Item — HN Reader

On rules - they certainly create clarity and also have the potential to enable NPC like behaviour which is all too common. Since you mentioned Traffic Light Coalition, the chancellor Olaf Scholz (who is a lawyer and was also the ex-mayor of Hamburg) recently said in an interview “Germany was known to be a country of engineers, we are now a country of lawyers”.

Hamburg along side with Munich is what Germany should look like. So I think Hamburg has played a role in your perception too.

4 comments

> rules[...] have the potential to enable NPC like behaviour which is all too common

Would you mind explaining this? What is NPC-like behaviour?

I'm not that commenter, but it seemed clear from the context. Inflexible, decision-tree-like behavior -- like an NPC from a video-game.

NPCs are Non-Player-Characters in video games, i.e. "extras". Their programming is usually kept simple, so they're kind of famous for robotically repeating the same lines or doing the same actions.

I think here it might mean getting attached to the rules for the rules' sake and forgetting the deeper reason why the rules are there in the first place - like waiting on a red light on a deserted street.

Munich is what Germany should look like? May I ask where you are from/if you live in Germany/Munich? Munich feels absolutely dead and is culturally pretty dead compared to other big cities due to Munich's vast rich immigrant (most would call them "expats) population. Munich has no soul is a rich landlord's watering hole by now.

yeah Munich if anything is extremely hostile to integration. i know several people who moved there and got burnt out trying to integrate. with previous knowledge of the language.

You know the parent comment is blaming immigration for the current status of Munich right?

good lord i did read right through that. how someone could come to that conclusion is beyond me

UK and Australia are also very rule-loving and have their own problems, but not the same disease you’re describing here.

It's interesting, as an Aussie, the decline in rule following is honestly a bit upsetting.

Part COVID, part mass migration, but the general decline in social trust is something that I really feel.

I guess I see breaking rules as fundamentally a lack of empathy.

As another Australian I'm glad to see it. I remember as a kid watching a neighbour's dog of many years being dragged away to the slaughter by a council worker as the old women pleaded for it to be spared, just because it wasn't the right breed. The rules don't leave any room for empathy. There's a saying, "the problem isn't that Australia was founded by prisoners, it's that it was founded by prison guards".

See, I would call getting a breed of dog that has been identified as dangerous, as incredibly selfish. Genuinely an insane degree of self centred reasoning. My special dog is fine, because it's my dog, and I know better than everyone else (but also can't convince anyone that you are in fact right, in order to change the rules).

It's all the behaviour that we have identified as better overall if everyone follows it, and deciding that it doesn't apply to you, because you don't feel like it.

Run a red light, because you are in a hurry. Drive a truck without a licence, because you think you will be fine. Throw a party every night, because your having a great time and there is not enough resources to limit how shit you can be to your neighbours.

Also "don't worry he doesn't bite" after they allow their dog to jump at you.

I think Clive James said that, or something similar. I think his version was something like "the tragedy isn't that so many Australians are descended from convicts, but that so many are descended from the guards."

The guards are in charge there as everywhere else.

Scholz was also involved in cumex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files