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.
You poor thing, maybe if your teachers were praised more you’d have been taught better and be less confused.
id argue that that’s not true but my roommate and his friend made me watch 30+ minutes of commentated (by my friends) WW2 footage. i had to be like “hey man with all due respect i get the appeal I think but im not really interested in the glorification of something this horrific im sorry.” they were understanding but that level of interest in something so bleek was crazy.
also they were using WW2 japenese slurs and saying id walk up to that if i were there. and im like NO THE FUCK YOU WOULDNT you wouldnt even make it out of the armored car that took you there bud. people are not as badass as they think they are and soldiers arent badass they just want to see their families again we dont have to cheer them on like the opposing side doesnt also just wanna go home to their families.
ugh
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.
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. ^^
I’m still not sure why there’s a regional difference, my guess is that it’s a quirk of history. We’re more used to it in the US, and there are benefits for the owners of the public toilets, so they don’t change.
How did we get so used to it? I’m no toilet historian but it could be a (horrible, evil) company had a near monopoly on stall design during a formative part of our architectural history. Could just be the newness and utilitarianism of a lot of American architecture in general. We kind of sprung up overnight and so sometimes bad ideas got caught up in that wave of “progress” and became the norm due to being in the right place at the right time, and not really because they were good ideas or ideas that worked. Tipping culture, tax added at the till, and other weird Americanisms could all have similar root causes! Once you’ve gone down the route of something pro-business and anti-consumer, and gotten most people to accept it as normal, there’s no going back in a capitalist society.
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Taxes vary from state to state and even city to city in some cases so it’d be a bit difficult to do. It’s still possible, but companies are lazy.
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We’re idiots.
Hold on, do you actually still have price stickers? Not the LCD tags on the shelf that can be changed remotely to, y’know, include the tax for that state?
I’ve seen this conversation many times on Reddit, and from what people say I assume there is a regional thing going on on. I’m from a part of the US where toilet stalls do not have massive gaps. There is a big gap at the bottom but too low for anyone to be seeing under unless they are crawling on the floor. Gaps along the sides are quite narrow. 1 cm at most, and nothing anyone is going to be seeing you through unless they are some kind of freak putting their eye right up to it. These stalls are prefab panels you can easily put into a room. The gaps mean ventilation for the room takes care the stalls too.
I assume stalls started this way and became normalized, and in some parts of the country they’ve gotten sloppier, and sloppier, and normalized these huge gaps I hear people describe but never see.
This might be my bias, but I assume these are the places where everything is a suburban stripmall wasteland, where there are no sidewalks, and where it seems to me the whole environment is increasingly dehumanized.
Thank you for your comment. I can’t speak for the entire world, but in the UK a *1 cm" gap in the door of a public toilet would be massive and unacceptable. It’s not enough that someone can only see into a stall through a gap in the door if they are “right up to it”; they should not be able to see in at all. Public toilets in other countries have doors with gaps you can’t leer through at all.
Re. the “gaps meaning ventilation”, surely the “big gap at the bottom” and the fact that the whole top is open will be contributing more to ventilation?
You say you think this might be a regional thing in the US. Okay, could be. I have personally encountered this issue in Washington, California, North Carolina, DC, Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, Oregon, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
I can understand that to someone not used to this, any gap at all might be troubling and one might tend to exaggerate it as “massive”.
However note that these walls are fairly thick which narrows any visibility angles considerably. So to really see someone through the gap you would have to be at exactly the right angle and looking straight at them. Sitting on the toilet in one of these you can see some really narrow strip of the sinks area which also reflects the areas in which someone would have to be and looking straight at you to see you. People at the sink area have their back to you. People walking past them to another stall, are not looking to the side.
I’m not trying to convince you that they are ideal, or that your should like them, just that when the gaps are pretty narrow it is not as big a deal as you might think to get used to.
Again this is assuming these gaps are pretty narrow. I get the impression from what some Americans have said in other discussion that in some places they are quite a bit wider than I am used to, and what I said above may no longer apply.
The US doesn’t have a VAT, but a sales tax on final sale of a good. Not only that, but states, counties, and cities can issue their own sales tax on sales within their borders. There are also cases where sales tax isn’t charged at the register. In the end, it is easier for companies to just charge the tax at the end, so they do.
There are these mystical things called computers, that are very good at computing things. So when printing the price you can automatically compute it into the labels.
Nowadays, yes. However, that wasn’t always the case. People got used to tax not being included and there has never been a big push to change that.
That is a nonsensical excuse. If they can calculate the price at the checkout then they can calculate it when they are putting up the price tags.
Many cities and counties often put a SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Tax) on the ballot. Usually for roads or schools, usually voted for, usually a penny. They are for a limited time, then they may expire or be put on the ballot again. If they expire, then every price tag for every item, in every store is now wrong. And if both city and county expire at different times, you could get a nightmare of changes.
Easier to change the software at checkout for the changes rather than every price tag.
It’s not that it’s easier it’s that it allows the companies to gouge you. If the store said the bottle of coke was 2.15 instead of 1.99 you might realize that it’s not a good price for acidic sugar water and pick something else. Like the free water out of the faucet. This also means public water would be higher quality because people would actually use it and demand cleaner water.
Two party system. They can’t possibly represent everyone’s interests. Feels more like religion to me .
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.
Two parties that are, if I’m not mistaken, the Right and the Rightest.
Didn’t the USA see any leftist ideology as radical?
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.
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
First Past the Post voting makes it more likely: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=X-8oz1K6iYxKhBeB
Tipping
Also, losing their shit over nudity
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.)
A modern analog I like is to high grade digital encryption.
Terrorists and criminals use it, and governments want to ban it. But that doesn’t actually mean it should be banned, or that people who oppose a ban are terrorists or criminals.
Totally, except regulating encryption makes much more sense because of al those encryption-violence deaths that happen daily in the US. All those kids with easy access to encryption going to school and encrypting their classmates, the policemen not intervening because they are afraid to get encrypted by the kids armed with military grade AES-512 routines.
It is a modern analog, but with its limits - all this stuff doesn’t happen in countries where encryption is much more regulated and you can’t buy encryption routines in malls.
Your comment comes off as shallow and dismissive. I’d be happy to discuss this further, but not under those conditions.
That’s not a great analogy though… you would have to add that, even though most people use it responsibly, banning digital encryption would cause a very dramatic reduction in harm caused by the people that don’t use it responsibly.
Furthermore digital encryption actually serves an inherent purpose so banning it would also cause some harm to society simultaneously. On the other hand, civilian gun ownership serves no inherent purpose so society wouldn’t be harmed by banning it, and we would only lose the risk.
But but but what if they get fascists in power! What if a bunch of goons attempt a coup!
Guns are the only reliable way to deal with tyrants. And while its not everytime, look at what happens to disarmed populations usually.
Also gun control started as and still is racist.
You had a tyrant that tried to overthrow a legitimate election through violence.
Where were all gun nuts then? Those who weren’t attempting said coup, that is. Doesn’t sound reliable to me.
As for what happens to disarmed populations, most of Europe has gun control laws that would make any American have a heart attack, and yet here we are, no dictators to be seen up to GMT+3. Do say, what is it that happens to disarmed populations? What is happening to us that I somehow didn’t notice?
And gun control being racist… I’m sorry, what? This right here, this is the thing I’ll never understand about Americans. Everything is racist. You can’t talk about anything, somebody will play the “racist” card before you can get any deeper than slogans. Absolutely every single thing turns out to be a race issue. Sure, you guys had very big issues with racism until very recently (learning about sundown towns for me was a huge WTF moment) and it’s very hard to deal with a past so ugly - but still, maybe not everything is about race.
In America, gun control started as a way to disarm black people. Worked out well when the Klan wanted to lynch someone. Thats what was racist about it.
King George is the funny answer.
The Taliban insurgency is a much more recent one.
The viet cong fought the USA and won.
The IRA fought well.
I can keep going, but its easier to just link a wiki page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions
I don’t know about the racism thing, but I doubt it. As far as the other thing, it doesn’t have to be a choice between no guns or no restrictions. In the UK we have a ban on handguns and some hoops you have to jump through to own a rifle. Nothing too onerous I believe (though I’ve never tried to own a gun.)
I’m not afraid of our government becoming tyrannical. If it did, though, and guns are really the only reliable way to deal with them (I’m not convinced but anyway) then we still have plenty going around.
If youre in the UK, what did the IRA use to fight the British in the Troubles?
What about it? Going to go bang, explosions are fun. Shooting people bad. What else did you want to know?
-signed Bleeding heart lefty with a gun
American lefty, which means you’d be at best centre right in any country with a healthcare system.
