There’s a million things Americans can’t comprehend. Not licking billionaire’s boots, for one
In Taiwan, we do roundabouts all wrong. We add traffic lights in the middle of them.
They’ve started using traffic circles in my state. They work sooo much better than traffic lights at intersections.
Roundabouts are even better.
I didn’t realize there was a difference
Traffic circles are not real roundabouts. They are just a road that have a circle shape. For example traffic circles often have traffic lights.
Roundabouts are traffic circles. But they have to be just a circle with “give way” at the entrance. No stop signs, no traffic lights.
I love roundabouts, but goddamn are they annoying when you’re stuck in a route starvation situation. I’ve had bad days when I’m stuck for close to 5 minutes at one near my house depending on time of day and approach route.
There’s quite a few roundabouts near us that have traffic lights that only function during busy traffic. Usually only installed on the busy sides.
Sounds like you need a 2-laner and drivers who understand how they work
It’s already a 2/2.5 lane roundabout, but if you’re on entrance 3, while 1 and 2 are busy as hell, you may not have a window to safely go through.
This roundabout is at a major intersection just off of a freeway and between like 3 different shopping centers, so it’s awful to go through at rush hour. I’ve gotten good at eyeballing windows that scare the piss out of my wife in that roundabout.
I mean sure, but I’ve been stuck at lights that long too
At least at a long red I can run it safely if there’s no one around (I had to do that at my last apartment complex because the secondary road had stupid long lights overnight, and mine regularly skipped my direction).
American here, I have no problem with them. There was a roundabout nearby in my city. When they unleashed it, the first driver brave enough to traverse it swerved off the road and died on the spot. It caused such a scene that the next 3 cars watching entered the wrong way and started to pile up. More cars piled up over the coming weeks, it couldn’t be taped off because the city service workers were unfortunately not Europeans and also could not traverse the labyrinth, they too piled up and died of starvation. Eventually it collapsed into a singularity under its growing weight (Americans are fat, so it was over the Chandrasekhar limit), cars add into the eternal swirl each day and emanate slowly as Hawking radiation. It’s quite beautiful to see.
I’ve taken a trip to see this infamous roundabout - it’s quite pretty at night!
Interestingly they spin counterclockwise here, but clockwise in Australia.
How can one be too stupid to use a roundabout?
I’ve seen
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Turning left without going around the center
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Stopping to allow someone into the roundabout intended as a kind gesture and
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My mom insisted that in her car I use the left turn signal if my roundabout exit is to the left of my entrance
Yeah your mom is right. An entrance signal is useful on smaller roundabouts, but is always less important than the exit right signal
As a European it’s very cute listening to you guys working out how to signal on a roundabout.
But to give some help… Signal as if you’re going to continue round until you pass the exit before the one you need at which point signal for the exit.
I think using your left signal if you’re leaving on the third exit of a four exit roundabout is actually standard practice in some countries. I saw people do this a lot in Norway for instance.
Oh? This is actually great news.
I’m a grownup who got a driving license late, but even after the practice and test I didn’t know the answer to how to signal out of a roundabout. So I looked it up.
In my home state, the law is: never use your left signal at a roundabout (unless switching to a left lane within a roundabout). So I assumed it was universal. Maybe not.
That’s probably how it should be. Otherwise the only way the left signal is useful is if you see it right when the car enters. Otherwise you’ll have no idea what exit it’s meant to be for.
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I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘can’t figure it out’ as much as ‘don’t like change’. We’ve been putting roundabouts in my shithole state and the number of people who complain about them boggles the mind. They will successfully navigate them, but they’ll whinge about it the whole time.
This happened to me just the other day as I was chauffeuring some good old boy around. Mind you he wasn’t even driving, but still had to let it be known that he disapproved. There was no traffic so I barely had to slow down to navigate the intersection and his input was “I hate these things, they just slow you down!”. I tried pointing out that if it had been a 4-way stop we would have had to stop, so it was actually faster this way. I don’t know if he was immune to logic or just unwilling to admit that something that was different than what he was used to had a benefit, but he just repeated that he hated them, so I dropped the subject.
I don’t know if he was immune to logic or just unwilling to admit that something that was different than what he was used to had a benefit
You said they were a (presumably white) old American dude, so I would wager that it’s all of the above.
Yeah, he was a cracker. Here’s the thing though, in other ways he seems like a perfectly normal and decent human being.
We passed by an Amish produce stand and he had me stop. He got a bunch of fresh Veggies and then we stopped at a Chinese restaurant where he went inside and gave the lady working there a bunch of them. As we were leaving he even had a short conversation with her in Chinese. I’m sure it was very simple things like “Have a good one” and “Goodbye” or something similar, but I thought it was cool he had learned it. That kind of thing is pretty rare around here.
In the car he was telling me how they had recently lost one of their children in a car accident. It was heartbreaking. Sounds like he has known them for quite while.
He then had me drive to a neighboring college town that has people from all over the world come to go to school, so it’s a fairly diverse place. He was telling me he liked it there because there were so many different kinds of interesting people. We stopped by his Dry Cleaners which was also ran by Chinese people and he left them with the other half of the vegetables.
Then on the way out of town he had me stop at the International Market. He asked me if I had ever tried Eel before and when I said I hadn’t he bought me a couple of cans (it’s ok, nothing to write home about imo).
So yeah, he was an old white redneck, but he wasn’t a total piece of shit and fairly open minded about some things. I’m not sure why he hates roundabouts, but that attitude is super common around here, among all sorts of people.
Unfortunately, it’s a thing. I’ve had people try to merge onto the roundabout when I’m in it, and then honk at me when I didn’t let them through. If any of these people ever do hit my car, I am not going to try to correct them ahead of time so that they perjurer themselves to the cop who eventually shows up to take the report.
Which I think speaks to the terrible level of driver training in America. A roundabout is a combination of things that you should already know about as a driver, like how yield signs work, and how to stay in your lane and follow lines on the road. If you can’t put those thoughts together, then I question your ability to drive safely at all.
I asked my neighbor, he said Europeans are stupid for driving in circles all day. So, that’s how.
for a country who’s core values is Car, they suck at driving
Our core value is taking necessary services and pricing them like a luxury.
Spread everything out really far, get rid of public transit, and, since everybody still needs a license to drive your expensive cars, make the driving test super easy to pass so almost everybody can drive. Boom, 1.2 passengers per car and nobody can actually drive them well.
Yep. This person gets it. The auto and gasoline industry basically ruined the environment and our culture so a few select people can make a few $$$.
I reeeeal American I just don’t want my tax dollars going to fund other people’s firefighting costs. Can we privatize that??
Also a right to bear arms and own weapons is sacrosanct and very important to my people. Why can’t our people please finally be allowed go have nuclear weapons. Their kids need some too. Very important.
Idiots.
Our core value isn’t Car, it’s “individual freedom, especially at the cost or inconvenience of others”. It just so happens that Car aligns pretty well with that
So interesting to me that Americans think being dependent on a car is “freedom”. Individual freedom should be the freedom to get to where you need to go with viable options to walk, bike, train, bus, tram, or drive.
I think you’re focusing too much on the “individual freedom” bit and missing the “at the cost or inconvenience of others” bit
We rarely have other viable options. Long before most of us were born, the U.S. built an infrastructure centered around cars, sidelining other forms of transportation.
In America, owning a car is often the key to freedom of movement. So it’s no surprise people equate cars with freedom. Getting people to see how car dependency actually limits our freedom is like trying to wake someone from the Matrix.
To be fair the mindset that a car means freedom is also quite common in Germany too. Especially in the countryside (tbf its often required if you dont want waste a lot of time due to shitty public transportation)
No one can make a profit on people walking, so I dont understand how your point makes any sense.
edit: oh wait! footware and sports drink companies. OK, well, you’ve made some compelling points here. And we use small handed children to in America to make these shoes and sports drinks, right?
Yeah, you can’t drive like a dangerous asshole on your way to park your full size truck based SUV across two handicap spots if you don’t have a car in the first place!
you don’t have to be smart to drive, we made sure of that.
Hey, I represent that implication!
Muh freedum to die in a raging, alcohol sparked ball of fire, metal, bone, and blood.
Just like the founding fathers intended
A bunch of white landlords in their 20s‑ish who owned other human beings def understand me better than anyone else
This was brilliant.
I’ve never seen this copypasta and I love it.
I typed it up while driving through a roundabout. It came from the hea
Laughs in Australian
You can pick up a coffee mug with a $9.99 price tag, then be asked to pay $10.74 at the register. The German mind cannot comprehend this
Not any sane mind can comprehend this.
I can comprehend it, but I’m certainly not happy about it
sane
sane
🎶Insane in the taxbrain🎶
🔔
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None of these a reasons the store, which posts it’s own prices and barcodes, can’t just include the total on the tag, or better yet set the price to the nearest whole number (or division of .10/.25) and take the tax out of that full amount. I know because I live in the midwest, I worked in retail/grocery store and our store piloted a test program of doing exactly that. Customers were incredibly happy and our overall sales actual went up because people who didn’t normally shop with us started to because it was easier to budget.
We got shut down by corporate beancounters who were freaking out because we were supposedly making less money. Except our sales and profits were up for the 8 weeks we demo’d the program and 4 weeks after we were forced to stop sales dropped below our year-on-year average. Literally forced to stop a program that benefited the customer and retailer because corporate greed couldn’t tolerate the customer not being screwed.
There is zero reason that can’t be on the price tag.
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Prices tags are normally prepared using computers which are famously good at maths. Here in the UK, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland have different rules for tax on certain products and yet everything is advertised with the final price.
I would love tax-included pricing (or maybe VAT?), though from what I know:
TV ads, sponsorship spots, circulars all complicate this.
TV ads usually don’t mention pricing for national brands. Local ads like circulars are generally for just one store anyway. All of this would be low effort to do. The only reason they don’t is it tricks people into spending more than they want.
Prices are printed on packaging for many things too, books, magazines, bags of potatoe chips.
So then stores would have to cover the manufacturer price with a higher one just in their store. Which is a waste of time and material if you can just condition a population to ignore the price jump at the register.
So does Europe.
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But the point is the same right? Whether you call them countries or states or counties or municipalities, there are multiple levels of government with their own distinct tax structures, but Europe has no problem displaying the final sale price on their tags. Why would this be harder to implement in the US than in Europe?
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Germany certainly is a state if you use the right definition.
And counties that have their own sales taxes. So not even within the state is the rate the same.
Not only can Americans comprehend it, they actively choose for it to be this way. Macys tried to switch to straight forward pricing and it did not go well for them so they switched back to their bs sales.
Imo it would only work here if everyone does it at the same time and if it’s implemented by legislation enforcing it. If one company does it, their competitors can take advantage of the perceived differences.
They could also first have both prices and slowly make the “before taxes” less noticeable over years
I thought that was JC Penney’s
E: it was
I stopped off in Oregon once for some McDonald’s. My total ended up being $8.00 exactly and I let out a little smile and told the cashier ‘wow perfect, what are the chances’
She looked at me like I was an idiot, and I learned some things about Oregon that day.
Oregon has entered the chat
neither can the Oregonian mind
A lot of germany has deposits actually, so an extra 25-50 cents on top for cans and glass bottles
Which are only added in fine print on the price tag usually. But it’s more like 8-25 cents for cans, most plastic bottles, and some glass bottles.
Mr bean, is that you?
As an American, I can ride my mobility scooter for 74 hours and still be in Walmart. Comprend that.
Do they have pit stops to recharge the batteries at Walmart? I would imagine there is also a burrito stand nearby
They’re not called burritos any more. They’re called Americas.
If you imply different you’ll get deported.
I give it 3 months until it’s renamed the Gulf of Burrito
Schaut mal, Kinder, Big Ben
Unexpected European Vacation quote.
>my citizens in Cities:Skylines
Don’t forget to put a toll booth on every street
LANE CHANGE
do germans move their cars like the flintstones or how do they manage to have fuel/battery for 74hrs?
Two words: German Efficiency
it’s a flintstones thing then
I hear their gas devices are very efficient.
Gassing out your soldiers during the first deployment of chemical weapons because you forgot about the wind is less than impressive.
Their cars run off centrifugal force.
Easy, just pick a roundabout that goes downhill.
Since you’re in a roundabout, you just need a large funnel into the gas tank. Every time around, someone standing at the side pours a bit of fuel in while you pass, so you get a splash of fuel per lap!
Just add a long range tank in the trunk.
A normal car can do 1600 km or 1000 miles on a tank. By normal of course I mean diesel-powered German executive class sedan or wagon with an 80 liter tank.
At the low speeds of the roundabout, you might use more fuel, so maybe it’ll only do 1200 km on a tank. Just use a long range tank and you’re golden. They use them in endurance racing, or to go illegally fast for extended periods of time in Cannonball Runs.
There’s a few diesel cars that can reach that distance on one tank (though it requires hypermiling)
I did not know
hypermiling
means making post-purchase changes to your car to make it more efficient. Why wouldn’t manufacturers sell them in better quality to begin with?
You’ve never heard of NASCAR. We are good at turning left for hours on end.
You’ve been turning right since at least '80…and you started far on the right already.
Hey!
Don’t forget Nixon.
Oh, please. There’s way more to NASCAR than that.
I really wanna know what they put in to Google to make it spit out that time estimate.
Probably a scripted route.
You can fit 74 Germanys inside a Texas roundabout. The European mind cannot comprehend this.
You can fit 74 texases inside an Australian cattle station. They’re hilariously angry about it.
That says more about the fat-ass Texans than the Germans
I think those are called beltways
American here, you can absolutely drive at least one more hour than that. Idiots.
Actually, driving without a destination is forbidden in Germany. It’s unenforceable in most cases because it’s easy to make one up but if you keep circling a roundabout, there is a case to be made against you.
Actually, driving without a destination is forbidden in Germany.
Completely reasonable, but somehow I’m still surprised that this is a thing.
