this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 111 points 1 month ago (26 children)

I'll try to avoid stuff you know is weird.

  1. Adjectives. You can't just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there's no such thing. There's x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted "4% milk") in this damned place?
  2. Fresh produce. In fairness you've gotten loads better on this one after subsequent visits, but beyond some basic staples like potatoes, carrots, corn etc it was really limiting what fruit and vegetables you could get in the supermarket. Also: baby carrots are weird.
  3. Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.
  4. Your eggs are weird. I'm not sure what yous guys do to to them, but it's like you blast away half the shell and are left with a porous super-white textured inner shell. They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they'd last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.
  5. Your bread tastes weird. Maybe it's sugar or preservatives in it, I don't know. Bread is meant to have a really short ingredients list like flour, water, salt yeast and maybe a touch of oil and sugar. Take a look at the ingredients on your bread and it's 5 lines long.
  6. Portions! Your food portions are ludicrous. I'd much rather pay half the price for half as much food as they offer on the menu.
  7. Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a "I'm better than this person" way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there's a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone's worth.
  8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.
  9. I'll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it's weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They're mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.
  10. Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it's train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?
  11. You have no idea what's going on. Most of you couldn't name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don't know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.
  12. I'll finish on a weird one: you guys are lovely. This may because I'm white and have an exotic accent to you guys, but almost everyone I've ever encountered from the USA in or out of the country has been wonderful. You don't seem to think of your fellow countrymen you meet as 'good' by default. There's a lot less connection and respect to each other than other nations I've been to.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?

you guys are out there buying NULL milk??

Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.

american cheese or cheese more generically? I assume more generically but i've seen this mentioned a few times and not specified lol.

They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.

"So what's the deal with washing and refrigeration? Soon after eggs pop out of the chicken, American producers put them straight to a machine that shampoos them with soap and hot water. The steamy shower leaves the shells squeaky clean. But it also compromises them, by washing away a barely visible sheen that naturally envelops each egg."

huh, basically just seems like a different approach to solving the problem. Prevention of disease and what not.

Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.

schools are run locally, though they all adhere to state standards. Sometimes it depends on the schools, some of them are run by the state directly, with a local school board, others are private.

I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.

is this true? there are a lot of non profit hospitals, i can't think of any "for profit" hospitals off the top of my head though. https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

i did find this stat, which appears to show that there are more non profit hospitals.

Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?

the obvious answer here is that it's not for 18 million people. Public transit is almost never intended to get 100% of society from one place to another. It's just to relocate mass traffic from the roads to something more efficient.

You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.

in our defense, Britain is basically the size of a small state... So with local politics alone we're basically dealing with the entirety of the EU, and probably more. Also, we don't really live next to anywhere exciting, so world news isn't really super relevant to us. We have canada up north, they exist, we're friendly. Mexico to the south, we're relatively friendly too, but they have an organized crime problem, and beyond that it's sort of just outside of our bounds.

Canada and mexico are considered "domestic" policy for us lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Eggs look like this:

They don't need to be washed with hot water and soap, they're perfectly good as they are.

Sorry about the hospital thing. By "for-profit", I meant you had to pay to go there. That's completely alien to everyone in the first world. We have private hospitals as well, and yep: lots of them are (or claim to be) non-profit also.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Actually you're not wrong about for profit hospitals here. Many of them are getting acquired by private equity firms(look into PE acquisitions across this country it will make you sick) and those are for profit hospitals.

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