this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it's pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that'd be rather time consuming.

Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can't ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.

edit: the high number of replies mentioning "swimming" made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.

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[โ€“] MJBrune@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

How to order coffee, get what you want and keep the line moving without any needless human interaction.

I'm from Seattle and so many tourists want to chat up the barista. Go to the stripe and sip coffee stand for that. If you are ordering something that requires more than 10 words, use the app or be prepared to get something left off and move on. For the love of choice don't try to chat with some stranger in the line.

[โ€“] manucode@infosec.pub 13 points 1 year ago

Humans generally don't want to interact with needles while waiting to get their coffee. Needles are pointy and can poke you.

[โ€“] mattiasdrp@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And that's one of the reasons why a big part of the rest of the world think that the people living in the USA are rude. It's not just about needless interactions, you don't interact at all. No hi, no please, no thanks, no goodbye, no have a nice day, no sorry, no time. I'm glad I never learnt how to be rude and that's not a skill I'll try to teach my kids.

[โ€“] BigNote@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Actually the opposite is true. Most of the world tends to think that Americans are overly friendly and informal, though obviously there's a lot of variation.

[โ€“] MJBrune@beehaw.org -1 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's rude. I've been in many places where people just don't make needless conversation. We interact just fine overall. Specially if you go to some place like southern California. Just Seattle in particular is a lot like the UK not only in weather but in social grouping. People in the UK also don't needlessly interact.

[โ€“] SeaJ@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feel free to chat up the baristas if there is no line. Otherwise they just want to power through the rush of people and don't give a shit about meaningless small talk.

[โ€“] MJBrune@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Also the barista may not want to talk to you but it's forced to nicely interact because they'd lose their job if they told you to go away.

[โ€“] BigNote@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm from Portland and my complaint is nearly the opposite; that the baristas try to be too friendly/chatty with me. I don't want to talk to you, I want my goddamned coffee and once I've had that I might be inclined to chat.

I even tell my employees not to talk to me until after I've had my coffee.

[โ€“] MJBrune@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Portland and Seattle are fairly opposites. Keep Portland weird and all. Seattle is also a big tech hub and that means a lot of quiet, shy, introverted engineers. Portland has tech but not as much.

[โ€“] BigNote@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Scarcely. This is the tyranny of small differences. Portland and Seattle have way more in common with one another than they do with any other big cities in the US. Sure, there are differences, but to the rest of the world they seem trivial.

It's notable, for example, that even something so organic as Seattle's "grunge" music scene actually had its roots in Portland with all of the proto-grunge bands, like Napalm Beach and Dead Moon that came out of Portland's Satyricon in the 1980s.

[โ€“] MJBrune@beehaw.org -1 points 1 year ago

It's still all the one but Seattle has moved into a big corporate city and doesn't support the same sort of people as Portland does.