Regarding the US obsession with automatics, when we were in California we visited Sequoia national park. The road up the mountain is very steep and long. On the way up we met some young girls who had been coming down, parked on the side of the road with their brakes smoking. They had clearly been riding the brakes all the way down the hill. I asked if they knew how to engine brake, they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I asked if they'd ever driven a manual, and none of them had. None of them knew what gears were. I had to teach them how gearboxes worked and teach them to change down and engine brake, in the hope they'd get to the bottom without killing themselves (they were lucky they hadn't done so already). They'd grown up in LA and always driven on the flat.
It should be mandatory to learn to drive in a manual, just so you know how vehicles work, even if you end up using automatics.
Both are good when they're new and the battery is fully charged. And as
@Maddog says, automatics are good for stop-go traffic. They're also good when driving in the snow, less likely to spin the wheels.
But when the battery is flat, manuals can be towstarted or even push started - you can even push start a small manual car by yourself if you have a good flat area, I did it several times in my university carpark when I was a student! So even if you leave the lights on you don't get stuck. Even if the starter motor is dead you can drive the car - I've even driven one of our cars with no starter motor installed at all (took it out to fix, couldn't fix it, pushstarted the car and drove to the wrecker, picked up another one, pushstarted it again and drove home to install it - couldn't do that with an automatic!). And as they age they have far less to go wrong with the transmission. They're simply more practical whenever anything goes wrong.
