[throwaway898989]

I am expat in south east asia and his comment is correct

low level officials taking bribes means you can do stuff like never wear a seatbelt, just pay the cop $20 USD if you get pulled over. get pulled up for smoking indoors? $20 USD. run over an illegal immigrant and kill them? USD 1000 to have their records completely erased. Sim card? $5 USD cash. rape? what? the police here hung up on my friend on a 911 call because they spoke english and not the 'national language' (police do speak english here).on a different note, it is legal to rape your wife here

low level corruption causes immense problems and injustices in society. here, everyone drink drives. driving a car while extremely drunk here is default behaviour.

ye high level official bribery will cause probelms, but the low level stuff is what completely craters the system and causes the catastrophic failures in complex engineering systems.

i am in the country of mh370

[quacked]

You said it better than I could. I am a US citizen, and most of my middle/upper-middle class colleagues simply cannot imagine that their society is the result of many hundreds of thousands of people following totally arbitrary rules, and that if people don't follow those rules their society will collapse. They think that US cops (who for the most part can't be bribed by citizens) are normal, and non-US cops who accept bribes are somehow exotic or abnormal.