American things

(which I love btw)

the one area in which usa doesn’t have enough cultural influence

can't believe it took this long for month / day / year to come up, it's so dumb

on zing so can't ctrl +f for fahrenheit

a) peanuts are in barely any of America's mostly-terrible candy

b) peanut butter NEVER is, only a weird gritty peanut-flavoured sugar sludge, occasionally

is your pedantry a bug or a feature, i cant decide

Sem-eye finals of world's championships of sports - the score, five hundred twenty to three hundred four.

I wish actual peanut butter was in this stuff though!

xpost by 15 seconds

Veg it's terrifying how much sugar or corn syrup is in almost everything here, and how little food content is in so many food items

(xp) he carried an assist and rushed one hundred two yards in 32.7 seconds.

Incomprehensible sports with incomprehensible jargon, is what I'm trying to say. Incomprehensible jargon in general, in fact.

xpost nah it is true that corn syrup is in everything, yr not wrong

maybe we cracked it: corn syrup is the most american thing

Bringing u haribo when u request fruit

even the bread had a buttload of sugar

the cult of 'mexican coke' and its sugar

Space cowboys

Had my first mexican coke yesterday twas like a melted Mr freeze

feisty, flat, coke

antipodeans loving Reese’s cups when you guys have Tim Tams made not a lot of sense to me either.

lol @ Tom D. iirc the UK is the home of cricket, curling, golf and rugby. So back atcha.

Arguing politics with their relatives on FB

Or indeed anybody

Maybe if y'all ate a little more sugar, you'd act a little more sweeter like us.

Month/Day/Year is the worst thing about America, I refuse to use any date format anymore other than YYYY-MM-DD

month day year is so obviously insane and stupid that it's kind of awesome

Fahrenheit is a better temperature scale for the weather than Celsius though.

But what we really need is a temperature scale for the weather where freezing is 0 and 95F is, like, 9, so the temperature outside is just one digit

Month/Day/Year is like Minutes/Seconds/Hours, ie insane.

...and therefore awesome?

True tbh

You haven’t lived until you’ve had to sit down with a dataset containing strings in a mix of MMDDYY and YYMMDD format and have to somehow disambiguate which is which

Some large % of American GDP is expended on reconciling dates

Fahrenheit is like pinball machines that score in the eleventy-millions just for the sake of having big numbers

antipodeans loving Reese’s cups when you guys have Tim Tams made not a lot of sense to me either.

Reese's cups are bad and gross. Most American chocolate is bad, but the "chocolate" in Reese's is the orange plastic cheese slice of American chocolate

110. Orange plastic "cheese" slices

sic and silby really getting controversial up in here

You haven’t lived until you’ve had to sit down with a dataset containing strings in a mix of MMDDYY and YYMMDD format and have to somehow disambiguate which is which

I had to do something like that last week, importing data from an old website we are revamping, but with MMDDYY and DDMMYY. Whoever decided to make the date fields strings should be harshly punished. In the end I just read them all as DDMMYY unless that threw an error then tried MMDDYY. Thing is this is a UK-only system so what kind of disgusting savage was putting in MMDDYY anyway. Never mind the entries that were 01 Janurary or 5 Feburrrarrary.

Oh my god that’s some amateur hour database management right there

Tell me about it. Then they had address, phone and email all in one text column. I wrote a parser for that and had to handle about 20 different ways of prefixing a telephone number. T., T:, Te:, Tel:, P:, Ph:, etc etc ad nauseam.

month date year is truly nonsensical

reeses peanut butter cups are not my favorite, they are kinda gross tbh i can only eat 1 or 2

Veg it's terrifying how much sugar or corn syrup is in almost everything here, and how little food content is in so many food items

Not in the produce section. That's where all the action is.

Now listen, I'm fine with all you Cape people shuffling around in this safe place, registering your discomforts with some of the oddities of American culture like peanut butter or too many stripes on a flag.

But come on. My man sic:

Fahrenheit is like pinball machines that score in the eleventy-millions just for the sake of having big numbers

Here's what you get when you watch the Australian weather report, all ten seconds of it: "Today, it was 23. Tonight, it will be 18. Tomorrow, looking at a high of 23." It's all too broad and general! Fahrenheit lets you denote more exact measurements of temperature. I mean, you all say the average human body temperature is "37" whatever that means. We say 98.6. And where 99 is a mild fever and 97.5 means your thermometer isn't working right, that's a big deal!

And here's something: for those exact reasons, I'm all in favor of the U.S. using kilometers instead of miles. I've already mentioned somewhere on this board how Missouri uses mile-markers for every two-tenths of a mile. Being able to say "my car's broken down at KM 82.5" would be much more accurate than just saying "Mile Marker #51".

We're not trying to run up the score with hot, hot days of 108º. We're just being very, very specific!

otm

I think of low temperatures in centigrade and high temperatures in Fahrenheit. Or I used to. After Brexit it will all be Fahrenheit.

100 boils, zero freezes, 23 is nice. Easy!

that it was minus two in Seattle yesterday is more impressive than saying it was twenty-eight point four

how Missouri uses mile-markers for every two-tenths of a mile.

in a lot of places it's every one-tenth. i won't stop until every highway is demarcated in one inch increments.

(xp) Exactly!

how a TV-announced city-wide temperature actually feels is so dependent on where you are, how the wind is, what the clouds are doing, whether a cat is sitting on you etc etc, that the supposed precision of Fahrenheit is irrelevant http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif

the supposed precision of Fahrenheit

Also pretty sure that it is possible to tell whether someone has a mild fever using a digital thermometer in *checks* basically every country in the world

Jesus fuck please get this argument off of ILX and back on whichever tumblr / subreddit it came from

Probably the one called "American things" tbrr

Why not just have it where 0 is freezing and 10 is boiling. Then you can just say, "Oh, it's nice today. It's only 2. Hope it doesn't get all the way up to 3!"