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.
U got me in the first half not gonna lie
Ah, the old
RedditLemmy switcharooHold my bulletprove backpack. I am going in.
Hello, future people!
It was good but I saw it coming right away lol.
A family friend of ours just quit his highschool teaching job and is moving his family because he was threatened with a gun in his classroom. The student was expelled, but not arrested and knows where he lives.
I fucking hate it here. Guns need to go.
As an American, it confuses me as well
You poor thing, maybe if your teachers were praised more you’d have been taught better and be less confused.
Feel free to enlighten us, O wise one.
I have no idea, I’m just sympathetic to the plight of confused Americans.
Well you’ve certainly confused this one. Though I suspect you’ve confused some Europeans as well
I was attempting to be humorous; obviously that failed. Surprisingly it doesn’t seem to be apparent to many as to why America glorifies soldiers rather than teachers so I guess I’ll elaborate.
Glorifying soldiers is a nationalistic practice designed to distract from the very real cost of war I.e. the death of young men and women to protect capitalist interests.
It’s a tactic to encourage impressionable people to join ‘for glory’ or prestige when in reality there is very little of either. First hand accounts of literally any war will tell you this.
You could use this same tactic for teachers but historically teaching is seen as a ‘woman’s’ job and so the existing value structures of our society preclude this profession from the same veneration. I.e. the patriarchy is why teachers aren’t glorified in the same way.
I think it’s worth noting that the “glorifying soldiers” tactic doesn’t really work; the US military routinely falls short of recruiting goals, and among people who do join, patriotism isn’t a common given reason.
Whoosh
The public school system, especially middle which is age 11-13/14 I think, almost never used my accommodations :) at least college is better at that
While travelling in the states, I was so perplexed to see that in some car parks where you’d expect to see disabled parking that there were parking spots for veterans.
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.
It’s not about doing it right for most. It’s about saving every dime you can. There are some that properly enclose stalls, like a nationally known Magic card seller in my locale.
They deliberately do that in some public toilets to discourage people from hooking up in there.
I don’t understand the question O:
Why
Oh, that. Because nobody gives a fuck about anybody’s rights in this country unless that person has a reasonable ability to sue.
or a reasonable probability to draw a gun.
What am I looking at here?
The inside of a toilet stall. As you can see it has a massive design flaw from top to bottom. That seems to be the norm in the grand ol’ US of A.
Ahhhhh now I get it, thanks. It was a hard perspective to catch up on without the explanation :)
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. ^^
Pleasant interaction ^ Thank you.
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.
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.
So instead of calculating the price once and putting it on the sign, they calculate it every time a customer shows up at the register. Sure sounds way easier.
Or they print out consistent signs across a region, advertise to it, and take care of the sales tax to handle it.
Again, they calculated the price at the checkout, so they could also have done it for the price tag. It is not a valid excuse in the slightest. Its only purpose is to obfuscate the actual price of an item and confuse the customer about the actual price of an item.
And what is I’m tax exempt? Now the price isn’t right for me…
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.
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.
Oh, I absolutely believe that people in America can accept it’s “not as big a deal as you might think”.
This is a thread about things about America that make no sense. So: I don’t understand why America, seemingly uniquely, accepts this as “not a big deal”.
It’s weird. Land of the free, home of the public toilets strangers can see inside. So odd.
Two party system. They can’t possibly represent everyone’s interests. Feels more like religion to me .
They don’t represent anyone’s interests except their own.
And those who lobby them and/or help them get reelected.
Two party system is great for polarizing the society.
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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.
We do do the same and we do have the same problems, but it’s not so bad. We have at least 4 parties in parliament who have a voice and a number of others who are at least represented. It’s not good, but you have it worse
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.
I vote for one of those other parties!
The two party system isn’t really codified in law, it’s just kind of a side-effect of the way we vote and the way government is organized. Due to those two things, it’s hard to change.
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.
Jokes on you, in the end they both represent the same interests
It’s like a restaurant with a single dish and you can only chose a side. One’s xenophobia with a sprinkle of batshit crazy, the other’s utter impotence.
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
American here. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
First Past the Post voting makes it more likely: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo?si=X-8oz1K6iYxKhBeB
As an American, I find it amazing that countries can have more than two active parties but also have a plurality voting system.
Tipping
Also, losing their shit over nudity
Puritans for the latter.
Bribery / slavery for the former.
While having a huge porn industry.
Huh, the US and Japan aren’t so different.
We have tipping in Europe, but that’s mostly only done if you have a very good experience, not because you are expected to. Just pay your employees.
They will say of themselves as being Irish/Italian/other-european-nationality because their great-grandfather or great-grandmother came from there.
At-will employment makes no sense to me. You go to work every day knowing you could be fired without any possibility of taking the time to find another job. It would drive me crazy.
Oh it’s terrifying.
For the most part, in my experience, don’t be a fuck up and you won’t get fired. Every company I’ve ever worked for has had very strict rules about firing people, It can take months for someone to get fired for anything short of violence, theft, or sexual harassment.
Thanks for the answer. It’s clearer now.
Some companies having strict rules isn’t a stand-in for decent workers protections.
Employers don’t have protections from employees flaking out either. It goes both ways.
Yeah, there’s quite a power imbalance there …
Only if you’re easily replaceable.
No, then there’s still a power imbalance, only slightly less egregious.
I guess that also makes it somewhat easier to get hired though? You can give your employees a chance without thinking too much about it, and if they suck just fire them.
We have this in Germany - for the first six months of employment. Ok, it’s still two weeks notice because that’s the right thing to do, but still, it’s less than the 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 months of notice required after working at a place for 0.5/5/8/10/12/15/20 years. (BGB §622 for the curious)
There is no reason to keep the possibility for such a short notice indefinitely.
A “politics” channel on a site called Lemmy.World that is specifically only for US politics, because America is the world.
The obsession with mutilating baby boy’s penises.
City design and suburbs. Like if I had to drive 40 minutes to get groceries I would prefer to starve and those suburbs look like death would be the better alternative. Also driving to go for a walk, wtf?
City zoning.
Oh, i have to drive from single family zone to commercial district to pick up a loaf of bread. Then drive to education district to drop kids at kindergarten, and finally to business district to work. At the end of the day i hang out at bar/entertainment district with the guys from work to have a beer, but there’s no public transport so I have to drink alcohol free so I can drive back home. That’s only 120 miles in a day!
Vote for people who actively oppose universal healthcare, mandatory PTO policies, universal family leave policies, universal college-level education, etc.
The way politicians and the political system nakedly serves the needs and interests of corporations and the wealthy, and not the average individual.
The way that the price you’re quoted invariably gets bumped up by various taxes.
The insane system that is tipping, including the fact that a lot of workers are so underpaid that they rely on tips to get by.
The incessant adverts on TV for medical products, particularly prescription drugs.
Your houses seem to be made out of paper. Then you complain about strong winds…
I remember hearing that Europe doesn’t use drywall nearly as much. A benefit of drywall is cost and repairability, but is basically glorified paper, yes.
Where does this come from. All Euro houses made out of harden steel and concrete?
Voting registration. I get a letter that I can vote and what the options are. Then on voting day, which is on a Sunday, because why would it be on any other day, I just walk into my town hall with that letter and my ID card, put down my crosses and leave. It’s like a walk in the park, often quite literally.
Canadian here but still, shoes in house? Gross. Obsession with gun culture? Also gross.
