Is Westminster School the best school on Earth? STATESMOM returns

[statesmom]

I have a lot to say, don't know if anyone remembers the thread. Let me know if you want to hear from me.

To do that you need to have had an equal chance of being any American. Rawls is about the status of the lowest. The status of the lowest is lower than the status of the lowest European person, I submit

Were you educated in the US?

No he was born rich American

You do find an awful lot hilarious / amusing OP!

FYI, according to the Harvard Style Guide there should only be a single space after a concluding punctuation mark, not a double space.

I was born in Belgium and DH in Canada. Am so grateful that DT’s have both passports which has enabled DD to work for the EU in Brussels and DS, for a global engineering company in Amsterdam. Two of their cousins had a US education but both have now moved back to Canada as the quality of life is better in so many countries compared to the US.

You know that way Donald trump talks..."I'm the best in the world at talking/ being/ blah blah". You sound like him. Well done.

I'm an American immigrant to the UK who much prefers life in the UK. But generalisations are unhelpful because one's experience of life in the two countries depends on so many different factors: income and region and so on.

The way the OP keeps citing that stat about GDP per capita in Mississippi is an example of skewed perspective based on incomplete information. Median income does not tell you how income is distributed across the population!

Try googling 'income distribution in Mississippi', and you will find that the gap between the richest and poorest families is dramatic. The wealth is concentrated at the top. So you have a minority of rich white families, and a much larger percentage of Blacks living below the poverty level. A bit like plantation days in the Old South, huh.

I would much rather live in a country that has the same GDP per capita income, but where the gap between rich and poor is less stark, and where there is a better social infrastructure to help the poorest.

Here, have a short read on economic inequality in the US:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=Income%20inequality%20in%20the%20U.S.,for%20Economic%20Cooperation%20and%20Development.

The OP is part of a small, privileged, elite minority. S/he should not be presenting her/his experience as typical.

2 American companies, Nvidia and Apple, combined are worth more than every single publicly traded company in this nation.

But it does mean that America is wildly more successful than the UK. What UK company actually matters, globally?

And? Why on earth would anyone care about that?! You go to a top UK university, get a great, high-paying job you enjoy, in the UK. Why would you give a moment's thought to how much various American companies are worth? It's just not important.

If you could do it all over, and you could be born in any country, where would you choose to be born?

An honest answer, for most people on this planet, would be America. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

😂😂😂

Oh dear.

OP, is this genuine?!

My (non-American) DH has occasionally been know to satirise my native country by breaking into a rendition of the song, 'I'm proud to be an American, Where at least I know I'm freeeeeeee'.

Usually I find it kind of annoying, it's such a cheap shot, but reading this thread makes me want to burst into that song myself. 😂

(Incidentally he taught politics at Harvard for awhile.)

Apart from the fact that the OP's son attended Westminster, this thread has virtually nothing to do with what the thread title purports (which is a nonsensical thread title in itself).

I know one is supposed to be patriotic, and clearly Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial are all world class, but once you drill down past that level, there are a lot of US universities delivering elite education that British families have never heard of. Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute for example, is an elite science-oriented university that most European companies HR people might just dismiss but in the US, Renssalaer is just a notch below MIT.

The same is true in the UK.

Can you name the university that has a world leading automotive engineering degree?

Google tells me that it is Manchester Met and Coventry in the UK, HAN in the Netherlands and Isik in Turkey, but I am happy to be told I'm wrong.

And while I would have put Coventry in the running in the UK, because of the sheer depth of the engineering tradition there, Manchester Metropolitan would probably not have come up in my mind because I associate it with soft fluffy subjects. We can all get things wrong.

Bristol has a world class aeronautical enginering degree. But it's super competitive. They failed the bottom third of every year, term by term, in 1975/6/7 when I was a student.

Talking about salaries being much higher in the US totally ignores the fact that cost of living is also significantly higher in many parts of the US - certainly in the cities where those high salaried jobs exist. I’m live/work in both the US and UK, but am on a US contract and paid a US salary. The cost of my NY 50% of time allocation far, far outstrips the cost of my London time. Not even vaguely comparable. You can’t just compare salaries without comparing real cost of living, which in my many years of experience living and working in different cities around the world, isn’t even vaguely close to the reported cost indices.

Oh, and I didn’t need to go to university in the US to get a job there. It was actually pretty easy - I’m good at what I do, and many US companies in my field recruit from the UK.

The average wage in MIssissipi, the poorest state in the USA, is higher than the average wage in the UK. I think that's quite a telling factor.

OP, are you testing a WIP sketch for the Edinburgh Fringe? If so, it's very good indeed

I was recently in Portland and it was an absolute shit hole, socially, with people off their faces on Fentanyl. It was shocking. My fear is that this drugs scourge will come to the uk and Europe in the next decade. I haven’t seen anything like this in the uk, or indeed anywhere in the world. Depressing and I couldn’t wait to get out of the USA. Unfortunately, I had to go back to the USA a month later. Different part of the country, same social issues.

This is nothing about cutting down tall poppies, since I’m not even English.

Also, what’s this about Westminster isn’t the best private school? If we’re looking at metrics, it’s the 12th best indie for a levels, and 8th for gcse.

Kings College Wimbledon is the top boys indie at GCSE.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure whether this thread is a spoof or not, but the op does sound a bit… unusual. As the child of academics, I’m used to “oddness” so (given she must have a bright son, so probably bright herself) may be there is a bit of neurodiversity going on… that all said, I was never quite sure if my mother was just a sociopath.

But back to this thread. I wouldn’t dream of sending my darling boy to the states. And my sister’s currently out there teaching at one of the top schools, too.

Are you ok, OP? You seem to be quite hyper.

The OP certainly has an extremely odd writing style. She sounds like a teenager. I’m not in any way convinced she’s what she says she is!