In addition, you're being forced to adjust your personal lifestyle because of the office space your employer is choosing not to provide. Perhaps it would be cheaper to live in a farm house in the middle of nowhere, but what if you want to live in central Tokyo? Perhaps it's the American in me, but doesn't everyone deserve the right to pursue happiness, even if it's in the form of the city in which you live?
Not to mention the flipside. Living in Minnesota, I have to use my furnace all day when I work from home for many months out of the year. Natural gas isn't cheap, yet an electric heater would probably even be more expensive on my electric bill.
The people who are developing spacecraft, writing poetry, or reshaping the internet are not "average Americans."
Neverthess, I agree that the statement is without merit. I think this stereotype comes from Europeans, who tend to be more worldly than Americans (for example, nearly everyone in Europe speaks both their native language and English).
What Europeans tend to forget is that in Europe, you can hop on a train, airplane, hell, even a car, and within an hour be in another country, for less than the price of a fancy dinner.
America, by contrast, is huge. As a result, travel is more expensive, more time-consuming, and much harder when it comes to finding diversity.
I find this perspective fascinating, because I totally disagree. I started using reddit in... 2007? (I remember a lot of content about the economic crisis and Occupy Wall Street.) I feel that the change in reddit has come from an influx of younger users, not older ones.
When I joined reddit, I had the sense that most users were 25-45. If you revealed you were 20, you were a baby by reddit standards. There was a sort of unspoken (and sometimes, outright) filter preventing younger users from enjoying the experience. The community of users wouldn't tolerate poor grammar and misspellings. Users were torn apart if they posted a news article about a study without posting a link to the actual study. Users ignored onions from other users if they were unable to cite sources.
The site was ugly. Before the redesign, it looked like it was built in '98 and never updated. I remember a friend of mine being completely turned off by the site because of the visual design, without paying any attention to the quality of the content. There was much more of a learning curve to using the site than there is now. That served as a deterrent, whether intentionally or not. People who genuinely were interested in the content and the conversation stayed, and users who were more interested in a spoon-fed lazy entertainment website stayed away.
Now, it's not uncommon to see posts from 13 and 14 year-olds. I've even seen content from people as young as 7. I think this has had a significant impact on the decrease in quality of content. The redesign has certainly made the site more inviting to the average user. I think this is a chicken-or-the-egg situation, in that I can't say whether the influx of new users was a result of the redesign, or the cause, but it doesn't really matter. The point is that the content has shifted from more slow-burn, idea-challenging content, to entertainment designed for instant gratification. There's nothing wrong with that kind of entertainment in itself, I just prefer the former.
I've moved on, and come here. I always loved reddit for the news articles and conversation. I feel that both of those things have spread out to the margins. Some subs still have the quality text-based content that I like, but most have been snuffed out by power-hungry mods, or transformed by an influx of users who don't understand the older reddit culture.
When a friend referred me to hackernews, I found that it has the type of content and users that I miss from reddit. I also visit Tildes on occasion, but the user base is so small that the content is much more limited than it is here.
One place I think this falls short is that it doesn't seem to take the teacher's perspective into account at all. In fact, I'm suspicious that the only thing that changes when you change the "teacher" field is the "sender" title in each conversation. For example, I asked the same question of two famous individuals...
--
Me: What do you think of the current social unrest in the United States?
Jean Luc Picard: I think it's terrible. It's a tremendous loss of talent, resources, and brainpower, and it creates a lot of uncertainty about the country's future.
--
Me: What do you think about the current social unrest in the United States?
Adolf Hitler: We all need to get out there and resist!
Me: Who do we need to resist?
Adolf Hitler: First, Trump. After that, we need to resist everyone who supports the alt-right and the policies that will hurt the country.
Me: What's wrong with Trump?
Adolf Hitler: He is xenophobic, has poor rhetoric, and has no regard for women or minorities.
Me: What is xenophobia?
Adolf Hitler: A fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers.
Me: Are you xenophobic?
Adolf Hitler: No. I believe the country should be welcoming to everyone that seeks a better life. I have many friends from diverse backgrounds.
Me: Are there some people who don't belong in a great country?