The corporate drones have the management tower above them, the OSS enthusiasts do not. That is it.

If you exercise, it does not matter what you do and how often.

If you train, you have specific number of time slots that are fixed at specific times in your schedule and nothing goes over them. You track your progress in a spreadsheet.

Googled that ‘yes’ thing. Not different from my experience in other parts of the world. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army. What is your environment?

As someone living in the Nordics my experience already with central Europeans and especially so Americans is that these cultures are already much more high context than the Nordics. I guess up here we're all borderline autistic?

I've done business the other way around, Western Europe with Finland. I think it's just different context? There are unwritten customs and meanings in Finland as well, just different ones.

Even UK vs Netherlands is a significant difference in how things work in business deals and that's just a 45 min flight. Unspoken expectations are different on how the other side is supposed to behave.

I am entirely convinced that the entire country of Germany suffers from Asperger's.

Denmark is a bit better, maybe because they drink more ? Dunno.

As someone who's visited both countries a few times, Germany is more of a drinking culture. Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...

As someone who has lived in both countries, the Danes drink much more in a social setting.

Maybe the overall consumption is higher in Germany, but in Denmark everyone is out drinking much more than in Germany.

In Germany people drink less - but those who drink really drink a lot. Averages don't tell the story.

Germany answers the question, "What if autistic engineers got to have their own nation?"

I have observed the same across a bunch of linguistically Germanic countries (DE, AT, CH, NL, DK, NO, haven't been to SE, didn't observe it in IS), and I thought of it as "cultural autism." Apparently "higher context" is the politically correct way to say it. Now I know!

Danish and Norwegian are not linguistically Germanic. If anything, German has more old Norse influences. And dutch.. Well, dutch is the illegitimate child of england and germany.

>Danish and Norwegian are not linguistically Germanic

Where do you get that notion? My education (and some googling to refresh my memory) has Norwegian, Swedish and Danish classed as "North Germanic" according to comparative linguistics. That is one subset of the West Germanic languages which most of northern Europe speaks.

You are right, west germanic is what I had in mind. In my mind north germanic never made sense, but I guess I will leave that to the experts :)

Speaking as someone with an academic background in Germanic historical linguistics: this is thoroughly incorrect.

> ‘Yes’ means ‘yes, sir’ only in the army.

Not really, if you get a "yes" in the Netherlands, Nordics, Germany or Poland it does mean, simply, yes.

The consequence of which is that actually getting a "yes" takes a lot of work.

I don't dare speak for other countries, no experience there.

I live in Germany. 'Ja' here means 'ich stimme zu' only when explicitly asked. That's why Germans stick 'Ja?' after every second sentence. Ja? In general, 'ja-a...' means 'I hear you', same as almost everywhere else. That has been my experience.

The 'ja?' with a question mark means 'right?'. It just happens to be the same word as 'yes'. So no, not same as almost everywhere else.

And why do they say ‘right?’ every time? Because without it my ‘ja’ does not mean ‘yes, sir’, but rather ‘I hear you, go on’. So, same as everywhere else.

The answer to 'right?' usually is 'yeah', to indicate: yes, I agree.

So 'Ja? Ja.' in German can be translated as 'Right? Yeah.' in English.

Hardware engineering, where an inappropriate yes can mean massive amounts of time and money wasted, making it a very low context environment, by necessity.

Vodka?

He created the most destructive one after all.

Samsara is nirvana, nirvana is samsara, no?

Coming up with excuses is not doing the thing.

Who claimed it was?

That is exactly why I’d take it seriously.

I remember times when this sentiment was being expressed about “According to Wikipedia...” As much as I am pro implementing this rule, I’m afraid we are losing this fight.

What’s not ok with stickers and a pen?

True, but what if the pen wrote everything for you and even turned your notes into tasks that got done automatically?

Personally, I don't find that use case to be very compelling. Taking notes, deriving tasks from them, etc., are not problems that I need solving. In fact, doing those things manually brings a very large benefit in terms of helping to clarify my thoughts, getting insights, and better remembering everything.

When I outsource that (whether to machine or another human), I lose a lot of benefit.