In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party • Hacker News Board

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#241

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:23 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #190

coldtea wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To write off the economic successes of the west under the guise of “problem” with western culture is deeply problematic. Well, there is a problem with western culture in this area -- it can never be content, and its eating away the planet. It's own visionaries and thought leaders imagined a society of leisure and 3 hour workdays and such, but we have many times the efficiency per hour of previous ages, and people a…

If you put the price on the free time (as e.g. opportunity cost, or cost of saving resources), you can see leisure as a form of consumption. The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many. This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due t…

>This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster.

I'd go further. Most products and projects are BS busywork, if not actively harmful and they shouldn't be part of the economy in the first place.

We've created a huge society middlemen, procurers, and snake-oil salesmen, and turned increasingly more aspects of life into commercial endeavours, where ever more people are constantly hustling and peddling something (manufactured crap, of which there are untold tons [1], planned obsolesce replacement products, their image, and so on).

[1] https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#242

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:24 PM UTC

dreen wrote: post #186

trhway wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Economic success requires efficiency in all aspects of a business. A lack of punctuality that permeates a society to the point that it effects business strategy is problematic. punctuality doesn't necessarily means efficiency. Punctuality itself comes at a cost. Somewhat similar to low latency. Your argument reminds about those Scrum proponents who tout that decreasing the latency and increasing synchronicity - what…

Punctuality is a foundation of respect for other people's time.

Demand of punctuality is a demand on other people's time.

Punctuality is a virtue of slaves -- to other people and to the clock in general.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#243

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:26 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #210

raesene9 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not. For example if you have 10 people attending a meeting and all must wait till they are present before starting (a very common occurrance) having all 10 people turn up promptly is more efficient than having 1-9 people waiting for the remainde…

It's honestly blowing my mind that this point even needs to be argued. Of course being on time correlates with efficiency. Have they ever looked up a store's hours before going there? Or gone to see a movie? Or met with someone else to do... anything? Or utilized public transit? Of course it can be argued that, in a cosmic sense, maybe society is more "efficient" toward people relaxing and enjoying life if that train…

>Honestly it's difficult to imagine having the opposing view with any experience at all managing anything. Or even considering what it might be like to do so.

Yeah, how dare people disagree.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#244

Post by oo0shiny » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

wirrbel wrote: post #205

alokrai wrote: post #107

Richard Feynman on Brazil: 1. “That evening I went for a walk in town, and came upon a small crowd of people standing around a great big rectangular hole in the road—it had been “dug for sewer pipes, or something—and there, sitting exactly in the hole, was a car. It was marvelous: it fitted absolutely perfectly, with its roof level with the road. The workmen hadn’t bothered to put up any signs at the end of the day,…

This is a funny and entertaining text snippet. I would however not have a problem (except maybe, that it wouldn't be written by a native speaker) to write a similar text about the US, from a German perspective. And think of what a swiss person could write. I could write about interstates that looked like tarred roads. About train stations in chicago that were closed and falling apart and locals explained that it was…

I would read that. Reminds me of the Bill Bryson books he wrote about coming back to America after living in England for 20 years.

The most memorable part for me was the vast amounts of cupholders in American cars that aren't found in vehicles anywhere else in the world.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#245

Post by 3x3matrix » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

I recently immigrated to Germany and have since become close friends with a Brazilian expat.

Within our first few weeks, we made plans to meet with some of our new German friends at 9 o'clock. By 9:10 both of our phones were flooded with messages asking where we were. We of course had not even left our houses yet.

The differences in culture when it comes to social settings and punctuality are very real.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#246

Post by thanatropism » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

Rio is known for its culture of ambiguity.

Another classic is "let's get together sometimes" (which means "dude, I totally don't hate you so let's be on each other's background social circle but never get together sometimes"). And its friendlier varient "come by my home sometimes to visit". (Don't go. It means they like you, but just don't show up unannounced).

Everyone is on about how São Paulo is much more businesslike than Rio (it is, but the ambiguous social norms of Rio don't bleed over the worlplace that much), but I think the main difference is how these cultures treat friendship.

In São Paulo friendship is very binary. People are strangers and sort of hostile by default, but once you make into their friend circle you might as well be family. Cariocas are friendly in a broad general fashion but have very very few true friends you can count on, visit unannounced, ask for help moving, etc.

This accounts for a lot of social customs re: parties and such. Cariocas are just more fluid.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#247

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

raesene9 wrote: post #221

coldtea wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whilst there may not be a perfect correlation between punctuality and efficiency, I'd suggest that it seems likely punctuality in business is more likely to be efficient than not. Efficient towards what, and what for? Those are good questions seldom asked.

Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time. The ability in business for people to complete tasks in-line with when they were expected allows for better scheduling. I'm not suggesting that everything in business benefits from being regimented but that meeting expectations allows for others to plan their time effectively. Time where people are waiting for others to do work which should have been completed can oft…

>Efficiency in terms of not wasting people's time.

Then you must first consider the need to have the business or meeting in the first place.

In fact, people's time is only "wasted" because it has been made precious -- i.e. because it was stolen and/or sold. That's way more wasted time (they'll never get again) there, than in "wasting time" by not being punctual.

Societies studied by ethnologists had little care for punctuality. In fact the same was true for rural societies in Europe and the US as well (the US South was considered "lazy" and without a "sense of time" as well), and even urban life before the tyranny of the modern "always on" demands. For the upper classes, being fashionably late was a virtue.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#248

Post by dsfyu404ed » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:35 PM UTC

MadSudaca wrote: post #200

brbrbrbrbr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To point #1. That happens still to today. It is a matter of education and resources. Unfortunately, both are low in Brazil. To point #2. Any guest in Brazil will be treated differently during their visit. https://jornalistaheitormenezes.blogspot.com/2015/11/o-carna... has some interesting historical context about Feynman's trips to Brazil.

It seems to me that #1 is a matter of lack of responsibility. In the US if you dig a hole and someone falls in it because there were no signs, I think you'd get sued to hell. The company, if it survices, would find who's responsible for the bad decision of not putting any signs, and punish that person accordingly for their lack of foresight. Next time that or another person, if they learned from the mistake, will be…

But what where is the line between your responsibility to put up signs and warnings and futile exercises in protecting stupid people from themselves? A sufficiency clever fool will find their way into the hole you'd dug past the most foolproof barrier you could possibly erect.

Societal exceptions of where that line is vary greatly even from state to state even in the US, say nothing of the differences between expectations in say, wealthy city in the US and Brazil.

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#249

Post by mikorym » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #173

mikorym wrote: post #165

Similarly to Feynman's quote on the hole dug in the road, in South Africa, it is also common to simply leave a construction site. However, the comment that I want to make relates more to how South Africans are often late and why the reasons are different to Brazillians. In South African English there exists a word "now now". This was adopted from Afrikaans, which is largely based on Dutch. The existence of this word…

For comparison, the Dutch "nou" means "now" as what it means in English - right now. "net" means "just", so "nou net" means "just now", or a short while ago.

This [1] wikipedia page also makes reference of "net-nou" and "nou-nou".

So too does this [2] article, although "nou-nou" certainly is sometimes used to refer to the past tense. I personally use "net-nou" to especially to refer to the future tense, so I am not sure whether the article's comments are historically more correct (i.e. that "nou-nou" should be future and "net-nou" should be past tense).

What I can say is that, in context, the words do seem to have different emotional value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_diaspora_in_Africa#Lan... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_slang_wo...

Re: In Brazil, it is considered rude to be on time to a party

#250

Post by otaviokz » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 1:38 PM UTC

As a Brazilian, don't take this as a reliable source of information.

Where I was raised, "Estou chegando" (I'm arriving) means exactly that. Arriving late is kind of expected in parties/bbqs but not at work, meetings, appointments etc.

As for Rio culture, no idea since I've never been there.