or bring the old country with them, exactly. But people’s cultural expectations are hard to change. I know that as an American kid in Mexico, I often found parts of the culture there to be uncomfortable. To take a trivial example, every middle-aged female stranger wanted to kiss me and pinch my cheeks &c. in a way that I found very invasive, because the US has a lot less cultural expectation of physical touching than mainstream in Mexico. (By contrast, in East Asia, there’s very little touching at all, much less hugging or handshakes than in the US, either among acquaintances or family..) When I would push those women away and offer a handshake instead, I wasn’t trying to bring the old country along, but just enforcing my own conception of my personal space, which differed from the norm there. There are all kinds of other differences from place to place, such as when you should offer gifts, whether it’s acceptable to turn down invitations, how to signal that you want to stop eating or whether it’s acceptable to not eat something you find unpalatable, how much you should smile and in which situations, etc., which seem like relatively trivial things but end up causing big misunderstandings.

Or if by bringing the old country along you mean immigrants moving to neighborhoods with people who speak their language, eat their food, know their customs, etc., that’s just an entirely natural thing: people have been settling in foreign enclaves of cosmopolitan cities for thousands of years. (For instance if you look at the ruins of Maya cities from 900 AD you can find neighborhoods full of architecture and artifacts that are similar to the style found 1000 miles away. Or I’m sure you could find similar in ancient cities in Italy, Turkey, or China.)

We are more alike than we are different.

[suicidal_orange]

To ignore all that's been said before your self-description sounds very much like that of an Enneagram type 9, perhaps it would help to have a read about the recommendations made for people who identify with that type (if you're against pseudo scientific pop psychology feel free to ignore me, but reading about such things has helped me grow so it's worth a go)