They glorify soldiers way too much and teachers way too little
Between the two there is a big difference:
One is a profession that can be a particularly dangerous way of life. Orders from above put you into place far from support, with limited resources, often in contact with hostiles on a daily basis. You're often left to fend for yourself with only what you have on you against overwhelming odds. Command structures often pit you against your peers in petty internal politics around rank. The pay isn't great, and those that stick with it for the long haul to make a lifetime of it often leave scared and mentally injured. It can be a thankless job in putting your life and health on the line to achieve the overall goal.
The other profession usually involves wearing a uniform and enforcing USA's geopolitical interests in other countries.
A family friend of ours just quit his highschool teaching job and is moving his family because he was threatened with a gun in his classroom. The student was expelled, but not arrested and knows where he lives.
Sticker price isn't the price you pay at the till. Why? Why do you do that.
Massive gaps between the walls and doors of public lavatory cubicles. This is not some mystical, advanced technology. Get it together.
We do that because our country is founded on the "right" for moneymakers to put as much onto the customer as they can get away with. Hence things like tipping culture.
No offense but how thick do you have to be to make a door that is put in place solely to shield you from other humans, have a massive gap?
It seriously boggles my mind.
It's not about doing it right for most. It's about saving every dime you can. There are some that properly enclose stalls, like a nationally known Magic card seller in my locale.
I think the toilet wall thing is because we have an expectation that every public building must have public toilets available. Places don’t want you to fuck or shoot up in the bathrooms, so they make them un-private so you hurry the hell up and leave. It’s a bit of hostile architecture, like making park benches that you can’t lie down on to keep people from trying to sleep on them. Make the “undesirables” uncomfortable enough and maybe they’ll go be undesirable somewhere else. Meanwhile it’s just a little bit less nice for everyone else as well.
This is a thoughtful reply. I will just say that the UK also has public toilets all over the place, and a desire for people to not screw & get high in the cubicles. Ditto many other countries. But I've never been anywhere else with this door gap problem, where no-one gets privacy.
I did once use a UK bathroom in a supermarket where the lighting was all blue, which makes it hard to find a vein to inject. But the doors still closed properly.
American here. I like your response and the one you responded to. Thanks for this insight. ^^
Two party system. They can't possibly represent everyone's interests. Feels more like religion to me .
They don't represent anyone's interests except their own.
And those who lobby them and/or help them get reelected.
Two party system is great for polarizing the society.
Divide and conquer.
More precisely: The reason for the two party system: FPTP voting. The Brits do the same shit, and have the same problems.
The way it feels now (more cult-like than political and representing the populace) automatically and unavoidably stems from this FPTP issue. It automatically reduces the whole field to a reduced number of options, and while each reduction step takes longer than the last, this will ultimativley lead to a one-party state. It's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN and the REP program for 2025 to basically turn the government upside down to get unbeatable is trying to achieve this very single party state.
We do do the same and we do have the same problems, but it's not so bad. We have at least 4 parties in parliament who have a voice and a number of others who are at least represented. It's not good, but you have it worse
Two parties that are, if I'm not mistaken, the Right and the Rightest.
Didn't the USA see any leftist ideology as radical?
The Cold War did some terrible things to our ideology.
They openly call Democrats radical lefties nowadays
We technically have more than 2; but nobody ever votes for the other parties, and the other parties are almost never given the opportunity to debate or have big ad campaigns. 🤷🏻♂️
And to be fair: Some of those other parties are even more narrow minded than the two big ones.
Skip to 1:36 to hear about how, no matter how many parties we have, it always comes down to 2 major parties competing in this voting system.
I vote for one of those other parties!
The two party system isn’t really codified in law, it’s just kind of a side-effect of the way we vote and the way government is organized. Due to those two things, it’s hard to change.
It's an inevitable conclusion of our winner take all voting system. "The man with the most votes wins." If 4 candidates run, and they get 22% 22% 16% and 40% of the vote, the man with 40% of the vote wins the race, and 60% of the population didn't get the candidate they voted for.
Now imagine you've got a red, orange, green and blue party. Orange voters get together and decide "You know, the Red party's platform is pretty similar to ours, what if we didn't run a candidate next time and instead encouraged our voters to vote for the Red candidate instead? The blue candidate won with 40% of the vote, but our two parties put together would have 44%.
In the next election with three candidates, the red candidate wins 44% to 40%, prompting a similar conversation at the Green party headquarters. Soon enough there are two parties.
We're one of if not the oldest representative democracy in the world today; our constitution is 250 years old, there's some old bugs still in the code base.
Basically because we were early adopters to modern republic systems. We tried something new because parliament was a bit too kingy for our tastes. But due to its simplicity it became really easy for two parties to wipe the floor with everyone else. And basically the only times they’ve changed was at the start and again shortly before our civil war. Neither party has ever had good reason to change the system, which would require massive agreement to change our constitution. So nobody does.
For example, politically I’m a syndicalist, but the democrats are pro union, pro environment, pro woman, and pro lgbt, all of which with a big asterisk but still I consistently vote for them because the greens didn’t win with Nader so they’re definitely going to lose now. So I dutifully vote Democrat because the only other party that has a chance is the republicans and they hate me and everything I believe in.
If we could do it again we’d do it better but in our defense we didn’t really have anyone to model off of
Jokes on you, in the end they both represent the same interests
It's like a restaurant with a single dish and you can only chose a side. One's xenophobia with a sprinkle of batshit crazy, the other's utter impotence.
American here. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
As an American, I find it amazing that countries can have more than two active parties but also have a plurality voting system.
Keeping your gun accessible when driving your car. Needing or wanting to open carry when you go shopping. Needing to pose with your family all holding powerful guns for a Christmas photo. I don’t get it.
Most of America doesn't do it, just the people who are afraid of violence - which also happens to the same people who would quickly resort to violence. At this point, seeing a person wearing a gun is the same as seeing warning colors on other species like insects. If you see it, turn and go the other way. There is literally nothing worth the inconvenience of dealing with those people. (And hospitals don't allow open carry so matters of life and death can be attend to without worry.)
At-will employment makes no sense to me. You go to work every day knowing you could be fired without any possibility of taking the time to find another job. It would drive me crazy.
Oh it's terrifying.
You should not compare that to employment as it is known in other countries.
Rather compare it to slavery. Doesn't it look better now? ;-)
The flip side is we can quit at anytime.
Yeah, that really doesn't make up for it.
I mean, I'll take the months notice period and knowing I get redundancy if my job goes over being able to quit a bit faster.
So like mid-shift or are there any limits to this?
I quit by showing up 3 hours early and sent an eff you I’m out email. Dropped my badge on my desk and walked out without talking to anyone.
No. You just tell someone above you that you quit, and then leave.
You could walk out without telling anyone, but that's rare. Depends on how shitty the job is.
They will say of themselves as being Irish/Italian/other-european-nationality because their great-grandfather or great-grandmother came from there.
Okay let's play a game. Let's pretend you're Italian, you said Italian, we'll go with that. You speak Italian, you're used to traditional Italian food, you believe in traditional Italian values. Things are done a certain way in Italy, and you're used to it that way. Then one day, for whatever reason be it economic prospects, famine, war, whatever, you decide to leave Italy forever and board a ship bound for America. New Life in the New World and all that jazz.
What do you do when you step off the boat at Ellis Island? Do you:
A. Continue to speak your native language at least at home, become part of a community of fellow Italian emigrants, continue to cook and eat your traditional dishes...as best as you can with the ingredients available in this new hemisphere at any rate, do things the way you're used to doing them, retaining your traditional values...or
B. Delete all that tedious "back in the old country" nonsense and instantly become an English speakin' cheeseburger eatin' stetson wearin' rootin' tootin' howdy y'all.
Going with option A, huh? How original. We've run this experiment on real hardware literally hundreds of millions of times over the last 250 years and not a single immigrant has gone with Option B.
Okay so...now you're an American. You're still an Italian though. It's who and what you are. You get married and have children. How do you raise those children? Do you...
A. Speak Italian to them at home, take them to the same church you were raised in, feed them the foods you were raised eating, teach them the same values you believe in, tell them the tales of your home country's folklore as bedtime stories...or
B. Speak to them only in English, send them to the First Baptist Church, feed them apple sauce and happy meals, and raise them on Sesame Street and Marvel comics.
Going with option A again? Daring today, aren't we? Your children are required to go to American public school. They're formally taught to read, write, speak and understand English, and invariably put in the role of translating for their parents during doctors visits and the like. They're taught American legends like the first thanksgiving with the pilgrims and Indians, of George Washington and that cherry tree. They grow up eating the food their parents invented out of necessity, like spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken parmesan.
One day, well into their adulthood, someone asks your children a question. It might be "Where are you from?" or some similar phraseology. How do your bilingual spaghetti-eating children answer this question?
"We're Italian."
Now that we've been on that journey, I want you to imagine logging onto the internet to find some dumb fuck who never left the Old Country, who has never been to a place where "What is your current nationality" and "What is your personal heritage" are different questions with different answers and thus has no grasp at all on the concept of diaspora says "No you're not."
There are several problems there:
Stereotypically, the Americans doing this are way further removed from their ancestry than the second-generation immigrants you describe (in fact it's completely normal and accepted for second-gen immigrants to identify as their parent's nationality as well in Europe);
"I'm Italian" and "I have Italian ancestry" are NOT the same sentence. You seem to realize that, but many Americans don't, and the comment you replied to complained about the former, and the difference is fundamental;
Europeans are generally not on board with the whole "ethnic identity" stuff that Americans do, for a variety of reasons that one could simplify down to "last time we did that, nazism happened". The mainstream progressive view is humanist and intentionally colorblind, and it is therefore profoundly shocking to see Americans derive a sense of self-worth from their blood, because these are the talking points we normally only hear in documentaries about Mussolini...
Now I have spent enough time reading about how American view their complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, to understand where you're coming from, but this is fundamentally at odds to the humanist approach of "we're all the same and who your great-grandparents were does not define who you are in any way". (Which is obviously idealist, and does tend to "whitewash" some struggles, but it is nonetheless the prevailing approach).
Mate, I've seen long-term immigrants not just of my own nation but other nations who returned and was even myself an immigrant of my own nation for over 2 decades abroad, and after 2 or 3 decades people living abroad are already culturally and even in values different from their countrymen, due to a mix of partially absorbing the values and way of being in life and society of were they live, and because their own country kept on changing over time generally in a different way in which they themselves change (it's quite funny how they have ideas about how their own country of birth is that don't really match the reality and look silly and outdated to the people actually living there).
This is a mere 2 or 3 decades for people who actually grew up in their nation of origin.
People 2 or 3 generations away from said nation are not only descendants of immigrants with a deviating cultural framework as describe above, but they have grown up in a different nation (and from all my observations living in a couple of countries, people culturally tend to be closer to the country they grew up in more than the country of their parents) and at least their parents and possibly their grandparents were already people who grew up in a different nation and only knew about the nation of their ancestors via 2nd or 3rd hand accounts.
Whatever "culture" and "value" they have from their ancestors' nation of origin is a thin slice, deeply degraded (often charicaturally so - note the mention of spaghetti eating to mean "culturally italian", something which would make me Italian and my Italian ancestors if any came over during the Roman Empire) and severelly outdated (a century or more) version of the culture and values of the nation of origin of their ancestors.
The difference for example between an American of Italian ancestry and one of Irish ancestry is token if that much compared to the difference between an actual modern Italian and an Irish: American-Italian, American-Irish and so on are but sub-cultures of the United States of America culture and draw most of their ways and values from that one, not from the cultures of the countries of origin of their great-grandparents.
When your country is so young, nearly everybody is an immigrant. So it's hard to take pride in a family lineage that is at most 4 generations of being American. Plus, we don't really have a unified national identity. "American" could literally mean every type of person.
funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.
My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn't speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it's because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany's so it's a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is "'Murica fokk yea" I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).
City design and suburbs. Like if I had to drive 40 minutes to get groceries I would prefer to starve and those suburbs look like death would be the better alternative. Also driving to go for a walk, wtf?
No one in a real city or suburb is driving 40 minutes to get groceries in the US.
I was being somewhat hyperbolic, the point was you guys have to drive everywhere to do anything which is so alien to me. Or I guess take public transit which always sounds horrible when Americans describe it, which is also something that sounds so weird to me about the US.
You're right, we do have to drive to get anywhere outside of major cities. The funny thing is that even the most rural area has a fleet of busses and routes that cover every home. The problem is that they only come through twice a day on weekdays during the school year. Other than that these busses just sit around forcing old folks who can't to drive anyway.
lol that's fair. But also, the there's a cyclical relationship between suburbs and grocers. If you build suburbs, the grocers arrive. Where there are grocers, people might live and form suburbs. You really only have to "drive 40 minutes to get groceries" if you're waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the sticks. Or, and I'm sorry to say it, what's more likely, is you live in a dense, urban area and are very near groceries, but can't afford a vehicle to get there directly, and so you've got to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus to come around. This could definitely total 40 minutes to go get some eggs and milk. It's a fucking tragedy.
American here. I hate this too. I am a proponent of convenient walking locations and far better public transportation, and it doesn't look like America's gonna give a damn about those in my lifetime.
Not Just Bikes (YouTube channel talking about this) basically said they've given up on any hope for north america.
Oh, i have to drive from single family zone to commercial district to pick up a loaf of bread. Then drive to education district to drop kids at kindergarten, and finally to business district to work.
At the end of the day i hang out at bar/entertainment district with the guys from work to have a beer, but there's no public transport so I have to drink alcohol free so I can drive back home. That's only 120 miles in a day!
It won't surprise you to know that what you're describing was created by the car and oil industry and forced on North America through intense lobbying
Oddly enough it's worse when American cities don't have zoning laws. Houston TX has no zoning laws and it's a nightmare
Your description isn't how it works in most places really. The "districts" aren't usually that far apart. It would be common to find single family homes close by a school, or an apartment building right next to an office building.
Zoning is useful in scenarios like industrial vs residential buildings. You wouldn't want to have an apartment building next to a railroad hub for example. The railroad would be very loud/dirty, and industrial business would benefit more from being closer to the rail hub.
Vote for people who actively oppose universal healthcare, mandatory PTO policies, universal family leave policies, universal college-level education, etc.
Then words are communism and we don’t take kindly to pinko commies round here.
The way politicians and the political system nakedly serves the needs and interests of corporations and the wealthy, and not the average individual.
The way that the price you're quoted invariably gets bumped up by various taxes.
The insane system that is tipping, including the fact that a lot of workers are so underpaid that they rely on tips to get by.
The incessant adverts on TV for medical products, particularly prescription drugs.
Agree to all but politicians, in that it isn't exclusive to the US, but most "naked" as you say
Voting registration. I get a letter that I can vote and what the options are. Then on voting day, which is on a Sunday, because why would it be on any other day, I just walk into my town hall with that letter and my ID card, put down my crosses and leave. It's like a walk in the park, often quite literally.
I think the thing is, in America people aren't required to register their residence with the government. At least here in Austria, we are, and that doubles as voter registration if we are eligible to vote. So there is voter registration here too, but it is compulsory.
Ah, if that's the case, then I can get on board with a separate voting registration. Not sure, I'd prefer it, but at least it's not just arbitrarily making democracy harder.
oh I know we don't do it on Sunday. America was so spread out that it took days to get into and kind of town. So you go to church on Sunday then travel on the on Sunday/Monday and and vote on Tuesday.
The Electoral College exists because it was never the intent for the President to be elected by the public. It sticks around because changing it requires changing the Constitution, and a majority of states benefit from the status quo.
Your houses seem to be made out of paper. Then you complain about strong winds..
I remember hearing that Europe doesn't use drywall nearly as much. A benefit of drywall is cost and repairability, but is basically glorified paper, yes.
You don't have to repair it if you can't break it.
Try breaking a brick wall with your head or fists, lol.
Try rebuilding a brick wall after a tornado, you're going to spend so much more money and you won't have a house for a lot longer
That's the other side of the confusion. You build houses out of sticks and paper, and live in somewhere called Tornado Alley...
I don't build houses, nor do I live in Tornado Alley lol
I think that was an empirical "you", not you specifically..
Yeah, I live in an area prone to tornadoes. Not as tornado prone as the midwest, but we've seen tornadoes in this area.
A particularly notable one touched down in a town not far from here, in the business district. It tore down multiple steel framed cinder block buildings including a Lowe's Home Improvement Center and a Tractor Supply Company.
A big bad wolf might not be able to blow a brick house down, but an EF3 tornado certainly can.
I'd like to see a tornado tearing up a brick house as easily as a wood and drywall house.
It doesn't need to tear it down, just weaken it enough that it's no longer structually sound.
Easy, can your brick house handle a 400 kph car flying into, follow by chunks of trees, houses, ice ball the size of grapfruit.
The "winner takes all" political system that ends with two extremist parties and a huge divide between people
Healthcare. Do I need to say anything?
The extreme divide between rich and poor
Police force. They hire lowly educated people, preferably racist, receiving barely any training, and what they do get is mostly nonsense. They then get military equipment, and the entire system is protected by a corrupt union
The amount that news organizations are allowed to lie
Most people aren't hugely divided on guns. Like you said, you're seeing the two extremes of the parties, not the will of the people. Browsing Lemmy would convince you that everyone except for the big bad GOP wants guns banned, and that's simply not true. Most people want responsible gun limitations, not total gun bans.
Guns are one of those things thats really hard to restrict. It's a freedom that most enjoy, and some abuse. Most that own guns responsibly don't want their guns taken away due to law changes.
This was actually the case with automatic firearms, automatic firearms were legal to buy until 1986, ironically with the support of the NRA, which is the largest gun lobby in favor of less gun control. In this ban of automatic firearms, they allowed existing owners to keep their automatics.
You can count self defense cases and crimes with those weapons on one hand, most crimes are committed with handguns.
Another argument is just banning "assault style rifles". This is basically the blanket description of an AR-15 style rifle, that is generally the same design as an M4 carbine in the military, with it's adjustable stock, 16 inch barrel, black color, with a comfy pistol grip, the automatic function removed, and an MLOK rail for attachments like lights, lasers, or sights.
The reason that this description is silly, is because a normal semi-auto hunting rifle is functionally the exact same as an "assault rifle". It has magazines and you can fire it rapidly buy pushing the trigger rapidly. You could ductape lights and lasers to it. Gun manufacturers could simply sell the same gun without the "tactical" features which are convenient for all users, and it would change nothing about crime.
Additionally, if there's a huge gun buyback and all gun owners turn in their guns because the second amendment has been repealed, criminals are not going to turn in their guns, and it would leave many defenseless.
Often times, guns are necessary for those living in rural areas, because there is a great number of threats from wildlife in rural areas, from Alligators, to Mountain Lions, to Grizzly Bears and Brown Bears and Black Bears. Hunting is required to control the ecosystems of large game and small game. Additionally, many hunters opt to use the "tactical assault style rifles" due to their modularity. (Not always, many still use bolt action rifles, when it's for sport).
Nobody in America actually has a problem with responsible gun ownership. The disagreements between states go down to magazine sizes, barrel sizes, concealed carry laws, concealed carry permits, etc.
Yes school shootings are a problem, with some troubled person shooting up a school with an "Assault style rifle". But the fact of the matter is that it makes up an extremely small minority of gun crime.
The only difference between the US and Switzerland for example, is the fact that we are allowed to use the weapons in self defense versus animals or human assailants in our homes or in public. The other difference is the process to obtain firearms.
The last reason you will see resistance against gun control comes from the left. Gun control was originally pushed by conservative Republicans in the mid 20th century as a response to the Black Panther movement, civil rights group that operated as a militia and open carried rifles around town.
There's an argument that gun control would be systemically racist agenda, because it would restrict gun control only to those with the money and time and clean records to complete the checks to complete a purchase of a firearm. It would leave minority groups less armed compared to conservative white males.
Weapons are inherently a check against violence in this way. Similar to how the world uses the fact that it can destroy each other as leverage for mutual and relative peace.
As for being able to relate this to someone from Europe who has never handled firearms or can't understand the need for them, or people stubborn about them, I can relate as someone who never felt the need to own a weapon until recently. It's quite similar to the freedom a motor vehicle gives you. You get used to the autonomy and independence that a vehicle gives you. Being able to take apart the machine, customize it, optimize it, make it yours and express yourself through that construction.
I'm not trying to draw a false equivalency, but it's the closest one I can portray.
Well it is hard from a "cat out of the bag" reason.
To be clear I agree, there's way to many guns around and the best time to plant a tree is before today, but today is better than tomorrow. So let's start.
But there's millions of absolutely unknown guns here and banning them would create a black market with no end in sight
Their US customary units. What even is a fluid ounce, and what is it doing in my drink?
They're Florida Ounces
Come visit the UK. We have fluid ounces too, but only for baking. Your drink will be served by the millilitre, unless it's beer in a pub, or milk in a home, in which case it will be served by the pint.
And here’s me hoping to be served by the bartender.
oh and British imperial pints are different than US customary pints just for the extra fun
A shot? An eighth of a cup? Sixteenth of a pint? I mean, I get it. Metric is standard, but of all the units to pick on, the fluid ounce is probably one of our more reasonable measurements. We have acres of less-intuitive units.
Grocery baggers. I'm German - we pack our own bags over here and most customers do NOT like others to fondle their groceries. We literally do not have any "baggers" in any supermarket, and if a cashier packs a customer's bags without being specifically asked to do so (basically never happens) the customer will take that as an insult - as if you're trying to say they don't get out of your sight fast enough / that you want to speed up their departure to get rid of them, or that you don't think they're capable of that super basic, simple task. It's considered rude and condescending.
A cashier is expected to scan the stuff the customer wants to buy, take payment, hand over the receipt and change, and then leave the customer and their groceries alone.
This seems more like a regional thing these days, over here. I haven't seen grociers bagging groceries for customers since I was a child. I mean... outside of delivery or curbside pick-up. I do remember it being a pretty standard thing, though. Heck, it used to be a dedicated job position.
The bagger is presented as a courtesy, someone to do the work for you. In reality you're exactly right: it's to keep a brisk pace for the transaction. And if it takes too long to finish the transaction the manager can also yell at someone to speed it up.
We have Aldi here (at least in some of the states) so some of us know what you mean. But it's definitely not the norm, so many customers aren't very acclimated to the rapid baggerless checkout.
American here. Honestly eager to hear what they have to say. It would be cool insight into things I don't even really think about! ^^
Love your attitude. Have an upvote.
they have an insane amount of gun and gun related deaths
They don't have Universal Healthcare
they don't have a federal payed leave law
they don't have a maternal/paternal leave law
they don't have tuition free universities
they don't have decent mass transportation
The use of the imperial system
It just doesn't make sense and baffles my mind for the richest country in the world to treat it's citizens like this
Restaurant tipping instead of decent wages; somehow the blame is on the "stingy" customer
Okay now I'm stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.
How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was... peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.
When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish... it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.
Don't get me wrong, it's not dunking on "dumb spanish speakers". There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it's famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that "Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian" etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.
No, no, this is the correct reaction to someone asking something about "America".
Fuck the USA for capitalizing the name of both land masses for itself.
While we don't have nearly as cool old architecture like other continents, buildings/houses from the 70s are all over. I think most historic buildings tend to be closer to 100+ years old, which is almost half the age of the country.
Electing positions that require specialized skills or have judiciary authority. You elect your law enforcement, your judges, your fucking dog catchers. What the fuck?? Is it so hard to come up with a meritocratic method of selecting a fucking dog catcher that you must just throw your hands up and just ask random people what to do?!
Very large cars. You can easily fit 5 people in a small car.. lol.
Your voting system. Registering to vote? Wtf is this? Here you get your "ticket" to vote, by mail, automatically after you turn 18, a few weeks before the election date. And you are required by law to get time off, to vote, if youre otherwise unable to make it in time.
Also paying for education.. lol. Here its all free. In fact, im getting paid to study. (Not a ton but enough to get by)
Seems like you have a few misconceptions.
My house is definitely not cheaply built. Yes it is wooden. Termites are rarely an issue for homeowners. Different building materials have different pros and cons.
I've never seen a house anywhere in the United States with no insulation.
And you pay for education the same way we do. Taxes.
Registering to vote is pretty normal. You might not have to because the government already has records of you and that is the same in America for a lot of people. For immigrants in Europe you still have to register!
If you change municipality or state in Europe you might also have to register again so they have you voting in the right local elections.
My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:
insane amounts of empty space. It's one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn't count as "far away", another to experience it.
guns. Not like in "them americans only shoot themselves", but like in "any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it's normal" wtf mates, you can't keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don't get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain "hey let's put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here"?
And a very specific nitpick: calling places "european" like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being "the most europe-like cities in north america" and... they're not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that's it.
Corner shops used to exist in small towns, but they were killed by malls, big box stores, and online shopping.
And car-centric infrastructure. It's dumb to drive somewhere for a single shop, so people wanted an excuse to drive their expensive cars. Hence the one stop mega mall, where you can find everything you could want to load your car up with.
Canada is huge . and their cities are mainly built on flat ground hence the spaciousness. Add to that the dependency on cars. And you get huge swaths of unwalkable cities.
When it comes to the absence of corner shops. Its mainly due to strict urban zoning. Where they don't mix commercial and residential activities
Religion.
Anti Vax.
Militarised police.
Racism.
Political corruption.
Foreign wars.
Mass shootings.
Healthcare.
Public transit.
Abortion.
UFO.
Capitalism.
Two weeks holiday.
Maternity leave.
At least half of those are not unique to the United States. Lots of countries have problems with militarised police. And of course racism is universal.
Nobody does racism like the Italians.
In before the Balkan countries start arguing about who's better at racism
Absolute hostility against pedestrians. Or not-driving in general. It seems you are unworthy of public services if you don’t own a car in the US.
Police officer: *sees black man running*
*spins wheel* dadada·da·da-da-da–da–da—da — da TRESPASSING
(The wheel is 60% trespassing)
Also, what are sheriffs for?
Sheriffs have jurisdiction over counties.
Counties are larger than (and include) cities in the same way that states are larger than (and include) counties.
Many areas are not incorporated into a city so they would not have city police and therefore would need to rely on Sheriffs for local law enforcement.
It sounds like a system begging for consolidation.
There must be huge inefficiencies with so many different and sometimes overlapping law enforcement organisations.
There are. I live just outside police jurisdiction. My neighbor got his truck stolen and called the police, they said "Sorry, can't help ya, call the sheriff." He called the sheriff's office and got a recording that they are only open Wed-Thurs-Fri, 12pm to 4pm, that he could leave a message and expect to hear back then (it was Saturday).
He had video of the thieves and the car they showed up in, including license plate and clear shots of their faces. Sheriff said "Well, it's been five days, they probably ditched that car by now, not much we can do."
That’s insane, and incredibly infuriating.
Your neighbour must be pissed.
The structure of US police is very confusing,between sheriffs, marshalls, police, state police...
We have police and municipal police (aka not really the police but almost).
Sherrifs are complicated. First it is important to understand that police are tied to the cities they serve in. There are parts of cities are are not incorporated and thus need a different sort of law enforcement. Mostly remote places. But it does happen in denser areas.
Sherrifs are elected law enforcement. You can "run" for sherrif and just be some rich guy looking to play cops and robbers. See Texas.
However there are sherrifs officers that are on the same wavelength of police and just to enforce where the lines keep the police out. And you might think "Well why don't they just incorporate the parts into the city?". Lots of other issues with how the land is distributed in other ways.
Well, odd how these officials were supposedly elected by a population that leans Democratic but they are almost exclusively Republican, 90% white and 97% male. There is something about the position (I think historical connotations) that make it disproportionately attract/favor white conservative men.
No promotion/relegation in their sports leagues so it's just the same 20 teams playing in the top flight every year. Sounds well boring.
They have this weird drafting system tho, so I guess it's not the same team after a few years. Well, I don't know how big a fraction of the team changes teams after a season.
Yeah, it's bizarre how much the US loves the free market in everything but sports where they draft players.
Cars. You seem to buy cars like smartphones( actualy probably even worse since buying phone on credit dosent seem to be as common nowadays ) . If you can afford the credit payment for the card dosent mean you can afford the car.
In fact why everyone buys stuff on credit cards in the US . It seems insane to me to go to debt for a stupid cofee.
The idea behind using a credit card is to earn credit for when you actually need to borrow money. You should be using credit cards as proof you can pay back what you spend so you should have that money. An ideal use case is having the money on a debit card, opting to use a credit card and paying it off before it incurs a cost. Doing this would be free for you but could help greatly in the long term when you borrow for something like a mortgage.
But you shouldn't do this if you are already bad with money. I just use mine to pay for online subscriptions and have them automatically paid off because I know I can't be trusted to remember to pay them off
I (european) pay everything with a credit card (where possible, which is every store except some small independent ones). Then, I pay everything back by the due date. Why? In addition to a free loan while my assets are invested, I get 1-2% cashback. Yay, free money.
What we have of credit scores doesn't depend on our credit history as in the US though. Unless you currently have unpaid debt there should be nothing negative in your credit report. As it should be.
You're misunderstanding how credit cards are very often used.
Just because you pay with a credit card doesn't mean you are 'going into debt'. I pay my credit card off every month. I never accrue interest. But it's 1. Beneficial to my credit score to use it some and 2. I get cash back on some types of items, so it's just beneficial to use my card.
Putting american flags everywhere. What do you want to tell me with that? That you like the country? Obviously you do or else you wouldn't live there
Obviously you do or else you wouldn’t live there
Don't make such assumptions.
Yeah, when you live in the US, moving anywhere else isn't as easy as packing up your things to go to a new country. We don't have the benefit of an EU or Schengen Zone.
Obviously you do or else you wouldn't live there
Very much not true. Moving to another country full time is not particularly easy for a lot of people.
Oh actually no most of us can’t reasonably leave. We don’t have a shengen type deal or financial security so leaving is actually quite difficult for most of us.
I asked an American who was getting citizenship in my country if they were going to relinquish their american citizenship and was told that was pretty much unthinkable for an american.
Yeah I can’t imagine why I would. Like the country has its huge issues but holy fuck is our passport an amazing thing to have. It’s a thing of nobody but us will fuck with us.
It takes swathes of resources to get out of this hellhole. You wanna provide about $50k and a guaranteed job / housing / transport out for me? Then I can leave.
They do this in Europe too though (not with the US flags, obviously).
Norway is particularly famous for flying the flag everywhere.
Everything in this thread so far is normal stuff I could have guessed. Guns, metric, tipping, etc. Most of it has large groups of people in the country that agree, or at least know.
What are some non-obvious things? Culture shock isn't about major political issues. It's about universal things that turn out to not be universal.
For example, US people have a strong culture of how standing in line works. It's basically a moral sin to butt in line unless you have someone holding your place. This is universal in the country. My understanding is that other countries differ. Is that true?
France doesn't understand how to queue.
They will look you in the eyes and smile while they cut you off in line at the bakery to buy a fucking baguette, not even realizing the injustice they have done you.
Source : I go to France at least once a year on vacation.
You say "off of". In the UK we just say off. "Get off my lawn" Vs "Get off of my lawn". Why do you need the extra word?
You call pasta noodles. Pasta is not noodles.
I once got kicked off (of) a beach at 9pm by a police officer. Wtf? It's the beach, who cares if I'm on it at night? And why is it so important to have a police car patrolling it?
On that note, trespassing seems much more serious in America. In a lot of the world you can just wander around, if it's on somebody else's land it's no big deal as long as you don't cause a mess.
For the culture thing, Americans are generally louder and less subtle than any other nationality. They're more friendly and energetic. There's a certain type of dry sarcastic humour that never lands with Americans. I don't want to call it British humour because there's never any confusion with the rest of Europe
Pickup trucks everywhere. No public transportation usually. General Tso's chicken is a typical Chinese food you get. Weed products are available almost everywhere legally. Light beer. No proper lager beer even in small breweries. How people drive. No sidewalks most of the time. The whole health industry. Electric sockets. So many churches. The general war against trans people. The general war against women.
No proper lager beer
We import almost every German, Austrian, and Czech beer to the US...what do you think we're missing?
There is local beer; microbreweries have blossomed a lot with the past 20 years. There just aren't that many old breweries because less than 10 survived Prohibition.
That's really something the rest of the world should learn to use, they're an upgrade.
If you don't compost and you don't want your garbage to stink, they make sense to me. If you're using it properly, i.e. just putting food waste in it, it's going to decompose safely.
I use them more for taking care of the little bits of food that wash off my dishes when I have to clean them in the sink. Instead of grabbing all that gunk out of the sink and throwing it away (which is gross to do), I just let it go down the drain and grind it up in the disposal. EZPZ.
Americans seem very "fighty" compared to people from many other countries. You just have to say something that could be construed as liberal (the American kind) or conservative, too politically correct or incorrect, or mention you ride a bicycle or have an outdoor cat, to set some people off. With some Americans having a conversation is like navigating a minefield, especially those who have very little understanding of the rest of the world and reads everything you say into an American context, language barriers and all.
I love talking politics, and have had pleasant conversations with all kinds of people but I have learned from experience to just not bother with Americans, unless they're the very curious and open kind.
It's such a strange contradictory place. You pride yourself in freedom of speech but are so puritanical you refer to using the toilet as 'using the restrooms' and 'taking a comfort break'. Everyone knows you're going in there to crimp one off, not to have a comfortable rest in a designated room.
The fraternity and sorority thing at universities is really odd too. I don't really know what they're for aside from providing a dedicated environment for abuse via the deceptively amiable name of 'hazing'.
And referring to all your sports competitions as World Championships when the only teams that play are American. Bit cringey. I mean, you probably would win if there was an actual international basketball or baseball or american football competition, but at least the World Champion thing would actually mean something then.
And referring to all your sports competitions as World Championships when the only teams that play are American.
That's literally only Baseball (and they did it for marketing,) and baseball happens to be the North American sport with the most popular international championship, the World Baseball Classic (actually I don't know whether WBC or Olympic Hockey is more popular, but Hockey has a separate international championship from the Olympics.) The Football championship is called the Super Bowl, the Basketball championship is called the NBA Finals, the Hockey championship is called the Stanley Cup.
Came up recently... cupholders in cars. You really have to drink in the car while driving?
Did you only visit New England? Because in most other states, the drive can take quite a while, as in hours between cities. And there's not much to see or do at a random gas station or rest stop while you enjoy a beverage, so you may as well bring it along and get the journey over sooner.
I mean its not only american thing.there are cupholders in european cars..... or there were cupholders. At least My father 2001 Audi has it.
No but we gotta put the drinks somewhere when we go get drive-thru
I've had coworkers with 100+ mile commutes--200 miles a day. A cup holder seems far less silly when you're spending that much time in the car.
"Garbage" means "food waste" and it's French af, originally meaning all offal taken out of animals being cleaned to eat. "Disposall" was a brand of...garbage disposal...from the 1930s and the name stuck
They glorify soldiers way too much and teachers way too little
Between the two there is a big difference:
One is a profession that can be a particularly dangerous way of life. Orders from above put you into place far from support, with limited resources, often in contact with hostiles on a daily basis. You're often left to fend for yourself with only what you have on you against overwhelming odds. Command structures often pit you against your peers in petty internal politics around rank. The pay isn't great, and those that stick with it for the long haul to make a lifetime of it often leave scared and mentally injured. It can be a thankless job in putting your life and health on the line to achieve the overall goal.
The other profession usually involves wearing a uniform and enforcing USA's geopolitical interests in other countries.
U got me in the first half not gonna lie
Your comment made read the other comment.
Worth it.
Ah, the old
RedditLemmy switcharooHold my bulletprove backpack. I am going in.
It was good but I saw it coming right away lol.
A family friend of ours just quit his highschool teaching job and is moving his family because he was threatened with a gun in his classroom. The student was expelled, but not arrested and knows where he lives.
I fucking hate it here. Guns need to go.
As an American, it confuses me as well
Soldiers and patriotism...
Sticker price isn't the price you pay at the till. Why? Why do you do that.
Massive gaps between the walls and doors of public lavatory cubicles. This is not some mystical, advanced technology. Get it together.
We do that because our country is founded on the "right" for moneymakers to put as much onto the customer as they can get away with. Hence things like tipping culture.
No offense but how thick do you have to be to make a door that is put in place solely to shield you from other humans, have a massive gap?
It seriously boggles my mind.
It's not about doing it right for most. It's about saving every dime you can. There are some that properly enclose stalls, like a nationally known Magic card seller in my locale.
I think the toilet wall thing is because we have an expectation that every public building must have public toilets available. Places don’t want you to fuck or shoot up in the bathrooms, so they make them un-private so you hurry the hell up and leave. It’s a bit of hostile architecture, like making park benches that you can’t lie down on to keep people from trying to sleep on them. Make the “undesirables” uncomfortable enough and maybe they’ll go be undesirable somewhere else. Meanwhile it’s just a little bit less nice for everyone else as well.
This is a thoughtful reply. I will just say that the UK also has public toilets all over the place, and a desire for people to not screw & get high in the cubicles. Ditto many other countries. But I've never been anywhere else with this door gap problem, where no-one gets privacy.
I did once use a UK bathroom in a supermarket where the lighting was all blue, which makes it hard to find a vein to inject. But the doors still closed properly.
American here. I like your response and the one you responded to. Thanks for this insight. ^^
Pleasant interaction ^ Thank you.
Two party system. They can't possibly represent everyone's interests. Feels more like religion to me .
They don't represent anyone's interests except their own.
And those who lobby them and/or help them get reelected.
Two party system is great for polarizing the society.
Divide and conquer.
More precisely: The reason for the two party system: FPTP voting. The Brits do the same shit, and have the same problems.
The way it feels now (more cult-like than political and representing the populace) automatically and unavoidably stems from this FPTP issue. It automatically reduces the whole field to a reduced number of options, and while each reduction step takes longer than the last, this will ultimativley lead to a one-party state. It's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN and the REP program for 2025 to basically turn the government upside down to get unbeatable is trying to achieve this very single party state.
We do do the same and we do have the same problems, but it's not so bad. We have at least 4 parties in parliament who have a voice and a number of others who are at least represented. It's not good, but you have it worse
Two parties that are, if I'm not mistaken, the Right and the Rightest.
Didn't the USA see any leftist ideology as radical?
The Cold War did some terrible things to our ideology.
They openly call Democrats radical lefties nowadays
We technically have more than 2; but nobody ever votes for the other parties, and the other parties are almost never given the opportunity to debate or have big ad campaigns. 🤷🏻♂️
And to be fair: Some of those other parties are even more narrow minded than the two big ones.
CGP Grey made an excellent video explaining our voting system: Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting
Skip to 1:36 to hear about how, no matter how many parties we have, it always comes down to 2 major parties competing in this voting system.
I vote for one of those other parties!
The two party system isn’t really codified in law, it’s just kind of a side-effect of the way we vote and the way government is organized. Due to those two things, it’s hard to change.
It's an inevitable conclusion of our winner take all voting system. "The man with the most votes wins." If 4 candidates run, and they get 22% 22% 16% and 40% of the vote, the man with 40% of the vote wins the race, and 60% of the population didn't get the candidate they voted for.
Now imagine you've got a red, orange, green and blue party. Orange voters get together and decide "You know, the Red party's platform is pretty similar to ours, what if we didn't run a candidate next time and instead encouraged our voters to vote for the Red candidate instead? The blue candidate won with 40% of the vote, but our two parties put together would have 44%.
In the next election with three candidates, the red candidate wins 44% to 40%, prompting a similar conversation at the Green party headquarters. Soon enough there are two parties.
We're one of if not the oldest representative democracy in the world today; our constitution is 250 years old, there's some old bugs still in the code base.
Basically because we were early adopters to modern republic systems. We tried something new because parliament was a bit too kingy for our tastes. But due to its simplicity it became really easy for two parties to wipe the floor with everyone else. And basically the only times they’ve changed was at the start and again shortly before our civil war. Neither party has ever had good reason to change the system, which would require massive agreement to change our constitution. So nobody does.
For example, politically I’m a syndicalist, but the democrats are pro union, pro environment, pro woman, and pro lgbt, all of which with a big asterisk but still I consistently vote for them because the greens didn’t win with Nader so they’re definitely going to lose now. So I dutifully vote Democrat because the only other party that has a chance is the republicans and they hate me and everything I believe in.
If we could do it again we’d do it better but in our defense we didn’t really have anyone to model off of
Jokes on you, in the end they both represent the same interests
It's like a restaurant with a single dish and you can only chose a side. One's xenophobia with a sprinkle of batshit crazy, the other's utter impotence.
American here. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
As an American, I find it amazing that countries can have more than two active parties but also have a plurality voting system.
Tipping
Also, losing their shit over nudity
Puritans for the latter.
Bribery / slavery for the former.
While having a huge porn industry.
We have tipping in Europe, but that's mostly only done if you have a very good experience, not because you are expected to. Just pay your employees.
The whole Guns thing
Keeping your gun accessible when driving your car. Needing or wanting to open carry when you go shopping. Needing to pose with your family all holding powerful guns for a Christmas photo. I don’t get it.
Most of America doesn't do it, just the people who are afraid of violence - which also happens to the same people who would quickly resort to violence. At this point, seeing a person wearing a gun is the same as seeing warning colors on other species like insects. If you see it, turn and go the other way. There is literally nothing worth the inconvenience of dealing with those people. (And hospitals don't allow open carry so matters of life and death can be attend to without worry.)
At-will employment makes no sense to me. You go to work every day knowing you could be fired without any possibility of taking the time to find another job. It would drive me crazy.
Oh it's terrifying.
You should not compare that to employment as it is known in other countries.
Rather compare it to slavery. Doesn't it look better now? ;-)
The flip side is we can quit at anytime.
Yeah, that really doesn't make up for it.
I mean, I'll take the months notice period and knowing I get redundancy if my job goes over being able to quit a bit faster.
So like mid-shift or are there any limits to this?
I quit by showing up 3 hours early and sent an eff you I’m out email. Dropped my badge on my desk and walked out without talking to anyone.
No. You just tell someone above you that you quit, and then leave.
You could walk out without telling anyone, but that's rare. Depends on how shitty the job is.
They will say of themselves as being Irish/Italian/other-european-nationality because their great-grandfather or great-grandmother came from there.
Okay let's play a game. Let's pretend you're Italian, you said Italian, we'll go with that. You speak Italian, you're used to traditional Italian food, you believe in traditional Italian values. Things are done a certain way in Italy, and you're used to it that way. Then one day, for whatever reason be it economic prospects, famine, war, whatever, you decide to leave Italy forever and board a ship bound for America. New Life in the New World and all that jazz.
What do you do when you step off the boat at Ellis Island? Do you:
A. Continue to speak your native language at least at home, become part of a community of fellow Italian emigrants, continue to cook and eat your traditional dishes...as best as you can with the ingredients available in this new hemisphere at any rate, do things the way you're used to doing them, retaining your traditional values...or
B. Delete all that tedious "back in the old country" nonsense and instantly become an English speakin' cheeseburger eatin' stetson wearin' rootin' tootin' howdy y'all.
Going with option A, huh? How original. We've run this experiment on real hardware literally hundreds of millions of times over the last 250 years and not a single immigrant has gone with Option B.
Okay so...now you're an American. You're still an Italian though. It's who and what you are. You get married and have children. How do you raise those children? Do you...
A. Speak Italian to them at home, take them to the same church you were raised in, feed them the foods you were raised eating, teach them the same values you believe in, tell them the tales of your home country's folklore as bedtime stories...or
B. Speak to them only in English, send them to the First Baptist Church, feed them apple sauce and happy meals, and raise them on Sesame Street and Marvel comics.
Going with option A again? Daring today, aren't we? Your children are required to go to American public school. They're formally taught to read, write, speak and understand English, and invariably put in the role of translating for their parents during doctors visits and the like. They're taught American legends like the first thanksgiving with the pilgrims and Indians, of George Washington and that cherry tree. They grow up eating the food their parents invented out of necessity, like spaghetti and meatballs, or chicken parmesan.
One day, well into their adulthood, someone asks your children a question. It might be "Where are you from?" or some similar phraseology. How do your bilingual spaghetti-eating children answer this question?
"We're Italian."
Now that we've been on that journey, I want you to imagine logging onto the internet to find some dumb fuck who never left the Old Country, who has never been to a place where "What is your current nationality" and "What is your personal heritage" are different questions with different answers and thus has no grasp at all on the concept of diaspora says "No you're not."
There are several problems there:
Now I have spent enough time reading about how American view their complicated relationship to race, ethnicity, and ancestry, to understand where you're coming from, but this is fundamentally at odds to the humanist approach of "we're all the same and who your great-grandparents were does not define who you are in any way". (Which is obviously idealist, and does tend to "whitewash" some struggles, but it is nonetheless the prevailing approach).
Mate, I've seen long-term immigrants not just of my own nation but other nations who returned and was even myself an immigrant of my own nation for over 2 decades abroad, and after 2 or 3 decades people living abroad are already culturally and even in values different from their countrymen, due to a mix of partially absorbing the values and way of being in life and society of were they live, and because their own country kept on changing over time generally in a different way in which they themselves change (it's quite funny how they have ideas about how their own country of birth is that don't really match the reality and look silly and outdated to the people actually living there).
This is a mere 2 or 3 decades for people who actually grew up in their nation of origin.
People 2 or 3 generations away from said nation are not only descendants of immigrants with a deviating cultural framework as describe above, but they have grown up in a different nation (and from all my observations living in a couple of countries, people culturally tend to be closer to the country they grew up in more than the country of their parents) and at least their parents and possibly their grandparents were already people who grew up in a different nation and only knew about the nation of their ancestors via 2nd or 3rd hand accounts.
Whatever "culture" and "value" they have from their ancestors' nation of origin is a thin slice, deeply degraded (often charicaturally so - note the mention of spaghetti eating to mean "culturally italian", something which would make me Italian and my Italian ancestors if any came over during the Roman Empire) and severelly outdated (a century or more) version of the culture and values of the nation of origin of their ancestors.
The difference for example between an American of Italian ancestry and one of Irish ancestry is token if that much compared to the difference between an actual modern Italian and an Irish: American-Italian, American-Irish and so on are but sub-cultures of the United States of America culture and draw most of their ways and values from that one, not from the cultures of the countries of origin of their great-grandparents.
When your country is so young, nearly everybody is an immigrant. So it's hard to take pride in a family lineage that is at most 4 generations of being American. Plus, we don't really have a unified national identity. "American" could literally mean every type of person.
funny that you say that, not all Europeans are stuck in the same nationality for 10 or 30 generations back, maybe not even majority.
My great-grandmother was German, never learned the language of what is now my nationality. My grandmother and her child (my parent) didn't speak German and have never subscribed to German nationality, neither do I (but I speak a little bit German though becouse of school not because of family). Maybe it's because the identity of the place I live in is as strong as Germany's so it's a simple choice. But for a country, whose entire schtick is "'Murica fokk yea" I am sometimes baffled how much this ancestral identity matters among people who are supposed to benefit from the whole thing (white middle/upper classes).
are they claiming nationality or ethnic heritage?
The obsession with mutilating baby boy’s penises.
As an American I don't get this either. You want to cut on my child's penis the day after he's born?! The fuck? Who says yes to that?
A “politics” channel on a site called Lemmy.World that is specifically only for US politics, because America is the world.
Where do they play the only sport that calls their competition the World Series yet only 1 county is participating?
(Okay, technically 2, but come on.)
City design and suburbs. Like if I had to drive 40 minutes to get groceries I would prefer to starve and those suburbs look like death would be the better alternative. Also driving to go for a walk, wtf?
No one in a real city or suburb is driving 40 minutes to get groceries in the US.
I was being somewhat hyperbolic, the point was you guys have to drive everywhere to do anything which is so alien to me. Or I guess take public transit which always sounds horrible when Americans describe it, which is also something that sounds so weird to me about the US.
You're right, we do have to drive to get anywhere outside of major cities. The funny thing is that even the most rural area has a fleet of busses and routes that cover every home. The problem is that they only come through twice a day on weekdays during the school year. Other than that these busses just sit around forcing old folks who can't to drive anyway.
lol that's fair. But also, the there's a cyclical relationship between suburbs and grocers. If you build suburbs, the grocers arrive. Where there are grocers, people might live and form suburbs. You really only have to "drive 40 minutes to get groceries" if you're waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the sticks. Or, and I'm sorry to say it, what's more likely, is you live in a dense, urban area and are very near groceries, but can't afford a vehicle to get there directly, and so you've got to walk to the bus stop and wait for the bus to come around. This could definitely total 40 minutes to go get some eggs and milk. It's a fucking tragedy.
Grocery is always 5 minutes away in the suburbs. I think you underestimate the amount of stores
5 Minute by car if your suburb is not completely fucked.
But that is also kinda the point, how long do you have to walk to get groceries?
I think you underestimate the sprawl of suburbs.
American here. I hate this too. I am a proponent of convenient walking locations and far better public transportation, and it doesn't look like America's gonna give a damn about those in my lifetime.
Not Just Bikes (YouTube channel talking about this) basically said they've given up on any hope for north america.
City zoning.
Oh, i have to drive from single family zone to commercial district to pick up a loaf of bread. Then drive to education district to drop kids at kindergarten, and finally to business district to work. At the end of the day i hang out at bar/entertainment district with the guys from work to have a beer, but there's no public transport so I have to drink alcohol free so I can drive back home. That's only 120 miles in a day!
It won't surprise you to know that what you're describing was created by the car and oil industry and forced on North America through intense lobbying
Oddly enough it's worse when American cities don't have zoning laws. Houston TX has no zoning laws and it's a nightmare
Your description isn't how it works in most places really. The "districts" aren't usually that far apart. It would be common to find single family homes close by a school, or an apartment building right next to an office building.
Zoning is useful in scenarios like industrial vs residential buildings. You wouldn't want to have an apartment building next to a railroad hub for example. The railroad would be very loud/dirty, and industrial business would benefit more from being closer to the rail hub.
Vote for people who actively oppose universal healthcare, mandatory PTO policies, universal family leave policies, universal college-level education, etc.
Then words are communism and we don’t take kindly to pinko commies round here.
The way politicians and the political system nakedly serves the needs and interests of corporations and the wealthy, and not the average individual.
The way that the price you're quoted invariably gets bumped up by various taxes.
The insane system that is tipping, including the fact that a lot of workers are so underpaid that they rely on tips to get by.
The incessant adverts on TV for medical products, particularly prescription drugs.
Agree to all but politicians, in that it isn't exclusive to the US, but most "naked" as you say
Voting registration. I get a letter that I can vote and what the options are. Then on voting day, which is on a Sunday, because why would it be on any other day, I just walk into my town hall with that letter and my ID card, put down my crosses and leave. It's like a walk in the park, often quite literally.
I think the thing is, in America people aren't required to register their residence with the government. At least here in Austria, we are, and that doubles as voter registration if we are eligible to vote. So there is voter registration here too, but it is compulsory.
Ah, if that's the case, then I can get on board with a separate voting registration. Not sure, I'd prefer it, but at least it's not just arbitrarily making democracy harder.
It’s since the elections are state run, so there’s no central db. Once you register though your electoral experience is a state by state crapshoot.
Some will make you stand in line for hours forcing you to miss work, others do mail-in ballots with early voting which is kind of awesome.
oh I know we don't do it on Sunday. America was so spread out that it took days to get into and kind of town. So you go to church on Sunday then travel on the on Sunday/Monday and and vote on Tuesday.
Healthcare, electoral college, how supreme court justices are elected, first past the post voting system.
Edit: and the self assurance to nitpick a foreigner over the details of how justices come into their job.
The EC is a mechanism to make the Presidential election less democratic.
Supreme Court Justices aren't elected at all. The President nominates a judge and the Senate votes to approve that person for the post.
FTtP voting is bad. It's just awful. The more you understand it the clearer that becomes.
Healthcare... no cap, we don't understand it, either. It's a mess.
Supreme Court justices aren’t elected.
The Electoral College exists because it was never the intent for the President to be elected by the public. It sticks around because changing it requires changing the Constitution, and a majority of states benefit from the status quo.
Your houses seem to be made out of paper. Then you complain about strong winds..
I remember hearing that Europe doesn't use drywall nearly as much. A benefit of drywall is cost and repairability, but is basically glorified paper, yes.
You don't have to repair it if you can't break it.
Try breaking a brick wall with your head or fists, lol.
Try rebuilding a brick wall after a tornado, you're going to spend so much more money and you won't have a house for a lot longer
That's the other side of the confusion. You build houses out of sticks and paper, and live in somewhere called Tornado Alley...
I don't build houses, nor do I live in Tornado Alley lol
I think that was an empirical "you", not you specifically..
Yeah, I live in an area prone to tornadoes. Not as tornado prone as the midwest, but we've seen tornadoes in this area.
A particularly notable one touched down in a town not far from here, in the business district. It tore down multiple steel framed cinder block buildings including a Lowe's Home Improvement Center and a Tractor Supply Company.
A big bad wolf might not be able to blow a brick house down, but an EF3 tornado certainly can.
I'd like to see a tornado tearing up a brick house as easily as a wood and drywall house.
It doesn't need to tear it down, just weaken it enough that it's no longer structually sound.
Easy, can your brick house handle a 400 kph car flying into, follow by chunks of trees, houses, ice ball the size of grapfruit.
Here you go.
Canadian here but still, shoes in house? Gross. Obsession with gun culture? Also gross.
German here. The shoe one is worse.
Guns. Just restrict them, it's not that hard
The "winner takes all" political system that ends with two extremist parties and a huge divide between people
Healthcare. Do I need to say anything?
The extreme divide between rich and poor
Police force. They hire lowly educated people, preferably racist, receiving barely any training, and what they do get is mostly nonsense. They then get military equipment, and the entire system is protected by a corrupt union
The amount that news organizations are allowed to lie
Most people aren't hugely divided on guns. Like you said, you're seeing the two extremes of the parties, not the will of the people. Browsing Lemmy would convince you that everyone except for the big bad GOP wants guns banned, and that's simply not true. Most people want responsible gun limitations, not total gun bans.
Guns are one of those things thats really hard to restrict. It's a freedom that most enjoy, and some abuse. Most that own guns responsibly don't want their guns taken away due to law changes.
This was actually the case with automatic firearms, automatic firearms were legal to buy until 1986, ironically with the support of the NRA, which is the largest gun lobby in favor of less gun control. In this ban of automatic firearms, they allowed existing owners to keep their automatics.
You can count self defense cases and crimes with those weapons on one hand, most crimes are committed with handguns.
Another argument is just banning "assault style rifles". This is basically the blanket description of an AR-15 style rifle, that is generally the same design as an M4 carbine in the military, with it's adjustable stock, 16 inch barrel, black color, with a comfy pistol grip, the automatic function removed, and an MLOK rail for attachments like lights, lasers, or sights.
The reason that this description is silly, is because a normal semi-auto hunting rifle is functionally the exact same as an "assault rifle". It has magazines and you can fire it rapidly buy pushing the trigger rapidly. You could ductape lights and lasers to it. Gun manufacturers could simply sell the same gun without the "tactical" features which are convenient for all users, and it would change nothing about crime.
Additionally, if there's a huge gun buyback and all gun owners turn in their guns because the second amendment has been repealed, criminals are not going to turn in their guns, and it would leave many defenseless.
Often times, guns are necessary for those living in rural areas, because there is a great number of threats from wildlife in rural areas, from Alligators, to Mountain Lions, to Grizzly Bears and Brown Bears and Black Bears. Hunting is required to control the ecosystems of large game and small game. Additionally, many hunters opt to use the "tactical assault style rifles" due to their modularity. (Not always, many still use bolt action rifles, when it's for sport).
Nobody in America actually has a problem with responsible gun ownership. The disagreements between states go down to magazine sizes, barrel sizes, concealed carry laws, concealed carry permits, etc.
Yes school shootings are a problem, with some troubled person shooting up a school with an "Assault style rifle". But the fact of the matter is that it makes up an extremely small minority of gun crime.
The only difference between the US and Switzerland for example, is the fact that we are allowed to use the weapons in self defense versus animals or human assailants in our homes or in public. The other difference is the process to obtain firearms.
The last reason you will see resistance against gun control comes from the left. Gun control was originally pushed by conservative Republicans in the mid 20th century as a response to the Black Panther movement, civil rights group that operated as a militia and open carried rifles around town.
There's an argument that gun control would be systemically racist agenda, because it would restrict gun control only to those with the money and time and clean records to complete the checks to complete a purchase of a firearm. It would leave minority groups less armed compared to conservative white males.
Weapons are inherently a check against violence in this way. Similar to how the world uses the fact that it can destroy each other as leverage for mutual and relative peace.
As for being able to relate this to someone from Europe who has never handled firearms or can't understand the need for them, or people stubborn about them, I can relate as someone who never felt the need to own a weapon until recently. It's quite similar to the freedom a motor vehicle gives you. You get used to the autonomy and independence that a vehicle gives you. Being able to take apart the machine, customize it, optimize it, make it yours and express yourself through that construction.
I'm not trying to draw a false equivalency, but it's the closest one I can portray.
I hope this answered your question!
:3
Well it is hard from a "cat out of the bag" reason.
To be clear I agree, there's way to many guns around and the best time to plant a tree is before today, but today is better than tomorrow. So let's start.
But there's millions of absolutely unknown guns here and banning them would create a black market with no end in sight
Imperial unit system.
I am American and hate imperial units especially ounces
Carter was transitioning the US to metric and then Reagan killed it.
Their US customary units. What even is a fluid ounce, and what is it doing in my drink?
They're Florida Ounces
Come visit the UK. We have fluid ounces too, but only for baking. Your drink will be served by the millilitre, unless it's beer in a pub, or milk in a home, in which case it will be served by the pint.
And here’s me hoping to be served by the bartender.
oh and British imperial pints are different than US customary pints just for the extra fun
A shot? An eighth of a cup? Sixteenth of a pint? I mean, I get it. Metric is standard, but of all the units to pick on, the fluid ounce is probably one of our more reasonable measurements. We have acres of less-intuitive units.
Thinking Europeans are the only other humans on Earth
Grocery baggers. I'm German - we pack our own bags over here and most customers do NOT like others to fondle their groceries. We literally do not have any "baggers" in any supermarket, and if a cashier packs a customer's bags without being specifically asked to do so (basically never happens) the customer will take that as an insult - as if you're trying to say they don't get out of your sight fast enough / that you want to speed up their departure to get rid of them, or that you don't think they're capable of that super basic, simple task. It's considered rude and condescending.
A cashier is expected to scan the stuff the customer wants to buy, take payment, hand over the receipt and change, and then leave the customer and their groceries alone.
This seems more like a regional thing these days, over here. I haven't seen grociers bagging groceries for customers since I was a child. I mean... outside of delivery or curbside pick-up. I do remember it being a pretty standard thing, though. Heck, it used to be a dedicated job position.
The bagger is presented as a courtesy, someone to do the work for you. In reality you're exactly right: it's to keep a brisk pace for the transaction. And if it takes too long to finish the transaction the manager can also yell at someone to speed it up.
We have Aldi here (at least in some of the states) so some of us know what you mean. But it's definitely not the norm, so many customers aren't very acclimated to the rapid baggerless checkout.
Hear hear! Why is this so hard to understand in this damn country?! (US)
American here. Honestly eager to hear what they have to say. It would be cool insight into things I don't even really think about! ^^
Love your attitude. Have an upvote.
they have an insane amount of gun and gun related deaths They don't have Universal Healthcare they don't have a federal payed leave law they don't have a maternal/paternal leave law they don't have tuition free universities they don't have decent mass transportation The use of the imperial system
It just doesn't make sense and baffles my mind for the richest country in the world to treat it's citizens like this
Restaurant tipping instead of decent wages; somehow the blame is on the "stingy" customer
Okay now I'm stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.
How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was... peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.
When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish... it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.
Don't get me wrong, it's not dunking on "dumb spanish speakers". There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it's famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that "Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian" etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.
No, no, this is the correct reaction to someone asking something about "America".
Fuck the USA for capitalizing the name of both land masses for itself.
Lack of history.
In LA I've been told that old buildings are demolished to build new ones.
Something 50 years old is an historic landmark there.
We have a history it's just that the Europeans who came over murdered most of the people who knew it.
While we don't have nearly as cool old architecture like other continents, buildings/houses from the 70s are all over. I think most historic buildings tend to be closer to 100+ years old, which is almost half the age of the country.
Saying "could care less" when that's not what they mean.
This has bothered me. It is supposed to be "couldn't" yet the consistenly degrading language has caused this I believe.
Can't tell if this was written in 2023, 1993, or 103 BC
Yes to all three.
Language is always changing and pain points like these (also" would of", etc) are parts of the driving force behind this process.
Not all Americans use this phrase incorrectly, mostly just ignorant people.
While we're at it, what does "on accident", and accident isn't a tangible object, it's an event.
I've decided to subvert the error. I could care less, but it would take the ratification of a constitutional amendment.
I could careless
Electing positions that require specialized skills or have judiciary authority. You elect your law enforcement, your judges, your fucking dog catchers. What the fuck?? Is it so hard to come up with a meritocratic method of selecting a fucking dog catcher that you must just throw your hands up and just ask random people what to do?!
Cheap wooden houses in areas with termites
And no insulation, so you rely on expensive AC
Tipping
Very large cars. You can easily fit 5 people in a small car.. lol.
Your voting system. Registering to vote? Wtf is this? Here you get your "ticket" to vote, by mail, automatically after you turn 18, a few weeks before the election date. And you are required by law to get time off, to vote, if youre otherwise unable to make it in time.
Also paying for education.. lol. Here its all free. In fact, im getting paid to study. (Not a ton but enough to get by)
Seems like you have a few misconceptions.
My house is definitely not cheaply built. Yes it is wooden. Termites are rarely an issue for homeowners. Different building materials have different pros and cons.
I've never seen a house anywhere in the United States with no insulation.
And you pay for education the same way we do. Taxes.
Registering to vote is pretty normal. You might not have to because the government already has records of you and that is the same in America for a lot of people. For immigrants in Europe you still have to register!
If you change municipality or state in Europe you might also have to register again so they have you voting in the right local elections.
My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:
Corner shops used to exist in small towns, but they were killed by malls, big box stores, and online shopping.
And car-centric infrastructure. It's dumb to drive somewhere for a single shop, so people wanted an excuse to drive their expensive cars. Hence the one stop mega mall, where you can find everything you could want to load your car up with.
Canada is huge . and their cities are mainly built on flat ground hence the spaciousness. Add to that the dependency on cars. And you get huge swaths of unwalkable cities.
When it comes to the absence of corner shops. Its mainly due to strict urban zoning. Where they don't mix commercial and residential activities
Religion.
Anti Vax.
Militarised police.
Racism.
Political corruption.
Foreign wars.
Mass shootings.
Healthcare.
Public transit.
Abortion.
UFO.
Capitalism.
Two weeks holiday.
Maternity leave.
At least half of those are not unique to the United States. Lots of countries have problems with militarised police. And of course racism is universal.
Nobody does racism like the Italians.
In before the Balkan countries start arguing about who's better at racism
Yes, maternity leave! The US approach is bonkers.
Absolute hostility against pedestrians. Or not-driving in general. It seems you are unworthy of public services if you don’t own a car in the US.
Police officer: *sees black man running*
*spins wheel*
dadada·da·da-da-da–da–da—da — da TRESPASSING
(The wheel is 60% trespassing)
Also, what are sheriffs for?
Sheriffs have jurisdiction over counties.
Counties are larger than (and include) cities in the same way that states are larger than (and include) counties.
Many areas are not incorporated into a city so they would not have city police and therefore would need to rely on Sheriffs for local law enforcement.
It sounds like a system begging for consolidation.
There must be huge inefficiencies with so many different and sometimes overlapping law enforcement organisations.
There are. I live just outside police jurisdiction. My neighbor got his truck stolen and called the police, they said "Sorry, can't help ya, call the sheriff." He called the sheriff's office and got a recording that they are only open Wed-Thurs-Fri, 12pm to 4pm, that he could leave a message and expect to hear back then (it was Saturday).
He had video of the thieves and the car they showed up in, including license plate and clear shots of their faces. Sheriff said "Well, it's been five days, they probably ditched that car by now, not much we can do."
That’s insane, and incredibly infuriating.
Your neighbour must be pissed.
The structure of US police is very confusing,between sheriffs, marshalls, police, state police...
We have police and municipal police (aka not really the police but almost).
Sherrifs are complicated. First it is important to understand that police are tied to the cities they serve in. There are parts of cities are are not incorporated and thus need a different sort of law enforcement. Mostly remote places. But it does happen in denser areas.
Sherrifs are elected law enforcement. You can "run" for sherrif and just be some rich guy looking to play cops and robbers. See Texas.
However there are sherrifs officers that are on the same wavelength of police and just to enforce where the lines keep the police out. And you might think "Well why don't they just incorporate the parts into the city?". Lots of other issues with how the land is distributed in other ways.
Well, odd how these officials were supposedly elected by a population that leans Democratic but they are almost exclusively Republican, 90% white and 97% male. There is something about the position (I think historical connotations) that make it disproportionately attract/favor white conservative men.
Several things, but top of the list is guns.
Tipping and calculating your own taxes
No promotion/relegation in their sports leagues so it's just the same 20 teams playing in the top flight every year. Sounds well boring.
They have this weird drafting system tho, so I guess it's not the same team after a few years. Well, I don't know how big a fraction of the team changes teams after a season.
Yeah, it's bizarre how much the US loves the free market in everything but sports where they draft players.
Cars. You seem to buy cars like smartphones( actualy probably even worse since buying phone on credit dosent seem to be as common nowadays ) . If you can afford the credit payment for the card dosent mean you can afford the car. In fact why everyone buys stuff on credit cards in the US . It seems insane to me to go to debt for a stupid cofee.
The idea behind using a credit card is to earn credit for when you actually need to borrow money. You should be using credit cards as proof you can pay back what you spend so you should have that money. An ideal use case is having the money on a debit card, opting to use a credit card and paying it off before it incurs a cost. Doing this would be free for you but could help greatly in the long term when you borrow for something like a mortgage.
But you shouldn't do this if you are already bad with money. I just use mine to pay for online subscriptions and have them automatically paid off because I know I can't be trusted to remember to pay them off
I (european) pay everything with a credit card (where possible, which is every store except some small independent ones). Then, I pay everything back by the due date. Why? In addition to a free loan while my assets are invested, I get 1-2% cashback. Yay, free money.
What we have of credit scores doesn't depend on our credit history as in the US though. Unless you currently have unpaid debt there should be nothing negative in your credit report. As it should be.
You're misunderstanding how credit cards are very often used.
Just because you pay with a credit card doesn't mean you are 'going into debt'. I pay my credit card off every month. I never accrue interest. But it's 1. Beneficial to my credit score to use it some and 2. I get cash back on some types of items, so it's just beneficial to use my card.
Putting american flags everywhere. What do you want to tell me with that? That you like the country? Obviously you do or else you wouldn't live there
Don't make such assumptions.
Yeah, when you live in the US, moving anywhere else isn't as easy as packing up your things to go to a new country. We don't have the benefit of an EU or Schengen Zone.
Very much not true. Moving to another country full time is not particularly easy for a lot of people.
Oh actually no most of us can’t reasonably leave. We don’t have a shengen type deal or financial security so leaving is actually quite difficult for most of us.
I asked an American who was getting citizenship in my country if they were going to relinquish their american citizenship and was told that was pretty much unthinkable for an american.
Yeah I can’t imagine why I would. Like the country has its huge issues but holy fuck is our passport an amazing thing to have. It’s a thing of nobody but us will fuck with us.
It takes swathes of resources to get out of this hellhole. You wanna provide about $50k and a guaranteed job / housing / transport out for me? Then I can leave.
They do this in Europe too though (not with the US flags, obviously).
Norway is particularly famous for flying the flag everywhere.
I was
very pleasedaghast that they had porn on TV in Europe after a certain hour when visiting in my teenage years.Everything in this thread so far is normal stuff I could have guessed. Guns, metric, tipping, etc. Most of it has large groups of people in the country that agree, or at least know.
What are some non-obvious things? Culture shock isn't about major political issues. It's about universal things that turn out to not be universal.
For example, US people have a strong culture of how standing in line works. It's basically a moral sin to butt in line unless you have someone holding your place. This is universal in the country. My understanding is that other countries differ. Is that true?
France doesn't understand how to queue.
They will look you in the eyes and smile while they cut you off in line at the bakery to buy a fucking baguette, not even realizing the injustice they have done you.
Source : I go to France at least once a year on vacation.
In the UK we pride ourselves on our ability to queue for no apparent reason.
Sir, pride in the sanctity of the Queue is reason enough alone.
Seriously though, being in places where people don't queue properly is miserable. That's something America should be applauded for.
I know some small petty things!
You say "off of". In the UK we just say off. "Get off my lawn" Vs "Get off of my lawn". Why do you need the extra word?
You call pasta noodles. Pasta is not noodles.
I once got kicked off (of) a beach at 9pm by a police officer. Wtf? It's the beach, who cares if I'm on it at night? And why is it so important to have a police car patrolling it?
On that note, trespassing seems much more serious in America. In a lot of the world you can just wander around, if it's on somebody else's land it's no big deal as long as you don't cause a mess.
For the culture thing, Americans are generally louder and less subtle than any other nationality. They're more friendly and energetic. There's a certain type of dry sarcastic humour that never lands with Americans. I don't want to call it British humour because there's never any confusion with the rest of Europe
Pickup trucks everywhere. No public transportation usually. General Tso's chicken is a typical Chinese food you get. Weed products are available almost everywhere legally. Light beer. No proper lager beer even in small breweries. How people drive. No sidewalks most of the time. The whole health industry. Electric sockets. So many churches. The general war against trans people. The general war against women.
We import almost every German, Austrian, and Czech beer to the US...what do you think we're missing?
There is local beer; microbreweries have blossomed a lot with the past 20 years. There just aren't that many old breweries because less than 10 survived Prohibition.
What's up with that "bus shaming"? It would never occur to me to judge people based on whether they use public transport VS own a car!
School/mass shootings.
What, they're shooting up catholic churches now
Nah, just the ones full of minorities
Sandwich for lunch.
Gas operated dryers.
High school proms being such a big thing.
Gas operated dryers?!
Da fuq is wrong with a sandwich for lunch?
Whats the correct time to have a sandwich then?
UK enters the chat
Garbage disposable units.
That's really something the rest of the world should learn to use, they're an upgrade.
If you don't compost and you don't want your garbage to stink, they make sense to me. If you're using it properly, i.e. just putting food waste in it, it's going to decompose safely.
I use them more for taking care of the little bits of food that wash off my dishes when I have to clean them in the sink. Instead of grabbing all that gunk out of the sink and throwing it away (which is gross to do), I just let it go down the drain and grind it up in the disposal. EZPZ.
Its handy af, why not
Americans seem very "fighty" compared to people from many other countries. You just have to say something that could be construed as liberal (the American kind) or conservative, too politically correct or incorrect, or mention you ride a bicycle or have an outdoor cat, to set some people off. With some Americans having a conversation is like navigating a minefield, especially those who have very little understanding of the rest of the world and reads everything you say into an American context, language barriers and all.
I love talking politics, and have had pleasant conversations with all kinds of people but I have learned from experience to just not bother with Americans, unless they're the very curious and open kind.
Worshipping guns.
Work hard.
Why???
A garbage disposal in the sink. Practically illegal everywhere. They seem fun to have though
Why are they practically illegal?
Random pick from a rather long list: The fact that the president can (and does; a lot..) "pardon" random criminals.
Pardons are fucked, they shit all over the idea of an impartial legal system
It's such a strange contradictory place. You pride yourself in freedom of speech but are so puritanical you refer to using the toilet as 'using the restrooms' and 'taking a comfort break'. Everyone knows you're going in there to crimp one off, not to have a comfortable rest in a designated room.
The fraternity and sorority thing at universities is really odd too. I don't really know what they're for aside from providing a dedicated environment for abuse via the deceptively amiable name of 'hazing'.
And referring to all your sports competitions as World Championships when the only teams that play are American. Bit cringey. I mean, you probably would win if there was an actual international basketball or baseball or american football competition, but at least the World Champion thing would actually mean something then.
That's literally only Baseball (and they did it for marketing,) and baseball happens to be the North American sport with the most popular international championship, the World Baseball Classic (actually I don't know whether WBC or Olympic Hockey is more popular, but Hockey has a separate international championship from the Olympics.) The Football championship is called the Super Bowl, the Basketball championship is called the NBA Finals, the Hockey championship is called the Stanley Cup.
Think that calling a waiter to your table is rude. Like are supposed to wait forever?
Came up recently... cupholders in cars. You really have to drink in the car while driving?
Did you only visit New England? Because in most other states, the drive can take quite a while, as in hours between cities. And there's not much to see or do at a random gas station or rest stop while you enjoy a beverage, so you may as well bring it along and get the journey over sooner.
I mean its not only american thing.there are cupholders in european cars..... or there were cupholders. At least My father 2001 Audi has it.
No but we gotta put the drinks somewhere when we go get drive-thru
I've had coworkers with 100+ mile commutes--200 miles a day. A cup holder seems far less silly when you're spending that much time in the car.
I always have water and some times coffee in my car even for small commute. Cupholders are standard in any car in Europe as well?
Yeah but most people never use it, or put other Stuff in it.
I had a 1.5 hour one-way commute to work before the pandemic.
Yeah I would often bring along a beverage.
Garbage disposal
"Garbage" means "food waste" and it's French af, originally meaning all offal taken out of animals being cleaned to eat. "Disposall" was a brand of...garbage disposal...from the 1930s and the name stuck