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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

I spent part of my childhood in France/Switzerland, and one thing I'll never forget is a scene of street construction in a French town. It's about 11:30am, and three guys all get done with the excavator and jackhammers. One guy goes and grabs something long from the bed of a truck, another heads to the cab and reaches for a brightly colored bundle, and the third guy grabs some chairs from the other side.

Right in the middle of the cordoned-off construction zone, the first guy sets up a folding table, the second guy neatly places a tablecloth on top along with a baguette and bottle of wine and some cheese etc., and the third guy brings up the chairs. These guys sat down for a nice meal for 90 minutes, at least, before getting back to work.

I think my American parents thought, "Wow, how in the hell does anything ever get built in this country?" while my thought was mostly, "that seems really nice, they look so relaxed!"

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There’s something to be said for a good solid break.

In the US, we’d have one guy who never stops using the jackhammer, two overseeing, one holding a “workers ahead” sign, and a cop playing with his phone.

Cops shouldn't be allowed to carry phones while on duty.

that officer is off duty, just supposed to be "present"...

I'm no fan of cops but this is so hilariously petty I can't believe it's a serious opinion. Why stop at cops, doctors, nurses, and firefighters shouldn't have phones either!

I think part of reason people feel this way about cops in particular sometimes is that a lot of their job is to go around monitoring things. It is hard to detect if they are actually working hard or not. Crimes are rare and noisy. If a doctor spends all day playing on their phone, the patients will notice. If a cop does—it was just a low crime day, maybe.

Also the general public has more opinions about the behavior of governments employees.

I dunno how to actually feel about this, from a “is it good” point of view. But I can see why people feel this way at least.

Cops need to be ready for shit to go down at any moment. They should be fully aware of their surroundings at all times. Firefighters, and those other professions you mentioned, when they're working, don't have the luxury of looking at their phones.

If you're a cop and you're on duty in a nyc subway station, your eyes should be on the people around you, not your screen.

My wife and I are both doctors; she does not carry her phone into her clinic rooms unless she's on call. I'm an anesthesiologist, so I have to be immediately available while I'm at work or on call. I always apologize to patients if I have to do more than glance at a text/call to determine if it's right-now important or can wait.

It took the better part of a year for a small ~3000 sqft single story building to be built next to my (American) residence. Dudes showed up every weekday around 8am and left around 5pm, but they all seemed to be standing around doing nothing half of the times I passed by.

I wonder how much of that standing around is say the drywall guy standing around waiting for pipes or wiring work to be done so they could do drywall work.

Well the drywall person shouldn't be there on that day if things aren't ready for their work to be done.

I mean, I'm all for people being allowed to work at a comfortable pace, spurts of activity in between breaks or a constant medium level of activity, whatever works for that individual.

But damn do I see construction as a particularly lazy industry a lot of the time; especially after moving to the UK, they used to build things so well and so quickly here and now look: nobody wants new build houses because of the shitty construction, crossrail took HOW long and HOW much to build?

Construction ends up looking lazy because they're locked in combat with Amdahl's law. You've got a complex system of interlocking task dependencies, with tasks requiring a variety of other tasks to reach varying levels of completeness before you can start on various other tasks, which rely on specialized labor and various materials provided by various third parties.

It's hard to get good estimates of how long any individual task will take, but you don't want to be in a situation where work could be getting done, but isn't because the necessary workers aren't there, so it's more efficient to pay for workers to be present and ready to begin as soon as their unblocked, versus having to wait for those workers to show up once their blockers are cleared.

I somehow doubt that’s the case when all the guys are idle (for months there was no structure at all and I could see everything).

Indeed! I work for a Swiss manufacturer of high voltage equipment. The best projects are in Romand, where they know how to enjoy life.

A couple of beers at 11:30 in the workshop, before lunch, and some wine and snacks on Fridays to celebrate the achievements that week(dug a hole? Wine! Pulled cables? Wine!)

It seems to have come to an end.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/france-allows-em...

But I doubt it's followed or at least I'd bet many ignore it.

My French relatives love to eat and sit down for at least two hours. There's even a word for the after dinner feeling where you chat with friends, but alas je ne sais quoi.

> It seems to have come to an end.

It really doesn't.

This article is about a 100 years old law, who said alcohol is not allowed while at work, unless it's beer, cidre or poiré (alcohol from apple and pear respectively), and essentially a relic of when those were considered food and not alcohol, and we were giving wine to kids at school lunch.

Some employer thought their workers drinking WHILE WORKING was not ok, and they used the law to say wine is not banned, and it went to the courts.

You're free to drink whatever at lunch time, as long as you don't show up drunk, this is about drinking DURING WORK HOURS.

Really not sure how you could misunderstand that case so bad you qualify it as "It seems to have come to an end."

> Wine to kids at school lunch. Never heard that one. My father's friends in boarding schools in the 1960s would have a glass of wine or apple wine (cidre) on sunday, but that was as wild as it got. But maybe it was a regional thing.

INA (french video archive) of the news report in 1956 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Ez2RMjwuA

> En 1956, le gouvernement s'empare de la question de l'alcool dans les cantines scolaires. Pour la première fois, une mesure significative est adoptée. Désormais, aucun enfant de moins de 14 ans n'est autorisé à boire du vin à table

To add to this, my father started (France, in the 1990s) allowing my brothers and sisters to drink alcohol from our 12th anniversary on, some beer or wine. He'd stave curiosity, monitor and teach about the effects and there wouldn't be much in the house anyway. No one batted an eye. Same for the cigarette. You want to try? Here, this is the poor people's stuff (awful awful cheap tobacco...) and now let me tell you about how much it costs every week and what we can't afford because I can't stop, and now let's talk compound interest and cancer and teeth, and... there was no mystery or edginess in all this. The price of modern life, he would call it.

> cidre or poiré (alcohol from apple and pear respectively)

Cider and perry, in Britain at least. Generally very close to the French versions, although perhaps a little less sweet.

> My French relatives love to eat and sit down for at least two hours. There's even a word for the after dinner feeling where you chat with friends, but alas je ne sais quoi.

Are you thinking about the Spanish word sobremesa? Never heard such a similar word in French.

Maybe 'les dents du fond qui baignent' which as far as French expressions go, is pretty... poetic

There is a cultural change and people drink much less wine at work during lunch breaks. But it's still served in a lot of work cafeterias. Maybe work has become mless wine-compatible?

But long lunch breaks are still there. My boss sometimes outright despises people in our company who take sandwiches "as if they couldn't spare 45 minutes to eat". Here, a 2-hour-long lunch break is a lot, but nothing that would get you strange looks if it doesn't happen everyday. Of course, a good lot of employees (30% I'd say) are following the French law-mandated 151,67 hours of work per month (a little more for us because of special dispositions), so it doesn't really apply for them and they "only" get one hour of lunch break.

"Cadres" (theoretically managers, but practically what's in your contract) have more autonomy and work hours are not recorded.

So many offices are closed 12-14. But don't go to the bank at 11:45: they'll be packing up and saying they're leaving for lunch. That break is really 11:30-14:30. Took me a few tries to get my bank stuff done when I just moved there. I'm used to being able to do such chores at lunch hour, but no, don't count on it in France. People are having lunch :)

A neat illustration of French union power.

Nope. Lunch time isn't part of work time so I don't see why the employer would even care.

They care a lot about the duration of breaks. Ask Jeff Bezos where his drivers pee.

Here I'm thinking bread and cheese and wine had to be the most disgusting malnourishing lunch possible for outside labor.

How about some steak, chicken, hell a few meatballs. Protein.

I used to be a laborer. Carbs were more important than protein.

>Here I'm thinking...

>How about some...

How about to each their own?

Cheese (being dairy), has a lot of protein.

You and I have very different definitions of a lot of protein.

Cheddar cheese is about 25% protein by mass. Chicken is about 27%.

100 calories of BLSL chicken has 18g protein.

100 calories of cheddar has 6g of protein.

One ounce of steak contains 7 grams of protein. One ounce of cheese however… contains 7 grams of protein.

Steak is also a high fat source of protein just like cheese, but steak has about 5g fat per 7g protein, cheese has about 9g fat per 7g protein.

The wine is a bit much for a mid day meal at work, operating heavy machinery on alcohol isn't the best idea but the cheese and bread are a lovely mid day meal. Cheese is very digestible and high in protein so it's going to sit less heavy than a piece of meat. Bread is carbs and helps with energy during the day. Maybe throw in some high quality French butter and you've got a delicious meal.

Isn't there too much calories in steak and chicken? Better to have just 2 slices of bread with 2 pieces of cheese and tea.

> … It's about 11:30am, and three guys all get done with the excavator and jackhammers …

> … and bottle of wine …

So operating heavy equipment after consuming alcohol?

This was normal everywhere not so long ago

I had always heard, but never corroborated, that the typical 750ml volume of a bottle of wine was chosen because it was an appropriate amount for two people to consume at lunch.

Is it true? I have no idea! But those guys would have emphatically agreed, I think.

Whoever told you that was an alcoholic.

One random site[0] on the internet says the 750ml[1] size began to be standardized on in the early 18th century. That's something like 250-300 years ago.

It could be entirely true that it was considered an appropriate amount of wine for two people to share over lunch at that time. Certainly other norms have changed since then.

[0] https://disndis.com/blogs/blog/why-wine-bottles-are-750-ml

[1] Give or take a margin of error, decreasing over time, one suspects.

> It could be entirely true that it was considered an appropriate amount of wine for two people to share over lunch at that time.

Alcohol content in wine went up significantly, as well.

I think the "appropriate" amount of alcohol to consume before operating construction equipment is actually lower than 750ml... lower by about 750ml...

What kind of lunch ? A sunday lunch maybe, if you down half a bottle of wine per day during the week you have an alcohol problem. At work it's certainly not appropriate, especially not for construction work

Someone told me that he doubts anyone could get anything built in Germany without beer, but that was decades ago, so maybe it's changed. This someone and I were talking about construction workers.

That's the point: the French have your sunday lunch every day.

I have no idea, but the alcohol content of different wines varies by quite a bit, and probably also changed over time?

Yes. AFAIK "Table wine" (and table beer in northern regions) was pretty light. Just enough alcohol to kill germs.

As in the immortal words of Lucille Bluth: "wine only turns into alcohol when you let it sit".

Here in France it certainly was nothing that would get you labelled an alcoholic 40 years ago. But it was rather an upper limit.

That makes sense really. It's about 5 glasses. So for two people if it's a 2 hour lunch break even with a very low tolerance at the end of lunch your BAC would be very close to 0.00. The average 150lb male metabolizes 1 glass of wine per 45-60 minutes.

Air France pilots used to get wine with their in-flight meals...

i guarantee you that at most american construction sites, at least one of the equipment operators has had a beer with their lunch.

I worked in landscaping a few summers during college. About a third of the crew was drunk or high most of the day. Driving small pickup trucks, operating commercial mowers. It was definitely eye-opening for me.

Warehouses, Kitchens, Construction. A lot of the blue collar jobs in the US are done while people are high on something. I think weed is more popular than alcohol though.

Woo Woo It's the sound of Le Gendarmerie.

Seriously though, and while it's falling rapidly, France has a very high rate of what other countries might label functional alcoholism. A very high, daily alcohol intake, by way of habit, but not hidden, not a binge.

If a glass or two is your background level, lunch isn't going to significantly impair you.

> Woo Woo It's the sound of Le Gendarmerie.

Woop Woop that's the sound of la brute?

I guess you can take it easy when you got rich being one of the most brutal colonial powers (which continues to tax its former colonies to this day: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/03/macron-france-cfa-franc...).

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