Nobody cares
(grantslatton.com)985 points by fzliu 3 days ago
985 points by fzliu 3 days ago
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 hostile infrastructure forever. This society is the product of the choices we've made collectively and if we made different choices we could have a much better (or much worse) society.
But street lights don't have to use harsh 3000 kelvin LEDs, there are warm light LEDs (2400-2700 kelvin). For example, these lights are widely available for home, yet most people just buy the 3000K LED bulbs because (IME) it doesn't occur to them that there is a strong aesthetic (and health) difference between these colors. i.e. They don't care.
It's probably getting better but the amber-colored LEDs used to be rather inefficient. I've also heard that white lighting can slightly improve reaction times of those in traffic and leads to slightly clearer captures for security cameras. I personally think these benefits do not outweigh how extremely ugly and unwelcoming they are, but "city officials just don't care" is not what led to the adoption of white LED street lighting at all.
> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons.
I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason.
Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.
It feels like zooming when you bicycle in those tight spaces at 9-12 km/h, which is a third of what you calld zooming. The point is that a collision at 12 km/h is pretty ok. The problem is that cyclists are always close to pedestrians so it feels unsafe even at slow speeds. The accident rate between cyclists and pedestrians are incredibly low so it is not really dangerous, but it feels like it.
I'm not inclined to be sympathetic to cyclists, but the bike-murdering signpost right there is all the proof I need that there are people who hate them more than I do and that at least one of those people works in city government. I winced. It might actually be a felony, that act of transportation engineering. I'd at least listen to the prosecutor's theory of the crime.
Yeah, my first reaction was "you should not move onto the sidewalk if you cant break and control the speed". Unless it is some kind of abandoned place where no one ever walks anyway.
I am cyclist by the way. It is just that looking at picture, it is not exactly super difficult turn, if you have those breaks.
Your rebuttal is dated. Suicide rates have been steadily declining in Japan and rising in the West to the point where suicides are actually less common in Japan than they are in the US currently. So perhaps it is a good example.
IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)
(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)
Related to the Japan thing, but one thing they don't do well is avoiding harsh white lights. It's far more common to find unpleasant fluorescent or LED lighting there than the US. The idea that warmer (or even dimmer) lights are preferable in most situations isn't a widespread opinion there apparently.
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 is fixated on quick extractive shareholder returns, not on celebrating supreme engineering quality. MBAs care very much too, but not about the things the author (and probably most of us) care about.
Some people do care but are simply not good at their jobs.
Even if you do care, people will assume you don't. Anyone who's done direct customer facing work or even just sold stuff online will know that people love to nitpick.
And so on.
The problem is narcissism vs empathy. Caring means trying to have some insight the experience of others. Narcissism is on a scale from blank unawareness of others to outright hostility, whether overt or covert.
There's a lot more of the latter than the former around at the moment, and corporate and economic values provide some conveniently expedient justifications for it.
The problem, essentially, is that you can't rage against the dying of the light all by yourself. If you're an architect and badly want to build great housing your goals are frustrated every step of the way. By people who don't care enough to do all the little things that are necessary to make a building 5% better in 20 subtle ways. You can only fight indifference for so long before you're empty.
What is the point of lighting being cheap if it produces a city where people don't want to live? Good lighting isn't unaffordable either. Cities with good lighting actually exist! And yet people will insist shitty lighting is somehow necessary. It isn't.
> "Ugly architecture" is subjective.
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.pngEh, I think as always is still just comes down to resource contention right at the root of the issues. We still all monk e, some things will never change.
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.
The funny thing is, in my neck of Seattle (the city this post is complaining about), I've seen some of the harsh white LEDs that went in switched over to a warmer color. I remember being quite shocked when I pulled into a city-owned parking lot one night and realized that all of the lights around were all now a warmer color instead of the harsh white. The lights in my neighborhood also seem to have been switched over at some point. I suppose they're the tunable LEDs, but clearly someone here does care.
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 can't miss bikes because even passive reflectors are blaring in the surrounding darkness; even pedestrians end up being more visible because of the higher contrast, cast shadows, and movement that conspire to make them plainly pop out like cardboard props or Doom 3 flashlight jumpscares.
And when you go out of the dark zone into a major axis that's bathed in light that feels warm and safe it's like everything is suddenly muted and flattened as if reality went through a low contrast sepia-tinted desaturation filter. You feel like you see better but everything is muddled together in the sameness of uniform lighting.
The experience is highly cognitively dissonant and counterintuitive.
OK but blinding blue LEDs are most common substitutes, because it's the lazy default, and because people do not care. That's the point of the article.
Blue-white LEDs have become the replacement for High Pressure Sodium [HPS] traffic lights because that's what the LED light companies have to sell. In the early years of the transition to LED streetlights they had to sell blue-white LED streetlights because warmer LEDs were not competitive with HPS on the basis of lumens-per-watt.
Most of the people who understood the advantages of blue-free amber HPS light over white metal halide lights retired, and this little tidbit of information didn't get passed to the next generation of city employees.
> and because people do not care.
People care, but they don't know why they hate the blue-white LED replacement lights. I've complained to the city about their new lights, but have not gotten any responses about why they haven't deployed LED lights with a safe spectrum of color.
This comment about unsafe blue-white headlights got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42444111
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.
Nitpick: "are actually purple" makes it sound like they came out of the factory purple, but they're actually changing from white to purple over time as the phosphor coating fails.
It happened in NC, too: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/10/duke-universit...
The city employee who bought them is probably a massive Ravens fan...
Not true, they're just defective and degraded quickly, resulting in the odd color.
Agree, but it's more expensive and less energy efficient[1]. Personally, that seems worth it to me [EDIT: "it" being using slightly less efficient lights that are more comfortable for people], but thats a difference in values not in how much I "care" about the problem...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-....
> that seems worth it to me
How much more energy efficient is it? If it's a tiny efficiency gain vs the negative effects of blue heavy white light then I would suggest it's a bad tradeoff. Some studies have suggested that blue light doesn't affect sleep [1] but the psychological effects of cold vs warm light has been used by lighting designers for decades. Cold light is less comfortable and discourages hanging around, the positive spin is "energizing", it's often used in supermarkets and budget stores that value faster browsing, and impulsive decisions under a greater feeling of urgency. Warm light has a relaxing effect and is used, for example, in luxury stores and restaurants where people are intended to take their time. [2] For outdoor areas where people are intended to enjoy relaxing after dark activities warmer light would be far superior an experience than colder light.
1. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/blue-light-may-not... 2. https://www.tcpi.com/how-lights-impacts-psychology-mood-in-r...
sure - for your house. For lights all over the city that will be lasting years?
In my town, when they replaced the old mercury arc and high pressure sodium lights, they picked a pleasing neutral white for the side streets that's far better than the bluish-white mercury arcs they replaced, while using 40 watts each instead of 175. Win-win in my book.
The main streets have a different LED with a slight yellow cast, but not the ugly orange of high pressure sodium. Yes, we can have nice LED street lighting.
Use a CD disk - really - it disperses light similarly to a dispersive prism. You can then see and estimate the amount of red, blue and green in a light. It works very well if you just want to check blue light sources at night. And you can even make a DIY spectrometer with it! https://youtu.be/p3MzQ1OF3lk
it is not exactly a huge secret that SDOT often would rather do weird compromises on a bike lane than inconvenience cars slightly. The NACTO guides don't really have anything on grades into turns, and the AASHTO and FHWA are notoriously not bike friendly.
This particular lane was done in 2018. https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...
You can actually see the diagram here: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDOT/Maintenan...
The entire reason it goes up onto the multi-use-trail to connect to Alki Trail, is because that leaves room for a right turn lane; whereas, if Seattle narrowed the two lanes to nine feet, which is a perfectly fine width on an urban street according to AASHTO, then you could have an actual protected bike lane all the way through the intersection without any sort of shallow curve.
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 to advocate for them really don't care about people.
anedcote but i've been using leds for 8 years+ now and there's big variance in such behavior between manufacturers.
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 the ones you have to keep buying. And good LED prices can go pretty high compared to bulbs.
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.
And part of the reason for that is compatibility with existing light fixtures using legacy sockets designed 150 years ago at the dawn of electrification for incandescent bulbs, where the part dissipating the most heat was the light emitting element itself, and not whatever lays between it and the mains power source. If the customer doesn't want to pay for a slightly more expensive LED lightbulb, they sure as hell won't pay for a whole new fixture specifically designed around LED technology that will last forever.
This is anecdata, but I haven't replaced a single LED bulb since I bought the current set ~7 years ago, and it's nothing fancy, just basic IKEA stuff.
The ones in the article clearly go against the best principles at https://www.savingourstars.org/ though.
> But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
He didn't say everyone was stupid. He said that no body cares. There is a very big difference between the two.
I tend to agree with him. Yes we can find examples, most commonly when it comes to safety standards, where there are systems in place that prevent the really bad stuff from happening. But why do those systems and checks need to be put into place? Because a lot of people simply do not care and would cut corners if their jobs didn't depend on them following the standards.
The problem with broad sweeping generalizations is that they never apply to all individual cases. It doesn't change the fact that the broad generalization is, well, broadly and generally true. Most people don't care about almost anything other than getting home to their families or pets. Most people will even happily admit that. It's not even that they're lazy necessarily (though a few people are). It's that they are working in what is, to them, "just a job / pay cheque." That's not even always a problem. It's just a fact of life that is as true as taxes and death. It's worth acknowledging because it is something that needs to be accounted for after identifying or choosing your fault tolerances. The systems and standards that you cite are the result of acknowledging this fact of reality.
LEDs last longer, but cities took the savings to add even more blue light, so the lifetime doesn’t matter.
The light pollution has absolutely increased because of the amount of LEDs that have been installed. This is well documented.
Also, the sodium line spectrum is easy to filter out for astronomy, broad spectrum blue LEDs add light pollution there.
Go look into the design standards used in The Netherlands.
https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/chap03.cfm gives a decent overview of some of those things. They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not.
> They are much better for end users because someone over there cared. Whomever designed the ones in the article clearly does not
This is kind of my point, at a very general level the statement "$thing follows design standards" may or may not mean that $thing is actually better for users.
> this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research
It was a rant not a thesis. I get frustrated by a lot of what he talks about too and many of them could be made better and without much cost. It might even be a call to action, shine a light on the nonsense so people do better next time (hopeful thought).
you guys are smarter than that.
in our civilization people observe and tell.
all that research is wonderful and helpful but how many percent of people can do that, can follow that, know where to find it, have an environment that enables them to get observations to the responsible people and how many of those have the trust to do that?
it doesn't matter how smart you are, any colony dies without enough people that fall into above "description".
and those people don't have to fall into that description, but smarter people rather figure out ......
We are starting to see some in my city in the US and while that is exciting and appreciated, many of them are terrible to ride on. There is one near my house that is so full of lane changes and curves, you really can do much more than 7mpg (walking speed). For some reason, they saw fit to make the bike lane weave in and out of the parallel parking? It's so bizarre and awkward that I'd rather just ride with the traffic in the street like we used to since that invokes less anxiety.
The bike ramp example was insane to me. OF COURSE it's not built so cyclists can zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour without slowing down. That's how you turn a pedestrian into paste.
Really, you should be dismounting and walking your bike onto the sidewalk, but if you're going to ride your bike up that ramp, absolutely do not do it so quickly that you risk crashing.
One thing I want to point out is that white light has worse effect on light pollution than warmer light, at least as far as astronomy goes. If you ever go to a stargazing party you'll notice everyone uses red flashlights if they need to see anything in the dark because it doesn't drown out the starlight.
That's because the warmer the light, the less it is affected by Rayleigh scattering. In other words, shorter wavelength (i.e., bluer) light scatters more. This is the same reason that the sky is blue.
Animals are also more sensitive/more attracted to bluer light. These harsh white LED street lamps are a death sentence for moth species.
I would even argue that the current design of the bike line is better than the one suggested by the author.
It forces the biker to slow down and reduces the collision risks with others in the line.
It is selfish to think only about the biker coming from the hill. The biker that thinks it is okay to drive 20mph in that situation.
We put sharp turns at the end of roads.
If you have a high-speed road merging into a slow one without some indication that it's ending and a sharp turn at the end, you have a road that kills people.
By not merging the cycling and walkway, sure. That would be a better design.
But presumably real world limitations forced them to merge the two at this point, and forcing cyclists to slow before the merge is of obvious benefit to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Not to mention that road construction crews can't fabricate an infinite array of curbs and affordances as a simple practical limitation.
As others have cited, the author seems to have an "everything is an easy fix" perspective to the world, at least when viewed as their own requirements and needs being the only consideration. In reality, loads of people care immensely about all the things that they think are easy fixes, but the fixes aren't nearly as easy as they think. Like, anyone who has ever listened to a user tell them how their app could be made much better knows this, when all of their suggestions would diminish usability for almost every other user.
Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
Fair enough.
On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.
…we do put stop lights at pedestrian crossings on high-speed streets. They look like this: http://www.pedbikesafe.org/PEDSAFE/cm_images/PedHyb1.png
This post is massive copium.
If you can't take a look around the U.S. and see that cynicism and apathy are running wild here, then you are either deceiving yourself or you live in an area that hasn't experienced collapse acceleration yet.
There are also LED lights that are more pleasant to look at and don't blind you.
OP's point stands: nobody cares. Nobody even thought about it for a minute. Everything are items in a spreadsheet.
Took me less than a minute to ask a lady in the lights store I visited two months ago to sell me softer, more yellow, LED lights. I still save a ton of electricity but my lights are not blinding me. This awful bright-blue-ish white light is bad for our brains btw, but that's a much bigger topic that I will not engage in.
Thanks for this. My parent's neighborhood has these purple lights and they are terrible. I never cared enough to do even the slightest bit of to understand why this problem is the way it is, until your comment.
LEDs produce trash light and I'm certain it'll eventually be linked to serious damage to human eyesight. Strobing alone is a nightmare, not to mention color temp like prison yard blue in street lights and car headlights.
> Don’t take anything here too seriously.
I’m not trying to sound snarky at all but I really do think you should reread the first paragraph of the article.
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.
No, I can't imagine that because again, nobody cares.
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.
I live in the Netherlands, in the burbs, and have to cycle a lot. That picture of a bike ramp... I can feel it. Whatever that document you googled says, it's wrong, if it justifies building ramps like that. That ramp is bad. There's no two ways about it.
But, responding to this particular example is missing the point of the article. Let me, for a moment, agree with you, and say that the ramp is within acceptable parameters: still, the author complains about a more general phenomenon, a lot of aspects of this phenomenon are very relatable. And it doesn't have to manifest itself uniformly and similarly everywhere in every detail.
For example, suburban houses in the Netherlands really show people care about the neighborhood. The want things to be nice. Windowsills are always decorated, have some art displayed in the windows, just for the passerby to enjoy. People mostly care to pick up after their dogs and to generally not litter. People even invest into community playgrounds, community garden patches etc. Life is good, at least in this respect.
But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light. It's a convention of sorts, that people understand without saying anything out loud. Do the absolute minimum, waste a lot of time doing nothing of value, don't rock the boat. And it is, as the author says, demoralizing. It makes my blood boil when defects discovered in our product, and instead of being fixed they get documented in a bottomless pit of our multi-thousands pages PDF manual, and the product is shipped regardless. A lot of these defects resulted not from honest mistakes, but from a desire to do as little work as possible, and to do only the "pleasant" part of the work: programmers prefer writing new code to fixing existing code. Testing is for wimps. Adding more stuff without fixing existing problems results in simply having more problems.
* * *
Now, how to make people care?--I don't know. I know of some things that worked, but they have bad side-effects (religion works, but sometimes it detracts into killing a lot of people, communism works, as in kibbutzim, but then it loses momentum, and is very prone to be exploited by external forces also, doesn't work on a large scale.)
>But, when I go to work, things change. Not only people around me don't care, they very much want everyone to not care, because that would show them in a bad light.
In your country this starts way back in middle school, where this phenomenon is worse than I've seen in any other place. It would be incredibly surprising if this suddenly changed in the workplace when it's all people have ever known.
As long as the culture doesn't change at that age, there's no hope for changing it later in life.
https://blogs.transparent.com/dutch/untranslatable-dutch-wor...
There's a large amount of peer pressure to idolize scraping by, and against actually doing your best and putting in effort. While this exists in certain other places too (see classic "jock vs nerd" Hollywood stereotypes), nowhere is it as widespread. Moreso than the intensity - which isn't particularly severe, in the sense that e.g. serious bullying isn't more common than in compare countries - it's how institutional it is that sets it apart, even among a lot of kids who have the potential to do very well and go places if they'd put in a little effort.
Of course YMMV and these things have a large degree of local variance, but there's a reason the linked term exists as a cultural phenemonon there.
I think spending a week in Japan you would see what the author is talking about, they care, we (USA) dont.
Everyone defends stupid decisions because they comply with existing standards and no curb is above the law. That doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design, and ain't nobody got the time to file an exemption appeal.
As 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 even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
This is the answer. It's not just government bureaucracy, large corporations are intentionally built to diffuse responsibility in order to allow the corporation to do things any single person would find abhorrent. This means that if you see something you want to fix, you most likely can't, because nobody is really fully responsible for that thing or can directly do anything about it.
So you just hit your head against wall after wall after wall until you burn out, and that's how you learn to just do your job instead.
An organisation arizes around people. The organisation that arises with the traits you describe, one that allows organizational behavior that non of the members would individually allow, but also behavior that has a competitive advantage towards other organizations that lack this behavior, will thrive. They are a cancer that grow around us instead of within is.
The fact that people pursue this sort of thing is extremely strange to me. They’ll admonish people under them for not caring while creating and perpetuating a system that requires it.
if you care and you end up in a position where you don't have the ability to act on that feeling, you WILL burnout and get cynical and go into not-caring preservation mode.
I used to work at a big tech co that made a popular consumer app. New hires were always excited because not only was it a pretty cushy job, they got to work on a product that they loved. They cared until the bureaucracy and product decision making processes ground that enthusiasm into dust. Everybody ended up jaded.
I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo.
There has been a global trend to decommission psychiatric hospitals. Japan didn’t follow suit, and today has 10x the beds per capita compared to the US.
This is balanced by the fact that it’s much harder to commit someone against their will in the US.
https://www.borgenmagazine.com/japans-homeless-population/#:....
> I asked myself the same question when I saw exactly 1 homeless person in all of Tokyo
Homelessness in Tokyo looks different than homelessness in a major US city. Often enough, it means freeters sleeping overnight in manga cafés.
I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
That must instill the sense that environments that are shared collectively are everyone's responsibility. When janitors clean up after us, it instills the sense that we can do what we want and it's the problem of some lowly person to deal with it.
> I hear that in Japanese schools, the kids do most of the cleaning, like sweeping, cleaning the boards, taking out trash, and cleaning windows. Janitors mostly do building maintenance or major jobs.
We did this in Catholic grade school. Every week the assignments would rotate. The cleaning involved sweeping the class floor, washing the chalk board, beating the erasers of chalk dust, and pulling the trash bag from the can. The janitor took care of the rest like the hallways, offices and so on.
Would never happen in a NYC public school as the kids would be doing a union job.
> kids do most of the cleaning
We have that in my country, and it doesn't really affect the society overall: the streets are full of trash and it's considered normal to throw away cigarette butts, candy wrappers, etc. after you're done with them. From reading local internet forums, you get the idea that it's always the government fault that trash does not get picked up in time, it's never our own fault.
There were many homeless people on the streets of Tokyo every time I went in the 2000s, building little cardboard homes every night and taking them down every morning.
If you mean the bureaucracy - every one of my coworkers there grumbled about dealing with government morass the same way we complain about the DMV here.
> 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 having a rough time.
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.
It's a surface level joke but if I remember there were reasons for it, both culturally and regulatory, something about Hankos? I think I read about it on a post here talking about them finally changing some of those requirements.
Japan has processes for everything, and people care about following the process properly, and are empowered to follow the process properly (indeed that's the only thing they're empowered to do).
High trust and good equilibria might be part of it as well. If your superior cares and does things properly then you can care and do things properly and you'll get proper results. If your superior is burnt out and doing the minimum, but you care and want to do things properly, you'll get burnt out, and a few years down the line you'll be that superior doing the minimum.
>Why doesn’t Japan have this problem?
Japan has some of these problems. For example: they do not care about homeless people. In Japan, I saw a homeless person sleeping between two car lanes, amongst some bushes. Literally 50cm of space separating cars, and he was lying there with his possessions.
aren't homes generally extremely cheap in most of Japan?
The OP is kind of wrong, because Japan has a different set of issues that Nobody Cares about that the OP hasn't understood Japan enough in Japan to immediately consider. Ironically, one could say that the OP failed to spend 1% longer thinking about this part of their claim to imagine that a different society might perhaps have different "nobody cares" that are not immediately visible to them, before making it.
Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japan)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
I can well imagine that the OP would point out to the pervasive unproductive work culture, or unnecessarily exploitative work culture, and wonder why nobody cares about it.
Note that the dynamic of work culture impacting domestic life is to such an extent that the government is recently trialing arguably drastic measures: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/asia/tokyo-government-4-d...
> Japan is infamous for a certain kind of work culture that demands being in the office even when it's lot necessarily productive to do so; so onerous that it harms domestic life, among others.
I think that's the opposite. They care too much. That collective school cleanup example above has a similar extreme. If you literally live to work, you'll forget about caring for yourself and collapse.
Tokyo Government just introduced a 4 day work week for its workers. You'd be surprised how much friction there has been to this, by the workers.
I feel like the article is mostly focused on environments around us, so it makes sense to focus on Japan in this context. He’s not saying it’s an entirely flawless country
Probably because workers' protections are very strong in Jaan and it's close to impossible to fire people.
- You cannot fire your staff (easily) - Rather than replace staff, you need to train them - You also really want to engender a sense of loyalty, because anyone who is checked-out is dead weight you need to carry
I think the legal protections for employment are upstream of the working culture. Maybe it's a chicken and egg problem. But in terms of policy you could test this, and it makes sense the culture is just in alignment with the incentive structure. America has an "I've got mine" approach, which is efficient and good for businesses, but... Employees (correctly) know they are replaceable and have a strictly profit/loss relationship with companies they work for. In that framework the risk/reward for a worker to be doing the minimum they need to earn their pay-check is pretty favourable.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Japan has plenty of other problems that people in the developed west don't, but of course the grass is always greener on the other side.
- Culture that prioritizes collective good over individual need
- Functioning government
- Competency, skilled engineers
With:
- A declining population
- Rural collapse
- Stagnating economy
- Shut in problem for old people
Like most cultures, Japan gets some stuff right and some stuff wrong. It's not perfect. Certainly not to say US culture couldn't improve by adopting some aspects.
I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidity, etc.
Of course, I don't know the actual situation, but this seems more likely to me than a doctor who doesn't care about their patient's health enough to spend 10 seconds diagnosing them. At the very least, I expect they're investing enough effort in their job enough to avoid transparent malpractice.
I’ve personally been incorrectly diagnosed with a life altering condition. When it became more and more clear that the diagnosis was wrong the doctor just doubled down. When I said I thought he was wrong and refused to see him he sent a colleague after me to another hospital to try to persuade the medical staff there of the misdiagnosis. That thankfully failed, but the whole process very much left me with the impression that the only thing that mattered to him and his colleague was to be “right”. My health was completely irrelevant to them. And nobody put them in their place.
Sure, I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor. But there comes a point when you have to conclude that something is seriously wrong. My feeling is that it’s a complete lack of consequences that is the core problem. Nobody is ever “forced” to admit they were wrong. Some people can’t handle that, start believing they are always right.
(This was in Sweden and malpractice is a bit different here.)
Living outside NYC, I’m reminded of both extremes with every visit to the city.
Government is definitely the worst here. Zero accountability means that after a while working there, even the most motivated best worker will have his desire to work destroyed by watching less competent people do nothing and move ahead. Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job. It grows and grows and drains more resources, just like cancer does.
> Then government hired more people to keep doing the same job.
Do they? The example given in the article is the DMV, and the only problem I've ever had at a DMV was long wait times caused by too FEW employees.
Yes, government can be overly bureaucratic, but I think people come up with a lot of weird narratives about it that go well beyond the actual inefficiencies at play.
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 designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...