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Nobody cares

grantslatton.com

191–200 of 1001 posts

Re: Nobody cares

#191
Whatever your locality is, there are existing opportunities to volunteer. Even if you don't particularly care about whatever that organization does, it's a great place to meet people who care, and they usually care about more than one thing. Maybe ask them about mutual aid.

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There is a very real danger in being too helpful in some organizations. I was too helpful and I got looks from my coworkers. People would call and ask for me specifically, which pissed them off.

In some organizations being too helpful is threatening to the boss. Are you trying to take their job?

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Another problem is the legacy mudball - it's not just for source code. The sidewalk fix that would cost less than $1000 in materials may wind up costing $100,000 after bubbling through all the required layers. The layers are there because of very real historical failings, but they create failures NOW. It's hard to build things now because of 'the sins of the father'.

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You can't fix bureaucracy all at once - it's not one thing, and it has many different causes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645391

Re: Nobody cares

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

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 lowl…

> 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.

We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.

Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.

Re: Nobody cares

#193

Has the author been tested for ADHD? Not that people with ADHD are the only ones that care. They just care really hard about all the little things, and have a really hard time switching it off for their own benefit.

> They just care really hard about all the little things

Maybe they just care and the world has become an endless distracting sea of little things that get in the way.

I mean, there's a lot of people trying to shift others attentions to little things, like ego.

Re: Nobody cares

#194

> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.

The idea that the DMV is a particularly awful experience does seem like something that would be especially susceptible to selection bias. Why would anyone ever announce "I went to the DMV today and it was fine"?

The service is fine. The lines and waits are horrendous and a DMV never seems to have the seating room for that. So you spend an hour before you even get in the door like you're waiting for a new iPhone or something.

Re: Nobody cares

#195
After all thay griping, this last bit really stuck out at me.

>We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.

Let me finish it for him.

>I just don't care (enough).

As for me, I'm looking forward to visiting Japan.

Re: Nobody cares

#196
post #107

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…

> There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.

The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.

Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?

Re: Nobody cares

#197
That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.

Re: Nobody cares

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you thought this through? Incessant requests for an unimportant matter is a sure way to have those in charge of said matters not care , not only about that particular request but requests in general or the desires of requesters.

If it’s unimportant then why is there a rule against it? Why did everyone agree to this rule when they bought a home there if it didn’t matter? Clearly it exists for a reason and if no one enforced it then it’s completely pointless

Really depends on the context. And the rule. Some rules are stupid, some situations have no rules but "expectations" ("Have it your way" is a famous slogan arguably perverted by reasoning for a few people). The rules could be made for powertripping reasons or safety reasons.

Re: Nobody cares

#199
Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.

Re: Nobody cares

#200
100% of the people around me at work care.

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?

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