waterbear's comments

Isn’t Java a pay-to-play runtime now? I thought Oracle changed the licensing model after Java 8?

I think aspects of the operational technology should improve, but should the subway be a brighter, more cheerful space? Of that I am uncertain...

I’d advocate for more reliable trains, in the same way I want the elevator to show up as soon as I press the button. Of course I want that instant gratification, but the atmosphere of the subway, on the other hand, I find to be a less urgent concern.

Mostly I think people are generally accepting of the fact that New York City’s subways are like an unfinished basement. It’s a moldy, musty cellar, and it’s not a destination. It’s a liminal zone.

If you want to talk about smell, consider this curiosity. One of the most irritating parts of the subway for me right now is the new cars. The bright, automated cars with the electronic conductor voice, and the light blue bench seating. [0]

These new cars have an air conditioned ventilation system miles ahead of the old cars, where you could just crack a window, and I swear to god these cars utilize an engineered odor as a crowd control mechanism. I harbor a suspicion that they radiate a strange odor on purpose so as to repel most normal people, so that no one lingers in these cars casually. It’s a unique smell. It only affects the new cars. And I only smell it inside those cars, even when they’re freshly cleaned. I suspect it’s the same tactic restaurants use [1], with artificially manufactured food aromas, but with a scent chosen to disgust.

None of the old cars smell like that. The plaform doesn’t smell like that. When the ventilation is off, and the doors are open, and the train sits in the station for 15 minutes, the new cars lose the smell. But for years, that smell has only affected the new cars. It smells like bad breath, if I were to try and describe it. Not vomit. Not urine. But more like if you lick the back of your hand first thing in the morning and smell it before it dries. That’s the closest smell. And I think it’s no accident the new cars smell like that.

[0] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/26/04/3093161B000005...

[1] https://www.scentair.com

The subtext of my point is that if you policed the subway beyond a certain threshold, New York might cease to be attractive to the kinds of people that find New York a uniquely livable place.

It’s not so much that the bar should be higher, so much that leaving the bar as low as it is provides a signal that contrasts the range of sky high standards New York also makes possible in other ways.

Yes, the subway sucks, but New York’s tendency is to let the full scope of humanity simply exist out in the open, as is, warts and all. This is the philosophy I take away from it.

Should the world standardize a mandatory minimum quality upon public civic spaces? If we did, wouldn’t that require cracking down on deviations from the prescribed norm? Wouldn’t that drive people out, possibly sending some to a place much worse that a dirty smelly subway tunnel? The answers to these questions aren’t cut and dry.

This feels like a troll comment, in that it asks a back-handed question, to highlight the shortcomings of a comparable example, more than the question voices honest curiosity regarding the question as it may be superficially posed. Possibly in an effort to lead the loaded question down a negative path, such that responses will lend voice to an opinion one might read between the lines.

But first and foremost, no one from New York calls it “NYC Metro.” It’s The Subway, and it’s operated by the MTA. So, already your comment has the ring of someone who doesn’t live in New York. And to go one deeper, The Subway hasn’t smelled like that since the mid 1990’s. Most of the tourist stations “Disney-fied” by Giuliani get power washed every single night, after midnight, during the gravyard shift, to eliminate the smells of humanity.

It’s still very old, very dirty, very inefficient, slow, crowded, and peppered with tourists, homeless people, pickpockets and weirdos all at once.

New York has more going on than many other cities, and is as dense as it is diverse, and it’s been that way for at least 100 years (or at least the subway has), and that’s a somewhat conservative time frame, but

Other cities aren’t like that, and some of it is due to strict policing. Not always though. Some of it has to do with climate, sunlight and weather, or in social terms, the implicit understanding of the expectation of one’s peers.

In lively cities, when transplanted people lose a sense of expected behavior among strangers, behavior loosens up. Some cities have a specific reputation as being a destination for the specific reason to either lose or find one’s sense of self. New York is one of those places.

Plus, GitHub is a Microsoft property now, and I believe that on some fundamental level, Microsoft is happy to be in command of social web properties that still see avid use, and aren’t being stifled by Microsoft’s otherwise domineering reputation.

  Mr. McDonald said that if Ms. Thompson’s daughter took 
  the groceries without scanning them properly, it was 
  by mistake. Video surveillance, reviewed by The New 
  York Times, shows her daughter trying to scan and 
  rescan groceries at the checkout machine for about 17 
  minutes.

I really have a mixed impression of self checkout lanes, as they currently exist. Ten years ago, if you had asked me if they sound like a good idea, I have responded with an emphatic yes.

But experiencing them on perhaps a monthly basis these days, I’ve developed an overwhelming urge to avoid them at all costs. And not because of incidents as described by this article.

It’s reached the point that even when I’m holding a single item, and there are five people with full shoppings carts in front of me, I get annoyed at people who suggest self checkout to me. I know damn well that there’s a self checkout lane, and it’s my time to waste. I’m waiting in precisely the lane I intend to be in.

Even though I totally agree that working a cash register should very nearly be an anachronistic job at this point, self checkout lanes are a horrid abomination in their modern form. Waiting for these machines to prompt me through the task of ringing my own items up is so far from my own experiences of actually working as a cashier, that I shake my head in dismay nearly every time.

When I used to work register at no less than ten other jobs, I could rip through a collection of 20 or 30 items in a minute or less (as long as barcodes or price tags were legible), and accept payment as fast as you could hand it to me. But self checkout prompts. Stops. Waits. Prompts. Stops. Fails. Back to square one. Prompt. Wait... Wait... Prompt. And so on.

Why is it so bad? Why is it worse than vending machines? So much worse. And restaraunts are trying to pull the same trick. Self service touchscreens leave you sitting at tables, unserved for half an hour, until you walk over to the bar and complain.

The future is hell.

More to the point, it’s proof of mental alacrity to find new challenges worth meeting.

To seek out cool things, even if they represent difficult accomplishments, and maintain enough drive to reach the finish line.

Imitating one successful chess strategy, and using it on only those who are unfamiliar with how to defend against it, is very different from being generally good at chess, and a handful of other complicated games as well.

Another way to look at it is to consider that it’s really embarassing to suffer an extremely high cost in lives lost, over a misconfigured Group Policy Object or Windows Registry Key or /etc/hosts file.

Something like that is akin to trusting cheap sheetrock/gypsum board and a couple of molly screws to support the weight of some priceless oil painting in a massive ornamental frame.

To see a priceless thing destroyed, but for want of a proper wall to mount it on is insult to injury.