Gie us a break!

Hello, regular readers*, and sorry for the long silence. I've been busy with work, which seems rather appropriate given what I'm going to talk about today: it turns out that having a grown-up job can be somewhat time-consuming. But that's fine because the American dream is that you can get anything you want as long as you work hard enough. Unless, of course, the thing that you want happens to be time off work.

It's pretty well known around the world that holiday time in the US is fairly abysmal, so I won't dwell too much on that other than to say that 10 days plus public holidays is, quite frankly, appalling. I'm used to 5 weeks, and the UK does less well than its continental neighbours. Although the European economy is crumbling at the moment, I'm sure it's nothing to do with holiday time. Not even in Greece. It's mostly because we gave all our money to the banks so they could, dunno, make confetti with it or something. Sorry, getting side-tracked. Back to holidays.

People generally argue that the US has more public holidays than the UK, so it balances out. Well, there are 10 Federal holidays (plus inauguration day, which comes round every 4 years when a new president gets sworn in). That's only 2 more than England & Wales and 1 more than us Scots and the (Northern) Irish (us Scots need 2 days to recover from New Year and you couldn't pay me enough to make any comment about the Battle of Boyne). Plus any extra days given whenever the institutional parasites royal family has something to celebrate and lets the serfs doff their collective caps in appreciation shares with the nation.

Maybe USians are harder working than their cousins across the Atlantic. Perhaps Europeans work more effectively in their shorter working year? Who knows. I'm not going to get into that. I won't moan about holiday time because we knew what it was like before we came. What I didn't know about, though, was what happens when you need to take non-holiday leave.

There is no legal requirement in the US, at the Federal level, for employers to give employees any paid time off for illness, no matter how serious it is. Four states (well, three because DC isn't a state) have passed local laws mandating some form of sick leave. The only legal protection for most workers is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA states that any company that employs more than 50 people has to give their employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family or medical reasons. In these 12 weeks, the employer cannot fire the employee or cut off health insurance.

This law was only passed in 1993 and is all good and well, if you can afford to take unpaid leave. I guess if you're working a minimum wage job with crap (if any) health insurance, you're pretty screwed. And I don't want to think what happens if you have a long-term (and expensive) illness once those 12 weeks are up and your employer no longer has to pay health insurance. Yikes.

Of course, many employers have their own provisions. My wife's contract officially allows her to take 15 days per year combined sick and holiday time. So if she has a flu, she has to drag her sorry arse to work and infect all her colleagues if we want a summer vacation. And this is her with an academic job! Larger employers, including Federal employers, sometimes allow workers to donate unused holiday time to colleagues who are seriously ill. Which is heart-warming, if surprising that people actually have unused leave from those 10 to 15 days. Of course, me being a European socialist, I would think that a basic duty of employers would be to provide some sort of cover for their employees and that the government's job should be to legislate for that. But hey, what do I know!?

Another, even more surprising bit of information concerns maternity (or parental) leave. Yes, when you get to my age, you start to consider these things. The USA is one of only four countries in the whole world that has no statutory maternity leave, with the other members of this exclusive club being Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. Compare this to the UK's LEGAL MINIMUM six weeks at full pay plus another 33 at £128.73 per week, or to Norway's 56 weeks at 80% pay or 46 weeks at 100% pay, to be split between both parents.

Of course, while the US is almost medieval in its legal provision for parental leave, many employers are much more progressive. We can, after all, take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave under FMLA. I think most women take around 4 weeks off, at which point they have to pass their newborn baby on to a stranger to raise for them. That seems very weird to me. And, given the cost of child care, if you had twins it's not worth working because one salary would go entirely to those costs. Yikes. Give me European socialism any day of the week.

Since I usually have photos on the blog these days which are loosely thematic, have a picture of us on a frantic three-day holiday in Canada last week:

(*) According to Google, I do have regular readers. I assume it's only friends who actually know Dom and I so... who is in Belize!?

Reason Rally

I am an atheist. Just four little words that, back home in Europe, are not that big a deal. Things are quite different in the USA - atheists are mistrusted more here than any other "minority' group, including muslims, lesbian/gay/bisexuals or recent immigrants, according to a 2006 study from the Univeristy of Minnesota (see here for a summary of the data or read on Wikipedia). Indeed, given the choice for president, the US would choose to elect a gay Muslim communist over an atheist.

Atheism in the US is almost like voting Tory in Scotland - something that people only admit to in the privacy of their own homes. I hadn't really noticed though: a figure often quoted is that 90% of scientists working in research are atheists, so most people I encounter are generally left-leaning secularists. But I was aware that most USians take their God rather seriously, which means that if Dom and I ever visit the bible belt, I'm not allowed to even open my mouth without permission from my wife.

But today was something different. Today, in the US, atheists and agnostics decided to come out as a movement, and I have to say that they did it in style. For those who don't know, the Mall is the big grassy bit in the middle of DC where Congress, the museums and all the monuments live. It's also the place where all the big political rallies are held, so it was a good venue for the Reason Rally today.

We arrived just as Tim Minchin was doing his thing, including this song, the Pope song. Watching shocked parents desperately trying to cover the ears of their children was particularly hilarious: I'd be surprised if the Mall has ever heard the words "mother fucker" spoken so many times at such a high density - respect to the women doing sign language on the side of the stage!

Other highlights were Nate Phelps, son of the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, a bunch of absolute mentalists who do lots of nasty things including picketing funerals with placards. If you've never heard of these nutters, check out the Wikipedia page. Given that the URL of their website is "www.godhatesfags.com", you can imagine what kind of unpleasant people they are. Anyway, I'll stop giving them more publicity and go back to the Reason Rally.

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers both gave pretty good talks and Eddie Izzard was simply hilarious. Dawkins pulled what was probably the biggest crowd of the day which was a surprise, but I guess Eddie Izzard probably isn't so big on this side of the Atlantic. The main aim of today was to try and get "social and legislative equality" for atheists. It was a good outing and I was glad to see that it didn't turn into just an excuse to bash religion, which would only ever be counterproductive and also miss the point.

A few religious types did turn up to explain to all us godless atheists that we were scum and due to burn in hell for all eternity (see above photo). I would have felt sorry for them, but they seemed to be quite happy. They were all concentrated in one area but mingling with the heathens, and people were queuing up to get a chance to debate with them. Think Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday, but with the American tendency to not hold back and you're half-way there. I've stick more photos on this page because some of the banners were truly hilarious.

Overall, I think the Rally got its point across. It included a video address from Representative Pete Stark, the first congressman to officially come out as atheist, and another video message from Senator Tom Harkin who, whilst a believer himself, was happy to see a group that represents around 15% of USians finally make their voice heard. Such a contrast to the UK, where we had Alistair Campbell stop Tony Blair from discussing faith with his now famous words "We don't do God".

One thing that we can learn from our cousins across the Atlantic is activism and personal involvement in politics. Back home, the political class have sort of budded off from reality and most people are apathetic. Here in the US, it's a lot more grassroots and a lot more people get involved in the full range of the political spectrum from campaigning on local single issues to being involved in caucuses and selecting the presidential candidate. That's something that has to be admired, even if it means that entities like the Tea Party can come to prominence. But I'll save talking about politics for another day.

Eatin' oot!

Regular readers of this blog (I know they exist, Google told me so) may be forgiven for believing that I think everything in the US is terrible, apart from their beer. I suppose this is because I'm a grumpy old man who likes to rant, and the things that I think the US does badly (healthcare, driving, bread, etc) are far more striking than the things which the US does well. Apart from the beer, which I noticed very quickly. Another thing that regular readers will notice about this blog is that many of my ramblings are focused on food and drink. Being a fatty takes effort, so food and drink are a big part of my life. From a culinary perspective, my wife and I are basically hobbits. So, this is another blog post about food.

One striking difference between the US and the UK is that the standard of restaurant food is generally quite a bit higher here. There are bad places here too, but the baseline is somewhat higher, which goes part of the way towards explaining why USians complain when they get to the UK. One thing I like is that most places will give you a couple of different types of veg on the side, and even pub-grub comes with crispy, steamed veg and not stuff that has come out of a freezer and been boiled to death. So, well done to the USA.

There are a few differences, though. Although pub-grub and restaurants tend to be better here in the US when compared to the UK, USian fast food is that bit saltier, fattier and generally nastier than its UK equivalent, even when coming from the same multinational. Dominos pizza in the UK isn't great, but much better than from Dominos in the US: we phoned in a Dominos when we first arrived here, and we were left feeling dehydrated all of the next day, presumably because EVERYTHING is much saltier here. Everywhere. I got a Subway a couple of weeks ago and even if left me feeling parched for quite a while.

Mexican-style fast food is becoming quite popular in the south east of England. The Mission burrito place in Oxford is a blatant rip-off of the USian company Chipotle (right down to the colour scheme and fonts on their menu!), but the Mission does the burrito so much better. And I've still not come across anything in the US that rivals Chilango, another burrito place which we only discovered in London the month before we left. I'm talking about fast-food Mexican though, we've been to one or two cracking Mexican restaurants here which have been pretty damned good.

Anyway, back to the positive. Restaurants are generally better and we've found a new Favourite Place. Well, we were taken there back in September by a couple of good friends, and we've spent a lot of time there in the last week or so. It's called Silver Diner, and there are a few of them dotted around Maryland and Virginia. They're laid out like a classical 60s diner (complete with matching music, dodgy colour scheme and silly juke boxes), but all of the food is locally-sourced, often organic and just bloody delicious. Mmmmm, bison. The photos in the this post were taken there in the last week or so, with Alyssa poisoning herself with milkshake (she's a lactard) and myself, below, enjoying a nice local craft beer. Mmmm, IPA.

There are a few things about the restaurant experience which are a little bit different from the UK, some of which are good, some of which are bad. The friendly customer service is good, but odd, and mostly because the waiting staff are paid less than minimum wage so need tips in order to eat. Which leads me on to the bad thing: the price in the menu is not what you get charged. You need to add on sales tax and a tip of around 20% (or you're a bad person, apparently), so this was confusing to begin with.

If you happen to clear your plate during the meal, it'll be quickly taken away even if other people in your party are still eating. This was really annoying to begin with, and seemed very rude, but it just seems to be how things are done in this country. Quite often, as soon as you say "no" to dessert, the bill will be brought to you unless you explicitly say "don't bring the cheque, we haven't finished drinking yet." Again, this seemed rude at first but most USians are busy and active, so I guess they like a fast turn-around at meal-time. One more thing: the portions are epic, truly epic. Even as an accomplished fatty, I often struggle to finish. But that's standard here and most places will offer you a doggy bag unprompted.

For a country where one fifth of all meals are eaten in a car, the quality of restaurant food in this country is pretty spectacular. The only thing missing is great Indian food. You can get decent stuff here, but it's not a patch on that to be found in Glasgow / Manchester / Birmingham / London. In fact, we're heading to Edinburgh on Sunday just to get a curry from Kismot, which is easily the best Indian restaurant we've been to. Mmmmm, curry....

Cheque it oot, man!

People in the US like to personalise things because your average USian is very exacting and has very specific needs. For instance, in Starbucks or similar such purveyors of coffee, it's not uncommon to hear something like "I want a tall double skinny cinnamon soy latte with extra foam and served at 170F, and only Bob the Barista can make my coffee because only he knows how I like it". 

When we first got here, we had a man in a mobile phone shop tell us that it's not uncommon to ask for your favourite server (apparently, waiter is too egalitarian a term) because "he knows how I like to order my food so I ask for him as he's someone I can work with". Seriously, I'm not shitting you here.

In some ways it's a good thing, because the customer service here is generally phenomenal. It's actually quite disconcerting at first, when you have staff in shops or bars actually pretending to take an interest in you and being all friendly and shit. In the UK, I've gone into an empty bar and still had to struggle to make the barman become terribly inconvenienced and interrupt scratching his balls to do something as futile as actually serving me a beer. So, in that respect, I can enjoy the US customer service even if it is kind of weird.

But sometimes, it's just plain weird. We ran out of cheques today so we thought it would be a simple task of contacting our bank and ordering some more. Of course, that's obviously a silly idea. Why would a bank actually make chequebooks? Banks only deal with forms of currency, after all. And what is a cheque? Oh, actually, it's a paper promise to pay money, sort of like cash but less useful.

Instead, our bank links to this website where you give them your routing number (equivalent of your sorting code) and your account number, and then you can personalise your cheques so that you can 'Find designs that express your personal style!". For instance, those of an infantile persuasion can get Disney characters on their cheques:

 

The more fundamentalist Christian, Tea Party supporting types have several options:

 

 (note the quote "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life. John 3:36")

 

(subtitle: "America, Fuck Yeah!")

If you believe in the rights of cute, fluffy animals:

For an extra 5 dollars, you can add your own little logo (they had examples like the Jesus fish) and add inspirational little saying as well. Amazing. You really can't make this stuff up. What you can't do is just click on a button to say "I bank with Wells Fargo. Give me some cheques from my bank like what I can use in lieu of money please." Except you'd have to call them checks and not cheques. This also highlights the fact that USian banks rip you off so badly that, not only do you have to pay for your own cheque books, but you have to use a 3rd party to get them made.

Dom spent some time trying to put together the most vomit-inducing, tacky cheque book that she could manage. But it all got a bit overwhelming, so she gave up and is now nursing a gin and tonic. I think I may join her.

 

Guid health tae ye

I've been meaning to write about healthcare in the US for a while now. I'm not going to talk about why the European model is far superior and that governments should be responsible for the well-being of their people. Nor shall I mention that the US government spends $2051 per capita on health when the UK government spends $1429, but US citizens pay through the nose for healthcare (source). While these things may be true, I don't want to have my visa revoked for attempting to subvert the American way of life with my socialist views, and I'm certainly not going to argue about public spending during an election year!

I want to focus on the actual experience of the American health care system because, after experiencing the NHS, the system here is bloody weird. We're lucky because my employer pays for our health insurance and the plan would cost us almost $1000 per month if we had to pay for it ourselves. After signing up for our health insurance, we got provided with a list of GPs (family doctors in this country) who our health insurance will cover. It's then down to you to choose your family doctor. This sounds fairly straightforward, but this is where things start to get weird.

There is a website called HealthGrades which allows you to search for medical doctors in your area. We went down the list of medics provided by our insurance company and started searching through this website. It's basically Amazon for doctors, right down to having star ratings and patient reviews! The website also has the professional record of the doctors available for all to see.

The first doctor that we liked the look of turned out to have been through disciplinary action twice for failing her cocaine test - we could actually read PDFs of the transcripts from the disciplinary hearing. In the second practice that we liked the look of, the doctor who ran it had been censured for fraudulently signing her employees signatures to fake records. Yikes! (I'm not linking to actual pages here because I don't want to get sued by disgruntled GPs, who are obviously used to lawyering up..!)

The other thing which is different is that you get family doctor practices which are similar to those in the UK, with a health centre which hosts several doctors. But you also get practices here which are in residential areas and are just people working from a room in their house. While I'm sure they are excellent doctors, it just seems like a really odd way of running medicine.

After we had actually chosen a clinic which looked good and didn't seem to be run by the criminally-minded, we had to get a medical, etc. Actually, mine is next week, so I'm basing this on Dom's experience. As well as a physical, they also top up vaccines which are out of date and test our blood for absolutely everything (cholesterol, kidney function, etc etc). At every step of the way, you have to sign a bit of paper saying that you authorise the procedure to be carried out and will accept financial liability in the event that your insurance company chooses not to pay for that procedure.

(As an aside: Dom's brother got faced with a bill for several thousand dollars when his insurance company decided that a test to look for a blood clot was not an essential procedure. Yikes!)

A wee while after you have been tested for everything (with doctors horrified that you had never been tested before by the barbaric and backward practices in the UK), a letter from your insurance company comes through the post telling you every procedure that had been carried out on you and how much they would cost. It's REALLY detailed: consultation, $400. Several lab tests individually priced at $18, $15.25, $10.94, $9.94, etc etc.

The form also shows that haggling which has occurred between your insurance company and the provider. For example, the consultation was billed at $400 from our provider, but our insurance company paid $206.55 in the end. Therefore, it seems, if you're poor and can't afford health insurance then you actually pay more the treatment than someone who can afford the insurance... perhaps it's the European in me who find this kind of appalling.

In the UK, your GP acts as the first point of call for all NHS services, so if you need to see a consultant neurologist / physiotherapist / etc, then you go via your GP first. While this can delay treatment, it also acts as a buffer to stop cardiologists being hassled by someone with indigestion or a neurologist being called about a headache. In the US, however, you contact the consultant directly because the consultant is happy to bill your insurance company for the time. I now understand why, in Oxford, newly-arrived Americans would often whine about not being able to see a physio / etc.

Another thing which I'm still not used to is billboard adverts for hospitals in places like the metro stations. You can see posters saying things like "What if your headache is more than just a headache? Come to hospital X for the best stroke treatment in Montgomery County". Seriously, I'm not exaggerating here.

I understand the principle of having a market in the health care system: competition should drive up standards because it people can take their business anywhere they want. However, if I'm sick, I would much rather know that every hospital had the same baseline level of excellence. If my leg is hanging off, or I'm shitting blood, the last thing I want to think about is choosing which hospital to treat me. I think that people in England and Wales should be very cautious about the Tories trying to bring more of a market into the NHS - what I see in the USA is the logical extension of what happens when you let the market get involved. And I won't even talk about the madness of paying hundreds of thousands of insurance salesmen and other bureaucrats...

This post is turning into a long one, so I'll stop soon. Take home message: the US healthcare system is very, very different to what we have in the UK. It feels very alien. On the plus side: because we have good health insurance, this is probably the best health care that we'll ever have, so we're very lucky to have that privilege here. On the down side: I don't like the idea of paying medics for each procedure that they do. Imagine paying Fire Fighters on the basis of how many fires they extinguish? You wouldn't want to live in a wooden house when it was time for the Christmas bonus...

(nb I've used "doctor" here as short hand for medical doctors because that's the common usage. We all know that medics are not proper doctors; proper doctors have PhDs...)

Guilty Pleasures

Alright, folks! Happy new year. That is new YEAR, as in singular. Americans and Canadians both have this annoying habit of saying "New Years" when, as far as I can tell, we only get one new year per year. Every time I got asked "What are you doing for New Years?" back in December, my eye twitched a little as I had to contain my anger before replying "I have no firm plans for Hogmanay yet, but it'll probably involve drinking too much and vomiting in the Canadian snow."

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today. I was going to talk about health care, but then I had to buy gin (as you do), so was going to talk about booze. But as you can only buy booze from a liquor store, I had to go elsewhere to get tonic and that inspired me to talk to you about food.

As you all know, I take my food very seriously. Although beer did contribute to my belly, it's hard to cycle to work every day and still be a fatty unless you have a serious love-affair with food. Which I do. As does my wife: we're basically tall hobbits with less-hairy feet. Hell, we even live in a basement apartment with a low roof, making it the quintessential modern-day hobbit-hole!

When we first arrived in this great country of the free (so they tell me), one of the first things we had to do was (obviously) a food-shop. If you ever visit a USian supermarket for the first time, what will become immediately obvious is that either Americans LOVE processed food, or the supermarkets force it upon them. The initial supermarket visits were actually great contributors to our culture-shock.

Making real food at home is actually a life-style choice and not a way of saving money. Little jars of spices and herbs such as oregano or cumin are RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Even buying the cheap brands, a jar of oregano that costs around £1 back home will easily set you back $6 to $8 (£4 to £5.50) - I calculated that, to make a curry properly, it would have cost me over $70 in spices alone.

Vegetables can also be appalling over-priced. In September, when they were still in season, a pack of 3 bell peppers cost $4.99, more than twice the price in the UK. Compare this to processed food, where you can buy 10 microwaveable dinners for $10. Processed food is much cheaper, and even foods that should be natural have all sorts of crap added to them.

Trying to buy flour to make bread? Just simple, whole milled wheat can't be bought from the supermarket. What you can buy is a super-enriched ultramegacrappy flour, made to look like bleached white flour, or made to look like wholewheat flour. I guess it is the whole of the wheat grain. Want to buy a tin of tomatoes? You have to look long and hard to find one that's not had stuff added to it (especially salt!).

The meat can make me quite sad too - you should not be able to buy 0.5kg of beef for around £1. I'm guessing that the cow didn't have a particularly happy life. Battery chickens is bad, but the industial scale feedlots in this country have battery cows and pigs! Places like Whole-foods, the expensive organic hippy middle-class supermarket has a rating system where they tell you about the meat. They do quite well with selling grass-fed beef, but the best their chickens generally do is have the label that effectively says "we didn't keep it in a cage the WHOLE of its life...". This contrasts with Europe, which, on the 1st of January, finally enacted the law banning battery chickens. (Actually, Peter Singer wrote an interesting opinion piece about this for Al Jazeera.

Ah, how I miss Waitrose.

Of course, with all things in America, there's always a "but". Farmers' Markets can be pretty awesome - most weeks, Dom and I now chat with the man who raises the cows (mmm, Angus) and chickens that provide us with all the eggs and beef that we need. The animals have had a happy life, the meat isn't that expensive and, perhaps most importantly, the beef is bloody good and the eggs may well be the tastiest we've had. Yay for Walnut farm! And I found a company online that sells what are easily the highest-quality spices I've ever used, for less than we paid in the UK.

Ethnic shops are also a very good way of getting decent ingredients at reasonable prices - it is possible to eat very well / ethically, as long as you're prepared to do a bit of leg-work. The two things that I've still not found are easy supplies of "exotic" meat like lamb or any sort of game animal. The supermarkets have effectively won the battle against localism to the extent that there are no butchers within a 12 mile radius of our home and, I suspect, much further. Your choices are evil supermarket or buy straight from the farmer.

The other thing I can't find yet is a decent supplier of flour that is nearby. There are some suppliers around, but generally in far away states where the shipping would cost more than the flour itself - definitely nothing like Doves who would deliver 25kg sacks of flour direct to our door.

Hopefully I've firmly nailed my foodie credentials to the wall. Now for my confession. What got me thinking about writing this post was where I went after buying gin. We needed some tonic water, so I stopped at the 7-11 to get some.

What I also bought was a trashy hot-dog, which pretty much embodies the antithesis of everything I've been writing about. It was terrible: fluffy white bun with ground parts of animal best labelled as "miscellanous". It was terrible, yet strangely satisfying, maybe even because it was naughty. It kept me warm in our first proper snow-fall. Perhaps processed food and cheap calories do serve some purpose?

It's the economy, bawbag!

Just when I think I'm getting used to the weird way in which this country works... Dom and I both got emails on Thursday telling us that, because a budget agreement had not been reached between the Republicans and Democrats, the federal goverment would run out of money today, which is Saturday. Both the senate and congress had to agree a bill, and have the president sign it, by midnight yesterday. Apparently, this happened.

If a deal hadn't been reached, the craziest thing would have happened. All federal government operations, except of a few essential things, get shut down. So, the NIH would have been shut down: not only is it an offence to try to go to work when the government is shut down, but if they find out you've been doing federal work in your own time, you get something like a $10,000 fine.

I don't understand. I accept that politics here are pretty stupid and that the whole American system of governance seems designed to prevent any sort of progress or agreements being made unless all 3 legislative bodies are run by the same party. I find it amusing, but that's how this place is. But to actively prevent people from working, even for free, because a budget hasn't been passed is absolutely mental! As is having the capacity to fine employees for trying to do their job!

What happened is that the legislature passed a continuing resolution, a stop-gap measure which keeps the federal government running on current or reduced levels, for another 2 months. The budget they are fighting over is for the fiscal year which started in October 2011, so it looks like at least one third of the year will pass before there is a budget in place.

For my work-place this means that there will be enough money to pay our salaries, consumables and to feed my mice, but there will be little way to buy any big-ticket items or sign things like service contracts. This massively increases the costs to the tax-payers, which seems rather vulgar in these straightened economic times. Even if a budget does get agreed in February, it will only run until the end of September when this silly process will start again. Apparently this is pretty normal.

In any of the UK parliaments, or most of the ones in Europe that I know of, if a government can't get its budget approved by it's parliament / legislature, then it's taken as a vote of no confidence, the government collapses and there's a fresh election. It's a good motivation to put aside partisan differences and actually work in the service of the citizens (or subjects if you come from a silly country where they monarchy rules supreme and people have no written bill of rights).

How the US can get by with this permanent deadlock confuses me. It doesn't seem very efficient...