An American comedian, following a long set here in Australia, told the audience to stand up and stretch. He then tried to direct us to "bend over and pat your neighbour on the fanny". Stone cold silence did not indicate to him his mistake, and he tried several times before eventually realising he had lost his audience goodwill entirely with this starting skit.

Turned out later that he had no clue what "fanny" means here, and had to have it explained to him.

It's not because you're 50. It's because it is celebrity news.

Honestly was shocked when I first visited. On TV the streets are wide there and everyone has enough to eat.

Visit (and at this point I have spent time in about half their states) and it is a different story. Broken roads in disrepair. Beggars everywhere, fighting for the chance to ask you for food, water, anything. We stopped at traffic lights and a teenage boy shaking with palsy knocked on our windows begging for food. People mobbed me in one city because I was carrying a bag of apples and they hoped for one as my bag split. I was careful never to give, but was still followed everywhere as an obvious tourist. The only place I did not get food begging on every single streetcorner was Manhattan. I am told this is because they deported beggars to the mainland there. Heartless sods in a capital that gets snow told me "there's less beggars in winter, the cold gets them".

I think you're right about the jobs, too. There were roadworkers on those broken roads, using jackhammers without ear protection, or even foot protection. I was told it was because they are "free" to bring their own PPE. They looked injured and sick but determined.

Shops were similar. Waitstaff looked half starved, serving the rich in an obsequious yet hateful way unnervingly like a roleplaying slave. It was disgusting, and ruined many a meal by constant disingenious artificial attention.

You won't regret visiting, but it is a ridiculously heartless broken place. The most expensive travel insurance too, for reasons most obvious in their medical stories.

Yanks are no doubt going to downvote this to oblivion, but it is how I have so far experienced their miserable cities.

A few Prime Ministers have been peculiar plotholes. Harold Holt just disappeared. Whitlam got taken out by a madman influenced by the yanks and nominally working for the Queen. Sometimes it seems the writers just get bored of the storyline and drop stuff.

Reddit was at the extreme end of emoji rejection as far as I ever saw. Odd that you experienced differently. I often saw well-upvoted comments such as "downvote due to emoji use" next to heavily downvoted emojis on Reddit.

Not an emoji fan myself, but each to their own.

I love that no one has a clue if there is in fact anything for sale, or what it might be.

Shorts made it less addictive, they're awful to watch and I invariably stop at one.

Perhaps you are experiencing a spike in your own addictive behaviour?

That is a weird whinge. Good on your parents for putting their foot down. If you show them some responsibility they will show you some trust.

What on earth is a used bedroom? Do you not know how to clean your room?

I'm mystified by why everyone wants to make a Twitter clone despite Twitter famously not being all that profitable.

And it is locational. Something insensitive in the US might be insensitive here in Oz or over in Europe.... Or might not.

That is how idiom works.

If they get too hot they will move. My cat loves sleeping in front of the fire.

Make sure they always have easy access to fresh clean room temperature water, and they won't dehydrate.

We all know a yank asked this one. They always assume we are all from the US.

I do miss the great stories from r/regretjoining.

Sounds like a yank. Poor sod.

Not in Australia.

...When I think about it, this Probably is unique to the US, as they have that weird "Minimum wage is tiny, so you have to pity the worker and pay them directly" caste-system mindset they call a "tipping culture".

Labyrinth, Willow, and of course The Princess Bride.

Capitalism is all about waste.

Ursula le Guin anyone?

The Left Hand of Darkness might be interesting. The Word for Tree is Forest would likely get thought of as an odd Avatar clone. But The Dispossessed would probably never get made, people would find worth in the politics and abandon the megacorp making it.

Be the change you want to see. Expose and vilify the owner of the company in question for the abuse they are doing to their staff for not paying them sufficiently.

It has a lot of meanings.

The oldest one I know of is that of Monkey King, who in the ancient story stole and ate the peaches of immortality. He did this without any plan; in some versions he was hungry and didn't understand that it would make him immortal. This act of spontaneity also inconvenienced the peach owner, who had intended to serve the peaches to those who were worthy of them.

Since then various martial arts moves and stories and so on were named after that one little bit of the story, usually to showcase a combination of spontaneity and strength.

Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean that you suddenly need it when you didn't need it before.

And just because they tell you it's cheaper doesn't mean that it is cheaper.

So go price something you want now, so that when the price theoretically falls you know whether it should be bought at all.

The man who spread that misinformation actually admitted his guilt. I recommend you read this article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/06/health-insurance-canada-lie/

I do note that no other balcony is yellow. One wonders why that one is. I suspect someone died for this. Poor sod.

Cannot believe she thinks Ukraine is to blame for the Russian invasion! Well, I guess I can. But it seems so odd and uninformed, even so.

As others have said, Federation.

I expect it was a random first arrival bias.

When the Japanese Earthquake information twitter account was throttled a few days ago, after the earthquake, there seemed to be this general realisation that they were not going to be able to use it for disaster communication any more....

Because Christians, basically. Religion is a massive factor in what people think is a "normal" name, for their baby, their town, or their dog.

Supporting all out genocide is not what you would expect from a paper like that one.

Not as weird or rude as telling them to pat their neighbour on the vulva.

It's an American thing. Australians mostly see it as mutilation; It isn't religion, it is yanks.

Then you are many decades out of date.

Suspect it is racism. People associate soy with Asia, despite the fact that it is grown and eaten worldwide, and then extrapolate from there.

They are arthropods, just like lobsters and insects, but no, they are not insects. Spiders are arachnids.

Yep. I can't even see why, probably something in the stuff they deleted. How bizarre!

The way publishing works, it is easy for Amazon to just check who is responsible for those books. Odd that they are not, I thought the US was a more litigious place.

Uh, no. I mean, only get surgery if you must, and mutilation of babies is wrong, but that is not the male clitoris.

The roadworkers? Three seperate sites in chicago, then similar seen again in New York State, and in Louisiana. Other places too but they stood out.

Knocking on our windows to beg for food and water? Everywhere on the east coast. The kid happened in New York State, but similar happened in Pennsylvania, in tenessee, in illinois, in Louisiana, and everywhere really.

I was mobbed in Pennsylvania during the notorious Apple Incident, it happened again to a friend in Charlestown with a large bag of peaches, but when we were telling this story to a bunch of other Aussies they told me a chilling tale similar that happened to a girl of their number in Tenessee. The third one happened to strangers, but they had no reason to lie to me.

I don't rightly know what to tell you, but we saw so many beggars everywhere except manhattan. We did not like getting restaurant meals, tried to stick to takeaway, because waitstaff were upsetting everywhere we went. And if you haven't seen the massive holes in your roads, society and infrastructure in your time there, it's likely because you are overused to them.

America is terribly full of the desperately poor.

Edit; I have learned not to talk of the incidents that happen once, if I can help it, as I get told they are "isolated incidents" or "just happen in that state". The girl with the dog crying in louisiana, the orphans we met in ohio, the shaking window knocker, poor bastard.... That said, those isolated incidents also add up to a larger truth. All of them were due to a lack of health care or social care. All could have been cured with a little kindness, or the yanks being a little less blind to their fellow man. It is a very harsh place.

Which reddit app came to Lemmy?

DD is common in Australia too. Sometimes they even give you free fizz to DDs.

Yeah, I have some yank doing that to me regularly on my email address. She has kids, and a car. Get a lot of car repair and rego emails. And childcare emails. I emailed her kids child care to tell them I wasn't in the US, didn't have kids, and couldn't find their unsubscribe button. They sent me irate messages back telling me that her poor toddlers would be sent home if I kept sending things like that... I told them it was a major security risk to send such emails to an unconfirmed email to a random stranger overseas. They eventually got the hint, or possibly phoned the mother, as they eventually shut up, but it took a few tries over several weeks.

I often wonder about her, but she is impossible to communicate with directly. I just get her mail, but have nowhere to forward it to.

I keep reading about bluesky on here, and here on bluesky. But calling it decentralised is wrong.