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Accountability sinks

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Re: Accountability sinks

#301

Post by larodi »

immibis wrote: post #140
formerly_proven wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> german public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality You have something mixed up there.

It's definitely easy to use. You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train. No security checks like an airport. No multi step check in. Just be there and get on. In many cases your ticket won't even be checked, and when it is it's while you're seated while the train is moving. Getting a ticket is no problem: the ticket machines are multilingual, and you type i…

interestingly you forget to mention something that was not there 20 years ago, when these trains still be running ok. all that was not so well connected with all apps, you can have a Lime calculated in your route perhaps today, which was not there. and this all IS connected with DE system of public transport, which on its own, no matter the technical underlying, is superb. and trains are lot cleaner than many other places, even those regularly servicing Berlin,

Re: Accountability sinks

#302

Post by f1shy »

bmicraft wrote: post #260
f1shy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes sir. A friend of mine, the girlfriend passed out, being pregnant. In the moment of total stress, we called 112, and said “passed away“ instead of „passed out“. The guy on the other side “well, if she is dead, why are you calling?!” Very rude. He went on to explain, it was an error, an instead of just dispatch an ambulance, had to hear a 10 minute lesson in english (from a german) after which the ambulance was dis…

> When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch” That part seems really hard to believe for me. The only time you should get charged at all is for prank calling. In fact, if you call and tell them and decide you don't need EMS after all they will in fact come anyways because they need to check on every call. And you will not get charged for that…

Believe me, it was charged. I could not believe until I saw the papers. This is noones land.

Re: Accountability sinks

#303

Post by f1shy »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #280
f1shy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please look my comment to the parent comment. If you do find a german that speaks understandable english (that you can differentiate “think” and “sink” or “g” and “she” or “zoo” and “sue” then may be the arrogant crap that got my friend. For that they receive years of “Ausbildung”…

Jaa. Vell. Trai zamm Turkish or Arabic zen? What THE FUCK is it with the expectation that everybody has to understand and speak in-glitch? Employ a local guide. Too expensive? Bad luck. Entitled little .....

Well... who won and who lost the war?

Re: Accountability sinks

#304

Post by methods21 »

This hit home and very recent experiences. Was even in my little notebook of ideas to write about.... seems its already been done. Nice job... and you can almost paint all corps. with this brush, esp. decisions made by upper management that is incentivized on financial metrics that can be gamed....

Re: Accountability sinks

#305

Post by berniedurfee »

I think this is related to the concept of “aligned incentives” in a way.

The chain breaks when incentives aren’t aligned and there’s a cascade of crap that roles downhill that seem like bad decisions. When, in fact, as the article points out, the decision made didn’t take knock on effects into consideration.

I’ve learned that seemingly poor or even terrible decisions almost always make sense in the context of when and where the decision was made.

Re: Accountability sinks

#306

Post by [deleted] »

maccard wrote: post #296
switch007 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly the line and slander they would use when they bring in new legislation to stop "abuse" of the system. You've proven my point

And ditto - you came to my comment to pick a fight with something a decent number of people will agree with me on. You didn’t have to, but you decided this was a hill to fight on. My experience in dealing with the public has been that there are a very small number of people who will frequently push the boundaries of what the system is designed for, will scream bloody murder when things don’t go as they want, and will…

[deleted]

Re: Accountability sinks

#307

Post by switch007 »

maccard wrote: post #296
switch007 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly the line and slander they would use when they bring in new legislation to stop "abuse" of the system. You've proven my point

And ditto - you came to my comment to pick a fight with something a decent number of people will agree with me on. You didn’t have to, but you decided this was a hill to fight on. My experience in dealing with the public has been that there are a very small number of people who will frequently push the boundaries of what the system is designed for, will scream bloody murder when things don’t go as they want, and will…

It was you originally who came to pick a fight, not me.

Re: Accountability sinks

#308

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

f1shy wrote: post #303
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jaa. Vell. Trai zamm Turkish or Arabic zen? What THE FUCK is it with the expectation that everybody has to understand and speak in-glitch? Employ a local guide. Too expensive? Bad luck. Entitled little .....

Well... who won and who lost the war?

Voult juh äsk zät in China, tu?

Re: Accountability sinks

#309

Post by simonask »

jhrmnn wrote: post #149
eloisius wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to trac…

> The person who answered couldn’t speak English. It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.

In Europe in 2024, it is totally unreasonable to expect every visitor to speak the local language at a high enough level. Yes, your language is big and important, but we can't all learn all of English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, which are the 5 biggest - alongside our native language.

The absolute arrogance of particularly French and German speakers is staggering. All of us from smaller countries and language spheres speak at least 2-3 languages, often more at a basic level, but they scoff at anyone who visits that didn't happen to learn theirs. Contrast this with Spanish and Italian speakers, where my experience is that they are often not great at English, but very much willing to try. To add, I've also never met an American who wasn't willing to do their best to help out.

When somebody is asking for help in a language you don't understand, your obligation as a human being is to do your best, if nothing else to help them find someone who does understand one of the likely several languages you have in common. Not everyone who speaks English at you thinks less of you because you aren't good at it, and everybody is just doing their best.

Re: Accountability sinks

#310

Post by gregmac »

yetihehe wrote: post #110
gregmac wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched ISPs, and the new one has one of the most obnoxious phone processes I've ever interacted with. I go through the usual hoops: press 1 for English, "we detected an account linked to the number you're calling from, is that that you're calling about?" ... Press 1 for support, press 1 for Internet, "no outages detected in your area. Most problems can be solved by rebooting your modem. Press 1 if you want t…

> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting) I had problems solved several times by rebooting modem. One time it was "reboot modem and access point in proper order", me naively rebooting them both at the same time didn't help, only phone support solved this problem. > Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Hmm, I might be desensitivised f…

> Hmm, I might be desensitivised from too much programming in erlang. It's implied that your program will encounter bugs or strange data and parts WILL be restarted, better account for that and plan on what to do on restart of each small part at the start of writing your program.

That's different from having software that can get into an unknown broken state, where physically power cycling it is the only fix.

It's better to crash and ensure there's a process that automatically restarts. Or use a watchdog process. Just breaking, to the point companies build external systems to reboot them, is just bad.

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