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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

I love your response because it's a great take-down of the "everything is relative and cultural" argument, which I have always thought comes from an overactive imagination.

When you start to reduce life down to simplistic concepts, everything is not relative and cultural. Sure, maybe on the fringes (.01%) there are situations that are heavily influenced by those. But for most things in life (near or on mazlowe's hierarchy) it is almost like math, or a logic puzzle.

Brazilians don't leave uncovered holes in the street because of something entirely logical within their own culture. They leave because they are lazy and do not care for the level of danger it represents to others. To imply otherwise is simply dressing a pig.

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> They leave because they are lazy...

Probably sounds better in the original German.

These proofs by anecdotes are really fast food for the biased mind.

Just as a thought experiment, if Brazilians are inherently 'lazy' as you say and it has nothing to do with the environment that they are in and its incentives, then are they also lazy abroad? Do they also forget to put signs when they dig holes? Do they do a worse service in restaurants? Do they work less than their coworkers? Are they also consistently late? Is this not the case because they are from a biased sample of non-lazy Brazilians that leave the country? Or maybe Brazilians are not inherently lazy?

Just a few questions for the debate.

I don't care if they are Brazilians or Norwegian. If you leave an open hole for someone to fall down you are being negligent.

The whole crux of my argument is to remove the concept of culture from the discussion unless it is absolutely necessary.

Sorry to bow out but I think you are barking up the wrong tree trying to get me to say something unique about Brazil. Human laziness and general awfulness is universal.

> I don't care if they are Brazilians or Norwegian. If you leave an open hole for someone to fall down you are being negligent.

We agree then.

> _Brazilians_ don't leave uncovered holes in the street because of something entirely logical within their own culture. _They_ leave because they are lazy...

I guess it is fair to say that your point was quite hard to grasp based on your last sentence, seeing the other comments as well. If you say "Brazilians don't leave uncovered holes because of...", then it seems you are making a point about the whole population in a generalized sense. Therefore "they are lazy" also refer to this generalization.

Sorry, I was using Brazilians and "they" in the context of the thread. I was not attempting to make assertions, but carry them through the conversation.

Sorry that it came across that way, and for any offense!

When I first went to Rio in 2003 and saw the greater abundance of moderately dangerous situations compared to U.S. cities, I thought it was partly due to differences in legal systems and legal culture. In the U.S., an accident resulting in personal injury is very likely to lead to a lawsuit and there are a huge number of lawyers entirely specialized in personal injury cases. This is less so in Brazil.

I don't have a clear answer about where that difference comes from, but I thought it was a factor in people's differing behavior.

The justice system is really slow and expensive. It can take years to end a lawsuit. Judges have 2 months and a half of vacation and most of them work less than 8 daily hours.

"Brazilians don't leave uncovered holes in the street because of something entirely logical within their own culture"

To be fair, there is some cultural relativism here: leaving a hole is probably 'logical' on some level because a) maybe it's not an operational requirement of the workers, b) maybe there are no signs available and they can't do anything about it ... but more likely c) these behaviours are common and it's hard to get anyone to 'act above and beyond' the local climate.

Those same workers might be totally different people with 3 months 'on the job' in Germany, with German standards, laws and behavioural norms.

I think cultural relativism (to which you are referring) is a real thing, but we can't use it as an excuse either.

I think a better approach than calling them lazy, would be to look into how easy it is to sue, who can be sued and what the difference is between the limit on liquidated damages allowable between the “lazy” countries and a place like the US.

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