Angelika After the school shooting in December last year at the "Sandy Hook" elementary school in Connecticut, with a death toll of 27, the press, including German newspapers, have been reporting about a steep increase in U.S. gun sales. Everyone suspects that Obama will now finally push for stricter gun laws. There's been less coverage, especially internationally, of so-called gun buyback programs, occasionally run by cities like San Francisco or Oakland, and reinstated last December because of the particular incident in Newtown, Connecticut.

Angelika Like many urban areas, San Francisco suffers from notorious parking problems. We've reported several times already how many intricate rules drivers must pay attention to: Street cleaning, residential parking, red, green, blue, and white curb markers, and so on. Parking at a meter is usually rather expensive. On average, the meters demand $2 per hour, but in downtown San Francisco, it's a whopping $3.50, and in the touristy area around Fisherman's Wharf, it's $3.00. The new meters are quite advanced and will accept not only coins for payment. Drivers can pay by credit card, or a parking card, which can be obtained in $20 or $50 denominations and then used at the meter, which then deducts the selected amount from the card. Before 2013, there was no need to feed the meters on Sunday. But starting January 2013, that's a thing of the past, between noon and 6pm on Sundays, meters now need to be fed just like during the week, when payments are required between 9am and 6pm. Since drivers can't leave their cars in the same spot between Saturday evening through Monday morning anymore, as it was common practice in our neighborhood Noe Valley, more temporary parking will be available during that time. But of course the city coffers will also benefit from the additional influx of money.

Angelika If you have ever crossed Golden Gate Bridge by car, you know that the bridge maintainers won't collect any fees if you are leaving the city, but that the toll is a whopping $6 per car when you enter. Until recently, drivers could pay the bridge toll in cash at one of the toll booths at the end of every lane, by stopping, handing the money through the car window to a friendly collector and then drive off. I fondly remember the times when we were traveling to San Francisco as tourists and stuck out like a sore thumb because we asked the bridge toll collectors for a receipt, which we planned to add to our photo album. At the end of March, the days of the bridge toll collectors are counted. Going forward, you'll only be able to pay electronically and that doesn't require any humans manning the toll booths anymore.

Michael Over the last couple of years, San Francisco has heavily increased the fines imposed for illegal parking. As you can see in figure 1, back in 2002, I received a parking ticket for $25 when parking our car PERLMAN for an hour on the sidewalk in front of the house, because there were no parking spots available at the time. According to the new parking fee table from 2013, for the same infraction the city now assesses a fine of $110!

Michael If you've ever tried to get a taxi cab in San Francisco after a heavy rain storm, you'd agree with me that there are deficiencies here in this town, just as if we were worshipping some destructive form of socialism. It's hard to believe, but in major American cities like New York City, San Francisco, Boston or Chicago, there's no free market for taxi drivers. Instead, these cities impose restrictions on the number of cabs in operation and hence create artificial bottlenecks on days with high demand.

Michael Germans tend to think "how well off we are with our great number of holidays, the whole world looks upon us with envy!" but that's a common misconception. While Americans can take far fewer vacation days than Germans, the number of national holidays is pretty much the same in both countries.

Michael I'm sure I've mentioned this before: when German children learn to speak English in school, their newly aquired skills are of little practical value when they go abroad and try to use them. They're taught how to get the grammar right, including present perfect and past tense, but when they try to communicate with regular people in the U.S., they need to start relearn everything all over again. A large part of the vocabulary in everyday use is never taught in German schools. Take home improvement, for example. I'm pretty sure that someone with a German high school degree could not even come up with the words for half the items sold at Home Depot.

Michael In the United States, U.S. citizens and legal immigrants alike identify themselves by a nine-digit number that looks like XXX-XX-XXXX. Germany has similar sounding numbers called "Sozialversicherungsnummern", which translate roughly to "Social Security Number", but they're different in that they only identify employed individuals and allow officials to track people's eligibilty for payments from the German retirement system. In the U.S., on the other hand, the SSN is used for general identification of individuals. Illegal immigrants don't have valid SSNs, but they often buy stolen numbers or recycle numbers of deceased citizens, because without an SSN, it's impossible to open a bank account or get a driver's license for the state the individual currently is residing in. Even doctor's offices hand out forms that ask for the SSN to link the patient to their health insurance if they have any. If you call your bank's phone operators, they identify the caller by the last four digits of their SSN, which the bank has on file. When I came to the U.S. in 1996, I remember that even the supermarket chain Costco wanted my SSN on their membership form, and I gave it to them, because I was an idiot who didn't know any better back then.