I understand why this post would get flagged but I love the question, it never came to my mind how logical it would be for someone to clone their beloved pet.
Tipping culture is properly weird to me as an European, I probably tip much more than the average European and I still find these prompts obnoxious, and they're popping everywhere in Barcelona. No thank you, that's a part of the U.S. culture I certainly don't want to see imported over here.
If it wasn't for the ICE situation there probably wouldn't even be any backlash. It is getting people to finally open their eyes a little bit and see how this post patriot act world we've built for ourselves actually operates.
The add is super cute, except for 1 second https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheUzrXsKrY&t=15s (probably from 14.5 to 15.5, the one home part is fine for me, but the neighborhood is scary). That second is out of an evil sci-fi film.
It is too-obviously intentionally designed to be “kinda cute.” It is clear to anybody who watched it that the people making the ad knew they needed a sort of euphemistic (or whatever) way of pitching their surveillance system.
I would suggest following the news with a delay, for example you can subscribe to a monthly publication like Le Monde Diplomatique[1] that'll give you a relatively fresh analysis of news but without the noise. They invite experts to contribute and give a saner perspective to world event, with more context.
Ukraine never had the possibility to keep its nuclear arsenal, they simply didn't have the infrastructure for it, let's not pretend they had any real choice.
I agree Ukraine could probably build a new nuclear deterrent, similar examples as you give.
> They couldn't have launched the Russian warheads as-is, but disassembly and reuse of the warhead material is another thing entirely.
Another thing entirely, yes.
But consider that Ukraine build the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, lost it in the collapse of the USSR because the (captain?) just sailed off with it: everyone would have noticed if Ukraine had tried to keep those weapons, and at least some of them would have demonstrated how upset they were with an invasion and/or by bribing guards to put them in trucks and drive them across a border (not necessarily the USSR-Ukraine border) regardless of what the government thought.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people.
It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...
Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.
Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.
I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.
Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.
But they did use early builds of liquid glass and that should've triggered nausea and someone must've said "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of all, Apple Designers).
Is this known to be true or speculated? I don't know how this process is handled at Apple specifically, however, generally decision-makers are highly detached from UX. One would think that, especially for an overhaul initiative, "important" people would daily-drive dev/nightly builds to wear off the cool factor and experience the not so pleasant annoyances, but generally they shield themselves from that and mostly look at the "cool demos".
Regardless, as far as I am aware Apple has a tight product release cadence and ties feature gates to that. Obviously hardware readiness gates are much earlier than software, but I can easily imagine situations where "yes men" report "good enough" at gates relevant for marketing, feature gets greenlit, but then gets half-assed for the actual release. Recall iphones crashing at the initial release demo? Might as well be history rhyming.
And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws away so many good design elements that have been there for ages - and for no good reason.
I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.
IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.
The golden rule from Apple in 2007 when they changed to flat design was icon or text - never both together.
Apple abandoned enforcing HIG for app developers around 2012 (Facebook tiled menu, modal abuse, and hamburger) but now seems to have given up on standards entirely.
The wall to wall interaction pattern is terrible too. Every time my hand brushes my phone some unexpected (and sometimes unknown) interaction occurs. Classic example is changing orientation while watching YT where accidental contact with the bottom-left (becoming top-right) part of the screen as you move the phone selects a new video. It’s becoming slop.
Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.
> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.
I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.
Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.
Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.
People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.
One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)
I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.
Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.
As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.
Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'
They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.
With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style
I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"
I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.
Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.
I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.
First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.
Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.
But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.
It's good until you boot your system and end up with an unrecoverable black screen that meeses your day of work for no good reason. Linux is free if you don't value your time.
You can't really make blanket statements like this about "Linux" in general because it depends on what distro you use. For example, in NixOS to fix this type of problem all you have to do is rollback to a previous configuration that is known to work. I've not used it, but I believe Arch has something similar.
Even with imperatively configured distros like Ubuntu, it's generally much easier to recover from a "screen of death" than in Windows because the former is less of a black box than the latter. This means its easier to work out what the problem is and find a fix for it. With LLMs that's now easier than ever.
And, in the worst case that you have to resort to reinstalling your system, it's far less unpleasant to do that in a Linux distro than in Windows. The modern Windows installer is painful to get through, and then you face hours or days of manually reinstalling and reconfiguring software which you can do with a small handful of commands in Linux to get back to a state that is reasonably similar to what you had before.
I spent years (maybe a decade) without seeing them in the Windows 7 and early 10 era, but in the last few years I have them sometimes. Many seem Nvidia-related, but I also remember some due to a bad update that broke things in some laptops.
I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.
You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Of course, MS seems to enjoy inflicting familiarity penalties on its established user base every couple of years anyway. After having your skills negated in this way enough times, the jump to Linux might not look so bad.
Not in my experience. I've run both Windows and Linux for the last decade and Windows is the only OS that I ever have problems with updates wasting my time and breaking things. I've been running image-based Linux for the last two years and the worst case is rebooting to rollback to the last deployment. Before that it was booting a different btrfs snapshot.
Fun aside: I had a hardware failure a few years ago on my old workstation where the first few sectors of every disk got erased. I had Linux up and running in 10 minutes. I just had to recreate the efi partition and regenerate a UKI after mounting my OS from a live USB. Didn't even miss a meeting I had 15 minutes later. I spent hours trying to recover my Windows install. I'm rather familiar with the (largely undocumented) Windows boot process but I just couldn't get it to boot after hours of work. I just gave up and reinstalled windows from scratch and recovered from a restic backup.
Windows has recently been a complete shitshow - so even if Linux hasn't gotten any better (it has) it is now likely better than fiddling around with unfucking Windows, and Windows doing things like deleting all your files.
You can put some work into windows to slim it down some, a unattended generator to turn most of the crap off on install, then Shutup OO goes a long way
There's an ever growing list of things to do in order to fix Windows, and that list is likely longer than Linux. This whole "your time is free" argument hinges on Windows not having exactly the same issue, or worse.
I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility.
As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a regional train in France, and the crew swiftly adapted by bending rules to accommodate a difficult situation caused by bad weather. I'm not sure this could happen today, but it was a thing 10 years ago, we used to trust the operators back then.
So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
It's always some magical higher power preventing you from doing the sensible thing. One favourite excuse is insurance liability. We can't do the sensible thing, because the insurance wouldn't pay if something bad were to happen, even though the odds of something bad happening are virtually nil.
You can also observe this in German politics. "Oh, we absolutely cannot do <common sense thing> because the rules won't allow it." Well, you could change the rules, but then you would have to take some actual responsibility, and we can't have that.
That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.
Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.
I don't think that's due to following the process but rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they arise.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work. Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment into the final product. It was about the people all along.
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.
Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".
Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.
My favorite part of German work culture is watching an excel sheet together and going over the numbers.
My actual favorite part of German work culture is that meetings always have an agenda, that part is a delight when doing business with German customers.
Your meetings have an agenda? We just debate something and are stuck on some minor unimportant point that doesn't matter and the meeting goes into overtime and then we schedule 2-3 follow-up meetings where everything we said is now completely irrelevant because our assumptions were incorrect from the start. And then you finally get to work and you can't implement it like it was specified since everyone forgot that you can't really do X so you have to it some other way making everything that was discussed completely moot.
>If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process years in the past. So, no one is really at fault or can be held accountable.
Worse. You can't even take responsibility even if you want to, that's usually against the rules too.
... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...
... Yep.
It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.
Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.
Reminds me of the "we can only send helmets" to Ukraine thing ... that apparently wasn't a real hard and fast rule but when originally presented you would have thought it was some magical rule set in stone.
It's interesting considering that based on the German military doctrine at the time low ranking officers on the ground had a huge amount of independence while the French ones were stuck doing nothing and waiting for orders to be signed and approved..
Of course maybe that didn't apply to committing atrocities to the same degree.
> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable
That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.
That's not the main reason though. The reason the denazification was mostly a sham is because a lot of federal positions required good contacts and experience in that field and you couldn't find anyone qualified who wasn't in the party. Based not just on first hand accounts on the family side but also lots of research. A lot of higher ups also were well connected so they got an already short conviction halved to released early in order to get a position in the government.
yes but there are so many
cases where they took the worst of the worst and gave them high profile jobs with way way way to much power for high ranking nsdap members.
Rheinhard gehlen and everyone around him is a something that could have been prevented.
And so many high class nazis where in such good positions because they where experts on anticommunism. For the americans and brits it was "safer" to give positions to exnsdap officiers then people from the SPD(socialists)
Gehlen kicked even the only high ranking spd member in secret service out
for god sake they even hired klaus barbie. that guy had entertainment partys where the guests could
torture jews homosexualls etc... and he killed most of french opposition.
Got hired from the bnd and cia as expert on anticommunism
Germany didnt change much..
fuck we even voted a full member of the nsdap as chancelor. Kurt kiesinger. Yes we had two Nazi chancellors!!
honestly the only reason the denazification was shit was because most people at power at that time where kind of nazis.
edit:// btw the DDR had somehow solved the problem and didnt had as much nazis in high position.
"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. And you have to keep in mind that all of the Nazi's racial ideology had been codified into law at the time. So you were once again just implementing the rules, even if those rules were actually harmful.
But what this episode also highlights is the opposite of this in the form of the American approach that is much more flexible and willing to bend the rules if necessary. Rightfully, the Allies could and probably should have brought everyone to justice, but they realised that a lot of the Nazi scientists were extremely valuable assets that they needed to get a leg up on the Soviets. So rather than execute them or put them in prison and throw away the key, they recruited them.
That's kind of interesting, though considering that the German army (and presumably Prussian before that?) was know for giving a relatively huge amount of leeway and authority to more junior officers.
Supposedly while the French and British officers were frozen waiting for new orders to be telegraphed when something didn't go according to plan, Germans took the initiative based on what's happening on the ground. US and other countries adopted this doctrine after the war because of how unexpected successful the German army was (despite being outgunned by the French and the soviets who had better tanks and more trucks just couldn't figure out how to use them efficiently)
There's always an option. You could die. And if you didn't choose that option before committing atrocity as ordered you definitely deserve death afterwards.
They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.
At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.
As far as DB goes, I'm pretty sure it's mostly an issue of systemic technical and consequently social collapse.
The system runs beyond its limits and consequently the culture collapses because the people inside learn they have no agency.
The German rail network is quite good on paper, with dense and high frequency connections even to relatively remote locations.
But keeping that functional (particularly with constantly rising demand) requires far more investment than it receives.
All the examples of great rail systems (France, Switzerland, Japan) are both simpler in network structure and invest more relative to their passenger load.
The privatization of the train system in Germany was a particularly insane disaster that is only now, 30 years later, being undone/repaired.
If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.
Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.
This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.
Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.
DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.
It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.
All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.
Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition
Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.
Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.
I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.
In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.
Raw investment numbers don't necessarily matter, but the productivity of said number. Even if things are more expensive in Switzerland, if they make efficient use of said investment, then it can work out ok (or even better).
I have no idea if this is actually the case, but you have to take that into account or Switzerland would not be as successful as it is. Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity (and while median incomes and productivity have decoupled, especially in the angosphere, it is still usually correlated).
>Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity
If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.
I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.
My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.
I have no idea how planes are the dominant form of transport for relatively short routes (like within the bounds of a large country or to an adjacent one) and how even in Europe the train networks can be a bit of a mess.
Like surely it’s easier to run a railway network when compared to the insane complexity to safely operate an airport and all the work that goes into plane maintenance and pilot training and so on.
You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same flexibility as planes have regarding routes.
The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.
Air traffic is not taxed heavily compared to other modes of transport - on the contrary, it is very heavily subsidized (at least in Europe): Regional airports often strongly depend on state subsidies, airlines are exempt from petroleum taxes, flight tickets are VAT-exempt.
In Germany (and also e.g. Switzerland), long-distance trains are expected to run either at cost (or make a profit). Short-distance trains (regional transport) are usually subsidized.
Sounds neat but what kind of range limits would that impose on each trip? Switching from one means of transportation to another, even if both are buses, increases the total travel time significantly. Not to mention all the hassle involved for passengers.
trains can be superfast. For example a tgv from strassbourg to marseille is 5-6h. Same with car is for me 8h. Bus is even slower so I would wildy guess 12h. Plan is btw 1 1/2 hour.
Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.
Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.
We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.
No amount of money will overcome the fundamental issue: monopoly.
Airlines are subject to market competition since any competitor around the globe can spot a poorly run route and buy their planes into those slots. If they can execute more efficiently than you, they can afford to lower prices (or increase the level of service) more than you, and thus put you out of business.
Trains do not work this way. No amount of investment can overcome the cushy institutional-rot, laziness, and demotivation that inevitably results from being a monopoly, as most train routes are not subject to competitive forces due to the real world constraints of the infrastructure needed.
France, Italy, Austria (and probably others) don't have monopoly on long distance train. For instance, you can take a DB/Renfe/Trenitalia train on french high speed line, or in Austria take a Westbahn train instead of ÖBB.
That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network than the dynamic one of other countries.
It doesn't really work all that well. The "everything above the rail" model suffers from the fundamental problem that "everything above the rail" is just a minor component in the overall cost of rail.
The German rails network went downhill when they decided to socialize the losses and privatize the profit. Failure is blamed on the grunt workers, which are absolutely not interested in taking responsibility as a result of this. The fact that there are rotting railways everywhere and the DB waits until it gets so bad for cities to step in and take over part of the cost is a wonderful example of this. The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
I have seen this systemic problem in other domains I worked in. The problems are very similar, and at the end of the day I can somewhat relate to the workers attitude of "why should I lean out of the window if I get punished anyway". But in some cases the workers are unfireable and oftentimes it is exactly that attitude that let the management get away with the terrible working conditions (most of the times more psychological than physical abuse) so it feeds into each other.
> The new ICE's speed is actually lower than previous generations.
While not the fastest ICE, the new ICE-L (assuming you refer to it) with a top speed of 230km/h, is not actually slower than what it is supposed to replace on most routes: InterCity trains, topping out at 200km/h.
ICE-L, btw, was planned to be a IC train, but just like before with IC-T/ICE-T (same top speed of 230km/h), and IC X (ICE 4), DB management has a tendency to decide next-to-last minute, that new vehicles must earn money and thus get rebranded ICE, which is both more prestigious and (at least in a fictional world without "Sparpreis") pricey.
TL;DR: This would be outrageous if ICE-L was to replace ICE 3 (neo; 320km/h +) services - but it is not.
Yeah, I didn't feel like looking up the exact details, so thank you for adding that. I didn't know that it was rebranded like that, I was just baffled at the outcome. Our mechanical engineering professor was responsible for the ICE breaking system a long time ago and those guys were all extremely good.
The other aspect is that there is a whole host of periphery issues, one of which is track maintenance, making it so for a lot of segments the ICE will not reach its top speed.
Could be. It used to be that to get phone service in Germany could take up to a month after putting in the order, that’s when it was state controlled. After the reforms installations were quicker.
So to me, there doesn’t seem to be a panacea except to hold the services accountable in some way.
That's a different situation / scenario and addressed a different problem.
The government is the most efficient and effective at big capital spending and with what I would call static operations. Competitive private entities are the best at delivering value on the front-end.
Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective privatization requires either creating a framework for a robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.
If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you let them get fat & lazy, you will need to move a mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!
> If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain.
... in the short term, happily screwing over society at large and possibly even themselves in the medium to long term. Perverse incentives are everywhere.
Add to that the transport buisness beeing marginal to the company who is mainly a immo speculation company trying to sell the strips of inner city land they hold.
The general reason is, the rule exists for a reason, and the "low worker" does not understand the bigger picture, so you should follow it blindly before doing something harmful you can't foresee. It's not always working well, but to be fair, also not always bad. Knowing how much you can stretch the rules can be an art which takes a long time to acquire.
Some cultures are more sticklers for creating and following rules and bureaucracy than others, though.
A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
Another example: Both France and Germany spend roughly the same amount (in raw Euros) on their militaries. France (which ALSO spends and develops a lot of their own kit) has a functional and effective military, including the only non-American nuclear aircraft carriers, and a bunch of nuclear attack and ballistic submarines and it's own nuclear deterrent. Germany is barely able to maintain their much smaller infrastructure because of its ineffective bureaucracy (there was a scandal a few years ago where over 80% of their euro fighters were combat ineffective due to lack of maintenance).
Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
> Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
I'm kind of curious how you expect this to work.
A driver is driving down the road at the posted speed limit. Instead of crossing at an intersection, a pedestrian steps into the road from between two parked vehicles directly in front of the moving car. By that point the car cannot be stopped before it hits the pedestrian because of the laws of physics, so who would you have at fault and how was that person expected to prevent it?
These are generally the same boot licking demographics who'll sit and wait out a 2min light cycle at 1:45am rather than treating it like a 4-way stop. Putting their money where their mouth is puts them head and shoulders above the types that tend to dominate the discussion on such issues.
I was in Germany once at a red light for a pedestrian crossing. After the last pedestrian had fully crossed the street and the pedestrian light turned red I drove off. I did not wait for my own light to turn green which is typical in my country.
The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to wait for.
I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500, and risk losing your licence.
1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
In Southern Europe, not many people wait for a red light if there isn't anything to wait for. Even the police blasts through red lights if nobody is using the pedestrian crossing.
Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the rules.
Isn't that the argument for the alternative? The risk of being distracted by other traffic and missing a pedestrian who was obscured by another vehicle is much lower when there are no other vehicles or traffic, and then the rules are indecorous for not taking into account the change in risk.
"Bootlicking"? I guess you'd love if non-bootlicking neighbors decided to do a rave party outside your window at 3am. Every day. Or maybe a nice drag race on your street at 1am.
I mean, only people who think for themselves can do that!
There is a huge difference between someone being annoyed by some thing based on how it affects you and that thing just so happening to be against the rules vs being annoyed by a thing that's of no consequence to you for no reason other than because it's against the rules.
Regardless, I don't share those values. I have stared into the abyss of what people who praise conformity and the common good will do to a municipality if given free reign to regulate it's minutia and I do not want. My neighbors on one side blast music in a language I don't speak until a couple hours after my bedtime most nights and the neighbors on the other have barking dogs. I don't even notice them anymore, same with the nearby highway noise.
What consequences? Who doesn't like music?!? Oh, and I'll just throw that candy wrapper on the ground. After all, it's of no consequence.
You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.
This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
Litter is a great example. You people and your rules for everything weren't what changed it's prevalence. Social changes and general attitudes were.
Like I said, I've stared into the abyss of what you people will do to a society if left unchecked. You are worse than the alternative. That's why I live where I do.
Fine then. They drive the speed limit in the left lane or whatever. Point is that the people who advocate for the rules in obscenely trivial situations when deviating them them is in fine taste tend to be drawn from the pool of "robotic rule follower with no extra thought given" type people. Which has the side effect of making them consistent with what they preach.
> "In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same."
Yeah, some Bavarian villagers can be hylariously weird. I, personally, have jaywalked all my life growing up in East and West Germany, and I only got "the lecture" twice: once in deeply pious Bavaria, and once in... Spain. Both involved the rolemodel-shaming routine as kids were to be seen, but only one came with a small fine attached.
> "Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic."
Most likely not a POC and not from NY or Washington D.C., I see (I'm reporting for a friend). Ah, anecdotes. The spice of life!
Nobody cares if you jaywalk as long as no children are around. If there are children around, most people will avoid crossing a red light even if they otherwise would cross. But that's not a rule-following thing, it's a "don't set a bad example to children" thing. It's easier to teach children the rules about how to behave in traffic if you have fewer adults obviously violating them.
That would make sense, except that one of the universal rules of childhood is, "Adults get to do things you don't get to do, usually for damn good reasons, so get used to it." Every child knows this in their bones, even when they don't like it.
Kids are stupid and follow what adults do. If I judge that I have the time to cross the street at red light without getting hit by the incoming car doesnt mean that the kid standing next to me is even seeing the car and crossing right after me.....
Showing kids good example is good. What you mean is showing them bounderies.
Getting shit drunk in front of kids and telling them how much fun it is but they cant do it is behaving like a child
> A good example: Here in North America I'll jaywalk without a thought if there's no traffic. In Germany, you'll get grandmothers calling you a child-killer for setting a bad example if you did the same.
This varies wildly in Germany. In Hamburg, at 7 - 9 in the morning near schools or kindergartens with kids around, many people are following good traffic behavior. At 9 on a university campus, or at 9 at night no one really cares.
Yeah, I think people who have not experienced the system have no idea how absurd the German process mindset is. If it's not part of the process, it's impossible - damned what the reality on the ground is
Frenchman here and so true. I was taking the bus and it was stuck in traffic and I was like "hey can you let me out I life right in that street and shit aint moving" .... no fucking way. had to wait 10 minutes and then walk back to my place... driver was completly
ghostinh me after he said the magic german words " I am not allowed to do this".
In france they Busdrivers let me out between stops if I ask them before.
Germany is crazy rule
obsessed. they also have the crazy mentality that if you put it into rule problem is solved xD
Although Germans are famously methodical, my experience with German bureaucracy was that it's quite flexible. They will break you, and when you finally give up and seem like you're about to cry, they will roll their eyes, and oblige you, stressing how exceptional and magnanimous they are for letting you get what you want. In reality, they were rooting for you the whole time, but did not want their flexibility to be taken for granted.
I document German bureaucracy for a living. I cannot stress enough how "vibes-based" the entire thing is. Half the job is convincing bureaucrats that you're either overprepared or litigious to be worth the trouble.
The best strategy I've found with such bureaucrats is to bike shed them with an obvious but easy problem that you fix with much adieu so they can feel like they've found you out and feel like they've done something. Meanwhile they will ignore all the subtler things that might be much harder for you to deal with.
What really ought to bother people more than it does is that within just about any white western country/culture you can run the same comparison with "decently well off" being the german side and "everyone else" being the english side.
Reminds me of being en route with Lufthansa to Germany, needing an emergency landing in Turin, being shepherded onto a new working plane by Italians, then continuing to Germany where the whole plane load arrived without tickets from Turin...
The gate people tried to tell us it was impossible to be there without tickets, as if we were somehow collectively hiding them and a bit of persuasion would convince us to find the non-existent tickets! Not one person found they had a ticket, despite this allegedly being impossible.
i love that meme which shows three identical paper clips in a row but one is upside down relative to the others which is a minute difference. the caption reads “chaos German style”
> "[...] this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility."
Neither absurdity nor "German philosophy", but just stock-standard safety and security culture in action. Or more specifically in this case: generelle and objektspezifische Dienstanweisungen (general and location-specific administrative instructions or regulations) [1]. You don't follow them, it's you who's on the hook. :)
And when was the last time anyone here visited a railway control centre in a metropolitan area? Yeah.
I worked in the Swedish office of a multinational for a couple of years and the one experience I had where Swedes were selling a complex multi-million euro project to Germans was one of the most bureaucratically filled initiatives I’ve ever experienced in my life. Not sure if the project ever really took off, but I’m thankful I was able to avoid it beyond the initial week of discussions.
If you don't know german culture, this story might be hard for you to imagine. Fact is, germany has a massive stick up its ass. If there is a written rule, they will follow it, no matter what.
I worked for a company where we brought in teams from a couple European countries after a merger.
The absolute "I won't do anything more than I explicitly have to." was brutal. It was hard to even talk to them as they seemed terrified / constantly defensive of being asked to do something outside their typical process. They never were asked as long as I was there but man they were on a knifes edge about it at all times.
I'd even be on the phone with folks I met and got along with and I'd ask them about what they saw on a ticket they used to own, and I'd get angry made up rules about "I don't have to tell you anything because that ticket doesn't belong to me anymore!" Like bro ... we had a good time having beers together, I'm not your boss I'm a peer asking, it's still both our work hours ...
They were smart folks, got along with them otherwise, but it was just a horrible experience working with those folks when it came to work. Company eventually just shut down those offices, complied with whatever local laws were required to do so and washed their hands of those locations. I didn't blame them.
<the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility>
you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you
I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.
TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***
It is certainly my biggest dislike factor with my stay in Germany, and I'm still struggling to come to terms with it: do I dislike it enough to compel me to move away? is this something I can accept? How much can I influence and improve things that I directly interact with?
It seeps in everywhere too, with almost all aspects.
Day-to-day with restaurants, cafe, shops. Almost all interaction feels like it's actively checked if it's in their process or job description. Shop staffs are typically disengaged and can't really help you with anything outside the normal process.
Healthcare, both receptionist and doctors. You can see the rushed service because they are only compensated for limited amount of time by the state insurance. This took me a while to figure out; the process really defines what treatment you get, with what equipments, as well as the duration, and they have to do their best with the constraints put by the process.
An example: with Wurzelkanalbehandlung, the process says (at least back then) only 1 hour of Laborkosten can be compensated by the state insurance. This means if the dentist took more than 1 hour to work on you, that would be done at their personal loss, and thus the incentive to rush the procedure.
Going private helps (they tend to be more relaxed after the mention of of Privatzahler, and gives you access to newer equipments not yet acknowledged by the state insurance processes), but you still have to research, find, and pick the right practice.
Bureaucracy, administrative. You often have to deal with clerks that just go "I just work here", the rules says this and there's nothing I can do, throws hand in the air. Goodbye, next person please!
In day-to-day work, I can also see it. New hires tend to be more into the work, and questions things, but the system does push everyone to just follow the process and not do anything more. I've seen my colleagues slowly shift into this mode, delivering what is outlined, nothing more, not questioning the intent behind the work (or at least, doing it much less than before, because the system does not incentivise that).
I would summarize Americans (and perhaps most English speaking countries) as perceiving this mindset to be callous, ineffective, and a dereliction of autonomy.
But I'm interested in how Germans perceive Americans in reverse? If shop staff went out of their way to help them find a product, shoot the breeze, or recommend a lunch spot, would Germans tend to see this as being overzealous? Would it cause embarrassment, or be a pleasant surprise? Just curious.
I tend to view shop staff having a random talk with someone while I’m waiting to purchase or ask something as a dereliction of duty. If you want to catch up with a friend you can do it on your own time.
Every country is different and you need to learn slightly different ways of dealing with them in each. On a bad day it can be pretty exhausting.
It turns out, people everywhere want the same things, in the end. They just go about them differently.
In Germany, it often helps frame it as both of you trying to work with the rules together; as a framework to build within and on, rather than a cage to hold you in.
Doesn't always work. Nothing works all the time, (especially if the other person is having a bad day themselves and just wants it to be over). But if it helps even once eh?
The difference in healthcare between private and public insurance is, as far as i know, because if a doctor sends you for some test or something that your insurance feels was unnecessary then the doctor has to pay for it with the public flavour. At least, that’s what I heard but could be wrong.
In the ancient Greek colony of Locri, any who proposed a new law would do so with a rope around their neck, if the law was voted down, they would get hanged.
Well, Congress renewed the Patriot act so I don't have a lot of faith. Personally I'm starting to think that all of Congress, including aides, should get cycled out all at once periodically so that their internal culture of hating the masses gets broken.
Fair point. The USA PATRIOT Act shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But one of its most controversial parts (Section 215) did expire in 2020 (it was barely going to make it, though).
But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.
Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.
Once social trust (or assibiyah, to use Ibn Khandun's term) in a region collapses, it often returns slowly or not at all. Sadly common pattern in history. I think one could plausibly argue that in this way, Calabria never recovered from the collapse of antiquity, the Gothic wars, and generations spent as a Christian-Muslim war zone.
Intentionally misinformed citizens continued to charge the streets demanding "essential services" like barber shops need to be reopened and to intentionally dismantle and resist against all government protections on public safety during the pandemic (like wearing a mask during an active spreading event), literally while their grandparents and relatives slowly and painfully died on respirators in hospitals largely agreeing with the same notion of covid prevention measures being "pointless". They then attacked the institutions that provided either medical treatments or provided assistance, and continue to promote that culture. Lemmings to a cause they dont understand for a message they know is false.
That is to say, there's always someone ready to make zealots die for a cause. IMO, that change would only shift in favor of the most radical extremists who see human life as expendable rather than cause anyone in power to think twice about pushing their ideologies onto masses.
Masks and protocols around them were largely just theatre though. Only very expensive n95 or better type masks, which were properly fitted and handled would actually provide any sort of protection from covid. Even the eventual proponents of masks initially were against the idea as in many ways many of the responses to covid were directed politically, not practically.
The mask mandates weren't to protect you, they were to protect others from you. If everyone did this, the spread would have been massively reduced, and super-spreader events wouldn't have happened anywhere near as much.
Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).
Perhaps the messaging was different where you lived, but I don't believe any credible professional was suggesting those outside healthcare wear masks for their own protection. Mask mandates are to reduce the risk of others catching covid from you, a considerably easier task for which even cloth masks are usefully effective. There's a reason surgeons masks are still used.
When governments push out clearly nonsensical regulations, like you must go to the office even if you can work from home, but you cannot go hiking, yes people do tend to get mad.
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