BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
Yep, equivalently US citizens who move to Europe largely move to big cities and live in apartments.
Our version of single family home in Britain is a bit different from that in the US. This picture from your link shows a nice symmetrical structure in the middle which Americans might think is a single house for a single family. In reality it's two houses (semi detached) for two different families which share a central wall.
Fully detached houses etc. do exist but they are very much an exception and even then we don't have "suburbia" in the sense the US does, you'll often find such fully detached houses a short walk away from a 6 storey tall council estate and a commercial area a few minutes away too. There is very little "this is where houses are, full stop.".
I've lived in a big apartment block which had exactly 0 year space and the nearest grocery store was literally on our ground floor (though it was more expensive than the supermarket 5 minutes walk away). And yeah I had access to a well maintained very large green space two minutes from the apartment lobby much bigger than the yard even massive detached houses have.
Agreed. The whole "suburb" thing as defined here in uniquely American. Here in the UK we also have homes with a yard and a dog and a car (though some of the most expensive properties in central London won't have an exclusive yard and potentially not even off street parking given that they literally share walls with their neighboring super expensive properties (they are terraced, not detached). They are amazing places to live (hence the prices) but Cowen's phrasing would put them as not "attractive".
Plus the whole controlling your school district is a very American thing as well, it just seems quaint and weird in the UK: schooling should be run by professionals, not the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy. As we move to a more and more multi polar world US citizens need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think like them and while in the past they had the luxury of being able to ignore what we said without much consequence this is fast dissipating and they will now need to learn some cultural sensitivity like the rest of us.
Both things can be true at once.
Honestly I would not claim to know what any of these people were thinking, remember this was said in the early 20th century so their standards of civilisation and decadence were probably quite different from ours, but the general sentiment of Americans being seen first as uncivilised barbarians and transitioning straight to being parvenus when they finally get wealth still is as relevant today as it would have been then, if you ask my non American social circle (the Americans I know would half agree and half vigorously deny it, in the "doth protest too much" sense).
If Republicans think it's perfectly reasonable to boost fringe political parties in Europe because they genuinely believe that's in the best interest of the USA then it's perfectly reasonable for European countries to officially adopt positions supporting the Democrats wholesale because they genuinely believe that's in the best interests of Europe. Something tells me the Republicans would throw a tantrum if it actually happened though.
There is a quote, often attributed to Clemenceau or Wilde or sometimes Shaw that goes:
American is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Seems more and more pertinent by the day if you ask me...
so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check
Fair enough, I remember reading something like this somewhere on the internet a few years ago and so brought it up. I fully accept that I didn't even bother to check, and yes, I should have done that.
Let nobody say that I don't admit to making bad points when I actually make bad points.
That's positively cheap for even the outskirts of London or even 2nd tier UK cities, remember the figure is CAD.
The other thing is that people aren't comparing like for like. NYC in the 1960s was a much smaller city than NYC today. If you look at similar sized cities as NYC was in the 60s today the pricing of housing in a similar area in real terms is basically the same as it was in NYC in the 60s.
EDIT: This is wrong.
- Prev
- Next

Or else you continued to get laughed at and have power moved away from you because the rest of the (western at least) world stops accepting you as the primus inter pares and then lose the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits because you have the world's reserve currency and can freely export away your inflation. If the UK tried the level of profligacy which has become standard in the US we'd end up under an IMF programme in 2 years.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been. This isn't just a me thing, there was a recent piece in the FT how the appropriate response for the EU now given the US reducing its support for Ukraine is to hit back hard on US tech with tariffs rather than the "roll over and take it" with the 15% tariffs they accepted earlier this year. It's now becoming fairly standard that when I meet someone new from the US they'll volunteer by themselves unprompted within the first few minutes that they "are one of the good ones"...
More options
Context Copy link