[TUHS] OT: American Culture

[arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com)]

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