[TUHS] OT: American Culture
arnold at skeeve.com
arnold at skeeve.com
Wed Jan 3 23:25:05 AEST 2018
Yes, this really is OT ...
> The problem is too many American',
> (particularly younger ones that experience our 'excellent' educational
> system), have often never travelled that much and experiences other places,
> cultures or social norms.
This is very true. I discovered this when, at the age of 18, I came to spend
a year studying in Israel. At that point I realized that Americans are
terribly parochial. ("Whaddaya mean you don't speak English?!? Whaddaya
mean I can't get a hmaburger here?" etc.)
> Which brings me to >>my complaint<<. We, as American's, project so much
> about 'us' via TV. The said truth is most Americans are not like what they
> see on TV
It's worse than just TV (and movies). It's huge parts of the culture. We
moved to Israel 20 years ago, and on the highways are signs for: Ace
Hardware, Toys 'R' Us, Office Depot, McDonald's ... UPS and FedEx trucks
are common sights. As well as the culture, many of the values (that
I personally moved to Israel to get away from) have seeped in as well.
"Cultural Pollution" wouldn't be too strong a term.
> When I run into things like what you just described (and I seem to run into
> then most often with MicroSoft based tools), I think to myself, it must
> have been a cold day in Redmond, WA and some programmer did not want to
> make an effort to do make her/his solution really general ;-)
I suspect that said programmer didn't even know enough to think about
making it general.
FWIW,
Arnold
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