[quote=“finley”]
It’s one thing to compare and contrast, but one thing many Taiwanese people certainly aren’t good at is critical analysis. So they might comment on the fact that you could earn US$100K in the USA, which is a wonderful country without any problems at all, and neglect to observe that you would pay 60% of that to your landlord or the bank, or that you might be bored shitless doing a 9-to-5 in a blue cubicle.[/quote]
This is simply wrong – spending 60k US a year on rent??
With a 100k/yr salary, you can live a very good life in the US.
Off topic, but these days I’ve been thinking that it is impossible to have a higher quality of life in Taiwan just because how messed up everything is. I actually had a better quality life in the US on my 1k / month budget as a student: I could walk down the street on a sidewalk and breath clean air. Money can’t buy that in Taiwan. The mess that is most of Asia is what draws many of us here, though; if it was just like back home, we would be back home.
[quote=“finley”]Some Taiwanese people have a very low opinion of their country. You get a lot of op-ed pieces in magazines (often written by academics who have never been outside their universities) about how great country X is and how pitiful Taiwan is in comparison, or what a great job country Y is doing regarding issue Z and how Taiwan should copy whatever it is they’re doing.
It’s one thing to compare and contrast, but one thing many Taiwanese people certainly aren’t good at is critical analysis. So they might comment on the fact that you could earn US$100K in the USA, which is a wonderful country without any problems at all, and neglect to observe that you would pay 60% of that to your landlord or the bank, or that you might be bored shitless doing a 9-to-5 in a blue cubicle.[/quote]
If I were Taiwanese I would love to be bored shitless earning $100,000 than being bored shitless earning 30,000 NT a month in a cubicle in Taiwan.
[quote=“archylgp”][quote=“finley”]
It’s one thing to compare and contrast, but one thing many Taiwanese people certainly aren’t good at is critical analysis. So they might comment on the fact that you could earn US$100K in the USA, which is a wonderful country without any problems at all, and neglect to observe that you would pay 60% of that to your landlord or the bank, or that you might be bored shitless doing a 9-to-5 in a blue cubicle.[/quote]
This is simply wrong – spending 60k US a year on rent??
With a 100k/yr salary, you can live a very good life in the US.
[/quote]
Actually, it depends on the location that you live in. If you live in NYC, Seattle or Los Angeles, or San Fran, 100K might not go very far and I can easily see you spending $2,000 - $4,000 per month on rent in some California cities. Whereas in major cities in Texas, a lower salary like $50,000 can get you a very decent life and you might pay $1200 for a decent apartment or a house. Of course, you’ll be bored in most of the state, spending your time fixing and taking care of the house, and sweating most of the year, but that’s why it’s cheaper.
Part of the appeal of Taiwan to me it that I can get around on public transport and rent a car or scooter if I need to go outside of the city. I at least have the option in Taipei, I don’t have that option back home.
Sure, when I lived in Houston I spend weeks at my house if I didn’t have school simply because I did not have a car. You can’t do anything if you don’t have a car in the US unless you lived in a huge city like New York.
OK, I exaggerate somewhat. But people tend to live within their means, and as noredneck said, the cost of living in the US is undoubtedly higher than in Taiwan. $100K is a senior-management salary, and in Santa Clara (say) you will pay $3000+ for a “nice” apartment. If buying, your mortgage payments would be $4000+. The thing is though, a more ordinary white-collar job in the same location is in the $50K ballpark. Pretty much anywhere in the world, salaries tend to the minimum level required to support an expected “standard” of living.
That’s true, and it’s a real pity, because most of the pollution (air/water/etc) happens for no good reason. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that everytime I go up to YangMingShan (nominally a protected area) there are “farmers” setting fire to huge piles of stuff. On any given day there is at least one enormous plume of smoke that stinks up the whole area. Why? Because nobody has told them to stop (it’s illegal) and because nobody has taught them how to make a compost pile.
It’s an old way of farming, slash and burn. The idea is cut down trees to clear farmland, and burn it so that the burned material becomes fertilizers for their crops. It was used by natives who lived in dense jungles to allow them to farm anything at all because you can’t really grow much in a jungle. Remember much of Taiwan was jungle before people came.
Slash-and-burn is shifting cultivation. You burn once, then after you’ve grown your stuff for a year or two, you leave it and move on. It can be ecologically sound, under certain limited circumstances.
These guys are not doing slash-and-burn (and if they were, it would be illegal in a national park). What they’re doing is growing crops, year after year, on the same plot, drenched in fertilisers, pesticides, and illegally-tapped groundwater. The stuff they’re burning is produce - or more specifically, everything left over after they’ve taken the saleable parts. It is the most brain-dead method of growing food that you could possibly imagine. Not only are they wasting valuable nutrients and organic matter, they’re stinking up a supposed “beauty spot”.
Despite Taiwan’s much-vaunted education system, nobody has taught these idiots about conservation of mass.
It’s not just slang. It’s a racial slur. No one sensible would dare to use terms such as nigger or wetback, which refer to colour or physical features in a derogatory way and have a whole history associated with them. The origin of the word redneck is, as Chewy pointed out, a slur against Scots-Irish. It referred to Scots-Irish settlers in America (and also the Caribbean colonies) who would get sunburnt (hence, they had red necks) because they were doing the lowest forms of outdoor labour (so it’s also a classist term). The Scots-Irish settlers in America or the Caribbean were very often not even really there by choice. During the mid-17th century Cromwell and others forcibly deported Irish Catholics to North America simply for being Irish Catholics. Scots were driven off their land during the Highland Clearances, amongst other events, and many entered indentured servitude. The British also routinely rounded up the urban poor all over the British Isles (even those who hadn’t committed any crimes) and sent them abroad. Whether as convicts (including those who were guilty only of being of a particular religion or ethnicity) or indentured servitude, somewhere up to 50% of these people died in the first year, at least in the Caribbean colonies, due to a combination of factors including the climate, tropical disease and being worked to death. Indentured servants were often worked much harder than slaves because their bosses only got seven years out of them and wanted to “get their money’s worth”, so to speak.
There’s actually a whole history to poor whites in America that appears in pejorative terms such as hillbilly, cracker and redneck. An interesting (and extremely funny) book on this subject is The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad.
It originated as a comment about someone’s racial characteristics (white people got red necks, black people didn’t), though it also comments on a whole lot of other things too such as socio-economic class.
So much misinformation in this thread. The answer is simply Taiwan is not a country which gets many immigrants aside from Taiwanese people’s SEA spouses. So it is rare and exciting that foreigners would want to move there which is why they ask you the reason why you want to go.
I don’t think that’s the reason at all, they think we are mad to move here because of the rather shitty pay and working conditions and I think they may be right!
On a lot of the measurable benchmarks, Taiwan scores very low compared to other countries. There are very few taiwanese brands, most people dont even know the difference between Taiwan and Thailand, There are very few famous athletes and Taiwan sucks in the olympics, Taiwan culture isn’t popular outside of mainland China, and pay in general is lower than other developed countries.
Since most Taiwanese don’t travel much, they just see or hear about these surface things, and obviously the outside world sounds a LOT better in these regards.
The things that are good about Taiwan, the stuff that keeps me here, is not always what you can see. Lower taxes, better value for your (NT)dollar on just about everything, people who are nice and civil to each other and friendly to foreignors, a relaxed atmosphere, an accepting and open minded culture, great weather(in my personal opinion), great scenery and environment.
I find the Taiwanese who never lived abroad have this disneyland idea of how foreign countries are amazing, while those who have lived abroad have a more realistic idea of their country, the good and the bad. A lot of them come to appreciate Taiwan a whole lot more.
I’d go with a lot of this. I would not go with the environment bit. In fact I often think of leaving the island due to the environmental problems here, especially the air pollution.
Great weather…again stinking hot and humid for much of the year? Well Winter in Taichung is really great (excepting the air pollution)…but Summer…I’d rather be somewhere else.
Taiwan does have quite a few well known brands, in fact it has far more than massive countries like China and India. Acer, Asus, HTC, Giant would bethe most famous I’d say. There are some big brands that are not known as Taiwanese but basically are…such as Vizio and Maxxis in the US.
There are also some world leading companies that are not household brands as they operate in business to business space or in smaller market niches, TSMC being the prime example, it now makes more chips than Intel if I remember rightly and they invest billions of USD every year just to keep ahead of the competition.
Just about every Taiwanese I talk to seems to think that foreign countries are paradise and Taiwan is hell.
I think the reason Taiwan lacks any brand is mostly because almost every manufacturer has bitten the OEM bug and they refuse to let go. Just a case in point, many factories refuse to deal with individuals and would only accept multimillion dollar deals, so even though Taiwan makes just about every electronic products out there, no one has heard of them. Only brand anyone can think of might be Acer or Giant, but then again, they don’t sound Taiwanese enough so most people assume they’re European brand. I guess it’s mostly due to lack of originality. Thing is Taiwan needs to stop because China can do the same thing and they can do it cheaper.
As for the weather, personally I think the weather sucks, and the environment is just a continuous stream of gray buildings that look like prison blocks.Whatever beauty that was in Taiwan was destroyed long ago by the rapid industrialization. Think ruhrgebet in West Germany, but much worse.
It depends what is your reference doesn’t it. If you grew up in massive crowded cities or industrial areas you might think Taiwan is pretty nice. Taiwan did and still has some outstanding areas of natural beauty, but most of the country is a mish mash of concrete, factories and highways.
I’ll have to steal that from you.
