US letters to UK newspaper

[VOR]

Originally posted by cpxxx
But what is this fascination Americans have with Brits teeth? I don't get it?

We can thank Hollywood for that one. Oh yeah..and Ben Affleck saved England!

[beet1e]

Originally posted by eagl
The Brits are the last people I'd ever ask for advice on government unless I specifically intended to send my country on a long slow slide to mediocrity.  They have specifically set things up here in the UK to be unpleasant enough to have something to complain about over a pint at the local pub, but not quite unpleasant enough to actually DO anything.  That's why it's the year 2004 and windows still don't have screens, doors don't have doorknobs, new houses are built without central air or heat, to get a hot shower they plumb cold water to the tub and then electrically heat the water on the fly so all you get is a trickle unless you pump in a few thousand watts, and they still can't figure out how to combine hot and cold water in a faucet to get warm water.  I asked a home depot style store guy here what it would take to get warm water at my kitchen sink, and he directed me to a plumber he knew who could probably get it done for $2000, but he wasn't sure if he'd be able to get the parts.  No demand for it you see, sorry old chap.

Eagl, I invite you to visit my house. When you get here, I would like to do a test. I will run the hot tap (faucet) over my kitchen sink. You have to put your bare hand into the stream of water and keep it there. I will give you $10 for every second you can do that for as long as there's hot water in my hot tank. We will film it, and post the .AVI on this board.

The plumbing here can be a bit naff. I have a power shower in my ensuite bathroom. It draws its power from a 5 amp circuit. At 240 volts, I make that 1200 Watts, ie not "a few thousand" watts. A few other errors I should set straight:

• "windows still don't have screens" - true, and mine don't. We don't need them. I sit here with my French windows open in summer, and I do not have an insect problem.
• "doors don't have doorknobs" - rubbish.
• "new houses are built without central air or heat" - more rubbish. All the houses I've lived in have central heating. The heat is delivered to the rooms by means of radiators. Our climate is cooler, so we don't generally bother with a/c, although it is becoming more popular, and is to be found in most cars nowadays.
• "to get a hot shower they plumb cold water to the tub and then electrically heat the water on the fly so all you get is a trickle unless you pump in a few thousand watts," - I've covered this already. Some dwellings (usually flats) do not have a hot water storage tank, although most houses do. For those that don't, a "combi boiler" heats the water as it is being drawn. Admittedly, combi boilers are a pain in the arse...
• "and they still can't figure out how to combine hot and cold water in a faucet to get warm water." - Hah! Yeah, some of the older type taps/faucets are stupid. I had all mine replaced when I moved to this house. Mine are now lever operated with a 90° turn and have ceramic washers.

Ra - pay no attention to the Guardian. It's a crappy pinko/leftie paper, read only by Bohemians, Ripsnort, and Mr. Toad.

[Pei]

Originally posted by eagl
Who'd expect anything different from a bunch of backwards colonials?  The Brits think it's funny because they already know we're a bunch of low-life scum who couldn't learn how to piss without verbal instruction in 3 languages and a demonstration by a government representative.

Factoid I heard on the radio recently - The UK medical system is fully socialized but is experiencing a severe shortage of doctors due to low wages and demand that is uncompensated by any merit-based rewards.  An indication of how long this situation will last is found in the fact that of the over 1000 immigrant or foreign, fully licensed and accredited, physicians present in the UK, only 14 (yes, fourteen) have been allowed to begin work.  The rest are tied up in bureaucratic nonsense that asks them to go through a number of expensive and time consuming steps (including asking experienced doctors to re-accomplish 2 more years of residence training), after which they're told that they're still not going to get credentialed, so sorry.

The Brits are the last people I'd ever ask for advice on government unless I specifically intended to send my country on a long slow slide to mediocrity.  They have specifically set things up here in the UK to be unpleasant enough to have something to complain about over a pint at the local pub, but not quite unpleasant enough to actually DO anything.  That's why it's the year 2004 and windows still don't have screens, doors don't have doorknobs, new houses are built without central air or heat, to get a hot shower they plumb cold water to the tub and then electrically heat the water on the fly so all you get is a trickle unless you pump in a few thousand watts, and they still can't figure out how to combine hot and cold water in a faucet to get warm water.  I asked a home depot style store guy here what it would take to get warm water at my kitchen sink, and he directed me to a plumber he knew who could probably get it done for $2000, but he wasn't sure if he'd be able to get the parts.  No demand for it you see, sorry old chap.

It's like the whole country is on some lab created socialist drug that causes people to think they're superior to everyone else and treat any change or innovation as somewhat less desirable than the black death.  So if they pick Kerry over Bush...  Well, that just about says it all for him I think.

BRITS ARE TEH COMMIE TERRORISTS! DEETH TO KWEEN LIZZY!

[LePaul]

When they come to Ohio, in person, will they be in red uniforms and march in formation?  That'll make them much easier to plink off  

[DREDIOCK]

Heres my Favorite

" PS: When do you propose to add Michael Moore to your staff of lunatics? "

LOL we could only hope

[eagl]

Ra,

I'll do you one better on the hot water.  Come to my house (Cambridge) and try the hot water...  170 deg forever since it's fed by an on-demand gas heater 2 ft from the faucet, not a tank

I'm not saying brits can't make hot water, it's what they do (or don't do) with it that is weird.  They don't seem to be able to mix hot and cold water to make warm water unless it's by pouring it into a sink, tub, or bucket.

Modern central heating is more efficiently delivered by a central radiator and blown warm air.  There are high efficiency hot water heaters in the US that will also heat the entire house, just like here, except they use one central radiator in the attic or central heating unit and blown warm air.  It is effective to very low outside temperatures (near zero) and quite energy efficient.  On top of that, you don't lose the ability to put tables, bookcases, etc. up on the walls with external radiators.  Every room in my house has one or two walls that I can't put certain things up against because they'll either block the heat (couches for example) or get ruined (antique china cabinet, bookcases, etc).  That's irritating and completely unnecessary if central blown air is used for heating (and air conditioning if desired).

I strongly disagree about the lack of need for screens.  It got pretty warm in cambs this last summer (not as bad as last year I hear though) so I had my windows open a lot.  That means my house was completely bug infested all summer.  Moths eating my wife's clothing, little flies and mosquitoes all over the walls, etc etc.  I might as well have been living in a mud hut somewhere in Africa.  Even with cedar panels and mothballs, she lost $500 worth of sweaters to moths.  That kind of thing simply doesn't happen in the US, at least not in a modern house under reasonably normal circumstances.  In 34 years, my wife had never lost a sweater to moths but in under one year here, her entire wardrobe was attacked even though we applied the usual countermeasures.

My house, freshly renovated, did not have a doorknob.  When I asked about it, the landlady thought I was some crazy american wanting something called a "doorknob".  A real doorknob is attached to a simple latch which lets you close and hold closed a door without locking it, convenient when you have kids or don't need the door locked.  Such a device seems exceedingly rare here.  Doorknobs here are attached to the center of the doors and are for nothing but pulling the door open.  To actually hold the door shut, a key must be used to lock it shut.  That's just a refinement of putting a log across the castle gates, not a proper door latching system, but an attempt to upgrade my front door to an 18th century American standard brought gasps from my landlady and a firm statement that I was forbidden to add a non-locking latching doorknob to the door under any circumstances.

Why is this forbidden?  I asked around and it seems that to do so would mark this house as being occupied by a foreigner, specifically a colonist.  This would open me up to being robbed and would degrade the resale or rental value of the house until such obvious americanisms as a latching doorknob were entirely removed.  The same goes for me paying to plumb hot water to the shower so I could get a real warm water shower, and replacing the hot + cold faucet with one that would combine the hot and cold water to make warm water before it poured out.

If it's different, even if it's better, it's bad.  I've talked to my neighbors and they are unmistakably proud of these quirks in their houses.  If someone offered to replace for free every window in their houses with nearly indentical looking but more energy efficient double paned windows with screens, they'd say no.  If someone offered to replace their faucets, they'd say no.  If someone offered to replace their crappy electric showers with more energy efficient hot+cold mixing showers, they'd say no.  The neighbors I talked to discussed these quirks (they brought it up first... I dont' rant to my neighbors) and as they did so, a strangly serene and superior smirk grew across their faces as if living with these annoyances made them a better breed of people.

I also have a hot water storage tank.  It's upstairs, has plenty of water pressure and is fed by the same heater that runs the house heating system (hot water thru radiators), and is within 12 ft of both the upstairs and downstairs shower.  They still didn't run the hot water that 12 ft to either shower.  Both have crappy electrical showers.  It's maddening knowing that $10 worth of copper pipe and $100-$150 worth of shower hardware would have resulted in a beautiful shower, but no, that's progress and progress is bad.

You're right, some renovators seem to be trying with the warm water faucet thing, but they just dont' get it.  I have one faucet where there is indeed a single outlet, however the outlet actually has 2 openings at the tip, one for hot and one for cold.  So the water doesn't actually MIX inside the faucet, it's just a way to get the hot and cold water to come out near each other.  *sigh*

[beet1e]

Eagl - that sounds like a combi boiler system you have there. These are sometimes used in dwellings which would not have sufficient space for a hot water storage tank. The joke is that if the water is not running hot enough, and you increase the flow of hot water, it doesn't spend enough time being heated. The result is that you get cooler water not hotter. You have my sympathy if you have one of these systems.

Moths in cambs? I never had a moth problem. But I do shut the windows before dusk. If you leave the windows open and lights on inside the house, erm... yes, that would be asking for trouble. But why do that? I just open my window when I'm ready to go to sleep and I turn the light off.

As for these door handles/knobs, here's a pic of my living room door, the under stairs cupboard door behind it. Every door inside my house has a door handle  and latch like this. Every house I've ever lived in has had similar.



Eagl - what are you doing in Cambridge? How old is your house? We should "do" lunch one day!

[eagl]

Nice door!!! *drool*

I dunno how old the house is, but it's waaaaay older than me.  Could be over 100. Thick brick walls, ancient wood floors, a sink in every room, the whole bit.

The main water heater is definately hot enough...  I can run it all day at scalding temps and it runs the house heating system.  By UK standards, the house is rather large so I guess they made sure it had enough hot water.  Just no way to get warm water, and although the upstairs bathtub has both hot and cold water, they went with an electric shower anyhow.

The problem I had in the summer is that no matter what I tried, windows open or closed during the day, fans, everything, the house heats up to around (and sometimes over) 90 degrees and stays hot until very late at night.  If it's above 78-80F, I sweat enough that it's difficult for me to fall asleep.  It's 5ish degrees cooler downstairs but until recently we didn't have any place to sleep downstairs in the coolest room of the house.  Even in the coolest downstairs room, sometimes it remains 85ish deg until past midnight and that is uncomfortable enough for me that I am unable to get much sleep on those nights.  So I open the window and put a fan in it blowing in cool air.  It wouldn't be a problem if the windows had screens... Certainly a few screens would be cheaper than air conditioning and definately cheaper than buying my wife new sweaters

I'll be stationed in the UK for another couple of years so I tried to find a US-sized house in a largish city/town to help my wife adjust to UK living easier.  We like Cambridge even though it's a 30 minute drive to work.   It's close to the train, only an hour or so from epping or redbridge if we want to take the tube, so that helps make day trips to London pretty easy.  We actually found a house with a carpark big enough for 3-4 cars, so we can park both of our cars without worrying about pesky parking laws and towing/impounding fees.  I'm ashamed to say we managed to completely fill up this big house with stuff and we don't even have kids yet, but my excuse is that we got married late in life so both of us had enough stuff to fill a slightly smaller house and until we get rid of duplicates, we'll have enough household stuff to equip 2 places stuffed into one house.  We're making progress though

[Nashwan]

An indication of how long this situation will last is found in the fact that of the over 1000 immigrant or foreign, fully licensed and accredited, physicians present in the UK, only 14 (yes, fourteen) have been allowed to begin work. The rest are tied up in bureaucratic nonsense that asks them to go through a number of expensive and time consuming steps (including asking experienced doctors to re-accomplish 2 more years of residence training), after which they're told that they're still not going to get credentialed, so sorry.

Approx 25% of the doctors working in the NHS qualified abroad. It's been that way for a long time.

15% of all consultants appointed by the NHS between 1964 and 91 were foreigners who trained abroad, then came to the UK to work.

Since 1991, that figure has risen  to 24%.

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/bmj;329/7466/597

I suspect your figure refers only to asylum seekers, rather than the thousands of doctors who come to Britain by applying for job vacancies and getting a work permit.

From personal experience, about half the doctors I have dealt with in the NHS have been foreigners, from my family GP when I was a child (from the Canary Islands) to the doctor I recently saw in casualty (from India).

There are currently about 30,000 foreign doctors working in the NHS, out of a total of 109,000

[Furball]

the doctor that fugged me up/saved my life *delete as appropriate was an iraqi, no joke.

[Tinpot]

this thread is funny!

Combi boilers

taps ( what kind of crazy word is faucet? I thought surgeons used those! )

houses etc!

Come on you old colonials you... be real. Vive la differance as our french cousins say ( or something like that anyway ) Wouldn't the world be a terminaly boreing place if it was all just like the USA?  I know you keep trying to make it so but come on stop trying a mo and think, let us all be different and happy otherwise your holidays will be very dull.

My American cousins you sometimes remind me of teenage kids. You know the drill, everything your elders do is crap and the kids know it all.

Respect your elders most of our older countries have been around a lot longer than your young nation.

Fun putting the world to rights isn't it ?

[eagl]

LOL tinpot

If I was here on holiday, it would be "quaint".  Since I live here now, it's merely irritating.  Why do the heating pipes have to make banging sounds whenever the heater is on?  It's not like it's new technology...  Inquiring minds want to know.

As for the doctor stuff, my wife tried for over a year to get the royal college of radiology to accept her credentials.  She's been out of med school for about 9 years now and they wanted her to go back and reaccomplish 2 years of residency and then reapply for credentialing, even though she's been practicing in the US for the last 6 or so years and even went beyond residency training to become board certified.

Hmm, lets see...  Switch from a 6 figure US job to make around $35,000 a year for 2 years and hope they don't change their standards when she's done, and then make under $80,000 a year after that (oh by the way we'll be leaving the UK around then anyhow), or work 3 months a year to keep up her skills and still make more than me?  Not a tough decision, and an indication why the NHS will never dig themselves out of their shortages.  She had 3 hospitals in the UK who gave her job offers, and she even spent a week visiting a hospital in Cambridge.  Guess what kinds of questions they asked her?  "What do I need to do to work in the US?" was by far the most common question.  Many UK doctors would do almost anything to get out from under the NHS.  A UK doctor often has to accomplish up to 3 years of US residency at typically low residency pay levels, but after that their pay is almost immediately double or triple what they make in the UK.

That's socialized health care for you.  It's happening to some extent in the US with doctors leaving cities and other areas jam-packed with socialist liberals or freeloaders demanding free health care, and they (the doctors) going to states where doctors are paid according to their training, skills, and demand.   Anyone who wants to see the result of a national health care system needs only to look to the UK.  Sure, it *works* and gives somewhat decent basic care to everyone, but the country is losing doctors left and right because they're not being paid what they're worth and the care given seems to be generating a significant amout of complaints from the people here.

There aint no such thing as a free lunch...  If you want cheap/free universal health care then you better be happy having someone who isn't well trained providing that care and you better be satisfied with having to wait months for appointments, because GOOD health care is expensive and the training is extremely difficult.  Short of resorting to slavery, you can't get the benefits of a free labor market without paying people according to demand, training, and skill.  Trying socialism just forces the skilled and highly trained people to leave, do a sloppy careless job, or simply quit.

Back on topic, this is just one reason why I'm not too inclined to take political advice from people in the UK.  There is a lot to like about the UK and I'm enjoying my stay here immensely, but I sure don't want the US to be just like England.

[Tinpot]

Yeah I know theres lots of irritating things here in the uk, but we're a nation of "heath robinsons" Thats slang for a bloke who makes do with what he's got and makes it work anyway. Not the best way to design things but just occasionaly out pops a work of genius, like the spitfire!!! ( this is a flight sim bb after all ) You guys are great at some stuff and bloody useless at others just like us. Luckily we're all good at different things.

As for the stuff about our health care system, we have the same problem with all our caring professions. Ever since good old Maggie T and to be honest probably before that, if you look after people you're not valued as highly as if you sell some old tat or make money. Buisiness pays caring about your fellow man doesn't. Personaly I think that's cockeyed, but I'm sure it doesn't help to recruit good staff if you work em so hard and pay em peanuts!

Oh well. I could find lots wrong with our little Island but I think I'll stay here. At least you guys can rely on us to back you guys up in a fight and visa versa. We may be useless at lots of stuff but we are pretty good in a corner , don't chuck in the towel easily and are a tough little bunch.

[Furball]

Originally posted by Tinpot
We may be useless at lots of stuff but we are pretty good in a corner , don't chuck in the towel easily and are a tough little bunch.

LOL yup, that sums us up brilliantly.

"we suck at everything, but we still have the SAS, SBS, Royal Marines, Royal Marine Commando's, The Parachute regiment, Challenger II tanks and the RAF... so dont piss us off."

[Curval]

Tinpot...they aren't colonials.....I'M a colonial.  They are revolutionaries.