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…
Nobody cares
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: Nobody cares
#552With the exception of a tiny number of people in exceptionally autonomous jobs (either working for small organizations or in high-powered roles) both government and corporate bureaucracies optimize everything they can for efficiency and replicability at a massive scale, which means that their processes are ironclad, most people have no ability to make decisions that matter, and caring about the results of those decisions cause them either to break protocols and be punished, or try and fail to create different outcomes under those constraints. Most people are unable to choose a job that does better than this and still support themselves. Thus, most people spend a significant chunk of their life, the part where they're supposed to be the most engaged and alert, under a condition of essentially learned helplessness
Increasingly, people's options are restricted in terms of what they can do outside of work too. A lack of third spaces means that most socialization takes place in your home, your friends' homes, or more realistically, an internet platform that is designed and controlled by the same bureaucratic drives. Digital platforms for things like payments, combined with monopolization of most sectors of the economy, has made commerce involve fewer meaningful choices and salient interactions for the "consumer". Increasing use of digital mediators for other interactions and increasing control exerted by the companies that run these mediators create fewer meaningful choices they can make there, too. People often cite the high degree of convenience of many everyday activities as a quality of life improvement that past humans couldn't imagine. This might be true, but the way it's implemented comes with a tradeoff at every turn with meaningful choices. We have in many contexts traded knowing things and deciding things for having a company do it for us, and I say "we" because this is by and large a tradeoff that most people didn't individually choose
A lot of people get this idea in their head that most people are stupid. But even people who aren't particularly educated or bright have a lot more vibrancy, a lot more ability to care when they have autonomy than even very educated and intelligent people do when they don't, and autonomy is a muscle that can grow with use and atrophy with disuse. The design of modern societies has drastically limited the ability of people to act autonomously, to choose most things that matter, in a ton of contexts that take up most of most people's time. Of course they don't care. But like most systemic issues, this author is so unwilling to consider systemic solutions that even after walking up to the brink of seeming to get that this isn't a problem you can just solve at the ground level by caring yourself, the conclusion is still just that people suck, most of them, but somehow individually. Like many people who think they're surrounded by idiots, the author's one example of someone who "cares" is a literal billionaire who is personally responsible for creating similar immiserating authoritarian conditions in workplaces he runs and for people who use the products of his businesses, a textbook defector who has claimed more autonomy for himself exactly by contributing to the systematic ways in which others are deprived of it. There is no way to solve systemic problems at an individual scale
Re: Nobody cares
#553People can’t have nice things, so they get grumpy, unhappy, and stressed. This creates a market for therapists and dietary supplements to offset stress.
And why care? The second law of thermodynamics will inevitably march on. Let’s dissolve in entropy now!
Re: Nobody cares
#554As 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 eve…
Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
Re: Nobody cares
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. The author was complaining about the use of cool white (5000k) LEDs instead of warm ones (2700k). Cool LEDs aren't any cheaper or more efficient than warm ones. So what tradeoffs are we talking about?
Maybe the city has a million of them sitting in a warehouse from some previous administration and they don't want to buy new ones.
Re: Nobody cares
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or in online spaces, the ever more common “maybe later.” No means no, maybe go jump in a lake of fire.
The iOS app “Calendars” recently starting showing a modal on launch trying to up-sell something - I don’t give a shit what it was - the “no” option was labeled “Thank you”. I had to click “Thank you” to dismiss it so that I could use the fucking app I pay a yearly subscription for. Or in this case: paid. The cheek of these people.
I'm actually chuckling at it -- just the sheer passive-aggressive childishness of its attempt at shaming users. I mean, what did they think writing that on the button would achieve? It has literally no effect except to infuriate people who were already going to opt out. Labelling it "I suck" would have been better.
Re: Nobody cares
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how trains work in Bangkok also, and Thai culture is very different from Japanese culture. This is just how trains work in that place. It’s not deeper than that.
Same in the UK. Isn’t waiting for others to get off before you get on just basic courtesy? There are definitely individuals who don’t do this, but most do. Same in lifts. Other than that, I completely agree that people in Japan seem to care and take their jobs more seriously than elsewhere. Though my Japanese friends would probably tell me that it’s not because they deeply care — really they’re just terrified of stan…
Re: Nobody cares
#558Another example of everything is amazing and nobody is happy. Maybe not everything. And certainly not nobody. But there's so much to be grateful for in most people's lives, if we all just calibrated our perspectives a little.
Everyone has a breaking point and negativity bias makes the awful stuff pile on quicker. Put it another way: Things are getting worse for more people. It may still be "amazing" for most people, but the ones next to the metaphorical "awful" line see it creeping. So it can feel very arrogant when someone a mile out says "why aren't you happy, it's great" as you see the line start to take your amazing things.
But I didn't expect the author to feel happiness, or be grateful for the state of things. However, we can pause and realize how much people still do (for a salary or otherwise) for each other, despite things getting worse for them.
A good bike road with one bad turn is still mostly a good bike road. Still took a lot of caring to build. There's only so much capacity to fix mistakes.
Re: Nobody cares
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Here in Baltimore the city seems to have purchased a huge batch of defective LEDs that are actually purple. It’s disturbing when you encounter one.
Re: Nobody cares
#560Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
It's always really interesting to see.