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.
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
I remember hearing that American service members are by far the best fed of all countries since WWII.
Along with resource richness, I think it's important to note how USA's geography also makes it extraordinarily safe from invasion. It is flanked by two oceans with die hard allies as neighbors to the North and South. Anyone that wants to invade USA would have to make an impossible amphibious landing or super-blitz through Canada or Mexico. Both of those options are nearly impossible. The entire world vs North America might not even he able to pull that off. Then, once the invaders get to the continental USA, they would have to deal the most possibly armed insurgency due to the culture's obsession with firearms. So, the only way the USA could be militarily taken over is by near complete destruction of its population via long-range missiles. This disregards the USA's vastly superior military power. The USA has more aircraft carriers than the next 7 countries combined and each one is technologically superior as well.
With that in mind, the USA didn't have to direct considerable economic efforts to protecting its homeland, while knowing that it's economic production would go mostly unharmed. In contrast, the Soviet's were scorching their own production centers just so the enemy wouldn't acquire them.
Additionally, the USA has the most expansive freight rail system and the Mississippi River allows for easy and efficient shipping of resources, especially from the food production area (eg the Bread Basket). So not only can the USA produce lots of food without having to worry much about protecting that, but it can also easily transport the food to other locations efficiently. When it comes to food and defense, the USA is overpowered af.
That's an interesting read, but I think it misses a point of where that 25% GDP is really coming from. The US makes 25% of the GDP because they outsource. To use other country's labor, other countries people, other other people's brains, and they take a huge chunk of profit from it. They then claim that's their GDP.
America is a very efficient country, with a lot of skilled workers creating a lot of cool products and stuff, but it's not 5x other countries. The only way to get those numbers is by leveraging the work of other people and claiming it for yourself.
That's not how GDP works
Edit to elaborate, GDP is calculated based on final goods and services, outsourced work exclusively counts towards the GDP of the country that work is done in, and only affects the GDP of another country when they buy what the first country made, but the outsourced work still happens in country A, so country A gets all the GDP created by selling finished goods, and all the GDP of the work done on unfinished products within their borders.
Basically, the US isn't sitting on everyone else's money, it just genuinely makes and sells that much shit
I‘m not sure how GDP is measured for an international company such as Google. Does the entire Revenue count cos the HQ sits in the US? Or is the license fees that it pays to Bahama‘s (in order to avoid taxes) is substracted from the US GDP? Does somebody know how that is measured?
Unless it's the sale of a product or service or the wage earnings or someone who worked on a product or service, it doesn't contribute to GDP, if country A made product X, it being sold in country B contributes to A's GDP
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.
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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
I'd like to see stats on that, because there are equally many 2nd language speakers in English speaking spaces as well. Not to mention the brits, irish, aussies, kiwis, canadians, etc, and that's before we get into this list of places with a non majority first language population, like many countries in Africa.
I think the percentage of Americans on the internet will be higher, but still not a majority
People are speaking English because that is an internationally known language. Americans assume that when people speak English on the internet, it must mean that they are American. It is not even remotely true though, Americans are a minority on the internet, including the "English speaking" internet, they are just never aware of it.
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.
It was kinda funny when lemmy was just taking in the reddit exodus crowd and people were complaining that their front page was full of German and Polish posts.
It makes sense, but it hurts. Sometimes I talk about niche Asian stuff and get blasted by people assuming I'm American.
It doesn't make any sense at all. The world wide web is gasp world wide. Reddit is an international platform which deliberately appeals to an international audience, regardless of which country the company is situated in.
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.
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
Strange, a lot of people speak that, why don't they have enough impact on the Internet to force that support?
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.
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The internet originated in the US. All of the original specs were made by Americans. ASCII is literally built around English, and ASCII is at the foundation of every single core technology of the internet. Hell, even when they designed UTF-8, it was still Western-centric; to this day it gets some push back from the Orient, because it's makes things harder for them - I think there was a fight to standardize on UTF-16 because it was easier for Asian languages; I may not be remembering the details correctly, but there's some legitimate beef some Asian languages have with UTF-8.
Now, obviously, more non-Americans are on the internet than Americans, but it's the same argument as Critical Race Theory: when the entire foundation and infrastructure is built on a bias, that bias influences all interactions even when isn't overtly obvious, or even intentional.
The "Internet" and many foundations of networking originated in the US, but the Web, which is what I'd wager many think of when you say "the Internet", was invented in Switzerland by a British man.
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which is what I'd wager many think of when you say "the Internet"
I wager you'd be right, but most people are wrong.
I'm saying that everything is built on foundations that are fundamentally English and American, and this influenced even Berners-Lees's creation. HTTP and HTML were fundamentally ASCII. DNS and the WWW eventually evolved broader encoding support, but it's clearly tacked-on and awkward. All you need to do is look at URL encoding rules as proof.
I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying there consequences of an English, American-centric design of what underlies all computer technology today is evident at all higher levels, no matter how hard we try to mask them.
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s just a “were” thing. You and I may have a more humble view of our homelands but I think we’ve both got to accept that there are some awfully myopic idiots residing in both of our states.
At least I can take solace in the fact that Donny never won the popular vote. Still entirely too many fools voting for the obvious wannabe autocrat though
Don't really appreciate the pommy remark there skippy
But yea, that happens. I meant the Empires over, not that some people refuse to believe it.
Burgerland? C'mon man! If anything we're bacon double cheeseburgers land!
Just a burger would be like an Englishman eating chips without the vinegar!
True. I also love me a bacon double cheeseburger. Shame we don't have Wendy's here.
I'm not opposed to being called burgerland, but I'm wondering why burgers and not hot dogs or apple pie. I think we should start referring to all countries by their national food.
True, as burgers didn't actually originate in the USA anyway. Are there any foods that are 100% USA creations?
I'm not sure anyone has original food. Isn't it all just the same stuff in regional flavors with available ingredients? We should just go by what's popular, or perceived to be popular, which i guess does make us burgerland.
Make burgerland, it's been how many decades and you still think they "should recall that once in a while"?
Earn it.
And are surprised when the other 95.8 don't understand US Customary Units, but you saw this gag coming from 3 Rhode islands away.
You confuse internet and media narratives with reality. We're friendly as fuck as long as you aren't a no tipping poutine eating maple leaf fuckers./s
This comment is the equivalent of trying to have a real conversation with someone and they start singing a commercial jingle.