4 ms·
I used to work at a very large (and reasonably well-educated) company that had coworkers from everywhere (LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Mi
by txcwpalpha 7y ago
I used to work at a very large (and reasonably well-educated) company that had coworkers from everywhere (LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, NYC, etc) and it was quite a common misconception amongst almost all of them (and to be fair, I also met a handful of Europeans who thought the same). Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI don’t think you would ever hear something like that in Seattle. I’m guessing deep south somewhere?
- txcwpalpha 7y agoOne of my Seattle coworkers was one of the specific people who I was thinking of when writing the above comment, actually. I think it's less common now due to stuff like pictures of Marina Bay Sands going viral over the past several years, as well as movies like Crazy Rich Asians "educating" people that Singapore is a modern city. But around ~2010, not so much.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI’m still not seeing it. A lot of my generations introduction to Singapore was via articles like wired’s Disney Land with the Death Penalty (still banned in Singapore to this very day). The Singapore being apart of China is even weirder for someone who knew nothing about Singapore (why would they even know it was populated by mostly ethnic Chinese?).
- txcwpalpha 7y agoYou're citing a piece of literature that famously contrasts Kowloon Walled City [1] as preferable to Singapore, and yet you are confused why people are misinformed and uneducated about it? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoI didn’t say the article had problems, but Singapore lacking electricity wasn’t one of them.
- pault 7y agoI think you are making the classic nerd mistake of assuming the average person has done as much self educating as you have.
- jpindar 7y agoI heard they don't even have internet in the deep south.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoPretty sure that was true when I was living there (unless 300 bps model dual up counts).
- cure 7y ago> Also very common was the belief that Singapore is a city in China. Yeah, that does not surprise me. Americans are not always that great at global geography. I'm not sure why that is. Of course the country is huge, and American culture is such a dominant force that it is not so hard to live your entire life and never learn much (anything?) about a relatively small city-state far away in Asia. If you've never met anyone from Singapore, this doesn't surprise me at all. It still feels like something that the US should be better at as a nation, though.