Nobody cares

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.

None of the corporations I’ve been part of have been doing “abhorrent” things. You’re projecting your socialist ideology.

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.

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

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.

I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).

The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.

Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment

I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.

Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...

>Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

But is that even true? My mid-tier appliances are all great and I love my IKEA furniture. Some things suck some of the time. Other things don't.

> The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work

People in Japan habitually kill themselves because of their stupid work culture. Maybe that's not the best example.

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.

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.

OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.

Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.

Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....

In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.

The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.

In the netherlands I have seen green street lights with motion sensors. Only on smaller streets and pedestrian paths, though.

Any way to test my light's spectrum? e.g. a cheap home spectrometer

anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.

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.

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."

This is a really interesting insight. Drop me a line if you want to talk further.

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.

Hey now, you can pay extra for "McDonald's without ads" like you can with Netflix or Amazon Prime or Disney okay.

This feeling is a driver of theft at self service checkouts.

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.

I go to a gas station that blares ads at an ear piercing volume. I now keep duct tape in my driver's side door.

I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use, He. Did. Not. Care.

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).

[1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1

Kindles already can have ads on the sleep screen! Unless you paid for the ad free version.

There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline

I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads

My swedish books from the 1800s have ads inside.

Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.

Next time go to the cashier instead, and complain to them about the self-checkout terminal ??

Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.

You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.

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.

No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.

Many cyclist are also drivers.

Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

Well damn I guess I’m living in the 1% /s

in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].

In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.

So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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 work for the government IT.

Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.

Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.

An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.

And playing PoE!

No, the examples in the article are bad.

The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.

DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.

The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.

Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.

> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.

It 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.

Maybe some fraction of incompetent interns are playing a kind of double game, where they merely pretend to be really caring.

But I doubt that’s the norm. There really are a lot of not so smart people of all ages out there in positions way beyond their actual capability.

Edit: And in a lot of situations the dumb and hard working are way more dangerous than the smart and lazy.

With the dumb and lazy being somewhat better, so I partially agree with the parent.

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).

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.

I think he mostly cares about getting humanity off this planet, he's been saying that for a long, long time.

Starting a space company to enrich yourself sounds like a very weird thing to do if you only care about money.

If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?

I believe his motivations are beyond getting rich. At some point in life money become means to goals, and goals are driven by real motivation.

That's not fair. He also cares what twitter randos think of him (e.g. to the point of paying to boost his diablo account or whatever).

You know what what happens when you assume...

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.

[dead]

> Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?

Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.

The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.

> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems

I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.

This may be intentional.

Road to sidewalk is a speed transition point. The transition from street to sidewalk via a tight turn here is an effective traffic-calming component to slow down bikes from road speed to walking speed. That's done on freeway off-ramps, where there's a curved section or two of decreasing radii to force vehicle speeds down before they reach a stop sign or traffic light. Same problem.

This reminds me of Tempest in a Pothole, an episode of The Paper Chase TV show from 1984:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEFBX4M5LCQ&t=2896s

The thrust is that standards of accountability are (or should be) higher for a professional than for a random reasonable person.

I agree people should be able to design things property, but I'm not sure this ramp is actually a good example. It might be! But no one is talking about an obvious issue for any ramp that would exist in that photo: it is merging bikes in to pedestrian traffic. So I'd think that you specifically want a ramp that forces the bike to slow down.

I don't disagree with you that people who design these things should be capable. That isn't what the post is about though, it's about whether or not they care.

Yeah, not doing one's job well because they don't know how to (and won't bother to figure out) is an example of not caring, fundamentally.

Imagine building an app for a market you’re totally unfamiliar with. You don’t research the market, you don’t talk to potential users, you don’t do any real world testing. You just build something that seems like it should be ok, ship it, and never touch it again.

None of us would dream of doing that, but that’s what the designer of this atrocity did, if we’re assuming the best.

Bonus: the app probably isn’t going to kill anyone.

Usually constraints are financial related. It takes money to do all that and public works is not some big tech company

I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.

Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.

I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.

Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?

Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?

Unless you can find a person who's deepest passion is feeding others.

27% of gdp on doctors and hospitals, are you sure youre not missing a middleman or two in there?

Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?