this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AAAAAAAaaaaand.... 97 percent of the FREEDOM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This comment is the equivalent of trying to have a real conversation with someone and they start singing a commercial jingle.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Pretty interesting that 4.2% of the world's population generates 25% of the world's GDP. Looking only at the numbers, it's pretty cool, but when you look at the reality of it, it becomes a lot more messy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Part of it is that America just has an insane amount of resource richness even compared to historical empires of it's comparative influence.

Let me try to explain it in agricultural terms. America is a nation of immigrants, and yet a common phenomenon is an observed disconnect between what Americans consider local cuisine from a given country and what people from that country today consider average cuisine of their culture.

This is because those immigrants were the tired, the poor, the hungry masses yearning to be free. The cuisine they brought was the stuff people would make to subsist as peasants, notice how many different varieties of "take this basic grain as a filler then layer on bitsins and fixins to give it flavor and nutrition." Meanwhile in the home country, cuisine culture continued to be defined by the elites who had already been defining it. What's really interesting is that the cuisine brought by the poor, did not stay pauper meals.

This is because America as a country is so packed to the gills with farmable land that ingredients considered a rarity for sheer cost in "the old country" were abundant to the point of being cheap. American serving sizes are so big because they were pioneered by people who were thanking god that they could be that big. Chop Sui literally was just "whatever you can throw in the pot, serve it up!", tacos and sandwiches were invented basically to maximize the flavor and nutrition of expensive fresh ingredients on limited supply, Pizza has roots as the equivalent of a street pretzel in NYC.

Imagine if someone took the NYC pretzel, moved to a land of unheard-of plenty unseen by human eyes thus far, and decided to spice that pittily ass bread and salt with choice of topping by loading that shit with the most unimaginably luxurious ingredients they could conceive of because that shit is all cheap there. That's the story of Pizza. That's what happened to basically every peasant food culture that made contact with the US and its because American resource richness is just that unprecedented for anyone who isn't from America already to conceive of.

Stalin once stated that WWII was won with, "British Intelligence, American Steel, and Soviet Blood.", but America wasn't just a factory for the world, the American kitchen put into that war just as hard as the American foundry, arguably more, America's first casualties of the war were the merchant marines who faced U-Boats head on to run food aid to the British public and anywhere else they could slip past the Nazis.

We got so much shit we will literally give it to you for free sometimes

That is how 4% of the world population ends up sitting on 25% of its GDP

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But how much of the online world are we?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

English speaking? Pretty big. There's also vast portions of the internet that are not in English, but if you don't speak anything besides English, chances are you're not going to come across it too much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

English-speaking population is about 1.5 billion worldwide and 300 million of that is in the US (first language or additional language), so the US is about 20% of the world's English speakers. The 2nd and 3rd countries with the most English-speakers are India and Nigeria, so factor in internet access, and the US is almost certainly >20% of the English-speaking internet.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And they keep assuming others are American too.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Genuine Skill Issue, how long has the internet been around?

Americans don't assume people online are americans because they're arrogant assholes, they assume because it's been X decades and somehow their 4.2% of the world still dominates the internet.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They *think they dominate the internet because they only speak one language

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, maybe!

But we're still doing this thread in English, and I'll bet the reason why isn't Britain's impact on the internet.

Fantastic name by the way

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

But we’re still doing this thread in English, and I’ll bet the reason why isn’t Britain’s impact on the internet.

It is incredible how poor you guys are at understanding the concept of languages. Your comments are completely unrelated to the fact that Americans are not a majority on the internet, even though Americans always assume so.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

It made sense on Reddit, being an American company. I am sure British or Australian social media has a similar assumption. (Please list them below.)

It makes less sense here.