Move to US is an option- am I mad?

[Tryingtohelp12]

We’ve had the opportunity to move to the US with my dh job. Are we mad to consider it?
I feel like we are stuck in a bit of a rut and in the future we will regret not taking more risks. we have 2 (about to be 3) children who would be aged 5,2 and newborn.
pros
great for long term career for dh
experience
change
increase standard of living in terms of salary

cons
young children being away from extended family
limit on my ‘career’ as I couldn’t work as we’d have no family support - I’m honestly not super passionate about work
reliant on husband/husbands job

Are we mad for considering it?

Again the same strange argument. How do you know what experience i had in interacting with whom? And when did i say that i ve only ever spoken to people working in ‘entry level’ positions?

I don’t ve time for long write-ups, so just gave a few examples. Suffice to say that I work in a professional environment, where most of my work related interactions are with highly educated people (most with a postgraduate degree) and i found similar patterns there too. As also stated by some other poster on this thread.

Anyways i don’t see much point in extending this debate with you. Good luck

??? What has a ‘university acceptance rate’ got to do with level of common sense and intellectual ability of the individuals?

George W Bush and Donald Trump are ivy league graduates.

@BlauVogel

How do you know what experience i had in interacting with whom?
I know because you have posted here about your disappointment with their intellect.

And when did i say that i ve only ever spoken to people working in ‘entry level’ positions?

These are entry level jobs:
It really is a struggle many times to talk to people in pharmacies, doctor receptionists, School administrators, DMV offices etc etc Try calling ANY customer services number for “something basic” and see how it goes.

My questions are not an 'argument'.

I'm trying to figure out how you came to the conclusions you have arrived at. If your conclusions are based on interactions with relatively few people over a relatively short period of time, in a language that is not your first language - which seems to be the case - then I think they can be treated as sad incidents, whereas you are using them to make very broad, sweeping statements about Americans as a whole.

@BlauVogel

What is your problem with the 'common sense' of the Americans you have encountered? You've mentioned this at least twice now.

Have you ever looked up the number of Nobel laureates who are graduates of Ivy League schools (plus Stanford, U Chicago)?

If you're going to make assertions like this, it's on you to provide evidence. Since all you have is your own anecdotal experience, offered with no actual examples and only vague assertions, all anyone else can offer is theirs.

mine is that minor bureaucratic functionaries in any country are largely hamstrung by institutional or corporate policy and much less their own common sense. And insofar as they are... the "computer says no" skit was from Little Britain.

And if you think you are somehow entitled to “report” people for sharing their opinions & observations. May be an internet forum isn’t the right place for you.

if your opinion or observation is racist or xenophobic, of course I am entitled to report you to MN. And your post would be deleted. As it happens I don't bother with the anti-american stuff - it is all so predictable and repetitive.

Most people on MN (like most Brits) only know America through media representations, and perhaps also a holiday or two.

They use America as an “other” to help construct their own supposedly different English middle class identity. They do this while forgetting there are huge swathes of ill informed and reactionary Brits - eg. Brexit voters.

That said, there are some differences that are real. On average, American are more likely to: have less vacation time, own a gun, be religious, support more right wing political ideas etc. But that said, an average, of course, is only that.

True @GodessOfThunder. But my guess is that anti- intellectualism and lack of so-called common sense is roughly equal relative to the population in both countries.

Yes, I expect they’re less different in terms of propensity than some here suggest.

Many Brits would be quick to condemn, say, an American not knowing where, say Bulgaria is exactly, but I would imagine they aren’t so hot in their knowledge of, say, Central America or the US itself. Both countries might share a language but they gave rather different back yards.

Also, to agree with you, “common sense” is a social construct that is situational. It’s not some essentialized, innate phenomenon that can be “compared” across cultures.

It’s nonsense to claim Americans have “less common sense” than Brits or anyone else.

Im a joint citizen BTW

I'm also a dual citizen - moved to the US when I was 52, which was 21 years ago. I agree about common sense. There were a lot of small things I had to acquire "common sense" about when I came over here, and similarly there are common sense things that my American husband has to be told about when we go to the UK.

Regardless of the leave you get, in 20 years of working with Americans, they don’t take more than a week’s holiday and they always check their email.

so you might get 30 days etc etc but you won’t do a two week stretch.

on the other hand everyone is off for the holidays like Labour Day and 4th July, Christmas, thanksgiving. There is no ‘cover’. So that is a bonus

Really? I worked there for 15 years until quite recently and myself and most of my colleagues took two week holidays.

I guess there are differences by industry, but you shouldn’t talk about it in absolutes.

I'm on a two week vacation right now.

Many financial services jobs are required to take 2 weeks. It is also that people in the US like to take smaller trips more often, personally I don’t want a 2 week holiday anymore a I would rather spread things out over the year.

As I said earlier in this thread, it's just factually true that Americans in general get less holiday/vacation time than British people do. There will always be exceptions to any rule but I don't get why posters attempt to deny that this is generally the case.

If you're in the UK, you can generally do both!

I have a two week holiday plus two week long ones plus a few days off this year.

True but the price of hotels and flights these days 2 weeks and multiple other weeks isn’t happening anyway! A 2 week holiday somewhere nice would bankrupt me at the prices these days!

Not denying that people in the UK generally get more vacation time than Americans do. Just attempting to address some of the incorrect generalizations about vacation time in the US that some posters on MN persist in repeating in nearly every thread about life in the US.

But you sort of did deny it earlier in this thread:

There are lots of misconceptions about the US on MN, but I think the supposed lack of time off is probably the most repeated.

It's not a misconception - Americans do generally get less time off.

I don't disagree that there are a lot of random stereotypes about guns and Fox news but I don't think it does Americans any favours to try and claim that the vacation time issue doesn't exist.

It's not a misconception - Americans do generally get less time off

I think this is true, but the MN stock answer is that all Americans get two weeks off....period. And no Bank Holidays.

No matter how many time you explain about vacation time, paid leave, federal holidays, it comes back to "two weeks and not a day more"!

But yes, higher wages with less time off seems to be the average.

And this is basically what I meant in my earlier posts. I never said that we get as much time off as people in the UK and other parts of Europe do. But this notion that no one gets more than 2 weeks in the US is patently false.

See, I don't see much of that - I do see a lot of "that's a misconception, I get a liberal amount of leave" from the Americans...