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Culture shock

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Re: Culture shock

#191

Post by watwut »

Paul_S wrote: post #143
watwut wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not really true. The amount of physical activity you do absolutely influences both your shape and your health. Also, we do have more sedentary lifestyles then typical 1960 person. Just in terms of how much you walk during the day, we are already not moving.

You have moved the goal posts. Exercise has a positive effect on health, yes. It does not have an effect on whether you're fat. That is down to food intake. That is what the poster was actually saying.

It absolutely does. As proven by people who stopped doing sport without changing diets and then gained weight. As proven by people who started doing sports and then over time lost weight - without any effort to change food (or even without conscious effort to modify their weight).

Also, I said "influences both your shape and your health". I did not moved goalposts.

Re: Culture shock

#192

Post by rsj_hn »

lordnacho wrote: post #190
rsj_hn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF has what, 4m people? That's like saying "London has, what, 50 million people"? We have left the realm of plausible errors and are far into "no idea what is talked about" territory. SF is a 7 mile x 7 mile box with mostly flat, single family homes. It's ~850,000 people. Within that box is a small 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer square that has the big buildings. Here you can see an aerial view of the top half of SF, wi…

The greater SF area is much more than the the area called San Francisco. I mean I might as well tell you that the City of London is a tiny square a mile on three side with a few tens of thousands of residents.

"SF" is not used to refer to the "greater SF area", which is rather "the bay" or "SF bay area", a reference to the San Francisco bay which all these areas adjoin.

Think of all the cities along a river. What they have in common is the river. They are not all called by the name of just one of the cities. The SF Bay is 4000 km^2 and there are hundreds of cities all along that bay.

The east bay has berkeley, and Oakland, the south bay has Palo Alto and the cities along the Peninsula and then Santa Clara county with San Jose (which has more people than SF). The North bay has Marin. These are all independent regions with their own history, economy, and demographics, and identity. They do not call themselves, nor are they commonly referred to, as "SF", nor does the SF muni service these areas, they have their own separate muni and lightrail. BART (bay area rapid transit) is the regional lightrail throughout the bay. Economically, SF is not even the most dominant of the regions along the bay -- Santa Clara county is much richer and home to more businesses and more people.

Back to your point, just because you are aggregating across a very big region, adding up all the people that live in that region, does not mean you can meaningfully compare that 4000km^2 area with a city and then complain about the differences in urban amenities between an actual city and the large geographic region.

The various cities along the bay are quite small - only San Jose cracks a million -- and none of them are dense. It is almost entirely single family homes with backyards, interspersed with very large parks and nature preserves.

Re: Culture shock

#193

Post by Aromasin »

makerofthings wrote: post #148

I have travelled a fair bit in the US. I don’t think anywhere in the US gives a realistic representation of the US. It’s all different, you need to visit a few different states and types of city and think about the whole. It’s Vegas and NYC and Portland and Salt Lake City and Austin and Mountain View and a whole bunch of other places mashed together. I don’t get this as much with other countries. If someone on here t…

I think this honestly applies for every country though, however it's impossible to recognize unless you grew up in said country, or lived there for many, many years. I would say the UK easily gives the US a run for it's money - but again that's only because I've lived my whole life there and have learnt to recognize the differences. The cultural disparity between Newcastle, Edinburgh, London, Cornwall, Liverpool, Belfast, Leicester, Birmingham, Inverness, Manchester, and all the small towns and villages in between are so vast, despite being so close geographically; the UK is only the size of Michigan, yet travel 40 miles in any direction and the dialect, food, buildings, clothing, and music preference can be completely different. The trip from Chester to Caernarfon is only as far as travelling half way down Long Island, but in one place they speak almost 100% English, and in the other it's more like 20.

Granted we don't have the dramatic shifts in climate (although our microclimates are quite unique), but the population density and long, chequered history as a nation seem to make up for it. Any country, despite how unified they look on the exterior, is not a realistic representation of the country as a whole. I'm sure a person from Moscow has very little similarity to one from Vladivostok, or likewise Sao Paulo to Sao Lius. There's no where in the world you can visit, besides some microstates, that give a realistic representation of the country in one visit.

Re: Culture shock

#194

Post by oogali »

lordnacho wrote: post #190
rsj_hn wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SF has what, 4m people? That's like saying "London has, what, 50 million people"? We have left the realm of plausible errors and are far into "no idea what is talked about" territory. SF is a 7 mile x 7 mile box with mostly flat, single family homes. It's ~850,000 people. Within that box is a small 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer square that has the big buildings. Here you can see an aerial view of the top half of SF, wi…

The greater SF area is much more than the the area called San Francisco. I mean I might as well tell you that the City of London is a tiny square a mile on three side with a few tens of thousands of residents.

The greater San Francisco area is specifically referred to as the "Bay Area".

When I see "San Francisco", it is not unreasonable for me to assume you are only talking about San Francisco.

If you were to refer to the surrounding areas of Oakland and San Jose as San Francisco, you would potentially upset those residents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

Re: Culture shock

#195

Post by Broken_Hippo »

birksherty wrote: post #110
ameen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Indian in the states - my observation was that obesity in the US seems like a class issue. Most well-off folks are fit and working out is woven into their lifestyles. Others can't as they're probably working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet.

It's not work out or time but diet that makes people obese. They probably eat fast food, sugary drinks, packaged food a lot everyday instead of unprocessed food like meat, veg, fruits, nuts. Edit: Poor people in India are thin and rich are fat, quite opposite, again due to diet. Indian poor can't afford fast food in chain restaurants daily, must cook which is cheaper.

Meat, veg, fruits and nuts are expensive - and they go bad. You simply can't always afford them and sometimes you can't actually buy fresh stuff.

You see, a fair amount of poor folks get paid once a month, and since there aren't a lot of little grocery stores nearby, folks wind up buying food once and hoping it lasts the month.

Poor folks don't always have steady electricity nor a refrigeration, either: Living without a fridge makes your diet go to crap pretty quickly.

Time is another luxury poor folks have issues with, which also makes diets go awry.

Re: Culture shock

#196

Post by frettchen »

"Watchmen and policemen are heavily, scarily equipped."

This one amused me, as an American who has been to India (though not Pune, so maybe the area was different in this sense), because while I don't remember what police carried (though I saw a fair number), I remember being shocked by the number of security guards I cam across (mostly in front of office buildings and when entering malls) who were carrying rifles (they looked a bit like AK47s/AKMs, though I don't know for sure if they were), whereas most security I've encountered in the US carries sidearms at most, and often no firearms at all.

Re: Culture shock

#197

Post by BlameKaneda »

eitland wrote: post #139

Norwegian here. I spent 6 work weeks in Canada and USA setting up machines and training operators around 2011. My observations: - huge meals. And "all you can eat" seems to mean exactly that. I didn't test though but remember waiters were eager to refill. - North Americans seems friendly to me. I was even invited over to dinner by a plant manager. - Talking to someone who was super-happy working 180% in three jobs be…

> Talking to someone who was super-happy working 180% in three jobs because it allowed her to send all her three sons to college and because three jobs were less boring than one

If she is, indeed, super-happy working at all three jobs, she's definitely an anomaly. I can't imagine working 2+ jobs and not feeling stressed out about them.

Did she say what the jobs were, and how many hours she spent in each per week?

Re: Culture shock

#198

Post by dougmwne »

I will add that the US is really huge with a lot of regional variation. About half these observations are pretty specific to the DC area. Everything from food, fitness, hobbies, dress, home construction, language, friendliness, patterns of small talk, political opinions, and demographic averages can be quite different from state to state and city to city.

Re: Culture shock

#199

Post by adwn »

kreeben wrote: post #185
Paul_S wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have moved the goal posts. Exercise has a positive effect on health, yes. It does not have an effect on whether you're fat. That is down to food intake. That is what the poster was actually saying.

Of course exercise has an effect on whether or not you are obese, because if you spend more calories than you absorbed through eating, you will loose weight. Exercise is a way to spend calories.

Although technically true, it's much easier (and quicker) to gain X calories than to lose them via exercise. So if you're overweight, your number one priority is to control your diet. Regular exercise is important for health reasons, but not to lose weight.

There are exceptions. If you're a professional cyclist, for example, and able to output several hundreds of Watt for several hours, 6 days a week, you'll quickly lose weight through exercise. But that's not actionable advice for regular people with a full-time job and a family.

Re: Culture shock

#200

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

>All house floors, apart from kitchen floors, obviously, are carpeted. I have no idea why, someone tell me.

You're in an apartment, carpets are cheaper than a hard surface floor for the price point of an apartment. So anywhere where a hard surface isn't required, wall to wall carpet will be put down.

The other advantage of carpet, especially in an apartment, is that it muffles the sound of your movement.

Last, it's also warmer in the winter, which is nice.

Now, in my own home, I have hardwood flooring throughout and area rugs.

>Stoves are always electric. No lighter needed.

Electric stoves are actually low end, or if you live somewhere without natural gas. A gas stove has a built in igniter with a little spark generator on each burner. So no lighter either way!

>But for bathroom taps, I don’t understand why there’s two different knobs for hot and cold.

Stylistic choice. You can also get bathroom faucets with a central handle control. Kitchen faucets can be either way, too.

>Names are re-used to an uncomfortable extent here: streets, cities, states, suburbs, all tend to borrow from each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield#United_States

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