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Comment by theoblt | Hacker News Reader

This sounds all too familiar, as a European. Friendship without intimacy is definitely big in the US.

Yep, I am from the West but not from the US and think this quote from the article is not correct:

    In the East, I’ve heard it said, there’s intimacy without friendship;
    in the West, there’s friendship without intimacy.

This is not about the East and the West, it's distinctively US-American.

In Brazil the small-talk culture is also strongly present. I can't speak for all places in the US, but definitely more than NY. I also was able to notice the same type of behavior in Venezuela, Uruguay and Peru.

Maybe West could be replaced by West-of-the-Atlantic?

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