Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.
But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.
A lot of America especially has an issue with too many lights, and the lights themselves are too bright relative to the population. Found what I thought was a cool image on Wikipedia Commons while searching the subject that has the light use relative to the population density. Green's lots of light use, red is lots of population density. America's bright green light use. Yellow is fairly equivalent light use to population density. [1]
They shine through my windows at night and are truly horrific.
They’re down the entire alleyway behind my place, and a walk to the grocery store at 7pm during the winter makes your body and mind think it’s sunrise.
It's probably getting better but the amber-colored LEDs used to be rather inefficient. I've also heard that white lighting can slightly improve reaction times of those in traffic and leads to slightly clearer captures for security cameras. I personally think these benefits do not outweigh how extremely ugly and unwelcoming they are, but "city officials just don't care" is not what led to the adoption of white LED street lighting at all.
> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.
I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.
Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.
Directing bicycles on to the sidewalk doesn't even make sense in the first place. It just makes for pedestrian conflicts, difficult maneuvers, and automobile drivers are definitely not looking for cyclists on the sidewalk.
It feels like zooming when you bicycle in those tight spaces at 9-12 km/h, which is a third of what you calld zooming. The point is that a collision at 12 km/h is pretty ok. The problem is that cyclists are always close to pedestrians so it feels unsafe even at slow speeds. The accident rate between cyclists and pedestrians are incredibly low so it is not really dangerous, but it feels like it.
What I read when I read about the bicycle lane is that bike lanes were a requirement, the user persona was assigned to a casual recreational rider on a small low speed recreational (<24" wheels) (aka kids under 10), when in reality, that hill is used by a road cyclist commuter, would only be used by a confident cyclist that close to traffic on that steepb of hill.
It's not that the traffic engineer didn't care about a quality product, they didn't care to research who bikes (and have car brain), and have never traveled out of the US, to the Netherlands, or met a cyclist.
Crashes are another thing, cars going 100 mph here is probably proportionally the same as the people trying to take that at 30 km/h. The streetview of the location makes it even worse than I thought especially looking at the history of the spot.
Hum... The bike lane seems to be designed to fill space and make the street run better, instead of being designed for being useful for riding bikes.
I can see why people get angry about it. But still, the article is asking for the wrong solution. And yeah, the people crashing on that fence at 30 km/h would just die hit by a car a few meters down if the article's fix was implemented.
I'm not inclined to be sympathetic to cyclists, but the bike-murdering signpost right there is all the proof I need that there are people who hate them more than I do and that at least one of those people works in city government. I winced. It might actually be a felony, that act of transportation engineering. I'd at least listen to the prosecutor's theory of the crime.
Yeah, my first reaction was "you should not move onto the sidewalk if you cant break and control the speed". Unless it is some kind of abandoned place where no one ever walks anyway.
I am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.
Your rebuttal is dated. Suicide rates have been steadily declining in Japan and rising in the West to the point where suicides are actually less common in Japan than they are in the US currently. So perhaps it is a good example.
IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)
(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)
Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.
Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason.
"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.
Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.
Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.
Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.
And so on.
The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.
There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.
The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty.
What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.
I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else.
But this isn't the case.
The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.
Architecture is no different.
Some buildings quite literally are better than others and we can scientifically study this [1]. We can recognize that all opinions are valid, but that some are better than others. We do this in daily life too, if you are in the ER and the trauma team comes and tells you their opinion on your condition, you will value that opinion over the opinion of the person outside waiting for a ride. Art, music, architecture - no different.
Tens of millions of people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Why?
Religious reasons of course, but many visit simply to marvel at the wonderful architecture. Contrast that with Rocky City Church [2] here in Columbus where I live. A big, bland, gray "modern" building that as our standards have dropped to nothing (remember everything is subjective so nothing can be better than anything else) we have come to accept as the norm.
This is the Nobody Cares phase of not just architecture but society as well.
> The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.
No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.
And yet, it's not as clear cut as that. There is some hardwired stuff in our brains (see e.g. the "bouba / kiki" effect [0]) but most people will agree that what is considered pretty, good, etc is cultural, not to mention changing over time - like architecture trends as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but also painting styles.
That said, a few posts back a commenter mentioned that the Mona Lisa is "objectively better" than anything they made; while I won't comment on aesthetics and appreciation, the assertion that the artist is more skilled in the arts than the poster is something definitely objectively true, simply because of education and experience. That's no guarantee that the outcome is better, but still.
To your point, though, I think as you look around at McMansions and Wal-Mart there's nothing architecturally redeeming about those structures besides efficiency in building and internal climate control. We know the architectural styles are bad and there are (again to your point about skill) scientific ways we can measure this (Ann Sussman's work).
If you look at historical architecture patterns (mostly pre-WWI) they mirror how art has changed over time.
It's not that Impressionism came about and Renaissance became shit, it's that both are good and important stylistic contributions.
It's not that Gothic architecture came about then all the Romanesque stuff sucked. Both were good and unique.
We run into the same problem as "all art is equal" when we tend to express the belief that because we live in the time period we're complaining about that if only we waited a few hundred years we would recognize that our current building patterns are actually really good. That's just not the case.
Then substitute one of my drawings (or paintings, if I painted) of a person. There's no way in the world that anyone--anyone!--would think mine were better. That's because mine are truly awful.
They might not be good reasons to you, but that is not the same thing as not caring. If someone cooks something that without salt for health reasons, that doesn't mean they don't care about salt as much as me.
Eh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.
It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.
The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.
In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas.
It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range.
Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.
And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.
The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
I'm glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.
I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.
I've grudgingly come to admit that also people who don't have great vision love bright lighting. I can usually see perfectly well by starlight, but that's not the case for everyone.
I was once in the US Navy, and stood many a bridge watch. When it got dark, all outside lights except for the navigation lights (red light on port bow, green on starboard bow, a white light up top and another white light on the stern). And on the bridge, we used only dim red lights, to avoid affecting our night vision. None of the navigation lights was easily visible from the bridge. And you could see reasonably well, even on a cloudy night.
Where I come from they did change the lights to LEDs, but they turn off 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them after midnight; still enough light to navigate, but much less power usage and light pollution. There's a bike lane outside of town whose lights were motion activated, iirc that was installed about 20 years ago.
I walk a lot and support this, even though I am not convinced it makes me more visible when not in front of the headlights. Typically, the danger happens when walking on the sidewalk perpendicular to a road. I can see the car, they cannot see me until I'm a few feet in to the crosswalk when I'm not lit up by a street light.
> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?
During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble.
At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.
> During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast,
Then a car drives past and your sight instantly adjusts to that, but takes several minutes to adjust back. Then you're stuck in subjective total darkness for a while.
Or, if you're in an area with mixed lighting (e.g. you walk past a house that incidentally lights part of the street) then your eyes can never adjust and you have to walk through pools of total darkness. I know this experience from rare situations where a few streetlights go out in a row, and it's not as easy as you just portrayed it.
> At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden
That's fair enough IMO. I don't think it's feasible or helpful to plaster every centimetre of every rural road in street lighting. But the comment we're replying to suggested removing them in cities "outside of ... active center areas". That's a different matter.
What range/years are you specifically referring to? It seemingly is as good as ever, and I'm 32 now. I'm guessing that would start being around 40s, when the general eye-sight starts to decline?
There’s a new-ish body of research that suggests aging is non-linear/happens in “cliffs,” and that the first big decline is mid-40s. Something to look forward to.
About the time you start needing reading glasses to see your phone or computer screen. Between 40-50 years for most people. You will develop an appreciation for the people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes. And yes, adapting to darkness takes longer.
I don't think there is a rule for that? At least not in my case. My eyesight got worse really fast out-of-nowhere when I was like, 15 years old? And since then it didn't change anymore. I got myopia, after a few years of too much computer screen (the old CRTs).
While there was a suspicion of eyesight troubles in my late teens, it really kicked in during a period I was working on pretty crappy screens, that was in my late 20's. It's not much but enough to give me headaches when not wearing them.
I'm currently 37, I hope it doesn't start to get worse again anytime soon. I never used glasses regularly, btw. Always had the impression that would weaken my eyes long-term.
Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.
And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.
LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.
Growing up on a island with 700 people where the most common mode of transportation is probably bicycle (besides walking, or possibly moped), it really isn't :) People are really eager to jump on the "ableist" accusation, aren't they?
> And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.
It really doesn't, at least it didn't for me. It's true that for some seconds you'll see less, but your eyes will adjust faster after that than the initial adjustment when you go from a fully lit environment to unlit, even without direct moonlight.
I'm not arguing for completely dark cities, that'd be bananas. I was just giving another perspective about how we can (usually) adjust to darkness if we let our eyes be used to it. Of course we should have lights in cities so everyone (not just us with good night-sight) can navigate without issues.
I am night blind, among other things and cannot drive. If an area doesn't have street lights it's much more inaccessible to me, I become fully blind and I usually end up not going.
Lights off is bad for me, end of story. Whether my ability to walk around at night is a factor here is a subjective decision. I understand people in my situation are a minority.
I suspect your terror comes from lack of familiarity with natural light outdoors, and is a product of always having the lights on plus not being out of a house often.
The night is not 'complete darkness', we can generally see fairly well.
Also, I suspect your presumption on assault risk and assault rates comes from media, which is designed around building fear. Fear sells.
So I agree that you find the natural world terrifying, I just wish you didn't. Because the natural world is what we are fit for.
Let's put it this way. The fear is someone hiding in the shadows to jump a person, and then dragging the victim back into the shadows.
Bright lights on the street create more shadows. All you have to do is step out of the streetlight and no-one will see you, because the light-level contrast between the lit street and the surrounding space.
If there aren't any streetlights, so the surrounding space has the same illumination as the roadway, then that space is more present in more passerby's visual awareness.
So your proposed solution, "Streelights on every street" actually increases the risk you are so concerned about.
Numerous studies show crime goes down when streetlights are turned off.
Simply put, you don't get scrotes hanging about in groups up to no good without lights, and anybody who is walking around is carrying a torch, making it obvious what they are doing (e.g. if you are breaking into a house, needing a torch instead of using a streetlight makes it obvious to everybody what you are doing).
No to mention a lack of streetlights makes if harder for somebody to hide in the shadows.
The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark. Statistics show the real truth of what you should be worried about.
I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.
Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible state of affairs which, in itself, is a gross anti-pedestrian move.
(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)
Clearly you have lived your entire life in a city under streetlights.
Here, if you go the the pub at night as the streetlights are turned off at midnight, so you take a torch (your phone as a backup). Its perfectly commonplace. To suggest this is "anti-pedestrian" is a bit silly. Rather, it's anti-light pollution.
If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.
When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.
If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.
This comment chain started with someone suggesting that in cities lighting be turned off almost everywhere, and someone replied that pedestrians won't be able to clearly see where they're going without a torch (and I agreed). Where I live, no pedestrian in a city would ever need to use a torch to see where they're going.
You've posted a couple of replies saying that pedestrians should carry a torch so that cars can see them. Well, maybe, maybe not. But that's a different matter.
I'm a regular outdoor runner and also an extreme morning person, so I'm often out running at like 3 AM, and it is absolutely not safer to be in complete darkness. Surfaces are not perfectly uniform and unobstructed and the ambient light from the atmosphere and surrounding city, even dead in the center of a major metro area, is nowhere near enough to see everything you might hit. I've tripped many times and even broken my hand before. It is effectively impossible to ever go full speed.
I run at night on trails (during the summer, when it's too hot to run during the day). I wear a headlamp, and don't trip any more than I do in the day--despite the fact that the trails have rocks and roots. The only issue I have is that because the headlamp is inches from my eyes, shadows are almost invisible.
> The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
Hitting the next homeless person and throwing them 10 meter in the space will be quite the experience.
Honestly, this is not shitty experience because of regulation, this is just councils cutting costs everywhere except their salaries. Los Angeles these last couple days has showed what it means to do that. You'll literally be on fire some day.
Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt.
Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees.
> and because people do not care.
People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color.
Blue light is safer for cars - it gives slightly faster reaction times, and lower the chance of drivers falling asleep.
The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to.
Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.
In some ways, car-centric cities are like that because people don't care. "I'll just take my car, whatever". They don't care about traffic, pollution, accidents, etc.
Or maybe they care about getting to their destination in time and not wasting half a day just going from point A to point B on foot/by (shitty) public transportation, or they'll be fired.
Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".
I’m not well-read on the old lighting research, but I’ve come across some explanations for why humans actually do much better with amber outdoor lighting than white. One of these points relates to how our pupils expand and contract with the amount of light available.
My impression was that HPS lighting became so widespread not because of the supposed advantages of its light spectrum, but because it was simply the most light-efficient technology available at that time. Here in Germany, only main/multilane streets requiring more lighting were using HPS, residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights, so switching those to LEDs wasn't as much of a change. But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?
> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?
Of course. But that's the problem -- now black-out curtains are required. And maybe you hate those because you really enjoy waking up with the sun streaming in, and now you have to wake up every morning in blackness until you go open the curtains.
The onus shouldn't be on the residents. It's the same as saying, sure it's noisy but why don't you just wear noise-canceling headphones all day long?
Government services exist to serve the people, not make the people work around them.
Low pressure sodium lights were more efficient, but they emit a single wavelength of orange light. These lights were strongly disliked by people who liked to admire their car in the streetlights (I suppose).
> residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights,
… they used CFLs? The spiral fluorescents were invented in the 1980’s, I guess. I speculate the residential street lights used mercury vapor bulbs, which had a longer expected lifespan than fluorescents.
> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.?
You need a good blackout curtain to deal with light pollution through your window.
Decades ago, my junior college's parking lot was lit by low-pressure sodium lighting. I recall the light being an absolute monochrome yellow, to the point that you had to be careful to remember exactly where you parked your car, because you weren't going to find it by color.
I can't vouch for Germany, but there used to be long, high-output fluorescent tubes and fixtures for street lighting in the US. They seem to have largely disappeared by the 1980s. They weren't very common, but some cities used them. They tended to be used on main streets when I saw them.
Nitpick: "are actually purple" makes it sound like they came out of the factory purple, but they're actually changing from white to purple over time as the phosphor coating fails.
Might be so that they don't interfere with a certain species of wildlife. We have deep blue ones near me that aren't visible by a protected bat species.
Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...
How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.
In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.
The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.
Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk
it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.
The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.
I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.
This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.
Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years.
With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes.
With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.
We essentially have a lifetime supply of LEDs because we label each one with the date and refund from Amazon when they don’t last the full warranty, which none of them do.
People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.
And only one of them is directly pertinent. None of the "decades of data" takes into account correct exploitation. But all talks about leds are about perfect spherical cow in vacuum that doesn't exist for average consumer
I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.
Look up Dubai Philips LEDs. The problem with most consumer LEDs is that they are overdriven, so their life is short. In Dubai, the Sheikh basically mandated that the bulbs need to be underdriven, so the lifetime is about 25x that of incandescents. They only deliver about 1/4 the power to the individual “filament” that most similar Philips lamps would at the same light output.
Since only apparently anecdotes count as pertinent for you, here’s one. I haven’t bought a bulb in over 12 years. My LEDs have simply not gone out. I had changed bulbs nearly every 6 months before that.
Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.
Not anecdotes but practical data. Yes if you power cycle tungsten all the time at maximum brightness they will not live long (when I was a kid we used them this way and changed them often). Read my comment about correct exploitation
Leds themselves are often fine for long time. It is the circuits they are powered by that are very often crap, poorly designed, specified, too cheap. So heat can kill it.
Or like my last cheap powerful bulb in kitchen that flickers when I have certain controlled resistive loads on.
I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.
The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.
Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.
And part of the reason for that is compatibility with existing light fixtures using legacy sockets designed 150 years ago at the dawn of electrification for incandescent bulbs, where the part dissipating the most heat was the light emitting element itself, and not whatever lays between it and the mains power source. If the customer doesn't want to pay for a slightly more expensive LED lightbulb, they sure as hell won't pay for a whole new fixture specifically designed around LED technology that will last forever.
This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.
> But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.
I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.
The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.
Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.
I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.
> this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research
It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).
Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.
https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.
> They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not
This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.
all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?
it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".
and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......
While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned..
I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(
We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.
The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.
Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.
One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.
By not merging the cycling and walkway, sure. That would be a better design.
But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation.
As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.
Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.
Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.
Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
> You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?
Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.
If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.
I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:
* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.
* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).
The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.
TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."
> Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design.
Aren't there usually signs indicating the maximum safe speed when that sort of thing happens? We don't have context here but I doubt there is a sign telling bikers that they should slow down. And aren't roads in general much larger and easier to see from far away, vs this tiny little ramp? You also haven't explained why the big curb is vertical instead of sloped, or why the street sign needs to be where it is. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this thing is designed as a fuck you to bikers who don't obey the rules. We simply don't design roads that way, where it's designed to make you crash if you deviate from the standard even a bit.
We absolutely do design roads for all kinds of people to make you crash if you do not follow them. In fact, on pretty much all roads, you will crash if you decide not to follow the road, and frequently you will crash into a tree or a building. Drivers generally see this kind of design and complain about it but slow the hell down. Cyclists seem to be the same.
There is a sign ahead of this ramp saying in very big letters "BIKE LANE ENDS." It's up to the bikers to decide how they want to use that information. The sign, the ramp, and the end of the bollards marking the bike lane are visible at quite a long distance.
As for the street sign, it's a street sign. It's where the street is. It also tells you exactly where to use Google street view to get full context.
If you look at the street view (https://maps.app.goo.gl/Li9FSf29kXJWJLxW8), you'll see that it's been redesigned since the picture in the post. The current street view picture is from Feb 2023; the picture in the blog post also appears to be from street view (given the translucent quadrilateral near the fence) but presumably from before 2023. So...it appears that the bike lane was redesigned in a way that reflects two of my biggest complaints that were based on the outdated picture. Doesn't that sort of vindicate what I was saying? Why did they change it if the original design was ok? Like why didn't they do it the right way in the first place?
The context is even worse than the bike ramp. The bike lane dumps directly onto a sidewalk, which is not really bikeable anyway with the impending complicated street crossings that require stopping to push a button to get a crosswalk against a very confusing intersection across right-turning traffic onto a motorway on-ramp.
Or stay on the street and shoot directly into a lane of traffic, and hope to find a gap big enough to cut left across the lane before it turns into a highway on-ramp.
Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.
Yeah, that's why when pedestrians have to cross where cars are that there is always a stop sign to make sure their high speed won't harm a pedestrian /sarcasm.
If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.
There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.
OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.
Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.
Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.
It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about.
But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.
Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old.
If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.
Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.
I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.
But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.
For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.
But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.
* * *
Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.
In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.
As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.
Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.
As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.
So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.
An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.
The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.
if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.
I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.
I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
According to the article, living in an internet cafe can be as little as $420 per month. But where does someone who has no work that month get the $420? Does the government have a minimal support program?
I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.
> I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.
Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.
We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.
There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.
If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.
They clearly had a problem and fixed it. I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw one homeless (I assumed?) person during my whole trip. He didn't look too bad (like the ones in the US) but he was probably having a rough time.
Neither of you are wrong. As your link says, they have one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the world, but it also says that their low rate is roughly 1 in 34,000 people. There are 14 million people in Tokyo (city, or 41M in Tokyo greater area), so for 14M residents you would expect roughly 400 homeless people if the ratio is exactly the same as national average (and typically, big cities have higher than average). So simultaneously there are many homeless people still even if you only saw one of them, it's just a smaller % than in most countries.
Ultimately the stats are what matters more than how many people any one anecdote happened to see, and they show that Japan should be applauded for doing well but also acknowledging that sadly they haven't completely solved the problem and too many people there, as everywhere, are still homeless.
Which is reasonable? Within the millions of people there will be a few people that are completely helpless. I think Japan is as close to having no homeless as a country can reasonably get. Which is a completely different situation from the USA. Also living in a small shoebox hotel is orders of magnitudes better than living on the streets. I am not saying it is a good option but between having nothing (US) and having that, I'd definitively chose the shoebox.
One difference is that they’re concentrated in areas away from the public eye - if you enter Yoyogi park from the entrance nearest Yoyogi Koen station then before the hill starts go up the footpath to the right, you will find a homeless encampment with 20+ tents. It’s orderly but they are homeless.
There are some homeless people living in camps in certain parks. Ueno Park has a bunch of them. Others have camps hidden away in flood-plain areas next to rivers. Some live on sidewalks, like under overpasses, and have a bunch of junk in front of their sleeping bag that they're trying to sell.
Generally, these homeless people want to be homeless. There's options for homeless people to get help, but some people simply don't want to be part of normal society for whatever reason (like mental illness).
Overall, in my experience living here, I very rarely see homeless people. It's nothing at all like the huge homeless camps in US cities these days.
We have to personally take the paper orginals to various offices around the city, wait hours in a queue, get another paper document, go make copies, assemble another folder and go to yet another office/institution.
A couple of jobs ago one of my colleagues went to work with a Japanese partner for a few days to do an integration. Apparently they had to import a bunch of data and one of the Japanese employees, who seemed to have an axe to grind, printed out pages and pages of a spreadsheet and handed it to my colleague. Whenever my colleague asked him to just send the file, he pretended to not understand. In the end they had to OCR it but at least it was a story.
To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.
It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.
Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).
High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.
Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.
They are cheap because they are in disrepair, in an area with no jobs (or only subsistence farming) and limited services. In central Tokyo, they are cheap compared to cities in most of the West but too expensive to keep up a good drinking habit without working and on limited out-of-work benefits.
The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
> Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I think that's the opposite. They care too much. That collective school cleanup example above has a similar extreme. If you literally live to work, you'll forget about caring for yourself and collapse.
Tokyo Government just introduced a 4 day work week for its workers. You'd be surprised how much friction there has been to this, by the workers.
They care about the wrong things. Ultimately everyone cares about something and then there is tons of things no one or that anybody doesn't care from simply because you have limited amount of possible care to give.
It's another country's culture. It's really hard to holistically judge what is right or wrong. If people want to be a workaholic, then I can't really judge their lifestyle.
That said, yes. If this is pressure from their society, they probably should revisit those mindsets. Especially when the birth rate right now really can't afford a higher mortality raet. Fortunately they are starting to in some sectors.
I can't find the link now but I read a post by an immigrant to Japan who attended one of these school cleanups at their child's school. They said basically that they seemed to be the only one really scrubbing / actually cleaning properly rather than just putting in a performative effort to wipe something down.
I feel like the article is mostly focused on environments around us, so it makes sense to focus on Japan in this context. He’s not saying it’s an entirely flawless country
Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.
- You cannot fire your staff (easily)
- Rather than replace staff, you need to train them
- You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry
I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but...
Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.
Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.
Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.
Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.
You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.
It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.
- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking.
- now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US.
- the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative
- there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture.
- neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan
It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.
There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.
Businesses I've dealt with in the manufacturing world (so most American workers before the 'service economy' revolution) deal way more with Japanese companies than Italian. Also I think humans just need an ideal to aspire to. We don't respond well to 'it's all crap, always has been, always will be'. Foreign countries we like look better because we see what's better than where we are. There's a reason for the saying 'the grass is always greener (because from a distance you can't see it's full of dog crap)'.
I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.
Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.
I’ve personally been incorrectly diagnosed with a life altering condition. When it became more and more clear that the diagnosis was wrong the doctor just doubled down. When I said I thought he was wrong and refused to see him he sent a colleague after me to another hospital to try to persuade the medical staff there of the misdiagnosis. That thankfully failed, but the whole process very much left me with the impression that the only thing that mattered to him and his colleague was to be “right”. My health was completely irrelevant to them. And nobody put them in their place.
Sure, I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor. But there comes a point when you have to conclude that something is seriously wrong. My feeling is that it’s a complete lack of consequences that is the core problem. Nobody is ever “forced” to admit they were wrong. Some people can’t handle that, start believing they are always right.
(This was in Sweden and malpractice is a bit different here.)
Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.
> Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.
Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.
Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. Note that this is not insider knowledge of actual policy, just common observations from analyzing data at different places.
One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.
In terms of the people with products to advertise being crewed over by the ad industry, I think it is more that they don't see the similarity between the ad industry brain-washing us and the ad industry brain-washing them. Perhaps the disconnect happens because they want to interact with the ad industry, so get their stuff hawked to us, but we'd usually rather not.
Another interesting disconnect is that sometimes a person is both the “us” and the “them” in different contexts. i knew someone who would complain about some of it on other sides but when pointed out that his site used some of the same tricks he'd respond with “yeah, but I need that because …”.
Meh. I have no idea if I am smart or not -- the last several years proved to me I am definitely stupider than I thought -- but I know that with time I only started buying things I directly derive value from or in the worst-case scenario, I'll undoubtedly need during the next few months. No cutesy phone cases, no gadgets "because why not", no extra socks "because you never know", no new toaster because the current one just a tad too big etc. Almost no unnecessary purchases.
It's much more related to maturing on this or that axis than being smart IMO.
Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.
Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.
> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.
I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.
>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.
This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Is there a solution? Obviously those companies are not going to change, so what can everyone else do about it - besides already being very rich, starting a competing ad-tech without funding, managing to get market share, and managing to remain one of the good guys.
The only thing I can think of is to use things like influencer ads on places like Instagram or Youtube which ironically sound like much better value for money as you actually know what you're getting for the money.
Lately, the number of times (across different businesses/industries) where I've found myself thinking "Will you please just fucking take my money and stop bothering me?" is too damn high.
Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.
Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1].
They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view.
They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.)
If you're a customer, and you font like their behavior stop being their customer. You have agency. Use it.
[1] good customer service, good customer experience, are all good for revenue. Happy customers are the ultimate success. But maximizing the revenue from those happy customers is very much the business goal.
The old "use your agency" response never gets old does it, no matter how much consumer alternatives are whittled away, and no matter how much the abusive corporate behaviour gets ratcheted up and normalized. Do you actually make a profit yourself from forcing ads on paying customers who can't choose to avoid your services, or just aspire to one day?
If an "alternative" to McDonald's does exactly the same abusive thing it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's at all.
If an "alternative" to McDonald's forces you to drive excessive distances to reach it, or it costs much more, or it sells Thai food instead of burgers, then it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's.
A suitable alternative to McDonald's would be one similar enough to McDonald's for your purposes that you can use it to replace McDonald's. I'm sure some people have that, but I'm also sure many people don't.
There are lots of things that don't actually have suitable alternatives. There are entire product categories that are completely filled with consumer hostile garbage, with zero competitors offering a suitable alternative, because sometimes it will always be more profitable for companies to refuse to give consumers what they want.
Cooking for yourself is a trope? You realise that's what most of the world does every day.
If making your own meals is literally out of your reach then I feel really sad for you. That must truly suck to be so dependent on companies just to eat...
Are you being obtuse on purpose or are you really desperate to "win" this debate?
EXTREMELY OBVIOUSLY I meant this part of your comment:
> As long as you keep signaling to MD that you'll tolerate more and more crap for lower prices, they happily oblige.
That is the trope many use, yourself included. A lot of people signal their displeasure with various status quo. Still nothing changes. I wonder how does the one-dimensional quote above addresses the messy and complex real world out there.
Sorry, it wasn't obvious to me. I misread your point.
I'm not really trying to "win" anything. I'm telling you that you have agency. Whether that means anything to you, or if you do anything with it, I guess that's up to you.
Personally I'm not looking for my agency to change anyone else or how any company behaves. I don't do it for them, I do it for me.
I choose to support companies that align with my requirements. If a company makes me feel like crap I go elsewhere. I'm not out to change the world, just choose how I live in it.
Do you grow 100% of your own food? It may be helpful for your understanding (and this conversation) to get off the high horse and realise that you're also dependent on companies "just to eat".
I never said I wasn't dependent on companies. I very much am. For everything. But I have choices and, when I gave the opportunity, I make those choices meaningfully.
For example, I don't much care for the McDonald's experience, so I go elsewhere. Indeed on occasion I find going 'nowhere' to be preferable if there's no alternative. I haven't been to MD in 30 years.
I'm not trying to be on a high horse. I follow a path that works for me, and I don't complain about it. You choose the path that works best for you.
I think I understand you: everyone at the bottom end of society should just have more money or more personal time, or both. I wonder how we could make that happen.
Different people are in different places. And obviously some people have been fortunate enough to have choices, and some do not.
I would assume that most people in this thread are not working 3 jobs to survive etc. My context is not their context.
I'd also guess they are far less invested in concepts like whether or not the server offers fries with that. In my long ago, limited experience, I couldn't have cared less about how many adverts there were, there were more pressing things to worry about.
Back to your point - I choose personal time over more money. My spending is modest, my income is likely much lower than most here. Frankly I have more than enough. Living is a lot cheaper when the goal isn't money.
What if I can't drive all the way to an ad-free restaurant or for that matter an ad-free gas pump? What if I buy a plane ticket to get out of this bad situation and the airline is using the emergency PA to harass their captive audience of paying customers to join their miles club? What can't be avoided must endured, but there is no reason for people like you to insist that this is fine or normal, or that it's something one can opt out of. You're actively building the dystopia when you do that
>What if I can't drive all the way to an ad-free restaurant
Eating at a restaurant is a luxury. If you don't like the experience, don't go (or don't go back). You're free to make your own food with stuff you buy at the supermarket, and you'll most likely get something healthier and much lower-priced. The entire point of a restaurant is to pay more money, frequently a LOT more, for a combination of convenience, service, ambiance, and food that might not be so easy for you to make at home (e.g. pizza) due to skill or equipment limitations.
Most of the supermarket is essentially ad-space. Companies often negotiate quite hard for good eye-line shelf positions for their products.
That special offer Tesco has on Pepsi products? Tesco is probably making exactly the same markup on each sale and the saving is actually coming from a supply price deal they have arranged with Pepsi in exchange for their products getting extra shelf space and end-isle displays.
High-shelf space (too high for customers to safely reach, so otherwise empty or used to store boxes of product to open when it is time to replace sold stock on lower shelves) often has advertising hoardings for products on other isles these days, again this is effectively paid ad space for the suppliers. If no external supplier is currently paying for it, the space is used to advertise own-brand ranges.
As others make clear here you have agency in theory, but in practice your ability to use that agency is very much dependent on how well the world enables the exercise of that agency. Something to think about, interdependence and all that.
> They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
Correction, "they" are not a hivemind with one goal, they are a collection of individuals with individual goals to maximize their own profit. If some marketing employee can get a bonus or promotion by showing ephemeral monetary gains at the expense of the long-term integrity of the product, they'll jump all over that.
It does not have to be this way. This should not be claimed as some kind of law of gravity-like nature of the universe. Businesses have operated in an enormous variety of manners over the years and continue to do so. Businesses have agency.
Just look at EA vs Nintendo for one. And I'm not even a Nintendo fan.
Badmouthing bullshit practices of a company is also a part of the agency here.
E.g. Yes, I hate that McDonalds (like tons of other companies) is incessantly bugging me and quite blatantly trying to upsell me. As a result, I rarely go to such places anymore. So they lose my business. But I will also complain out loud. This is part of the deal with bullshitting your customer base. This is part of my agency. Losing me as a customer, as well as getting badmouthed left and right is the cost of extracting that 3 additional cents from me. Now the company also has a choice.
I think some small businesses start because the owner wants to do something well. Sometimes this aligns with some group of customers and it's sustainable.
Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Once you get large (McDonald's in the parent thread) the focus is necessarily on the business part. At that scale it's not "doing the thing as well as possible " - it is "making money as well as possible".
Clearly lots of people use McDonald's. So they provide customers with satisfaction. But that doesn't mean they aren't out to maximize revenue.
One of the things that’s surprising about traveling to Europe and Japan is that this revenue maximizing business strategy isn’t as prevalent. You don’t see the same upsells everywhere and tipping culture is also mostly non-existent. Many US businesses managed to behave in a manner that was vastly less extractive to their customers for most of the last century as well. It really is possible to care about the quality of your business in some cultures, it’s just harder to do so here today.
It's exactly harder but when customers prioritize price above everything it's hard to succeed if you offer better, but charge more.
The hard truth is that American consumers care only about price, and so businesses optimize for that (or go under). Which means they lean into other sources of revenue, or ways to reduce costs.
Elsewhere people care about value more than price, and are willing to spend more to get more. Restaurants post the real price (including service) because that's what it costs.
Ryanair exists to fill the need for those who want low price above all else. KLM exists for those who want a better experience and are prepared to pay more.
Do you think it is possible for a society to switch from emphasizing price to emphasizing value? If so, how do you think such a change would take place?
It's really hard for cultures to change. Outside of a major event (WW2 scale event) its likely to take multiple generations.
It can happen locally. Farmers markets are a thing. Supporting local owner-run, not chain, restaurants is a thing.
But in big cities, or nationally? Probably not in pur lifetime.
But it doesn't really matter what others do. It starts with what you do, for yourself. Look around, find small-scale suppliers. Support local producers where you can, and so on. The quality is usually better.
The problem is that the number of suppliers seems to be constantly going down. Chains are taking over public spaces, successful smaller companies get bought out, and the successful independent ones eventually get a new CEO who is incentivized to maximize profits (see e.g., Chipotle hiring Taco Bell's CEO.)
Obviously this is highly location dependent, and I don't doubt there are places where this is true.
Also, there may not be sufficient people in your area to support independent businesses that believe in providing more value at a higher price.
But it's worth looking and asking around. They may exist, but you won't see them on TV. Ask in local Facebook groups, look out for weekend markets and do on. Asking in those places can give you clues.
But I agree that the vast majority of Americans care only about price, so there will be lots of places where quality simply doesn't exist outside of what you cook yourself.
McDonalds has fallen so far in the past few decades. I used to eat there or at least grab a soda several times a week. I never go there anymore. The kiosks suck; I refuse to use them, but they don't staff the counter half the time so there's no other way to order. The drive-thru expects you've already ordered on the app. Fuck that. It's all way too complicated. I want a Big Mac meal with a coke. That used to take me 3 seconds to order and I had it on a tray in about another minute. Now I have to dick around on the kiosk for a couple of minutes, pay, and then wait 5-10 minutes for the food. It's absurd.
This is a bizarre take to me. If food is on my tray in 60 seconds, I'm concerned what corners they are cutting to serve food this fast. It sounds terribly stressful for the employees. How can 5-10 minutes be considered slow?
I think in any case, this is an entirely different qualm than the other issues, like taking orders only via kiosk, or constantly up-selling you during the order.
Personally, I hate the McDonald's app. All the vouchers seem quite plainly optimized to encourage you to come back. I hate this kind of psychological micro-optimization of human behaviours. I would take a ten minute order every time if they stopped trying to manipulate me.
behind the counter-guy, in that wide silver opening, is a black plastic slope with with burgers queuing up. The cooks are constantly cooking, even when nobody has ordered anything, and that means they can get the efficiency boost of making 5 Big Macs at the same time - laying out 5 boxes, 5 buns, 5 patties cooking, etc. - and with no customer waiting on them, there need be no immediate rush[1]. The cashier only picks one up and puts it on your tray, much less than 60 seconds and no stress[1]. Contrast with Subway where the cashier has to assemble one custom sandwich at a time while the customer and queue of waiting people all watch (stressor); they can not get custom sandwiches into muscle memory, or the efficiency of doing several at once (slow), and the cashier delaying for a moment doesn't relieve pressure by letting the buffer fill, it just adds more pressure.
If McDonalds is now taking 5-10 minutes for a typical order, what has gone wrong with their fast-food-factory-production-line design?
[1] Maybe it isn't actually low stress or no-rush in McDonalds, but that design of food service could be.
They changed their model a while ago to trying to optimise the assembly time of each item, and produce them as they are ordered. The hot parts are pre-cooked and put into warmers, but not assembled (put into buns with toppings etc.) until you order.
Allows for easier customisation and less food wastage (and you don't have to keep track of when something was made), at the cost of time for 'easy' orders.
> Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Some small businesses fail because larger ones see their initial success and compete by making a slightly worse product a bit cheaper. Sometimes a significantly worse product. Once the superior but smaller competition is either out of business or has been forced to reduce their quality to try compete on price, the bigger business can either reduce the quality & price further (the big business will usually win in this sort of race-to-the-bottom because they can afford to take losses on individual products for a time, where a smaller business cannot) or bump their price up to improve margins.
It sometimes isn't that the small business is bad at the business part, but that they refuse to play dirty even if playing dirty is the only way to compete. It is easier to rationalise some tactics in a bigger company, because there is no one who has to look the customer in the eye who is also making product quality affecting decisions.
Actually, in a way this is already true. If you consent to installing their mobile app (which includes god knows what kind of analytics), you are rewarded with at least 20% off all McDonald’s food list prices.
So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.
Now, if there was an option when booking a flight to pick a fare class not subjected to the stupid branded credit card offer walk of shame prior to landing, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
> So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.
I didn't know they took orders at the register still. I've only been in once (last year) in the past 20 years, but they seemed to insist on kiosk-only. Not sure if the drive-thru is like that too.
You still pay the unsubsidized full menu price at the kiosk or drive through. I believe you can order at the kiosk and not use a card (pay cash at register)
I recently went to a gas station where the pump worked right! No affinity cards. No car wash offer. No asking for a ZIP code, since I'd been there before. No screen with ads. Press card against RFID reader, select octane, pump gas.
I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use.
I go back there occasionally, even though the station with the ad screen is cheaper.
nah - gas pumps that ask for phone numbers for savings card id's are great opportunities to save cents at the pump. 555-555-5555 always works everywhere and half the time gets you savings.
Enough people use 867-5309 as their grocery loyalty card's phone number that it's often got savings available at the gas pump. Use the local area code. It works great for filling up rentals while traveling, too.
This seemed like a poor example for the author to choose, of "not caring." Annoying, sure. But these extra upsells originate from someone who definitely cares about increasing revenue and is aggressively exploring multiple avenues to achieve it.
Companies don’t care about you, they care about your wallet, extraction of money from. The most pleasant companies to deal with are the ones who have found a niche where customer satisfaction helps with the goal of wallet, extraction from. But at best it’s a means to an end, and McDonald’s is definitely not one of those companies.
I understand that, but it included this particular example which doesn’t fit. I guarantee the people at McDonald’s in charge of the kiosk design care a great deal about wallet.
I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other).
Paper magazines still have "blow ins", though - advertising cards that are injected into the magazine with compressed air after printing. They're not bound in. They fall out.
There was a post, here, some time ago, about how many paperbacks had ads actually woven into the story. Apparently, it was quite common practice, at one time. Sort of an obnoxious “product placement” thing. I think the author had nothing to do with it.
i sent an email to have them removed. it was a thing some years ago at least (though I don't know if US-ians are allowed to do that or if it's just in the EU)
I actually recently purchased my first Kindle, as well as an gift upgrade for my partner. I researched and talked to a friend of mine who owns one.
At first I was determined I would purchase the ad-free version (I think the price difference was like ~20€), but after talking to my friend they kind of convinced me that the ad version is not so bad.
2 points on this:
1. The ad appears only on the lockscreen of the device, so you see it once and then never again until you reopen it. The ad is also only for a book in the Kindle store, never anything else (this might seem trivial, but I think one of the negative aspects of advertising is being blasted with stimuli about so many different things you don't care for)
2. The ads are personalized on books you bought and therefor a sort of recommendation engine. Both my friend and my partner told me they got some inspiration from those ads to find books they liked.
So all in all while I despise ads, I gave this one a try. Personally (and yeah, I know – subconciously) I have never looked at the lockscreen apart from the first time I launched it. It's a relatively non-intrusive ad about a book that I don't even need to engage with. And in case something relevant is on there, it leads to a good outcome for me.
So far, Kobos are the way better option in my opinion. No ads, and it's much easier to add your own books. It's (currently) a much more open system. But, not without fault. They've shut down some older readers for no good reason.
"Easier to add your own books"... it depends. Yes, if you have ePubs and want to transfer files to the reader via USB, Kobo is marginally easier. But Kindle is easier for wireless delivery (regardless of format), and supports it on all of their models instead of just a limited subset.
The Onyx Boox readers have a feature called BooxDrop which runs a web server on the device when you enable it that provides file management and upload. It simple, wireless, and works great.
The readers work perfectly fine without an account and the Poke 5 I have is a fair bit smaller than the last Kindle I had with the same size screen.
It runs Android and I also use Termux plus a bluetooth keyboard with it for a rather nice minimal writing experience.
I've been tempted by their products in the past, but unless they've improved their stance on their use of GPL covered code in a non-compliant manner I don't want to support their business.
If you put them into the Kindle Kids mode you get a much cleaner, more streamlined, ad-free experience without paying extra. I've seen a few adults say that they prefer it to the full-featured mode.
There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline
I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads
At the dominant pharmacy/convenience store in my area (Shoppers Drug Mart), it can take up to 12 clicks to self-checkout, depending on what garbage they're upselling on the day. I counted them.
I refuse to use them, and (annoyingly, I know) let the cashier know why each time as they're checking me out. I feel bad for the poor cashier but unfortunately for them, they're my only interface to the company.
Yes. Our local IKEA recently started doing this. During self-checkout, you have to click through hot dog, ice cream, cinnamon buns and drink offers, and the inevitable offer to get an IKEA family card before you are actually able to pay for your furniture.
Seeing this after waiting in line for 10 minutes, navigating a sluggish, unresponsive touch screen terminal and unsuccessfully trying to scan slightly bend bar codes while 10 people are watching you doesn't exactly increase my desire to return to this store.
I really think a huge part of the problem is that there isn't a direct interaction with a human anymore. If IKEA would ask their cashiers to advertise all this crap to customers before accepting their money, they would revert this after a single day because many customers would very, very strongly complain, and the cashiers would care and threaten to quit.
But you cannot complain to a self-checkout-terminal, which makes this even more frustrating. As another comment has pointed out, there is just a "No thanks" button. I want a "I am seriously offended that you try to milk me like a brainless cash-cow, you should be ashamed to even advertise this to me after I bought a couch for 1,400 EUR, and I will not return anytime soon" button.
Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.
I feel like this reveals some sampling error in the OP rant. When you see something negative get made that makes you think "nobody cares", you're not seeing the people who did care and left.
Which relates to the linked incentives piece: when you create incentives, you think you're changing people's behaviour. Actually you're selecting for people who respond to the incentive.
The iOS app “Calendars” recently starting showing a modal on launch trying to up-sell something - I don’t give a shit what it was - the “no” option was labeled “Thank you”. I had to click “Thank you” to dismiss it so that I could use the fucking app I pay a yearly subscription for. Or in this case: paid. The cheek of these people.
That "Thank you" button just raised the bar on cheek, I think.
I'm actually chuckling at it -- just the sheer passive-aggressive childishness of its attempt at shaming users. I mean, what did they think writing that on the button would achieve? It has literally no effect except to infuriate people who were already going to opt out. Labelling it "I suck" would have been better.
Silicon Valley is like a creepy and terrible suitor, never knowing what "no" means or letting its counterparty express "no". It's always "ask me later".
I hate that the options when faced with a location permissions request is "block" or "allow". why isnt ignore an option?? Block adds the site to a discrete local list which i dont need recorded on my computer...
Exactly? I may not want a site to have my location now, but I may be okay with it in the future. Eg, I’m not in a place where I want my location tagged at the moment.
Yes. Similarly, the “agree” should have the option for “Okay yes, but just for this session.”
The fact that this part of the UI is not escapable by the user is hostile and breaks the interaction model. If the “webpage” is asking me this question, why is the browser acting as a middleman and forwarding me this message without letting my continue unless I answer. Let me respond to the webpage or ignore it as well.
if you don't, someone else will. Maybe you could've introduced a "bug" that makes it so it usually doesn't work except when a member of the QA team is looking at it :P
Well.. I did implement most of the framework. The good thing is that I'm waaaayyyyy detail oriented, and I made an extremely sophisticated system for it.
Maybe a little bit TOO sophisticated
Not my proudest _engineering_ achievement, but as an R&D project? I consider it a success.
and decoupling order taking with service makes for "funny" times. since mcdonalds installed the tablets i regularly wait 10 minutes while looking at confused / avoidant employees not knowing what to do, even if there's nobody else waiting.
i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"
That seems more indicative of just bad management.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve been in (specially) a McDonalds, but I used to frequent them easier in my life. The ones I went to were well run and efficient. But still as seemed as decoupled as kiosk ordering. The cashier would take the order and put it into the computer. The food preparers would prepare the food and put it on the trays where the packagers would subsequently take it and put it on your tray or in your bag. There was 0 communication between the three groups in 99% of the cases. Often I would make small talk with the cashiers or packagers if there was nobody behind me.
I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.
it's pretty obvious, there's no more tension in the job, the cooks still have a list of things to do, but people serving customers have no idea who ordered what beside a number. they have no real relationship with any of us waiting and quite often I see them roaming around aimlessly, not sure if I've been called or not
This is a result of Taylorist management brain rot drive to reduce drive thru wait time metrics at the expense of anybody not in the drive through. Watch the shot clock near the drive through window (they're highly visible at Taco Bell) and observe that drive thru customers almost never wait more than 60-80 seconds.
you can't say "they don't care" though, the folks making these screens are obviously pretty motivated to keep squeezing out more profits and care a lot about that. if they "didn't care" they'd have told you "ok fine, im going for break"
McDonald's touch-screen were only profitable because users ordered more. Possibly Covid and processes to get costs down have changed this, but not to begin.
I feel like your comment falls under "Nobody cares"
I love the touch screens and having the time to order what I want. I used to rush my order at the checkout and never got exactly what I wanted.
If you did a start-up 'ethical ordering' you'd care, made money, and probably forced McDonalds to change it's touch screens. In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
> In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
Really? I guess I've just never taken up such an upsell, but I'll try to remember it next time I go just to see the UI. Barely ever go there now that ironically Lotteria has more veggie burger options here (1) than McDonalds (0), and their chicken burgers are imo worse than KFC's.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
I see this fallacy a lot in the US. I think it's because of our individualism. Attention and hard-work can't overcome everything, we aren't all-powerful beings.
If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.
(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)
You're more likely to burn out butting your head against the incentives working against you. If you're lucky, you may get a few successes before you burn out.
That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.
Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.
It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.
(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)
I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.
Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.
To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.
It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.
No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.
The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.
> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded
This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.
As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.
The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(
Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.
Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.
Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.
Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.
Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care.
And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn't feel adversarial.
in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].
In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.
So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.
There are plenty of professions where it makes sense someone unpleasant still has a job because they're actually hyper competent (like software development) but why would physicians be filtered out of the profession for poor bedside manner? In what part of the world is there a surplus of supply of doctors that would allow for that?
I think you missed a bit of nuance. Psychologically, people are more likely to pursue a malpractice case against an incompetent physician who has poor bedside manner rather than an incompetent physician who has excellent bedside manner. So that specific quadrant would be penalized the most.
"In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated."
I'd [citation needed] on that, depending on the condition.
In that for some conditions, successful diagnosis and treatment across a wide range of the population (not just the most educated, articulate, mentally with-it and compliant quartile) is going to depend on being able to get qualitative information from the patient, and interpret that correctly.
Equally though the medical profession has enough specialisation in terms of role to be able to put the right personality types in the right jobs.
citation: i made it up based on my intuition because this is a thought experiment to illustrate a paradox.
also "bedside manner" is not just about conveying information. that would be a big part of successful treatment.
if you ask people about bedside manner is all going to be about personality and emotional sensitivity (where they gruff? did they make you feel bad? etc). somebody can be amazing at conveying accurate information but come across as a complete asshole, and those are the 'bad bedside manner' docs.
The entire article is a form of engagement bait. It’s a pile of stereotypes with storytelling. Paul Graham does the same thing. Arguing about which stereotype is true or false… you’re just playing into it.
And in particular engagement bait, when you're blogging or writing, requires you to not be circumspect but rather be polarized and absolute in what you say.
My mother is a nurse practitioner who works in an acute care clinic, and I can say that she feels horrible when she makes a mistake, learns that one of her patients’ conditions has worsened and they’ve been hospitalized, or — worst of all — when they die, even if it was expected.
My personal experience with multiple doctors, some in primary care and others in hospitals, is that they often don't care and just want to get you out of the door.
Bring up some symptoms not immediately easily attributed to something? Sorry, those are "nonspecific symptoms" and they can't help you. Maybe see a specialist, maybe not. Figure it out.
Obviously this isn't all of them, but it is definitely a decent chunk.
Let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've spent on a single patient over the last month? What do you think that number is like for your fellow physicians?
Of course this will massively depend on your specific workplace, the ratio of doctors to patients in your vicinity, and so on. But I've seen plenty of doctors for who that statistic can't be higher than 10 minutes.
I'll freely admit I'm biased. I have a medical issue that despite visiting a good number of different doctors, none have properly diagnosed. This is despite the symptoms being visible, audible and showing up on certain scans (inflammation), so it can't be disregarded as "it's in your head". Some have made an attempt, and after that failed quickly did the equivalent of throwing their hands up and saying "I don't know", providing no further path.
Regardless of facts about how much doctors actually care, he still perceives the world as one where almost nobody does. I'm glad he expressed himself as such because I feel the same way sometime, even though I know that most people try to fill their role in society well. It's like a special kind of loneliness that grows quick. I like how he describes the development of this loneliness. Once he put on its glasses, he thinks carelessness is everywhere, even in doctors who do care, so he develops existential hopelessness of some sort.
Loneliness is a really good way to describe it. I definitely have had similar experiences to the author. It can make you feel really pessimistic and like a freak outcast for actually caring. It makes me feel arrogant or overly confident too.
I think ironically it does show that the author thinks highly of people and their potential. A truly bitter person would have long stopped expecting anything of anyone, which I think is very unhealthy. You expect people to care but only about things that harm you.
I'm guessing there's more people out there who feel this way, and likewise I'm glad the author shared this experience even if it's not the healthiest mindset to always be in.
This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.
I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.
My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.
It’s a statement of privilege to believe (and say) that there are hundreds of good doctors per handful of bad ones? It sounds to me like a statement of fact. And that you dispute the fact. What does privilege have to do with it?
Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to mind for nearly the first diagnosis that comes to mind. Given the volumes of patients they are expected to churn through though it’s not surprising that they become desensitized and divorced from the ramifications of shoddy work with minimal research — for many (especially nonspecialists) it’s effectively impossible to do thoughtful work for every patient. I think overwork desensitizes many/most and few actually have the time or energy to do more research or think deeply about an individual patient, but ultimately decisions which consume minimal resources from them drastically affect the lives of patients.
Healthcare professionals know this to be true. This is why when their own loved ones are the patients they have such a strong tendency to become very actively involved —- it’s not necessarily that the person attending to their loved one is incompetent, but chances are that their loved ones will similarly be just another face that occupies another physician’s mind for a few minutes.
Artificially high barriers of entry in the field may lead to massive compensations but also to a huge ratio of patients to physicians — this takes a toll.
It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.
"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.
(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)
You think PCPs get to decide what their schedule looks like? Or do you think they have a specific patient load they are expected to meet, which dictates how many in-person vs remote slots they have in each day?
Yes. They just choose to fill it way passed capacity because they want more money and don't want to accept the money they will end up getting for doing a proper non-rushed job.
That's why they have 15min slots and rush you out the door if you look like you'll be taking too much of their time. Maybe blame the insurance for dictating they must charge per-session instead of per-hour, sure, but the doctors at the end of the day prioritize their own salary over patients well being. Not to the extent that one can say they are negligent or do a bad job, but they ride that line between in order to optimize their earnings without getting into (too much) trouble.
Presumably, if the GP comment hasn't switched yet, then there's a bit of a shortage of options. So it's entirely possible that there's a shortage of doctors in general in the area, and a doctor that does care about serving patients in that circumstance will find themselves in exactly the same pattern of behaviour, because there's more need from patients than they can satisfy, so they try to help the most people they can even if that means each person gets less help.
More egregously in that regard, in the UK it's common for doctors to part work for the NHS and part work privately. Anything on the NHS is massively underresourced and so long waiting times for short, overworked appointments are common, but you can get an appointment much faster and with better attention from the same doctor if you pay. But then even these private services are starting to have too much demand, because the problem is more structural as the population grows and ages, while investment in the education and training, not to mention reasons to stay in the country afterwards, has stagnated.
His care does not scale and he has to ration his care between existing patients. For him to give you more care, it will likely come at the expense of someone else's care.
This situation has occurred because somewhere and somewhen else, a chain of other people have not cared and allowed primary care resources to get to this state.
They might be living in the UK where most of the population has no private healthcare insurance and the nationalized GPs are frequently all overloaded like that.
Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait. If I heard someone say that they were required to wait that long for in-person doctor's visits, I'd wonder why they were still seeing that doctor and ask them polite questions to try to figure it out.
That's the case where I live, there's only a few surgeries I'm allowed to register at and they all have this problem. I think there is some manipulation of statistics the surgeries do to prevent more being created, and to hide the difficulty in getting an appointment. For example rather than having 6 month waiting list, they don't make appointments more than a few weeks in advance, so you just can't get an appointment and it looks like nobody waits more than a few weeks. I think while surgeries are allowed to do this we'll never understand the real capacity.
Man, it should NOT be permitted to play with the "waiting list" stats in the way you describe. I wish you had someone who gave a fuck about (and could do something about) the problem to report it to... that's just bullshit.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.
I think you’re absolutely right. I was using it in the more abused term, but I actually subscribe to the original intent of it. My wife’s organization would almost certainly be better off if they embraced this mentality even slightly more. Maybe most people would, for that matter.
But yeah, the movement did seem to become the primary goal, and breaking things seemed less about stress-testing and freeing from restrictions, and more like an inconvenience on the path of progress, whatever that might mean. It seemed like a lot of us went from being experimental and nimble to clumsy and incoherent at some point.
I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).
The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.
Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).
Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.
Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.
Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.
An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.
There are many problems with individual ownership though. It is a whole large system where people constantly change. You need to have multiple owners and redundancy otherwise all the projects are dependent on one individual who might quit any time. Things happen in the past, people make mistakes and you start to incorporate processes to avoid it because people are and will always be imperfect, you end up with thise processes and bureaucracy.
Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!
Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
> One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
> This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
There is a tradeoff between affordability and aesthetics. Lengthy review processes make housing more expensive. Seattle cares, but it cares more about affordability. With the cost of housing right now I think that's the right call. Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
> Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
> Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
Paying architects, engineers, and lawyers to go back and forth with city bureaucrats and committees for months or even years is typically the expensive part.
Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.
The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.
> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems
I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.
I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.
I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.
In NYC at least, the low point of architectural beauty was in the 1960-2000 era. In the past decade or two I think there has been a lot of really quality architecture going up. The current aesthetic issue plaguing the city is the onerous regulations that result in unneeded scaffolding being put up around buildings for months or even years.
Do you think New York and Florence have those beautiful buildings because their local design review committees had high standards? I don't.
I think aesthetics should nearly always come second to other concerns, except in very specialised cases. For a start, it's largely a matter of personal taste. "Streamlining the design review process" is something I wish was more of a priority where I live. Those rates (local property tax) dollars are much better spent on almost anything else in my opinion.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?
Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.
An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.
The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.
DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.
The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.
Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.
I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.
> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It is not.
It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.
One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.
Measuring results is notoriously hard in this industry. Any metric can be easily manipulated, and many qualitative aspects of software are not quantifiable. Moreover, the people who get to decide the metrics will tend to choose them in a way that gives an advantage to themselves.
Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).
In my 15 years, I’ve had a lot of interns, and a lot of indirect interaction with other interns. I can usually spot a genuine one in about a day at this point.
I'm sure there are also a lot of competent smart people who may happen to have other issues in their lives affecting their output. Maybe they are burned out, have some family drama, have health issues, etc.
I for one am glad if 10 interns get a chance even if only 1 turns out to be truly useful. It's a matter of empathy and I hope it prevails because what real purpose do we have without it.
As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.
The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.
On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.
And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.
I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.
I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
> If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?
It's a PR stunt. He pays someone to play for him and level up his account. Then, he plays for a bit and it's painfully obvious that he's inexperienced.
He doesn't take criticism very well either. He recently removed a live streamers Twitter verification for pointing out his lack of skill. How's that for a "free speech" platform?
Elon is extremely partisan, insecure, and rich. That's it.
What do you not agree with? That he doesn't care? I would assume scaling Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity are net positive for the world (as it stands). Can you achieve those ambitious things if the leader/ceo of the company doesn't care?
I mean, he clearly didn't care that supervisors at his company were calling people the N-word on the job. He cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image, at least to a specific audience.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.
Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.
But your work may contribute to a product that helps a doctor, nurse or teacher do their job.
Even if it does not directly do that, maybe your fellow workers use the income they get from the company existence to raise their kid who becomes a doctor, nurse, etc.
This does not solve the problem that people are compensated based on the ability to create profit and the trendiness of the industry, not on usefulness. If I allow a kid of someone in my company to go to med school and then they drop out of being a doctor because the pay sucks and become yet another financier/dev/consultant/middle manager/entrepreneur of fairly useless business, then the system still failed.
Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and public workers should definitely be paid better, but I'm just focusing on one part of your argument which I find specious.
I'm saying you have a skewed idea of usefulness. Relative usefulness can only be properly evaluated when you look at the big picture.
The fact that you are not seeing the immediate usefulness of what you are doing does not necessarily mean much. Even a comedian can be incredibly useful if he helps stave of mental and emotional distress that could contribute to burn out or shoddy work among those doing the supposedly more "useful" work.
I don't have a skewed idea of usefulness, you are just trying to justify your loyalty to a system that will fuck any logical priorties over for profit in order to cope with our current reality. I'm coping by having a job that is not very useful but makes profit, but I am not fooling myself to believe this system is virtuous.
And yes I would say an artist or comedian is far, far more useful than a middle manager at a company managing devs fixing minor bugs on a website for a superfluous business. Back to my original point, I would probably give more to society as an artist than a dev. Some people would bring more to society as a dev than an artist, mind. In a world where we got paid just to be actually useful, there would be less devs and they'd all be better at their jobs.
I think it can be subdivided into value creators and value movers.
A comedian, doctor, farmer, or teacher creates value. They directly produce something that benefits other humans.
The financial sector, marketing, sales, real-estate conglomerates, etc I see as value movers. They don't actually create something themselves, but rather move it from someplace else to themselves, thereby forcing others to play the same game not to get outcompeted. It's pretty hard to argue marketing or hedge funds aren't a zero-sum game.
I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.
Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?
Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?
Exactly. A lot of people would be bring more value to society doing literally ANYTHING else than working on the metaverse or something but they won't get compensated the same for the actually useful stuff.
Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.
Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
Ha. The traffic curb example is actually a good one. I don’t think it’s an excuse to build a potentially dangerous ramp because you aren’t a cyclist yourself. People who design ramps should be capable to do it properly.
Imagine it were a ramp for wheelchairs and they would have decided that a 20 degree slope is doable.
Road to sidewalk is a speed transition point. The transition from street to sidewalk via a tight turn here is an effective traffic-calming component to slow down bikes from road speed to walking speed.
That's done on freeway off-ramps, where there's a curved section or two of decreasing radii to force vehicle speeds down before they reach a stop sign or traffic light. Same problem.
This is the most likely reason. They should have put a sign, but the ramp looks right to me if you want them to match pedestrian speed when merging into a pedestrian space.
Yeah, that's why we have raised crosswalks and stop signs everywhere that a pedestrian has to interact with a car.
Or that we have safe and separated bike lanes instead of paint to keep cyclists safe, right?
Do you really think a pedestrian feels safe here with this design?
Its the same reason many dont walk places. Too many half passed attempts by people who don't care designing crosswalks and intersections for cars and not pedestrians.
I don't get what you're getting at here. But, yes, I feel safer with a cyclist going slow on a shared sidewalk rather than going at full speed.
For some reason, cyclists like to close their eyes when their fellow cyclists run stop lights, cut people off, hit pedestrians. Oh but cars are more dangerous! Yeah, no shit, but that doesn't excuse cyclists not caring about pedestrians.
I agree people should be able to design things property, but I'm not sure this ramp is actually a good example. It might be! But no one is talking about an obvious issue for any ramp that would exist in that photo: it is merging bikes in to pedestrian traffic. So I'd think that you specifically want a ramp that forces the bike to slow down.
People who aren't competent to do a job also generally aren't competent to teach themselves the job. That's why we the whole idea of qualification, competency testing, supervision, training, etc., exists.
I imagine the designer was under a set of constraints, for example, only a certain about of linear space was available for the ramp, because of other issues in the area; or maybe there was some budget constraint.
The designer may have thought about what it's like for a cyclist to make that curve, and thought, "the bicyclist can slow down to make the ramp."
None of those things have anything to do with not caring.
> This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
They literally mentioned it to the Director of the Seattle DOT. If the person who designed a bike lane isn't aware of the needs and dangers to bike users then they are not fit for the job. Engineers must make decisions for the curve of car lanes based on speed limits and terrain. They must make those same decisions for other vehicles.
>Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
So... In other words... They did not care about their job enough to investigate and think through the situation. They just did the default easy thing and moved on with their day.
it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
Can you even imagine any piece of automobile infrastructure being designed in a way that is dangerous to drivers, and those drivers' concern being downplayed with the excuse that perhaps the person who designed the infrastructure isn't an automobile driver and didn't think about what it would be like to be a driver?
That would be inconceivable, but when non-drivers are the ones whose safety is ignored in favor of automobile drivers' convenience, nobody cares.
> isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
But this is exactly the "don't care" attitude. Ignore the specifics of the problem, avoid studying it or just giving it a thought. Didn't think that, not being a cyclist themselves, they should ask somebody who is. Didn't even think about very obvious things, like putting a warning sign ahead of the actual object that it would warn about.
Imagine building an app for a market you’re totally unfamiliar with. You don’t research the market, you don’t talk to potential users, you don’t do any real world testing. You just build something that seems like it should be ok, ship it, and never touch it again.
None of us would dream of doing that, but that’s what the designer of this atrocity did, if we’re assuming the best.
Bonus: the app probably isn’t going to kill anyone.
The whole article is "This design isn't optimized for me" and "No one else prioritizes my priorities". Empathy is something one can develop with practice if you take the self-reflection to recognize things from others perspectives. Their "Nobody cares" can easily be redirected back to author with how little other perspectives they consider. Multiple times their "objectively" better thing is worse for some.
I completely agree. The author is attributing apathy to every action or inaction of everybody they see.
Just take the banal examples, like the person listening to their headphones. Maybe that person is listening to an audio book about medicine, because they are in medical school, and they really care about being a good student. Or the people taking up the whole escalator. Maybe they are old friends who have the opportunity to be together, and they care about listening to the conversation. Maybe the man zoned out in traffic who doesn't see your signal has his mind occupied by thoughts of his new baby who is sick in the hospital. Maybe the bike ramp was designed by a plucky intern who, despite inexperience, successfully got the entire mile-long bike lane installed in the first place.
The author is entirely wrong because they are myopic. It isn't that nobody cares, but rather that _everybody cares_. About different things, but the author has no insight into this and it's not their place to judge those things in the first place. They reach a good conclusion though, which is to change the things they care about with personal activism.
Yes, I get a lack of empathy from this article. The author mentions a lot of little things other people do that annoy him, without the sense that maybe you need to put up with a little annoyance to get along with other people, and without any awareness that maybe he does little things that annoy other people.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
Don't have a ton of experience in Paris, but I stayed at the Yotel at Charles De Gaulle once. The first room had dirty bedsheets, and the lamps were broken. I called the guy to give me another room, and he just goes, 'there's no problem' And I was left wondering—what is 'problem' reserved for? A fire?
I agree also with most of the rant but the part about state/municipal jobs looks a bit unfair to me.
If you have ever volonteer or worked for this kind of job, you could find that many people are so ungrateful: only few care to answer polls or attend public meetings, almost nobody cares about the why. But when something changes, lots of loud mouths shout rants like this one.
People sometimes don't imagine how hard this is to have basic consensus on anything when there is lots of people in a group.
Doing anything is also so complicated nowadays with the numerous parts involved in any decision, each one having their own priority set and timelines, the constraints of the law...
The care is certainly not the only reason of having broken things.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
> Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
The author was complaining about the use of cool white (5000k) LEDs instead of warm ones (2700k). Cool LEDs aren't any cheaper or more efficient than warm ones. So what tradeoffs are we talking about?
Imagine this argument made about e.g. the leftover stock of lead-based paint. What, are we gonna dispose of all this toxic paint and re-stock with new one? That'd be just ridiculous. /s
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
Nobody is asking you to care and fix everything. They are asking you to care about the things in direct control, like your job or kid.
This thread is filled with “I do care but can’t because _”. And yet there are those rare people who do care, and with a little bit of preparation and effort make a big difference.
When people start in a new job they go through a tough 3-6 week sink or swim experience, and then the skills and approach they develop rarely changes. Think about that. Most professionals probably have spent 200-300 focused hours of their entire life trying to get good at what they do for 40 years.
> Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, thank you for writing this.
I have a pet theory that selling products and services that reduce people's ability to look after their own needs (either directly or as a side-effect), while marketing that the same product actually improves your life is one of the key business strategies of our generation.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
> There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.
The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.
Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?
This is still pretty true. The xenophobia is waning as Japan's economy stagnates and there's a general vibe that Japan did something wrong economically. But otherwise, these all continue to be real issues in Japan.
These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.
The suicide rate in the United States is higher than it is in Japan if you believe official government figures of Japan and the United States. The talking point about suicide in Japan is one of those that's 30 years out of date.
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
One thing that rarely mentioned in Japanese 7-11 efficiency is the "employment ice age" problem that contributed to it: there was a massive job crisis around 1993-2005 and major STEM university graduates were dime a dozen. A McDonald's but with only clones of Gordon Freeman as employees tends to become a bit different place than a regular hamburger shop.
theres an effect in countries with high average iq where the quality of low skill labor workers is higher. I dont remember the name, but was convinced it was causal.
its similar to what you are saying, but applies across the board, not just to university grads, and in taiwan also.
i suspect japanese workers at 7-11 now are not college grads still working there from the 90s. its mostly young part time workers. i see middle age people sometimes. Noteably theyre losing the high quality service reputation entirely because many of the stores are being run by immigrants from nepal and the philipines now who dont follow the japanese service memes.
They also mess up the sushi at sushiro/kurasushi and your fish come sideways.
Oh.. do people not do that anymore? At the little grocery store I worked at in BC Canada, if there were like 2 or 3 people in line we'd call for help if they weren't already on their way. Seems like a pretty basic thing.
Here in the US, I don't know what's going on with the cashiers. They're slow. They don't say a single word to you, not even to give you your total. And they're awful at bagging. I just don't get it. It's not a hard job.
How roles are perceived, becomes how people perceive themselves, becomes how people act out those roles.
Or more to the point: Its easier to be what people expect you to be.
In my experience the US is especially susceptible to this 'roleplaying', probably because all (entertrainment) media comes from the same overarching culture.
What, we expect cashiers to be slow and bad so that's how they act? That's ridiculous. I expect them to scan my groceries at a reasonable pace, put the eggs and bread on top, and read me the total when they're done. I expect their managers to give them heck if they're clearing lines at half the speed as the next cashier over. That's about it.
It's not a shameful or embarrassing job. My sister-in-law made a career out of it. She's happy there, so I'm happy for her. She gets good benefits and decent pay. Just do your job and everyone's happy.
I've literally done it. It's not hard. Maybe if you have some health conditions that make it difficult to stand, but I hope the store will provide accommodations if you do.
I used to rank the McDonald's in Toppongi hills Tokyo as having the best employees anywhere after I saw one run from one side of the little shop to the other when the French fry buzzer went off.
However, it got beat out by the McDonald's in Arkadelphia Arkansas, where the employee fast walked as quickly as hen could to take the order to the car waiting in the Drive-Thru, and then also fast walked back. Running of course would have been against OSHA and gotten hen in trouble so hen did the best hen could.
"hen" is my go-to gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.
I realize that English speakers use "you" for both singular and plural, having retired "thee" and "thou", but the resulting ambiguity has led to the creation of a new word, "y'all", or sometimes prepending it with "all of" for clarity.
Using "they/them" in the singular will just lead us down the same path.
Why not short circuit it and just add the pronoun English speakers have needed forever?
How often is the gender of the pronouned person(s) relevant? In my experience, almost never.
I'm not sure what was going on in tokyo, but in arkadelphia it was simply that there are a huge number of people waiting for food and the employee did not want them to wait any longer than they had to.
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure".
The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc.
He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), but what can you do, in your group, as part of a solution we all work towards to help fix this?"
So yeah, it is the other guys fault. But what you can you do to help fix it?
The CEO in question publicly declared his own job would be forfeit within a year if he didn't meet goals that were in the recent past history of the company, absolutely impossible.
Power and money got to his head, hard, but he used to be a really good manager, probably the best Michelin ever had, before he took the job at Renault (then Nissan). Not surprised to hear he was very successful there, as he had a really good reputation before his divorce (and this is baseless gossip, but I will still say I doubt any of his wrongdoings were before 2012. Too much power and no one to keep his ego checked down).
> Nobody:
> LinkedIn 'influencers': "Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog."
This is such a low effort learned-helplessness response. Look, there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, I'm not here to defend them, but one thing you have to understand is that CEO action is an extremely blunt instrument. Of all the problems in an org, the vast majority can not be directly solved by the CEO, they can just sort of broadly steer the culture in the right direction, but folks down the chain need to solve problems at their own level. Of course there are tradeoffs in an organization and so not every problem can be solved, but if folks who understand the details can't propose any kind of solution that doesn't A) require CEO action or B) every other person to act exactly the way they propose, then they're not really helping.
I understand there's a lot of toxic environments where it's not worth trying to improve things, but a blanket statement pointing at CEOs en masse as the root of all problems is just as stupid and reductive as CEOs who don't do anything to empower ICs and learn from the front-line expertise.
I have no way of knowing if this is true, but supposedly Musk gets down and dirty at the front line, on the factory floor, every single week trying to solve problems:
Sure, that's great if you all work for the same organization and everyone involved asked themselves that and they all benefited from the organization's overall success.
But that is not the case here. That is not how bike lanes or many other things get built. The engineer is a consultant that works for one independent company. The contractor is a different independent company. The client is another company or a government entity. Possibly the client involves several different entities with competing demands and priorities.
And "success" for the engineer doesn't really mean building a good thing. It means a happy client who will come back for repeat business.
How does this problem get fixed? Well, eventually someone hits that curb and breaks their neck and sues the city. Then the city hires an engineer to create design standards that they include in future contracts when they build new bike lanes.
There are two groups of people: blamers and doers. For example, people will often blame local government for issues such as not disposing of fly tipping garbage quick enough, but they will not do much to clean up the pavements with sofas or fridges around their house – a man with a van can often drive over these large bits of garbage to a recycling centre for like $30/£30 an hour. Sometimes people will say government is spending money poorly, but they will not have participated in any of the consultations the government did on the matter, even if they were online or accepted mail-in comments. And in workplaces, they will often blame other departments without having put in elementary effort to resolve the issues with them. Sometimes people will blame government services for collapsing – there are certainly many YouTubers that constantly moan about how bad public transit is in many regions of the US, but few will donate to groups and politicians that genuinely want to replan public transit. Few will campaign for them, which can be done online in the fraction of a time it takes to produce a video.
If an org gets taken over by the blamer culture, it is doomed. These people will make no attempt at fixing problems, even when that would sometimes take 5 minutes and an email, but they will moan. And they will blame, and sometimes they'll blame the person suggesting an easy and workable course of action to resolve the problems.
Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain. And still, people who tend towards the blamer group will blame and moan. Though I make no insinuation that moaning doesn't have any other benefits (such as YouTube video revenue, virtue signalling, and similar) – it is clearly appealing to one of the two groups I mentioned.
> Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain.
That would involve actually doing some kind of work that people doing the complaining would like to avoid in the first place, because it's "someone else's responsibility to get it right!".
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
is it lying or not?
People lie all day every day, and if you dont they wont like you.
They expect you to lie.
Someone invites you somewhere.
You respond you dont want to go because meh. They get angry.
"Atleast make up an excuse or something dont just tell me you dont want to go!!"
I refuse to socialize with people who cannot handle my way of communication, unless I strictly require them in a professional setting. Recently I organized a party and it was so amazing to be able to communicate in a group without any barriers at all.
I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.
Resist the cold churn toward pride-fueled apathy that this rant exhausts.
After reading this, if this is supposed to demonstrate the psyche of the sort of person who “cares”, I really hope he keeps indoors and spends a little bit more time on his self before stepping out on others.
The thing is that I might be another psycho. But there is a city center, winter and an old women with blueish hands. Wearing no proper shoes and having only a sweater. There are hundred other caring and loving persons and missionaries around, heavy car traffic too. But somehow I am the one bringing her to the care facility a mile away. How can it happen!? Why do you think, that only a Good Samaritan can care and a psycho can’t?
I think that's actually a known psychological phenomenom. The more people there are, the less likely someone steps in to help. Because if help was needed, someone of all the other people would have already helped. Same with driving past car accidents for example.
It's good to keep this in mind. If you see something and no one is helping, it's good to check. Especially when there are other people around.
Personally I just try to do right within my influence. And helping someone find their keys, or going after a stray pet, and similar fits right into that. It won't change the world, but it makes life better for someone and I'd hope to be treated similarly if I was in that situation.
And caring at work in an institution? I don't know, it seems part of survival to learn to not care there.
Well, pardon me. It doesn’t seem to me like you’ve gone mad, but if you are a psycho indeed, I don’t want to do you further harm.
If you really are “all right” and just an honestly styled man trying to cultivate good in a barren city with crushed soil and souls, then I reckon there’s some care in you of some kind much to be desired from others and you know it.
And I suspect that it’s the psychos who believe that they’re “Good Samaritans” and if your word is true then we can tell that apparently they’re unwilling to provide actions that confirm their claims. Crazy.
So, my guess is maybe the world’s gone so mad that anyone trying to behave sane looks strange, and the ones who are mad pretend to be right until wrong shows up.
Sorry, but it’s in German: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/sterbenden... Society is that far, that some people just step over the corpse to reach ATM and get some cash. World is gone mad and numb to the pain of others. So don’t be shy if you sometimes help others.
> „Ich gehe einfach nur rein, mache meine Erledigungen und gehe wieder.“
What a world. And what a way that this phrase can mean different to different people depending on what a person perceived to be their duties and their deeds.
As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
I really enjoyed your comment. Without digging deep into design philosophy, it really is a fun practice to try hard to notice the things around you (especially in the physical world as opposed to digital) that were specifically designed for you in mind and have actually positively affected you. Most of them were quite intentional, indeed! Isn't that great?
>The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.
>The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.
Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.
The goals of managers (and business in general) are profit maximization, and of course upselling exists exactly for that. And if a manager decided that we need to add another upselling screen then it's more or less futile to disagree from the position of a subordinate employee. The decision has been thought of and made.
One time I asked a guy on the bus to turn his music down. (He was wearing headphones but also blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker.) He got extremely upset and threatened to beat me up. Everyone else on the bus got away from us. Nobody seemed willing to help me if he attacked. Fortunately the bus came to a stop about 20 seconds later and he got off.
I have since moved out of the SF bay area and I drive everywhere. My life is much more pleasant.
I get where you are coming from and also got the impression that this guy is just bitching about people not doing things the way he wants them to.
But, I catch myself doing this sometimes, though the motive for my gripe may be a bit different. The music on the trail one is a good example, since I like to hike. Generally speaking, most people are respectful out on the trails because we are all there for a similar reason; to connect with nature and relax our mind/spirit while we get our dose of motion medicine. It's an immersive experience, but that immersion and the comradery that comes with it is broken by people who disrupt the serenity of the experience by not considering how their actions effect other people around them.
If I apply that to the examples, that "nobody cares about the impact of their actions on the lives of others" it clicks. Yes, it's heavily cynical, but it is hard not to be, most days, which is why I hike (among other hobbies) to get out of my own head and shed that default cynicism for a bit.
Maybe the author feels that way, but didn't articulate it well enough? Or maybe it's just a hard thing to convey since it always appears as just bitching about the way things are. I guess I empathize, but would have approached it differently.
The author should really move to Japan if they’re so impressed. Then they’ll get to find out what things in Japan no-one gives a shit about, and the shine will wear off.
People often seem to caution against romanticizing Japan, and I think that is a good instinct no matter what, but at least among my cohort, I don't know anyone who has moved to Japan and shown any signs of having regret for having done it. I've never considered moving to Japan, but based on what I know and people I've talked to, I suspect I'd probably enjoy it too, though having only one year of Japanese class under my belt, it'd be quite a long road for me.
But actually, I like a lot of aspects of the United States, too, and I also wish more people gave a shit here. They're clearly speaking in hyperbole but I think the overarching point rings true; less people give a shit than you'd hope. Hell, I struggle to give a shit some days.
Hmm, I've met quite a few people over the years who spent time living in Japan and moved back, they usually weren't in any hurry to return. Seems like some really love it and others think they will, but don't.
The flight is long and expensive, the exchange rate fluctuates, and people like to be near their families. Also the language thing is kind of tough without consistent practice and it can be harder to remember over time.
I say this as someone who loved being there but can't quite afford to go back and see my friends who are still inviting me to visit again.
In terms of permanent residency, I think that Japanese culture Does Not Care about employees' work/life balance. The USA is working hard to catch up here so that's only a temporary gap.
This is where the author lost me as well. Massive peer pressure to conform is not the same as not caring. Maybe thats a little reductive, or the worst possible way to look at it, but no place that really cares would have such a bad reputation for terrible working conditions.
I would like to a make a small joke about something that Japanese culture does not care about: Home insulation! I have been in so many older, frigid homes and small hotels with paper thin windows and walls. It is like they are allergic to building insulation! Of course, newer homes and buildings are much better now.
I've been living in Japan for more than 9 years. I think that the author is right in the sense that people in Japan seem to care more. Of course, the stress is on the word "seem". Some people truly care, but there is also the cultural expectation that you should care. I don't know if realising that counts as the "shine that will wear off", but it seems to not a bad default.
I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.
I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else. They just buy into a different social contract, one where they believe that if you behave a certain way towards others, your life in turn will be better as well. Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there. Those sorts of social contracts only work when everyone is on the same page.
> I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else.
They do care more than most countries where I have visited or lived. There is a real send of "excellence" about their public behaviour that is hard to replicate. For example, when you queue to board a train, people stay to the side to allow passengers to exit. After others have exited, they board the train. (Tourists sometimes make the mistake of rushing into the train when the doors open, but it only takes one try to figure it out!) Ask yourself: Why do they do it? I don't why, but I observe it on the daily, and the incentive to behave well in public is pretty low in a modern ("selfish") society. I feel the same about littering -- the amount of litter in public places is astonishingly low in Japan. Another tiny thing that you may notice: When in a busy public place where two groups of people are crossing one another's path, people in Japan make an effort to allow one person to cross from each side. It is like watching a ballet performance when you see it.
> Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there.
This is a myth. Japan (and, coincidentally, Germany) welcomes three groups of foreigners: (a) students (language and university, mostly), (b) low skill workers (factory, farm, retail), and (c) high skill knowledge workers. I would say it is much easier to get (and keep) a work visa in Japan compared to the US.
Same in the UK. Isn’t waiting for others to get off before you get on just basic courtesy? There are definitely individuals who don’t do this, but most do. Same in lifts.
Other than that, I completely agree that people in Japan seem to care and take their jobs more seriously than elsewhere. Though my Japanese friends would probably tell me that it’s not because they deeply care — really they’re just terrified of standing out. Still, perhaps the resulting society is worth it! High trust is great.
It's not even the basic courtesy, it's basic reason. The inside of the train is smaller than the outside (which is a station) so it's easier to maneuver your way if you first let people out and then go inside than it is in the case when you first go inside and then try to let people to go out. The same is true with elevators.
Not sure what train you got in Thailand, you were perhaps lucky. Usually it is the opposite. As a westerner working in BKK this drives me mad that they do not wait. They will only wait if there is no gap to try push in on.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.
Patton Oswalt has a bit on this and its too true. The problem with the DMV isn't the DMV or its employees... its the general public who can't be bothered to read basic instructions.
I've had experiences with the DMV in three US states, and in two out of the three it was highly efficient and worked great. In one of them it was mediocre to unpleasant, but nothing to write home about.
I suspect the DMVs in LA and NYC are particularly bad and that's why it's a cultural meme.
The idea that the DMV is a particularly awful experience does seem like something that would be especially susceptible to selection bias. Why would anyone ever announce "I went to the DMV today and it was fine"?
The service is fine. The lines and waits are horrendous and a DMV never seems to have the seating room for that. So you spend an hour before you even get in the door like you're waiting for a new iPhone or something.
Well, now that it is a meme, and the DMVs where I live is actually very effient, I've actually heard multiple people say "I went to the DMV, and actually it was fine"
Indiana's BMV used to be the Kafkaesque when I went with my mom in the 1970s. She waited in a huge line only to find out it was the wrong line...waited again to find she didn't have a certain document and had go home to get it.
About 20 years ago the would check to see if you had everything right as you came in.
Now it's almost magical how fast friendly and efficient they've become for the few times you actually have to visit. Most transactions are online or via mail.
I've had wonderful experiences at DOL offices (which are 3rd party contracted), not so much at the DMV. Which one are you going to? Honestly worth a drive (or bus ride, depending on the issue) to go to a a decent one
Same. Getting a drivers license and car plates in Seattle was a _fantastic_ experience. Start with a simple, fast web app. Finish with a 10 minute start-to-end in person appointment.
I think I have dealt with such organization thrice in my life. 3 driving tests. And on all times it was as pleasant experience as possible.
Only complaint I really have with that system is them caring too much. Why does my car need "type certificate" sticker... It is all online and tied to VIN... Replacement cost like 200€ and then tens more for showing them paperwork new one was ordered...
This is cynical. There are a lot of people who do care. Consider that someone cared enough to build a bike lane in the first place. IMO life is hard for most people and as much as most would love to "care", they have to take care of themselves and their families first. The caring is focused where it is best applied.
I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.
I think it is the direction of the situation, rather than the state of things, that is concerning. The general direction is that everyone is incentivized and rewarded to look after their bottom line and personal gain and then everything else.
IMO, not caring about the wider impact of our actions is something that will keep happening at an increasing rate.
I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.
Thank you to the author for putting the feeling I have had since years into words. It's not just the US that is this bad, it's also in Europe. Just looking at the COVID pandemic tells you all you need to know about countries where people care and where they don't care. Maybe the west emphasized individualism too much? See also: Communitarianism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism
but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.
A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!
Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.
Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.
Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.
Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.
In my experience it isn't individuals not caring as much as there is no one individual accountable for making these kind of decisions. Whomever designed the bike ramp probably followed a set of curb-and-ramp regulations set by some committee, thought they were stupid, but then remembered that the last time he pushed back it was a huge hassle and he got reprimanded by his boss. The committee people probably cared about the rules in general but didn't foresee all use cases and didn't make their rules flexible enough.
A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.
I set up a weekly auto-buy for a stock about a year ago with Cashapp.
I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.
In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.
The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.
Yet you're still a user? Perhaps you also do not care? Actually the "do not care" covers a lot of ground here, perhaps you still find it useful and reliable enough, that you are willing to forgive this one bug due to the general convenience of cashapp.
No, I despise their stock feature. It was just easy to set up, but is fundamentally terrible in every aspect. The rub is I have a bunch of stock with them from the start of the pandemic and am pretty sure there is no way to move it to another service without triggering a taxable event.
So I guess I don't care in that I don't care enough to lose money on switching, or complicating my taxes even further by utilizing multiple investment firms.
They have an option to do an ACATS to another brokerage account. They do not mention specifically, but it looks like this would be considered a stock transfer "in kind" which should not be considered a taxable event.
As HN loves to quote Hanlon's razor: <<Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetance).>> First, assume that they shares were purchased, but not correctly credited to your account. Second, confirm that with CashApp. (Doubt it -- but try that first.)
Assuming CashApp is a US-based brokerage, I would first raise a complaint with CashApp. If you get the blow-off (which I fully expect), send a written letter to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and CC CashApp legal and compliance team. (Make it clear in the letter that you are CC'ing CashApp L&C.) Usually, brokerages are not allowed to make a customer whole after an execution mistake. However, if they make enough mistakes, SEC will slap them with a huge fine. (See: Robinhood.) It is very important to formally register your complaint with CashApp. In fact, I would use this exact phrase: "I would like to formally file a complaint about poor execution service from your brokerage firm." Everything is recorded in brokerage firms these days (voice or written). There will be absolutely no doubt that you wish to formally file a complaint, and I can guarantee you that it will be taken seriously by either CashApp (L&C team) or SEC (enforcement team).
I don’t think people don’t care, I think they have too much to do. Kids at home, too much work, and still barely making ends meet. Our society is set up to push people to the max, prioritizing quantity and “good enough” over quality. Most people do not have a career where spending 1% more time on a curb design instead of spending that time with their kids results in any more pay, much less the spare time to focus on craftsmanship for its own sake.
To make people / us care, we need to be subject to frequent community gossip. But the suburbs were built in part to escape that, hence why we create these omni-directional online communities, distressed at everything but responsible for nothing.
Thanks for complaining about McDonald's self service, which is truly dreadful and just gets worse (no I don't have the app, why would I want something you people made on my own phone, stop asking!).
Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.
People do not care because they don’t want to suffer all the time they see some lack of effort.
Even when there is 80% carers and 20% do-not-carers, 80% will suffer and go into the opposing group.
It has upside-down-bowl stability.
That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.
The author stated that a sign should be BEFORE the end of the lane. When riding, it's not clear that your lane will all of a sudden disappear so that you have time to slow down and change 'modes'. That wouldn't be allowed for the equivalent car lane without advance notice/signage.
The "bike lane ends" sign is...at the END (almost as bad as it saying 'bike lane has ended). And, it conflicts with the messaging on the road itself which features a "this is a bike lane and its going right" marking even up to the end." That marking is trying to say "this is turning into a combined pedestrian/bike pathway" but that's not clear and it makes it extremely dangerous for pedestrians.
Here's the streetview of the bike lane in question:
From skip-reading, this is not about motivation (intrinsic or otherwise) in general. This is about other people not caring about you, or what you care about.
I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.
The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.
I invite the author to work for a large corp or a government and try and improve things. The most supportive people for improvements will be your team. The least supportive will be the higher-level managers. And no, the Director of Transportation is not the real manager. That's the mayor or city council.
Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).
A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.
Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.
In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.
Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.
For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.
Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.
Maybe the Will To Have Nice Things is solved by culture not process.
I’ve seen the above too. Imbuing an organisation with the Will To Have Nice Things seems unsolved because, as you say, the value is constantly traded off against more measurable outcomes.
I think the solution has to be building and rewarding a culture of doing the right thing, taking pride in delivering not just to spec but excellence. So when the org plan demands a giant construction barrier near the kids playpark of course the person responsible also commissions a dinosaur mural for it. Not because it’s a KPI or was debated and traded off on the functional spec but as a matter of personal and professional pride.
Interestingly I think the drop in taking pride in your work coincides with the relative anonymity of society in which reputation is no longer tracked through past interactions or word of mouth but is institutionalised in rating systems. This is perhaps related to why a more insular and smaller society in Japan has managed to retain it to a higher degree. Certainly there are elite groups around the world in which everyone knows the other players and so reputation and (from an institutional perspective) over-delivery are still valued, and these groups are the ones that accomplish otherwise unachievable advances. The broader anonymous society that delivers only to spec ends up with leaky abstractions that gradually collapses under its own weight of incompetence once the former culture of Wanting Nice Things degrades to Somebody Else’s Problem.
If true this predicts a
stable rule-of-law-based society or organisation in which the most powerful all know each other and which otherwise is broken into small mostly-stable communities would foster the Will To Have Nice Things more than an anonymous interchangeable mass would.
I can hear patio11 reminding me that this should have been a blog post.
I imagine so. You need agreement on "nice things" first.
My city constantly fights over this. Is a mural a nice thing or is the tax saving? Heck, is colour printing too much? I've heard people whine about them printing city handouts for council in colour.
It’s not a case of not caring, but rather caring about something else more. If you live in a country that emphasizes profit and watching out for self as priority then yeah you’re not going to get a whole lot of wholesome selfless community minded behavior.
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015.
The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11.
The world most of us grew up in is lost.
So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort?
Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse.
They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.
It's most likely capitalism doing this to us. A lot of people are disenfranchised in society, most are alienated from their labor, don't feel happy about the work they do –if they have any control over it at all. Most of us don't have "third places" we go every day, we don't spend our days hanging out with our loved ones. Most of us are mainly isolated, maybe not intentionally, but work-rest-sleep-work cycle doesn't leave a lot of room for recreation or socializing.
Money doesn't fix any of our problems either, even if you're one of the few lucky to have enough of it, you can't possibly be happy living society perpetually decaying. We'll always be as happy as our neighbor.
Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.
I agree with author's frustrations. So many things could be better if people cared and did the right thing.
Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.
In smaller communities, people care more. There is a reputation social cost associated with being a self-centered asshole when everyone knows each other. If one doesn't care about others, they'll soon find themselves excluded from social circles, not offered help when they need it, and similar.
This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.
This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.
There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.
There must be a name for this bias. "Everyone else's stuff sucks but the reason my stuff sucks is because someone is keeping me from doing good work"
Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
Illusory superiority - "a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their abilities compared to others"
We have really developed an entire culture in the US around illusory superiority.
It seems like the average person in 2025 thinks they are above average in basically everything.
I think this is a big reason why sports betting has taken off the way it has in the US. Every sports fan basically thinks they are way above average in their understanding of sports.
Well, we live in a punitive culture that ascribes great social value to appearances.
To your example, if I tell my friends that I had a tough day at work because the old code was broken I will get more sympathy then if I say I wrote some shitty code last week and it made my day awful.
Another example, in a minor traffic accident, it might be nice to say "oh I'm sorry that was my fault" but I would be penalized by my insurance carrier for making such a statement.
We have successfully integrated the results of capitalism and game theory directly into our language. And I believe that has a knock on effect: people's actions follow from their thoughts which are influenced by the set of things they're allowed to or not allowed to vocalize.
We have aggressively evolved away from anything like humility or empathy being expressed in this culture because we punish that behavior.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care.
The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.
Bloggers mention Musk like they do Trump to politicize their writing for some stupid reason. Ignoring it isn't part of any problem. Starting a flame war over it is.
I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.
Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.
On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.
I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.
This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.
In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.
You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.
I admit the article is rather whiny but it did resonate a bit with me.
A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.
I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”
In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.
I find that caring, and networking with other people who care, at work can be a huge career boost in the long term. So I'm not even sure the not-caring people are winning, long term, but maybe they also don't can't about that.
My experience is that such indifference comes with seniority. Unfortunately most people tend to try and change things outside of their control, ignoring what they can change and quickly burn out. With that said:
> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)
This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.
Most people don't care about doing their jobs well because they don't really choose what they work on, they don't own the product they're working on and don't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They know working harder won't improve their material condition either, only tire them more, seemingly pointlessly.
And so society turns to sh*t, but a lot of value is created for shareholders in the process, so who cares?
You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.
Most Karen's are actually great. We only hear about the unhinged ones on social media because the algorithm rewards outrage. But most Karen's are kind and they care and they work hard and they set an example for all of us. It's the Karen's in the world that keep all the small things from being shitty all the time.
They're called "Karens" because they're unhinged, not because of whatever other criteria you're imagining. The kind people you're referring to aren't Karens.
No there is most definitely more to it. There is a generalized trend as to what unhinged social media Karens care about. A Karen isn't a Karen if she is just spouting conspiracy theories loudly at you. She is only a Karen if she is adamant that you follow the established rules of good society, whatever she is convinced that these rules are. Karens value "good" group behavior, whatever their definition of good is, and they are willing to tell you to get in line. Karens care that you don't put external costs onto others. Karens care.
A "hinged" Karen is your common group mom stereotype, who makes sure everybody is doing well and that everyone understands what is up and is following along. She has no problem telling you what you should and shouldn't be doing, but you love it because she is lovely. Hinged Karens are simultaneously the scaffolding and lubrication of good society.
Have you thought this through? Incessant requests for an unimportant matter is a sure way to have those in charge of said matters not care, not only about that particular request but requests in general or the desires of requesters.
If it’s unimportant then why is there a rule against it? Why did everyone agree to this rule when they bought a home there if it didn’t matter? Clearly it exists for a reason and if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless
I don’t think it’s black and white to think, hey that door isn’t an approved color, and I care about community standards, so I’m going to submit a note on it
I wouldn’t personally do this but I can see how someone would without it being mean spirited
Really depends on the context. And the rule. Some rules are stupid, some situations have no rules but "expectations" ("Have it your way" is a famous slogan arguably perverted by reasoning for a few people). The rules could be made for powertripping reasons or safety reasons.
> Why did everyone agree to this rule when they bought a home there if it didn’t matter?
I don't think you have thought this through. People are generally not asked about every bylaw individually. Maybe they bought the house because it was close to work. Or maybe they bought the house to get the kids into a good school. Maybe they bought the house because they just loved the garden. Or maybe they bought it because that was the only one they could afford after a long search and they were exhausted and just wanted to live somewhere.
Even if they read the rules maybe they cared about 80% of them and couldn't give a hoot about that specific one. (Maybe they like that their neighbour can't turn their front yard into a mechanic shop, but they don't care what colour their door is. That sort of thing.)
They might have agreed to it in a legalistic sense. As in they signed a piece of paper which referred to an other piece of paper which had this rule in it among many others. But you can't pretend that that means they "agreed" to it in the common sense meaning.
> Clearly it exists for a reason
That is not always clear. No.
> if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless
Some rules are completely pointless. Weather or not they are enforced is a different point. But either way enforcing it doesn't make it have a point if it had none to begin with.
Indeed. Imagine a neighbor who was upset that people didn't care enough to clear the parkway of leaves and selflessly dedicated himself to spend hours loudly leaf-blowing the whole neighborhood.
You bring up an important adjacent point. OP believes bikers and non-drivers are substantial stakeholders, but ignores that the tax complainers and drivers may prefer the world that way. And they do hound council.
I feel this way a lot, i would suspect however that these "1% improvements" are really obvious to some people and completely not obvious to the person who did it.
People are lazy, which means if it isnt obvious to them, or more importantly, if they don't see a direct incentive to their life, they don't do it.
In reality "1% effort" probably looks like 10-50+% effort... and society would be 10-1000x better for it but the incentives are wrong.
This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.
Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).
So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.
To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?
I used to care so much 10 years ago. I didn't have to factor the state of the world or society into all my decision. I trusted society fully like I trusted air.
Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.
Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.
I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.
In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.
In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.
> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.
This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.
Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.
At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.
This is a great way to get all doctors who care out of the profession.
Healthcare is always going to have the most severe consequences when mistakes are made. Diagnosis are also hard and there are many risks with treatments. If you are going to demand punishment for mistakes consider punishing yourself next time you make a normal mistake at your job.
The thing is, I care a lot when I make a mistake. To me some kind of “punishment” wouldn’t make a dent. I already imagine I do get “punished” for my mistakes, in the form of reputation and missed opportunities down the line (even if that may not be strictly true).
But if you don’t care and you expect zero consequences, then yes: “punishment” would make a dent.
And to be clear, the kind of “punishment” I think is needed is e.g. that a regulatory authority keeps a score of severe misdiagnosis that is publicly accessible. Every doctor would probably have a few in their career, nothing to worry about. But if you routinely misdiagnose patients then it’s going to add up over the years.
In the US your insurance is literally worthless. Doctors make more money referring doctors to bullshit specialists then doing their job. I think you’re right about Swedish cheese. It does taste better.
If nobody cared, art would not exists. Nobody would do science. Civilisations would not be built. Health care would not exists. And nobody enjoys living in a shit hole. People collectively do make decisions which are selfless, so long they know there is a positive outcome. People stop caring about something soon as they recognise their efforts is wasted or it's all for nothing.
90% of "not caring" is actually external limitations where trying to overcome those would so far outweigh any benefit or even tangentially have anything to do with the original problem, that you must be a lunatic to waste energy trying to change it.
His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.
America glorifies hustlers and hustle culture. Society is about bragging and showing off how successful you and your family are compared to everyone else. What do you expect then? Of course no one cares enough to do more than they have to to get ahead of the other guy!
He's really talking about aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) and how we lost the ability do admire beautiful things. The only means we have to assess & debate merit are quantitative (and lossy) so the grotesque dominates.
There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)
I don't have faith that this is something we can fix in the short term because most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first. I'm not saying that the opposite is good either, but we should find a balance in between. I also feel like that we are all becoming more disconnected, alone, and where the center of gravity is only ourself. Despite my premise, I still have some hopes for future generations, but unfortunately I think that things will get way worse before correcting.
> most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first
This is definitely intertwined with rampant individualism, but I don't think it's just our education or lack thereof that's to blame. It's also the environment we're born into and therefore never really question where it leads us and why. Century of the Self [0] makes an excellent case for where/how things went wrong, and we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.
For those comparing post-WWII to now, the only real difference seems to be capitalism becoming ever more desperate to squeeze all remaining profits. Capital concentrates [1] and profits continue to trend toward zero as Marx warned they would. It's a fundamental contradiction built into capitalism that has yet to be addressed except for by those few who are already disproportionately benefiting from the arrangement at everyone else's expense.
Consider how the average baby boomer was treated by their company of employment compared to the average worker in the 21st century. Employers now make it painfully obvious that everybody is disposable, and the only thing that matters are the metrics tied to their own compensation, no matter how disconnected that is from producing results that are actually good for society. The workers are all incentivized to become back-stabbing careerist wolves fighting and hoarding secrets instead of cooperating to build actual Good Things. The best way to get a raise is to jump ship to another company. Etc.
Given all of the above, it'd be very strange if we didn't end up in the hellscape that we are currently in.
> we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.
While I haven't read Century of the Self, I will say that most of East Asia outside of China and NK are fiercely capitalistic. Ads are everywhere and obvious. There's a huge focus on consumption and status. There's generally much looser restrictions on zoning, gambling, and prostitution than the West. And yet the cultures continue being a lot more collective and understanding of their fellow person. South Asia is less capitalistic (having transitioned from more socialistic modes of economic organization somewhat recently), but is still quite capitalistic.
I think capitalism might exacerbate this in the West but it is fundamentally a Western problem. Most of East and South Asia still operates on an extended family model where there's an expectation that when a person or a family is having a hard time they take resources from their family and when they're in a position to do well they give resources to their struggling family members. Lots of extended families have family members who are ... problematic. Many of these folks have gambling issues, can't hold down jobs, have mental health problems, etc. But families support them. They never really thrive but they usually have food, shelter, companionship, and understanding around them. I think this creates a level of empathy that's just absent from Western society.
My partner and I are Asian but we have caucasian friends. Many of our caucasian friends will cut off problematic family members immediately. Indeed a lot of caucasians I know are very quick to cut people they don't like or who don't align with their values out of their life. This culture of individual supremacy is what I think really plagues the west which used to at one time have a less individualistic nature and now finds its hyper atomization eating away at the foundations of its societies.
Yes, this is the correct understanding of the problem. The thing is, correctly understanding the problem is highly disincentivized, much less doing anything about it.
Whatever your locality is, there are existing opportunities to volunteer. Even if you don't particularly care about whatever that organization does, it's a great place to meet people who care, and they usually care about more than one thing. Maybe ask them about mutual aid.
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There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.
In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?
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Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.
The sad game theory result of this is that no one ends up caring or comes to the conclusion there is no point of caring. Wonder if it is at all possible to reverse it once you fall in this cycle.
What make OP think they do not care? They apparently care about themselves more than anybody else to not care about anyone else. What is it called: selfishness!
I ran out of (good) things to watch on Netflix so I watched a couple of Japanese drama shows (TBS product I think). At first it seems boring as heck: no sex, no violence. But after a while, I think I got hooked. The usual theme is always something around respect, self-sacrifice, leaving a place better than when you found it kind of feeling. It is just a departure from the usual US based drama.
Is it just the general direction we in the US live everyday for the last decade?
Or I guess, put another way,
IMO this is about Apathy. The feeling where doing things or not doing them, what's it matter anyways.
I think, a lot of the apocalyptic sentiment lately has a lot to do with it. Climate change is already ruining things and will only get worse and also has started getting worse faster. Politically, economically, things are pretty hopeless. What use is picking up trash or wearing a nice shirt in the face of all of this. What are we building towards, and does anything I do mean anything
Societies decide if they are pro-social or anti-social.
Pro-social is more work. It’s harder. It is caring, sensitive, flexible. You have to give a shit because society actively disapproves of and discourages not giving a shit. No one wants to be your friend cus your the asshole who doesn’t give a shit.
Anti-social is easier: you don’t have to care. My industrial effluent will cause cancer? I don’t care. My bigass truck is more likely to kill pedestrians? I don’t care. Masking during a pandemic jmight save someone else’s life? I don’t care.
Everyone wants to live in a prosocial society. Certainly many people complain about the fact that society isn’t pro-social, yet themselves are deeply anti-social.
“No one wants to work! Do you pay a living wage? Benefits? Heck no, my business wouldn’t be as profitable”
Unfortunately, the ability to freeload off the collective relatively more pro-social past is coming to a rapid end.
Why should someone working at big tech care? Their mission is , generally , to 'capture value' from elsewhere and in the process make the world worse. Hard mission to get behind.
And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.
All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important
> And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
Because their actions affect the customers they interact with, who have no direct bearing on their jobs or salaries. To make your customers suffer because you're angry at your boss is misdirected at best, and selfish at worst.
No that's true-
I totally believe that everything is connected, that by putting good energy into the world you make other people's lives better and in return feel good about yourself and inspire others to do good as well.
There's a certain amount of lack of agency and connection that the modern worlds taken from us though. A McD's employee doesn't see the same customer twice. They're thoroughly disconnected from whether the company makes record profits or not. They are not empowered to change things. And management is often putting out bad energy.
The incentives are such that caring is more effort than not and doesn't accomplish much other than appealing to internal pride. If that gets grinded down its over.
it's a chain of broken windows. Their employers should care about making sure the primary interface with business cares. But they don't. So it goes down the chain until we simply say "7/11 is a sad place to be"
Agreed about Musk.
Elon Musk as an example of caring, is ignorant of his actions vs his narrative.
Example him saying he says he's the best diablo player in the world, vs seeing him play poorly.
We live in a world full of people doing good who don't do it for the "player 1 energy"
I think there's an undertone of why should I care? or the idea of motivation. In Japan, theres definitely a social pressure to care, only because you'll become ostracized if you don't. In the west there are phrases from pop culture such as,"If it ain't broke don't fix it, Welp not my problem, ..." So the question is where does this stem from. Why do we not care?
Nowadays, the scope of what I can care about is drastically reduced.
But one area where I don't allow care to be dissolved (apart from my family) is the work I do.
I had to leave a job where co-workers wouldn't care and it was about to influence my own level of care by the end.
Zooming out of your own world is a gift that can be taught.
You have a gift that 100% makes your life easier, with the side effect of the occasional frustration.
I feel compassion for those people who live in their own body and keep hitting walls.
I moved to Norway 5 years ago and I can say pretty confidently that everyone cares here. I haven’t been to Japan so can’t compare to that, but I haven’t experienced any of the not-caring examples you described at all.
It really sucks to be the one person who cares amongst colleagues that don’t care. You’re seen as creating work for others, making waves, causing instability, etc etc. Or because you care, you get burned out by trying to fix everything.
People obviously "care", as in: we are social animals. We survived and thrived through coexistence and caring.
But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?
When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.
One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".
Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.
Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.
Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.
But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:
As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.
Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.
This person is missing that modern global society is rigidly organized around principles of competition. It's not the case that people don't care -- instead we are systemically pressured into putting all of our care into getting one over everyone else and taking care of our own. A society organized around different principles would give us the space to care about our collective wellbeing. Hopefully one day we'll get there.
My instinctive, gut reaction is to hate this article, because I suspect its written by the kind of person who thinks they are better than everyone else.
But on deeper reflection I think they are actually right. Our civilisation became great because people took pride in their work - and not just at the crop level: the average poor tailor or cobbler would take 100x more pride in their work than the average government employee today. This is a problem — I suspect largely caused by the internet and technology warping people’s reward mechanisms - and it needs addressing.
Far as the bike lane/sign thing goes at least there’s a bike lane. Many streets in Seattle don’t even have a sidewalk let alone a bike lane. And I got hit by a car while biking in seattle a few years ago.
Either way wear a helmet while biking
Republicans want to tear government apart and privatize everything. Democrats have big ideas but sacrifice them on the altar of protecting public unions. Nobody fights for good government. I'm sick and tired of the endless big vs small government argument, I want to vote for good effective responsive government, good hang for the tax buck whatever it's size.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
It's a sad realization. When our culture only values profit as a measure of success there is a strong incentive to cut down costs (now) in exchange for quality (that will only be perceived in the future). It slowly moves down the threshold, bit by bit, until you suddenly realize how much we all lost for a few very rich people to become a little bit richer.
I think the undue romanticism for East Asian societies is an instance of not caring. I think it’s racist too.
East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.
I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.
I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer.
I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.
Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.
I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.
>Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck.
Oh they care... about money. We're being sold out but keep re-electing the same perpetrators simply because "it's better than the other person".
Meanwhile a third of our country is a mix of "not caring" or legitmately unable to keep dates in mind and find a poll booth to vote. Who knows how things would change if voting was compulsory, as was receiving a ballot in the mail.
I’m not advocating for anything. I’m pointing out the cause of the effect you’re noting.
Concretely, I suspect it’s a side effect of ‘how dare they’ type political attacks and increasing balkanization. What a lot of folks would call ‘California style politics’.
Short of everyone taking a step back and actually evaluating what they want/need as people and having a productive conversation about it and a useful compromise (hah!), I imagine we’ll just end up with a ‘strong man’ who can do all the ‘bad things’ necessary to pull everyone together into a consistent direction despite whatever hate might be thrown in their direction.
Though typically that is just what someone pretends to be so they can loot everything… at least unless people are really careful to look at the persons track record of outcomes instead of what they are saying right now. And since everyone will be all angry and pissed off while this happens, lots of room for various bullshit to happen, ‘others’ to be made and punished, etc, etc.
Oh wait….
And yes I know this is a symptom of the problem, but I’ve also literally had enough of my life destroyed trying to discuss elements of this already to not do anything else. Murder anyone trying to be a hero, and what else is going to happen? You’ll either have villains, dead bodies, or cowards.
What the author of this post is actually mad about is that most people don't care about him. The people who designed the DMV don't care about him. The people who made the crappy Oracle HR software he probably has to use don't care about him. The people who designed the bike lanes don't care about him.
It's not their job to. They have about a million other priorities, they're not sorry about it, and they shouldn't be.
The DMV, the HR software people, the engineering people, they care about lots of things: Following the laws they are required to follow; maintaining regulatory compliance. Handling the latest set of changes and rules from a higher office who demands they be implemented yesterday. Not overwhelming the underpaid staff they have on-hand. Figuring out how to deal with a generally unpleasant general public, including the guy who wrote this. Holding back an ounce of sanity so they can get home at the end of the day and be happy and not drink themselves to death.
The reality is that life is a series of tradeoffs. Even if I am giving 100% at work (and I have a family and a life, so often I am not), that 100% does not get allocated entirely or even mostly to "deliver the best experience for the specific needs of the author of this article." It's dedicated to getting work out the door at an acceptable level of quality; monitoring our systems so they don't crash and lose us money; complying with the rules and procedures my employer demands I comply with; being tolerable and decent to my colleagues so they don't resent me and make my life harder. If I think about the needs of one specific customer out of the millions that transact business with my employer every day, it's because something extraordinary has happened with implications for one of the things above.
What sets people like Elon apart is that they are single-mindedly dedicated to getting people to appease them, and also pretty good at it. All Elon cares about is whatever interests him day-to-day, his ego, his impact on the world, whether people like him or hate him. He's "successful", by this author's metric, because he's self-obsessed.
All that said, the UK has a phrase for someone who cares only to do the bare minimum: a jobsworth, as in, more than my job's worth. A jobsworth is unhelpful on purpose, or because enforcing apathy is more valuable to them than doing anything that might impose upon them later an obligation to act. The thing is - those people are universally reviled. They are not liked or approved of in society. They're also a severe minority.
Most people are doing their best to stay above water on a dozen different things, and you are only one of them. The author ought to have some humility and realize that.
Then why the huge disparity between cultural attitudes in the USA vs. Japan? Clearly the Japanese tend to take more pride of ownership, which is OP's point.
He only thinks it's that way because in Japan, he's the big man with the big bucks the whole society caters to. An average Japanese person probably makes a terrible salary, has few if any economic prospects, sees a stagnant economy, and also is very unlikely to even start a family. I'd much rather have a family than have store clerks obsses about serving me.
If you have tons of money in Seattle area and live in an exurb, and only go to Seattle for the orchestra and a baseball game in a box, you probably think everyone in America cares too
Those are a lot of very wrong assumptions. Salaries aren't US level but more than liveable because even most non-tokyo housing is perfectly reasonable. The economny is stagnant (and now recessionary) but they have a decent amount of safety nets. They don't need to worry about walking to work one day to be locked out or being in debt if they collapse (yes, there are some very dark work patterns to "lay off", but you won't suddenly have zero salary next month).
>I'd much rather have a family than have store clerks obsses about serving me.
Okay, the US has neither. So...
>If you have tons of money in Seattle area and live in an exurb, and only go to Seattle for the orchestra and a baseball game in a box, you probably think everyone in America cares too
These are small micro-behaviors, not a larger mindset. Even a rich tourist would notice the difference between someone taking your ticket for an orcheastra and going to a corner store in Japan.
I don't think they are wrong assumptions. Japan has higher suicide rates, lower rate of having kids, and on and on.
And like I said, obviously a rich tourist is treated better. The average Japanese person doesn't benefit from these things because the average Japanese person lives in a cramped, barely livable closet-sized apartment in a huge city where costs are probably not close to wages
They are wrong assumptions. They aren't so signifigantly high that they fundamentally affect the perceptions of the culture. Japan is 14.29 per 100k suicide rate. the US has 14.21. Japan has something low like 1.2 kids per family, the US has 1.66, also pretty dang low. You gotta do a lot of heavy lifting to say those differences make for a much worse culture.
>obviously a rich tourist is treated better. The average Japanese person doesn't benefit from these things because the average Japanese person lives in a cramped, barely livable closet-sized apartment in a huge city where costs are probably not close to wages
Tourism goes both ways. You can switch Japanese with American and this metaphor is just as apt. You're missing a lot of subtleties and cultural difference just saying "well Americans make more money on average" while comparing the quality of life of the lower compensated parts of each society.
Fair play. I'm open more to the idea that a culture where people care about the greater good makes more of a difference. Haven't seen it myself, and I'm still skeptical that if he were an average Japanese person he'd see it the same way. But your argument is convincing.
It's cultural. Japan and Asian in general is a lot more conformist and taught to care about the larger society. Huge contrast of the individualism of US enforcing "hustle culture" and "dog eat dog world".
Japan also has an entire group of people so disillusioned with society they completely lock themselves off from it (0), record high suicide rates (1), record low fertility rates (2), and a far lower rate of self-reported happiness.
I don't know why they prioritize differently, but I don't think it's working out for them.
Which set of tradeoffs would you rather live under?
>Which set of tradeoffs would you rather live under?
I'll take the one that doesn't lay me over every year to hit record profits, thanks. There's degrees of not caring and the US is very far on the "you are just a number" peg. The fake drinking parties at least try to make me feel involved.
This post is angry detritus. I’m sorry someone upset you recently Grant, but seriously?
Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.
And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”
This article resonated with me and OP was able to clearly articulate what I have been feeling pretty much my entire life. It’s probably not as extreme as OP makes it sound but it’s there.
Enough to make you feel defeated. The dreaded feeling of “yeah we are going to be so f*cked 100 years from now” because no one gives a shit. In Japan this feeling transforms into optimism and hope because people generally do care and take things seriously. It has given me the strength to care and try to do my best. The power not be an asshole to the person next to me. The ability to see the bigger picture.
Karl Marx talked about alienation -- we are alienated from our work, we are alienated from one another, and eventually alienated from our humanity.
I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product.
You can pay people to care, for agile, but ultimately the alienation wins. The solution? I'm not sure! Probably several possible things, not least of which is probably work that's focused on building one's community and helping meet their needs.
Ctrl+F'ed to see if anyone mentioned alienation, since this post basically seems to be OP talking about alienation without them knowing.
I think fundamentally if we want people to care about things again, we are going to need to give them ownership of the things they produce. Otherwise, why would anyone care?
In my experience, most people don't care because they are lazy. Initiative on the job requires effort, IF they're allowed to have initiative. If someone is put into a thinking job, but are more suited to have an assembly line job, failure will ensue.
The 12 years or so I have lived in America I have observed that people always keep the door open for those walking behind them.
Always. Everywhere. DC, Boston, LA, New York, Seattle, Cupertino, everywhere.
Nobody cares about anything.
Somebody cares about something.
Everybody cares about everything.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. This makes me optimistic. At least, its nice that people care to hold doors open : )
I like to think I care about putting out good quality work, but, the nature of agile and especially standups and reviews means I am under pressure each day to be able to say I have completed a jira story.
If that story's acceptance criteria doesn't say "take the time to make this perfect" which of course it doesn't, and mr big balls bullied us into it being pointed a 2, then am I going to spend an extra day or two really making it perfect with perfect test coverage etc? When I am surrounded by (competing with) contractors who don't have to do anything other than churn out sprint work and rack up points?
On Japan caring so much:
They live in a society where pretty much everyone's ancestors are from the same geographical location, they all look similar, they are basically a nationalistic society, they all feel "Japanese" and they all pull together in the same direction more or less.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.
The sad part, the "do not care" attitude is infectious. Maybe there is a bright-eyed programmer who just joined and who wants to make UX better.
They are full of enthusiasm, but nobody (around them) cares.
They are fixing the most annoying bugs that users complained forever about.. but they is not recognized, because nobody (around them) cares.
They hope to show a good example but nobody cares. Instead they get negative feedback when instead of blindly implementing horribly-designed feature, they are trying to fix it so it won't be so user-hostile.
Eventually they give up and stop caring. When asked what they like about the job, their answer is "stability" and "job security".
These people show up, offer trivially incorrect or untenable solutions to the trickiest problems. Rarely do they have the insight that fixes them. Often they do things that introduce more risk.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No.
It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)
But wait, the author understands this!:
> Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.
I don't think it's wise to assume everyone is going to be perfect at their job. Yes, that bike line sucks. But haven't you ever made a mistake at your job? Expecting everything to work perfectly in life is a recipe for misery.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face act. On the surface they pretend to care but well, People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
Nah, I moved from a big city where people are feeling squashed by the pressure, to a small town, where people feel a bit more relaxed, and I am constantly surprised by how much of a shit people give. I’m not advocating for small towns here, I like the city, I’m advocating for making a society where we act like people matter and stop calling anyone who doesn’t want to kick everyone in the teeth to get ahead a communist, and stop calling people who do inspiring visionaries
I've lived in most every manner of setting the US has to offer. The best by far is the micro-urban settings. Where as opposed to a small town with strip malls and neighborhoods, there is high density around an urban center that pretty much immediately transitions to rural. That way you can still have walkability and the mix of bars / restaurants / activities that urban settings inspire without all the overhead of actual large cities. Even when I lived in large cities I spent most of my time in just a few blocks. So a few blocks of city and then all the recreational activities of rural areas is pretty great.
There's still issues with people not caring, but it seems like those are more so outliers than anywhere near the norm and it's a lot more expedient to get in contact with someone that does care and can take actionable measures where there is a problem.
Just as an example there was a water leak from the municipal system in the right of way in front of my house. It was repaired quickly but they had to dig up a lot of the yard, which they filled back in. But after a few heavy rains it washed out a fair amount. It was a little annoying but I just said "Oh well". A few years ago in Atlanta my neighbors had reported a sinkhole FOR YEARS, and nothing was done about it until it finally caved in and swallowed an entire intersection.
I had a friend come over though and this had been like 3 months and he asked about the hole. I told him the situation and he just said "Call the city and tell them you need dirt." So I did, and told someone that took a message. A couple hours later they called me back and confirmed my address and that I needed dirt. He said they were busy but would do it tomorrow, and sure enough the next day they came with a dump truck, a trailer of equipment and filled in the hole, compacted the area, smoothed it all out and planted grass. All in 24 hours for a problem that impacted no one but me.
> I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.
This is dumb. Of course people enjoy job stability. It's irrational to draw a line from "I value being able to feed my family" to "I do not care about actually doing my job".
And beyond that, does the author actually know why it takes 18 months to get a permit? Does it actually take that long? Or is he doing a stand-up bit, and that's just a line that's designed to elicit the 2 seconds of laughter from the audience as a punchline?
> But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
So the author cares, but is sufficiently burned out that he's done caring. I wonder what he'd answer when he finds his magical Japan-like community - presumably one with stability - and is asked what his favorite part of living there is.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face . People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
It's interesting how people react first when you start acting different, doing little things like picking up garbage you didn't throw on the ground.
Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?
I just ask: Why not ME?
After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.
It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.
What a worthless rant. There are big problems and there are small problems and/or inconveniences. People do care, when they have a budget for caring. Unfortunately the modern world depletes that budget with the day-to-day life. I live close to where the author does and trust me, the city has way bigger problems to deal with than the nitpicky bullshit OP is calling out. In the suburb I live in, we have an app where the city does receive and implement reasonable recommendations. The reason why is that it's a small town with large pockets.
The rest of the things are just rants aimed at society? big tech? I don't get it.
> When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
No. Bullshit take. I used to care. But then in 2008, my employer showed me that I'm not the 'developer! developer! developer!' Steve Ballmer was excited about, I'm just a number on a spreadsheet governed by some pencil pushers in finance. All employers since have showed me again and again that if times are tough, I'm the ballast the company can shed to stay afloat. And in the past 4-5 years they've showed me I'm ballast even if the company is doing great, because 'activist' investors say so. So why should I care? I care about my family, I care about my personal projects, I care about my craft and I care about my health and the people around me. Do I care about your little annoying bug? Fuck no. Why would I? It's not even my intellectual property.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
I have. It's actually called the DOL where we live, OP. And it's great. I need to renew my license in person because of my disability and it takes me 15 minutes in-and-out, I barely have to stay in line. I also renew my car tabs online exclusively with 0 problems. I really don't understand the DMV meme, at least in Washington state.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
Oh, you shouldn't have gone there, you lost all credibility my friend.
The Maryland DMV used to be quite efficient. Once, having mislaid my driver's license (at my mother-in-law's, 100 miles away), I drove to the Wheaton DMV, and was out within 20 minutes with a new license.
This was about two years before 9/11, after which a whole lot of rules came down about verifying one's identity, and the DMV then crawled.
"We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care"
In the hypothetical world where Im the Supreme Leader, there are crack teams of sharpshooters that who get placed around randomly selected grocery store parking lots dealing out summery justice to people that dont return their shopping carts.
Maybe I'll retire to one. Will I be welcome as a transgender person? How far do I need to drive for tofu? I've been eating a lot the last few weeks and I don't want to give it up
I thought about this the other day and came up with a theory that people _do_ care if the thing they are doing has their name associated with it for everyone to see (in theory).
Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons
Human beings evolved to be surprisingly efficient. At any give moment, we are running in our heads a statistical analysis with a massive number of simultaneous inputs. We think about what we need, prioritize this list by level of necessity, analyze the perceived costs, multiply by probability of success, and divide by predicted time to reward. From this analysis, we make our choices whether or not to take action. In a system where people generally already have what they need, caring would be an inefficiency and an aberration. We have a salary, a house, food, water, companionship. We are comfortable. Why would a comfortable man care? To care for the sake of caring goes against 6 million years of evolution.
My hot take on this is that it is due to a lack of energy. I liked the phrase “a will to have nice things.”
We all want the nice things. However, they require conscientiousness. People who are run down and lack energy struggle with conscientiousness.
So why are we all rundown and lacking the energy required to have nice things? There are many reasons, some controversial.
One that is not so controversial is the industrialization of food. As the quality of food that our mothers consume has degraded, so have their offspring. I believe in TCM this concept is called maternal jing, or the essential life essence that you receive from your mother. Healthy moms breed a healthy populace. This is a problem generations in the making that keeps getting worse.
One that is more controversial is the impact of banking. Money is the life blood of society, and we’ve given bankers the right to siphon off our blood as they see fit. Generations of wealth transfer from the working class to bankers has left the populace anemic.
Japan has it better because they have maintained a more traditional way of life.
I care way too much and it causes burnout because those in power do not care.
That's probably my take on this: those in power do not care anymore. Money has turned into political influence in America, so now politicians are there for money first of all, and the needs of their communities are an afterthought. Even back in the day when you had shitty politicians or robber-barons, they still wanted their local area and America to succeed because they lived there, but in today's world the oligarchs and their appointed cronies (execs, upper management, etc.) just jet around the planet and could not care less about how well people are doing in one area of the world over another. This leads to the regular American seeing the lack of responsibility and lack of punishment for injustice and they also stop following the rules or caring about doing a good job, or they are too busy to do so, and you can't really blame them.
Solution: Money out of politics first, then we need to instill a pride and responsibility for the local community into the new generations of Americans, but in a non-propagandized way because they actually have to have real pride and not some fake patriotism like today.
I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.
I recently used the system to order a bunch of chicken nuggets for my four kids. When my order came out, I got a bunch of spicy nuggets. If you have young kids, you know that this is a disaster. Anyway, I said, "Uh, spicy nuggets? That's not what I ordered." The supervisor sighed and immediately said that I could keep them if I wanted to, but he'd fast-track a new order of regular nuggets for me (on the house, of course). Then he started complaining about how the kiosk UI confusingly puts the spicy nuggets as the first choice, so this happens all the time.
Meanwhile, an old man was hollering about how he wanted to pay with cash, but the kiosk wouldn't take cash, so another employee was trying to figure out how to transfer his order to the register at the counter to take his payment.
So in addition to being a horrible experience for customers, this whole thing appeared to be a disaster for the company in terms of both employee time and real money.
When I know what I want, I order at the counter, which is faster and there's never a queue because everyone else is using the kiosk. There isn't a cashier waiting but you just stand there and somebody will stop to take your order pretty quickly.
>a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture
>municipal governments
>department of transportation
>Street lights
>airport
What do they all have in common?
I think he dismissed “incentive systems” way too early.
I would also argue that people not following the law (e.g. not picking up their dog’s poop) or proper laws simply not existing (e.g. playing shitty EDM on a trail) have the same root cause.
Governments don’t care.
It’s still amazing to me how some smart people still want the government to manage an even larger part of their lives when we should clearly be pushing in the other direction.
Of course they only want this when The Party I Agree With(TM) is in power, not so much when it’s The Party I Don’t Agree With(TM).
My gut says that it isn't a lack of caring, or anything nefarious.
I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.
regarding "These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck."
I have a blinding street light across from my house. I complained to the city and they put a shade on the light so that my house is now in the dark. Its so much in case anyone else has the same problem.
Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.
There was a crummy, barely used, mostly abused, walking path with a sitting area near my old apartment complex. [0]
One day I decided to pick up all of the trash/cigarette butts, installed a butt bin, and planted a bed of flowers in the center. Big sunflowers.
The next day I went out and someone had destroyed the cigarette bin. When the flowers sprouted someone immediately doused them with something and set all but one on fire.
I replaced the butt bin same day and replanted the flowers the day after they were burned.
Nobody cared, they even resisted at first, but, eventually people stopped trashing the place and what was an empty sitting area started filling up with people.
It’s worth trying. Sometimes people will care.
[0]: Turns out (and I learned this way after the fact) that the path marked the site of a WWII POW work camp. I didn’t know this but German prisoners were shipped to the US to make up for the farm labor shortage during by WWII.
Anyway, the path was a loop with a sitting area at the entrance. Imagine the most out of the way, inconvenient place you could put a plaque. That’s where they put it. The plaque informing you that your apartment complex was built on the former site of a Nazi work camp was at the very back of the loop with the text facing away from the path.
I had the great displeasure of working with a colleague who thought he was the only one who cared. He told me flat-out that "its OK to care!" during a disagreement.
I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.
Classically underspecified, you are right. The care has to be about others and respecting them, not about oneself. Like in a good partnership. Care about giving, not taking.
But as the article frustratedly states, it usually goes the other way. Like Jethro Tull progressing into desillusion from
Reading the original article I reflected: "I can totally see how this can happen, but for some reason it doesn't happen where I live"
I moved to Switzerland 9y ago. People care. I believe this is due to high trust society which evolved not that long ago from small, poor, tightly woven communities.
Of course, I'm kind of outside the "incentive system," so I do it for different reasons.
Yes, it's frustrating, when I encounter obvious "Person didn't care" stuff. Sometimes, it infuriates me, but usually, it helps me to feel that I need to care more about my own work.
I'm not sure that I buy that every example given is a "Person didn't care" instance. I feel that personal values may play a part, in interpreting the work.
Also, when you run large organizations/municipalities, small numbers become big numbers, quite easily, and you are often serving folks with very different priorities. Can't make everyone happy. Often, unfortunately, folks decide to make the weakest people unhappy.
Want people to care? Incentivize them. That's not just money. Treat the people (and their work) better. Hire and promote good managers. Stand up to unreasonable demands from above, etc. If you are an "above" person, then don't be insecure. Let the people under you, stand up to you, if you are being unreasonable. It really doesn't hurt as much as you might think. You always have the power to force your will, anyway, but I found that it was a good idea to listen to my employees.
When you deal with a wide variety of people, constraints, etc you develop processes to deliver output. The DMV is that way for a reason, sidewalks get made a particular way for a reason
And that’s that, you don’t rethink it every time. It’s all transactional. human APIs interfacing with other human APIs
It’s a long cry from the old timey village where you had people: Bob was the only baker, and your neighbor. You also need his help to shovel your driveway. But he needs your help to make house repairs and get eggs from your chickens. If you don’t care then you have longer term personal consequences.
That’s not the case today - if you don’t care and deliver subpar experiences, people rant then move on to their next transaction and you to yours. You aren’t affected one bit in the long run. (Assuming people don’t have a choice - if they do then you do care just enough to get the sale)
>White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.
I've always been sensitive to the flicker and broken colour spectrum of fluorescent lights, it has been a longstanding "How come everyone is so willing to spend all day every day under these horrible lights?" type pet peeve.
This guy has a problem with white LEDs and I'm not sure what his issue is. He really hates them but didn't explain why. I can't empathize, I don't understand.
I don't care because I honestly believe that caring in a world of stupid cunts is not worth the limited time I have on this Earth, which I'd rather spend doing things that make me happy, instead of being perpetually frustrated and disappointed. There are some people who keep pushing out good value despite the frustration and I think they're the real heroes, but I'm not a hero myself. BTW the society is constructed in such a way that I won't have kids so all of you can go fuck yourself once I die.
Contrary to the author's quip about incentive systems, I wish I'd learned earlier that it's a fool's errand to care about things that have no positive feedback loop, no relevancy in my life, that I have no actual influence over, or that are otherwise beyond my purview. To 21 year old me, and probably many others, it would seem heartless or self-serving, but by doing so I get to focus on the few things I can authentically care about without worrying about how much they're reciprocated, and I don't need to passive aggressively try to influence broader behavior indirectly. If a neighbor or random stranger needs a hand, I give it to them and don't ask for anything in return. Likewise if someone wants to strike up a convo. I give people my time and energy if I can afford to and want to. I try to make that possible more often than not, and it leaves me with a very healthy social life, along with a non-burnout inducing work life. Beyond that, it'd be self-destructive and non-economical.
I realized years ago that in retrospect it was stupid to care beyond what I was rewarded for caring about or that my success was measured by, which was time, not quality, or accessibility, or usability, or anything else, and that's usually the case. If you have 2 weeks to get something completed, and it's not in the definition of completed to make sure screen readers can parse the website or whatever, then it's not your job to do that unless you'd be there anyway and get the rest of the stuff done with time to spare.
If you work at the DMV, you're sure as hell not wise to try and fight for different higher level decisions, it's not worth losing it for, and you're not measured by how happy of a place it is. Sure, engage in your interactions with people with respect, but don't take on responsibilities you're not paid for.
That said, if you could otherwise afford to spend a bit more time or effort outside work on things that aren't entirely self-serving, after you've done things that do bring you only personal value, but deliberately choose not to all the time, then ya that's just lame af.
Lastly, I do ultimately agree that some people are just absolute careless assholes on an individual level or deeply antisocial unfortunately, and we shouldn't be cultivating that in our cities, but that's a different convo. The worst I tend to see on a daily basis is cigarettes being tossed on the sidewalk and dogshit left by owners who I'd prefer didn't have them.
I feel like I’ve been in his shoes before and they tend to run you toward running people away from you who do “care”…well they may not care about how long it takes a guy to get a shed approved or order McDonald’s (can a man claim to care who cares to wish to expedite his order of that?) or that nobody wants to help him lace the streets with dog crap sack sticks when they’re worried about actual human issues like they’re well-being, dignity and identity.
I’m conflicted by this article. Because I hate most of it, because I relate to it.
Institutional gripes are low hanging fruit that are only significant in relation to taking care of what’s relevant to a mundane life but not relevant at all to a life worth living and dying over as a man. Maybe a man-child, but not a man.
This reads like “Suicidal Tendencies All I wanted was my Pepsi” remixed into Yacht Rock. This is not a rant, but a wining pantomime griping over things that a town elder would roll his eyes over his grave and take pity on the youthful.
So yeah man, I felt you. I felt you. But I beg Allah that I never have to feel where you’re coming from again beyond knowing about how I once felt myself & the destruction it caused me and the disdain it arises from the people who I thought I was just trying to help.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.
Has the author been tested for ADHD? Not that people with ADHD are the only ones that care. They just care really hard about all the little things, and have a really hard time switching it off for their own benefit.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
How does the second part of this paragraph disprove "something something incentive systems" ?
I am sincerely curious, as I can't make the connection myself, and of course "something something incentive systems" would be exactly my argument.
Saying engineers don't care is victim blaming. The way to survive at a company with "blah blah incentives" is to _not care_. You have to stop caring until you have an opportunity to move to another job.
I think the author is very myopic in understanding that other people care - just not about the same things he cares for. Most people don't care about publicly available dog poop bags or fixing a random bike lane that's sort of wrong. In fact you could argue that the things he cares about are not the most important things. Other people might care more about family than work, or about animal activism than petitioning for green space. It's not that others don't care, they just care about different things - sometimes more important and sometimes less.
Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.
I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm.
I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.
It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.
this articles has a ton of typos but that reinforces the emotional state the author was - an emotional state that i think is becoming more and more common. theres an underlying anxiety here; the world you grew up in is gone. this is bad and we (the author and myself) are not falling victim to nostalgia. all the things i interact with are becoming more and more dysfunctional. everybody has their answer to whose fault it is, people to blame for the fact that things simply don’t work anymore, but i think an analysis of this “lack of care” or “i just dont dgaf” attitude on the part of the workers, the employees of the companies who, theoretically, make the USA and similar countries the beacons of good living that they appear to be, might be fruitful. i’ll definitely be thinking about this observation for a while.
I have a feeling this is a very common sentiment as one gets older though.
When you live somewhere where wages and costs diverge further and further every year, as you get to be 30-40-50-60, etc. you feel more and more like the world was better back then
I also think part of the realization is that as you grow up, the world was "whitewashed" for you when you were younger. Your parents took care of going to the DMV, or taking you to the dentist and paying / using insurance, and making sure there was someone to drive you there.
Now, you're the parent, and you have to figure out if you can drive your child, make sure they're covered by insurance, make sure you can pay the dentist if your insurance is maxed out for the year, heck, just in the last year, find a new dentist because the one you had for 20 years switched to "not taking Delta" and suddenly wants you to pay $500/checkup instead of previous $0, etc. And if you can't pay, well.. sucks to be you..
I'm in my 50s, and I kind of understand this attitude, and I also understand why people get cynical. I moved to the US due to finding someone to marry online (from Canada), and while I had heard some stories of how bad the US was, I felt like I had my eyes open going in, knew about insurance, etc. I never figured I'd have to worry about the government going openly hostile, somehow embracing Russia AND Nazis at the same time, etc - I always figured things would slowly improve over time (especially when Obama was elected), not get drastically worse. So I've stopped caring as much - during Covid, I canceled several charities we used to donate to regularly - suddenly, after feeling quite secure financially (not rich, but ok), I didn't feel that way anymore. I got laid off the day after my 50th birthday and after transferring to another position in the same company, again 1.5 years later and I stopped donating to the local food bank where I was employed. Finally found a job ~1 year later - actually with better pay, but less WFH and it's hard to go back.
Eventually life gets to you. Looking around, there are a whole lot of people who care greatly - but what they care about is hurting specific groups of "others" in specific ways.. Or in grifting as much $$ as possible. So now I don't care as much. I just want the ants to stop crawling into the house and the neighborhood dog to stop barking at night so I can sleep. Because I'm (*&@#$ TIRED.
Rich (relatively?) software bro wants other people to care more. Does not reflect on the economics. Everything is economic. Tech has exacerbated the hyperfinancialization, enshittification, and general reduction to meaninglessness of every action.
Caring requires time and energy. Most tech companies aim to consume every freaking instant of your life (or else they serve the other tech companies that do that). For many people there is little time or energy left to care (or there is a sense that there is little time or energy left). Gotta hustle more, gotta hurry up so I can look at my phone.
Caring is not financially rewarded. Caring is generally penalized because no one else cares, so you're just wasting your time. How many ppl in this world can say this: "There are legal jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they make the world shittier." Caring doesn't make you money, and money is what the world wants. Until that changes, the problem persists.
What's sticking out to author like a sore thumb is a normal for majority. One can not imagine a better way of things until they have experienced a better one. Even if they are badly bitten by one, majority still can't come up with any better idea.
It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.
I don't like this post, mainly because I think I don't like the attitude behind it. It seems somewhat obvious to me that people who do care exist and are out there; all you have to do is go and ask people what they care about and you'll get some interesting answers. You can choose to view the world as having no one who cares, but that seems seems a distorted way of viewing the world. And distorted in way that will make you more lonely, since you aren't looking for other people like yourself, since you've concluded they don't exist.
I read the blog post feeling the author's rage, but your insight is far more important. Humanity's collective goodwill is stifled by friction and inertia while moneyed interests are given jetpacks.
When people ask me what cope is, I'll be pointing them to the comments here.
All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.
By “nobody cares”, I think they mean “not everyone shares my exact priorities”.
I see this rant against the exact way a bike lane was installed- installed because someone cared ALOT to get it approved and built- and all they can think to do is complain?
The world is a complex place full of trade-offs and compromises, I feel for the people that worked so hard to get this project done.
The fact that there are reasons for things that they are how they are is one thing, and it's true he does not elaborate - but I take it his point is one of general attitude: U.S. Americans are different from Japanese. I would not say either group cares less; instead, they probably care about different things (different cultures have different value systems; the weight put on individual versus society plays a large role here, too).
It's easy to spot problems everywhere, especially if you are an analytical mind.
Somebody else might care, but they may not perceive things as problematic to begin with.
Different people have different levels of sensitivity and granularity of perception: I buy "just cheese" when my wife buys "Gruyère français medium-aged" and don't you dare getting her the wrong brand.
Then, some people actually like the things how they are, so there are differences in opinion and personal taste, heck, some may even financially benefit from the status quo financially (distinguish those who don't care
to help make change happen but would enjoy it if others did the work from the ones who genuinely don't care about either outcome, and both of them sit next to a third group, who do not what that change, full stop.
The post was more than just a rant: he notices where he lives, his community and him do not have "value fit" (to borrow and modify the concept of "product-market fit", since this is HN), and he is comtemplating a move. But when he says he won't move to Japan (where in any case he would always be an outsider) he is looking for middle ground - so I read his blog post as a "search query aimed at human blog readers", a call for information to find out where may be more likeminded folks, which is a good idea, given his situation.
That people do not see the need for change, one former co-worker of mine calls the "fish bowl effect": a new person joins a company, and they see everything that is broken immediately. But all the other people who have been there for 20 years don't get it. Like a new fish that joins the aquarium, who blurts "hey guys, the water in here is pretty dirty!" and all the other fill shake their head about such a weird statement, "What is he talking about?" They have been around for so long, they can't even perceive the water as "not clear" anymore, perhaps a survival adaptation to avoid permanent state of frustration.
So I wish all readers of HN that they will never become that kind of fish who stops seeing things! (Belated happy New Year, too.)
Seems to me that bike-lane-onto-pavement transition is designed to be deliberately awkward so that the cyclists have to SLOW DOWN before they join the pavement and share the space with pedestrians
It's a common misconception of youth to think nobody cares. For the most part, people care, a lot, to the point that they get exhausted. The challenge is prioritizing what to care about, which means as much about not caring as it does about caring.
People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.
And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!
But their _are_ some people who care. I've been busting my ass in the software world for over 10 years, documenting it as I go. Largely everything I give away for free, or at the very least offer a free tier. I cant control what other people do, but I can keep chugging along doing the best that _I_ can do.
Some of this I think is misjudged - there is an implication that people know what they are doing or what their actions' consequences are, but do not care about it.
I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.
It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.
Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.
Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.
Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.
"Nobody Cares [about the things I think they should care about in the specific way I think they should]"
The author seems very conscientious and civic minded, but there are often unsatisfying explanations for why things are they way they are or why people act how they do.
Maybe the bike lane is that because of real world engineering, regulation, or design limitations?
Perhaps the author should appreciate the bike lane existing in the first place. It's better than no bike lane.
I get the sense a lot of these cynical types feel a desperate need for control over every component of their lives. Relax, some things aren't perfect but they're probably better than they were a hundred years ago. Progress takes time, accept that it takes time.
trying to fix half this stuff would burn you out, the other half would leave you jobless
I tried to fix the neighborhood playground and it took 2 years to get funding for a renovation that might happen 2 years from now... I gave up pushing for it because I don't have the time anymore... who knows if it will happen
most americans don't have a strong enough support system that gives them the space to care
There are an infinite number of things to care about (which is to say, to spend resources on, because that's what caring about something actually means), a finite amount of resources allocated to everyone except about 6 people who have a practically infinite amount of resources, and a social organization system that revolves around getting as much of those resources as possible and nothing else. What you're looking at is the real end product of "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family" neoliberalism. It's not just that no one cares, it's not even that no one has answered the question "Why should I care?". It's that the majority of people simply cannot care.
A lot of this is attributable to the way our society is designed at a high level
With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness
Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose
A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale
I mean...
This guy must not have kids in school—because to be a teacher, you have to be nothing but a ball of caring because the job sucks the life out of you at every step. No money, half the country thinks you want to turn their kids into trans people and want you to teach their specific brand of a religion and so they defund you at every step. I feel bad for teachers—they really, really care.
This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.
This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.
This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.
This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...
At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.
Tldr: smorgasbord of 0.1th to 1st world problems designated as horrendous failures by me ain't fixed, so I decide that people in their jobs don't care.
I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.
This is a bullshit take considering the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.
And in software youre going to have to close a ticket or two that piss you off. You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features? Cool, see you in Japan bro.
> the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.
Broken windows. To use his example with bikes: the firms didn't care enough to allow the engineer to properly angle that entrance to the sidewalk. The engineer didn't care to push back because they were underpaid and things are getting more expensive at home. Things get more expensive because landlords are taking advantadge of the situation to jack up prices, because no regulation cared enough to stop that (or worse, regulation cared about money more and landlords "donated" to him to sway their ruling).
This apathy is a virus that spreads. At some point it becomes hard to figure out where it started. It's just this fog that seemingly always existed.
>You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features?
I don't get paid to deliver features. If that bug is really critical enough I may push back on it.
Or I simply realize it's above my paygrade, don't care, leave a paper trail down the line for when they inevitably blame me, and do what I'm told like a proper worker.
Another example of everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.
Everyone has a breaking point and negativity bias makes the awful stuff pile on quicker.
Put it another way: Things are getting worse for more people. It may still be "amazing" for most people, but the ones next to the metaphorical "awful" line see it creeping. So it can feel very arrogant when someone a mile out says "why aren't you happy, it's great" as you see the line start to take your amazing things.
I hear you. I also sense people generally are becoming more anxious. More and more we took granted for decades has a question mark next to it.
But I didn't expect the author to feel happiness, or be grateful for the state of things. However, we can pause and realize how much people still do (for a salary or otherwise) for each other, despite things getting worse for them.
A good bike road with one bad turn is still mostly a good bike road. Still took a lot of caring to build. There's only so much capacity to fix mistakes.
Everybody cares actually. Obviously the author cares more about investing the time to write this blog post than to take a sledgehammer and some concrete and fix the bike ramp himself. Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.
The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish - incurvatus in se (curved inwards).
"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake." - Martin Luther
>Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.
uhh, yes? What was the point of this ridiculous metaphor you yourself created?
>The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish
It's a bit more basic than that. If people aren't happy they care less, because their senses dull to focus only on survival and not assisting one's community.
I love looking at the About Me section of a site when I read a blog post that can be summed up as “The world would be objectively better if I were simply put in charge of it” because it’s always like “When I’m not blogging I’m working on chat with a blockchain for scooter thieves” or whatever and in this case our new overlord is “a founding engineer at Row Zero where we've built the world's fastest spreadsheet”
Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.
But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.
Besides the color temperature, they are way too bright. It's like daylight in front of my house since they changed the lamps.
A lot of America especially has an issue with too many lights, and the lights themselves are too bright relative to the population. Found what I thought was a cool image on Wikipedia Commons while searching the subject that has the light use relative to the population density. Green's lots of light use, red is lots of population density. America's bright green light use. Yellow is fairly equivalent light use to population density. [1]
[1] Light Use vs Population Density, WP Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Earth_li...
They shine through my windows at night and are truly horrific.
They’re down the entire alleyway behind my place, and a walk to the grocery store at 7pm during the winter makes your body and mind think it’s sunrise.
It's probably getting better but the amber-colored LEDs used to be rather inefficient. I've also heard that white lighting can slightly improve reaction times of those in traffic and leads to slightly clearer captures for security cameras. I personally think these benefits do not outweigh how extremely ugly and unwelcoming they are, but "city officials just don't care" is not what led to the adoption of white LED street lighting at all.
> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.
I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.
Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.
Directing bicycles on to the sidewalk doesn't even make sense in the first place. It just makes for pedestrian conflicts, difficult maneuvers, and automobile drivers are definitely not looking for cyclists on the sidewalk.
There’s a huge difference between “impeding” and “causing you to fucking crash”.
Like, what an insane take.
Solution then is to add slowing features uphill from the cut over.
"We'll fix our hardware bugs in software" :)
It feels like zooming when you bicycle in those tight spaces at 9-12 km/h, which is a third of what you calld zooming. The point is that a collision at 12 km/h is pretty ok. The problem is that cyclists are always close to pedestrians so it feels unsafe even at slow speeds. The accident rate between cyclists and pedestrians are incredibly low so it is not really dangerous, but it feels like it.
What I read when I read about the bicycle lane is that bike lanes were a requirement, the user persona was assigned to a casual recreational rider on a small low speed recreational (<24" wheels) (aka kids under 10), when in reality, that hill is used by a road cyclist commuter, would only be used by a confident cyclist that close to traffic on that steepb of hill.
It's not that the traffic engineer didn't care about a quality product, they didn't care to research who bikes (and have car brain), and have never traveled out of the US, to the Netherlands, or met a cyclist.
The article explicitly says cyclists crash there going at ~30 km/h.
Crashes are another thing, cars going 100 mph here is probably proportionally the same as the people trying to take that at 30 km/h. The streetview of the location makes it even worse than I thought especially looking at the history of the spot.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/EcG7qKSNDDHjzWJk9
Hum... The bike lane seems to be designed to fill space and make the street run better, instead of being designed for being useful for riding bikes.
I can see why people get angry about it. But still, the article is asking for the wrong solution. And yeah, the people crashing on that fence at 30 km/h would just die hit by a car a few meters down if the article's fix was implemented.
I'm not inclined to be sympathetic to cyclists, but the bike-murdering signpost right there is all the proof I need that there are people who hate them more than I do and that at least one of those people works in city government. I winced. It might actually be a felony, that act of transportation engineering. I'd at least listen to the prosecutor's theory of the crime.
Yeah, my first reaction was "you should not move onto the sidewalk if you cant break and control the speed". Unless it is some kind of abandoned place where no one ever walks anyway.
I am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.
> The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work
People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.
That’s not limited to Japan.
And besides it’s a strange take to argue that you shouldn’t acknowledge good thing A because unrelated thing B is bad there.
Your rebuttal is dated. Suicide rates have been steadily declining in Japan and rising in the West to the point where suicides are actually less common in Japan than they are in the US currently. So perhaps it is a good example.
IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)
(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)
Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.
But is that even true? My mid-tier appliances are all great and I love my IKEA furniture. Some things suck some of the time. Other things don't.
Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason.
"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.
Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.
Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.
Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.
And so on.
The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.
There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.
The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty.
What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.
> "Ugly architecture" is subjective.
I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else.
But this isn't the case.
The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.
Architecture is no different.
Some buildings quite literally are better than others and we can scientifically study this [1]. We can recognize that all opinions are valid, but that some are better than others. We do this in daily life too, if you are in the ER and the trauma team comes and tells you their opinion on your condition, you will value that opinion over the opinion of the person outside waiting for a ride. Art, music, architecture - no different.
Tens of millions of people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Why?
Religious reasons of course, but many visit simply to marvel at the wonderful architecture. Contrast that with Rocky City Church [2] here in Columbus where I live. A big, bland, gray "modern" building that as our standards have dropped to nothing (remember everything is subjective so nothing can be better than anything else) we have come to accept as the norm.
This is the Nobody Cares phase of not just architecture but society as well.
> The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.
No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.
Some elements of beauty are objective. As in, they are hardwired into our brains.
Some cities are more beautiful than others. Prague is more beautiful than Detroit.
And yet, it's not as clear cut as that. There is some hardwired stuff in our brains (see e.g. the "bouba / kiki" effect [0]) but most people will agree that what is considered pretty, good, etc is cultural, not to mention changing over time - like architecture trends as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but also painting styles.
That said, a few posts back a commenter mentioned that the Mona Lisa is "objectively better" than anything they made; while I won't comment on aesthetics and appreciation, the assertion that the artist is more skilled in the arts than the poster is something definitely objectively true, simply because of education and experience. That's no guarantee that the outcome is better, but still.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
To your point, though, I think as you look around at McMansions and Wal-Mart there's nothing architecturally redeeming about those structures besides efficiency in building and internal climate control. We know the architectural styles are bad and there are (again to your point about skill) scientific ways we can measure this (Ann Sussman's work).
If you look at historical architecture patterns (mostly pre-WWI) they mirror how art has changed over time.
It's not that Impressionism came about and Renaissance became shit, it's that both are good and important stylistic contributions.
It's not that Gothic architecture came about then all the Romanesque stuff sucked. Both were good and unique.
We run into the same problem as "all art is equal" when we tend to express the belief that because we live in the time period we're complaining about that if only we waited a few hundred years we would recognize that our current building patterns are actually really good. That's just not the case.
Then substitute one of my drawings (or paintings, if I painted) of a person. There's no way in the world that anyone--anyone!--would think mine were better. That's because mine are truly awful.
How would you compare the two?
They might not be good reasons to you, but that is not the same thing as not caring. If someone cooks something that without salt for health reasons, that doesn't mean they don't care about salt as much as me.
Eh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.
It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.
The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.
In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas.
It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range.
Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.
And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.
The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
I'm glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.
People are afraid of the darkness.
I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.
Even dimming the lights is hard.
I've grudgingly come to admit that also people who don't have great vision love bright lighting. I can usually see perfectly well by starlight, but that's not the case for everyone.
I was once in the US Navy, and stood many a bridge watch. When it got dark, all outside lights except for the navigation lights (red light on port bow, green on starboard bow, a white light up top and another white light on the stern). And on the bridge, we used only dim red lights, to avoid affecting our night vision. None of the navigation lights was easily visible from the bridge. And you could see reasonably well, even on a cloudy night.
Where I come from they did change the lights to LEDs, but they turn off 2/3rds or 3/4ths of them after midnight; still enough light to navigate, but much less power usage and light pollution. There's a bike lane outside of town whose lights were motion activated, iirc that was installed about 20 years ago.
I walk a lot and support this, even though I am not convinced it makes me more visible when not in front of the headlights. Typically, the danger happens when walking on the sidewalk perpendicular to a road. I can see the car, they cannot see me until I'm a few feet in to the crosswalk when I'm not lit up by a street light.
WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?
This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.
> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness?
During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble.
At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.
> During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast,
Then a car drives past and your sight instantly adjusts to that, but takes several minutes to adjust back. Then you're stuck in subjective total darkness for a while.
Or, if you're in an area with mixed lighting (e.g. you walk past a house that incidentally lights part of the street) then your eyes can never adjust and you have to walk through pools of total darkness. I know this experience from rare situations where a few streetlights go out in a row, and it's not as easy as you just portrayed it.
> At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden
That's fair enough IMO. I don't think it's feasible or helpful to plaster every centimetre of every rural road in street lighting. But the comment we're replying to suggested removing them in cities "outside of ... active center areas". That's a different matter.
YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.
What range/years are you specifically referring to? It seemingly is as good as ever, and I'm 32 now. I'm guessing that would start being around 40s, when the general eye-sight starts to decline?
Yep, right around your mid-40’s in my experience. Friends have said it started the day they woke up on their 40th birthday.
There’s a new-ish body of research that suggests aging is non-linear/happens in “cliffs,” and that the first big decline is mid-40s. Something to look forward to.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/15/1096799/aging-hi...
About the time you start needing reading glasses to see your phone or computer screen. Between 40-50 years for most people. You will develop an appreciation for the people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes. And yes, adapting to darkness takes longer.
> people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes.
I already do this at this point, so guessing that's a club I'm in already, even if my eye-sight is perfect :)
Well, I guess I'll report back in 10-20 years and I can finally have this confirmed for all of us.
It's not usually possible to reply to decades-old HN threads.
I don't think there is a rule for that? At least not in my case. My eyesight got worse really fast out-of-nowhere when I was like, 15 years old? And since then it didn't change anymore. I got myopia, after a few years of too much computer screen (the old CRTs).
While there was a suspicion of eyesight troubles in my late teens, it really kicked in during a period I was working on pretty crappy screens, that was in my late 20's. It's not much but enough to give me headaches when not wearing them.
How old are you? Most people experience worsening eyesight mid 40s.
I'm currently 37, I hope it doesn't start to get worse again anytime soon. I never used glasses regularly, btw. Always had the impression that would weaken my eyes long-term.
This is a car-centric ableist take.
Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.
And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.
LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.
> This is a car-centric ableist take.
Growing up on a island with 700 people where the most common mode of transportation is probably bicycle (besides walking, or possibly moped), it really isn't :) People are really eager to jump on the "ableist" accusation, aren't they?
> And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.
It really doesn't, at least it didn't for me. It's true that for some seconds you'll see less, but your eyes will adjust faster after that than the initial adjustment when you go from a fully lit environment to unlit, even without direct moonlight.
I'm not arguing for completely dark cities, that'd be bananas. I was just giving another perspective about how we can (usually) adjust to darkness if we let our eyes be used to it. Of course we should have lights in cities so everyone (not just us with good night-sight) can navigate without issues.
I am night blind, among other things and cannot drive. If an area doesn't have street lights it's much more inaccessible to me, I become fully blind and I usually end up not going. Lights off is bad for me, end of story. Whether my ability to walk around at night is a factor here is a subjective decision. I understand people in my situation are a minority.
Wouldn’t a headlamp or a flashlight achieve the same purpose?
Also it's terrifying for safety; way too easy to assault someone in complete darkness.
I suspect your terror comes from lack of familiarity with natural light outdoors, and is a product of always having the lights on plus not being out of a house often.
The night is not 'complete darkness', we can generally see fairly well.
Also, I suspect your presumption on assault risk and assault rates comes from media, which is designed around building fear. Fear sells.
So I agree that you find the natural world terrifying, I just wish you didn't. Because the natural world is what we are fit for.
> Because the natural world is what we are fit for.
Good thing we live in cities then!
Let's put it this way. The fear is someone hiding in the shadows to jump a person, and then dragging the victim back into the shadows.
Bright lights on the street create more shadows. All you have to do is step out of the streetlight and no-one will see you, because the light-level contrast between the lit street and the surrounding space.
If there aren't any streetlights, so the surrounding space has the same illumination as the roadway, then that space is more present in more passerby's visual awareness.
So your proposed solution, "Streelights on every street" actually increases the risk you are so concerned about.
Completely the opposite.
Numerous studies show crime goes down when streetlights are turned off.
Simply put, you don't get scrotes hanging about in groups up to no good without lights, and anybody who is walking around is carrying a torch, making it obvious what they are doing (e.g. if you are breaking into a house, needing a torch instead of using a streetlight makes it obvious to everybody what you are doing).
No to mention a lack of streetlights makes if harder for somebody to hide in the shadows.
The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark. Statistics show the real truth of what you should be worried about.
> The real question to ask, is why people like yourself are 'terrified' [sic] of the dark.
Statistics show that people don't care about statistics but about confirmation bias and the media is eager to feed it.
I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.
Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch.
It’s easier than ever to carry one.
Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible state of affairs which, in itself, is a gross anti-pedestrian move.
(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)
> except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better.
Yes, generally the purpose of the light is so others can see you.
My god, we spend all of our lives blasting lights into our eyes (some people call these lights "screens"), we've forgotten how to live without it!
I use the flashlight on my phone to flash at drivers to increase the likelihood that I am seen.
I mean I quite often see people holding a torch (or maybe a lit up phone) while they're walking.
I'm in an urban area, but it's not as well-lit as a downtown environment. There's street lights every 2-3 houses and they're not super bright.
I personally prefer this over a downtown-like bright environment since it makes it easier to sleep and the ambience is just better at night.
Clearly you have lived your entire life in a city under streetlights.
Here, if you go the the pub at night as the streetlights are turned off at midnight, so you take a torch (your phone as a backup). Its perfectly commonplace. To suggest this is "anti-pedestrian" is a bit silly. Rather, it's anti-light pollution.
> Carry their own torch
You state this like it is a bad idea.
If you have a cell phone, you have a torch.
If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.
When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.
If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.
You are starting an unrelated conversation.
This comment chain started with someone suggesting that in cities lighting be turned off almost everywhere, and someone replied that pedestrians won't be able to clearly see where they're going without a torch (and I agreed). Where I live, no pedestrian in a city would ever need to use a torch to see where they're going.
You've posted a couple of replies saying that pedestrians should carry a torch so that cars can see them. Well, maybe, maybe not. But that's a different matter.
Get a flashlight?
I'm a regular outdoor runner and also an extreme morning person, so I'm often out running at like 3 AM, and it is absolutely not safer to be in complete darkness. Surfaces are not perfectly uniform and unobstructed and the ambient light from the atmosphere and surrounding city, even dead in the center of a major metro area, is nowhere near enough to see everything you might hit. I've tripped many times and even broken my hand before. It is effectively impossible to ever go full speed.
if you're out running at night, perhaps you should also be carrying some lights? both to help you see your environment and to help others see you.
I run at night on trails (during the summer, when it's too hot to run during the day). I wear a headlamp, and don't trip any more than I do in the day--despite the fact that the trails have rocks and roots. The only issue I have is that because the headlamp is inches from my eyes, shadows are almost invisible.
> The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
Hitting the next homeless person and throwing them 10 meter in the space will be quite the experience.
Honestly, this is not shitty experience because of regulation, this is just councils cutting costs everywhere except their salaries. Los Angeles these last couple days has showed what it means to do that. You'll literally be on fire some day.
OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.
Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt.
Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees.
> and because people do not care.
People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color.
This comment about unsafe blue-white headlights got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111
Blue light is safer for cars - it gives slightly faster reaction times, and lower the chance of drivers falling asleep.
The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to.
Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.
In some ways, car-centric cities are like that because people don't care. "I'll just take my car, whatever". They don't care about traffic, pollution, accidents, etc.
Or maybe they care about getting to their destination in time and not wasting half a day just going from point A to point B on foot/by (shitty) public transportation, or they'll be fired.
Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".
I’m not well-read on the old lighting research, but I’ve come across some explanations for why humans actually do much better with amber outdoor lighting than white. One of these points relates to how our pupils expand and contract with the amount of light available.
My impression was that HPS lighting became so widespread not because of the supposed advantages of its light spectrum, but because it was simply the most light-efficient technology available at that time. Here in Germany, only main/multilane streets requiring more lighting were using HPS, residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights, so switching those to LEDs wasn't as much of a change. But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?
> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.? It's not as if people are forced to endure the intrusion of street lighting into their bedrooms?
Of course. But that's the problem -- now black-out curtains are required. And maybe you hate those because you really enjoy waking up with the sun streaming in, and now you have to wake up every morning in blackness until you go open the curtains.
The onus shouldn't be on the residents. It's the same as saying, sure it's noisy but why don't you just wear noise-canceling headphones all day long?
Government services exist to serve the people, not make the people work around them.
Low pressure sodium lights were more efficient, but they emit a single wavelength of orange light. These lights were strongly disliked by people who liked to admire their car in the streetlights (I suppose).
> residential streets mostly had lamps with white fluorescent lights,
… they used CFLs? The spiral fluorescents were invented in the 1980’s, I guess. I speculate the residential street lights used mercury vapor bulbs, which had a longer expected lifespan than fluorescents.
> But still, I'm wondering: what about curtains, window blinds etc.?
You need a good blackout curtain to deal with light pollution through your window.
Decades ago, my junior college's parking lot was lit by low-pressure sodium lighting. I recall the light being an absolute monochrome yellow, to the point that you had to be careful to remember exactly where you parked your car, because you weren't going to find it by color.
I can't vouch for Germany, but there used to be long, high-output fluorescent tubes and fixtures for street lighting in the US. They seem to have largely disappeared by the 1980s. They weren't very common, but some cities used them. They tended to be used on main streets when I saw them.
> they used CFLs?
Nah, the lamps used (I assume) standard fluorescent tubes. Although honestly I don't know how widespread they were. They were (and still are in some areas) all over the place in Munich (and also e.g. here https://maps.app.goo.gl/M3RPqkN5MHZuPG7f7). Hamburg (https://maps.app.goo.gl/fPGfeEwWXtUGFnTL7) and Berlin (https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSemA2Md84AEJ9Py8) also have similar-looking ones.
Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.
Nitpick: "are actually purple" makes it sound like they came out of the factory purple, but they're actually changing from white to purple over time as the phosphor coating fails.
Just to be clear, these are about 1-3 years old. So yes they probably weren't purple on the day they were installed, but this is a defect and not normal aging. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/136nz3b/til_...
They'll be near-UV LEDs with a phosphor to produce white, high efficiency, low cost, but garbage long term.
It happened in NC, too: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/10/duke-universit...
The city employee who bought them is probably a massive Ravens fan...
i mean who wouldn't be the way they're playing
Might be so that they don't interfere with a certain species of wildlife. We have deep blue ones near me that aren't visible by a protected bat species.
They’re purple (blue is the other option) because veins are harder to see under purple light. They’re used to deter drug use, from my understanding.
Edit: final clause
Not true, they're just defective and degraded quickly, resulting in the odd color.
Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
> that seems worth it to me
How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.
1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...
sure - for your house. For lights all over the city that will be lasting years?
In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.
The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.
In the netherlands I have seen green street lights with motion sensors. Only on smaller streets and pedestrian paths, though.
That sounds cool.
Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer
Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk
Take a photo
Implies no white balance shenanigans
A sheet of paper will generally manage ok for white balance calibration. A 3 tone grey card would be better, but a single, simple white will suffice
it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.
This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...
You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan...
The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.
I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.
This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.
anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.
Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years.
With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes.
With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.
We essentially have a lifetime supply of LEDs because we label each one with the date and refund from Amazon when they don’t last the full warranty, which none of them do.
People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.
Neat approach. I am not organized enough for that so I just buy whatever crappy leds ikea sells today.
On the one hand you have your Anne site, on the other hand there’s decades of data.
And only one of them is directly pertinent. None of the "decades of data" takes into account correct exploitation. But all talks about leds are about perfect spherical cow in vacuum that doesn't exist for average consumer
I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.
Look up Dubai Philips LEDs. The problem with most consumer LEDs is that they are overdriven, so their life is short. In Dubai, the Sheikh basically mandated that the bulbs need to be underdriven, so the lifetime is about 25x that of incandescents. They only deliver about 1/4 the power to the individual “filament” that most similar Philips lamps would at the same light output.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
That is interesting.
Since only apparently anecdotes count as pertinent for you, here’s one. I haven’t bought a bulb in over 12 years. My LEDs have simply not gone out. I had changed bulbs nearly every 6 months before that.
Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.
Not anecdotes but practical data. Yes if you power cycle tungsten all the time at maximum brightness they will not live long (when I was a kid we used them this way and changed them often). Read my comment about correct exploitation
Leds themselves are often fine for long time. It is the circuits they are powered by that are very often crap, poorly designed, specified, too cheap. So heat can kill it. Or like my last cheap powerful bulb in kitchen that flickers when I have certain controlled resistive loads on.
I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.
One of the dead lights that died was above the stove so could be heat related. Other 2 maybe just bad circuits...
I think it is too expensive to run tests in real life changing conditions
The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.
Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.
And part of the reason for that is compatibility with existing light fixtures using legacy sockets designed 150 years ago at the dawn of electrification for incandescent bulbs, where the part dissipating the most heat was the light emitting element itself, and not whatever lays between it and the mains power source. If the customer doesn't want to pay for a slightly more expensive LED lightbulb, they sure as hell won't pay for a whole new fixture specifically designed around LED technology that will last forever.
This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.
So... somebody responsible for the power supplies does not care? ;)
They care about being the cheapest option on Amazon, so that you will care about buying it. :)
The ones in the article clearly go against the best principles at https://www.savingourstars.org/ though.
> But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.
I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.
The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.
LEDs last longer, but cities took the savings to add even more blue light, so the lifetime doesn’t matter.
The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented.
Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.
Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.
I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.
> this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research
It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).
> There are enormous design standards [..]
I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.
Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.
https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.
> They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not
This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.
you guys are smarter than that.
in our civilization people observe and tell.
all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?
it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".
and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......
While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned.. I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(
We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.
The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.
Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.
One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
I would even argue that the current design of the bike line is better than the one suggested by the author.
It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line.
It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.
Yeah, that's why we put sharp turns at the bottom of roads too.
It is selfish to only think about the driver coming from the hill. The driver that thinks it is okay to drive 45mph in that situation.
Do you see the irony of your statement.
We put sharp turns at the end of roads.
If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.
You can accomplish both with the right design.
By not merging the cycling and walkway, sure. That would be a better design.
But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation.
As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.
Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
Fair enough.
On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.
Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.
Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
The example by the author is an unsafe one. You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?
Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.
> You think putting unsafe sharp curves at the bottom of hills for cars is acceptable?
Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design. It happens specifically because people (apparently in all vehicle types) will speed on the long straightaway down the hill into whatever comes next. Many, many suburban areas with hills will have sharp curves or T-intersections at the bottom of hills as a matter of course and it does work at slowing down the traffic going down the hill.
If you look at street view on the actual road, that is exactly this situation: a very straight road with a lot of visibility, leading toward a very long and complicated intersection where everyone needs to pay attention and go slowly. Nobody traveling a reasonable speed on a bike will be surprised by that turn since they can all see it coming for literally a mile.
I assume the alternatives to this specific merge are either:
* Merge the bikes into the car traffic and pray to god that they obey traffic signals at the upcoming intersection (we all know this isn't happening), while also accepting that they accelerate very slowly compared to cars.
* Set up a dedicated bike lane with dedicated signals (which is very expensive).
The engineers here clearly opted to instead merge the bike traffic with the pedestrian traffic through that intersection so that the existing pedestrian signals apply to them. You can see that the bike lane continues after this intersection, so they literally just did this to handle the intersection.
TFA on this point reads like "cyclist (or illegal moped user) doesn't want to be slowed down and doesn't care about anyone else."
> Yes, it is absolutely acceptable and it happens all the time in road design.
Aren't there usually signs indicating the maximum safe speed when that sort of thing happens? We don't have context here but I doubt there is a sign telling bikers that they should slow down. And aren't roads in general much larger and easier to see from far away, vs this tiny little ramp? You also haven't explained why the big curb is vertical instead of sloped, or why the street sign needs to be where it is. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this thing is designed as a fuck you to bikers who don't obey the rules. We simply don't design roads that way, where it's designed to make you crash if you deviate from the standard even a bit.
We absolutely do design roads for all kinds of people to make you crash if you do not follow them. In fact, on pretty much all roads, you will crash if you decide not to follow the road, and frequently you will crash into a tree or a building. Drivers generally see this kind of design and complain about it but slow the hell down. Cyclists seem to be the same.
There is a sign ahead of this ramp saying in very big letters "BIKE LANE ENDS." It's up to the bikers to decide how they want to use that information. The sign, the ramp, and the end of the bollards marking the bike lane are visible at quite a long distance.
As for the street sign, it's a street sign. It's where the street is. It also tells you exactly where to use Google street view to get full context.
If you look at the street view (https://maps.app.goo.gl/Li9FSf29kXJWJLxW8), you'll see that it's been redesigned since the picture in the post. The current street view picture is from Feb 2023; the picture in the blog post also appears to be from street view (given the translucent quadrilateral near the fence) but presumably from before 2023. So...it appears that the bike lane was redesigned in a way that reflects two of my biggest complaints that were based on the outdated picture. Doesn't that sort of vindicate what I was saying? Why did they change it if the original design was ok? Like why didn't they do it the right way in the first place?
The context is even worse than the bike ramp. The bike lane dumps directly onto a sidewalk, which is not really bikeable anyway with the impending complicated street crossings that require stopping to push a button to get a crosswalk against a very confusing intersection across right-turning traffic onto a motorway on-ramp. Or stay on the street and shoot directly into a lane of traffic, and hope to find a gap big enough to cut left across the lane before it turns into a highway on-ramp.
The sharpness of the corner is the same, which is TFA's real biggest complaint. Yours may have been the sign.
Bikes has a thing called breaks. You are not helpless on the bike and if you are, you are really behind the maintenance.
And yes, roads for cars are intentionally build in a ways that makes high speed obviously unsafe at places.
Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.
Yeah, that's why when pedestrians have to cross where cars are that there is always a stop sign to make sure their high speed won't harm a pedestrian /sarcasm.
…we do put stop lights at pedestrian crossings on high-speed streets. They look like this: http://www.pedbikesafe.org/PEDSAFE/cm_images/PedHyb1.png
the ackchyually energy in this post is amazing
This post is massive copium.
If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.
There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.
OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.
Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.
Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.
> Don’t take anything here too seriously.
I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.
It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about.
But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
Thanks grant!
LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.
Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old.
If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.
No, I can't imagine that because again, nobody cares.
You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done.
Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.
I think spending a week in Japan you would see what the author is talking about, they care, we (USA) dont.
Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.
He does not care
I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.
But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.
For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.
But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.
* * *
Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.
In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.
As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
That's unsettling :( My son is in second grade now, so I haven't been exposed to the middle school realities yet. Thanks for the warning!
https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/untranslatable-dutch-wor...
There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.
Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.
As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.
So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.
An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.
The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.
if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.
I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.
Love the analogy and your explanation
Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
> I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo
Homelessness in Tokyo looks different than homelessness in a major US city. Often enough, it means freeters sleeping overnight in manga cafés.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_café_refugee
According to the article, living in an internet cafe can be as little as $420 per month. But where does someone who has no work that month get the $420? Does the government have a minimal support program?
lol that’s actually more expensive than a lot of small apartments in Tokyo.
That said there is no shortage of work in Tokyo. Far more work than the number of people available to do it.
I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.
> I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.
Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.
> kids do most of the cleaning
We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.
There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.
If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.
> There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s
This is misleading. Japan has the lowest homelessness rate in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan
They clearly had a problem and fixed it. I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw one homeless (I assumed?) person during my whole trip. He didn't look too bad (like the ones in the US) but he was probably having a rough time.
Neither of you are wrong. As your link says, they have one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the world, but it also says that their low rate is roughly 1 in 34,000 people. There are 14 million people in Tokyo (city, or 41M in Tokyo greater area), so for 14M residents you would expect roughly 400 homeless people if the ratio is exactly the same as national average (and typically, big cities have higher than average). So simultaneously there are many homeless people still even if you only saw one of them, it's just a smaller % than in most countries.
Ultimately the stats are what matters more than how many people any one anecdote happened to see, and they show that Japan should be applauded for doing well but also acknowledging that sadly they haven't completely solved the problem and too many people there, as everywhere, are still homeless.
Which is reasonable? Within the millions of people there will be a few people that are completely helpless. I think Japan is as close to having no homeless as a country can reasonably get. Which is a completely different situation from the USA. Also living in a small shoebox hotel is orders of magnitudes better than living on the streets. I am not saying it is a good option but between having nothing (US) and having that, I'd definitively chose the shoebox.
One difference is that they’re concentrated in areas away from the public eye - if you enter Yoyogi park from the entrance nearest Yoyogi Koen station then before the hill starts go up the footpath to the right, you will find a homeless encampment with 20+ tents. It’s orderly but they are homeless.
I strongly disagree that 400 homeless people in a city of 14 million is a lot
There are some homeless people living in camps in certain parks. Ueno Park has a bunch of them. Others have camps hidden away in flood-plain areas next to rivers. Some live on sidewalks, like under overpasses, and have a bunch of junk in front of their sleeping bag that they're trying to sell.
Generally, these homeless people want to be homeless. There's options for homeless people to get help, but some people simply don't want to be part of normal society for whatever reason (like mental illness).
Overall, in my experience living here, I very rarely see homeless people. It's nothing at all like the huge homeless camps in US cities these days.
I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).
Faxing... So very convenient!
We have to personally take the paper orginals to various offices around the city, wait hours in a queue, get another paper document, go make copies, assemble another folder and go to yet another office/institution.
Don't forget when your coworker prints out a memo, asks you for edits on the paper, then you go in and edit the virtual document.
A couple of jobs ago one of my colleagues went to work with a Japanese partner for a few days to do an integration. Apparently they had to import a bunch of data and one of the Japanese employees, who seemed to have an axe to grind, printed out pages and pages of a spreadsheet and handed it to my colleague. Whenever my colleague asked him to just send the file, he pretended to not understand. In the end they had to OCR it but at least it was a story.
To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.
It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.
Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).
High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.
>Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.
aren't homes generally extremely cheap in most of Japan?
They are cheap because they are in disrepair, in an area with no jobs (or only subsistence farming) and limited services. In central Tokyo, they are cheap compared to cities in most of the West but too expensive to keep up a good drinking habit without working and on limited out-of-work benefits.
No; they’re cheap because Japan builds homes more than other countries do.
The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...
> Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I think that's the opposite. They care too much. That collective school cleanup example above has a similar extreme. If you literally live to work, you'll forget about caring for yourself and collapse.
Tokyo Government just introduced a 4 day work week for its workers. You'd be surprised how much friction there has been to this, by the workers.
They care about the wrong things. Ultimately everyone cares about something and then there is tons of things no one or that anybody doesn't care from simply because you have limited amount of possible care to give.
It's another country's culture. It's really hard to holistically judge what is right or wrong. If people want to be a workaholic, then I can't really judge their lifestyle.
That said, yes. If this is pressure from their society, they probably should revisit those mindsets. Especially when the birth rate right now really can't afford a higher mortality raet. Fortunately they are starting to in some sectors.
I can't find the link now but I read a post by an immigrant to Japan who attended one of these school cleanups at their child's school. They said basically that they seemed to be the only one really scrubbing / actually cleaning properly rather than just putting in a performative effort to wipe something down.
Yes, but the author doesn't care
I feel like the article is mostly focused on environments around us, so it makes sense to focus on Japan in this context. He’s not saying it’s an entirely flawless country
Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.
- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry
I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.
Don't leave us hanging like that.
- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
With:
- A declining population
- Rural collapse
- Stagnating economy
- Shut in problem for old people
Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.
Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.
Not sure what you are driving at. This thread was about Japan and I responded about Japan. If we were talking about Italy or South Korea then my response would be different.
You are correct that Japan isn't the only nation with large problems, particularly around declining populations. The thrust of my initial comment is that no nation is perfect and thoughts of "why aren't we just like that nation" are a little silly.
It's very easy to come up with a few bullet points of the big problems of a nation. Just like it's easy to generate such bullet points about the positives of a nation.
- Western media wants to focus on negatives of Japan because the idea of an alternative functioning system is narrative breaking. - now that UK is out of EU, negative EU messaging about Greece, Spain, and Italy is unlikely to reach US. - the media doesn’t want to promote a “declining white birth rate” narrative - there are a lot of nerds on the internet interested in Japanese culture. - neighboring Asian countries do not tend to love Japan
It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.
There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.
Businesses I've dealt with in the manufacturing world (so most American workers before the 'service economy' revolution) deal way more with Japanese companies than Italian. Also I think humans just need an ideal to aspire to. We don't respond well to 'it's all crap, always has been, always will be'. Foreign countries we like look better because we see what's better than where we are. There's a reason for the saying 'the grass is always greener (because from a distance you can't see it's full of dog crap)'.
> talking about "open kimono" leadership
That’s not a thing.
Anime and 90s propaganda from people appealing to Japanese businessmen.
Because we aren't bombarded with "Why don't we do things like they do in Italy" messages on every online forum like we are with Japan.
Because it’s full of Japanese.
That doesn’t explain the doctor who doesn’t care that they are misdiagnosing their patients though… Or am I missing something?
I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.
Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.
I’ve personally been incorrectly diagnosed with a life altering condition. When it became more and more clear that the diagnosis was wrong the doctor just doubled down. When I said I thought he was wrong and refused to see him he sent a colleague after me to another hospital to try to persuade the medical staff there of the misdiagnosis. That thankfully failed, but the whole process very much left me with the impression that the only thing that mattered to him and his colleague was to be “right”. My health was completely irrelevant to them. And nobody put them in their place.
Sure, I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor. But there comes a point when you have to conclude that something is seriously wrong. My feeling is that it’s a complete lack of consequences that is the core problem. Nobody is ever “forced” to admit they were wrong. Some people can’t handle that, start believing they are always right.
(This was in Sweden and malpractice is a bit different here.)
1177 is the best, or not..
Living outside NYC, I’m reminded of both extremes with every visit to the city.
Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.
> Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.
Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.
Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. Note that this is not insider knowledge of actual policy, just common observations from analyzing data at different places.
One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.
The average “smart person” thinks a trillion dollar industry can’t brainwash them.
In terms of the people with products to advertise being crewed over by the ad industry, I think it is more that they don't see the similarity between the ad industry brain-washing us and the ad industry brain-washing them. Perhaps the disconnect happens because they want to interact with the ad industry, so get their stuff hawked to us, but we'd usually rather not.
Another interesting disconnect is that sometimes a person is both the “us” and the “them” in different contexts. i knew someone who would complain about some of it on other sides but when pointed out that his site used some of the same tricks he'd respond with “yeah, but I need that because …”.
Meh. I have no idea if I am smart or not -- the last several years proved to me I am definitely stupider than I thought -- but I know that with time I only started buying things I directly derive value from or in the worst-case scenario, I'll undoubtedly need during the next few months. No cutesy phone cases, no gadgets "because why not", no extra socks "because you never know", no new toaster because the current one just a tad too big etc. Almost no unnecessary purchases.
It's much more related to maturing on this or that axis than being smart IMO.
You lost me at socks ! :O
"advertising works, even when you know exactly how advertising works"
Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.
Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.
> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.
I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.
>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.
This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Is there a solution? Obviously those companies are not going to change, so what can everyone else do about it - besides already being very rich, starting a competing ad-tech without funding, managing to get market share, and managing to remain one of the good guys.
The only thing I can think of is to use things like influencer ads on places like Instagram or Youtube which ironically sound like much better value for money as you actually know what you're getting for the money.
This is a really interesting insight. Drop me a line if you want to talk further.
Lately, the number of times (across different businesses/industries) where I've found myself thinking "Will you please just fucking take my money and stop bothering me?" is too damn high.
Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.
Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1].
They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view.
They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.)
If you're a customer, and you font like their behavior stop being their customer. You have agency. Use it.
[1] good customer service, good customer experience, are all good for revenue. Happy customers are the ultimate success. But maximizing the revenue from those happy customers is very much the business goal.
The old "use your agency" response never gets old does it, no matter how much consumer alternatives are whittled away, and no matter how much the abusive corporate behaviour gets ratcheted up and normalized. Do you actually make a profit yourself from forcing ads on paying customers who can't choose to avoid your services, or just aspire to one day?
Thats a cop out.
There are lots of alternatives to McDonald's.
There are lots of alternatives to most things. Some cost more money though. That's kinda the point.
If an "alternative" to McDonald's does exactly the same abusive thing it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's at all.
If an "alternative" to McDonald's forces you to drive excessive distances to reach it, or it costs much more, or it sells Thai food instead of burgers, then it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's.
A suitable alternative to McDonald's would be one similar enough to McDonald's for your purposes that you can use it to replace McDonald's. I'm sure some people have that, but I'm also sure many people don't.
There are lots of things that don't actually have suitable alternatives. There are entire product categories that are completely filled with consumer hostile garbage, with zero competitors offering a suitable alternative, because sometimes it will always be more profitable for companies to refuse to give consumers what they want.
A suitable alternative to McDonald's is learning to cook.
Or pay a bit more to go to a nicer joint.
Quality does cost more. As long as you keep signaling to MD that you'll tolerate more and more crap for lower prices, they happily oblige.
Another trope that never gets old, it seems.
Many people have stopped going to McDonald's by the way. But not enough for McD to hurt.
Then what? What does our agency change in the world in this situation?
You are using cop-outs as well.
Cooking for yourself is a trope? You realise that's what most of the world does every day.
If making your own meals is literally out of your reach then I feel really sad for you. That must truly suck to be so dependent on companies just to eat...
Are you being obtuse on purpose or are you really desperate to "win" this debate?
EXTREMELY OBVIOUSLY I meant this part of your comment:
> As long as you keep signaling to MD that you'll tolerate more and more crap for lower prices, they happily oblige.
That is the trope many use, yourself included. A lot of people signal their displeasure with various status quo. Still nothing changes. I wonder how does the one-dimensional quote above addresses the messy and complex real world out there.
Sorry, it wasn't obvious to me. I misread your point.
I'm not really trying to "win" anything. I'm telling you that you have agency. Whether that means anything to you, or if you do anything with it, I guess that's up to you.
Personally I'm not looking for my agency to change anyone else or how any company behaves. I don't do it for them, I do it for me.
I choose to support companies that align with my requirements. If a company makes me feel like crap I go elsewhere. I'm not out to change the world, just choose how I live in it.
Now I look like an a-hole! :D
It's OK, of course, and yes I take a number of stances out there by supporting one and not supporting another, company.
My point however was that nowadays that's mostly a feel-good measure. Not the unquestionable actual agency many make it out to be.
Do you grow 100% of your own food? It may be helpful for your understanding (and this conversation) to get off the high horse and realise that you're also dependent on companies "just to eat".
I never said I wasn't dependent on companies. I very much am. For everything. But I have choices and, when I gave the opportunity, I make those choices meaningfully.
For example, I don't much care for the McDonald's experience, so I go elsewhere. Indeed on occasion I find going 'nowhere' to be preferable if there's no alternative. I haven't been to MD in 30 years.
I'm not trying to be on a high horse. I follow a path that works for me, and I don't complain about it. You choose the path that works best for you.
I think I understand you: everyone at the bottom end of society should just have more money or more personal time, or both. I wonder how we could make that happen.
Different people are in different places. And obviously some people have been fortunate enough to have choices, and some do not.
I would assume that most people in this thread are not working 3 jobs to survive etc. My context is not their context.
I'd also guess they are far less invested in concepts like whether or not the server offers fries with that. In my long ago, limited experience, I couldn't have cared less about how many adverts there were, there were more pressing things to worry about.
Back to your point - I choose personal time over more money. My spending is modest, my income is likely much lower than most here. Frankly I have more than enough. Living is a lot cheaper when the goal isn't money.
What if I can't drive all the way to an ad-free restaurant or for that matter an ad-free gas pump? What if I buy a plane ticket to get out of this bad situation and the airline is using the emergency PA to harass their captive audience of paying customers to join their miles club? What can't be avoided must endured, but there is no reason for people like you to insist that this is fine or normal, or that it's something one can opt out of. You're actively building the dystopia when you do that
>What if I can't drive all the way to an ad-free restaurant
Eating at a restaurant is a luxury. If you don't like the experience, don't go (or don't go back). You're free to make your own food with stuff you buy at the supermarket, and you'll most likely get something healthier and much lower-priced. The entire point of a restaurant is to pay more money, frequently a LOT more, for a combination of convenience, service, ambiance, and food that might not be so easy for you to make at home (e.g. pizza) due to skill or equipment limitations.
So at least the supermarket should be ad-free, right?
Most of the supermarket is essentially ad-space. Companies often negotiate quite hard for good eye-line shelf positions for their products.
That special offer Tesco has on Pepsi products? Tesco is probably making exactly the same markup on each sale and the saving is actually coming from a supply price deal they have arranged with Pepsi in exchange for their products getting extra shelf space and end-isle displays.
High-shelf space (too high for customers to safely reach, so otherwise empty or used to store boxes of product to open when it is time to replace sold stock on lower shelves) often has advertising hoardings for products on other isles these days, again this is effectively paid ad space for the suppliers. If no external supplier is currently paying for it, the space is used to advertise own-brand ranges.
You seem to believe that you're entitled to certain things that are provided by other businesses -- but on your terms.
I don't know why you think that.
You seem to believe that someone wanting a thing to exist means they believe they are entitled to it.
I don't know why you think that.
As others make clear here you have agency in theory, but in practice your ability to use that agency is very much dependent on how well the world enables the exercise of that agency. Something to think about, interdependence and all that.
> They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
Correction, "they" are not a hivemind with one goal, they are a collection of individuals with individual goals to maximize their own profit. If some marketing employee can get a bonus or promotion by showing ephemeral monetary gains at the expense of the long-term integrity of the product, they'll jump all over that.
It does not have to be this way. This should not be claimed as some kind of law of gravity-like nature of the universe. Businesses have operated in an enormous variety of manners over the years and continue to do so. Businesses have agency.
Just look at EA vs Nintendo for one. And I'm not even a Nintendo fan.
Badmouthing bullshit practices of a company is also a part of the agency here.
E.g. Yes, I hate that McDonalds (like tons of other companies) is incessantly bugging me and quite blatantly trying to upsell me. As a result, I rarely go to such places anymore. So they lose my business. But I will also complain out loud. This is part of the deal with bullshitting your customer base. This is part of my agency. Losing me as a customer, as well as getting badmouthed left and right is the cost of extracting that 3 additional cents from me. Now the company also has a choice.
That’s nonsense. Some businesses exist purely to fund the ability to do exactly that thing as well as possible. Making money is a means to an end.
It’s just that they always seem to lose to those that optimize for money.
I think some small businesses start because the owner wants to do something well. Sometimes this aligns with some group of customers and it's sustainable.
Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Once you get large (McDonald's in the parent thread) the focus is necessarily on the business part. At that scale it's not "doing the thing as well as possible " - it is "making money as well as possible".
Clearly lots of people use McDonald's. So they provide customers with satisfaction. But that doesn't mean they aren't out to maximize revenue.
One of the things that’s surprising about traveling to Europe and Japan is that this revenue maximizing business strategy isn’t as prevalent. You don’t see the same upsells everywhere and tipping culture is also mostly non-existent. Many US businesses managed to behave in a manner that was vastly less extractive to their customers for most of the last century as well. It really is possible to care about the quality of your business in some cultures, it’s just harder to do so here today.
It's exactly harder but when customers prioritize price above everything it's hard to succeed if you offer better, but charge more.
The hard truth is that American consumers care only about price, and so businesses optimize for that (or go under). Which means they lean into other sources of revenue, or ways to reduce costs.
Elsewhere people care about value more than price, and are willing to spend more to get more. Restaurants post the real price (including service) because that's what it costs.
Ryanair exists to fill the need for those who want low price above all else. KLM exists for those who want a better experience and are prepared to pay more.
Do you think it is possible for a society to switch from emphasizing price to emphasizing value? If so, how do you think such a change would take place?
It's really hard for cultures to change. Outside of a major event (WW2 scale event) its likely to take multiple generations.
It can happen locally. Farmers markets are a thing. Supporting local owner-run, not chain, restaurants is a thing.
But in big cities, or nationally? Probably not in pur lifetime.
But it doesn't really matter what others do. It starts with what you do, for yourself. Look around, find small-scale suppliers. Support local producers where you can, and so on. The quality is usually better.
The problem is that the number of suppliers seems to be constantly going down. Chains are taking over public spaces, successful smaller companies get bought out, and the successful independent ones eventually get a new CEO who is incentivized to maximize profits (see e.g., Chipotle hiring Taco Bell's CEO.)
Obviously this is highly location dependent, and I don't doubt there are places where this is true.
Also, there may not be sufficient people in your area to support independent businesses that believe in providing more value at a higher price.
But it's worth looking and asking around. They may exist, but you won't see them on TV. Ask in local Facebook groups, look out for weekend markets and do on. Asking in those places can give you clues.
But I agree that the vast majority of Americans care only about price, so there will be lots of places where quality simply doesn't exist outside of what you cook yourself.
Exactly. Enshitification wouldn't be a concept if there wasn't a previous better point to reference.
McDonalds has fallen so far in the past few decades. I used to eat there or at least grab a soda several times a week. I never go there anymore. The kiosks suck; I refuse to use them, but they don't staff the counter half the time so there's no other way to order. The drive-thru expects you've already ordered on the app. Fuck that. It's all way too complicated. I want a Big Mac meal with a coke. That used to take me 3 seconds to order and I had it on a tray in about another minute. Now I have to dick around on the kiosk for a couple of minutes, pay, and then wait 5-10 minutes for the food. It's absurd.
This is a bizarre take to me. If food is on my tray in 60 seconds, I'm concerned what corners they are cutting to serve food this fast. It sounds terribly stressful for the employees. How can 5-10 minutes be considered slow?
I think in any case, this is an entirely different qualm than the other issues, like taking orders only via kiosk, or constantly up-selling you during the order.
Personally, I hate the McDonald's app. All the vouchers seem quite plainly optimized to encourage you to come back. I hate this kind of psychological micro-optimization of human behaviours. I would take a ten minute order every time if they stopped trying to manipulate me.
This is a classic McDonalds counter: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D3A1A6/dpa-customers-of-the-us-fas...
behind the counter-guy, in that wide silver opening, is a black plastic slope with with burgers queuing up. The cooks are constantly cooking, even when nobody has ordered anything, and that means they can get the efficiency boost of making 5 Big Macs at the same time - laying out 5 boxes, 5 buns, 5 patties cooking, etc. - and with no customer waiting on them, there need be no immediate rush[1]. The cashier only picks one up and puts it on your tray, much less than 60 seconds and no stress[1]. Contrast with Subway where the cashier has to assemble one custom sandwich at a time while the customer and queue of waiting people all watch (stressor); they can not get custom sandwiches into muscle memory, or the efficiency of doing several at once (slow), and the cashier delaying for a moment doesn't relieve pressure by letting the buffer fill, it just adds more pressure.
If McDonalds is now taking 5-10 minutes for a typical order, what has gone wrong with their fast-food-factory-production-line design?
[1] Maybe it isn't actually low stress or no-rush in McDonalds, but that design of food service could be.
They changed their model a while ago to trying to optimise the assembly time of each item, and produce them as they are ordered. The hot parts are pre-cooked and put into warmers, but not assembled (put into buns with toppings etc.) until you order.
Allows for easier customisation and less food wastage (and you don't have to keep track of when something was made), at the cost of time for 'easy' orders.
> Most small businesses fail of course. Usually because while they do a task well, they're bad at the business part.
Some small businesses fail because larger ones see their initial success and compete by making a slightly worse product a bit cheaper. Sometimes a significantly worse product. Once the superior but smaller competition is either out of business or has been forced to reduce their quality to try compete on price, the bigger business can either reduce the quality & price further (the big business will usually win in this sort of race-to-the-bottom because they can afford to take losses on individual products for a time, where a smaller business cannot) or bump their price up to improve margins.
It sometimes isn't that the small business is bad at the business part, but that they refuse to play dirty even if playing dirty is the only way to compete. It is easier to rationalise some tactics in a bigger company, because there is no one who has to look the customer in the eye who is also making product quality affecting decisions.
Hey now, you can pay extra for "McDonald's without ads" like you can with Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney okay.
Actually, in a way this is already true. If you consent to installing their mobile app (which includes god knows what kind of analytics), you are rewarded with at least 20% off all McDonald’s food list prices.
So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.
Now, if there was an option when booking a flight to pick a fare class not subjected to the stupid branded credit card offer walk of shame prior to landing, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
> So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.
I didn't know they took orders at the register still. I've only been in once (last year) in the past 20 years, but they seemed to insist on kiosk-only. Not sure if the drive-thru is like that too.
You still pay the unsubsidized full menu price at the kiosk or drive through. I believe you can order at the kiosk and not use a card (pay cash at register)
This feeling is a driver of theft at self service checkouts.
I recently went to a gas station where the pump worked right! No affinity cards. No car wash offer. No asking for a ZIP code, since I'd been there before. No screen with ads. Press card against RFID reader, select octane, pump gas.
I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use. I go back there occasionally, even though the station with the ad screen is cheaper.
nah - gas pumps that ask for phone numbers for savings card id's are great opportunities to save cents at the pump. 555-555-5555 always works everywhere and half the time gets you savings.
Enough people use 867-5309 as their grocery loyalty card's phone number that it's often got savings available at the gas pump. Use the local area code. It works great for filling up rentals while traveling, too.
I go to a gas station that blares ads at an ear piercing volume. I now keep duct tape in my driver's side door.
I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use, He. Did. Not. Care.
This seemed like a poor example for the author to choose, of "not caring." Annoying, sure. But these extra upsells originate from someone who definitely cares about increasing revenue and is aggressively exploring multiple avenues to achieve it.
Companies don’t care about you, they care about your wallet, extraction of money from. The most pleasant companies to deal with are the ones who have found a niche where customer satisfaction helps with the goal of wallet, extraction from. But at best it’s a means to an end, and McDonald’s is definitely not one of those companies.
The article was about not caring at all, as in total apathy. Not "we're going to work really hard to purposely create anti-patterns."
I understand that, but it included this particular example which doesn’t fit. I guarantee the people at McDonald’s in charge of the kiosk design care a great deal about wallet.
...which is why I started out by calling it a poor example!
My spouse bought us kindles recently, and it popped in my head today that at some point e-books are going to have ads interspersed…
I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other).
[1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1
https://lithub.com/the-time-terry-pratchetts-german-publishe...
That was so unpopular that it died out.
Paper magazines still have "blow ins", though - advertising cards that are injected into the magazine with compressed air after printing. They're not bound in. They fall out.
There was a post, here, some time ago, about how many paperbacks had ads actually woven into the story. Apparently, it was quite common practice, at one time. Sort of an obnoxious “product placement” thing. I think the author had nothing to do with it.
My dad has some old sci-fi books with full color cigarette ads in the middle. Crazy!
Sometimes ads end up in the actual text, without the authors permission or even knowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/q1wbie/the_time_te...
Kindles already can have ads on the sleep screen! Unless you paid for the ad free version.
i sent an email to have them removed. it was a thing some years ago at least (though I don't know if US-ians are allowed to do that or if it's just in the EU)
I actually recently purchased my first Kindle, as well as an gift upgrade for my partner. I researched and talked to a friend of mine who owns one.
At first I was determined I would purchase the ad-free version (I think the price difference was like ~20€), but after talking to my friend they kind of convinced me that the ad version is not so bad.
2 points on this: 1. The ad appears only on the lockscreen of the device, so you see it once and then never again until you reopen it. The ad is also only for a book in the Kindle store, never anything else (this might seem trivial, but I think one of the negative aspects of advertising is being blasted with stimuli about so many different things you don't care for)
2. The ads are personalized on books you bought and therefor a sort of recommendation engine. Both my friend and my partner told me they got some inspiration from those ads to find books they liked.
So all in all while I despise ads, I gave this one a try. Personally (and yeah, I know – subconciously) I have never looked at the lockscreen apart from the first time I launched it. It's a relatively non-intrusive ad about a book that I don't even need to engage with. And in case something relevant is on there, it leads to a good outcome for me.
This is advertising done well for me at least.
Oh my…I’ll have to ask, I bet they did. Unreal.
So far, Kobos are the way better option in my opinion. No ads, and it's much easier to add your own books. It's (currently) a much more open system. But, not without fault. They've shut down some older readers for no good reason.
"Easier to add your own books"... it depends. Yes, if you have ePubs and want to transfer files to the reader via USB, Kobo is marginally easier. But Kindle is easier for wireless delivery (regardless of format), and supports it on all of their models instead of just a limited subset.
I have KOReader on my Kobo device, with a couple taps I can connect to my desktop instance of Calibre and transfer books in a flash.
https://koreader.rocks
There are some awesome independent tools to get files on the device via the web.
Try https://send.djazz.se/
But you’re right. Via email is easy. And I’m mostly thinking of epubs/mobi — but drm free.
The Onyx Boox readers have a feature called BooxDrop which runs a web server on the device when you enable it that provides file management and upload. It simple, wireless, and works great.
The readers work perfectly fine without an account and the Poke 5 I have is a fair bit smaller than the last Kindle I had with the same size screen.
It runs Android and I also use Termux plus a bluetooth keyboard with it for a rather nice minimal writing experience.
I've been tempted by their products in the past, but unless they've improved their stance on their use of GPL covered code in a non-compliant manner I don't want to support their business.
It's a fair point and since hearing about that I've been in two minds as to whether I could buy another device from them.
They also use incredibly annoying DRM
If you put them into the Kindle Kids mode you get a much cleaner, more streamlined, ad-free experience without paying extra. I've seen a few adults say that they prefer it to the full-featured mode.
There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline
I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads
My swedish books from the 1800s have ads inside.
At the dominant pharmacy/convenience store in my area (Shoppers Drug Mart), it can take up to 12 clicks to self-checkout, depending on what garbage they're upselling on the day. I counted them.
I refuse to use them, and (annoyingly, I know) let the cashier know why each time as they're checking me out. I feel bad for the poor cashier but unfortunately for them, they're my only interface to the company.
Just want to thank you for standing up for your values at your workplace. I wish more SWEs would have morals like this.
> That is fucked up.
Yes. Our local IKEA recently started doing this. During self-checkout, you have to click through hot dog, ice cream, cinnamon buns and drink offers, and the inevitable offer to get an IKEA family card before you are actually able to pay for your furniture.
Seeing this after waiting in line for 10 minutes, navigating a sluggish, unresponsive touch screen terminal and unsuccessfully trying to scan slightly bend bar codes while 10 people are watching you doesn't exactly increase my desire to return to this store.
I really think a huge part of the problem is that there isn't a direct interaction with a human anymore. If IKEA would ask their cashiers to advertise all this crap to customers before accepting their money, they would revert this after a single day because many customers would very, very strongly complain, and the cashiers would care and threaten to quit.
But you cannot complain to a self-checkout-terminal, which makes this even more frustrating. As another comment has pointed out, there is just a "No thanks" button. I want a "I am seriously offended that you try to milk me like a brainless cash-cow, you should be ashamed to even advertise this to me after I bought a couch for 1,400 EUR, and I will not return anytime soon" button.
Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.
Next time go to the cashier instead, and complain to them about the self-checkout terminal ??
I feel like this reveals some sampling error in the OP rant. When you see something negative get made that makes you think "nobody cares", you're not seeing the people who did care and left.
Which relates to the linked incentives piece: when you create incentives, you think you're changing people's behaviour. Actually you're selecting for people who respond to the incentive.
Yeah, there's always the "No thanks" button but not the "No, fuck you" button.
Or in online spaces, the ever more common “maybe later.” No means no, maybe go jump in a lake of fire.
The iOS app “Calendars” recently starting showing a modal on launch trying to up-sell something - I don’t give a shit what it was - the “no” option was labeled “Thank you”. I had to click “Thank you” to dismiss it so that I could use the fucking app I pay a yearly subscription for. Or in this case: paid. The cheek of these people.
That "Thank you" button just raised the bar on cheek, I think.
I'm actually chuckling at it -- just the sheer passive-aggressive childishness of its attempt at shaming users. I mean, what did they think writing that on the button would achieve? It has literally no effect except to infuriate people who were already going to opt out. Labelling it "I suck" would have been better.
Silicon Valley is like a creepy and terrible suitor, never knowing what "no" means or letting its counterparty express "no". It's always "ask me later".
I hate that the options when faced with a location permissions request is "block" or "allow". why isnt ignore an option?? Block adds the site to a discrete local list which i dont need recorded on my computer...
Because if you don't remember the block, it'll probably ask again on the next page load.
Exactly? I may not want a site to have my location now, but I may be okay with it in the future. Eg, I’m not in a place where I want my location tagged at the moment.
Next page load aka next link you click. I agree it would be nice to have a "No, don't ask me again for this session".
Yes. Similarly, the “agree” should have the option for “Okay yes, but just for this session.”
The fact that this part of the UI is not escapable by the user is hostile and breaks the interaction model. If the “webpage” is asking me this question, why is the browser acting as a middleman and forwarding me this message without letting my continue unless I answer. Let me respond to the webpage or ignore it as well.
Brave has an option for "remember this choice until I close this site".
Qutebrowser offers that.
because that 2nd one requires a "No, fuck YOU!" button and so on ad infinitum.
if you don't, someone else will. Maybe you could've introduced a "bug" that makes it so it usually doesn't work except when a member of the QA team is looking at it :P
Well.. I did implement most of the framework. The good thing is that I'm waaaayyyyy detail oriented, and I made an extremely sophisticated system for it.
Maybe a little bit TOO sophisticated
Not my proudest _engineering_ achievement, but as an R&D project? I consider it a success.
Ethical outcome? Success.
Good on you for sticking to your guns. I hope karma rewards it somehow.
Volkswagen already had this idea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
and decoupling order taking with service makes for "funny" times. since mcdonalds installed the tablets i regularly wait 10 minutes while looking at confused / avoidant employees not knowing what to do, even if there's nobody else waiting.
i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"
That seems more indicative of just bad management. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been in (specially) a McDonalds, but I used to frequent them easier in my life. The ones I went to were well run and efficient. But still as seemed as decoupled as kiosk ordering. The cashier would take the order and put it into the computer. The food preparers would prepare the food and put it on the trays where the packagers would subsequently take it and put it on your tray or in your bag. There was 0 communication between the three groups in 99% of the cases. Often I would make small talk with the cashiers or packagers if there was nobody behind me.
I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.
it's pretty obvious, there's no more tension in the job, the cooks still have a list of things to do, but people serving customers have no idea who ordered what beside a number. they have no real relationship with any of us waiting and quite often I see them roaming around aimlessly, not sure if I've been called or not
This is a result of Taylorist management brain rot drive to reduce drive thru wait time metrics at the expense of anybody not in the drive through. Watch the shot clock near the drive through window (they're highly visible at Taco Bell) and observe that drive thru customers almost never wait more than 60-80 seconds.
Respect for standing up for what you believe in
Even Costco gives you a pop up trying to upsell you on a cookie.
you can't say "they don't care" though, the folks making these screens are obviously pretty motivated to keep squeezing out more profits and care a lot about that. if they "didn't care" they'd have told you "ok fine, im going for break"
McDonald's touch-screen were only profitable because users ordered more. Possibly Covid and processes to get costs down have changed this, but not to begin.
I feel like your comment falls under "Nobody cares"
I love the touch screens and having the time to order what I want. I used to rush my order at the checkout and never got exactly what I wanted.
If you did a start-up 'ethical ordering' you'd care, made money, and probably forced McDonalds to change it's touch screens. In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
I was working so hard to change the internal culture for this.
I did not succeed.
It's ran by business people who want to make money. Not by philosophers.
Same here.
Also, TFA sounds like something I could've written.
Anyway, besides other anecdata, I don't have anything to add.
But I wanted to thank you, azeirah, that at least you tried
I left impressions where it matters. The young engineering talent is not interested in working there.
> In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
Really? I guess I've just never taken up such an upsell, but I'll try to remember it next time I go just to see the UI. Barely ever go there now that ironically Lotteria has more veggie burger options here (1) than McDonalds (0), and their chicken burgers are imo worse than KFC's.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.
You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.
I see this fallacy a lot in the US. I think it's because of our individualism. Attention and hard-work can't overcome everything, we aren't all-powerful beings.
If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.
(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)
You're more likely to burn out butting your head against the incentives working against you. If you're lucky, you may get a few successes before you burn out.
That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.
Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.
It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.
(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)
I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.
Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.
To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.
It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.
No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.
The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.
Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency
> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded
This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.
As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.
The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(
> Person with headphones blocking the sidewalk.
Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.
Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.
Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.
Many cyclist are also drivers.
Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.
Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.
Well damn I guess I’m living in the 1% /s
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care.
And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn't feel adversarial.
in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].
In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.
So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
There are plenty of professions where it makes sense someone unpleasant still has a job because they're actually hyper competent (like software development) but why would physicians be filtered out of the profession for poor bedside manner? In what part of the world is there a surplus of supply of doctors that would allow for that?
I think you missed a bit of nuance. Psychologically, people are more likely to pursue a malpractice case against an incompetent physician who has poor bedside manner rather than an incompetent physician who has excellent bedside manner. So that specific quadrant would be penalized the most.
or doctors with bad bedside manner could move into non-patient-facing roles like research or pathology
"In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated."
I'd [citation needed] on that, depending on the condition.
In that for some conditions, successful diagnosis and treatment across a wide range of the population (not just the most educated, articulate, mentally with-it and compliant quartile) is going to depend on being able to get qualitative information from the patient, and interpret that correctly.
Equally though the medical profession has enough specialisation in terms of role to be able to put the right personality types in the right jobs.
citation: i made it up based on my intuition because this is a thought experiment to illustrate a paradox.
also "bedside manner" is not just about conveying information. that would be a big part of successful treatment.
if you ask people about bedside manner is all going to be about personality and emotional sensitivity (where they gruff? did they make you feel bad? etc). somebody can be amazing at conveying accurate information but come across as a complete asshole, and those are the 'bad bedside manner' docs.
TIL that there's a name for it. I always just sort of intuited this phenomenon.
The entire article is a form of engagement bait. It’s a pile of stereotypes with storytelling. Paul Graham does the same thing. Arguing about which stereotype is true or false… you’re just playing into it.
And in particular engagement bait, when you're blogging or writing, requires you to not be circumspect but rather be polarized and absolute in what you say.
My mother is a nurse practitioner who works in an acute care clinic, and I can say that she feels horrible when she makes a mistake, learns that one of her patients’ conditions has worsened and they’ve been hospitalized, or — worst of all — when they die, even if it was expected.
My personal experience with multiple doctors, some in primary care and others in hospitals, is that they often don't care and just want to get you out of the door.
Bring up some symptoms not immediately easily attributed to something? Sorry, those are "nonspecific symptoms" and they can't help you. Maybe see a specialist, maybe not. Figure it out.
Obviously this isn't all of them, but it is definitely a decent chunk.
Let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've spent on a single patient over the last month? What do you think that number is like for your fellow physicians?
Of course this will massively depend on your specific workplace, the ratio of doctors to patients in your vicinity, and so on. But I've seen plenty of doctors for who that statistic can't be higher than 10 minutes.
I'll freely admit I'm biased. I have a medical issue that despite visiting a good number of different doctors, none have properly diagnosed. This is despite the symptoms being visible, audible and showing up on certain scans (inflammation), so it can't be disregarded as "it's in your head". Some have made an attempt, and after that failed quickly did the equivalent of throwing their hands up and saying "I don't know", providing no further path.
Regardless of facts about how much doctors actually care, he still perceives the world as one where almost nobody does. I'm glad he expressed himself as such because I feel the same way sometime, even though I know that most people try to fill their role in society well. It's like a special kind of loneliness that grows quick. I like how he describes the development of this loneliness. Once he put on its glasses, he thinks carelessness is everywhere, even in doctors who do care, so he develops existential hopelessness of some sort.
Loneliness is a really good way to describe it. I definitely have had similar experiences to the author. It can make you feel really pessimistic and like a freak outcast for actually caring. It makes me feel arrogant or overly confident too.
I think ironically it does show that the author thinks highly of people and their potential. A truly bitter person would have long stopped expecting anything of anyone, which I think is very unhealthy. You expect people to care but only about things that harm you.
I'm guessing there's more people out there who feel this way, and likewise I'm glad the author shared this experience even if it's not the healthiest mindset to always be in.
This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.
I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.
My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.
It’s a statement of privilege to believe (and say) that there are hundreds of good doctors per handful of bad ones? It sounds to me like a statement of fact. And that you dispute the fact. What does privilege have to do with it?
Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to mind for nearly the first diagnosis that comes to mind. Given the volumes of patients they are expected to churn through though it’s not surprising that they become desensitized and divorced from the ramifications of shoddy work with minimal research — for many (especially nonspecialists) it’s effectively impossible to do thoughtful work for every patient. I think overwork desensitizes many/most and few actually have the time or energy to do more research or think deeply about an individual patient, but ultimately decisions which consume minimal resources from them drastically affect the lives of patients.
Healthcare professionals know this to be true. This is why when their own loved ones are the patients they have such a strong tendency to become very actively involved —- it’s not necessarily that the person attending to their loved one is incompetent, but chances are that their loved ones will similarly be just another face that occupies another physician’s mind for a few minutes.
Artificially high barriers of entry in the field may lead to massive compensations but also to a huge ratio of patients to physicians — this takes a toll.
It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.
"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.
(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)
My primary care physician will only do video meetings or wait 6 months for in-person appointment. He does not care.
You think PCPs get to decide what their schedule looks like? Or do you think they have a specific patient load they are expected to meet, which dictates how many in-person vs remote slots they have in each day?
Even people posting comments don't care.
Yes. They just choose to fill it way passed capacity because they want more money and don't want to accept the money they will end up getting for doing a proper non-rushed job.
That's why they have 15min slots and rush you out the door if you look like you'll be taking too much of their time. Maybe blame the insurance for dictating they must charge per-session instead of per-hour, sure, but the doctors at the end of the day prioritize their own salary over patients well being. Not to the extent that one can say they are negligent or do a bad job, but they ride that line between in order to optimize their earnings without getting into (too much) trouble.
Presumably, if the GP comment hasn't switched yet, then there's a bit of a shortage of options. So it's entirely possible that there's a shortage of doctors in general in the area, and a doctor that does care about serving patients in that circumstance will find themselves in exactly the same pattern of behaviour, because there's more need from patients than they can satisfy, so they try to help the most people they can even if that means each person gets less help.
More egregously in that regard, in the UK it's common for doctors to part work for the NHS and part work privately. Anything on the NHS is massively underresourced and so long waiting times for short, overworked appointments are common, but you can get an appointment much faster and with better attention from the same doctor if you pay. But then even these private services are starting to have too much demand, because the problem is more structural as the population grows and ages, while investment in the education and training, not to mention reasons to stay in the country afterwards, has stagnated.
His care does not scale and he has to ration his care between existing patients. For him to give you more care, it will likely come at the expense of someone else's care.
This situation has occurred because somewhere and somewhen else, a chain of other people have not cared and allowed primary care resources to get to this state.
Why don't you change ?
Is it not allowed ?
They might be living in the UK where most of the population has no private healthcare insurance and the nationalized GPs are frequently all overloaded like that.
Yep. That's what I was curious about.
Is that a rebuttal to the idea that the doctor doesn't care?
Why would you think it's a rebuttal?
Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait. If I heard someone say that they were required to wait that long for in-person doctor's visits, I'd wonder why they were still seeing that doctor and ask them polite questions to try to figure it out.
That's the case where I live, there's only a few surgeries I'm allowed to register at and they all have this problem. I think there is some manipulation of statistics the surgeries do to prevent more being created, and to hide the difficulty in getting an appointment. For example rather than having 6 month waiting list, they don't make appointments more than a few weeks in advance, so you just can't get an appointment and it looks like nobody waits more than a few weeks. I think while surgeries are allowed to do this we'll never understand the real capacity.
When you say "surgeries", are you using what I understand to be the UK word for the US phrase "doctor's offices"?
Yes
Cool. Thanks for clarifying.
Man, it should NOT be permitted to play with the "waiting list" stats in the way you describe. I wish you had someone who gave a fuck about (and could do something about) the problem to report it to... that's just bullshit.
> Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait.
I always find it cute to see what Americans consider a long wait for any medical service.
For myself in Canada the very minimum time to see a GP is a month and a half and that's a best case scenario. Get a different GP? Impossible.
No. I was curious as to why they are stuck like that and what country and system they were in.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.
While I was at Facebook they dropped the "and break thing" off the corporate values anyways. Turns out they just want you to move fast.
I think you’re absolutely right. I was using it in the more abused term, but I actually subscribe to the original intent of it. My wife’s organization would almost certainly be better off if they embraced this mentality even slightly more. Maybe most people would, for that matter.
But yeah, the movement did seem to become the primary goal, and breaking things seemed less about stress-testing and freeing from restrictions, and more like an inconvenience on the path of progress, whatever that might mean. It seemed like a lot of us went from being experimental and nimble to clumsy and incoherent at some point.
I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).
The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.
Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).
Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.
Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).
I work for the government IT.
Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.
Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.
An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.
There are many problems with individual ownership though. It is a whole large system where people constantly change. You need to have multiple owners and redundancy otherwise all the projects are dependent on one individual who might quit any time. Things happen in the past, people make mistakes and you start to incorporate processes to avoid it because people are and will always be imperfect, you end up with thise processes and bureaucracy.
Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!
And playing PoE!
This is my experience as a government worker.
Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
> One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
> This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
There is a tradeoff between affordability and aesthetics. Lengthy review processes make housing more expensive. Seattle cares, but it cares more about affordability. With the cost of housing right now I think that's the right call. Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
> Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
> Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
Paying architects, engineers, and lawyers to go back and forth with city bureaucrats and committees for months or even years is typically the expensive part.
Building housing lowers the cost of housing. Requiring some accounting of $ saved on brickwork -> $ spent on homelessness is just another bureaucratic hurdle, which is ironically exactly what TFA is complaining about.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.
The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.
> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems
I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.
I am much more depressed by our crushing lack of new housing construction that keeps cities unaffordable for the middle class than I am about new buildings not being sufficiently pleasing to my eye.
I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.
In NYC at least, the low point of architectural beauty was in the 1960-2000 era. In the past decade or two I think there has been a lot of really quality architecture going up. The current aesthetic issue plaguing the city is the onerous regulations that result in unneeded scaffolding being put up around buildings for months or even years.
Do you think New York and Florence have those beautiful buildings because their local design review committees had high standards? I don't.
I think aesthetics should nearly always come second to other concerns, except in very specialised cases. For a start, it's largely a matter of personal taste. "Streamlining the design review process" is something I wish was more of a priority where I live. Those rates (local property tax) dollars are much better spent on almost anything else in my opinion.
100% of the people around me at work care.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?
Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.
An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.
No, the examples in the article are bad.
The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.
DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.
The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.
Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.
I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.
> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It is not.
It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.
One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.
> One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill
Only when there's no way to measure the results.
Measuring results is notoriously hard in this industry. Any metric can be easily manipulated, and many qualitative aspects of software are not quantifiable. Moreover, the people who get to decide the metrics will tend to choose them in a way that gives an advantage to themselves.
Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).
Maybe some fraction of incompetent interns are playing a kind of double game, where they merely pretend to be really caring.
But I doubt that’s the norm. There really are a lot of not so smart people of all ages out there in positions way beyond their actual capability.
Edit: And in a lot of situations the dumb and hard working are way more dangerous than the smart and lazy.
With the dumb and lazy being somewhat better, so I partially agree with the parent.
In my 15 years, I’ve had a lot of interns, and a lot of indirect interaction with other interns. I can usually spot a genuine one in about a day at this point.
Show horses and workhorses – Hillary Clinton was all about that and say what you like about her, this distinction is quite wise.
There is also the latin saying "res, non verba" – that one is proven by action rather than words.
I'm sure there are also a lot of competent smart people who may happen to have other issues in their lives affecting their output. Maybe they are burned out, have some family drama, have health issues, etc.
I for one am glad if 10 interns get a chance even if only 1 turns out to be truly useful. It's a matter of empathy and I hope it prevails because what real purpose do we have without it.
As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.
Point being, this isn't new.
The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.
On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.
And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.
Isn't "good enough" the definition of "bare minimum"? That aligns pretty well with "doesn't care"
I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.
I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.
Good enough... seems almost too self explanatory. Its good enough! Great!
Not really sure why you brought your job into this, other than to inject corporatism into social problems.
Good enough = human shit in the street in USA.
This reads more like a death by a thousand tiny cuts, much like people that do not return their shopping carts.
As for solutions, it won't happen in our life time in USA.
Shame has a function in society, USA as a whole is shameless, that's all there is to it.
Thanks for the domain name suggestion.
TheCaringCompany.com was taken but a good enough variant wasn’t and I got it.
Thank you!
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
Elon only cares about enriching himself.
I think he mostly cares about getting humanity off this planet, he's been saying that for a long, long time.
Starting a space company to enrich yourself sounds like a very weird thing to do if you only care about money.
He's certainly working towards getting humanity of this planet by making it a worse place to survive. I'm not sure why you would praise him for that.
Also Elon lies all the time. He's even lying about playing games.
He's just trying to get money and power. Maybe he's doing some stuff that interests him on the side but he really doesn't care about you specifically.
He only cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image.
He don't want poor people with him, only his rich friends
If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?
I believe his motivations are beyond getting rich. At some point in life money become means to goals, and goals are driven by real motivation.
> If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?
It's a PR stunt. He pays someone to play for him and level up his account. Then, he plays for a bit and it's painfully obvious that he's inexperienced.
He doesn't take criticism very well either. He recently removed a live streamers Twitter verification for pointing out his lack of skill. How's that for a "free speech" platform?
Elon is extremely partisan, insecure, and rich. That's it.
Do you mean paying others to game for you?
> I believe his motivations are beyond getting rich. At some point in life money become means to goals, and goals are driven by real motivation.
They are now about acquiring power and respect from other people, after he became rich and everyone started making fun of him.
That's not fair. He also cares what twitter randos think of him (e.g. to the point of paying to boost his diablo account or whatever).
What do you not agree with? That he doesn't care? I would assume scaling Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity are net positive for the world (as it stands). Can you achieve those ambitious things if the leader/ceo of the company doesn't care?
You know what what happens when you assume...
Good rebuttal, very nice debate.
I mean, he clearly didn't care that supervisors at his company were calling people the N-word on the job. He cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image, at least to a specific audience.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.
I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.
Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.
But your work may contribute to a product that helps a doctor, nurse or teacher do their job.
Even if it does not directly do that, maybe your fellow workers use the income they get from the company existence to raise their kid who becomes a doctor, nurse, etc.
This does not solve the problem that people are compensated based on the ability to create profit and the trendiness of the industry, not on usefulness. If I allow a kid of someone in my company to go to med school and then they drop out of being a doctor because the pay sucks and become yet another financier/dev/consultant/middle manager/entrepreneur of fairly useless business, then the system still failed.
Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and public workers should definitely be paid better, but I'm just focusing on one part of your argument which I find specious.
I'm saying you have a skewed idea of usefulness. Relative usefulness can only be properly evaluated when you look at the big picture.
The fact that you are not seeing the immediate usefulness of what you are doing does not necessarily mean much. Even a comedian can be incredibly useful if he helps stave of mental and emotional distress that could contribute to burn out or shoddy work among those doing the supposedly more "useful" work.
I don't have a skewed idea of usefulness, you are just trying to justify your loyalty to a system that will fuck any logical priorties over for profit in order to cope with our current reality. I'm coping by having a job that is not very useful but makes profit, but I am not fooling myself to believe this system is virtuous.
And yes I would say an artist or comedian is far, far more useful than a middle manager at a company managing devs fixing minor bugs on a website for a superfluous business. Back to my original point, I would probably give more to society as an artist than a dev. Some people would bring more to society as a dev than an artist, mind. In a world where we got paid just to be actually useful, there would be less devs and they'd all be better at their jobs.
I think it can be subdivided into value creators and value movers.
A comedian, doctor, farmer, or teacher creates value. They directly produce something that benefits other humans.
The financial sector, marketing, sales, real-estate conglomerates, etc I see as value movers. They don't actually create something themselves, but rather move it from someplace else to themselves, thereby forcing others to play the same game not to get outcompeted. It's pretty hard to argue marketing or hedge funds aren't a zero-sum game.
I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.
Yeah I think a lot of people care about that stuff.
Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?
Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?
Exactly. A lot of people would be bring more value to society doing literally ANYTHING else than working on the metaverse or something but they won't get compensated the same for the actually useful stuff.
Unless you can find a person who's deepest passion is feeding others.
Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.
27% of gdp on doctors and hospitals, are you sure youre not missing a middleman or two in there?
Look it up.
Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
Ha. The traffic curb example is actually a good one. I don’t think it’s an excuse to build a potentially dangerous ramp because you aren’t a cyclist yourself. People who design ramps should be capable to do it properly.
Imagine it were a ramp for wheelchairs and they would have decided that a 20 degree slope is doable.
This may be intentional.
Road to sidewalk is a speed transition point. The transition from street to sidewalk via a tight turn here is an effective traffic-calming component to slow down bikes from road speed to walking speed. That's done on freeway off-ramps, where there's a curved section or two of decreasing radii to force vehicle speeds down before they reach a stop sign or traffic light. Same problem.
This is the most likely reason. They should have put a sign, but the ramp looks right to me if you want them to match pedestrian speed when merging into a pedestrian space.
Yes, this is most likely the reason.
Which means that the author didn't "care" enough to think through what the reason might have been or didn't "care" enough for the pedestrians.
Yeah, that's why we have raised crosswalks and stop signs everywhere that a pedestrian has to interact with a car.
Or that we have safe and separated bike lanes instead of paint to keep cyclists safe, right?
Do you really think a pedestrian feels safe here with this design?
Its the same reason many dont walk places. Too many half passed attempts by people who don't care designing crosswalks and intersections for cars and not pedestrians.
I don't get what you're getting at here. But, yes, I feel safer with a cyclist going slow on a shared sidewalk rather than going at full speed.
For some reason, cyclists like to close their eyes when their fellow cyclists run stop lights, cut people off, hit pedestrians. Oh but cars are more dangerous! Yeah, no shit, but that doesn't excuse cyclists not caring about pedestrians.
This reminds me of Tempest in a Pothole, an episode of The Paper Chase TV show from 1984:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEFBX4M5LCQ&t=2896s
The thrust is that standards of accountability are (or should be) higher for a professional than for a random reasonable person.
I agree people should be able to design things property, but I'm not sure this ramp is actually a good example. It might be! But no one is talking about an obvious issue for any ramp that would exist in that photo: it is merging bikes in to pedestrian traffic. So I'd think that you specifically want a ramp that forces the bike to slow down.
Yeah, not doing one's job well because they don't know how to (and won't bother to figure out) is an example of not caring, fundamentally.
People who aren't competent to do a job also generally aren't competent to teach themselves the job. That's why we the whole idea of qualification, competency testing, supervision, training, etc., exists.
I imagine the designer was under a set of constraints, for example, only a certain about of linear space was available for the ramp, because of other issues in the area; or maybe there was some budget constraint.
The designer may have thought about what it's like for a cyclist to make that curve, and thought, "the bicyclist can slow down to make the ramp."
None of those things have anything to do with not caring.
> This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
They literally mentioned it to the Director of the Seattle DOT. If the person who designed a bike lane isn't aware of the needs and dangers to bike users then they are not fit for the job. Engineers must make decisions for the curve of car lanes based on speed limits and terrain. They must make those same decisions for other vehicles.
>Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
So... In other words... They did not care about their job enough to investigate and think through the situation. They just did the default easy thing and moved on with their day.
it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
Can you even imagine any piece of automobile infrastructure being designed in a way that is dangerous to drivers, and those drivers' concern being downplayed with the excuse that perhaps the person who designed the infrastructure isn't an automobile driver and didn't think about what it would be like to be a driver?
That would be inconceivable, but when non-drivers are the ones whose safety is ignored in favor of automobile drivers' convenience, nobody cares.
If the person designing it can't consider the needs of people who are biking then they shouldn't have that job.
> isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
But this is exactly the "don't care" attitude. Ignore the specifics of the problem, avoid studying it or just giving it a thought. Didn't think that, not being a cyclist themselves, they should ask somebody who is. Didn't even think about very obvious things, like putting a warning sign ahead of the actual object that it would warn about.
No. That person did not care. Really sad.
Imagine building an app for a market you’re totally unfamiliar with. You don’t research the market, you don’t talk to potential users, you don’t do any real world testing. You just build something that seems like it should be ok, ship it, and never touch it again.
None of us would dream of doing that, but that’s what the designer of this atrocity did, if we’re assuming the best.
Bonus: the app probably isn’t going to kill anyone.
Usually constraints are financial related. It takes money to do all that and public works is not some big tech company
True. But putting the signpost 20 yards ahead likely costs exactly the same.
The whole article is "This design isn't optimized for me" and "No one else prioritizes my priorities". Empathy is something one can develop with practice if you take the self-reflection to recognize things from others perspectives. Their "Nobody cares" can easily be redirected back to author with how little other perspectives they consider. Multiple times their "objectively" better thing is worse for some.
I completely agree. The author is attributing apathy to every action or inaction of everybody they see.
Just take the banal examples, like the person listening to their headphones. Maybe that person is listening to an audio book about medicine, because they are in medical school, and they really care about being a good student. Or the people taking up the whole escalator. Maybe they are old friends who have the opportunity to be together, and they care about listening to the conversation. Maybe the man zoned out in traffic who doesn't see your signal has his mind occupied by thoughts of his new baby who is sick in the hospital. Maybe the bike ramp was designed by a plucky intern who, despite inexperience, successfully got the entire mile-long bike lane installed in the first place.
The author is entirely wrong because they are myopic. It isn't that nobody cares, but rather that _everybody cares_. About different things, but the author has no insight into this and it's not their place to judge those things in the first place. They reach a good conclusion though, which is to change the things they care about with personal activism.
Yes, I get a lack of empathy from this article. The author mentions a lot of little things other people do that annoy him, without the sense that maybe you need to put up with a little annoyance to get along with other people, and without any awareness that maybe he does little things that annoy other people.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
Don't have a ton of experience in Paris, but I stayed at the Yotel at Charles De Gaulle once. The first room had dirty bedsheets, and the lamps were broken. I called the guy to give me another room, and he just goes, 'there's no problem' And I was left wondering—what is 'problem' reserved for? A fire?
It's not just the West. I'm Indian and it's 2x worse there.
I agree also with most of the rant but the part about state/municipal jobs looks a bit unfair to me. If you have ever volonteer or worked for this kind of job, you could find that many people are so ungrateful: only few care to answer polls or attend public meetings, almost nobody cares about the why. But when something changes, lots of loud mouths shout rants like this one. People sometimes don't imagine how hard this is to have basic consensus on anything when there is lots of people in a group. Doing anything is also so complicated nowadays with the numerous parts involved in any decision, each one having their own priority set and timelines, the constraints of the law...
The care is certainly not the only reason of having broken things.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
> Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
The author was complaining about the use of cool white (5000k) LEDs instead of warm ones (2700k). Cool LEDs aren't any cheaper or more efficient than warm ones. So what tradeoffs are we talking about?
Maybe the city has a million of them sitting in a warehouse from some previous administration and they don't want to buy new ones.
Imagine this argument made about e.g. the leftover stock of lead-based paint. What, are we gonna dispose of all this toxic paint and re-stock with new one? That'd be just ridiculous. /s
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
Nobody is asking you to care and fix everything. They are asking you to care about the things in direct control, like your job or kid.
This thread is filled with “I do care but can’t because _”. And yet there are those rare people who do care, and with a little bit of preparation and effort make a big difference.
When people start in a new job they go through a tough 3-6 week sink or swim experience, and then the skills and approach they develop rarely changes. Think about that. Most professionals probably have spent 200-300 focused hours of their entire life trying to get good at what they do for 40 years.
> Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, thank you for writing this.
I have a pet theory that selling products and services that reduce people's ability to look after their own needs (either directly or as a side-effect), while marketing that the same product actually improves your life is one of the key business strategies of our generation.
lovely perspective <3
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
> There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.
The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.
Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?
This is still pretty true. The xenophobia is waning as Japan's economy stagnates and there's a general vibe that Japan did something wrong economically. But otherwise, these all continue to be real issues in Japan.
These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.
The suicide rate in the United States is higher than it is in Japan if you believe official government figures of Japan and the United States. The talking point about suicide in Japan is one of those that's 30 years out of date.
Not sure what the "official government figures" are but the OECD says otherwise: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/suicide-rates.html
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
In Japan this attentive behaviour is often out of fear or boredom. Either way the service is good overall.
I live here. Sometimes the service isnt good and staff behaves like an insentient robot who repeats a script and fucks off.
If you know Japanese and actually talk to them, its obviously the same ape base mech the rest of us are driving.
One thing that rarely mentioned in Japanese 7-11 efficiency is the "employment ice age" problem that contributed to it: there was a massive job crisis around 1993-2005 and major STEM university graduates were dime a dozen. A McDonald's but with only clones of Gordon Freeman as employees tends to become a bit different place than a regular hamburger shop.
theres an effect in countries with high average iq where the quality of low skill labor workers is higher. I dont remember the name, but was convinced it was causal.
its similar to what you are saying, but applies across the board, not just to university grads, and in taiwan also.
i suspect japanese workers at 7-11 now are not college grads still working there from the 90s. its mostly young part time workers. i see middle age people sometimes. Noteably theyre losing the high quality service reputation entirely because many of the stores are being run by immigrants from nepal and the philipines now who dont follow the japanese service memes.
They also mess up the sushi at sushiro/kurasushi and your fish come sideways.
Oh.. do people not do that anymore? At the little grocery store I worked at in BC Canada, if there were like 2 or 3 people in line we'd call for help if they weren't already on their way. Seems like a pretty basic thing.
Here in the US, I don't know what's going on with the cashiers. They're slow. They don't say a single word to you, not even to give you your total. And they're awful at bagging. I just don't get it. It's not a hard job.
How roles are perceived, becomes how people perceive themselves, becomes how people act out those roles.
Or more to the point: Its easier to be what people expect you to be.
In my experience the US is especially susceptible to this 'roleplaying', probably because all (entertrainment) media comes from the same overarching culture.
What, we expect cashiers to be slow and bad so that's how they act? That's ridiculous. I expect them to scan my groceries at a reasonable pace, put the eggs and bread on top, and read me the total when they're done. I expect their managers to give them heck if they're clearing lines at half the speed as the next cashier over. That's about it.
It's not a shameful or embarrassing job. My sister-in-law made a career out of it. She's happy there, so I'm happy for her. She gets good benefits and decent pay. Just do your job and everyone's happy.
It is a hard job if you and your partner both have full-time jobs and other part-time or side-hustles just to barely pay the rent.
It's not a hard job to check out any single customer's groceries. It's a hard job to do it all day, especially when you're not allowed to sit down.
I've literally done it. It's not hard. Maybe if you have some health conditions that make it difficult to stand, but I hope the store will provide accommodations if you do.
I used to rank the McDonald's in Toppongi hills Tokyo as having the best employees anywhere after I saw one run from one side of the little shop to the other when the French fry buzzer went off.
However, it got beat out by the McDonald's in Arkadelphia Arkansas, where the employee fast walked as quickly as hen could to take the order to the car waiting in the Drive-Thru, and then also fast walked back. Running of course would have been against OSHA and gotten hen in trouble so hen did the best hen could.
Are you Swedish? Just wondering because I've never seen the gender neutral pronoun "hen" in English.
And here I thought it was about how actual hens walk.
"hen" is my go-to gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.
I realize that English speakers use "you" for both singular and plural, having retired "thee" and "thou", but the resulting ambiguity has led to the creation of a new word, "y'all", or sometimes prepending it with "all of" for clarity.
Using "they/them" in the singular will just lead us down the same path.
Why not short circuit it and just add the pronoun English speakers have needed forever?
How often is the gender of the pronouned person(s) relevant? In my experience, almost never.
Til https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_(pronoun)
The run usually isnt because they care its because theyre scared of senpai and (bucho/shacho) big boss.
If the management is chill they arent gonna run.
I'm not sure what was going on in tokyo, but in arkadelphia it was simply that there are a huge number of people waiting for food and the employee did not want them to wait any longer than they had to.
I don't want to see employees running in the direction of hot fat, thanks.
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
A well known CEO noted that in a failing organization he was trying to devise a turn around plan for that everyone in the organization invariably blamed... the other teams! Not a one said "our team is responsible for our failure".
The engineers blamed product, the product people blamed sales, etc.
He said he provided this suggestion, "You are of course right (it's the other groups fault, and it might have been so), but what can you do, in your group, as part of a solution we all work towards to help fix this?"
So yeah, it is the other guys fault. But what you can you do to help fix it?
Classic CEO. "How can you, the powerless IC, fix an organisational problem? No, I mean without me having to do anything meaningful or risky"
Not at all.
The CEO in question publicly declared his own job would be forfeit within a year if he didn't meet goals that were in the recent past history of the company, absolutely impossible.
He met and exceeded those goals.
The IC isn't powerless with good management.
What company was it, who was the CEO, and what's one specific thing one of the departments did?
Or are you just copy/pasting LinkedIn drivel?
Nissan, Ghosn, and I can't answer the third easily without delving back into it, but if I think of an answer, I'll edit this reply.
Never heard of Ghosn before - but you mean this guy? https://www.dmarge.com/cars/nissan-bankruptcy-ceo-carlos-gho...
The guy who's a wanted fugitive in Japan and fled to Lebanon by shipping himself in a piano box?
Power and money got to his head, hard, but he used to be a really good manager, probably the best Michelin ever had, before he took the job at Renault (then Nissan). Not surprised to hear he was very successful there, as he had a really good reputation before his divorce (and this is baseless gossip, but I will still say I doubt any of his wrongdoings were before 2012. Too much power and no one to keep his ego checked down).
100% correct.
This is such a low effort learned-helplessness response. Look, there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, I'm not here to defend them, but one thing you have to understand is that CEO action is an extremely blunt instrument. Of all the problems in an org, the vast majority can not be directly solved by the CEO, they can just sort of broadly steer the culture in the right direction, but folks down the chain need to solve problems at their own level. Of course there are tradeoffs in an organization and so not every problem can be solved, but if folks who understand the details can't propose any kind of solution that doesn't A) require CEO action or B) every other person to act exactly the way they propose, then they're not really helping.
I understand there's a lot of toxic environments where it's not worth trying to improve things, but a blanket statement pointing at CEOs en masse as the root of all problems is just as stupid and reductive as CEOs who don't do anything to empower ICs and learn from the front-line expertise.
I have no way of knowing if this is true, but supposedly Musk gets down and dirty at the front line, on the factory floor, every single week trying to solve problems:
https://techstartups.com/2024/12/20/marc-andreessen-on-elon-...
So the CEO as "big ship pilot" but not in the trenches fire fighting seems to be contradicted by at least one CEO if this is true.
>a blanket statement pointing at CEOs en masse as the root of all problems
That's not what I said. Must've struck a nerve.. CEO by chance?
Sure, that's great if you all work for the same organization and everyone involved asked themselves that and they all benefited from the organization's overall success.
But that is not the case here. That is not how bike lanes or many other things get built. The engineer is a consultant that works for one independent company. The contractor is a different independent company. The client is another company or a government entity. Possibly the client involves several different entities with competing demands and priorities.
And "success" for the engineer doesn't really mean building a good thing. It means a happy client who will come back for repeat business.
How does this problem get fixed? Well, eventually someone hits that curb and breaks their neck and sues the city. Then the city hires an engineer to create design standards that they include in future contracts when they build new bike lanes.
There are two groups of people: blamers and doers. For example, people will often blame local government for issues such as not disposing of fly tipping garbage quick enough, but they will not do much to clean up the pavements with sofas or fridges around their house – a man with a van can often drive over these large bits of garbage to a recycling centre for like $30/£30 an hour. Sometimes people will say government is spending money poorly, but they will not have participated in any of the consultations the government did on the matter, even if they were online or accepted mail-in comments. And in workplaces, they will often blame other departments without having put in elementary effort to resolve the issues with them. Sometimes people will blame government services for collapsing – there are certainly many YouTubers that constantly moan about how bad public transit is in many regions of the US, but few will donate to groups and politicians that genuinely want to replan public transit. Few will campaign for them, which can be done online in the fraction of a time it takes to produce a video.
If an org gets taken over by the blamer culture, it is doomed. These people will make no attempt at fixing problems, even when that would sometimes take 5 minutes and an email, but they will moan. And they will blame, and sometimes they'll blame the person suggesting an easy and workable course of action to resolve the problems.
Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain. And still, people who tend towards the blamer group will blame and moan. Though I make no insinuation that moaning doesn't have any other benefits (such as YouTube video revenue, virtue signalling, and similar) – it is clearly appealing to one of the two groups I mentioned.
> Interestingly, sometimes resolving the problem takes less effort than sustained moaning, and certainly less mental strain.
That would involve actually doing some kind of work that people doing the complaining would like to avoid in the first place, because it's "someone else's responsibility to get it right!".
The irony is that the CEO is essentially blaming the employees in this case without listening and figuring out what the actual problem is.
Definitely a cultural problem where any sort of flaw is punished. We definitely need to root that out if we are to come together.
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
"does this dress make me look fat"
is it lying or not? People lie all day every day, and if you dont they wont like you. They expect you to lie.
Someone invites you somewhere. You respond you dont want to go because meh. They get angry. "Atleast make up an excuse or something dont just tell me you dont want to go!!"
Very common. More common in women.
I refuse to socialize with people who cannot handle my way of communication, unless I strictly require them in a professional setting. Recently I organized a party and it was so amazing to be able to communicate in a group without any barriers at all.
I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.
Please never give up the fight against entropy. We can keep the flame alive a little longer.
Resist the cold churn toward pride-fueled apathy that this rant exhausts.
After reading this, if this is supposed to demonstrate the psyche of the sort of person who “cares”, I really hope he keeps indoors and spends a little bit more time on his self before stepping out on others.
The thing is that I might be another psycho. But there is a city center, winter and an old women with blueish hands. Wearing no proper shoes and having only a sweater. There are hundred other caring and loving persons and missionaries around, heavy car traffic too. But somehow I am the one bringing her to the care facility a mile away. How can it happen!? Why do you think, that only a Good Samaritan can care and a psycho can’t?
I think that's actually a known psychological phenomenom. The more people there are, the less likely someone steps in to help. Because if help was needed, someone of all the other people would have already helped. Same with driving past car accidents for example.
It's good to keep this in mind. If you see something and no one is helping, it's good to check. Especially when there are other people around.
Personally I just try to do right within my influence. And helping someone find their keys, or going after a stray pet, and similar fits right into that. It won't change the world, but it makes life better for someone and I'd hope to be treated similarly if I was in that situation.
And caring at work in an institution? I don't know, it seems part of survival to learn to not care there.
Well, pardon me. It doesn’t seem to me like you’ve gone mad, but if you are a psycho indeed, I don’t want to do you further harm.
If you really are “all right” and just an honestly styled man trying to cultivate good in a barren city with crushed soil and souls, then I reckon there’s some care in you of some kind much to be desired from others and you know it.
And I suspect that it’s the psychos who believe that they’re “Good Samaritans” and if your word is true then we can tell that apparently they’re unwilling to provide actions that confirm their claims. Crazy.
So, my guess is maybe the world’s gone so mad that anyone trying to behave sane looks strange, and the ones who are mad pretend to be right until wrong shows up.
Sorry, but it’s in German: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/panorama/sterbenden... Society is that far, that some people just step over the corpse to reach ATM and get some cash. World is gone mad and numb to the pain of others. So don’t be shy if you sometimes help others.
> „Ich gehe einfach nur rein, mache meine Erledigungen und gehe wieder.“
What a world. And what a way that this phrase can mean different to different people depending on what a person perceived to be their duties and their deeds.
Thanks.
As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
I really enjoyed your comment. Without digging deep into design philosophy, it really is a fun practice to try hard to notice the things around you (especially in the physical world as opposed to digital) that were specifically designed for you in mind and have actually positively affected you. Most of them were quite intentional, indeed! Isn't that great?
>The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.
>The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.
Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.
The last time I asked someone to turn down the music they dropped their bag to their feet and headed straight to punch me out.
Maybe the wisdom is to just not care, and know you'll die soon, who cares.
Every generation is a shitshow after the next.
This is why concealed carry is so important.
> The author could ask the guy to turn off the music
People who tend to blast their music on a loudspeaker are not exactly the kind of people who are going to accept the message.
Doesn't this work for every point then?
> Programmers should speak up against managers who want to upsell fries, but they don't care.
Managers who tend to upsell fries are not exactly the kind of people who are going to accept the message.
Broadly speaking yes.
The goals of managers (and business in general) are profit maximization, and of course upselling exists exactly for that. And if a manager decided that we need to add another upselling screen then it's more or less futile to disagree from the position of a subordinate employee. The decision has been thought of and made.
One time I asked a guy on the bus to turn his music down. (He was wearing headphones but also blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker.) He got extremely upset and threatened to beat me up. Everyone else on the bus got away from us. Nobody seemed willing to help me if he attacked. Fortunately the bus came to a stop about 20 seconds later and he got off.
I have since moved out of the SF bay area and I drive everywhere. My life is much more pleasant.
I get where you are coming from and also got the impression that this guy is just bitching about people not doing things the way he wants them to.
But, I catch myself doing this sometimes, though the motive for my gripe may be a bit different. The music on the trail one is a good example, since I like to hike. Generally speaking, most people are respectful out on the trails because we are all there for a similar reason; to connect with nature and relax our mind/spirit while we get our dose of motion medicine. It's an immersive experience, but that immersion and the comradery that comes with it is broken by people who disrupt the serenity of the experience by not considering how their actions effect other people around them.
If I apply that to the examples, that "nobody cares about the impact of their actions on the lives of others" it clicks. Yes, it's heavily cynical, but it is hard not to be, most days, which is why I hike (among other hobbies) to get out of my own head and shed that default cynicism for a bit.
Maybe the author feels that way, but didn't articulate it well enough? Or maybe it's just a hard thing to convey since it always appears as just bitching about the way things are. I guess I empathize, but would have approached it differently.
Y'all seem to willfully miss the point.
A lot of people are just not very conscientious.
The author should really move to Japan if they’re so impressed. Then they’ll get to find out what things in Japan no-one gives a shit about, and the shine will wear off.
People often seem to caution against romanticizing Japan, and I think that is a good instinct no matter what, but at least among my cohort, I don't know anyone who has moved to Japan and shown any signs of having regret for having done it. I've never considered moving to Japan, but based on what I know and people I've talked to, I suspect I'd probably enjoy it too, though having only one year of Japanese class under my belt, it'd be quite a long road for me.
But actually, I like a lot of aspects of the United States, too, and I also wish more people gave a shit here. They're clearly speaking in hyperbole but I think the overarching point rings true; less people give a shit than you'd hope. Hell, I struggle to give a shit some days.
Hmm, I've met quite a few people over the years who spent time living in Japan and moved back, they usually weren't in any hurry to return. Seems like some really love it and others think they will, but don't.
The flight is long and expensive, the exchange rate fluctuates, and people like to be near their families. Also the language thing is kind of tough without consistent practice and it can be harder to remember over time.
I say this as someone who loved being there but can't quite afford to go back and see my friends who are still inviting me to visit again.
In terms of permanent residency, I think that Japanese culture Does Not Care about employees' work/life balance. The USA is working hard to catch up here so that's only a temporary gap.
This is where the author lost me as well. Massive peer pressure to conform is not the same as not caring. Maybe thats a little reductive, or the worst possible way to look at it, but no place that really cares would have such a bad reputation for terrible working conditions.
I would like to a make a small joke about something that Japanese culture does not care about: Home insulation! I have been in so many older, frigid homes and small hotels with paper thin windows and walls. It is like they are allergic to building insulation! Of course, newer homes and buildings are much better now.
I've been living in Japan for more than 9 years. I think that the author is right in the sense that people in Japan seem to care more. Of course, the stress is on the word "seem". Some people truly care, but there is also the cultural expectation that you should care. I don't know if realising that counts as the "shine that will wear off", but it seems to not a bad default.
I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.
I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else. They just buy into a different social contract, one where they believe that if you behave a certain way towards others, your life in turn will be better as well. Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there. Those sorts of social contracts only work when everyone is on the same page.
This is how trains work in Bangkok also, and Thai culture is very different from Japanese culture.
This is just how trains work in that place. It’s not deeper than that.
Same in the UK. Isn’t waiting for others to get off before you get on just basic courtesy? There are definitely individuals who don’t do this, but most do. Same in lifts.
Other than that, I completely agree that people in Japan seem to care and take their jobs more seriously than elsewhere. Though my Japanese friends would probably tell me that it’s not because they deeply care — really they’re just terrified of standing out. Still, perhaps the resulting society is worth it! High trust is great.
It's not even the basic courtesy, it's basic reason. The inside of the train is smaller than the outside (which is a station) so it's easier to maneuver your way if you first let people out and then go inside than it is in the case when you first go inside and then try to let people to go out. The same is true with elevators.
True.
Not sure what train you got in Thailand, you were perhaps lucky. Usually it is the opposite. As a westerner working in BKK this drives me mad that they do not wait. They will only wait if there is no gap to try push in on.
I’m talking about the skytrain, where they paint arrows on the ground to tell you where to stand to await boarding.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.
I find the piling on of the DMV to really be a cheap shot. In a sense it made the entire rant seem like another example of someone not caring.
Patton Oswalt has a bit on this and its too true. The problem with the DMV isn't the DMV or its employees... its the general public who can't be bothered to read basic instructions.
I've had experiences with the DMV in three US states, and in two out of the three it was highly efficient and worked great. In one of them it was mediocre to unpleasant, but nothing to write home about.
I suspect the DMVs in LA and NYC are particularly bad and that's why it's a cultural meme.
The idea that the DMV is a particularly awful experience does seem like something that would be especially susceptible to selection bias. Why would anyone ever announce "I went to the DMV today and it was fine"?
My experience has been that it sucks but not as bad as private customer service.
Getting a refund from UHaul was fifteen hours of pulling teeth. DMV was a 45 minute wait.
Worse in Texas where they dont fund it ofc.
The service is fine. The lines and waits are horrendous and a DMV never seems to have the seating room for that. So you spend an hour before you even get in the door like you're waiting for a new iPhone or something.
DMV in Virginia has been efficient and relatively painless in my experience.
Well, now that it is a meme, and the DMVs where I live is actually very effient, I've actually heard multiple people say "I went to the DMV, and actually it was fine"
Indiana's BMV used to be the Kafkaesque when I went with my mom in the 1970s. She waited in a huge line only to find out it was the wrong line...waited again to find she didn't have a certain document and had go home to get it.
About 20 years ago the would check to see if you had everything right as you came in.
Now it's almost magical how fast friendly and efficient they've become for the few times you actually have to visit. Most transactions are online or via mail.
I've had wonderful experiences at DOL offices (which are 3rd party contracted), not so much at the DMV. Which one are you going to? Honestly worth a drive (or bus ride, depending on the issue) to go to a a decent one
Ironically, we may look with fond memories of the days when an actual human being handled our DMV paperwork.
An AI chatbot with an unblinking stare and frozen smile is likely to be your new DMV virtual assistant!
Why do people in the US need to go to the DMV at all?
Here in the UK, pretty much any interaction with our equivalent (DVLA - Driver and Vehicle Licensing) can be done online or by phone.
If you want/need to apply in-person for a licence or to pay vehicle tax, you can do it at many post offices.
I guess it is a centralised system, while the DMV is per-state.
Same. Getting a drivers license and car plates in Seattle was a _fantastic_ experience. Start with a simple, fast web app. Finish with a 10 minute start-to-end in person appointment.
Most complaints I hear about the DMV are just about long lines.
Maybe I'm just not American, but I've never had to go at all, it's just a bizarre TV/movie thing.
I think I have dealt with such organization thrice in my life. 3 driving tests. And on all times it was as pleasant experience as possible.
Only complaint I really have with that system is them caring too much. Why does my car need "type certificate" sticker... It is all online and tied to VIN... Replacement cost like 200€ and then tens more for showing them paperwork new one was ordered...
This is cynical. There are a lot of people who do care. Consider that someone cared enough to build a bike lane in the first place. IMO life is hard for most people and as much as most would love to "care", they have to take care of themselves and their families first. The caring is focused where it is best applied.
I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.
I think it is the direction of the situation, rather than the state of things, that is concerning. The general direction is that everyone is incentivized and rewarded to look after their bottom line and personal gain and then everything else.
IMO, not caring about the wider impact of our actions is something that will keep happening at an increasing rate.
I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.
Thank you to the author for putting the feeling I have had since years into words. It's not just the US that is this bad, it's also in Europe. Just looking at the COVID pandemic tells you all you need to know about countries where people care and where they don't care. Maybe the west emphasized individualism too much? See also: Communitarianism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism
Yeah the pandemic was very enlightening, in a not so positive way.
Mindfulness of others is a very rare trait.
but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.
A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!
Everyone cares, but:
- everyone has a different idea of what that means.
- many problems can't be solved by one person.
- caring has an opportunity cost.
- caring introduces liability.
- we live in a society.
Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.
This list is quite well-put.
Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.
Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.
Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.
Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.
In my experience it isn't individuals not caring as much as there is no one individual accountable for making these kind of decisions. Whomever designed the bike ramp probably followed a set of curb-and-ramp regulations set by some committee, thought they were stupid, but then remembered that the last time he pushed back it was a huge hassle and he got reprimanded by his boss. The committee people probably cared about the rules in general but didn't foresee all use cases and didn't make their rules flexible enough.
A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.
They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.
I set up a weekly auto-buy for a stock about a year ago with Cashapp.
I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.
In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.
The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.
> having dealt with Cashapp support in the past
Yet you're still a user? Perhaps you also do not care? Actually the "do not care" covers a lot of ground here, perhaps you still find it useful and reliable enough, that you are willing to forgive this one bug due to the general convenience of cashapp.
No, I despise their stock feature. It was just easy to set up, but is fundamentally terrible in every aspect. The rub is I have a bunch of stock with them from the start of the pandemic and am pretty sure there is no way to move it to another service without triggering a taxable event.
So I guess I don't care in that I don't care enough to lose money on switching, or complicating my taxes even further by utilizing multiple investment firms.
They have an option to do an ACATS to another brokerage account. They do not mention specifically, but it looks like this would be considered a stock transfer "in kind" which should not be considered a taxable event.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fidelity/comments/la7tj6/can_someon...
https://cash.app/help/5026-transferring-stock-to-another-bro...
Oh interesting! Thank you kind stranger
As HN loves to quote Hanlon's razor: <<Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or incompetance).>> First, assume that they shares were purchased, but not correctly credited to your account. Second, confirm that with CashApp. (Doubt it -- but try that first.)
Assuming CashApp is a US-based brokerage, I would first raise a complaint with CashApp. If you get the blow-off (which I fully expect), send a written letter to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and CC CashApp legal and compliance team. (Make it clear in the letter that you are CC'ing CashApp L&C.) Usually, brokerages are not allowed to make a customer whole after an execution mistake. However, if they make enough mistakes, SEC will slap them with a huge fine. (See: Robinhood.) It is very important to formally register your complaint with CashApp. In fact, I would use this exact phrase: "I would like to formally file a complaint about poor execution service from your brokerage firm." Everything is recorded in brokerage firms these days (voice or written). There will be absolutely no doubt that you wish to formally file a complaint, and I can guarantee you that it will be taken seriously by either CashApp (L&C team) or SEC (enforcement team).
This is great advice I hope GP follows, but this also highlights something that I wish the original article addressed: not caring is contagious.
The reason corporate interests push a façade of not caring is so that many customers will also not care.
Between binding arbitration and other legalese-fu, the process for remediation slowly chips away at people who at first thought they cared.
I don’t think people don’t care, I think they have too much to do. Kids at home, too much work, and still barely making ends meet. Our society is set up to push people to the max, prioritizing quantity and “good enough” over quality. Most people do not have a career where spending 1% more time on a curb design instead of spending that time with their kids results in any more pay, much less the spare time to focus on craftsmanship for its own sake.
To make people / us care, we need to be subject to frequent community gossip. But the suburbs were built in part to escape that, hence why we create these omni-directional online communities, distressed at everything but responsible for nothing.
Thanks for complaining about McDonald's self service, which is truly dreadful and just gets worse (no I don't have the app, why would I want something you people made on my own phone, stop asking!).
Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.
People do not care because they don’t want to suffer all the time they see some lack of effort. Even when there is 80% carers and 20% do-not-carers, 80% will suffer and go into the opposing group. It has upside-down-bowl stability.
That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.
Given the design, looks like the rider will definitely be getting off the bike one way or the other.
The author stated that a sign should be BEFORE the end of the lane. When riding, it's not clear that your lane will all of a sudden disappear so that you have time to slow down and change 'modes'. That wouldn't be allowed for the equivalent car lane without advance notice/signage.
The "bike lane ends" sign is...at the END (almost as bad as it saying 'bike lane has ended). And, it conflicts with the messaging on the road itself which features a "this is a bike lane and its going right" marking even up to the end." That marking is trying to say "this is turning into a combined pedestrian/bike pathway" but that's not clear and it makes it extremely dangerous for pedestrians.
Here's the streetview of the bike lane in question:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/J2b5mgG5LhNLhQk38
From skip-reading, this is not about motivation (intrinsic or otherwise) in general. This is about other people not caring about you, or what you care about.
I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.
The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.
It's really about culture. The US is high individualism, low in long-term orientation, and high in indulgence. The US has a bad culture for caring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio...
I invite the author to work for a large corp or a government and try and improve things. The most supportive people for improvements will be your team. The least supportive will be the higher-level managers. And no, the Director of Transportation is not the real manager. That's the mayor or city council.
Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).
A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.
Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.
In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.
Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.
For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.
Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.
Maybe the Will To Have Nice Things is solved by culture not process.
I’ve seen the above too. Imbuing an organisation with the Will To Have Nice Things seems unsolved because, as you say, the value is constantly traded off against more measurable outcomes.
I think the solution has to be building and rewarding a culture of doing the right thing, taking pride in delivering not just to spec but excellence. So when the org plan demands a giant construction barrier near the kids playpark of course the person responsible also commissions a dinosaur mural for it. Not because it’s a KPI or was debated and traded off on the functional spec but as a matter of personal and professional pride.
Interestingly I think the drop in taking pride in your work coincides with the relative anonymity of society in which reputation is no longer tracked through past interactions or word of mouth but is institutionalised in rating systems. This is perhaps related to why a more insular and smaller society in Japan has managed to retain it to a higher degree. Certainly there are elite groups around the world in which everyone knows the other players and so reputation and (from an institutional perspective) over-delivery are still valued, and these groups are the ones that accomplish otherwise unachievable advances. The broader anonymous society that delivers only to spec ends up with leaky abstractions that gradually collapses under its own weight of incompetence once the former culture of Wanting Nice Things degrades to Somebody Else’s Problem.
If true this predicts a stable rule-of-law-based society or organisation in which the most powerful all know each other and which otherwise is broken into small mostly-stable communities would foster the Will To Have Nice Things more than an anonymous interchangeable mass would.
I can hear patio11 reminding me that this should have been a blog post.
I imagine so. You need agreement on "nice things" first.
My city constantly fights over this. Is a mural a nice thing or is the tax saving? Heck, is colour printing too much? I've heard people whine about them printing city handouts for council in colour.
It’s not a case of not caring, but rather caring about something else more. If you live in a country that emphasizes profit and watching out for self as priority then yeah you’re not going to get a whole lot of wholesome selfless community minded behavior.
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015. The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11. The world most of us grew up in is lost.
So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort? Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse. They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.
It's most likely capitalism doing this to us. A lot of people are disenfranchised in society, most are alienated from their labor, don't feel happy about the work they do –if they have any control over it at all. Most of us don't have "third places" we go every day, we don't spend our days hanging out with our loved ones. Most of us are mainly isolated, maybe not intentionally, but work-rest-sleep-work cycle doesn't leave a lot of room for recreation or socializing.
Money doesn't fix any of our problems either, even if you're one of the few lucky to have enough of it, you can't possibly be happy living society perpetually decaying. We'll always be as happy as our neighbor.
Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.
I agree with author's frustrations. So many things could be better if people cared and did the right thing.
Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.
In smaller communities, people care more. There is a reputation social cost associated with being a self-centered asshole when everyone knows each other. If one doesn't care about others, they'll soon find themselves excluded from social circles, not offered help when they need it, and similar.
This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.
This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.
There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.
There must be a name for this bias. "Everyone else's stuff sucks but the reason my stuff sucks is because someone is keeping me from doing good work"
Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
It's always really interesting to see.
Illusory superiority - "a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their abilities compared to others"
We have really developed an entire culture in the US around illusory superiority. It seems like the average person in 2025 thinks they are above average in basically everything.
I think this is a big reason why sports betting has taken off the way it has in the US. Every sports fan basically thinks they are way above average in their understanding of sports.
Well, we live in a punitive culture that ascribes great social value to appearances.
To your example, if I tell my friends that I had a tough day at work because the old code was broken I will get more sympathy then if I say I wrote some shitty code last week and it made my day awful.
Another example, in a minor traffic accident, it might be nice to say "oh I'm sorry that was my fault" but I would be penalized by my insurance carrier for making such a statement.
We have successfully integrated the results of capitalism and game theory directly into our language. And I believe that has a knock on effect: people's actions follow from their thoughts which are influenced by the set of things they're allowed to or not allowed to vocalize.
We have aggressively evolved away from anything like humility or empathy being expressed in this culture because we punish that behavior.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care.
The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.
You’re all part of the problem.
Bloggers mention Musk like they do Trump to politicize their writing for some stupid reason. Ignoring it isn't part of any problem. Starting a flame war over it is.
Yes because this place is known for its tolerance and ability to just sidestep such nuances.
Tech bro bs.
I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.
Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.
On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.
I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.
This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.
In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.
You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.
I admit the article is rather whiny but it did resonate a bit with me.
A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.
I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”
In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.
I find that caring, and networking with other people who care, at work can be a huge career boost in the long term. So I'm not even sure the not-caring people are winning, long term, but maybe they also don't can't about that.
My experience is that such indifference comes with seniority. Unfortunately most people tend to try and change things outside of their control, ignoring what they can change and quickly burn out. With that said:
> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)
> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
I have a few people on my team that do not care and seem to be incapable of caring. I'm trying to get them removed but it takes months.
In the meantime, I'm deeply worried that the solid performers will find other opportunities and leave because they can find new jobs in a few weeks.
The Dead Sea effect in action [0] (and HN responses [1]).
[0]: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23166786
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Too late. Too many bastards. Too much grinding.
Does anyone have the time to care anymore? I searched for "time" in the comments and found a few unrelated hits.
Good enough is going to be the output when nobody has the time or people's time isn't valued.
This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.
Most people don't care about doing their jobs well because they don't really choose what they work on, they don't own the product they're working on and don't enjoy the fruits of their labor. They know working harder won't improve their material condition either, only tire them more, seemingly pointlessly.
And so society turns to sh*t, but a lot of value is created for shareholders in the process, so who cares?
> This guy is this close to rediscovering worker alienation.
A lot of people in the comments are, too. It's been a real interesting case study for me.
You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.
Most Karen's are actually great. We only hear about the unhinged ones on social media because the algorithm rewards outrage. But most Karen's are kind and they care and they work hard and they set an example for all of us. It's the Karen's in the world that keep all the small things from being shitty all the time.
They're called "Karens" because they're unhinged, not because of whatever other criteria you're imagining. The kind people you're referring to aren't Karens.
No there is most definitely more to it. There is a generalized trend as to what unhinged social media Karens care about. A Karen isn't a Karen if she is just spouting conspiracy theories loudly at you. She is only a Karen if she is adamant that you follow the established rules of good society, whatever she is convinced that these rules are. Karens value "good" group behavior, whatever their definition of good is, and they are willing to tell you to get in line. Karens care that you don't put external costs onto others. Karens care.
A "hinged" Karen is your common group mom stereotype, who makes sure everybody is doing well and that everyone understands what is up and is following along. She has no problem telling you what you should and shouldn't be doing, but you love it because she is lovely. Hinged Karens are simultaneously the scaffolding and lubrication of good society.
Have you thought this through? Incessant requests for an unimportant matter is a sure way to have those in charge of said matters not care, not only about that particular request but requests in general or the desires of requesters.
If it’s unimportant then why is there a rule against it? Why did everyone agree to this rule when they bought a home there if it didn’t matter? Clearly it exists for a reason and if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless
I wonder if this is how Karen logic works, black and white thinking with no sense of proportion.
I don’t think it’s black and white to think, hey that door isn’t an approved color, and I care about community standards, so I’m going to submit a note on it
I wouldn’t personally do this but I can see how someone would without it being mean spirited
Really depends on the context. And the rule. Some rules are stupid, some situations have no rules but "expectations" ("Have it your way" is a famous slogan arguably perverted by reasoning for a few people). The rules could be made for powertripping reasons or safety reasons.
> Why did everyone agree to this rule when they bought a home there if it didn’t matter?
I don't think you have thought this through. People are generally not asked about every bylaw individually. Maybe they bought the house because it was close to work. Or maybe they bought the house to get the kids into a good school. Maybe they bought the house because they just loved the garden. Or maybe they bought it because that was the only one they could afford after a long search and they were exhausted and just wanted to live somewhere.
Even if they read the rules maybe they cared about 80% of them and couldn't give a hoot about that specific one. (Maybe they like that their neighbour can't turn their front yard into a mechanic shop, but they don't care what colour their door is. That sort of thing.)
They might have agreed to it in a legalistic sense. As in they signed a piece of paper which referred to an other piece of paper which had this rule in it among many others. But you can't pretend that that means they "agreed" to it in the common sense meaning.
> Clearly it exists for a reason
That is not always clear. No.
> if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless
Some rules are completely pointless. Weather or not they are enforced is a different point. But either way enforcing it doesn't make it have a point if it had none to begin with.
Those aren’t Karens, they’re all Jessicas
Indeed. Imagine a neighbor who was upset that people didn't care enough to clear the parkway of leaves and selflessly dedicated himself to spend hours loudly leaf-blowing the whole neighborhood.
You bring up an important adjacent point. OP believes bikers and non-drivers are substantial stakeholders, but ignores that the tax complainers and drivers may prefer the world that way. And they do hound council.
How would a better solution to the bike lane cost more tax or worsen situation for drivers?
I feel this way a lot, i would suspect however that these "1% improvements" are really obvious to some people and completely not obvious to the person who did it.
People are lazy, which means if it isnt obvious to them, or more importantly, if they don't see a direct incentive to their life, they don't do it.
In reality "1% effort" probably looks like 10-50+% effort... and society would be 10-1000x better for it but the incentives are wrong.
I agree with that.
US is becoming a culture of 'Good enough'
This is very prevalent in Eastern Europe, near east, probably China and India, not sure. Certainly not Japan.
Culture - is what people do when nobody is watching (or they think that nobody is watching) (I am stealing this definition from somewhere else).
So changing from good-enough culture to 'We are closer to perfectionists, culturally' -- is a big change that would take generations.
To be honest -- I am not if there is a 'one thing' that would drive this, may be it is an instinct, something built-in, more prevalently, in specific ethnics groups but not in others? if it is an instinct, then it should be preservable during immigration. Are the Japanese when living for more than on generation in a 'good enough culture' preserving the perfectionist traits ?
I used to care so much 10 years ago. I didn't have to factor the state of the world or society into all my decision. I trusted society fully like I trusted air.
Now I feel like the boiling frog and I only trust a handful of people. I don't trust the system. I don't trust that it's fair. I feel like being honest is harming my survival odds.
Imagine you have to live in North Korea... Your awareness of how that society operates can make it challenging to sing your praises to your dear leader.
I really hope things change. I live outside the US and it feels like we get the worst of everything. It's as though the political machinations which used to take place in Africa to keep the people poor has spread on to parts of the western world in a slightly different form. In Africa, the environment is about artificial deprivation of resources and rights; in the west, it's about deprivation of opportunities.
In Africa, the goal is to deprive people of resources and rights; to allow corporate monopolies to exploit their labor as much as possible. In the west, the goal is to deprive people of opportunities to prevent them from competing against monopolies.
In the west, we have a fake society where everyone pretends to be on the same playing field, but we're not even close.
> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.
This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss.
Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes what I’d even call malevolence) reaches a certain level feedback mechanisms are overwhelmed: those who do care can no-longer impose negative consequences on those who don’t. Their boss doesn’t care either, their careers progress just the same, they make the same money, their jobs are just as secure. It snowballs from there.
At least here in Sweden it’s taboo to say it, but I think we just need to get back to individual negative consequences for not caring.
This is a great way to get all doctors who care out of the profession.
Healthcare is always going to have the most severe consequences when mistakes are made. Diagnosis are also hard and there are many risks with treatments. If you are going to demand punishment for mistakes consider punishing yourself next time you make a normal mistake at your job.
The thing is, I care a lot when I make a mistake. To me some kind of “punishment” wouldn’t make a dent. I already imagine I do get “punished” for my mistakes, in the form of reputation and missed opportunities down the line (even if that may not be strictly true).
But if you don’t care and you expect zero consequences, then yes: “punishment” would make a dent.
And to be clear, the kind of “punishment” I think is needed is e.g. that a regulatory authority keeps a score of severe misdiagnosis that is publicly accessible. Every doctor would probably have a few in their career, nothing to worry about. But if you routinely misdiagnose patients then it’s going to add up over the years.
In the US your insurance is literally worthless. Doctors make more money referring doctors to bullshit specialists then doing their job. I think you’re right about Swedish cheese. It does taste better.
Not saying the US system is better. But the basic problem that people just don’t care is fairly ubiquitous in the West I think.
Maybe catholic countries are doing a bit better. I sometimes get that feeling.
If nobody cared, art would not exists. Nobody would do science. Civilisations would not be built. Health care would not exists. And nobody enjoys living in a shit hole. People collectively do make decisions which are selfless, so long they know there is a positive outcome. People stop caring about something soon as they recognise their efforts is wasted or it's all for nothing.
I tend to agree. Anytime I encounter negativity or cynicism of this level, it reminds me of a speech by David Foster Wallace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2BvRbjOYo
In text if preferred: http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html
It's even worse. Many people find it odd if you do care
90% of "not caring" is actually external limitations where trying to overcome those would so far outweigh any benefit or even tangentially have anything to do with the original problem, that you must be a lunatic to waste energy trying to change it.
His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.
America glorifies hustlers and hustle culture. Society is about bragging and showing off how successful you and your family are compared to everyone else. What do you expect then? Of course no one cares enough to do more than they have to to get ahead of the other guy!
He's really talking about aesthetics (the philosophy of beauty) and how we lost the ability do admire beautiful things. The only means we have to assess & debate merit are quantitative (and lossy) so the grotesque dominates.
There are a couple exceptions about apathetic doctors and degrading community, but most of his examples are complicated and ugly things (McDonalds app, the bike ramp, dog mess , etc)
I don't have faith that this is something we can fix in the short term because most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first. I'm not saying that the opposite is good either, but we should find a balance in between. I also feel like that we are all becoming more disconnected, alone, and where the center of gravity is only ourself. Despite my premise, I still have some hopes for future generations, but unfortunately I think that things will get way worse before correcting.
> most of us have been educated in a very competitive environment where individuals come first
This is definitely intertwined with rampant individualism, but I don't think it's just our education or lack thereof that's to blame. It's also the environment we're born into and therefore never really question where it leads us and why. Century of the Self [0] makes an excellent case for where/how things went wrong, and we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.
For those comparing post-WWII to now, the only real difference seems to be capitalism becoming ever more desperate to squeeze all remaining profits. Capital concentrates [1] and profits continue to trend toward zero as Marx warned they would. It's a fundamental contradiction built into capitalism that has yet to be addressed except for by those few who are already disproportionately benefiting from the arrangement at everyone else's expense.
Consider how the average baby boomer was treated by their company of employment compared to the average worker in the 21st century. Employers now make it painfully obvious that everybody is disposable, and the only thing that matters are the metrics tied to their own compensation, no matter how disconnected that is from producing results that are actually good for society. The workers are all incentivized to become back-stabbing careerist wolves fighting and hoarding secrets instead of cooperating to build actual Good Things. The best way to get a raise is to jump ship to another company. Etc.
Given all of the above, it'd be very strange if we didn't end up in the hellscape that we are currently in.
[0] https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h...
> we never deviated from this path because capitalism and its consumption-first economies would never permit such a thing.
While I haven't read Century of the Self, I will say that most of East Asia outside of China and NK are fiercely capitalistic. Ads are everywhere and obvious. There's a huge focus on consumption and status. There's generally much looser restrictions on zoning, gambling, and prostitution than the West. And yet the cultures continue being a lot more collective and understanding of their fellow person. South Asia is less capitalistic (having transitioned from more socialistic modes of economic organization somewhat recently), but is still quite capitalistic.
I think capitalism might exacerbate this in the West but it is fundamentally a Western problem. Most of East and South Asia still operates on an extended family model where there's an expectation that when a person or a family is having a hard time they take resources from their family and when they're in a position to do well they give resources to their struggling family members. Lots of extended families have family members who are ... problematic. Many of these folks have gambling issues, can't hold down jobs, have mental health problems, etc. But families support them. They never really thrive but they usually have food, shelter, companionship, and understanding around them. I think this creates a level of empathy that's just absent from Western society.
My partner and I are Asian but we have caucasian friends. Many of our caucasian friends will cut off problematic family members immediately. Indeed a lot of caucasians I know are very quick to cut people they don't like or who don't align with their values out of their life. This culture of individual supremacy is what I think really plagues the west which used to at one time have a less individualistic nature and now finds its hyper atomization eating away at the foundations of its societies.
Yes, this is the correct understanding of the problem. The thing is, correctly understanding the problem is highly disincentivized, much less doing anything about it.
Whatever your locality is, there are existing opportunities to volunteer. Even if you don't particularly care about whatever that organization does, it's a great place to meet people who care, and they usually care about more than one thing. Maybe ask them about mutual aid.
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There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.
In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?
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Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.
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You can't fix bureaucracy all at once - it's not one thing, and it has many different causes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645391
The world is what it is today because 1% of people do care. Or more probably, 5% of people care for about 20% of their life.
Whatever you do today, through action or inaction, it will ripple through eternity with both intended and unintended consequence.
The sad game theory result of this is that no one ends up caring or comes to the conclusion there is no point of caring. Wonder if it is at all possible to reverse it once you fall in this cycle.
What make OP think they do not care? They apparently care about themselves more than anybody else to not care about anyone else. What is it called: selfishness!
I ran out of (good) things to watch on Netflix so I watched a couple of Japanese drama shows (TBS product I think). At first it seems boring as heck: no sex, no violence. But after a while, I think I got hooked. The usual theme is always something around respect, self-sacrifice, leaving a place better than when you found it kind of feeling. It is just a departure from the usual US based drama.
Is it just the general direction we in the US live everyday for the last decade?
Or I guess, put another way, IMO this is about Apathy. The feeling where doing things or not doing them, what's it matter anyways.
I think, a lot of the apocalyptic sentiment lately has a lot to do with it. Climate change is already ruining things and will only get worse and also has started getting worse faster. Politically, economically, things are pretty hopeless. What use is picking up trash or wearing a nice shirt in the face of all of this. What are we building towards, and does anything I do mean anything
Societies decide if they are pro-social or anti-social.
Pro-social is more work. It’s harder. It is caring, sensitive, flexible. You have to give a shit because society actively disapproves of and discourages not giving a shit. No one wants to be your friend cus your the asshole who doesn’t give a shit.
Anti-social is easier: you don’t have to care. My industrial effluent will cause cancer? I don’t care. My bigass truck is more likely to kill pedestrians? I don’t care. Masking during a pandemic jmight save someone else’s life? I don’t care.
Everyone wants to live in a prosocial society. Certainly many people complain about the fact that society isn’t pro-social, yet themselves are deeply anti-social.
“No one wants to work! Do you pay a living wage? Benefits? Heck no, my business wouldn’t be as profitable”
Unfortunately, the ability to freeload off the collective relatively more pro-social past is coming to a rapid end.
Why should someone working at big tech care? Their mission is , generally , to 'capture value' from elsewhere and in the process make the world worse. Hard mission to get behind.
And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.
All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important
> And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
Because their actions affect the customers they interact with, who have no direct bearing on their jobs or salaries. To make your customers suffer because you're angry at your boss is misdirected at best, and selfish at worst.
No that's true- I totally believe that everything is connected, that by putting good energy into the world you make other people's lives better and in return feel good about yourself and inspire others to do good as well.
There's a certain amount of lack of agency and connection that the modern worlds taken from us though. A McD's employee doesn't see the same customer twice. They're thoroughly disconnected from whether the company makes record profits or not. They are not empowered to change things. And management is often putting out bad energy.
The incentives are such that caring is more effort than not and doesn't accomplish much other than appealing to internal pride. If that gets grinded down its over.
it's a chain of broken windows. Their employers should care about making sure the primary interface with business cares. But they don't. So it goes down the chain until we simply say "7/11 is a sad place to be"
Agreed about Musk. Elon Musk as an example of caring, is ignorant of his actions vs his narrative. Example him saying he says he's the best diablo player in the world, vs seeing him play poorly.
We live in a world full of people doing good who don't do it for the "player 1 energy"
I think there's an undertone of why should I care? or the idea of motivation. In Japan, theres definitely a social pressure to care, only because you'll become ostracized if you don't. In the west there are phrases from pop culture such as,"If it ain't broke don't fix it, Welp not my problem, ..." So the question is where does this stem from. Why do we not care?
I used to feel the same before having a kid.
Nowadays, the scope of what I can care about is drastically reduced. But one area where I don't allow care to be dissolved (apart from my family) is the work I do.
I had to leave a job where co-workers wouldn't care and it was about to influence my own level of care by the end.
Zooming out of your own world is a gift that can be taught. You have a gift that 100% makes your life easier, with the side effect of the occasional frustration.
I feel compassion for those people who live in their own body and keep hitting walls.
You can help people care, it's your path.
I moved to Norway 5 years ago and I can say pretty confidently that everyone cares here. I haven’t been to Japan so can’t compare to that, but I haven’t experienced any of the not-caring examples you described at all.
It really sucks to be the one person who cares amongst colleagues that don’t care. You’re seen as creating work for others, making waves, causing instability, etc etc. Or because you care, you get burned out by trying to fix everything.
In these places you’re pushed to not care.
People obviously "care", as in: we are social animals. We survived and thrived through coexistence and caring.
But how do you scale "caring" to huge and complex societies where vast numbers of individuals pursue a vast number of (possibly conflicting) interests?
When it appears that nobody cares its more a manifestation that the amount of systematic care we have invented and organized is not matching the need.
One powerful but ultimately limiting tool we invented is money. You can think of it as tokenizing care. "I have cared for $x worth of cleaning you now you care for $x worth of feeding me in return".
Many of our caring problems link to the primitive and oversimplifying traits of financialization. Which - in addition - over time have become grossly abused by shrewd operators.
Parents don't need to get paid to care for their babies and no amount of money will produce equivalent quality of care.
Elon does not care about others hundreds of billions of times more than a "normal" person does.
But the organizational failure from monetizing everything is only one pathology. There are many others:
As social animals we also care a lot about power structures. Organized violence and destruction shows that caring about others is not universal behavior in time and space.
Above all, intrinsic traits are groomed in childhood in a positive feedback loop. An educational system that reinforces caring behavior does not fall from a coconut tree. It needs to be cared about.
This person is missing that modern global society is rigidly organized around principles of competition. It's not the case that people don't care -- instead we are systemically pressured into putting all of our care into getting one over everyone else and taking care of our own. A society organized around different principles would give us the space to care about our collective wellbeing. Hopefully one day we'll get there.
My instinctive, gut reaction is to hate this article, because I suspect its written by the kind of person who thinks they are better than everyone else.
But on deeper reflection I think they are actually right. Our civilisation became great because people took pride in their work - and not just at the crop level: the average poor tailor or cobbler would take 100x more pride in their work than the average government employee today. This is a problem — I suspect largely caused by the internet and technology warping people’s reward mechanisms - and it needs addressing.
Far as the bike lane/sign thing goes at least there’s a bike lane. Many streets in Seattle don’t even have a sidewalk let alone a bike lane. And I got hit by a car while biking in seattle a few years ago. Either way wear a helmet while biking
Republicans want to tear government apart and privatize everything. Democrats have big ideas but sacrifice them on the altar of protecting public unions. Nobody fights for good government. I'm sick and tired of the endless big vs small government argument, I want to vote for good effective responsive government, good hang for the tax buck whatever it's size.
| Does such a community really exist? Where everyone cares? Or at least a | supermajority? Or does it need to be built?
Yeeahhhh... I'd stay as far as possible from Miami.
Rhe bike ramp thing is likely intentional. You don't want a bike doing 20mph on a sidewalk with pedestrians and the ramp forces bikes to slow down.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
About his ego. Nothing else.
People barely care about their family nowadays, a huge amount of people don't even care about themselves, how can we care about anything really?
It's a sad realization. When our culture only values profit as a measure of success there is a strong incentive to cut down costs (now) in exchange for quality (that will only be perceived in the future). It slowly moves down the threshold, bit by bit, until you suddenly realize how much we all lost for a few very rich people to become a little bit richer.
I think the undue romanticism for East Asian societies is an instance of not caring. I think it’s racist too.
East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.
I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism
I relate to this a lot. Someone is referring to this take as “bullshit” contrasting the experience of the average worker to a software engineer.
I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.
Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck. There’s a certain nihilism to life in the US in 2025 that has been enabled entirely by people not speaking up.
I’m myself guilty of staying on the sidelines. Starting to realize that perhaps I need to be louder, because no one else is speaking up and that “giving a fuck” is something that must be led by example.
>Our government has let go of its principles, because no one in charge could be bothered to give a fuck.
Oh they care... about money. We're being sold out but keep re-electing the same perpetrators simply because "it's better than the other person".
Meanwhile a third of our country is a mix of "not caring" or legitmately unable to keep dates in mind and find a poll booth to vote. Who knows how things would change if voting was compulsory, as was receiving a ballot in the mail.
> I’d argue the average worker is in the position they’re in because of a whole chain of people that couldn’t be bothered to care.
This is a lame excuse. My caring is a choice I make. I can choose to care whether you care or not. I make the choice for myself.
Just wait until you try to speak up and get destroyed. Why do you think folks don’t speak up?
so… the fear of speaking up should lead to staying silent? what exactly are you advocating for here
It's human nature. You don't put your hand into a fire because early in your childhood, you learned the consequences of those actions.
>what exactly are you advocating for here
Nothing really. Bad people do bad things to keep good people down. figure out how to prevent that.
I’m not advocating for anything. I’m pointing out the cause of the effect you’re noting.
Concretely, I suspect it’s a side effect of ‘how dare they’ type political attacks and increasing balkanization. What a lot of folks would call ‘California style politics’.
Short of everyone taking a step back and actually evaluating what they want/need as people and having a productive conversation about it and a useful compromise (hah!), I imagine we’ll just end up with a ‘strong man’ who can do all the ‘bad things’ necessary to pull everyone together into a consistent direction despite whatever hate might be thrown in their direction.
Though typically that is just what someone pretends to be so they can loot everything… at least unless people are really careful to look at the persons track record of outcomes instead of what they are saying right now. And since everyone will be all angry and pissed off while this happens, lots of room for various bullshit to happen, ‘others’ to be made and punished, etc, etc.
Oh wait….
And yes I know this is a symptom of the problem, but I’ve also literally had enough of my life destroyed trying to discuss elements of this already to not do anything else. Murder anyone trying to be a hero, and what else is going to happen? You’ll either have villains, dead bodies, or cowards.
What the author of this post is actually mad about is that most people don't care about him. The people who designed the DMV don't care about him. The people who made the crappy Oracle HR software he probably has to use don't care about him. The people who designed the bike lanes don't care about him.
It's not their job to. They have about a million other priorities, they're not sorry about it, and they shouldn't be.
The DMV, the HR software people, the engineering people, they care about lots of things: Following the laws they are required to follow; maintaining regulatory compliance. Handling the latest set of changes and rules from a higher office who demands they be implemented yesterday. Not overwhelming the underpaid staff they have on-hand. Figuring out how to deal with a generally unpleasant general public, including the guy who wrote this. Holding back an ounce of sanity so they can get home at the end of the day and be happy and not drink themselves to death.
The reality is that life is a series of tradeoffs. Even if I am giving 100% at work (and I have a family and a life, so often I am not), that 100% does not get allocated entirely or even mostly to "deliver the best experience for the specific needs of the author of this article." It's dedicated to getting work out the door at an acceptable level of quality; monitoring our systems so they don't crash and lose us money; complying with the rules and procedures my employer demands I comply with; being tolerable and decent to my colleagues so they don't resent me and make my life harder. If I think about the needs of one specific customer out of the millions that transact business with my employer every day, it's because something extraordinary has happened with implications for one of the things above.
What sets people like Elon apart is that they are single-mindedly dedicated to getting people to appease them, and also pretty good at it. All Elon cares about is whatever interests him day-to-day, his ego, his impact on the world, whether people like him or hate him. He's "successful", by this author's metric, because he's self-obsessed.
All that said, the UK has a phrase for someone who cares only to do the bare minimum: a jobsworth, as in, more than my job's worth. A jobsworth is unhelpful on purpose, or because enforcing apathy is more valuable to them than doing anything that might impose upon them later an obligation to act. The thing is - those people are universally reviled. They are not liked or approved of in society. They're also a severe minority.
Most people are doing their best to stay above water on a dozen different things, and you are only one of them. The author ought to have some humility and realize that.
Then why the huge disparity between cultural attitudes in the USA vs. Japan? Clearly the Japanese tend to take more pride of ownership, which is OP's point.
He only thinks it's that way because in Japan, he's the big man with the big bucks the whole society caters to. An average Japanese person probably makes a terrible salary, has few if any economic prospects, sees a stagnant economy, and also is very unlikely to even start a family. I'd much rather have a family than have store clerks obsses about serving me.
If you have tons of money in Seattle area and live in an exurb, and only go to Seattle for the orchestra and a baseball game in a box, you probably think everyone in America cares too
Those are a lot of very wrong assumptions. Salaries aren't US level but more than liveable because even most non-tokyo housing is perfectly reasonable. The economny is stagnant (and now recessionary) but they have a decent amount of safety nets. They don't need to worry about walking to work one day to be locked out or being in debt if they collapse (yes, there are some very dark work patterns to "lay off", but you won't suddenly have zero salary next month).
>I'd much rather have a family than have store clerks obsses about serving me.
Okay, the US has neither. So...
>If you have tons of money in Seattle area and live in an exurb, and only go to Seattle for the orchestra and a baseball game in a box, you probably think everyone in America cares too
These are small micro-behaviors, not a larger mindset. Even a rich tourist would notice the difference between someone taking your ticket for an orcheastra and going to a corner store in Japan.
I don't think they are wrong assumptions. Japan has higher suicide rates, lower rate of having kids, and on and on.
And like I said, obviously a rich tourist is treated better. The average Japanese person doesn't benefit from these things because the average Japanese person lives in a cramped, barely livable closet-sized apartment in a huge city where costs are probably not close to wages
They are wrong assumptions. They aren't so signifigantly high that they fundamentally affect the perceptions of the culture. Japan is 14.29 per 100k suicide rate. the US has 14.21. Japan has something low like 1.2 kids per family, the US has 1.66, also pretty dang low. You gotta do a lot of heavy lifting to say those differences make for a much worse culture.
>obviously a rich tourist is treated better. The average Japanese person doesn't benefit from these things because the average Japanese person lives in a cramped, barely livable closet-sized apartment in a huge city where costs are probably not close to wages
Tourism goes both ways. You can switch Japanese with American and this metaphor is just as apt. You're missing a lot of subtleties and cultural difference just saying "well Americans make more money on average" while comparing the quality of life of the lower compensated parts of each society.
Fair play. I'm open more to the idea that a culture where people care about the greater good makes more of a difference. Haven't seen it myself, and I'm still skeptical that if he were an average Japanese person he'd see it the same way. But your argument is convincing.
It's cultural. Japan and Asian in general is a lot more conformist and taught to care about the larger society. Huge contrast of the individualism of US enforcing "hustle culture" and "dog eat dog world".
Japan also has an entire group of people so disillusioned with society they completely lock themselves off from it (0), record high suicide rates (1), record low fertility rates (2), and a far lower rate of self-reported happiness.
I don't know why they prioritize differently, but I don't think it's working out for them.
Which set of tradeoffs would you rather live under?
(0) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori (1) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-33362387.amp (2) https://apnews.com/article/japan-birth-rate-declining-popula... (3) https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index/...
>Which set of tradeoffs would you rather live under?
I'll take the one that doesn't lay me over every year to hit record profits, thanks. There's degrees of not caring and the US is very far on the "you are just a number" peg. The fake drinking parties at least try to make me feel involved.
This post is angry detritus. I’m sorry someone upset you recently Grant, but seriously?
Billions of people care. And if you bother looking for them, you’ll find them. Most of the problems he describes result from complex systems being challenging and individuals having limited ability both to comprehend and influence them.
And no I don’t mean “this software module is complex” complex. I mean, “this social problem has hundreds of interacting incentives, changing any of them in isolation makes things worse, and it will take years and millions of dollars to change things, all while political winds of change are trying to blow down the consensus to tackle the problem.”
It's also a question of competence. Many do things that don't understand. And don't even try to understand it.
This article resonated with me and OP was able to clearly articulate what I have been feeling pretty much my entire life. It’s probably not as extreme as OP makes it sound but it’s there. Enough to make you feel defeated. The dreaded feeling of “yeah we are going to be so f*cked 100 years from now” because no one gives a shit. In Japan this feeling transforms into optimism and hope because people generally do care and take things seriously. It has given me the strength to care and try to do my best. The power not be an asshole to the person next to me. The ability to see the bigger picture.
Guy lost me when he mentioned Musk is caring. Of course he cares...about his fortune and his power hunger.
Karl Marx talked about alienation -- we are alienated from our work, we are alienated from one another, and eventually alienated from our humanity.
I disagree with Marx about a lot of things, but I do think that this theory makes a lot of sense. As we become increasingly mechanistic in our work, we feel less agency. Less control. Less attachment to the work. We stop caring about the product.
You can pay people to care, for agile, but ultimately the alienation wins. The solution? I'm not sure! Probably several possible things, not least of which is probably work that's focused on building one's community and helping meet their needs.
Ctrl+F'ed to see if anyone mentioned alienation, since this post basically seems to be OP talking about alienation without them knowing.
I think fundamentally if we want people to care about things again, we are going to need to give them ownership of the things they produce. Otherwise, why would anyone care?
Yes. Give people the ownership of their job. Kaizen comes to mind.
What we have today are MBA's that tweak spreadsheets and see employees as replaceable cogs in a machine. No one cares in that environment.
In my experience, most people don't care because they are lazy. Initiative on the job requires effort, IF they're allowed to have initiative. If someone is put into a thinking job, but are more suited to have an assembly line job, failure will ensue.
People are often not compensated enough to warrant the mental energy of caring more, or the effort or making those around them care.
Sometimes people did care, but they left because they didn't want to deal with the rest who didn't any more, and found better conditions elsewhere.
The 12 years or so I have lived in America I have observed that people always keep the door open for those walking behind them. Always. Everywhere. DC, Boston, LA, New York, Seattle, Cupertino, everywhere.
Nobody cares about anything. Somebody cares about something. Everybody cares about everything.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. This makes me optimistic. At least, its nice that people care to hold doors open : )
On caring as a software developer:
I like to think I care about putting out good quality work, but, the nature of agile and especially standups and reviews means I am under pressure each day to be able to say I have completed a jira story.
If that story's acceptance criteria doesn't say "take the time to make this perfect" which of course it doesn't, and mr big balls bullied us into it being pointed a 2, then am I going to spend an extra day or two really making it perfect with perfect test coverage etc? When I am surrounded by (competing with) contractors who don't have to do anything other than churn out sprint work and rack up points?
On Japan caring so much:
They live in a society where pretty much everyone's ancestors are from the same geographical location, they all look similar, they are basically a nationalistic society, they all feel "Japanese" and they all pull together in the same direction more or less.
America on the other hand...
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.
I think if you want the closest thing to Japan in the United States, consider moving to Hawaii.
Seriously, the cops drive Toyota 4Runners. It’s an asian majority state.
It might be a good compromise into what you are looking for.
The sad part, the "do not care" attitude is infectious. Maybe there is a bright-eyed programmer who just joined and who wants to make UX better.
They are full of enthusiasm, but nobody (around them) cares.
They are fixing the most annoying bugs that users complained forever about.. but they is not recognized, because nobody (around them) cares.
They hope to show a good example but nobody cares. Instead they get negative feedback when instead of blindly implementing horribly-designed feature, they are trying to fix it so it won't be so user-hostile.
Eventually they give up and stop caring. When asked what they like about the job, their answer is "stability" and "job security".
These people show up, offer trivially incorrect or untenable solutions to the trickiest problems. Rarely do they have the insight that fixes them. Often they do things that introduce more risk.
That's one possibility -
Here's a story of the burnout of one of the GNOME terminal maintainers
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/259
In a situation where no amount of effort seems to be enough its really easy to not see the point anymore
Not all problems are tricky, there are plenty of easy-to-fix bugs that go unfixed.
For example, there is an internal product that I use daily that has broken http links in error/status messages.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No.
It's exactly that. All your government and regulatory capture examples are precisely about bad incentives leading to bad outcomes (including people who cared but stopped caring because these perverse incentives punished them for caring one way or another)
But wait, the author understands this!:
> Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much.
So it's a YES?
The sad thing about this article is that they can't be happy making the world a better place, instead they focus on what other people aren't doing.
"I am proud of my work" >> "You should work harder!"
I don't think it's wise to assume everyone is going to be perfect at their job. Yes, that bike line sucks. But haven't you ever made a mistake at your job? Expecting everything to work perfectly in life is a recipe for misery.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face act. On the surface they pretend to care but well, People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
Nah, I moved from a big city where people are feeling squashed by the pressure, to a small town, where people feel a bit more relaxed, and I am constantly surprised by how much of a shit people give. I’m not advocating for small towns here, I like the city, I’m advocating for making a society where we act like people matter and stop calling anyone who doesn’t want to kick everyone in the teeth to get ahead a communist, and stop calling people who do inspiring visionaries
I've lived in most every manner of setting the US has to offer. The best by far is the micro-urban settings. Where as opposed to a small town with strip malls and neighborhoods, there is high density around an urban center that pretty much immediately transitions to rural. That way you can still have walkability and the mix of bars / restaurants / activities that urban settings inspire without all the overhead of actual large cities. Even when I lived in large cities I spent most of my time in just a few blocks. So a few blocks of city and then all the recreational activities of rural areas is pretty great.
There's still issues with people not caring, but it seems like those are more so outliers than anywhere near the norm and it's a lot more expedient to get in contact with someone that does care and can take actionable measures where there is a problem.
Just as an example there was a water leak from the municipal system in the right of way in front of my house. It was repaired quickly but they had to dig up a lot of the yard, which they filled back in. But after a few heavy rains it washed out a fair amount. It was a little annoying but I just said "Oh well". A few years ago in Atlanta my neighbors had reported a sinkhole FOR YEARS, and nothing was done about it until it finally caved in and swallowed an entire intersection.
I had a friend come over though and this had been like 3 months and he asked about the hole. I told him the situation and he just said "Call the city and tell them you need dirt." So I did, and told someone that took a message. A couple hours later they called me back and confirmed my address and that I needed dirt. He said they were busy but would do it tomorrow, and sure enough the next day they came with a dump truck, a trailer of equipment and filled in the hole, compacted the area, smoothed it all out and planted grass. All in 24 hours for a problem that impacted no one but me.
Nihilism is a cancer on the western psyche.
Nihilism is cynicism with a turbo button
> I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.
This is dumb. Of course people enjoy job stability. It's irrational to draw a line from "I value being able to feed my family" to "I do not care about actually doing my job".
And beyond that, does the author actually know why it takes 18 months to get a permit? Does it actually take that long? Or is he doing a stand-up bit, and that's just a line that's designed to elicit the 2 seconds of laughter from the audience as a punchline?
> But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
So the author cares, but is sufficiently burned out that he's done caring. I wonder what he'd answer when he finds his magical Japan-like community - presumably one with stability - and is asked what his favorite part of living there is.
Japanese culture might have the impression of caring but if you get to spend more time there it’s all a face . People are people and they don’t care. The magical city the author wants is something you need to create and fight to maintain. It’s not out there waiting for you. The smaller the town the easier it is to accomplish. You aren’t gonna change Seattle and certainly not New York City.
It's interesting how people react first when you start acting different, doing little things like picking up garbage you didn't throw on the ground.
Even my kids went: Why are YOU picking this up, you didn't do it?
I just ask: Why not ME?
After some of similar experiences my kids asked to help and they were so excited when a friend of my wife bought them trash tongs to help me.
It's not that I'm proudly making the world a better place by doing something very difficult (like in the movie Pay it forward), but just doing small things that aren't difficult to do. Somehow it feels nice.
What a worthless rant. There are big problems and there are small problems and/or inconveniences. People do care, when they have a budget for caring. Unfortunately the modern world depletes that budget with the day-to-day life. I live close to where the author does and trust me, the city has way bigger problems to deal with than the nitpicky bullshit OP is calling out. In the suburb I live in, we have an app where the city does receive and implement reasonable recommendations. The reason why is that it's a small town with large pockets.
The rest of the things are just rants aimed at society? big tech? I don't get it.
> When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
No. Bullshit take. I used to care. But then in 2008, my employer showed me that I'm not the 'developer! developer! developer!' Steve Ballmer was excited about, I'm just a number on a spreadsheet governed by some pencil pushers in finance. All employers since have showed me again and again that if times are tough, I'm the ballast the company can shed to stay afloat. And in the past 4-5 years they've showed me I'm ballast even if the company is doing great, because 'activist' investors say so. So why should I care? I care about my family, I care about my personal projects, I care about my craft and I care about my health and the people around me. Do I care about your little annoying bug? Fuck no. Why would I? It's not even my intellectual property.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
I have. It's actually called the DOL where we live, OP. And it's great. I need to renew my license in person because of my disability and it takes me 15 minutes in-and-out, I barely have to stay in line. I also renew my car tabs online exclusively with 0 problems. I really don't understand the DMV meme, at least in Washington state.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
Oh, you shouldn't have gone there, you lost all credibility my friend.
I agree the authors examples were all nitpicky and omg Elon was the worst example you could have picked.
But it does touch on a sort of apathy and nihilism that I can feel myself falling towards.
I gather that the worth of this piece lies in relating and resolving not to follow the author’s lead.
For sure
Well, I don't know about the other things, but I absolutely hate the orange street lights. Bad color reproduction, and make me sleepy.
> They spend all their free time doing activist stuff
Having free time is a privilege. The author is privileged and they don't know it.
That's quite literally the reason #1 why I moved to Switzerland. It's the only place in Europe that I know where people care about doing things well.
Care does not come from without, but instead from within.
To proclaim "Why does nobody care about anything?" is to neglect an oft quoted axiom:
0 - https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mahatma_gandhi_109075Okay, I now care passionately about each and everything I do. The bike ramp still sucks. What now?
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
The Maryland DMV used to be quite efficient. Once, having mislaid my driver's license (at my mother-in-law's, 100 miles away), I drove to the Wheaton DMV, and was out within 20 minutes with a new license.
This was about two years before 9/11, after which a whole lot of rules came down about verifying one's identity, and the DMV then crawled.
"We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care"
Yikes.
In the hypothetical world where Im the Supreme Leader, there are crack teams of sharpshooters that who get placed around randomly selected grocery store parking lots dealing out summery justice to people that dont return their shopping carts.
Sounds terrible!
At least the benevolent supreme leader cares! Just look at the corpses!
Vlad the Impaler, without any irony, cared a lot.
Believe it or not, there are many super rural places in the US where people care because there is such a close knit community
Maybe I'll retire to one. Will I be welcome as a transgender person? How far do I need to drive for tofu? I've been eating a lot the last few weeks and I don't want to give it up
I thought about this the other day and came up with a theory that people _do_ care if the thing they are doing has their name associated with it for everyone to see (in theory).
Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons
Human beings evolved to be surprisingly efficient. At any give moment, we are running in our heads a statistical analysis with a massive number of simultaneous inputs. We think about what we need, prioritize this list by level of necessity, analyze the perceived costs, multiply by probability of success, and divide by predicted time to reward. From this analysis, we make our choices whether or not to take action. In a system where people generally already have what they need, caring would be an inefficiency and an aberration. We have a salary, a house, food, water, companionship. We are comfortable. Why would a comfortable man care? To care for the sake of caring goes against 6 million years of evolution.
My hot take on this is that it is due to a lack of energy. I liked the phrase “a will to have nice things.”
We all want the nice things. However, they require conscientiousness. People who are run down and lack energy struggle with conscientiousness.
So why are we all rundown and lacking the energy required to have nice things? There are many reasons, some controversial.
One that is not so controversial is the industrialization of food. As the quality of food that our mothers consume has degraded, so have their offspring. I believe in TCM this concept is called maternal jing, or the essential life essence that you receive from your mother. Healthy moms breed a healthy populace. This is a problem generations in the making that keeps getting worse.
One that is more controversial is the impact of banking. Money is the life blood of society, and we’ve given bankers the right to siphon off our blood as they see fit. Generations of wealth transfer from the working class to bankers has left the populace anemic.
Japan has it better because they have maintained a more traditional way of life.
I care way too much and it causes burnout because those in power do not care.
That's probably my take on this: those in power do not care anymore. Money has turned into political influence in America, so now politicians are there for money first of all, and the needs of their communities are an afterthought. Even back in the day when you had shitty politicians or robber-barons, they still wanted their local area and America to succeed because they lived there, but in today's world the oligarchs and their appointed cronies (execs, upper management, etc.) just jet around the planet and could not care less about how well people are doing in one area of the world over another. This leads to the regular American seeing the lack of responsibility and lack of punishment for injustice and they also stop following the rules or caring about doing a good job, or they are too busy to do so, and you can't really blame them.
Solution: Money out of politics first, then we need to instill a pride and responsibility for the local community into the new generations of Americans, but in a non-propagandized way because they actually have to have real pride and not some fake patriotism like today.
I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.
I recently used the system to order a bunch of chicken nuggets for my four kids. When my order came out, I got a bunch of spicy nuggets. If you have young kids, you know that this is a disaster. Anyway, I said, "Uh, spicy nuggets? That's not what I ordered." The supervisor sighed and immediately said that I could keep them if I wanted to, but he'd fast-track a new order of regular nuggets for me (on the house, of course). Then he started complaining about how the kiosk UI confusingly puts the spicy nuggets as the first choice, so this happens all the time.
Meanwhile, an old man was hollering about how he wanted to pay with cash, but the kiosk wouldn't take cash, so another employee was trying to figure out how to transfer his order to the register at the counter to take his payment.
So in addition to being a horrible experience for customers, this whole thing appeared to be a disaster for the company in terms of both employee time and real money.
When I know what I want, I order at the counter, which is faster and there's never a queue because everyone else is using the kiosk. There isn't a cashier waiting but you just stand there and somebody will stop to take your order pretty quickly.
After all thay griping, this last bit really stuck out at me.
>We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.
Let me finish it for him.
>I just don't care (enough).
As for me, I'm looking forward to visiting Japan.
As much as I hate the light from hooded LED streetlights, they leak far less light than sodium lights and are better for wildlife.
I actually believe the DMV workers care that it does actually suck (eg. they want it to suck haha)
For caring you need empathy.
I hear people all around me all the time be boastful of how much they don't care. It's a competition.
>DMV
>software […] found some regulatory capture
>a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture
>municipal governments
>department of transportation
>Street lights
>airport
What do they all have in common?
I think he dismissed “incentive systems” way too early.
I would also argue that people not following the law (e.g. not picking up their dog’s poop) or proper laws simply not existing (e.g. playing shitty EDM on a trail) have the same root cause.
Governments don’t care.
It’s still amazing to me how some smart people still want the government to manage an even larger part of their lives when we should clearly be pushing in the other direction.
Of course they only want this when The Party I Agree With(TM) is in power, not so much when it’s The Party I Don’t Agree With(TM).
My gut says that it isn't a lack of caring, or anything nefarious.
I think Hanlon's Razor is handy here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
In this case I'd modify it slightly, as I don't think it is stupidity at play, but ignorance. It takes activation energy to address ignorance, and its too easy to kill activation energy inadvertently. It could just be that the person who could fix it is not aware of the issue, and everyone else just looks at it and thinks, wow, someone should do something.
regarding "These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck."
I have a blinding street light across from my house. I complained to the city and they put a shade on the light so that my house is now in the dark. Its so much in case anyone else has the same problem.
What city are you in? Or state / general region, if you'd rather not share.
marin county
Nobody see's the time or effort that went into a thing only it's outcome. Unfortunate reality.
I wonder if it’s really about not caring or rather optimizing for perverse incentives or just lack of competency.
This is the official motto of the Microsoft Teams and (New) Outlook groups.
Great article. I need to care more myself even if other do not care, thanks for the wake up call!
Title could be “Nobody cares about the same things that I do”. Or simply “Nobody agrees with me”, which also would be exaggerated, but slightly less myopic.
There was a crummy, barely used, mostly abused, walking path with a sitting area near my old apartment complex. [0]
One day I decided to pick up all of the trash/cigarette butts, installed a butt bin, and planted a bed of flowers in the center. Big sunflowers.
The next day I went out and someone had destroyed the cigarette bin. When the flowers sprouted someone immediately doused them with something and set all but one on fire.
I replaced the butt bin same day and replanted the flowers the day after they were burned.
Nobody cared, they even resisted at first, but, eventually people stopped trashing the place and what was an empty sitting area started filling up with people.
It’s worth trying. Sometimes people will care.
[0]: Turns out (and I learned this way after the fact) that the path marked the site of a WWII POW work camp. I didn’t know this but German prisoners were shipped to the US to make up for the farm labor shortage during by WWII.
Anyway, the path was a loop with a sitting area at the entrance. Imagine the most out of the way, inconvenient place you could put a plaque. That’s where they put it. The plaque informing you that your apartment complex was built on the former site of a Nazi work camp was at the very back of the loop with the text facing away from the path.
I had the great displeasure of working with a colleague who thought he was the only one who cared. He told me flat-out that "its OK to care!" during a disagreement.
I did care. I just cared about different things than he did. He cared about fixing little hinks in code that drove him made. I cared about fixing things users cared about and would notice.
I want to live in a community where everyone cares.
Trust me: You don't. You'd go insane.
See for example everyone who has to live with an HOA.
Classically underspecified, you are right. The care has to be about others and respecting them, not about oneself. Like in a good partnership. Care about giving, not taking.
But as the article frustratedly states, it usually goes the other way. Like Jethro Tull progressing into desillusion from
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=luDfuZkeqKU
to
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7SGq7jMdSU
This planet is such a beautiful marble and all we do is trample it with our feet. Guys, make a random somebody smile today, will ya?
Is that what caring about people in your community looks like? Or some kind of property value paranoia and sense of control.
Reading the original article I reflected: "I can totally see how this can happen, but for some reason it doesn't happen where I live"
I moved to Switzerland 9y ago. People care. I believe this is due to high trust society which evolved not that long ago from small, poor, tightly woven communities.
This is largely a political problem, I'd start there
That's Japan.
Eh, Japan is mostly a place where everyone is afraid to not ‘be Japanese’. It can be quite stressful.
Author, be the change you want to see in the world. Stop whining and do something.
I care about the work I do.
Just sayin'.
Of course, I'm kind of outside the "incentive system," so I do it for different reasons.
Yes, it's frustrating, when I encounter obvious "Person didn't care" stuff. Sometimes, it infuriates me, but usually, it helps me to feel that I need to care more about my own work.
I'm not sure that I buy that every example given is a "Person didn't care" instance. I feel that personal values may play a part, in interpreting the work.
Also, when you run large organizations/municipalities, small numbers become big numbers, quite easily, and you are often serving folks with very different priorities. Can't make everyone happy. Often, unfortunately, folks decide to make the weakest people unhappy.
Want people to care? Incentivize them. That's not just money. Treat the people (and their work) better. Hire and promote good managers. Stand up to unreasonable demands from above, etc. If you are an "above" person, then don't be insecure. Let the people under you, stand up to you, if you are being unreasonable. It really doesn't hurt as much as you might think. You always have the power to force your will, anyway, but I found that it was a good idea to listen to my employees.
this is such a US coded essay and to anyone else i think it would be like "you really need to get outa there"
I mean, it’s a symptom of scale right?
When you deal with a wide variety of people, constraints, etc you develop processes to deliver output. The DMV is that way for a reason, sidewalks get made a particular way for a reason
And that’s that, you don’t rethink it every time. It’s all transactional. human APIs interfacing with other human APIs
It’s a long cry from the old timey village where you had people: Bob was the only baker, and your neighbor. You also need his help to shovel your driveway. But he needs your help to make house repairs and get eggs from your chickens. If you don’t care then you have longer term personal consequences.
That’s not the case today - if you don’t care and deliver subpar experiences, people rant then move on to their next transaction and you to yours. You aren’t affected one bit in the long run. (Assuming people don’t have a choice - if they do then you do care just enough to get the sale)
I tend to agree with the author. But then, look around: a lot of stuff works really really well.
> I want to live in a community where everyone cares.
This summarizes the whole thing quite well.
>White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.
I've always been sensitive to the flicker and broken colour spectrum of fluorescent lights, it has been a longstanding "How come everyone is so willing to spend all day every day under these horrible lights?" type pet peeve.
This guy has a problem with white LEDs and I'm not sure what his issue is. He really hates them but didn't explain why. I can't empathize, I don't understand.
Also he says that they switched to white LEDs because they don't care when they likely switched to save on their electric bill.
I don't care because I honestly believe that caring in a world of stupid cunts is not worth the limited time I have on this Earth, which I'd rather spend doing things that make me happy, instead of being perpetually frustrated and disappointed. There are some people who keep pushing out good value despite the frustration and I think they're the real heroes, but I'm not a hero myself. BTW the society is constructed in such a way that I won't have kids so all of you can go fuck yourself once I die.
reality as a whole doesn't care caring and creating perfect producrs a fundamentally flawed system is a contradiction
I wish I had billions of sheer force of will.
Contrary to the author's quip about incentive systems, I wish I'd learned earlier that it's a fool's errand to care about things that have no positive feedback loop, no relevancy in my life, that I have no actual influence over, or that are otherwise beyond my purview. To 21 year old me, and probably many others, it would seem heartless or self-serving, but by doing so I get to focus on the few things I can authentically care about without worrying about how much they're reciprocated, and I don't need to passive aggressively try to influence broader behavior indirectly. If a neighbor or random stranger needs a hand, I give it to them and don't ask for anything in return. Likewise if someone wants to strike up a convo. I give people my time and energy if I can afford to and want to. I try to make that possible more often than not, and it leaves me with a very healthy social life, along with a non-burnout inducing work life. Beyond that, it'd be self-destructive and non-economical.
I realized years ago that in retrospect it was stupid to care beyond what I was rewarded for caring about or that my success was measured by, which was time, not quality, or accessibility, or usability, or anything else, and that's usually the case. If you have 2 weeks to get something completed, and it's not in the definition of completed to make sure screen readers can parse the website or whatever, then it's not your job to do that unless you'd be there anyway and get the rest of the stuff done with time to spare.
If you work at the DMV, you're sure as hell not wise to try and fight for different higher level decisions, it's not worth losing it for, and you're not measured by how happy of a place it is. Sure, engage in your interactions with people with respect, but don't take on responsibilities you're not paid for.
That said, if you could otherwise afford to spend a bit more time or effort outside work on things that aren't entirely self-serving, after you've done things that do bring you only personal value, but deliberately choose not to all the time, then ya that's just lame af.
Lastly, I do ultimately agree that some people are just absolute careless assholes on an individual level or deeply antisocial unfortunately, and we shouldn't be cultivating that in our cities, but that's a different convo. The worst I tend to see on a daily basis is cigarettes being tossed on the sidewalk and dogshit left by owners who I'd prefer didn't have them.
I feel like I’ve been in his shoes before and they tend to run you toward running people away from you who do “care”…well they may not care about how long it takes a guy to get a shed approved or order McDonald’s (can a man claim to care who cares to wish to expedite his order of that?) or that nobody wants to help him lace the streets with dog crap sack sticks when they’re worried about actual human issues like they’re well-being, dignity and identity.
I’m conflicted by this article. Because I hate most of it, because I relate to it.
Institutional gripes are low hanging fruit that are only significant in relation to taking care of what’s relevant to a mundane life but not relevant at all to a life worth living and dying over as a man. Maybe a man-child, but not a man.
This reads like “Suicidal Tendencies All I wanted was my Pepsi” remixed into Yacht Rock. This is not a rant, but a wining pantomime griping over things that a town elder would roll his eyes over his grave and take pity on the youthful.
So yeah man, I felt you. I felt you. But I beg Allah that I never have to feel where you’re coming from again beyond knowing about how I once felt myself & the destruction it caused me and the disdain it arises from the people who I thought I was just trying to help.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
Regarding programmers specifically I can concur, but with a caveat. Devs often care quite a lot about many things, but often one of those things is not doing the job they were hired for. The tedium of building software for businesses, even what we now call "big tech", is universally unappealing and definitely not the reason most devs started tinkering with computers. So they care very little, and it shows in the tech taking over the clerical aspects of every day life.
Was just thinking about this the other day. I feel vindicated that I'm not the only one who thinks this.
Has the author been tested for ADHD? Not that people with ADHD are the only ones that care. They just care really hard about all the little things, and have a really hard time switching it off for their own benefit.
What you’re describing sounds more like OCPD than ADHD to me
I mean that's in the anxiety disorder family so it probably bleeds between both.
> They just care really hard about all the little things
Maybe they just care and the world has become an endless distracting sea of little things that get in the way.
I mean, there's a lot of people trying to shift others attentions to little things, like ego.
It is really more about culture.
> You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
How does the second part of this paragraph disprove "something something incentive systems" ?
I am sincerely curious, as I can't make the connection myself, and of course "something something incentive systems" would be exactly my argument.
Saying engineers don't care is victim blaming. The way to survive at a company with "blah blah incentives" is to _not care_. You have to stop caring until you have an opportunity to move to another job.
I think the author is very myopic in understanding that other people care - just not about the same things he cares for. Most people don't care about publicly available dog poop bags or fixing a random bike lane that's sort of wrong. In fact you could argue that the things he cares about are not the most important things. Other people might care more about family than work, or about animal activism than petitioning for green space. It's not that others don't care, they just care about different things - sometimes more important and sometimes less.
Preach brother. I am in the same boat but in the caring side of things. I read e-mails, I respond to them as promptly as I can. I read the tickets and contact the users to resolve their issues as quickly as I can. I attend to meetings, do the required things and long story short, I give two shits about what is going on around me.
You know what I get? Additional assumed responsibilities is what I get, because I read the goddamn mails sent to the goddamn regional IT staff distribution list - I am the "knowledge base". If you are naivé you might, just might, assume that additional responsibilities involve a raise or a title change.
Hell. No.
The final straw was a person got promoted without any interviews etc. to a position I am de-facto doing. So you keep the people who care in the same position because "they get the job done" and you raise the people who doesn't care and the end result is this situation.
But hey! KPIs are green, the job gets "done", right? Who cares?
There is no solution, only trade-offs.
I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.
I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.
It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.
this articles has a ton of typos but that reinforces the emotional state the author was - an emotional state that i think is becoming more and more common. theres an underlying anxiety here; the world you grew up in is gone. this is bad and we (the author and myself) are not falling victim to nostalgia. all the things i interact with are becoming more and more dysfunctional. everybody has their answer to whose fault it is, people to blame for the fact that things simply don’t work anymore, but i think an analysis of this “lack of care” or “i just dont dgaf” attitude on the part of the workers, the employees of the companies who, theoretically, make the USA and similar countries the beacons of good living that they appear to be, might be fruitful. i’ll definitely be thinking about this observation for a while.
I have a feeling this is a very common sentiment as one gets older though.
When you live somewhere where wages and costs diverge further and further every year, as you get to be 30-40-50-60, etc. you feel more and more like the world was better back then
I also think part of the realization is that as you grow up, the world was "whitewashed" for you when you were younger. Your parents took care of going to the DMV, or taking you to the dentist and paying / using insurance, and making sure there was someone to drive you there.
Now, you're the parent, and you have to figure out if you can drive your child, make sure they're covered by insurance, make sure you can pay the dentist if your insurance is maxed out for the year, heck, just in the last year, find a new dentist because the one you had for 20 years switched to "not taking Delta" and suddenly wants you to pay $500/checkup instead of previous $0, etc. And if you can't pay, well.. sucks to be you..
I'm in my 50s, and I kind of understand this attitude, and I also understand why people get cynical. I moved to the US due to finding someone to marry online (from Canada), and while I had heard some stories of how bad the US was, I felt like I had my eyes open going in, knew about insurance, etc. I never figured I'd have to worry about the government going openly hostile, somehow embracing Russia AND Nazis at the same time, etc - I always figured things would slowly improve over time (especially when Obama was elected), not get drastically worse. So I've stopped caring as much - during Covid, I canceled several charities we used to donate to regularly - suddenly, after feeling quite secure financially (not rich, but ok), I didn't feel that way anymore. I got laid off the day after my 50th birthday and after transferring to another position in the same company, again 1.5 years later and I stopped donating to the local food bank where I was employed. Finally found a job ~1 year later - actually with better pay, but less WFH and it's hard to go back.
Eventually life gets to you. Looking around, there are a whole lot of people who care greatly - but what they care about is hurting specific groups of "others" in specific ways.. Or in grifting as much $$ as possible. So now I don't care as much. I just want the ants to stop crawling into the house and the neighborhood dog to stop barking at night so I can sleep. Because I'm (*&@#$ TIRED.
This is an amazing post, it resonates a lot. Good on you for calling it out.
I sure do miss the sodium lamps.
Rich (relatively?) software bro wants other people to care more. Does not reflect on the economics. Everything is economic. Tech has exacerbated the hyperfinancialization, enshittification, and general reduction to meaninglessness of every action.
Caring requires time and energy. Most tech companies aim to consume every freaking instant of your life (or else they serve the other tech companies that do that). For many people there is little time or energy left to care (or there is a sense that there is little time or energy left). Gotta hustle more, gotta hurry up so I can look at my phone.
Caring is not financially rewarded. Caring is generally penalized because no one else cares, so you're just wasting your time. How many ppl in this world can say this: "There are legal jobs I would not take, no matter how much they pay, because they make the world shittier." Caring doesn't make you money, and money is what the world wants. Until that changes, the problem persists.
Fix the values, fix the world
Give me a single actionable item that will enable me to fix the values of anyone else and I will move the world.
"Fix the values, fix the world" should go on the wiki page of examples of things that are easier to say than to do
What's sticking out to author like a sore thumb is a normal for majority. One can not imagine a better way of things until they have experienced a better one. Even if they are badly bitten by one, majority still can't come up with any better idea.
It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.
The DMV in Seattle is good though...
It's called the DoL btw. I guess nobody cares about getting department names right anymore.
I don't like this post, mainly because I think I don't like the attitude behind it. It seems somewhat obvious to me that people who do care exist and are out there; all you have to do is go and ask people what they care about and you'll get some interesting answers. You can choose to view the world as having no one who cares, but that seems seems a distorted way of viewing the world. And distorted in way that will make you more lonely, since you aren't looking for other people like yourself, since you've concluded they don't exist.
I read the blog post feeling the author's rage, but your insight is far more important. Humanity's collective goodwill is stifled by friction and inertia while moneyed interests are given jetpacks.
When people ask me what cope is, I'll be pointing them to the comments here.
All of the things he mentions really could be better. It's lazy and careless to say that there's a constraint so something had to be bad. Every engineering problem has constraints.
I’ll care - for money.
By “nobody cares”, I think they mean “not everyone shares my exact priorities”.
I see this rant against the exact way a bike lane was installed- installed because someone cared ALOT to get it approved and built- and all they can think to do is complain?
The world is a complex place full of trade-offs and compromises, I feel for the people that worked so hard to get this project done.
I don’t know, prioritizing sharing the sidewalk with everyone who wants to use it seems like it should transcend individual priorities.
The fact that there are reasons for things that they are how they are is one thing, and it's true he does not elaborate - but I take it his point is one of general attitude: U.S. Americans are different from Japanese. I would not say either group cares less; instead, they probably care about different things (different cultures have different value systems; the weight put on individual versus society plays a large role here, too).
It's easy to spot problems everywhere, especially if you are an analytical mind. Somebody else might care, but they may not perceive things as problematic to begin with.
Different people have different levels of sensitivity and granularity of perception: I buy "just cheese" when my wife buys "Gruyère français medium-aged" and don't you dare getting her the wrong brand.
Then, some people actually like the things how they are, so there are differences in opinion and personal taste, heck, some may even financially benefit from the status quo financially (distinguish those who don't care to help make change happen but would enjoy it if others did the work from the ones who genuinely don't care about either outcome, and both of them sit next to a third group, who do not what that change, full stop.
The post was more than just a rant: he notices where he lives, his community and him do not have "value fit" (to borrow and modify the concept of "product-market fit", since this is HN), and he is comtemplating a move. But when he says he won't move to Japan (where in any case he would always be an outsider) he is looking for middle ground - so I read his blog post as a "search query aimed at human blog readers", a call for information to find out where may be more likeminded folks, which is a good idea, given his situation.
That people do not see the need for change, one former co-worker of mine calls the "fish bowl effect": a new person joins a company, and they see everything that is broken immediately. But all the other people who have been there for 20 years don't get it. Like a new fish that joins the aquarium, who blurts "hey guys, the water in here is pretty dirty!" and all the other fill shake their head about such a weird statement, "What is he talking about?" They have been around for so long, they can't even perceive the water as "not clear" anymore, perhaps a survival adaptation to avoid permanent state of frustration.
So I wish all readers of HN that they will never become that kind of fish who stops seeing things! (Belated happy New Year, too.)
Seems to me that bike-lane-onto-pavement transition is designed to be deliberately awkward so that the cyclists have to SLOW DOWN before they join the pavement and share the space with pedestrians
Apathy is death.
It's a common misconception of youth to think nobody cares. For the most part, people care, a lot, to the point that they get exhausted. The challenge is prioritizing what to care about, which means as much about not caring as it does about caring.
This entire article is code for "regulations are bad."
Many things that suck, like DMV, do so not because nobody cares, but because incentives are aligned in a way to make things work the way they do.
Don’t worry.
People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.
And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!
Let's keep cycling between articles about how nobody cares and how everyone is burned out until we can see the pattern.
But their _are_ some people who care. I've been busting my ass in the software world for over 10 years, documenting it as I go. Largely everything I give away for free, or at the very least offer a free tier. I cant control what other people do, but I can keep chugging along doing the best that _I_ can do.
I care.
Some of this I think is misjudged - there is an implication that people know what they are doing or what their actions' consequences are, but do not care about it.
I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.
It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.
Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.
Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.
Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.
"Nobody Cares [about the things I think they should care about in the specific way I think they should]"
The author seems very conscientious and civic minded, but there are often unsatisfying explanations for why things are they way they are or why people act how they do.
Seems like the title of this post ought to be "nobody cares about the things I care about"
This article is dumb.
Maybe the bike lane is that because of real world engineering, regulation, or design limitations?
Perhaps the author should appreciate the bike lane existing in the first place. It's better than no bike lane.
I get the sense a lot of these cynical types feel a desperate need for control over every component of their lives. Relax, some things aren't perfect but they're probably better than they were a hundred years ago. Progress takes time, accept that it takes time.
extremely relatable ! thanks for sharing.
trying to fix half this stuff would burn you out, the other half would leave you jobless
I tried to fix the neighborhood playground and it took 2 years to get funding for a renovation that might happen 2 years from now... I gave up pushing for it because I don't have the time anymore... who knows if it will happen
most americans don't have a strong enough support system that gives them the space to care
Wait till you discover India and goverment.
> Don't take anything here too seriously
550 comments later...
"You're at the airport. There's a group in front of you on the escalator taking up the full width, preventing anyone from walking by" take the stairs
I care. Title busted.
Now this is another Luigi right here
There are an infinite number of things to care about (which is to say, to spend resources on, because that's what caring about something actually means), a finite amount of resources allocated to everyone except about 6 people who have a practically infinite amount of resources, and a social organization system that revolves around getting as much of those resources as possible and nothing else. What you're looking at is the real end product of "there is no such thing as society, only the individual and the family" neoliberalism. It's not just that no one cares, it's not even that no one has answered the question "Why should I care?". It's that the majority of people simply cannot care.
I mean, you talk about the problem, and everybody loves you and rushes to agree with your observations.
You talk about the [underlying reason for the problem][1] and everybody hates you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation
A lot of this is attributable to the way our society is designed at a high level
With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness
Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose
A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale
another approach would be to take it easy and lead by good example.
On Vomiting in Dunning-Kruger…
And yet:
People who care too much are angry.
People who care too much fight over stupid things.
People who care too much self-righteous.
People who care too much are intolerant.
People who care too much are not adaptable.
People who care too much are bullies.
People who care too much are trolls.
People who care too much write rants on their blogs.
People who care too much are miserable.
Welcome to capitalism, where people care only about one thing: money.
I think this is just the flip side of disengaged workers and managers.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-...
To care is to be engaged.
I mean... This guy must not have kids in school—because to be a teacher, you have to be nothing but a ball of caring because the job sucks the life out of you at every step. No money, half the country thinks you want to turn their kids into trans people and want you to teach their specific brand of a religion and so they defund you at every step. I feel bad for teachers—they really, really care.
This guy must not ever volunteer for anything—In my town we have volunteers who will find houses with dogs chained up and offer to build them a fence for free because they don't like seeing dogs on chains. We have volunteers who work community evenings and do cleanups at schools, parks and graffiti removal for community spaces. My city has hundreds of volunteer fronts, and they always need an extra hand.
This guy must not ever have bought girl scout cookies or got a Christmas tree from the boy scouts, a lot of people volunteer to make sure all that happens and the money goes back to the kids, and nobody there is getting "paid" and they all care.
This guy must never have talked to a fireman or a parks worker, they have crap pay and dangerous job conditions (Park rangers are assaulted at the highest rates for any job). They do it because they care.
This guy must never have been to a museum... actually, I could go on all day about people who care ...
At this point, all I can figure is this guy has his head firmly lodged up his rear-end.
Tldr: smorgasbord of 0.1th to 1st world problems designated as horrendous failures by me ain't fixed, so I decide that people in their jobs don't care.
I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.
This is a bullshit take considering the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.
And in software youre going to have to close a ticket or two that piss you off. You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features? Cool, see you in Japan bro.
> the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.
Broken windows. To use his example with bikes: the firms didn't care enough to allow the engineer to properly angle that entrance to the sidewalk. The engineer didn't care to push back because they were underpaid and things are getting more expensive at home. Things get more expensive because landlords are taking advantadge of the situation to jack up prices, because no regulation cared enough to stop that (or worse, regulation cared about money more and landlords "donated" to him to sway their ruling).
This apathy is a virus that spreads. At some point it becomes hard to figure out where it started. It's just this fog that seemingly always existed.
>You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features?
I don't get paid to deliver features. If that bug is really critical enough I may push back on it.
Or I simply realize it's above my paygrade, don't care, leave a paper trail down the line for when they inevitably blame me, and do what I'm told like a proper worker.
Why was this written?
Another example of everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.
Everyone has a breaking point and negativity bias makes the awful stuff pile on quicker.
Put it another way: Things are getting worse for more people. It may still be "amazing" for most people, but the ones next to the metaphorical "awful" line see it creeping. So it can feel very arrogant when someone a mile out says "why aren't you happy, it's great" as you see the line start to take your amazing things.
I hear you. I also sense people generally are becoming more anxious. More and more we took granted for decades has a question mark next to it.
But I didn't expect the author to feel happiness, or be grateful for the state of things. However, we can pause and realize how much people still do (for a salary or otherwise) for each other, despite things getting worse for them.
A good bike road with one bad turn is still mostly a good bike road. Still took a lot of caring to build. There's only so much capacity to fix mistakes.
You should not care. The universe does not need your help.
Universe instantiated you in this reality in a random body in a random timeline with zero input from your side.
It's just your ego that think your care actually makes any difference in this reality.
The universe will continue to run creating bodies, life forms and so on. It keeps destroying and recycling stuff.
Nothing is permanent. The more you care about impermanent things the more you suffer.
I do care. In fact, I bring a sort of "fuck it, we ball" vibe to the existentialism that nihilists don't really like.
Nice. The ying and the yang.
Everybody cares actually. Obviously the author cares more about investing the time to write this blog post than to take a sledgehammer and some concrete and fix the bike ramp himself. Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.
The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish - incurvatus in se (curved inwards).
"Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake." - Martin Luther
Everybody cares, but not enough to make a difference
>Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.
uhh, yes? What was the point of this ridiculous metaphor you yourself created?
>The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish
It's a bit more basic than that. If people aren't happy they care less, because their senses dull to focus only on survival and not assisting one's community.
A lot of people are unhappy these days.
I love looking at the About Me section of a site when I read a blog post that can be summed up as “The world would be objectively better if I were simply put in charge of it” because it’s always like “When I’m not blogging I’m working on chat with a blockchain for scooter thieves” or whatever and in this case our new overlord is “a founding engineer at Row Zero where we've built the world's fastest spreadsheet”