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Nobody cares

grantslatton.com

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Re: Nobody cares

#631

Post by presentation »

swores wrote: post #494
csomar wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 avera…

One difference is that they’re concentrated in areas away from the public eye - if you enter Yoyogi park from the entrance nearest Yoyogi Koen station then before the hill starts go up the footpath to the right, you will find a homeless encampment with 20+ tents. It’s orderly but they are homeless.

Re: Nobody cares

#632

Post by nejsjsjsbsb »

diggan wrote: post #617
jaimebuelta wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.

> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble. At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.

YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.

Re: Nobody cares

#633

Post by presentation »

automatic6131 wrote: post #524
cokeandpepsi wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aren't homes generally extremely cheap in most of Japan?

They are cheap because they are in disrepair, in an area with no jobs (or only subsistence farming) and limited services. In central Tokyo, they are cheap compared to cities in most of the West but too expensive to keep up a good drinking habit without working and on limited out-of-work benefits.

No; they’re cheap because Japan builds homes more than other countries do.

Re: Nobody cares

#634

Post by sanj »

jl2718 wrote: post #427
azeirah wrote: post #210

> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care. I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such. I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into c…

I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seeme…

This is a really interesting insight. Drop me a line if you want to talk further.

Re: Nobody cares

#635

Post by presentation »

ks2048 wrote: post #115
liontwist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?

I thought Japan had a reputation for pointless bureaucracy (faxing useless paperwork around to get something approved, etc).

To be fair, while it’s antiquated and there is a lot of needless paperwork, the rules are always clear and if you follow them you more or less always get the result you’re looking for. And they almost never make you wait on hold or in line for inordinate amounts of time; generally when I go to city hall, or a doctors office, or call a telephone line, or go to the post office, or whatever it is, I generally don’t need to wait more than 2-3 minutes and usually I get service immediately.

Re: Nobody cares

#636

Post by arccy »

nonameiguess wrote: post #601
lloeki wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city they started turning off all streetlights at midnight outside of major driving lanes and active center areas. It's weird and somewhat unnerving at first but brilliant. I'd argue road-wise it is possibly even safer because headlights work so much better when it's pitch black by virtue of the human eye having so much dynamic range. Pedestrians can't miss cars as they're blasting light through the dark; cars…

I'm a regular outdoor runner and also an extreme morning person, so I'm often out running at like 3 AM, and it is absolutely not safer to be in complete darkness. Surfaces are not perfectly uniform and unobstructed and the ambient light from the atmosphere and surrounding city, even dead in the center of a major metro area, is nowhere near enough to see everything you might hit. I've tripped many times and even broke…

if you're out running at night, perhaps you should also be carrying some lights? both to help you see your environment and to help others see you.

Re: Nobody cares

#637

Post by presentation »

rgovostes wrote: post #499

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…

I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.

Re: Nobody cares

#638

Post by n00b_heal »

Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015. The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11. The world most of us grew up in is lost.

So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort? Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse. They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.

Re: Nobody cares

#639

Post by diggan »

nejsjsjsbsb wrote: post #632
diggan wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble. At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.

YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.

What range/years are you specifically referring to? It seemingly is as good as ever, and I'm 32 now. I'm guessing that would start being around 40s, when the general eye-sight starts to decline?

Re: Nobody cares

#640

Post by jmyeet »

diggan wrote: post #617
jaimebuelta wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? This seems to be totally oriented to cars. I find American cities incredibly dark by night. Walking around feels too dark and unpleasant.

> WTF? What about pedestrians? Are they walking in full darkness? During a normal night, you get used to the darkness surprisingly fast, and if there even a slight sliver of moonlight, your eyes will within seconds adjust and let you see things again without trouble. At least that's my experience growing up in the dark countryside in Sweden and seemingly retaining this as an adult, YMMV.

This is a car-centric ableist take.

Not everyone has excellent vision. In addition to those who are actually visually impaired, your eyesight simply gets worse as you get older even if you had perfect vision when you're young.

And even if you can adjust to the night, which is Moon and cloud-dependent anyway, that completely goes away every time a car goes past with its LED high beams.

LED lights have way more capacity to be directional. There's absolutely no reason why street lights can't mostly point down to light the street and sidewalks with minimal light pollution to any nearby houses.

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