From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2018 06:25:05 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] OT: American Culture In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201801031325.w03DP567014114@freefriends.org> 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