[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
[1] Light Use vs Population Density, WP Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Earth_li...
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.
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.
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.
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 am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.
People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.
And besides it’s a strange take to argue that you shouldn’t acknowledge good thing A because unrelated thing B is bad there.
(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.)
"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.
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.
[1] https://annsussman.com
[2]https://rockcitychurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1.pngNo 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 cities are more beautiful than others. Prague is more beautiful than Detroit.
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.
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.
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 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.
This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.
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.
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.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/15/1096799/aging-hi...
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.
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.
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.
Good thing we live in cities then!
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.
Statistics show that people don't care about statistics but about confirmation bias and the media is eager to feed it.
It’s easier than ever to carry one.
(Or did you just factiously mean that people have smart phones on them which can function as torches?)
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Daily reminder that we live under capitalism where you're not allowed to just "take your time".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Edit: final clause
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am sure leds technically do live longer than bulbs. But the difference is not significant enough in real life.
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
Maybe spring the extra couple of dollars and get high quality LEDs.
I wonder how many tests are run in actual enclosures for example. Which for example might not dissipate enough heat.
I think it is too expensive to run tests in real life changing conditions
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.
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.
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.
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 ......
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.
I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.
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."
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.
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.
And yes, roads for cars are intentionally build in a ways that makes high speed obviously unsafe at places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/#:....
Homelessness in Tokyo looks different than homelessness in a major US city. Often enough, it means freeters sleeping overnight in manga cafés.
That said there is no shortage of work in Tokyo. Far more work than the number of people available to do it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
- 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.
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 …”.
It's much more related to maturing on this or that axis than being smart IMO.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I don't know why you think that.
I don't know why you think that.
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.
Just look at EA vs Nintendo for one. And I'm not even a Nintendo fan.
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.
It’s just that they always seem to lose to those that optimize for money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1
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.
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.
But you’re right. Via email is easy. And I’m mostly thinking of epubs/mobi — but drm free.
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 think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads
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.
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.
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.
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.
i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"
I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.
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 did not succeed.
It's ran by business people who want to make money. Not by philosophers.
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
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.
> 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.
You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.
(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)
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.
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
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.
Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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.
Is it not allowed ?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems
I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Only when there's no way to measure the results.
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.
There is also the latin saying "res, non verba" – that one is proven by action rather than words.
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.
Point being, this isn't new.
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 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 = 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.
TheCaringCompany.com was taken but a good enough variant wasn’t and I got it.
Thank you!
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.
Starting a space company to enrich yourself sounds like a very weird thing to do if you only care about money.
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.
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.
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.
They are now about acquiring power and respect from other people, after he became rich and everyone started making fun of him.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The care is certainly not the only reason of having broken things.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the management is chill they arent gonna run.
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.
He met and exceeded those goals.
The IC isn't powerless with good management.
Or are you just copy/pasting LinkedIn drivel?
The guy who's a wanted fugitive in Japan and fled to Lebanon by shipping himself in a piano box?
> Or are you just copy/pasting LinkedIn drivel?
> 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."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.
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.
That's not what I said. Must've struck a nerve.. CEO by chance?
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.
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.
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!".
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!!"
Very common. More common in women.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else.
> Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there.
This is just how trains work in that place. It’s not deeper than that.
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.
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.
Maybe the wisdom is to just not care, and know you'll die soon, who cares.
Every generation is a shitshow after the next.
People who tend to blast their music on a loudspeaker are not exactly the kind of people who are going to accept the message.
> 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.
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.
I have since moved out of the SF bay area and I drive everywhere. My life is much more pleasant.
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.
A lot of people are just not very conscientious.
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.
IMO, not caring about the wider impact of our actions is something that will keep happening at an increasing rate.
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 suspect the DMVs in LA and NYC are particularly bad and that's why it's a cultural meme.
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.
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.
An AI chatbot with an unblinking stare and frozen smile is likely to be your new DMV virtual assistant!
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fidelity/comments/la7tj6/can_someon...
https://cash.app/help/5026-transferring-stock-to-another-bro...
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensio...
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tech bro bs.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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...
Good enough is going to be the output when nobody has the time or people's time isn't valued.
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?
A lot of people in the comments are, too. It's been a real interesting case study for me.
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.
I wouldn’t personally do this but I can see how someone would without it being mean spirited
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe catholic countries are doing a bit better. I sometimes get that feeling.
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.
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.
In text if preferred: http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html
His "snowball of care" doesn't work if your 1% effort needs to put out the house fire first.
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)
Whatever you do today, through action or inaction, it will ripple through eternity with both intended and unintended consequence.
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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
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
We live in a world full of people doing good who don't do it for the "player 1 energy"
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.
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.
In these places you’re pushed to not care.
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.
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.
Yeeahhhh... I'd stay as far as possible from Miami.
About his ego. Nothing else.
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’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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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
>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.
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/...
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
America on the other hand...
They absolutely do care! But they have competing interests.
"I am proud of my work" >> "You should work harder!"
Seriously, the cops drive Toyota 4Runners. It’s an asian majority state.
It might be a good compromise into what you are looking for.
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".
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
For example, there is an internal product that I use daily that has broken http links in error/status messages.
I (and OP) was talking about people who have power over the product (software engineers, managers, designers) not caring.
In your case, people with power over product (you) clearly care very much, it's just the product is not interesting to others. (Which kinda makes sense? It's yet another PHP framework with AI and Crypto, and there is plenty of them...)
I have no idea what a “Social Operating System” is supposed to be. Seems like it’s a web/mobile app framework, but it’s completely unclear why I would want to use it. You need an “elevator pitch”.
There are hundreds of frameworks, if you want developers to use yours, maybe show some example code? No one is going to spend a bunch of effort trying to build with your framework if they can’t see an advantage.
Not trying to be a hater, I care and want you to succeed
Edit: just read some of the links in the readme - so it also has something to do with crypto and micropayments? Why would I want to use your “QBUX”? Would a developer only be able to get paid in your crypto? If so, why should they trust that you won’t rugpull? If you want people to care about your project, you need to think about what they care about (pro tip: nobody cares about making you rich via support contracts or shitcoin schemes. Sorry.)
But I think this illustrates perfectly what I said originally. Context matters. The context on HN is "I see a word that triggers me (token / web3) somewhere and I immediately assume all these things I haven't seen or read, and forget about anything you actually did."
That's why it is very important how you present things. The original Facebook was just a bunch of profiles in php. And yet people used it like mad and investors camped out Zuck's dorm room. It's not so much about what you build but how you present it.
1) Doesn't explain to the target market (developers) why they should use your product
2) Throws up a bunch of red flags to developers who actually bother to read it all, namely that your business model seems to be either/both of selling devleoper support (is that why there aren't any good developer docs?), or locking developers into a token with no published tokenomics or even a contract address (as you noted, the token doesn't exist!). Anyone with any experience in crypto knows that there is risk adopting an ERC20 token, you *need* to address the risk points (eg the potential for rugpull, available liquidity) if you want anyone to take you seriously.
My point is, this is why you are getting no traction from developers. People aren't ignoring your completely free awesome code because of apathy, it's because you're not doing a good job showing them any benefits to using your product. Your marketing needs work.
Also, you should really consider if you actually have a product that fits your market. It sucks to spend a lot of time developing a product that the market doesn't want, but you might be in that position. If so, no amount of marketing will help you.
Ironically, I went to the effort to parse through all your docs because I wanted to help you understand why your Show HN failed, but now I kind of feel like I wasted my time, making it harder for me to care in the same way for the next person in a similar position.
Anyhow, take the critique or not -- I wish you luck either way!
While presentation definitely matters, the product itself has to be actually interesting (especially on HN). For example, current HN's top post is about Anthropic - and I don't even know what their stack looks like!
On the other side, if the product's is Yet Another PHP Framework then your target audience is (1) PHP developers who are (2) unsatisfied with existing frameworks they know and (3) willing to spend hours to try the unknown thing. This is a pretty narrow category.
Oh by the way ... I tried doing a "Show HN" with it. It just got buried after getting 1 like. If you post something that people take a while to engage with, then they don't come back to HN to upvote it fast enough. So it gets eclipsed by stuff that's memey and fun. Result: no one cares.
Thousands of rock bands released new songs today. I don't care, and that's OK. But if a rock magazine editor does not care about them, it would be bad.
Latest Microsoft C# has new lock type. I absolutely don't care, and that's OK. But if someone working with high-performance C# does not care, they are doing a bad job.
At my work, I've just released a new version of internal tool I've worked hard on. Majority of the company do not care at all, and that's fine. But those users who use daily? I expect them to read the announcement and take notice.
My local park has a burned-out streetlight. Most people don't care. But I'd expect my town's public works department to care, or they are doing a bad job.
I've submitted a very interesting link to HN. Most people did not care (as evidenced by a very small number of upvotes). But I'd expect ... nah, I don't actually expect anyone to care. There is not a single person on this earth whose job is to care about things I post on HN.
it might be worth taking some time to reflect on what your part in that was and what you might do differently next time.
Sometimes the same link can go viral and other times it doesnt
But the real issue is when people follow the link and get enagaged and dont come back to HN to upvote it fast enough before it scrolls off the page
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it does touch on a sort of apathy and nihilism that I can feel myself falling towards.
> 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.
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.
To proclaim "Why does nobody care about anything?" is to neglect an oft quoted axiom:
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.[0]
Yikes.
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.
Edit: And sometimes, it's just the tragedy of the commons
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.
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.
>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.
I hear people all around me all the time be boastful of how much they don't care. It's a competition.
>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).
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.
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.
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 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.
See for example everyone who has to live with an HOA.
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?
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.
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.
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)
This summarizes the whole thing quite well.
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 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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
"Fix the values, fix the world" should go on the wiki page of examples of things that are easier to say than to do
It's not that nobody cares, they just don't know any better.
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 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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/654911/employee-engagement-...
To care is to be engaged.
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.
I actually like the bike ramp. Cyclists merging to a footpath at 20mph are a danger. Take em out before they hit the pedestrian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.