:eek:
It’s the rule in all 50 plus DC, AFAIK. It’s certainly the case everywhere I’ve been (27 states plus DC so far). We take our asses seriously.
Edit: By “the rule” I don’t mean it’s a state law or anything, I mean it’s just how it’s done everywhere, with few exceptions.
The first claim I completely disagree with, I really think that most Britons are still buried, definitely in my experience.
The second point, I completely agree with, most British men are not circumcised, couldn’t really comment on American men.
If you keep a watch on the boards, there’s occasionally a big blowup regarding circumcision. Up through the early 1970s, circumcision of boys was routine. It’s not so routine anymore, but (and all this is second hand informatino to me) it seems there’s tremendous social pressure on mothers to get their boys circumcised and it also seems that those who get to adulthood uncircumcised sometimes get pressure from sexual partners to get the job done.
I can’t get my husband to get a vasectomy; I can only imagine how hard it would be to get him to get a highly-questionable circumcision. I think the discussion would consist of me asking, and him saying not no but hell no, and that would be the end of it. Seriously, who would ask a partner to alter such a sensitive (in all ways!) part of themselves surgically in a non-medically-indicated way? (We both agree on the vasectomy - he’s just surgery-phobic so I’ve basically dropped the idea. I’d be willing to get my tubes tied, but that would be an insult to his manhood, apparently. :rolleyes: )
Go and google it, as I did when I didn’t believe it.
In the US in 2006 there were twice as many debit card transactions as credit card transactions. Dollar volume for credit was slightly higher.
Consider ignorance fought.
I really don’t get that mentality. It’s everywhere–lots of men say they would never get a vasectomy, and it’s clear that it’s because they would feel like less of a man. I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. Who the hell wants to prove their manhood by changing diapers?
In my husband’s case, it’s because he’s afraid of the surgery. He thinks he should suck it up and get it done. If I go get my tubes tied, it means that he was too chicken to get his snip done.
It has absolutely nothing to with logic or rationality. It’s a primal imperative – someday, somewhere, with some female I might not give two shakes for, I might get a chance to propagate my genes again, and it doesn’t matter who has to change the diapers. In fact, it might be better, if whoever is changing the diapers doesn’t even know that its my genes he or she is helping to propagate.
There was an OLD thread I was going to post a link to, but cannot find… aspects of your country that would amaze foreigners or some such thing. I know I posted in it about the Pecos Wilderness and how having an area roughly half the size of Luxembourg in front of you that you could tromp through and not meet another person (and perhaps get good and lost and die there) might be a bit foreign to Europeans. (Probably not very impressive to the Australians though). Dunno where the thread went, there were lots of interesting posts.
They do have KFCs in Malaysia too…and Singapore. The mashed potato dispenser is also found in 7-11s in Singapore.
Tidbit behind the chewing gum ban in Singapore. Some prankster finds it funny to stick their half-chewed gum on the doors of the train of the local subway (Mass Rapid Transport), which cause numerous jams, delay and damage. The government got fed up and issue a ban on chewing gum. I thought it was kind of extreme when I heard the news back then. Just another random note: For the FTA with US, Singapore has agreed to import certain chewing gums that has medical properties.
I wrote:
> Does anyone have any examples of differences between countries that it takes
> years to discover even if you’ve lived in both countries?
I thought of an example of a fact about the U.S. that not only do most non-Americans not know, but most Americans (I suspect) don’t know. What is the largest ethnic ancestry in the U.S.? I suspect the reason that most Americans don’t know this is that we have this small set of stories from American history that we think we know. We have the image of English ancestors arriving early on, but in fact English ancestry is only ranks in a tie for third. We have the image of slaves arriving from Africa, but African-Americans (if that counts as an ethnic group) are approximately tied with English ancestry for third. We know that there are lots of Hispanics now entering the U.S. If that counted for a single ancestry, that would actually be ahead of English or African ancestry. However, most Hispanics don’t think of that as their ancestry. They think of themselves as Mexican, Salvadorean, Cuban, etc., ancestry, so I don’t count that as a single ancestry.
So what are the highest two ancestries? Perhaps people might think of Irish ancestry, since they might have an image in their head of the Irish potato famine and the ensuing emigration from there. Irish is the second largest ancestry in the U.S. So what’s the highest ancestry? There’s no well-known story from American history about it, so people don’t tend to think about it. It’s German. Something like 15% of the American population has German ancestry. (More precisely, if you added up the fractions of each American’s ancestry, 15% of the total would be German.)
The only case I know of that’s similar in another country is that the largest ethnic group in Argentina is Italian, not Spanish as you might think.