I’m Australian and I’ve been to only a few countries. But my experience with people from the US when I’m travelling overseas is that they’re respectful and understanding that they are in another country.

Yea, as a Norwegian I agree. The only thing is that most Americans I’ve met talk so loudly.

I tried to change pounds to dollars in Florida in the 1990s. The lady read the conversion details backwards (it was probably 1.25 dollars to the pound at the time) and gave me the opposite ratio (works out at 0.80).

When I pointed out the error, she said “The US dollar is the strongest currency in the world, sir! It’s always point-something” and refused to believe me.

This was at a bank. The manager had to be called. Neither of them were happy to discover the truth and both resented having to eventually give me the correct exchange!

This confirms the other stereotype, that they’re a country of morons

I see it all the time even here on Lemmy. Americans love to wade into international communities and act like the US perspective always applies.

A recent example would be a discussion in a UK community about upgrading ANPR cameras to catch ghost plates, but a couple of yanks decided to pop in and get angry about Flock cameras, despite the fact that ANPR tech has been around without controversy for decades here.

It’s not ALL Americans, obviously, but it’s enough of them that it’s a known issue.

I notice this often in comments of political topics. Even if not involving the US, positions are often labeled very bipolar, e.g. as “liberal” or “conservative”. But they don’t seem to realize that those terms describe totally different political standpoints in different countries. Not sure tho if this bipolar thinking can be considered US-centric or if it’s just how they are raised to think.

The only weird thing I sometimes witnessed was that, when I waited tables, Americans paid in Euro or via credit card and then proceeded to leave me a tip in US Dollar. Surely this poor European must crave the strong currency of the US over his weird colorful banknotes.

Oh, and in northern European countries they stick out enormously on account of their loudness when just speaking amongst themselves.

Oh its real. In communities where there is an explicit rule about only being for local things will always have a post somewhere about the numpties and the poster always says something along the lines of “This non us place is mentioned in the US article so its OK to post.”

Look at any help community, the numpties will post about a hyper specific problem but not where they are, or just an abbreviation expecting everyone to know what MS or OK is.

i’m not from the US and i feel it all the time here on the threadiverse. in most cases i don’t feel there is any malicious intent so i don’t nitpick(?) about it though

I feel it whenever the discussion on football comes up. They get so fucking triggered when we call football football and not soccer. Even more when we correct them when they mistakenly call it soccer. Then they pull out their go-to cope about britain calling it soccer back in the jurassic period and I’m over here like: okay, but britain is one small country and the world is vast and literally everywhere else, we call it football. They always get so fucking triggered.

That and the gun control debate makes Americans go completely apeshit.

i fucking hate this so much. i’ve heard that brits started calling futbol football instead of soccer because of like a disdain against usonians, although unsure how true that is, lol.

I heard the opposite, that they supposedly began calling it soccer as a posh thing but every brit I know of, calls it football. Personally, I don’t care how it happened, I just find it weird how americans seem to cling to the word soccer and bring up goofy ancient history between them and britain as a defence. I have taken to calling their game, American rugby and will continue to do so for as long as they call football, soccer.

A combination of defaultism and exceptionalism happens very often. An American I knew got surprised we weren’t celebrating Thanksgiving… he had to think it through to figure it out. Another asked me if in Europe there is AC. Many are surprised that not everyone knows fluent English. Here on Lemmy many times statements are made assuming that everyone lives like in US… I sometimes get annoyed at that - my bad.

In my opinion, Americans and Canadians have a very similar attitude when abroad. They are loud and opinionated which can be both good and bad and they sometimes feel a bit like elephants in a china shop. They have no idea that how they behave, which is perfectly polite and normal in their own countries, is considered extremely clumsy and borderline rude in ours.

Americans are showmen by nature. They can’t help it (Canadians have a bit of a similar streak in that regard). It feels very fake in my culture even though I understand that you kinda have to be a showman in America in order to fit in. I consider myself pretty out going and loud by Danish standards, but next to an American or a Canadian, I become very mousy. They are just that extreme when put in the nordic context.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. I knew a couple of Americans who were really chill and didn’t try to “sell” me anything. One of them was an extremely introverted, but deep thinking writer, who might as well have been scandinavian himself because he never wanted to take up space and he was very soft spoken. Another was technically a total showman, until you learned that he had raging ADHD and had to stand up and move around while he spoke. He was very down to earth and real when you looked past his yoga poses during his talks. He had hated the hectic world in the city and built a cabin in the woods for him and his family. The third, ironically, became obsessed with our food culture, which shocked the hell out of me because our food culture is notoriously repulsive to foreigners. This woman lived entirely of rye bread, pickled fish, salty licorice, potatoes and every other food group that we pickle. All the pickled food. She looked like a feral animal at lunch time and was like: Gotta get my fill while I’m here because once I’m back in the States, I’ll never eat this good again.

We respected her immensely.

Most americans (and canadians) I have met irl have been good people, even with the showmanship. I have met a handful of truly ignorant and obnoxious assholes, but I have mostly forgotten about them while I remember the nice ones more.

Online americans are obnoxious af, though.

On the other hand if you say you prefer inches to centimeters you’ll get piled on. I’m Canadian btw but inches suit my needs.

If only they’d have made a metre equal a yard…

-thanks for proving my point lemmy.

It might as well have been a yard, considering how the definition came about.

If 1 meter = 1 yard, inches would still not exist in this metric system. Every individual imperial unit is fine. Inches are fine. Yards are fine. Gallons are fine. But the ratio between inches and yards is not. The ratio of cubic yards to gallons is insane.

Even if one metric unit would exactly equal an imperial unit, the systems would still be incompatible. Metric is not superior because of how “big” each individual unit is, but because it is a coherent system. The only conversions between units are by factors of 10 (except for units of time but I think that’s the only measurement the whole world agrees on). You never need to learn a conversion rate with an arbitrary factor like in the imperial system.

This exactly proves my point again. I like imperial. I like factors of 8 and 12. I don’t want factors of 10, in my occupation in a cut/sew shop I don’t find it as useful.

If a metre was a yard we could talk between the systems. We could use the preffered system for the application. If someone said 2.5 meters, because I know my twelve times table, I would understand instantly that it’s 90" or 7 1/2 feet. I honestly have no clue how many feet are in a mile, I use kilometers for that.

What volume does one pound of water have? How long are the sides of a cube of that volume? How much energy do you need to raise a one pound object up by one yard?

In the respective metric units the answer to these conversions is either 1 or a factor of 10

How many of those conversions are a factor of 8 or 12?

Metric is a lot more then just meters and centimeters and all of those conversions make sense

That is all information I don’t need in my day to day existence, you missed the part about cut/sew I guess. If I did need it I’d use metric because it’s good for that. For my needs measuring things on the table or around the house inches work better for me. My point was if there was a common reference between systems we could speak between them, but my original point was that if you say you like inches around here you’ll never hear the end of it from lemmy. QED.

Its real. Just take a look on how many Google or apple features are only available in us and maybe uk.

Someone from the states told me that canada needs its own banking system urgently because of trump tarrifs. Comrade, we were able to pay at stores directly from our bank accounts decades before you could (i.e., it was instant, no pending debit transactions).

The US owns about half Canada’s banks. Canadian banking is extremely tightly integrated in the US banking system and Canada holds a lot of their assets in the US . The US can debank anyone from Canada easily just like they did in Europe.

Sure, there is no doubt they are tightly integrated. But this person thought we didn’t have any banks that were not US companies, or means of transferring money between people in canada without using US infrastructure. I asked, because I was so confused about what they were implying.

I think that was me. I’m Indian, but I was talking based on what I knew about the US banking system and assuming it would be similar for Canada.

I apologize about my assumption.

No problem. Hope your financial independence efforts succeed.

Because VISA and Mastercard are the worldwide banking standards and the US empire has made itself the global reserve currency (eliminating anyone who didn’t play along) you can pay virtually everywhere with dollars and it’s kinda strange when you can’t unless you’re in a nation revolting against US oppression

at least in argentina, an economy that’s pegged to the dollar and where we kind of not use the peso as the real currency you cannot pay with dollars if you go to the kiosk. maybe if you go to some rich place they do, or if you pay with virtual dollars.

Many card readers worldwide accept Mastercard and Visa. We recently had the Jolani meme. x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/…/1

BRICS is of course the major counter player to this and works outside of US control which is why the US hates it so much.

yeh, yeh, you can with cards, but i mean with a bill. if i were to buy a beer and i’d give the cashier a 5usd bill they wouldn’t accept it, look weird at you, or accept it but not give you change or some shit.

That’s true the direct dollar bill usually isn’t accepted but it often can get converted in local currency through card payment. That’s their benefit of the US owning Visa and everyone using dollars as the reserve currency

But this only works if the shop accepts cards, right? Smaller shops in India have almost all dropped card readers for UPI QR codes.

Yes India is part of BRICS and UPI is one of the (few) good things the Indian government has done. But interfacing Visa and Mastercard with UPI is very easy so once again for Americans are catered to as are most people whose banking system is based on that.

What is UPI?

Unified Payments Interface. It is an instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. You need an Indian bank account or debit (ATM) card and a smartphone (some feature phones can also use UPI). You install any one of the UPI apps, and bind your account / card to it. You can send money to someone by entering their mobile number, UPI ID (any unique alphanumeric string that isn’t already taken; this is useful if you want to hide your number) or QR code (most shops will display this at the entrance). The NPCI sets the standard and maintains the backend; users can use any standard-compliant app. It is also okay if the recipient uses a different app from the sender.

There is no fees for personal transactions, and business transactions up to Rs. 2,000. Business transactions above that will be charged 0.4% starting tomorrow, but this is still lower than what most cards charge.

Outside of India, UPI is interoperable with the national payment systems of Singapore, Malaysia, Oman and Qatar, and with some banks in the UAE.

Unified Payments Interface. It is an instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India. You need an Indian bank account or debit (ATM) card and a smartphone (some feature phones can also use UPI). You install any one of the UPI apps, and bind your account / card to it. You can send money to someone by entering their mobile number, UPI ID (any unique alphanumeric string that isn’t already taken; this is useful if you want to hide your number) or QR code (most shops will display this at the entrance). The NPCI sets the standard and maintains the backend; users can use any standard-compliant app. It is also okay if the recipient uses a different app from the sender.

There is no fees for personal transactions, and business transactions up to Rs. 2,000. Business transactions above that will be charged 0.4% starting tomorrow, but this is still lower than what most cards charge.

Outside of India, UPI is interoperable with the national payment systems of Singapore, Malaysia, Oman and Qatar, and with some banks in the UAE.

But is that REALLY “paying with dollars”, or is that more like the payment provider just doing the currency conversion for you on the fly?

I can use my VISA card around the world and my bank account gets deducted in €. I wouldn’t say that I’m able to pay with € everywhere, though.

The US invented the internet (and the UK invented the world wide web), so English is the lingua franca of the internet for better or worse. Most people on the internet who speak English as a first language are from the US, and with the algorithmic nature of most of our online interactions being borderless, people in the US get fed non-US content all the time. If there’s not anything obvious signifying that they are seeing content from another country, confirmation bias will lead them to think it is US-relevant content.

I will say, on the money thing, there are a lot of countries that use USD from an official (or unofficial) capacity. The US is also pretty cashless at this point, so it’s possible that people have used their card overseas no problem, and not realized that their bank was doing an exchange in the background. Then they get to somewhere cash-only that doesnt also take USD, and suddenly experience their money is not good. Still stupid to be a dick about it when it’s your own fault, but idiots all around the world respond poorly when subject the the consequences of their own mistakes.

Regarding your comment regarding the Internet, US defaultism generally happens as Americans are a plurality of English speaking people on several major platforms and a lot of news in non-English speaking countries is usually written in the local language and discussed in the local language. So, the assumption is generally that the person is American, especially if they are taking a point of view somewhat in line with American politics.

I’ve seen a lot of angry comments from too online leftists on Lemmy telling the person they are talking with that they hope the other person dies in a fire as America falls, with the response being “I’m not American”.

A lot of people understand American politics because it is written in the language in which the Internet was developed and so much is written. Without other context clues, people may not see that someone within the boundaries of American politics may be from another country.

Regarding travel, it isn’t typical for US defaultism for Americans traveling abroad. However, not typical doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen in some forms.

Regarding currency, a lot of countries and regions will take American currency. Some smaller Caribbean countries peg their dollars to the American dollar 1:1. Some touristy regions around the world will also take American currency, usually at inflated prices. Or, you may have a tourist who has run out of the local currency and only has American cash on hand. It isn’t typical, but it likely happens and everyone remembers the few idiots who don’t know that France uses Euros.

Regarding language, it can be stressful for some to be in an area where people are speaking in a language you don’t understand, especially if you are used to people only speaking your language. Yelling “Speak English” could be someone having a panic attack or just expressing frustration that they can’t interact with society like they could at home. Sure, there is likely some racism and ignorance wrapped up in that. However, I’m providing an explanation, not an excuse.

I’ve always felt like as long as you’re in English speaking places in the web, you’ll get mostly Americans anyway as they have the largest English speaking population.

Like when I see family members or friends with a different native language online, they are always usually following people and pages in their own language.

Nobody defaults to Americanism in Arabic spaces for example.

So there will always be a majority of Americans on English language websites, and that’s why it always be American centric.

Know what a country code top level domain is?

Ever notice anything about American URLs compared to URLs from other countries?

It’s a real phenomenon I’ve only observed online, luckily not in person as usually people who travel here care about learning about the world. It’s not a top 10 tourist spot.

Online examples I’ve seen plenty of:

• Assuming someone is from the same jurisdiction, especially in legal matters, or asking “which state are you in”?
• Going into a non-US national instance and making one-sentence replies about Democrats and Republicans on irrelevant political matters (most countries like their self-identified republicans)
• Going into a non-US national site and assuming a company name is an American company with a similar name (reasonable, but still an example). For example, we have an NBC, and it’s very different.

The “Speak English!” example isn’t defaultism as much as it’s chauvinism. Defaultism seems more like telling them to leave if they don’t speak English.