I don't understand this. I live near Munich, people cross against a red light all the time. Maybe you were doing it near children? That's a real social faux-pas, because they're not supposed to normalize jaywalking.

Here is an incident that happened the second day I got to Vietnam (long before I was ever in Germany). My girlfriend was really sick in the hotel. I was vomiting too, but I went out to find medicine. I got to the corner of a huge boulevard, maybe 8 lanes wide. There was a pharmacy on the other side. But the traffic never stopped when the light turned red. On and on the traffic just kept going, weaving around all the other cars on the cross-street. The boulevard was maybe 1 meter below the level of the sidewalk. I stood there for 5 minutes waiting for some time to step into the street.

Finally, a 6-year-old boy walked up alone, paused next to me, and started crossing the boulevard in the middle of the traffic. And all the cars and motorcycles just went around him.

I was like, well fuck, if that kid can do it then I can do it...

So what value are you teaching children? How to cross a street or how to follow orders? Crossing a street when it's possible may be illegal but it's not immoral. The idea that neglecting formalities leads to immorality can only be true if the morality isn't implanted. Worse, it implies that formalities are the only thing that holds back man's immoral nature... which should not be the lesson. If a man jaywalks, it doesn't make him more liable to commit other criminal acts.

What value are you teaching children by not swearing in front of them? Why is making certain sounds with your mouth immoral? Isn't it just showing your are in-group and well cultured? The jwalking culture in Germany is exactly the same.

Yes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning that different groups of people may have their own languages and customs is the first step to being able to blend in with a diverse group; it's great when you're able to adopt a register appropriate to the people you are with at any given moment.

Of course it's also possible that the child learns to be a snob and treating with disdain those who are not in your group. But I would say that's a character trait of the person, and it's still worth having the opportunity to learn how to adapt, rather than being unable to modulate your behavior and only knowing how to have a single posture. Having a culture of acceptance starts with knowing the customs of many different groups.

Countries like Vietnam are the exception, not the rule. In most countries traffic won't swerve around you, they'll just end up hitting you because they are not expecting it!

I don’t think this is necessarily true. They probably end up with a lot more dead kids as a result of this.

I don't know how Vietnam makes it work; they either have really alert drivers, really slow drivers or a really high child mortality rate.

[0]: I often notice that children are quite unobservant of their surroundings and behave as if they are alone in the world.

YES that is precisely what happened. That's so funny you said this.

I was standing in heavy falling snow, at the corner of an empty boulevard, next to a woman with two little daughters and a young boy. I stood for a moment and then walked across and she started yelling at me. I suppose she was trying to teach her children to be patient and wait for the light to change. What went through my head at that moment was, I kid you not, "ah, that's how they learn to follow orders".

And this is entirely in sync with my original point above, but also personally, I loathe Munich. There's nothing like being told holocaust jokes when people don't know you're Jewish. I believe the people there would vote for Hitler in a heartbeat if he were alive and running for office.

However, instead of reconsidering your stance on Germans' law-abiding behavior, you reassert your bias by invoking Godwin's Law, linking a contemporary incident to the actions of Hitler.

Do you see any issue with this?

(I'm not German)

You don't shout at a man in the street in order to demonstrate good behavior to your children.

Obedience, yes. Good behavior, no.

this is literally how every minority (basically anyone but the waspiest of wasps) feels in america. terrible jokes about <insert race here> are completely normalized.

You do if you are angry that said man is sabotaging your efforts to raise your children correctly. Also, said man is breaking a law instituted for a good reason.

I’m also personally of the opinion that speaking up when you are angry instead of passively taking it is good for society.

It sounds like you have some hangups that you are projecting onto this situation.

She wants to avoid her kids considering it acceptable to cross a red light. Parent violated community norms by crossing a red light. So now she has to signal that this person has violated community norms, so that her kids learn "red light crossing is bad" rather than "red light crossing is normal".

This is not a "german" thing, this is a "human" thing.

I spent a year there, mostly in SA and the NT. A six pack of beer and a pack of smokes will set you back $50. When it comes to road signs, the "are you feeling sleepy" every few kilometers really makes you... sleepy. Police presence is heavier than in America. There are checkpoints going into towns. Then of course there's the separate window for alcohol for Aboriginals, who line up early in the morning, the scanning of your driver's license every time you buy beer...

When I first got there, I stayed in King's Cross, Sydney, and it was fairly wild. I heard that neighborhood isn't there anymore, and hasn't been for some time.

I'm Australian, currently live in Sydney and I feel as you do, but none of your examples explain your claim.

No, I don't have time to list the ways Australians follow rules (more so that Germans), it is 1:15am, and I'm going to bed.

Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.

For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.

When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.

I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.

Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.

--

Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.

pervasice in Russia too. Most non-democratic societies are indivifualistic and highly cynical.

That's why I say American brain is' a prison - they think in 'Socialist countries everyone cares about each. other too much, and that why they are poor

To tell you the truth, Russia itself has always been a prison, as it is now, and the people have a prison mentality. That causes you to brag or be humble; always to scheme and never to be honest; always to look for an edge. Lying to people's faces, what is it vranyo? Just to make sure they know you're lying, and exercise power over them? No, the American brain is not a prison. Americans individually have a lot of problems understanding the world, but we do not think all other countries are the same. Also, obviously, Russia is no longer socialist in any way. Not to mention, many Americans are in fact socialists, at least on par with European socialist parties.

>>seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive

I'm sad to say that this is true everywhere I've been. The attitude is everywhere in the US... it's only that in the US people are trained to be quiet about it. My observation, everywhere I go, is that only smart, observant people do not mistake kindness for weakness.

>> because fuck you, that's why

So, this is one thing I do like about the US. The police in the US do not get involved in anything unless you pull out a gun and shoot somebody... even then, they really don't care. On the other hand, this kind of fake "manliness" you're describing is sort of self-limiting in the US; it tends to look ridiculous to us when we travel overseas or when we see new immigrants from (choose a chaotic country) act this way - because here, the guy you jump in line in front of might look like nothing but he also might have a 9mm. I say this from the perspective of someone who has seen multiple shootings at the bar around the corner from my house in the past year, for things as stupid as someone acting rudely.

Stupid, selfish, short-sighted people are the same everywhere. Being rude is really the issue; one does not need a God or a police force to avoid being rude. Being rude and taking advantage for oneself is cultural, and I actually believe it's impossible to take a culture who has been raised that way and make them - under any police regime - act differently. (I'll qualify that further by telling you that all my grandparents came from Russia in the 1920s, and spoke Russian, but they hated the criminal type of Russian scavengers who came out of that ruthless wasteland from the 1980s onward). Taking care of others outside your family requires two things: 1. a functioning rule of law, yes, but 2. a view passed to you from your parents that treating others well will cause you to flourish more than trying to take advantage of them. This cannot be enforced. It has to be internalized and understood. I really think it's better in many ways to see what kind of people you're speaking with bluntly than to listen to the sophistry of the modern version of the same avarice as it presents itself in New York or Los Angeles. I can sit and listen to the racism toward black people in the American South or toward Aboriginal people in Australia, and just openly disagree. That's better to me than listening to people who I know are racist trying to sound politically correct in Seattle.

>> I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world

I think it's the second-most important metric. Being polite. But it's worse to be somewhere everyone is polite and everyone is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is to me the most important metric.

(This is actually what my problem is with Thailand. True, no one cuts in line. But there's so much bottled-up anger that no one can admit to, and suddenly it explodes).

But not cutting in line - in my book - is representative of the best human value. So I absolutely agree with your view and don't think you should say it's not important. It's possibly the most important thing.

A shout out to the Argentines, when my ex-gf was possibly kidnapped there, people asked me to cut in line in front of them at an ATM that was running out of money, where they had been waiting for a long time, just from seeing the look on my face.

I have lived in India where lines do not generally exist and in US. I have seen the culture in India change from line cutting to following the line (generally). The biggest difference is caused by whether you believe you will get the service if you wait in the line.

If you have a service that is available for only the first 20, but you have 50 people waiting, line-cutting will happen. Railway tickets in India are a big example - when I was growing up, you rush to the beginning of the line since there were only small number of seats allocated to each station. Now, that it is computerized and you can book from anywhere to anywhere, people stay in the line since they know they will get the ticket.

Look at your last example - lack of service if you are not in the front will cause chaos.

I also grew up there. I think there’s a low level compliance with what I’d call daily/minor rules. Cigarette butts tossed wherever you are when you finish one, speed limits are barely even advisory, jaywalking widely practiced, etc.

Depends. In NYC, jaywalking is normal. In Santa Monica, you get a ticket. Speeding is mostly enforced everywhere.

What sets the US apart from countries like Argentina, in this department, is that the cops won't just ask you for a bribe when they stop you. You actually end up with a ticket and have to deal with it.

MA highways are moving 75-80mph when traffic permits, regardless of whether they have a posted 55 or 65mph speed limit. NH is only a few mph less typically.

In some American cities (Chicago), crossing against the light is how muggers and pickpockets tell the tourists apart from the locals.

People who live in downtown Chicago wait for the light because they know that there's very often a car ready to make a left turn right into the crosswalk. Tourists are often from places where, if there is a crosswalk, there's no traffic to worry about.

Bingo. If one hasn't spent serious time in at least 4+ states, I don't think they ever really get an idea of how differentiated American cultural norms really are. "Americans are ______" is about as descriptive a statement as "Left-handed people are _____" - there's just toooo much variance for it to be a useful observation.

I think we get this a lot as Americans because we are such a huge cultural power with our movies, music and software. (and pizza). But like, there are definitely enormous cultural differences between Northern and Southern Italians, or N/S Vietnamese, or like, the 500 different cultures in India... we're sort of blind to it until we go somewhere because no matter where you are, you just get the summary of everywhere else.

I see tons of online comments generalizing about California or the West Coast (I’ve been guilty of this generalization myself), but after living here for the past 8 years I’ve learned otherwise. I will also refer anyone who wants to lump the whole coast together to Oregon’s legacy as a self-proclaimed “white state” [0].

It turns out that making accurate generalizations about millions of people is hard, and if you’re committed to doing it anyways then you’ll just end up with cliches and platitudes.

[0] https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/racial-h...

I disagree. Everyone I've talked to in the US considers 5 mph over the limit to be perfectly safe from tickets (enforcement), and 10 mph over to probably be safe from enforcement. The few times I've heard of people getting ticketed for 5 mph over the limit they were outraged at the injustice of it, and most people agreed with them.

Speeding is mostly enforced if you're 10+ over the speed limit, or driving a heavy vehicle.

It's also why Argentina is a fucking mess, but I love it. When I'm there it feels like the people will never, ever be conquered.

This is true in a lot of countries that had a dictatorship.

Weirdly, it is not true for Chile, where everyone still acts like they're in a dictatorship.. also the US, which never had a dictatorship but created and supported dictatorships all over the world.

But, different strokes for different folks.

We ended up at a police station in Mendoza where the cops did not want to handle our paperwork. A few months later, I parked the car in Buenos Aires and my girlfriend left a sandwich inside. It rained and the car got moldy. I wanted to sell it. So I called a number in the newspaper that said they buy cars. Some guys showed up, took it on a test drive, and didn't come back. They just took the car.

So I called my friend who knew a cop and she said, meet us in Plaza Serrano at 12:00, those guys will be there, and bring $100 for the policeman.

I did, the guys showed up, they paid me $1500 for the car and everything worked out. The cop just stood there watching.

Argentina is sort of how life is supposed to work. If you had the amount of guns like in the US it would much more fucked up. Also in a weird way people still have morals there, at least they are not as nihilistic as in the US. People still read fucking books and are educated. I think a lot has to do with having late night dinners and talking for hours instead of being on your phone. Taking your kids out to dinner and wine at 11pm is a really good value. Teaching them to talk and listen and be adults.

Indeed, in some ways this place is crazy and in others its reasonably livable. I have many anecdotes like those but my English is not so good to make them funny.

Río negro native here. If you come to visit again, and go to San antonio oeste or las grutas hit me up and I'll invite you a beer

This brings back so many crazy stories from Río Negro. We got stuck for two weeks in General Roca. The car broke down on RN22 and we were towed into town by a farmer on a tractor. We left the car with our luggage inside on the street and walked to find a hotel. When we came back in the evening, five or six old men had surrounded the car and were looking inside, thinking that someone had been killed, or it was drugs, because who is crazy enough to just leave a car full of suitcases? Some Paraguayans towed us to the river and fed us lunch at their trailer, but couldn't fix the car. Then it was New Years and at midnight we sat in the empty street with a bottle of wine, surrounded by a dozen frightened dogs while the fireworks went off in people's yards. After a week we were able to find out where the farmer lived, who was a really wonderful guy named Javier. He introduced us to his family, and we had lunch under their grape vines. He knew how to fix tractors, and he was able to fix our car's electrical wiring at his house. No one ever asked us for money to help. The people were incredibly kind.

Getting to Las Grutas was a different story... we took a "taxi" which was not a real taxi, just some guy waiting at the Viedma airport who turned out to be extremely high on cocaine. At one point in the middle of the desert he just stopped the car, got out and went to the trunk. We got very worried. When he came back, he talked rapidly on and on about why guns should be easier to buy, because if he wanted to kill people he could just as well kill them with a knife, or even a pen. To demonstrate this he was jabbing a pen around wildly like he was going to stab me. My girlfriend said the whole time she was in the back seat with a towel ready to throw it around his neck and strangle him, even if we crashed.

Ahhhh. Well, enough stories ;) likewise, if you're ever in Portland, Oregon, look me up!

Some people don’t follow the unimportant rules, but almost never when it’d inconvenience someone else.

As someone born in, and having spent most of my life in New Zealand, I have no idea what this means. I'm not being defensive, but I just don't understand. Maybe I'm 'too close' to see it. Perhaps I'm thinking about civic rules (e.g. jay-walking, speeding) and you're thinking of, e.g. industry like construction?