Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 0Comments 803Joined 4 mo. ago
Well, for me moving abroad was a massive eye opener, especially since I started by living in The Netherlands and when it comes to the way they do things the Dutch are very different even though they're generally pretty relaxed (though they might not look so since they normally only real open up to people who they know well).
I went in with all those "bad" habits and found out that, no, those were not in fact "the way people do things", they were just the way people tended to do things in my own country.
It probably helped that I moved driven by wanting to "learn different perspectives and ways of doing things" rather than for economic reasons (back in the 90s somebody with an Engineering degree would be just fine in Portugal and be under no economic pressure to emigrate). These were the days when you could be hired from abroad even as a junior software developer and the company would pay your moving and settling costs, so you didn't actually need money to move, just willpower and guts.
IMHO, everybody should live abroad for long enough to feel that you really live there (so at least a year or two), if only for the perspective and broader life experience it brings.
More precisely:
Possible banana(s).
You must banana/for bananas.
No bananas.
Danger, banana(s)!
"I fart in your general direction!"
It's a mix of various behavioural and social learned habits.
Consideration for others is only direct person to person and regulated by social shame: people don't think of "the system" as being "other people", they think of it as something you take advantage of and you're a sucker (otário) if you don't, so when they're not being watched by others or standing out they'll take for themselves that which is of the fuzzy "others":
- They'll go around the queue if they found a quiet way back or they feel not seen (people in cars generally acts as if they themselves are not seen)
- They'll swindle the State on tax or benefits if they'll think they can get away with it.
- They'll park their cars on sidewalks hindering or even blocking pedestrians.
- They'll keep on crossing the traffic lights just after they turned red even though pedestrians are waiting to cross.
- They'll not use the car blinking lights when it's merely for the benefit of others (I.e. turning right) but will when it might help them (I.e. turning left across another lane).
- They'll leave trash on the ground in the middle of a forest.
And more.
Generally people will behave vastly more selfishly if they think they won't stand out but be ashmed to do so when they feel that others are judging them negatively for it (that's what I mean with "regulated by social shame")
This kind of behaviour then translates into very low activism when it comes to things which are "of everybody" such as the Environment.
As for other elements of the lack of prosperity in Portugal, I would say two related to the management culture in the country stand out:
- A tendency for Nepotism, for example "a cunha". More in general choices about who does what are regulated by "who do I know" and "who do I like", not objective merit and suitability criteria. The result is that generally the best person for the job is NOT the one that gets the job, especially in positions seen as more prestigious (mainly management).
- Very little natural tendency for being organised: people tend to do just about everything reactively, the whole time, and almost never proactively and this also applies to managers who are generally terrible at preparation and organisation resulting in lots of time wasted from "going after the wrong thing", inappropriate tools for the job, lot of empty periods were somebody is waiting for others and so on. Further, because of the lack of preparation and organisation a lot of otherwise predictable problems that could have easily been avoided if tacked earlier become full-blown fires, so people end up spending lots of time in firefighter mode - fixing problems rather than doing productive activities. All this inefficiency is then compensated with overwork, which brings its own problem since overworked people are tired people and tired people make more mistakes and have an even lower tendency to be proactive. The Portuguese tend to work long hours whilst having low productivity. All this also means that most Portuguese managers are pretty shit at the more advanced levels of management, i.e. Strategy.
And so on.
All these various elements are painfully visible in the behaviour of Portuguese politicians and their management of the country.
Because this stuff are learned behaviours most people that grew up here have them and they naturally feel that "this is how people are" since in their life experience "everybody does this". From my own experience, people can learn to act differently, but when pretty much everybody around them behaves like that, they're not even aware that they're acting in specific ways which are not universal plus some of these things only yield rewards when most people are doing it and being the sole person acting in a certain way just makes one stand out or even be seen as a sucker.
That they're literally putting a Tariff on uninhabited islands show us that their process for deciding the Tariff rates is complete total crap.
One doesn't need to understand Finance, Economics and the Ins & Outs of Tariffs to see this as a seriously dumb error and hence a pretty big indicator of the incompetence of those doing it.
Whilst based on the overall actions of this Administration it's not hard to convince the well informed that those in this administration have no clue about what they're doing, this specific mistake is so straightforwardly and obviously wrong that even the ill-informed and under-educated can spot it.
If it's good enough for inventors, it's good enough for musicians, writters and software developers.
Afrikaners are an etnic group specifically from South Africa so "South Afrikaner" would mean an Afrikaner from the south part of South Africa.
(The word Afrikaner is derived from the Dutch word for "african", because most Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch Colonists who went there centuries ago, so maybe that's a source of confusion for people who speak Germanic languages!?)
Considering other people's hurt in one's own actions is a social contract and those who have no consideration for the hurt they might/do cause others with their own actions don't deserve that others to take their hurt into consideration in theirs.
Musk is very much an extreme example of somebody who couldn't give a rat's arse about the hurt he causes to others so it's absolutely Ethical and Moral for others to reciprocate it.
More likely Nero.
Curiously, the pirate version works fine offline.
It's almost as if being online is not an actual technical requirement...
Go check in Aliexpress: there are tons of non-smart phones, especially the stuff marked as "senior phone", and they're pretty cheap too (like $15 for a mobile phone that just does calls and SMS).
If you want the stuff that's not glitzy and heavy on marketing you need to get it from where the factories are, not were the brands are - basic mobile phone tech is a thoroughly solved problem and highly integrated nowadays and well within range for even smallish electronics manufacturers to design themselves.
Also check HMD, the Finnish mobile maker who bought Nokia's mobile business, who also have several non-smart models (including old Nokia models).
Edit: No idea if any are flip-phones though. Here's an example flip phone
The relationship of the average Portuguese with cars is still just as weirdly fucked up as it was 40 years ago.
Yeah, I've lived in a couple of countries in Europe and my fellow countrymen are the least socially aware of all and easily 30 - 40 years behind Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
I moved back to Portugal some years ago, after 2 decades abroad, and in several things (mobility, environmental awareness, social values) it was like going back in time.
Things are especially bad in everything to do with cars, with people still having the same mindset as back in the 80s, even young people.
The country were I was living when I rented videos didn't have Blockbuster, so 1.
You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.
This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.
The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can't seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.
If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.
It massively depends on the country - it's probably fine in Southern and Eastern Europe but not for example in Germany were if I'm not mistaken copyright violation is even part of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law as in pretty much the rest of the World.
Personally ever since I lived in the UK - which has the most insane levels of civil society surveillance in Europe, including of Internet usage - I got into the habit of doing pretty much everything behind a VPN, which also helps with peace of mind for the whole torreting thing no matter which country I'm living in at the moment, plus I pay 5 euros a month for the VPN which is less than a single streaming service, so in a way it pays itself (it's funny how piracy compensates for the costs of protecting myself from dragnet surveillance).
Pretty similar to how Brexit reduced the popularity of being anti-EU in the rest of the European Union.
Bullshit!
The tariffs on the tools required for the mandatory cock and ball torture would be set higher than for everything else imaginable.
I agree with that: I don't think any "people" has an intrinsically heightened disposition for racism.
In fact, if I thought otherwise I would be quite the hypocrite as that would be pure and simple racist prejudice.
What I do think is that the Press and Political environment in Germany for the past decades have promoted race-based thinking thus increasing the acceptance of racism and even a certain blindness to it because the dominant forms were "benevolent" racism. This is how Germany ended up were it is now: by the active normalizing of a dysfunctional behavior as being "benevolent" rather than due to predisposition of those living there for such things.
You see a lot of that too in places like the US were one party is Racist in the traditional sense and the other spins their Racism in the modern sense (but when it comes to, for example, Muslims, they're both traditional racists).
The really alarming thing is that rather than stop and re-evaluate that posture in light of how that ended up with the German Government supporting the most extreme Genocide of this century (so far :/ ) very overtly due to the race of the genociders, the German authorities have instead doubled down with authoritarian measures (IMHO, bypassing the Courts to expel dissidents is pretty authoritarian for a supposedly Democratic nation).
IMHO, such climate of race-based thinking and normalization of racial prejudice and discrimination (even if spinned as "positive") is also fertile ground for the growth of traditional racists such as the AfD in Germany and the MAGAs in America - the moral and ethical distance between "those people should be supported because of their race" and the traditional racists' "we should be supported because of our race" is much, much smaller than the distance between "people's race should not mater for how they are seen or treated" and "we should be supported because of our race" - "if it's OK to do it for them then it's OK to do it for us" is quite a tiny mental step.
I don't actually think that Germany is worse in this than for example the US, it's just that I had a far, far better opinion of Germany than I had of the US previously and the deep disappointment of figuring out the dark nature of racial policies in German Politics makes it hit me harder than what's happening in the US.