741–750 of 1001 posts
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One thing you know about ad guys—they are really good at tricking people into spending money. I mean, it’s right there in their job description. For some reason their customers don’t seem think they’ll fall for it, I guess.
The average “smart person” thinks a trillion dollar industry can’t brainwash them.
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Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hosti…
Cheaper lighting costs across an entire city are a very good reason. "Ugly architecture" is subjective. A lot of architects care very much, but they follow the academic line and lack the imagination and empathy to understand why elements of that aesthetic are unpopular and impractical - a completely different problem, even if it causes related outcomes. Bugs are easy to write and hard to fix. MBA culture as a whole i…
I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else.
But this isn't the case.
The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted.
Architecture is no different.
Some buildings quite literally are better than others and we can scientifically study this [1]. We can recognize that all opinions are valid, but that some are better than others. We do this in daily life too, if you are in the ER and the trauma team comes and tells you their opinion on your condition, you will value that opinion over the opinion of the person outside waiting for a ride. Art, music, architecture - no different.
Tens of millions of people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral.
Why?
Religious reasons of course, but many visit simply to marvel at the wonderful architecture. Contrast that with Rocky City Church [2] here in Columbus where I live. A big, bland, gray "modern" building that as our standards have dropped to nothing (remember everything is subjective so nothing can be better than anything else) we have come to accept as the norm.
This is the Nobody Cares phase of not just architecture but society as well.
[1] https://annsussman.com
[2]https://rockcitychurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1.png> 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…
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Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.
Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques. Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
Your example is good, and the matching example of a bike lane is the opposite of what was shown in the article.
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I don't understand how they're safer, because locally they've installed a few and they're already dying, and dying by strobing on and off at about 1Hz, which makes it quite hard to drive through. They're so bright that this failure mode is like a disco strobe light. This failure is so severe that regardless of how it might be elsewhere, to me it seems like the people who decided to use these LED lights and continue t…
The problem is almost never the LEDs themselves, but the power supply. Sure, the actual LEDs might have a 50000 hour lifetime, but the crappy power supply they got from the lowest bidder and packaged with woefully inadequate thermal dissipation dies after a tiny fraction of that.
> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care. This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss. Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes…
In the US your insurance is literally worthless. Doctors make more money referring doctors to bullshit specialists then doing their job. I think you’re right about Swedish cheese. It does taste better.
Maybe catholic countries are doing a bit better. I sometimes get that feeling.
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Three led lights in my flat went within 3 months after I moved in. But some time ago I had an incandescent bulb that lived for years. With bulb it depends on how/how often you power cycle. A good way to extend its life is to not power cycle it and to underpower it. Dimming a bulb also saves electricity and easier on the eyes. With LED it is up to manufacturer. People say LEDs are cheaper but those leds are exactly th…
We essentially have a lifetime supply of LEDs because we label each one with the date and refund from Amazon when they don’t last the full warranty, which none of them do. People assumed that LEDs would last forever because the crystals essentially do, but the encasement and all of the heat issues you have to deal with for the electronics makes that pointless.
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…
Also, the Wikipedia link he points to has 2 references from the same research team the latest of which is over a decade old. If white LED lights were so awful you’d imagine at least somebody would have done a decent, fairly cheap paper to show the negative impacts in the last decade where the uptake of LED street lights has been so widespread.
You are demonstrating the problem very clearly btw: you assume people would have cared and that's why nothing was done.
Which is a puzzling thing to say. Because clearly, the people who care have no power.
> The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care. This one is the hardest for me to digest. But I’ve seen it first hand a couple of times (here in Sweden), so impossible for me to dismiss. Personally I think it’s an incentives problem, but one consisting of a lack of negative consequences. Once incompetence (and sometimes…
Healthcare is always going to have the most severe consequences when mistakes are made. Diagnosis are also hard and there are many risks with treatments. If you are going to demand punishment for mistakes consider punishing yourself next time you make a normal mistake at your job.