this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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in terms of land-area, the us is closer to Europe than any single European country.
Imagine, for example, being surprised that Catalonians are unfamiliar with Sami, or Swedes being unfamiliar with Maltese.
Population wise, too. Minnesota is different than California, or even our neighbors (north and South Dakota, Wisconsin and Iowa, Canada to the north,).
Hell. The Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St Paul) are very different and we can lob insults across the river.
LA to NYC is roughly the same distance as Lisbon to Moscow
Yup. Europe is only slightly larger. And that’s europe, not the EU. Europe on the whole is significantly denser in population, though.
If you want to compare direct numbers, the EU has ~450 million to the Us’s ~350 million and 3.9 million (or cia’s fact book, 4.2) km^2 compared to 9.8 million km^2.
The other countries that are similar are India, china and Russia.
...so the fact that the US is large somehow explains how that sign got through its entire chain of production and deployment without anyone realising that Latino people don't speak Latin?
No. it explains this:
having a lot of Latinos in one place doesn't mean there's a lot elsewhere, or that the people who made the sign are even anywhere close to familiar with any sort of Latino culture... for example, in Minnesota, there's a large number of Puerto Ricans in St Paul. if you drove forty minutes out west, you're not going to see that. Same goes with the Somali influence in Cedar Riverside, or the Hmong neighborhoods.
as for the sign... the people who actually made the sign don't give a flying rat's ass what's on it. A client sends them a picture or something, they print it, and send it out. If anyone even actually looked at it. It could have been an entirely automated service like vistaprint or whoever.
its like the bakers that put "just say 'Happy Birthday' in rainbow icing letters" on the cake. they're not paid enough to care what they're actually printing.
Which means the only people who probably who really needed to fail to understand the distinction is... the people that ordered it. And when you're talking about somebody who probably hung that up on their fence... there's not a "chain" of people involved.
Pre-press is part of my job. I care about the quality of the art and whether or not the text prints correctly. I send a proof to the client after I've checked those thing, and they verify that the text, etc. is correct, that we have the correct size, material, and so on. If someone sends me artwork that's going to end up printing at 26dpi, then I'm going to let them know that it's going to look bad. If they send raster text that they've blown up 5x and is all bitmappy, I'm gonna let them know that they need to fix that.
If the text is in Latin rather than Spanish? Not my concern.
In my own experience inside political parties (granted, small ones in Europe rather than a big US one) is that actual merit is almost never how people are selected for most responsabilities, especially at a local level.
You're not going to get the same quality of work out of people who basically volunteered to do something or got picked because they're mates of the guy or gal running the local party office, and are doing it for free, than you would get when the necessary skills are determined, an advert for a PAID position is posted with those skills and from the candidates responding to it one is selected via a half-way decent interview process.
Judging by the looks of that poster that's very much an amateur job done by a local voluntary, not something created at national level where it's more likely (at least for big parties, not so much for smaller ones) that people are actually employed and were properly selected to do it (not that there's not plenty of cronyism at national level in political parties, but that's not usually for what are seen as "lowly" "auxiliary" positions in a Political Party such as a Graphics Designer position would).
Then, of course, on top of that comes the "small detail" that the average level of formal Education and even breadth of Life Experience is significantly lower in the Far Right, so the average Republic Party amateur is more ignorant at all levels than the average Democrat Party amateur.