Otherwise known as hollywood accounting

Not so sure about that. Perhaps they just weren't sufficiently comfortable with English. I met a girl from Hong Kong once, that was essentially the master of sarcasm. She had lived a few years in the US though. Another one living all her life Guangzhou also understood it well.

But in my experience people with an intermediate English level mostly seems to reacts they way you mentioned. Not just sarcasm but with most humour.

I'm ok with very small populations such as Luxembourg and Norway may be an invalid comparison. However comparing Europe as a whole to the US will probably have to wait 50 to 100 years more. For instance Denmark and Romania are about as similar as the state of New York vs Bolivia both culturally, language and economically. Nobody lives in "Europe", but in France or similar. The EU might be striving to become a US equivalent, but is very far today. Many countries are still also outside the union, even more outside the euro zone.

But with the danger of a flag waving contest, by which metric are Norway and Luxembourg merely close? Not in terms of economy. Even compared to New York state only.

No reason to be so defensive though. You guys still rock in terms of total economy.

Your last off-topic comment makes you seem to hold a biased grudge against Europe. What's up?

I've heard this point about lacking ability of the general public to serve 'automation jobs' quite a few times, and you may very well be right.

However I wonder if people 100 years ago imagined the things the general public are now able to these days. For instance not only read and write, but operate complex machinery that instantly communicates their thoughts across the entire world. Yeah most of those thoughts may be youtube comment quality, but that's besides the point.

Probably true while speaking of Europe as if it was an actual nation. But replace 'Europe' with either Norway, Sweden, Germany and few others, and I'd be surprised they weren't competitive in most your listed claims.

I'd think you're right, but I still hear plenty of non-to-semi-technical people making crash/unstable related jokes about windows. Your experience may differ

Whether those are fallacies or not doesn't really matter in the short term. The reputation is there, and has been there for decades. Most of the time justified imho. That image will take many more years to change

Nah. They should've learned something else from Vista. That if your current version is unpopular, you can raise prices of the last popular one and laugh all the way to the bank.

By accident modded this "Informative". Posting as to erease my grave error. Have you even looked at the sales train wreck Nokia have had since partnering with MS?

Depends on their menu design. With a huge tablet and a well designed menu, it's quite possible to get an overview at just a glance, and get a lot done by pressing a button or two.

Compare this to many modern cars (like Audi and BMW) where they seem to prefer a complex menu, 5" screen, controlled by a wheel. Operating these still require 100% focus on screen. They also still have some normal one-use buttons, but are the teslas absolutely stripped from all buttons?

To nitpick Germany is more number #6 in Europe when it comes to average gross monthly salary. Switzerland, Norway and Denmark thrones the list.

They are recyclable. How efficiently recycled? I don't know, but will likely improve in time.

Not as bad as you think. It could even result in a net positive. A big problem today in the electric grid is peak power. The grid is in many places already maxed out during beginning and end of office hours. However during night time the available capacity is huge. Coincidentally most current electric car owner charge their cars during night time.

Also note that many power technologies have big problems adjusting to changing power requirements (like the mentioned peak power). A nuclear power facility for instance takes weeks to adjust power output, and months to shut down. Not to mention its recurring costs are about the same running at 100% as 30%. Imagine everyone had a big power bank in their cars connected to the grid (most of the time). Now people could potentially charge and buy cheaper power during times of excess production, then sell (parts) of it back to the grid during expensive peak power (for a net profit of the car owner). A similar principle applies with unreliable sources such as wind and solar. This would make electricity cheaper for everyone, by reducing waste production.

By choice. In the US. This could be fixed independently. Even if you'd build a power company running on gasoline, this would still be a net gain due to bigger engines being more efficient.

Every bigger religion has had bad apples, that's true. What's unique about Islam is that their leader Muhammed himself raped, enslaved, kidnapped, murdered and at least ordered people to stone in his name. This is pretty well documented in Hadith, an important source of Islamic knowledge for every interpretation of Islam as far as I know.

The mafia analogy doesn't work. No apple employee walks around forcing developers to develop for iOS at gunpoint.

This discussion is fruitless. You didn't even respond to any of my main points.

And I never even mentioned the speech you linked to. I was simply referring to their training, arming and funding of several groups that certainly have Israels death on their public agenda.