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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.
As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
I really enjoyed your comment. Without digging deep into design philosophy, it really is a fun practice to try hard to notice the things around you (especially in the physical world as opposed to digital) that were specifically designed for you in mind and have actually positively affected you. Most of them were quite intentional, indeed! Isn't that great?
[+] [-] DharmaPolice|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tqi|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
[+] [-] gizmo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] easygenes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bobthepanda|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] veltas|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gspencley|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CalRobert|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phito|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scosman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] logifail|1 year ago|reply
I would suggest that "design standards" do not always make things uniformly better, certainly not for end users.
[+] [-] pointedAt|1 year ago|reply
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 ......
[+] [-] renox|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bccdee|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] indoordin0saur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nicce|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ulbu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cassepipe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] more_corn|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ksec|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bill_joy_fanboy|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kylebenzle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pdimitar|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aheidne|1 year ago|reply
But, good job bruh, you defeated a strawman. Super proud of you.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] addicted|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] azeirah|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] hoosier2gator|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] frotty|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sureglymop|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rgovostes|1 year ago|reply
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
[+] [-] ryanisnan|1 year ago|reply
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
[+] [-] solatic|1 year ago|reply
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
[+] [-] helboi4|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cyrnel|1 year ago|reply
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
[+] [-] Yen|1 year ago|reply
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
[+] [-] bibelo|1 year ago|reply
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
[+] [-] Shank|1 year ago|reply
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
[+] [-] imgabe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] arisbe__|1 year ago|reply
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
[+] [-] lnsru|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] spencerflem|1 year ago|reply
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
[+] [-] mc3301|1 year ago|reply