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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

The same culture exists in Poland. Drove on a normal road and an unsecured bar of metal fell on your car from a construction site? Should have watched where you were going. The default stance is always that if something happens to you it's your own fault, should have been more careful. I'd lean towards this being a common thing either in Slavic culture or at least in ex-communist countries for some reason.

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Can't confirm as a Pole. Don't want to ask you to dox yourself through an argument, but I'd like to say that it's a lot better nowadays, with the only exception being the Catholic Church's wrongdoings in the countryside.

Maybe. Literally had a situation few weeks back when a waitress brought our meal to the table, dropped it all on the floor, and her first words within 5 seconds? "your child distracted me, what have you done" - a child that was strapped in a chair and commiting the grand crime of smiling at her. She calmed down shortly after and apologized, but her first instinct was to blame anyone but herself.

Like yeah, maybe it's getting better. But I keep running into these situations where if something goes wrong, you are always at fault by default. I don't mean to say anyone else's opinion about it is not valid though.

It's funny cause I've seen similar situation with people of wildly different social status. A big lawyer asking a court clerk for files. He grabbed them like a moron, folders all slipped and fell. We all saw it coming but assumed he wouldn't be so goofy. The young lady clerk still jumped to help him gather the files. His first word: You stacked them wrong you idiot. She smiled and he got away with being an impolite moron.

Now seeing a waitress act like this to a customer is even weirder :)

On the other end you have California where people will sue the state for thousands if they trip on the sidewalk, scraping their knee a bit. I suppose the USA and ex-USSR still remain polar opposites in some respects.

Citation needed on that one.

Not exactly the same but there's the legendary McDonald's lawsuit after some customer burned his finger after dropping his coffee.

You mean this case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

Where a 79 year old woman suffered 3rd degree burns to her pelvic region after spilling coffee in her lap?

While I agree that McDonalds should have been found guilty in that case(they deliberately set their machines to produce much hotter coffee than is standard anywhere) I feel like this is a case that could have been only won in the US, because only US courts give any time to stuff like this. Maybe I'm wrong, but my feeling is that a case like this would have been thrown out long before being heard in any other country - she spilled her coffee, it's clearly her fault(would have been the resoning).

Yeah I think so. I think I misremembered the burned area due to some standup that made fun of this later.

Legendary in the sense that you got all the details wrong. If you're answering someone saying 'citation needed' the least you can do is look up what you want to reference first so you can actually share useful information instead of multiplying confusion. If you can't remember or don't have time to look something up, you can just not reply.

How else would I get to enjoy your magnificent replies then ?

I once had a guy scold me for having an umbrella in my hand while walking on the street in front of his business (a garage, really) because his German shepherd will attack me and it will be on me.

Incidentally, his appearance was in total sync with his character. This was about a decade ago here in Bulgaria. We have plenty of troglodytes like that around here

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