WideHuckleberry1

I think it's mostly people who don't understand translation, full stop. The Spanish word commonly used for Americans taken strictly literally would be translated something like "United Statesian" so they treat that as what it should be in English. But that's simply not how translation works. The English word for "estadounidense" *is* "American." Getting worked up about that is like getting worked up that Spaniards aren't called Españards or Germans Deutschlanders or Japanese people Nipponians. 

Why are Europeans only capable of making sweeping generalizations?

I'm not even in the Rockies or Cascades and I'm less than an hour and a half away from several mountains 500 m or more taller than Ben Nevis, and I likewise couldn't imagine living in a place where you couldn't take a day trip to the foothills to get away. It's just what you grow up with 🙂  Also for what it's worth, the **vast** majority of the US population does live very close to either the oceans or the Great Lakes, so most of them can get to the beach (somewhat) easily.

I'm going to pretend like that was intentional because it still technically provides an example of why we'd use "off of" instead of "off."

The internet is something I want to get this guy off of.

Now they move to the southern suburbs to larp as country...

My English curriculum (Tennessee state requirements plus AP courses) had us doing English classes all the way through high school but very little focus on actually writing fiction. We had a state writing assessment at grades 5, 8, and 11 (I think, memory is hazy, also that's usually ages 11, 14, and 17) but in high school the prompt for the writing assessment was a nonfiction essay. We had to write a persuasive or argumentative essay about a topic rather than a story. In AP and regular English classes we read a lot of fiction but it was more about literary analysis than on creating fiction, so those essays were also more about analysis and interpretation than creative writing. As others have said, we also don't have an equivalent of the GCSE - we have AP exams, state standardized tests, and college entrance exams that each overlap somewhat but are not the same as the GCSE.

Because people aren't a monolith. The United States Soccer Federation *does* care about the World Cup, a lot. So do millions of Americans. But we're also a nation of 340 million people, so there's even more people who don't care. Soccer/football is far from being our most popular sport, but we still have more fans than most countries simply due to size.

Just to put numbers on exactly how much more space there is in the US: Great Britain has a population density of 294/km^2 and the lower 48 contiguous US has a population density of 111/km^2. The reason I use lower 48 is because Alaska skew the numbers even further - about 9x as large as GB, and a comparable population to Northamptonshire.

Neither? Both? It's a matter of semantics. The US didn't lose the war in the same sense that Germany lost the World Wars. The war was effectively a stalemate that the US public did not support any longer. The actual war per se was not won by (North) Vietnam until the US pulled out. If you want to say the US lost the war, you're arguably correct. If you want to say we didn't, you're also arguably correct.

"R1" is the top level of research university in a classification system, basically universities that have national/global research and the highest funding for research productivity. They give undergrads more exposure to research and top education.

That's crazy, but kind of understandable. It definitely has its pros (cheaper, easier transition out of high school into college) and it's cons (2 fewer years of exposure to an R1 environment).

Or if you're in California sometimes both.

Subreddits with strict rules fairly enforced are usually the very best ones. Especially here, where there's the potential for so many hot button topics. Without rules limiting common reposts or political topics the bots would turn this into nothing but "Did you realize your president was bad also why don't you travel internationally more?"

They're very close synonyms. The difference is primarily in tone. Complain is more neutral. Somebody who's complaining could be doing it for legitimate reasons. Whining is much more negative. You'd more likely use it to describe what someone is doing if you don't think they should be complaining.

S'mores are delicious sugar bombs. I firmly believe the only reason any American would ever turn them down is because they're health conscious and have far more willpower than me. So to answer your question, yes, pretty much every way you can slice Americans, they'll do s'mores.

Of the myriad problems with our health system, this one is pretty far down the list. For one, the harm is actually pretty minimal. Like think of where someone might *actually* get harmed by this commercial. If the drug is the only one on the market for that condition, no harm. If the drug is one of several equally priced, equally effective alternatives, no harm to the patient. If the drug is more expensive but more effective or cheaper but less effective, then the consumer and their health care provider can decide if the tradeoff is worth it. It's really only hurting people if it's a worse outcome for the money, which is pretty uncommon, or it's something you don't really need in the first place (arguably things like GLP1s, but not really - most people aren't refusing to exercise or change their diet because the ad told them they don't have to). Maybe I'm reading too much into the phrasing of your title but it seems like people who post here think we're just stupid and don't realize how clearly everything in Europe is better. A pretty good rule of thumb is if you're every asking a question about America is "Do you realize how (negative adjective) your (noun) is?" the answer is almost always one of: * Yeah, but it's really not a big deal so we don't care  * We know but it's hard to change entrenched habits  * We know and are working toward fixing it but a lot of people have money invested in the status quo  * It is actually not that (negative adjective), just something subjective or arbitrary where you fall on the other side.

I was a really atrocious hitter playing little league, like Mendoza-line bad, but I still remember 20+ years later a game where we were down 3 with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th, I hit a 2-RBI double, got knocked in to tie it, and we walked them off right after. Keep talking that shit about how it's over, losers.

It's worse than it should be here but not nearly as bad as people outside of here seem to think it is.  I mean, you said it yourself - it made the news there because it's rare enough to be newsworthy. Why don't you think it could be the same thing to a less rare extent here?

It's part of the school system budget which ultimately comes from taxes.

It's home sweet home, to me. That pretty much says it all.

Chattanooga Aquarium is rad as hell, and Chattanooga riverfront in general hits way above its weight for a city that size. And it's really an incredible transformation in less than a generation. That area used to be super dangerous.

My state (Tennessee) is the neighbor and they do two of the things we're best known for (country music and whiskey) better. Sorry, but most equivalent-priced bourbon is better than Jack Daniel's & similar, and tons of the actual good country stars (such as Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Chris Stapleton) meanwhile we get Morgan Wallen, to my great shame. Also, UK-UT with both wearing their colored jerseys is my favorite matchup, bright and striking contrast and both have very nice uniforms across most sports.

They're superficially similar but extremely different in practice. Rugby is continuous, doesn't have the same value for blocking players and players that get around blocks (offensive linemen could never, ever, ever play rugby), and a whole other component of the game based around the forward pass. I would say rugby and American  football are probably less similar than baseball and cricket. And with respect to the number of fans, rugby isn't even a tertiary sport in the US. I'd call it the most popular of the "niche" sports but a niche sport nonetheless.

I'm split between you and the consensus. I stand to show respect mainly because I want to do tiny little symbolic gesture to make sure that the current administration and its fans aren't able to completely claim America as theirs. I'm standing for the aspirational America, not America as it currently exists. Nothing makes me angrier than these people claiming they speak and act for all of us.

I think sports are an obvious thing here. Soccer football is barely a tertiary sport here but is the #1 sport in most countries. Only a few Latin American countries and Japan have significant baseball culture. And *nobody* likes American football except Canada. But we love baseball and especially American football.

TIL British pancakes are different from our pancakes. Every day I find a new uncanny valley thing we do different from each other.

Until Paul Walker in the Fast and Furious movies gave the whitest of white kids permission to say it and ~~we~~ they milked the cool out of it. 

People have remarked that it varies state to state and school to school but it often varies from *student to student.* My AP English classes had maybe 5-6 core books we did as a class and had to do another 5-6 we chose from a list of 20 or more. A lot of the classics I read and remember were part of that optional - I remember specifically Catch-22 and Brave New World were on my optional list, but not much more than that. Also I should point out that it's been 16 years since I graduated high school so those numbers might be way off, but I'm pretty sure they're close relatively to each other with it being about a 50/50 split between core and optimal books.

I think one thing Europeans often don't fully intuitively grasp is how disparate and decentralized our systems and structures are. If you want to enroll your kids in school, you just need do deal with the school district. You may be required to verify residency but a lot of residency requirements are really simple, like utility bills addressed to you showing your address. The school district doesn't have the labor capacity to verify citizenship for everyone even if they had access to some database. If you want to work, plenty of jobs outside the big corporations can be done on a cash basis. You can mow lawns, do landscaping, clean houses, etc either for a small business or by yourself by referral. And a lot of people who immigrate illegally know and possibly live with someone on a legal basis, either on a visa or a naturalized citizen, who can do a lot of the stuff they can't (get a driver's license to take them places, things like that).

Whichever one is in front of me. I'm pretty slutty with my sports fandom. Basketball, baseball, hockey, and football are all great. Whichever one is my favorite tends to shift to whichever one my teams are best at. If I had to rank I'd probably go basket > baseball > football > hockey, but it's really close.

As others have said and as it almost always is, it depends on the state. For Texas, their largest city is in the east and they are a huge state. It would take nearly 12 hours to get from El Paso in the west to Houston in the east. Texas also has several major metropolitan areas of >1 million residents so pretty much all the big city amenities can be found in one of the others. On the flip side, my state (Tennessee) is much smaller by population and geographic area, plus our biggest city is our state capital and very close to the dead center of the state. Pretty much the farthest you can be from Nashville is about 4.5 hours. Additionally, we only have one other major metro, and it's in the far west. So if you ever went on a state government field trip in school, you went to Nashville. If you want to see a top-league soccer, American football, or hockey team, you went to Nashville. If you wanted to see a concert at a major venue, you either went to Memphis or Nashville (or out of state) and for 3/4 of the state, Nashville is closer.

*If* you use it smartly, but that's a big if. The issue with things like that is that it makes it easier to go beyond your budget. It still requires a lot of discipline because it's a lot easier to spend $20 a month without noticing it than $1,200 at a time, every 5 years.

The whole structure of sports in America is different so, for the most part, our expectations are different. For you, the Bundesliga has 18 teams. Our top leagues in the major sports have 30-32 teams, but those cover a geographic area 20x as large and a population base 4x as large as Germany. So in that sense, top league team fans are far, far less centered around the local team and are usually regional (meaning within a radius of 100s of kms) or even national. In that sense, there's incredible competition for those teams among the biggest cities, so you kinda always know that team residency could end. When it does, fans are often pretty furious. But, on the other hand, most cities that are big enough to have a team are big enough to have multiple, so *usually* they turn their energy toward the ones that stayed. Unfortunately, sometimes they all leave like what is happening to Oakland. This is also why I think college sports are so popular here. Division 1 college sports are semi-pro in all but name, and are extremely good. In most of the top college teams, you'll see at least one or two guys who could be a pro player on either of the teams in just about every game. And these are very often public universities, so they aren't going anywhere.

The boundary that has become a metaphor specifically for the divide between north and south, the Mason-Dixon line, is Maryland's boundary with Pennsylvania. I don't see how Maryland could *not* be considered the south.

US as well but there's no pro/rel so the teams at each tier are set. Baseball has a minor league system with 200 teams spread across multiple tiers, basketball and hockey both have feeder leagues, and every sport has college to pick from. The focus of the original question was around top level dominance and I think that's a lot of it, in European leagues there's hundreds of teams fighting for spots in the ladder and competing for players of all levels, but in American sports all those lower level teams are intentionally feeding their best players to the top 30.

This one is huge. The Premier League has 20 teams for a population of 56-75 million, whereas top North American leagues have 30-32 for a population of 340-375 million, depending on if you're including just England or all the UK or just the US or US+Canada, respectively.

They said in their original post why: > I don’t like big cars, but I’m afraid to drive a small car for safety reasons. From car crashes go being blinded by the lights of big pickups. It's a fair concern, maybe a bit overblown but wrecks where there's a size mismatch are very disproportionately damaging to the smaller car because of simple physics, so more big vehicles on the road --> greater likelihood of a wreck being very bad.

I mean the producers are making fuel efficient cars. The Ford Fusion gets like 30 mpg, and Ford also makes the most sold vehicle in the country, the F150. You can only do so much from a manufacturing perspective. An F150 is never going to be as fuel efficient as a Fusion. If it was, they'd just take those advances and put them in the lighter car. At the end of the day, fuel efficient vehicles exist but consumers *choose* trucks and SUVs.

And it's miniscule compared to other countries. The average MLS attendance is about 21k. That would rank 18th in the Premier League.

I don't think hockey will have the national appeal in the US that it has in Canada, but as someone in the Predators' market I can say it absolutely can have the same excitement as the big 3 within markets, when there's something to be excited about. But part of the problem, like baseball, is the league's media rights are abysmal. There's no financially feasible way for me to watch the Predators. I can see a lot of games on Hulu or ESPN+ but my favorite team is nearly always blacked out. 

Who is going to collect the taxes? Are they just gonna do it for fun?

Leaving the oven on and refrigerator door open 24/7...

And gripe is the English word for what I do when I have the flu.

AP classes often replace regular classes. For instance you may need 4 math classes to graduate, so you could take Algebra 1&2, Geometry, and some sort of "practical math" or an easier pre-calculus to prep you for college. Alternatively, you could take AP Calculus in your junior and/or senior year (when I was in school they offered 2 AP calc classes but my school could only provide the first). AP classes are governed by the College Board, an independent company that provides basically quality assurance (they also produce the SAT, one of the major university admissions tests). They have certifications for teachers and curricula to ensure that the AP class is close enough to university caliber to count. The College Board also makes the final exams for all AP classes; depending on the university, if you score a certain grade or higher you'll get university credit for the AP class you took in high school, or in some cases you may need to actually take the AP class. You don't technically have to take the AP class to sit for the exam; my school offered non-AP versions of some AP classes and so a few of us got some additional work and test prep from our teachers to take the AP exam for those classes, but very few of us scored high enough for credit for the universities we attended.

A lot of what schools provide is circular. The best students go to Ivy League schools because they offer the biggest prestige on resumes. They offer the biggest prestige on resumes because their graduates have the best track record for success. Their graduates have the best track record for success because they get the most skilled and intelligent students. In general, how these schools work to make people obscenely successful is you get the rich kids (generally, the ones who are at least very smart) and you combine theirs and their families' resources with the less well-to-do, *extremely* talented students and they build companies together after.

Welcome to language. "Price" and "worth" mean nearly the same thing but "priceless" and "worthless" are opposites.

HOAs are established by the developer when the neighborhood is being built because obviously there aren't any homeowners at that time. Once the houses are built and sold the governance is in the hands of the homeowners.

Absolutely insanity that we would let a governance organization that is democratically elected but has no opt-out to collect money from all its members to provide for common services. Instead, we should have a *different* governance organization that is democratically elected but has no opt-out to collect money from all its members to provide for common services.

It's worth mentioning that nobody is going to make a post "Today, my HOA left me alone." You're only gonna hear the bad stories. Plenty of them just kinda exist quietly in the background.