As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.
So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.
Sure, I get your point. But there are lots of tiny things that we can do to make our lives a teeny, tiny bit better - these things are fully in our control.
Example - someone makes a large spreadsheet, but without locking the header row or adding filters. It would take 10 seconds to do, but people in my org don’t, even after I requested them, showed them how.
I understand fixing massive problems like money in politics etc are super hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to not play music in elevators without headphones (yes, it happens, I am not lying) or write a sensible bug report with useful details instead of “this ain’t working” etc. If we can’t even do small things well, how can we even begin to take on massive problems like wealth inequality, poverty, judicial reforms etc?
An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.
The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.
if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.
I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.
I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.
I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.
If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.
The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
Japan 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 has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).
High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.
Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.
- You cannot fire your staff (easily)
- Rather than replace staff, you need to train them
- You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry
I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but...
Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.
I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.
Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.
Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.
> Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.
Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.
Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.
Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.
But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.
> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.
I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.
Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.
IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)
(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)
Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.
Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason.
"Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes.
Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.
Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.
Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.
And so on.
The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.
There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.
They might not be good reasons to you, but that is not the same thing as not caring. If someone cooks something that without salt for health reasons, that doesn't mean they don't care about salt as much as me.
Eh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.
It’s possible to install warm colored LEDs with very little blue light output though. You get all those benefits without giving up the more-suitable-for-night sodium light spectral benefits.
The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.
Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...
In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.
The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.
it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.
The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.
I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light.
This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue to advocate for them really don't care about people.
The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply.
Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.
> But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.
I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.
The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.
Except he is talking about the color of the LEDs. Blue LEDs are terrible, just put orange ones. Has nothing to do with the fact that it's LEDs or hallogen.
I'm a big bike lane design nerd: that bike lane design absolutely sucks, and in more ways than the author mentions. The person designing it didn't care.
Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.
https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.
all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?
it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".
and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......
While you're right on the LED part, this bike lanes is obviously misdesigned..
I have a similar one next to my house and fell from my bicycle due to its poor design, some French civil engineer also don't care :-(
We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.
The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.
Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.
> this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research
It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).
One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.
Hawaii Big Island does care about light pollution - for the sake of astronomical observatories. They use yellow low pressure sodium light. Yellow is dispersed less by air. The energy efficiency of low pressure sodium bulbs is also high, comparable or higher than most LEDs.
LEDs come in multiple color temperatures. It’s possible to install led streetlights that don’t suck.
Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks.
DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services.
I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.
>But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid.
I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.
If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.
There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.
OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.
Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.
Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.
It’s* ironic, because you don’t even seem to understand his argument and lazily disputed the LED part which isn’t even remotely what he’s complaining about.
But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old.
If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.
LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.
I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.
But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.
For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.
But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.
* * *
Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.
In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.
As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. Note that this is not insider knowledge of actual policy, just common observations from analyzing data at different places.
One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.
Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.
> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.
I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.
>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.
This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Lately, the number of times (across different businesses/industries) where I've found myself thinking "Will you please just fucking take my money and stop bothering me?" is too damn high.
Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.
I recently went to a gas station where the pump worked right! No affinity cards. No car wash offer. No asking for a ZIP code, since I'd been there before. No screen with ads. Press card against RFID reader, select octane, pump gas.
I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use.
I go back there occasionally, even though the station with the ad screen is cheaper.
nah - gas pumps that ask for phone numbers for savings card id's are great opportunities to save cents at the pump. 555-555-5555 always works everywhere and half the time gets you savings.
This seemed like a poor example for the author to choose, of "not caring." Annoying, sure. But these extra upsells originate from someone who definitely cares about increasing revenue and is aggressively exploring multiple avenues to achieve it.
Companies don’t care about you, they care about your wallet, extraction of money from. The most pleasant companies to deal with are the ones who have found a niche where customer satisfaction helps with the goal of wallet, extraction from. But at best it’s a means to an end, and McDonald’s is definitely not one of those companies.
I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other).
There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline
I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads
At the dominant pharmacy/convenience store in my area (Shoppers Drug Mart), it can take up to 12 clicks to self-checkout, depending on what garbage they're upselling on the day. I counted them.
I refuse to use them, and (annoyingly, I know) let the cashier know why each time as they're checking me out. I feel bad for the poor cashier but unfortunately for them, they're my only interface to the company.
Yes. Our local IKEA recently started doing this. During self-checkout, you have to click through hot dog, ice cream, cinnamon buns and drink offers, and the inevitable offer to get an IKEA family card before you are actually able to pay for your furniture.
Seeing this after waiting in line for 10 minutes, navigating a sluggish, unresponsive touch screen terminal and unsuccessfully trying to scan slightly bend bar codes while 10 people are watching you doesn't exactly increase my desire to return to this store.
I really think a huge part of the problem is that there isn't a direct interaction with a human anymore. If IKEA would ask their cashiers to advertise all this crap to customers before accepting their money, they would revert this after a single day because many customers would very, very strongly complain, and the cashiers would care and threaten to quit.
But you cannot complain to a self-checkout-terminal, which makes this even more frustrating. As another comment has pointed out, there is just a "No thanks" button. I want a "I am seriously offended that you try to milk me like a brainless cash-cow, you should be ashamed to even advertise this to me after I bought a couch for 1,400 EUR, and I will not return anytime soon" button.
Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.
I feel like this reveals some sampling error in the OP rant. When you see something negative get made that makes you think "nobody cares", you're not seeing the people who did care and left.
Which relates to the linked incentives piece: when you create incentives, you think you're changing people's behaviour. Actually you're selecting for people who respond to the incentive.
I hate that the options when faced with a location permissions request is "block" or "allow". why isnt ignore an option?? Block adds the site to a discrete local list which i dont need recorded on my computer...
if you don't, someone else will. Maybe you could've introduced a "bug" that makes it so it usually doesn't work except when a member of the QA team is looking at it :P
Well.. I did implement most of the framework. The good thing is that I'm waaaayyyyy detail oriented, and I made an extremely sophisticated system for it.
Maybe a little bit TOO sophisticated
Not my proudest _engineering_ achievement, but as an R&D project? I consider it a success.
and decoupling order taking with service makes for "funny" times. since mcdonalds installed the tablets i regularly wait 10 minutes while looking at confused / avoidant employees not knowing what to do, even if there's nobody else waiting.
i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"
That seems more indicative of just bad management.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve been in (specially) a McDonalds, but I used to frequent them easier in my life. The ones I went to were well run and efficient. But still as seemed as decoupled as kiosk ordering. The cashier would take the order and put it into the computer. The food preparers would prepare the food and put it on the trays where the packagers would subsequently take it and put it on your tray or in your bag. There was 0 communication between the three groups in 99% of the cases. Often I would make small talk with the cashiers or packagers if there was nobody behind me.
I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.
This is a result of Taylorist management brain rot drive to reduce drive thru wait time metrics at the expense of anybody not in the drive through. Watch the shot clock near the drive through window (they're highly visible at Taco Bell) and observe that drive thru customers almost never wait more than 60-80 seconds.
you can't say "they don't care" though, the folks making these screens are obviously pretty motivated to keep squeezing out more profits and care a lot about that. if they "didn't care" they'd have told you "ok fine, im going for break"
McDonald's touch-screen were only profitable because users ordered more. Possibly Covid and processes to get costs down have changed this, but not to begin.
I feel like your comment falls under "Nobody cares"
I love the touch screens and having the time to order what I want. I used to rush my order at the checkout and never got exactly what I wanted.
If you did a start-up 'ethical ordering' you'd care, made money, and probably forced McDonalds to change it's touch screens. In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
> In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
Really? I guess I've just never taken up such an upsell, but I'll try to remember it next time I go just to see the UI. Barely ever go there now that ironically Lotteria has more veggie burger options here (1) than McDonalds (0), and their chicken burgers are imo worse than KFC's.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.
Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.
It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.
(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)
I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.
Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.
To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.
It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.
No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.
The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.
> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded
This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.
As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.
The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(
Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.
Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.
Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.
Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.
Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care.
And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn't feel adversarial.
in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].
In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.
So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.
The entire article is a form of engagement bait. It’s a pile of stereotypes with storytelling. Paul Graham does the same thing. Arguing about which stereotype is true or false… you’re just playing into it.
And in particular engagement bait, when you're blogging or writing, requires you to not be circumspect but rather be polarized and absolute in what you say.
My mother is a nurse practitioner who works in an acute care clinic, and I can say that she feels horrible when she makes a mistake, learns that one of her patients’ conditions has worsened and they’ve been hospitalized, or — worst of all — when they die, even if it was expected.
My personal experience with multiple doctors, some in primary care and others in hospitals, is that they often don't care and just want to get you out of the door.
Bring up some symptoms not immediately easily attributed to something? Sorry, those are "nonspecific symptoms" and they can't help you. Maybe see a specialist, maybe not. Figure it out.
Obviously this isn't all of them, but it is definitely a decent chunk.
Regardless of facts about how much doctors actually care, he still perceives the world as one where almost nobody does. I'm glad he expressed himself as such because I feel the same way sometime, even though I know that most people try to fill their role in society well. It's like a special kind of loneliness that grows quick. I like how he describes the development of this loneliness. Once he put on its glasses, he thinks carelessness is everywhere, even in doctors who do care, so he develops existential hopelessness of some sort.
Loneliness is a really good way to describe it. I definitely have had similar experiences to the author. It can make you feel really pessimistic and like a freak outcast for actually caring. It makes me feel arrogant or overly confident too.
I think ironically it does show that the author thinks highly of people and their potential. A truly bitter person would have long stopped expecting anything of anyone, which I think is very unhealthy. You expect people to care but only about things that harm you.
I'm guessing there's more people out there who feel this way, and likewise I'm glad the author shared this experience even if it's not the healthiest mindset to always be in.
Let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've spent on a single patient over the last month? What do you think that number is like for your fellow physicians?
Of course this will massively depend on your specific workplace, the ratio of doctors to patients in your vicinity, and so on. But I've seen plenty of doctors for who that statistic can't be higher than 10 minutes.
I'll freely admit I'm biased. I have a medical issue that despite visiting a good number of different doctors, none have properly diagnosed. This is despite the symptoms being visible, audible and showing up on certain scans (inflammation), so it can't be disregarded as "it's in your head". Some have made an attempt, and after that failed quickly did the equivalent of throwing their hands up and saying "I don't know", providing no further path.
This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.
I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.
My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.
It’s a statement of privilege to believe (and say) that there are hundreds of good doctors per handful of bad ones? It sounds to me like a statement of fact. And that you dispute the fact. What does privilege have to do with it?
Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to mind for nearly the first diagnosis that comes to mind. Given the volumes of patients they are expected to churn through though it’s not surprising that they become desensitized and divorced from the ramifications of shoddy work with minimal research — for many (especially nonspecialists) it’s effectively impossible to do thoughtful work for every patient. I think overwork desensitizes many/most and few actually have the time or energy to do more research or think deeply about an individual patient, but ultimately decisions which consume minimal resources from them drastically affect the lives of patients.
Healthcare professionals know this to be true. This is why when their own loved ones are the patients they have such a strong tendency to become very actively involved —- it’s not necessarily that the person attending to their loved one is incompetent, but chances are that their loved ones will similarly be just another face that occupies another physician’s mind for a few minutes.
Artificially high barriers of entry in the field may lead to massive compensations but also to a huge ratio of patients to physicians — this takes a toll.
It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.
"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.
(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)
You think PCPs get to decide what their schedule looks like? Or do you think they have a specific patient load they are expected to meet, which dictates how many in-person vs remote slots they have in each day?
His care does not scale and he has to ration his care between existing patients. For him to give you more care, it will likely come at the expense of someone else's care.
This situation has occurred because somewhere and somewhen else, a chain of other people have not cared and allowed primary care resources to get to this state.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.
I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).
The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.
Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).
Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.
Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.
Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.
An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.
Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!
Imagine taking the answer to an innocuous question like "what is your favorite part of the job?" in what I assume was a social setting and extrapolating from there to "they don't care about their job."
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?
Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.
An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.
The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.
DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.
The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.
Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.
I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.
> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It is not.
It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.
One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.
Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).
As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.
The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.
On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.
And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.
I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.
I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
What do you not agree with? That he doesn't care? I would assume scaling Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity are net positive for the world (as it stands). Can you achieve those ambitious things if the leader/ceo of the company doesn't care?
I mean, he clearly didn't care that supervisors at his company were calling people the N-word on the job. He cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image, at least to a specific audience.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
Readit News
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.
Example - someone makes a large spreadsheet, but without locking the header row or adding filters. It would take 10 seconds to do, but people in my org don’t, even after I requested them, showed them how.
I understand fixing massive problems like money in politics etc are super hard. But it doesn’t cost anything to not play music in elevators without headphones (yes, it happens, I am not lying) or write a sensible bug report with useful details instead of “this ain’t working” etc. If we can’t even do small things well, how can we even begin to take on massive problems like wealth inequality, poverty, judicial reforms etc?
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.
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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.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation
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.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...
Japan 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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
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.
(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.)
People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.
"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.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Yes that bike lane follows some sort of standard. Still sucks.
DMV sucks. Know what doesn’t suck? AAA DMV services.
I think you’re right though. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner of suck and we don’t know how to get out.
Well thanks to all the replies below to prove may be he is not assuming it's because everyone is stupid.
I think this reply also amplifies what the author was saying. Just because the standard is like this and everyone is following the standard doesn't mean the standard is good.
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.
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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.
But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
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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.
I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
I 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."
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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
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.
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.
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'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.)
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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 ?
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
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