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  • 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.

    • it turns out, I wanted "4% milk"

      As a lifelong American, I don't think we have 4% milk (reliably). Growing up we had Skim, 2% and Whole. Looking it up Whole is defined as 3.5%

      I did look up a local store online and I was able to find it, but not universally at every store.

    • I'll try to address some of this, as I'm able. 🙂

      1. Yes, many many milks, we can't agree on what is best. Personally I like a quality almond milk, for its nutrients & no sugars and huge bonus it's shelf stable. Great for emergencies.
      2. I think the dearth of fresh produce is related to Americans not doing a lot of cooking. Most Americans have a simpler diet, and the stores need to concentrate on a number of things they know will sell. Baby carrots are actually awesome, you're going to appreciate this -- IIRC baby carrots are an innovative way to reduce food waste, sell crop. A farmer had ugly, misshapen, perhaps slightly molded or otherwise undesirable carrots. But most of it was good! So they cut off the bad parts & whittle it down to a nice, uniform, attractive shape & size. Baby carrots were born! Kids like them, they're 'snackable'...idk, I like them & I like the green effort.
      3. Yes, food dyes are thrown into everything. RFK recently did a little rant about the yellow dye, some coal runoff chemical. He's absolutely right, it's not cool. I always say you go back 200 years & some people were starving, food of any kind was great. Now we throw red dye into ketchup solely because the ketchup isn't red enough. Disgusting.
      4. Natural eggs have some waxy layer on it, a protective layer. So your eggs look dirtier but are actually healthier, can withstand low/no refrigeration. IIRC. Our eggs have that layer removed, they're required by law to be 'washed'. Yes, I also think it's bullshit.
      5. It is definitely the sugar & preservatives.
      6. As our bellies have grown, so has everything else. If you find old houses with old cabinets & old plates, you'll find the dinner plates are much smaller than we have today! We have been programmed to consume. Search 'dinner plates have gotten bigger' and read for yourself.
      7. Yes, our police forces get down to counties. Towns. Idk, I would say that this should provide a more personal & immediate presence. Also in the American spirit, keeping these matters fractured & separate (but also working together, and deferring to increasing levels of authority as needed) allows for the most freedom. You don't like how things are run in this town? Well move to another one. Same with the states. I see people moving towns because they want a better school for their kids. It allows for choice.
      8. Yeah, pretty much. TBF, though, our brains can only process so much. And what can we do about the European stuff, anyway?? We've got our jobs, maybe our families, our homes, 334M fucking people of our own with various beliefs scattered across 50 diverse states, heavy taxation without representation (hint, hint), our own problems...then somebody comes up to you..."Did you hear what happened in Fuckistan this morning? 🥺" NO! 😂🙃

      Thankfully, with the internet, we can look into any world events we want to & educate ourselves that way. I do, I am politically more involved than most. But no, I cannot name current ministers, chancellors, presidents... I hear their position & that's enough for me. Not my monkeys, not my circus, you handle yours & I'll handle mine.

      12 . Thanks! I think at heart we're very cordial people generally speaking. But onto that second, contradictory part: I absolutely agree. I live in a generally good area, but I also see a lot of...other...people. There's a saying, people were a lot more polite & considerate when duelling was legal. Looking around, I think things have become far too 'civilized', the people too soft & dumb, our food as you've pointed out is poisoned, mental & physical illnesses abound, the people haven't seen real hard times, there is no clear & present danger to unite & fight so they make up stupid things to get offended by & fight each other, they're protected from the natural consequences of their actions...I see it. Often. This & more culminates in disrespect & disconnects. Unlike other nations, partly because of our freedoms & partially because our legal system lacks balls, we tolerate a lot of bullshit behavior. As they say, if you tolerate something, expect more of it.

    • In fairness for number 11, many Americans can't even name their own government officials, expecting to know about other countries is a tall order.

    • We’re not neighbors with 43 countries, so we don’t have as much immediate exposure to everything going on around those countries. For one, because it’s not going on around us, like it is for you. That said, I thought I had you with the Prime Minister comment. Of course it’s Boris Johnson. Doh! It seems you’ve had 4 prime ministers in 2 years? What’s going on with that? Like I said, we don’t really get exposure to what is happening over there, so unless we specifically go looking for it, I guess we’re out of the loop. We know what’s going on in Mexico and Canada though.

      • I just sort of assume my instance gives away my location - I'm in Australia, not the UK. Not that we can talk, we also churned through about 5 prime ministers in five years a while back.

        But I could still talk about any number of issues going on around the world, because our news covers topics around the world. Yours doesn't. It's too busy talking about your election and recently a hurricane. Which I know about as it was in our news.

        That's not a criticism, I actually sought out world news while I was there, and there just weren't any local sources of it.

    • 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.

      Others have written on this far more eloquently than I have, and so I will use their words to help explain this.

      ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

      • Kin Hubbard

      Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

      • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
      1. 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.

      This might be dependent on state but any place I've ever lived has had 3 kinds, state police, county "sherrifs department" police and town/city police. To hear theres a part of the US with sherrifs department police is odd to me, usually the state police would take that role in rural areas without their own police department in my experience.

    • #8: Police

      State police enforce state level laws, and Federal agencies enforce federal laws.

      The whole semi-autonomous thing. If a state and the Feds both have their own laws against something they could each try to arrest somebody, but there could also be a situation where one might not have a law while the other one does. For example , weed is still illegal under Federal law. The Federal government has mostly chosen not to enforce these laws, but it could. Many states have legalized weed to varying degrees.

      So there could be a situation where somebody is smoking weed in a state that has legalized it. The state police have no power to arrest that person, but the Feds do.

      I'm sure this has all made it more confusing.

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • based on knowledge of the US : many things that other places take for granted or fight to preserve, you guys struggle to obtain.

    based on my trip : fucking nothing, I visited new york and stayed at a run down, pre paid hotel. I ate food from stores or carry out. I can't exactly critique the healthcare system, tipping culture, driving culture when I had access to a fairly modern public transport system, didn't need medical assistance and didn't need to tip 50 people just to eat one thing.

    EDIT: it's like asking tourists in antalya at the beach what they think of turkey, they're fucking tourists, they aren't affected by the dictator and his bullshit

  • Your urban planning. Your cities are unwalkable, the scenery makes me depressed af, everything is scaled up for cars, even restaurants are for cars, the highways are huge, all I can see is tar. I don't know how you can live like that.

  • Canadian here, British Columbia.

    Going to a Wal-Mart in a small-ish town and counting 38 CCTV cameras across the outside front of the building. Ours, in a city with 28× the population, has only 6.

    Inside that same Wal-Mart, going into a checkout line without first checking out the customers, and the very next guy ahead of us was an open carry: a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

    The sheer amount of infrastructure decay. Sure, even Canadian towns that haven’t seen economic good times look run down and dilapidated, but American towns really kick that up a notch. Most small-town buildings look like they haven’t seen a makeover since the Carter administration.

    Unusually authentic Mexican food. Up here 90% of Mexican places are run by white dudes who make semi-authentic “fusion” dishes that are mainly just spicy. Cross the border and less than 15 minutes in, there is one family-run chain (Rancho Chico, Rancho Grande) with super-cheap 100% authentic foods run and staffed solely by Mexicans. And like, holy shit, that’s good food.

    The sheer number of people who support and vote for a party who will do absolutely nothing for them, and will enact policies that will drive them even further into poverty and destitution just so their Parasite-Class campaign donors can get even more obscenely wealthy. Conservative voters are just weird, man.

  • German, only having been there once some years ago, so no idea if it still is that way:

    Not knowing what I will have to pay in the grocery store until the cashier tells me what to pay. Here the price on the shelf is THE price. I might have a voucher that reduces the price in the end, but nothing is ever added only subtracted, all prices on the shelf are easily comparable, because no matter the weight of one package there is also given the price of 1kg or 100 g for everything.

    No kids on playing grounds without parents standing around. No kids just playing on the side walk (often there is no side walk anyway), no kids walking to school. It made me aware of how much freedom kids have in Germany, how independent even 6 y.o. are in Germany compared to kids in the US. They walk to to school alone or use public transport alone, they buy groceries alone, they visit friends by foot or public transport, three y.o. already having a bike and cycling besides their parents to kindergarden...

    On the other hand seeing so many very young people having a job, like a really hard job for many hours besides school. It broke my heart, they should be free to be young and having all the time, working comes fast enough and goes on forever. Also I saw very old people doing jobs that should be able to retire because you could see them being in pain and barely able to function, definitely not a "choice" for them.

    The amount of medication, especially pain medication, people take in the US compared to Germany and how much of it is freely available while it is needing a subscription from a doctor here. Every time I was feeling unwell I was offered pills that I found to be numbingly strong and switching my brain off? Hard to explain. I found them scary, but was told that they take them on a daily basis and they are harmless ... nope.

  • Sorry to be honest, but this is my view...

    Voting between two parties, and then getting whatever the "electors" pick. All the while, thinking they live under the biggest democracy of the world.

    Having all sorts of inhuman behaviors, like robbing childs from immigrants.

    Child marriage.

    Having lots of weapons in the country but all wars outside.

    Mmm.. What else? Ah, prisoners are slaves.

  • Seems to have deliberately taken the opposite path of anything British:

    • Drive on the wrong side of the road
    • The light and power switches are upside down
    • Weights & measures. Imperial? Ha!
    • Screw your English dictionary. Ima put z's everywhere, drop the letter u and randomly pronounce words like buoy so you think there's an animal in the water over there

    It kinda makes me laugh to think about it as just anti-British 🤣

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