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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2876 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Right, Chinese are pretty much all new money (if they have money), so it’s a different cultural perception of wealth. My parents would get angry because my best friend’s parents would give me like $1000 in cash for my birthday aged 10, which they found ridiculous and unreasonable (and would make me share it with my siblings). But I came to understand that - for them - to give me a card and a chocolate bar, the kind of gift ten year olds might give each other, would have been insulting. Arab friends were similar. The point of wealth in non-Hajnali cultures is to share it with chosen acquaintances, friends and family for your own prestige and good fortune. It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food. Or the Dutch with their endless ‘tikkies’ for €3 coffees. Nobody in the Arab world or in China would ever split the bill for a coffee, or even dare to suggest it, the idea would seem ridiculous unless both people worked for a western company and it was some expenses thing (and even then, someone would just pay). It’s an honor to pay for another.

And yeah, eating ramen broth is often a bad idea, as delicious as it is.

It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.

I thought I could perhaps add some context here because this gets blown out of proportion a bit.

When you go to a friend's house after school you are served food (like sandwiches or yoghurt), just not dinner, unless there is an agreement. The reasons for this are threefold:

On a week night people usually make food just for the amount of people that are expected to eat, and will only have bought enough food for this. There are often literally not enough potatoes available to feed another person.

Secondly, you don't want to deprive the other family of their family dinner without asking first. Serving someone else's kid without asking is impolite.

Thirdly, what usually happens is that a bunch of friends go home to someone, not just one person (because the vast majority live within walking distance to school). So it's often not about feeding a single person but 2-4 extra persons. It's also often the case that it's the same house you go to (the one closest to school or whatever) and you go there after school almost every day. So it's not about occasionally feeding a single person a portion of dinner, it's about regularly feeding a number of extra people. The amount of people supposed to be fed varying by as much as 100% is not a small imposition on working parents.

Despite all this people are regularly fed dinner at other people's houses, you just ask first. In middle school I got an earlu dinner at a friend's house ~2 days a week for 2 years.. but I've also sat and waited while friends have had dinner in cases where they had dinner at 5pm and I'm going to have dinner at 7pm.

On a week night people usually make food just for the amount of people that are expected to eat, and will only have bought enough food for this. There are often literally not enough potatoes available to feed another person.

This always got me about Europeans going "we don't need cars, we just carry a single day's shopping home from the grocery store!" Like, what do you do if people are coming over? Or if something's bad and you decide to cook something else, or there's 10ft of snow on the ground?
And I guess sometimes the answer is "there are not enough potatoes available in the house"

or there's 10ft of snow on the ground?

In my area 3m of snow would imply some sort of apocalypse. Not happened in my life. Would result in at least deployment of army for rescue and restoring basic supply, maybe evacuations.

Like, what do you do if people are coming over?

How many and how much they are going to eat? Recently I was cooking for 10 people, brought all the things necessary for it in one backpack.

The Russian custom is that you must offer dinner to your guests, it's your duty as a host, but the guests should come up with an excuse not to eat it and leave before dinner. If you're a kid and your friend's mom is asking if you would stay for dinner, staying for dinner is a social faux pas; if you're an adult, and your friend and your friend's spouse are both saying you should stay for dinner, then it's really up to you, but everyone has this bigass mental ledger of small favors owed that roughly tracks who's in whose debt.

This reminds me of the German custom. You can seemingly drop by for coffee (including cake, of course) at any reasonable time, but while you may be offered dinner it would be very unusual and weird to accept unless it was effectively a pre-planned dinner party or event.

The British seem to mean it more honestly, they’ll say something like “I’m just making pasta for dinner tonight, please stay” and welcome it. But the inverse is that if you’re ever outside the home and they invite you over, there’s a 95% chance they’re just being polite (the famous “oh, we must do dinner”) and would be horrified at you actually expecting a date and time.

Anglos aren’t desperate to feed you but they’re usually happy enough to have the company. Kind of a hybrid between the Scandinavians and, say, Indians or Mexicans who start serving food and don’t stop.

The British seem to mean it more honestly, they’ll say something like “I’m just making pasta for dinner tonight, please stay” and welcome it. But the inverse is that if you’re ever outside the home and they invite you over, there’s a 95% chance they’re just being polite (the famous “oh, we must do dinner”) and would be horrified at you actually expecting a date and time.

My wife used to spend a fair bit of time in the UK for work and she had dinner at home with multiple colleagues, at different occasions, with their families. I've always wondered a bit whether they were just very inviting to their Swedish boss or if she accepted insincere invitations. She thought it was nice but also a bit strange, and the same thing didn't happen with her French or German coworkers, they just ate out.

I've certainly never been invited to have dinner with a colleague and their family in their home.

Maybe it’s just the quality of the food. In my experience, the french are more sparing with their dinner invitations than the germans – understandable, when they feel obliged to offer multiple courses of heavenly delights, while the german casually serves you his dreadful slop, ‘come as you are and eat what is left’.

Our dreadful slop is filling and gives you energy for actual work. Not like the eternal slimming diet the french are on. Their food is art, but art sucks, and ours is meant to get people through a long day of actual work, which it does.

German cooks are often good when they cook you the food of their people, but they have an awful fondness for the most awful bastardizations of “Asian food” imaginable. The English, meanwhile, are usually either good cooks at multiple cuisines or terrible at all of them, including their own.

Germans just don’t care about food like the french do. Even working class french people spend considerable money and time preparing different kinds of meat, on any given day of the week. Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time. I don’t really mind, I enjoy the lack of fuss. I find the french high maintenance, generally. At work, at school, at dinner, germans are more laid back.

Middle class germans eat potato salad with sausage on christmas. If they’re feeling adventurous, they’ll spring for some schweinemedaillons – but whatever happens, it’s all pork all the time.

Really? I thought the tradition was fish on Christmas Eve - in the far south they had the (amusingly Jewish to my mind, although of course not really) smoked salmon with latkes (kartoffelpuffer), and then goose on Christmas Day. Pork was reserved for breakfast or the 26th.

Truth is that almost every family has their own traditions here. Ours was grilled chicken.

I thought I could perhaps add some context here

No, don't, stop, you're only making it worse.

It's a cultural difference, it's fine. Cultures are weird, and that's what makes them fun, celebrate diversity and all that. If you try to provide additional explanations like "there's not enough potatoes" you'll just end up looking silly to people who make a fraction of your salary and have saying likes "where there's food for four, there's food for five".

I don't care if people like it or not, I dislike when people get the wrong idea and then spread it. I've seen so much false claims about this and it irritates me.

People are fed, they're just not invited to dinner as a rule. They're not invited to dinner because they're not planned for (and people actually are planning) and because people don't want to presume or irritate other families. That there isn't enough food isn't the only reason, it's one of the multiple reasons that taken together amount to why people might not be invited to dinner.

If people don't like this, then that's fine. It's just that it is not true that people aren't invited for dinner as a rule, it's just a possibility. It isn't weird to offer your kid's friend dinner, if you check with their parents first.

I’m not scandinavian, but it seems to me there’s more to it than these practical considerations. Of course it’s not a question of a lack of generosity. But regularly feeding another family’s child goes against your aggressively egalitarian ethos, by marking one family as poor and the other as rich.

That is not it at all. No one is that poor and no one would even consider that an issue for a second.

It's about the child being an imposition (on that particular day), and depriving the other family of their family time and fucking up their planning.

It's almost the other way around. The more affluent the family is the the more precise their planning will be and the parents time more precious, and they likely have their children's time planned out as well.

That can’t be it, I doubt Scandinavians are more likely to be helicopter parents than Americans of the same class. The family time explanation, I don’t know, you’re not really “losing” family time if your family eats together with your kid’s best friend, not in any practical sense.

It's not the family that offers dinner that's deprived of family time, it's the other family whose kid isn't home for dinner that's losing their family time.

Sorry for being unclear.

I still think your society is uncomfortable with gifts because it implies an unequal relationship and disturbs the law of jante, which also explains the going dutch and the rest of your peculiarities. And it’s just more fun to believe that, rather than your culture being particularly anal about eating times and potatoes.

People are for sure uncomfortable with gifts but a weekday home dinner is too small to be considered a gift, even if it repeats.

Don't underestimate how anal and uptight at least Swedes can be.

People are fed, they're just not invited to dinner as a rule.

Yes, good, exactly, this is what you should stick to! There's nothing more to it.

That there isn't enough food isn't the only reason, it's one of the multiple reasons that taken together amount to why people might not be invited to dinner.

No! You're doing it wrong again! There are no other reasons. All these other dinner-by-default cultures are subject to the same constraints, they don't have infinite food or infinite family time either, but if they have a guest at home, they invite them to join. The moment you start trying to explain yourself with anything other than "them's the rules" you start looking silly.

I'm not on a PR campaign trying to deceive you to perceive us in a more positive ligbt, I'm trying to explain whats going on and how people are reasoning.

Furthermore, I don't think the conditions are the same. Maybe in the general sense they are, people could organise their lives differently, maybe, but in the moment the choices are made the conditions are different. If you plan your meals (and shopping) more meticulously and you have practically twice the female labour force participation rate, having extra meal guests is a larger imposition and such a consideration is more important.

If this highlights a cultural difference then then that may be so, it doesn't make it a factor people doesn't consider and doesn't consider important.

It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.

Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.

In Sweden they will apparently eat dinner while the guest child is still in the house, which is beyond the pale IME in America (or among my Russian family). That's different from having kids go home to eat at a certain time.

Oh, I agree that that would be a step too far.

Interesting. If I went to a friend’s after school it was always assumed I was staying for dinner and would be picked up afterwards at 8 or 9 (after my parents had eaten), not before.

There were three kids in our house and it was very normal to have 1-2 (or more on Fridays) friends of mine or my siblings over for dinner pretty much every weekday.

In Australia it's weird if you don't feed your kids' friends, and the same was true when I was a kid in the States, although that was back in the late eighties/early nineties. But yeah one of my early memories is of my parents scoffing at my friend's parents on the ride home for being too poor to make me a sandwich or something.

If you don’t mind my asking, whereabouts did you grow up in the States? I’m a bit younger than you, but I also know that my parents never ate dinner at their friends’ houses growing up either. When my dad was young, one of my grandma’s neighbors would ring a farm bell when it was getting close to supper, which was the signal for all the kids in the neighborhood to go home.

Tennessee. Your experience kind of reminds me of when we'd visit my grandparents though, but there my grandma rang the bell to let anyone on the property know it was time to come in for dinner. But now my confidence is shot, so maybe that was to do with her Italianness.

It just occurred to me -- I guess Americans mostly falls in the with the Arab/Chinese/Koreans on this matter? Or maybe somewhere in between. If you sent someone a "tikkie" in the U.S. for a coffee, I think a lot of people would think you're stingy. When I used to eat out with friends after around the age of 25 or so (i.e. when most people weren't scraping to get by), usually someone would pick up the bill for the entire table, and then next time it would be someone else's turn to pick it up. Occasionally there were weasels in the group who tried to only pick up the tab at the cheapest restaurants, but we usually would just go somewhere fancy next time it was their turn and stick them with the bill. Some people probably came out ahead a few bucks here and there but complaining about that would have seemed petty.

I spent most of my time in the South though and America is really a handful of nations in a trenchcoat pretending to be a single unified nation, so perhaps norms are different elsewhere.

EDIT:

It’s an honor to pay for another.

N=1 but this is pretty much how I feel. I feel proud to be generous with my money and pay for my friends. Not sure how much of that is culture vs personality vs something else.

When I used to eat out with friends after around the age of 25 or so (i.e. when most people weren't scraping to get by), usually someone would pick up the bill for the entire table, and then next time it would be someone else's turn to pick it up. Occasionally there were weasels in the group who tried to only pick up the tab at the cheapest restaurants, but we usually would just go somewhere fancy next time it was their turn and stick them with the bill.

Huh, in Poland and Germany norm is that anyone pays for themself. At least among people I know well.

Yeah, it’s one of those interesting cultural differences like whether it’s normal to take your friends out for food on your birthday or whether it’s normal for them to take you.

Another difference: in Poland it is typical to organize this at home, rather than dining out.

This is probably mostly a personality thing, but I hate the “I’m buying this time” culture that is pretty much standard both in America and also it seems in most of the English-speaking world. I hate it in part for OCD type reasons that David Mitchell lays out here, but also because I’m quite frugal by nature, which hurts both when I’m paying and when I’m not. When someone else is paying, I feel the need to keep my tab to a minimum, so as not to impose. When I’m paying, I still keep my tab to a minimum, since I’d rather not waste my money on eating out. My friends, on the other hand, don’t share my frugality, so they’ll happily order more expensive items regardless of whether they’re paying, which means I always end up paying extra to cover their profligacy. I much prefer the Dutch system.

Is it because you're uncomfortable feeling like you "owe" someone or are "owed" something? I used to be like that to the point where I would refuse gifts from friends and family sometimes, but I realized one day that allowing someone else to be generous to you is actually also an act of humility and generosity on your own part since you're making your self "vulnerable" in a sense. Since then, I've tried to freely accepted gifts (though I do try to gift back later when I have the chance).

Hmm, maybe in part. I don’t have a problem giving or receiving explicit gifts. It’s the ambiguous nature of the paying-for-each-others’-meals arrangement that has always slightly bothered me (are these gifts or is the understanding that it will all even out in the end?). That and the fact that I dislike spending extra money on eating and drinking out. Plus it’s not something I grew up with. Even my extended family goes Dutch on the few occasions we all go out together.

It doesn’t really work well at Western restaurants where everyone orders their own food and drinks because of this defection risk (unless you really trust your dining companions, it’s always best to just order the steak/lobster/stack the cocktails for game theory reasons).

But in the Middle East and China it tends traditionally to be one person (not necessarily the person paying, but one person) ordering for the whole table, and then maybe ordering drinks for the table, so it makes more sense. Even when I’m with Chinese clients at Western restaurants they have typically tended (certainly more than average) to order sharing dishes or, say, the tasting menu for the whole table.

game theory reasons

Until you consider the iterated game, and realize that you're not going to be invited back if you order obnoxiously expensive meals and drinks.

Yes if as @reactionary_peasant notes you follow my exaggerated example literally and order a $200 meal when your friends spend $50. But if you just get a $12 G&T while your friends get $7 beers each round of drinks, or you order slightly more expensive sides or dessert or a marginally more expensive meal then you can usually get away with it and won't be disowned as a friend at all. And in time that's essentially taking hundreds of dollars more than you 'should' if the desire is actual equal contribution.

Also, only tangentially related, but in Japan there's a fascinating phenomenon at business meals (even internal meals!) where the first person to order will order entree X and drink Y, and then everyone else at the table will follow suit, with the chances of someone ordering something different decreasing in proportion to how late they place their order (i.e. the last person to order is almost guaranteed not to order something else).

I've asked Japanese people about this and they say that they don't want to break the flow or harmony and that it would be embarrassing or it would draw attention to order something else. As western barbarian steeped in individualism, I can only comprehend this on a theoretical, intellectual level. It's totally alien to me.

I do this all the time! That is, just piggyback on someone else's order, and find it slightly pleasing/harmonious if others at the table do as well.

I feel like it's a minor bonus to group cohesion if we all do a thing together. (eg. if everyone has poutine, or everyone orders a Caesar). I'm pretty indecisive, and not too picky, so anything that helps tip the scales one way or another, I'll just go with it. There's also some consideration for kitchen/bar/server efficiency.

unless you really trust your dining companions, it’s always best to just order the steak/lobster/stack the cocktails for game theory reasons

Not sure if you're joking but this is the sort of comment that makes me wonder if motteposters spend much time around normal average people (no particular offense meant towards you). If someone did this in my friend group he'd be cajoled into paying $10-20 towards the bill. You probably couldn't swing steak and lobster but if everyones getting chicken fajitas you could probably get the steak fajitas for +$3 without anyone complaining. It's kind of like going over the speed limit. Everyone just sort of knows that you can go roughly 5 over in a 40MPH zone and roughly 10 over in a 70MPH zone since the cops are people instead of robots

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