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

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

#251

Post by moduspol »

coldtea wrote: post #243
moduspol wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Feel welcome to disagree--I just think you might feel differently with broader life experience or a more open mind.

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

#252

Post by nine_k »

coldtea wrote: post #241
nine_k wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 faste…

If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling. It's only filling it poorly.

Finding such toxic-but-still-used product is a good opportunity to both make a living and improve life in general. I suppose the hardest part is to detect and understand the real need being filled.

Certainly enough, education, and other ways to change culture, is a more profound way to change the way people fill their needs, and especially what they even perceive as needs. E.g. the need to serve a bloody revenge is by now mostly absent from a typical Western society, while the need to one-up a neighbor is still pretty widespread.

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

#253

Post by kiproping »

mattlondon wrote: post #199

In the UK as a native Englishman I would be totally ok with people turning up late to a party/BBQ/whatever. No problem (although not for a dinner party where you need to prepare etc) But if you agree to meet people at a certain time, then being more than 10-15 minutes late without letting the person know is just rude, selfish and inconsiderate. Sure problems come up - these days there is zero excuse to not let the pe…

I am African and I can say that it depends on your culture.

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

#254

Post by [deleted] »

mirimir wrote: post #229
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,…

I've also seen this in Mexico. Sometimes, roads just end, into holes and large rocks and equipment. However, this is mainly an issue in rural areas. And even though there may be no signs, there's typically a line of small rocks, maybe 0.5 meter from the edge.

[deleted]

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

#255

Post by draw_down »

tchaffee wrote: post #191

São Paulo is a city of over 12 million people, the largest city in the southern hemisphere of our planet, and is almost 10% of the Brazilian population. Almost everyone I meet with in SP is on time for work related meetings. I haven't noticed a difference between SP, the UK, the USA, or many of the other places I've worked. Generalizing about an entire country when that generalization is wrong for its biggest city ma…

On the other hand, if I said Brazilians are punctual based on my experience with several of them, I’m guessing you wouldn’t have a problem with that.

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

#256

Post by Jazz4241 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #6

I don't think this is just a Brazilian thing. When I throw parties in the US nobody shows up until 30 mins after the start time, and the peak of people showing up is between 60 and 90 minutes after start time. The exception to this is dinner parties, where people are much more punctual because they know you're planning the meal timeline.

I think in a social gathering, people take things casually and thus turning up late.

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

#257

Post by dsfyu404ed »

forkerenok wrote: post #228
senorjazz wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because it is your responsibility not to walk blindly into a hole. Why the US is so blame happy, rather than personal responsibility, that is the question. -------------------- Just different cultures

Well, it's actually both. We get a decent buffer of safety only if all parties take precautions.

Humans are very good at optimizing their behavior for close to constant risk. If one party does stuff to increase safety to compensate for other parties not being alert as they should be then the other parties will decrease their alertness to keep risk constant. You give them blind spot detection that works most of the time and they merge onto a motorcycle because they've learned to stop looking. You put orange barrels up at 99% of the road hazards and they'll drive right into the one that doesn't have them because they expect there to be orange barrels. You remove the little holder tab from gas pumps and people just shove the gas cap in (it fits perfectly). You put emergency stops, fail-safes and limit switches on power tools and they become part of normally operating the tool (why disengage the blade on a riding lawnmower when you can just take your butt off the seat and it will do it for you, no reason to not overload the trash compactor when it's got a relief valve).

Once you get beyond the bare minimum of warnings that alert people to some hazard returns diminish quickly, better to spend your resources on minimizing the damage of people being dumb than preventing them from being dumb in the first place.

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

#258

Post by coherentpony »

tchaffee wrote: post #191

São Paulo is a city of over 12 million people, the largest city in the southern hemisphere of our planet, and is almost 10% of the Brazilian population. Almost everyone I meet with in SP is on time for work related meetings. I haven't noticed a difference between SP, the UK, the USA, or many of the other places I've worked. Generalizing about an entire country when that generalization is wrong for its biggest city ma…

> Almost everyone I meet with in SP is on time for work related meetings.

Is 'almost everyone you met' a representative sample of the population of SP? Of Brazil?

To say that Brazilians are late is a generalisation. To say they are on time is also a generalisation.

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

#259

Post by AlexB138 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #240
sonnyblarney wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As to 1, no, it's neither 'education' nor 'lack of resources' really. It's a matter of conscientiousness and responsibility. Even if there were no signs immediately available, nobody with an ounce of decency would leave a large hole unmarked. Signs are not expensive, if they're not available it's because of a lack of intelligent and responsible acting somewhere else in in the value chain. As for #2, it's still a lack…

>99% of the world's problems would be solved if we all just acted with very basic levels of conscientiousness and responsibility Your expectations and the expectations in most parts of the west are that everyone take care to protect others from being harmed by their actions. Brazil, Indonesia, India, etc, expect people to be vigilant and steer clear of things that may do them harm. The only reason you see that as wro…

In many societies they mutilate the genitals of female children. In many others they carry out honor killings when a member of the family acts, as they see it, incorrectly. These are two examples of aspect of society that vary from culture to culture.

Cultural relativism is largely nonsense. Leaving a giant pit in the road for people to drive into is objectively a dangerous and selfish thing to do. Whether the expectation in the country is that people will do dangerous and selfish things doesn't change that fact, it just means the society has some huge problems.

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