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Nobody cares

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Re: Nobody cares

#821

Post by cowfriend »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #616
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.

I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.

> Carry their own torch

You state this like it is a bad idea.

If you have a cell phone, you have a torch.

If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden.

When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flash my torch at potentially oncoming cars. Even if I'm at a lit crosswalk.

If you are walking in a place without cars, then the place probably doesn't have the infra to provide street lighting. You may want a torch, depends on the phase of the moon and your comfort level with dim lighting.

Re: Nobody cares

#822

Post by GJim »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #687
tass wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch. It’s easier than ever to carry one.

Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible…

Clearly you have lived your entire life in a city under streetlights.

Here, if you go the the pub at night as the streetlights are turned off at midnight, so you take a torch (your phone as a backup). Its perfectly commonplace. To suggest this is "anti-pedestrian" is a bit silly. Rather, it's anti-light pollution.

Re: Nobody cares

#825

Post by cowfriend »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #687
tass wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, even with streetlights, most people I see walking after dark carry a torch. It’s easier than ever to carry one.

Honest question: Do you mean that most pedestrians are actually using (not just carrying on their person) a torch while walking along lit streets? I have essentially never seen that where I live, except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better. I can't imagine street lighting in an urban/suburban area being so bad that that would be necessary. That's a terrible…

> except some joggers have lights attached to their clothing but that's just so others can see them better.

Yes, generally the purpose of the light is so others can see you.

My god, we spend all of our lives blasting lights into our eyes (some people call these lights "screens"), we've forgotten how to live without it!

Re: Nobody cares

#826

Post by marcosdumay »

rbetts wrote: post #689
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 glad that darkness is respected in some places. The need to live in constant light is, to me, unnerving. Light pollution, like noise pollution, creates a myopic dome of sensory oblivion, separating us from experiencing the sounds of nature, the splendor the night sky, the emotions of isolation. I think we'd be better off with a nightly reminder of the natural world and expansive universe beyond our city block.

People are afraid of the darkness.

I really wish that wasn't the case. But removing lights is an uphill battle powered by irrational arguments and doomed to failure even on the cases where it's clearly the best option.

Even dimming the lights is hard.

Re: Nobody cares

#827

Post by parpfish »

Earw0rm wrote: post #803
parpfish wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0]. In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and med…

"In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated." I'd [citation needed] on that, depending on the condition. In that for some conditions, successful diagnosis and treatment across a wide range of the population (not just the most educated, articulate, mentally with-it and compliant quartile) is going to depend on being able to get qualitative information from the patient, and i…

citation: i made it up based on my intuition because this is a thought experiment to illustrate a paradox.

also "bedside manner" is not just about conveying information. that would be a big part of successful treatment.

if you ask people about bedside manner is all going to be about personality and emotional sensitivity (where they gruff? did they make you feel bad? etc). somebody can be amazing at conveying accurate information but come across as a complete asshole, and those are the 'bad bedside manner' docs.

Re: Nobody cares

#828

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

bruce511 wrote: post #380
amatecha wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.

Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1]. They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view. They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit. If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.) If you're a customer, and you…

> They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.

Correction, "they" are not a hivemind with one goal, they are a collection of individuals with individual goals to maximize their own profit. If some marketing employee can get a bonus or promotion by showing ephemeral monetary gains at the expense of the long-term integrity of the product, they'll jump all over that.

Re: Nobody cares

#829

Post by stanleykm »

silexia wrote: post #818
helboi4 wrote: post #586

I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep.…

Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.

27% of gdp on doctors and hospitals, are you sure youre not missing a middleman or two in there?

Re: Nobody cares

#830

Post by Earw0rm »

deeg wrote: post #375
Tiktaalik wrote: post #369

> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done? > Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the…

I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.

That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.

Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.

It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.

(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)

I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.

Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.

To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.

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