Interview with Americans! 1/23/19

[MasterWalks]

America

Please ask your questions below and any Americans may answer if they please

If you would like to ask a question anonymously you may pm me
If you would like to answer a question anonymously you may pm me

*Any racial, defamation, or demeaning questions will be reported to admins and may consequence in a ban*

***Extra Rule for this interview: If you are an American that is answering a Trump/Political question, you are NOT allowed to quote another Americans answer. You are allowed to give your view and answer but this is not Facebook. We are not going to argue political opinions here. If this rule is broken, it will be treated as demeaning***

[Submachine]

My question:

I noticed a trend lately, that if people are referring to the United States of America (USA), people just call it America. It almost feels like when people say "America", people only refer to the USA, forgetting about Brazilia, Canada, the Caribbeans, etc. Do you also see this trend? When did this start happening?

Edit: To support my view, even this topic is called Interview with Americans, though I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be Interview with USAns.

[Linkcat]

This has always been the case.

[MasterWalks]

My question:

I noticed a trend lately, that if people are referring to the United States of America (USA), people just call it America. It almost feels like when people say "America", people only refer to the USA, forgetting about Brazilia, Canada, the Caribbeans, etc. Do you also see this trend? When did this start happening?

Edit: To support my view, even this topic is called Interview with Americans, though I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be Interview with USAns.

I mean, technically speaking Canada, USA, and Mexico are "North American" while Brazil, Venezuela, Chile etc. Is South American. So since Brazil is South and Canada is North we are in the "Middle America". Shortened to just America.

[Linkcat]

America is not short for Middle America, it's short for The United States of America. There is no Middle America, and nobody uses that term except to refer to the central part and/or middle class of the United States. There is a Central America, which is the land connecting North America and South America. We are in North America. The reason everybody refers to the United States as America is because the only reasonable term to use for people who live in the United States is "American", so it makes sense to call the country "America" rather than "The United States", and since there is both a North America and a South America, people refer to them collectively as "The Americas", so there is no other "America" to be confused with.

[ARTHANASIOS]

Why Russians are always the bad guys for you?

[dawn to dusk]

Putting personal bias aside (which is probably difficult due to having used it your entire lives), but do you think that Imperial is truly better than Metric? Also same question to MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

[Linkcat]

Why Russians are always the bad guys for you?

It's called The Cold War.

Putting personal bias aside (which is probably difficult due to having used it your entire lives), but do you think that Imperial is truly better than Metric? Also same question to MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

Nah, Imperial is shit.

Our dates don't make sense either.

[Submachine]

Ah, that makes sense. So "USAn" really isn't a term that anyone uses. (Admittedly, I made it up on the fly. ^^")

I have other questions too:

• What do you do in your free time if you cannot stay at home? Especially in city areas.
• I heard that everyone has a gun in the US. How true is that? How easy is it to get a gun? Is there an age under which guns cannot be gotten?
• When you want to get off an american bus, how do you signal it to the driver?

[Linkcat]

The most popular things to do if you're out and about are going to bars if you're old enough, going out to eat, and going to the movies. If you're going out shopping you can easily spend half a day at the mall looking at different stores.

It's common for the head of a household to have a gun in the house for self-defense. If you live alone I would say it's not very common. The more rural you are and the more southern you are, the more likely it is you have a gun. It's not that difficult to get a gun if you're 21. If you're in the hood, it's not that difficult to get a gun at any age.

You pull a cord that runs along the side of the bus before your stop.

[CCCombobreaker]

Putting personal bias aside (which is probably difficult due to having used it your entire lives), but do you think that Imperial is truly better than Metric? Also same question to MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

Spoiler for Hidden:

The Imperial system is a pile of junk.  We should have switched to the Metric system a long time ago.  We teach the metric system (halfheartedly) in schools (I still have 10 or so conversions memorized years later), but the "shock" of the transition makes it pretty unpopular to implement and big unpopular things don't happen much here because if a politician implements something unpopular they risk losing their job at the next election.  No one wants to stake their political career on "we should switch all the road signs to kilometers".

As for the date convention... I dunno, I have adopted YYYYMMDD personally when dating things, as this actually sorts items chronologically when using an alphabetical sort.  However, when interacting with others, I still use the month first.  It sort of makes sense if you think about brevity when saying a date:
January 24th 2019 vs the 24th of January 2019. 
So I think the first way being simpler/quicker then led to it being converted to numbers in the same order for clarity?  It sort of makes sense.  I still think YYYYMMDD is the best when writing/dating things in any digital context (which is increasingly most things).

Ah, that makes sense. So "USAn" really isn't a term that anyone uses. (Admittedly, I made it up on the fly. ^^")

I have other questions too:

• What do you do in your free time if you cannot stay at home? Especially in city areas.
• I heard that everyone has a gun in the US. How true is that? How easy is it to get a gun? Is there an age under which guns cannot be gotten?
• When you want to get off an american bus, how do you signal it to the driver?

Spoiler for Hidden:

When I have free time and can't be at home (gaming/interneting) I usually play pickup basketball or play pokemon go.  I agree that going out to eat, going to movies, or shopping are all common activities, though I generally don't do them for cost-efficiency reasons. 

Many many people have guns in the US, but "everyone" is clearly going to be inaccurate.  I don't have one.  Could I have one, definitely.  Would it be fairly easy, probably... although the laws/hurdles to obtaining a firearm do vary quite widely from state to state, and here in California it is one of the more restrictive states.  Growing up, my family and friends used to drive out to very deserted areas and set up targets and shoot at them.  So I probably shot a gun as young as five or six years old.  My dad intended to give me a gun that would be "mine" when I was like twelve, but I opted out.

And the bus has a pull cord running above the windows that triggers a sensor showing the driver someone wants to get off.

Why Russians are always the bad guys for you?

Spoiler for Hidden:

For me, Russians as "bad guys" feels more cliche than real, since I don't have any memories of the cold war or before the dissolution of the USSR.  I'm sure most Russians are people living their lives.  Their leaders are trying to do something between what is best for them individually and what is best for the country, just like the leaders in the USA, but what is best for Russia and what is best for the USA don't really seem to complement each other, so there is still some international friction.  That friction allows our media sources to portray the Russians as "out to get us", and there is some evidence that they still sort of are... as we catch their spies, find them hacking our politicians, and uncover their systems for generating digital propoganda to try and alter outcomes of our elections.  So, they aren't really helping their case if they want to be considered our friend (or even neutral).

[Submachine]

You pull a cord that runs along the side of the bus before your stop.

That's different than in the few european countries I visited. We have buttons instead of a cord.