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Nobody cares

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Re: Nobody cares

#491

Post by Animats »

spc476 wrote: post #310
dgfitz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My spouse bought us kindles recently, and it popped in my head today that at some point e-books are going to have ads interspersed…

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

That was so unpopular that it died out.

Paper magazines still have "blow ins", though - advertising cards that are injected into the magazine with compressed air after printing. They're not bound in. They fall out.

Re: Nobody cares

#492

Post by challenger-derp »

disambiguation wrote: post #109

Everyone cares, but: - everyone has a different idea of what that means. - many problems can't be solved by one person. - caring has an opportunity cost. - caring introduces liability. - we live in a society. Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.

This list is quite well-put.

Also, for a large number of roles, people are judged by the net value that they've contributed (net of mistakes). In a pretty large subset of such roles, it's usually the case that small-ish mistakes result in small-ish penalties, or sizeable penalties that aren't apparent immediately – so in the short-term, the here and now, folks in these roles are incentivized to focus on the big picture, and to ignore what they might feel could cause small-ish mistakes.

Consider a person involved with the modification of city street infrastructure to better cater for bikes. It's pretty good by most people's standards to have made progress by building reasonably use-able bike pathways, stands, etc. in say, a 4 km radius in a year. If it just so happens that like three out of, say, sixty of such constructs are problematic (mistakes) but they aren't big-ish problems, then on the whole, this person would be, quite justly, credited for having contributed to at least fifty seven functioning constructs; all in all, pretty good work despite three problematic constructs.

Of course, not all types of work is like that. That is, not all work are that forgiving in the sense that most earnest mistakes turn out to be small ones relative to the overall value produced. E.g., trading: algorithmic or otherwise.

Now, just a note in closing, the distribution of the price of mistakes in a given role is a different matter, can be an art in that it involves qualitative judgement, may be largely sensitive to context, and may be quite opinionated depending on who is reached for comment.

Re: Nobody cares

#493

Post by 000ooo000 »

dasil003 wrote: post #266
000ooo000 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic CEO. "How can you, the powerless IC, fix an organisational problem? No, I mean without me having to do anything meaningful or risky"

This is such a low effort learned-helplessness response. Look, there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, I'm not here to defend them, but one thing you have to understand is that CEO action is an extremely blunt instrument. Of all the problems in an org, the vast majority can not be directly solved by the CEO, they can just sort of broadly steer the culture in the right direction, but folks down the chain need to solve probl…

>a blanket statement pointing at CEOs en masse as the root of all problems

That's not what I said. Must've struck a nerve.. CEO by chance?

Re: Nobody cares

#494

Post by swores »

csomar wrote: post #423
syncsynchalt wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s This is misleading. Japan has the lowest homelessness rate in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan They clearly had a problem and fixed it. I was in Japan a few years ago and I saw one homeless (I assumed?) person during my whole trip. He didn't look too bad (like the ones in the US) but he was probably…

Neither of you are wrong. As your link says, they have one of the lowest rates of homelessness in the world, but it also says that their low rate is roughly 1 in 34,000 people. There are 14 million people in Tokyo (city, or 41M in Tokyo greater area), so for 14M residents you would expect roughly 400 homeless people if the ratio is exactly the same as national average (and typically, big cities have higher than average). So simultaneously there are many homeless people still even if you only saw one of them, it's just a smaller % than in most countries.

Ultimately the stats are what matters more than how many people any one anecdote happened to see, and they show that Japan should be applauded for doing well but also acknowledging that sadly they haven't completely solved the problem and too many people there, as everywhere, are still homeless.

Re: Nobody cares

#495

Post by tdeck »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #372
cogman10 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With: - A declining population - Rural collapse - Stagnating economy - Shut in problem for old people Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.

Your first three problems also apply to Italy. Why don't we read as much about it? I find it bizarre. (South) Korea, the same. Non-Asians just love to focus on the extreme positive and negative aspects of modern Japanese society; it is weird.

It is weird. I think it's kind of a leftover from the apex of the Japanese economy and all those Japanese business management books. We had a whole generation of managers putting samurai swords on their walls and talking about "open kimono" leadership and people got famous essentially promoting the idea that Japan is like nowhere else and fetishizing the country. So it kind of entered the zeitgeist.

There was never a corresponding image of Italy and almost nobody in the US was talking about South Korean society at all 15 years ago.

Re: Nobody cares

#496

Post by Qwertious »

teslabox wrote: post #462
_lyxd wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt. Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over whit…

Blue light is safer for cars - it gives slightly faster reaction times, and lower the chance of drivers falling asleep.

The problem is that for pedestrians, the reaction-time is irrelevant, they're butt-ugly, and plenty of people go on night walks because they can't sleep but want to.

Half of this article is basically about cities being overly car-centric.

Re: Nobody cares

#497

Post by vv_ »

My experience is that such indifference comes with seniority. Unfortunately most people tend to try and change things outside of their control, ignoring what they can change and quickly burn out. With that said:

> It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

This really hits home as it's happened to me several times. Eventually, you stop caring as well and just cruise through. On the flip side, stress has gone down by quite a bit :)

Re: Nobody cares

#498

Post by pointedAt »

tqi wrote: post #425

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 de…

you guys are smarter than that.

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 ......

Re: Nobody cares

#499

Post by rgovostes »

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.

Re: Nobody cares

#500

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ClaraForm wrote: post #245
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 t…

I think you’re absolutely right. I was using it in the more abused term, but I actually subscribe to the original intent of it. My wife’s organization would almost certainly be better off if they embraced this mentality even slightly more. Maybe most people would, for that matter.

But yeah, the movement did seem to become the primary goal, and breaking things seemed less about stress-testing and freeing from restrictions, and more like an inconvenience on the path of progress, whatever that might mean. It seemed like a lot of us went from being experimental and nimble to clumsy and incoherent at some point.

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