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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28346 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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The rate at which this went out of fashion differs wildly between countries. As recently as 10 years ago, my dad had some renovations done at the grandmother's flat in downtown St Petersburg which left him with a bunch of rotten window frames in the [upper floor] place. His solution was a quick trip downstairs to get "the alcoholics" at the bar across the street to carry them down ("alcoholics", in Russia, are a socioethnic group much like "drifters" or "gypsies"). My understanding is that three dudes did it for the equivalent of something like $10 each.

Perhaps relatedly, in the late 2000s, Germany (where I was living then) had a very prolific online marketplace for carpooling - if you were going from city A to city B, you would just put up an ad saying when and how many people you'd take for how much, and people could contact you via the website. It was vastly cheaper and more convenient than the train system (and the cheap intercity bus network was not as developed as it is now; I figure this contributed to the website's demise), and the cross-section through German society I encountered on those is a story for another time, but one thing that is memorable is that once I casually mentioned that I was taking such a ride to some very typical Middle American internet friends I had made on the phpBBs, whose response was one of concern bordering on panic ("you'll be robbed and left for dead in a ditch somewhere and nobody will know"). It took a lot of convincing them that everyone does those things over in Europe and bad things generally don't happen (and I might have mildly offended them by repeating the standard Euro talking point that it's not like the carpool people will have guns). I still think that societal trust in the US would be in a better place if they didn't have mass media with non-stop dastardly-crimes-in-your-area programming.

As recently as 10 years ago, my dad had some renovations done at the grandmother's flat in downtown St Petersburg which left him with a bunch of rotten window frames in the [upper floor] place. His solution was a quick trip downstairs to get "the alcoholics" at the bar across the street to carry them down

In the US you can pick up a few Hispanic guys at the home depot parking lot for something like this.

Or taskrabbit, or Craigslist…

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