On 2/13/2016 11:19 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Ed Pawlowski:

Europe definitely has better benefits. What was the wage scale though?
Could they both have the same style of living?

In my experience, the German standard for a similar job is much higher.

But this is a subjective judgment.

Last time I priced them (a loooooong time ago) a pair of Nikes that
cost, say, $50 USD were more like $150 in Germany.... and people there
drive much, much smaller automobiles.....

OTOH, that has to be weighed against 6 weeks of vacation, overtime pay
for working overtime, retirement at full pay, medical coverage,
vastly-greater literacy, and so-forth.

Europe has a different idea of the role of gummit in society.
The US believes society exists so folks can exploit one and other;
the europeans seem to think it exists so folks can *help* one and other.

Huge difference.

"You pays your money and you takes your choice".

I tell my German relatives that I'd emigrate to Germany in a heartbeat
except for one problem: Too Many Germans..... i.e. It's a foreign
culture and German is a infamously-difficult language to learn.

Nonsense! You just fill your mouth with olive-sized jagged stones
and try to pronounce "Petter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers"
*without* letting any of them fall out of your mouth! ;-)

When we would walk around in towns of any size (Mainz, for instance) it
was obvious when we walked into a neighborhood populated mainly by
non-Germans: dog poop on the sidewalks, trash, graffiti, dirt in
general....

Germans, IME, tend to be highly conformist. But, that's from my
observations of "german immigrants" and first descendants thereof.

When I was taking Latin in high school, we had to read Caesar's Gallic
Wars. I remember one part where somebody was talking about the English
and the Germans.

The gist was something to the effect of "Well, the English paint
themselves blue and throw spears at us; but we're going to civilize
them. The Germans, on the other hand, are far more civilized and
developed; but we are never going to get on with them because they're
just so *different*".