| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago |
| While I can understand the frustration and the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced. Yes, engineer types want to solve problems with inventions rather than overhauling the entire nation's infrastructure. Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp, whereas wholesale replacing every civil engineer and architect in the country isn't? Or replacing every building and road regulation and the politicians who put them there? It reminds me of the people in self-driving car threads complaining that the billions should've gone to transit. Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there. |
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| ▲ | the_other a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| It's both "the entire nation's infrastructure." and not that. What I mean is... many cases are individual: the ramp for that library; the door knobs/handles in that office; the floor indicators in this lift/elevator; the audio announcements (or lack of) on the busses/trains; the small print on contracts; live subtitling at the theatre; the checkout button on this web site; the checkout button on that website. You get the idea. The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations. The problem the OP is circling is the same as that proposed by the Social Model of disability. Most systems present obstacles to disabled users which could have been avoided if those systems' owners and designers and included disabled people in the design phase. Instead, no-one does this claiming it's too expensive, forgetting they themselves will be disabled in the future (most people become disabled in one way or another, with age). We all kick the can down the road, rather than deal with it today. Dealing with it is hard. The "national level infrastructure" aspect is a mixture of cultural praxis/expectation and, potentially, government carrot to go with the (existing) government stick (regulation; that most people try to ignore). (I'm not saying the Social Model of Disability is 100% right. I feel it's viewpoint is hugely instructive it's not the whole story.) |
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| ▲ | jnovek a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > the Social Model of disability The best way I’ve heard this articulated is: Under the medical model, disabled individuals are expected to change their behavior to accommodate (fit on with) society. We ask people whose lives are already more difficult than average to do additional work. Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. Further, the social model says that any policy that affects disabled people should be crafted by or with disabled people who are affected by that policy. Nothing about us without us. I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence. I support the social model. It’s the one where I get to have agency. | | |
| ▲ | azalemeth a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence. For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history. You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management! Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally'). | | |
| ▲ | jnovek 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am so thankful that I just deal with chronic pain and not mobility issues as well. I’m sorry. Even though it doesn’t affect me directly I’ve started to notice places where mobility accommodation sucks. In a sense it’s a canary: mobility is the most visible category disability to able-bodied folks and if our society can’t be bothered to help folks like you, god help us who have “invisible” illnesses. |
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| ▲ | snapplebobapple 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Those both skirt around the correct way to think about it, which is the costs way.there are extra costs associated with having a disability. the two models you propose are the disabled person pays or everyone else pays. Everyone else pays is not the correct model because it coerces people into mazsive costs that dont necessarily make sense for them. Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase. There should be ahealthier middle ground that routinely gets the cheap stuff done and leaves an easy path for the expensive stuff without coercing spending | | |
| ▲ | jnovek 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase. ??? This is the social model on a nutshell. | | |
| ▲ | snapplebobapple 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | No it isn't because it isn't cast in cost/opportunity cost/etc. The reality of implementation is top down dictation without apparent consideration of cost (For example, I redid the front door of our office and I now have two buttons to open the automatic door that look like crap and are at waist height and at the floor. This was dictated in the code in my region as a new concession that I never would have done because it is broadly stupid in my context.) Maybe highly cost sensitive and more optional social model would be a better description. |
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| ▲ | AlexandrB a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional? There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder [2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/8/harvard-undergr... | | |
| ▲ | jnovek 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is really ignorant. That’s not an insult exactly, I mean that you’re asking questions that all have answers if you cared to look them up. The reason why people call that sort of attitude “ableist” is that you’re requiring me, the disabled person, to prove that I’m not a liar. > What specific accommodation is being asked for? There is a whole field of study called “Disability Theory” that includes this topic. It is well-defined with thousands of pages written on the topic. It is not nebulous, you just aren’t familiar with it. > What counts as a disability? Words have definitions: “the condition of being unable to perform as a consequence of physical or mental unfitness” > Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD Yes, but a person with ODD is still expected to be a decent human. They may make more often mistakes but they should recognize and apologize for those mistakes. They should be in therapy to help learn self-regulation techniques. Likewise, you should give them some extra grace because, in spite of all that extremely hard work, it’s hard to ignore what your body is telling you (push back against authority) and sometimes they will slip up. > can I request proof from a medical professional? I dunno, can I get a video of your last colonoscopy? Can you tell the public internet if you take take viagra? Can you list your mental health disorders for me please? How’s your gut, had any diarrhea lately? Medical information is private. > There are real tradeoffs here. Yes, the tradeoffs are that things are a bit less convenient for able-bodied people and disabled people get to actually have agency on their lives. | |
| ▲ | Avshalom a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I mean you kinda are just expected to ignore angry outbursts directed at you from anyone. That's not even about disability, it's just part of the social contract that you don't start throwing blows when people yell at you. | |
| ▲ | MSKJ a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bit of fallacy of relative privation. No need to fix it all. We can all be considerate in the areas we have control over and as a society have basics like ramps etc. |
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| ▲ | automatic6131 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work? And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it. The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy. | | |
| ▲ | fatbird a day ago | parent | next [-] | | May you someday experience the same lack of empathy you're broadcasting here. | |
| ▲ | eli_gottlieb a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest Why? And not why in terms of a trivial statistical tautology, where a bell curve has to have a left tail. Why, in terms of, what downstream causal effect of deliberately maintaining large cohorts of poor people accomplishes something desirable? | | |
| ▲ | blacksmith_tb a day ago | parent [-] | | The cynic in me says that the visible presence of people dying on the street is very much intended to send a message, "work hard or this will be your fate". | | |
| ▲ | eli_gottlieb a day ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't entirely call that cynicism considering a lot of people just come out and say it. |
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| ▲ | ashleyn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A great deal of changes proposed to make disabled peoples' lives easier end up having many fringe benefits for the non-disabled. The classic example is strollers or hand trucks going up the little dip on the sidewalk rather than having to lug them over an enormous curb. The cost argument starts looking weak when you observe there's always billions of dollars shaken from magical couch cushions whenever it's time to wage another losing war. | | |
| ▲ | PaulHoule a day ago | parent | next [-] | | In terms of the web two of the greatest things we could do for accessibility: (1) eliminate GDPR pop-ups (and all pop-ups and senseless modal dialogs) and (2) eliminate cloudflare harassment, ReCAPTCHA harassment and anubis harassment. Any of those things should be an immediate F rank for WCAG. | | | |
| ▲ | Henchman21 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | The cost argument is a cover for institutional cruelty. Some people really really want to be cruel. Usually those folks are the most emotionally damaged people IME. |
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| ▲ | coryrc a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Another way to look at the social model is kids playing in neighborhoods. It's not unsafe to walk from one place to another because of lousy sidewalks or excessive leaves: it's the roads we put between any place they want to go. This might've been tolerable when each household only had 1 car and it was gone all day, but not now that everybody has a RAM Child-squasher 2500. In my neighborhood the sidewalks also just... end randomly, would be awful to live here and be blind. Would be a lot better to be blind if you weren't a misstep away from getting run over. | |
| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > The vast majority of cases are individual; owned by myriad businesses, charities, foundations. Agreed, but the solution is more general. If you want handicapped people to have more access, that probably means widespread societal change through regulations, like the ADA (which obviously didn't fix everything, but was at least a big step forward). | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | But don't you see how the fact that many cases are individual makes it harder? You mention doorknobs, and it's easy to declare (which is why the US government has declared) that lever style door handles are more accessible and should be preferred. It's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open. | | |
| ▲ | jnovek a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It seems like the implication here is “if we can’t do anything, we shouldn’t do anything at all” under the social model. Not every doorknob will be disability friendly. If pressure from the social model fixes 20% of doorknobs, now there is a group of people can open 20% of doors where they could open 0% before. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent [-] | | My intended implication is that pressure from the social model has achieved as much as it can, and the left over problems must be resolved through other means. The vast majority of doorknobs I personally interact with, including 100% of the ones at my house and workplace, are lever-style. | | |
| ▲ | jnovek 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | As a disabled person, my experience indicates that we’re not even close to what the social model could achieve. Example: I have a chronic pain disorder. I have substantial difficulty working in an office. WFH was an absolute blessing, and RTO has been a curse. RTO is a regressive policy for disabled people who found they were finally able to participate in their industry for the first time in ages. Now they are expected to take on extra burden to function in an able-bodied world. Many, whose bodies do not allow that option simply have to go back on SSDI. That is an example of progress in the social model that has regressed back to the medical model. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm sympathetic to your problems, but I don't think this has anything to do with the social model or medical model. Even the strongest advocates of the social model of disability wouldn't argue, I don't think, that construction site supervisors must be allowed to work from home after setting up some cameras and microphones to monitor what's happening. The dispute here is that RTO employers think working together in an office is similarly important, but you think they're wrong and WFH is just as good. |
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| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > it's hard, impossibly so, to construct a world where nobody with wrist mobility problems will ever encounter a round doorknob they'd like to open. its not that hard to get to 99.999% though. stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs. add incentives to swap or return round knobs. include checks for round knobs both for building inspections and insurance. you wont wont get the last couple people that build their own doors and machine their own knobs, but thats gonna be a really small segment | | |
| ▲ | keybrd-intrrpt a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > stop selling door knobs, or doors that accept round knobs. Ok, but that's not a "Silicon Valley" thing. Go talk to politicians or Home Depot and Lowe's and the home builders conventions. That's why the post screams of mis-placed anger. Silicon Valley probably would invent FaceID / NFC / Passkeys / WIFI authentication for doors - but that doesn't mean they'll get installed anywhere. | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can't talk about things from a social model perspective without modeling the political realities of the policies you're proposing. A national ban on the sale of round doorknobs would not pass, and local bans would create an enormous backlash which might well ruin the longstanding consensus that ADA compliance requires levers. |
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| ▲ | ashleyn a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The US has been institutionally dysfunctional for quite some time, so that puts us in an interesting position where it's easier to imagine inventing our way out of social problems with $30,000 servo-filled boxes than it is to imagine ever getting a cheaper and easier solution moved through Congress. Congress rarely seems to pass disruptive changes to law these days. Statehouses are less sclerotic, but not by much. Many of the civil rights gains touted 10+ years ago came from hacks shoved through the supreme court exploiting a partisan lean. If you really read between the lines, much of the fuss about Mayor Mamdani in NYC has been a curious rediscovery that the government can in fact Just Do Things for people who elected it. |
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| ▲ | bluGill a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Congress passed the ADA in 1990. There isn't much more they can do - they have limited power. (there were a few updates since then, and I'm sure there are more tweaks they can make, but the majority of their work is done). Most of the authors rant are not things the government does or should do, government buildings generally are ADA compliant these days. The rant is about non-government things. | | |
| ▲ | harimau777 a day ago | parent [-] | | The biggest thing that I want is a way for ADA to realistically apply to invisible disabilities like autism. Although in theory people with invisible disabilities can get accomodations, in practice the accomodation that they really need is "stop being a shitty employer". |
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| ▲ | perpetuallunch a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | BigTTYGothGF a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Forcibly confiscate some people’s money to spend $30 million opening one grocery store. My money's been forcibly confiscated for a whole lot worse. > because governments caring for people’s children is famously the best way to raise kids I can guess your views on public education in general. > Doxing 900,000 people who own a second residence. Wasn't that info public already? | |
| ▲ | harimau777 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yet even if we accept your premise, he is still worlds better than the alternatives. | | |
| ▲ | perpetuallunch a day ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | ambicapter a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Give that guy a chance to properly fuck things up before you pass judgment. You should do the same. > And anyway, since life isn’t a Git branch, we’ll never know if the alternatives were better or worse in practice. Oh, so you wouldn't be able to tell, either? Man, there's a lot of concepts you espouse that you should really apply to yourself. | |
| ▲ | xboxnolifes a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > He’s been mayor of New York for, what, 8 months? > Give that guy a chance to properly fuck things up before you pass judgment. I really, really, urge you to try seeing the hypocrisy between this statement and your previous comment. | | |
| ▲ | perpetuallunch a day ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | xboxnolifes 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > He’s already doxed 900,000+ people who own at least one non-primary residence. > Tell me a good faith argument why he would do that? I don't have a good argument for it, but I also don't really care that it happened? Only a few decades ago we had phone books with every person's name and number in them. Housing information is already generally public data. It's an overblown issue that news sources that have been against Mamdani even before he became mayor have latched onto as a scare tactic for their audience base. Relative to things going on in politics right now I'd call it nothing-burger. Relative to my ideals I'd call it a minor miss-step. > Explain how discount grocery stores operated at tax payers expense is a net good. Keeping people feed is a top 3 priority in any society. Without hard numbers, I can't really say anything more than that? Basically... if this is Socialist politicians destroying the country, then capitalist politicians already put the country in the grave. And I don't live in NYC, so I care a lot more about the national stage. Edit: Wait. I noticed in your comments that you're from Austrialia. Why are you even worried about Mamdani? |
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| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | if you take a look, i think youll find much more of your money has been confiscated to open a lot of grocery stores over time, by the federal government of the US. the government runs a pretty big grocery chain for the military |
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| ▲ | why_at a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think their anger is justified. Yes there's not a lot that individual engineers can do to help, but a big part of the problem is that they don't even understand the people they're "helping". These tech gadgets are the annoying experience we've all had of someone taking a look at a problem from the outside and proposing unhelpful "solutions" that won't work because they don't fully understand it. It reminds me of conversations I've had with people who suffer from insomnia. They say that everyone has some suggestion to just try melatonin, or not use screens before bed, or whatever. As though they haven't tried these things. Yes they're just trying to be helpful, but it comes off as patronizing. |
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| ▲ | mhurron a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Yes they're just trying to be helpful Experience says they're not, they're being dismissive. They don't understand because they don't care to and it's beneath them to learn, because the solution is to 'just' do this simple thing everyone knows to do. It now becomes the sufferers fault they continue to suffer and it's not longer required for anyone else to care. | |
| ▲ | serf a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 'Help me but don't patronize' is a tall order without some real linguistic gymnastics. | | |
| ▲ | clcaev a day ago | parent [-] | | > 'Help me but don't patronize' is a tall order without some real linguistic gymnastics. Not at all. Just don't start by guessing what a disabled person's concerns are, or presume that an unsolicited suggestion is helpful. A respectful start is letting them know you will be responsive and let them lead the conversation. | | |
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| ▲ | zaptheimpaler a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is so true and I see this pattern constantly all over the west: There is some horrible problem that was created by the government or needs government intervention to fundamentally solve. The idea of the government being effective or useful in any way is so distant that it doesn't even register as a possibility. The government doesn't even register as a valid target to blame or locus of change anymore, so it never even enters the conversation. Instead, the next proximate cause is blamed and the anger is directed to them. Recently - a teacher made a private joke on Snapchat expressing frustration about her workday. Snapchat automatically sent the message to the police and the police pulled up an hour later to the school and arrested her. She wasn't charged thankfully. The response on reddit is "FUCK SNAPCHAT" even though we know all communication platforms are being monitored by the government and are no doubt strong-armed into doing this by the government. Even the potential solutions being discussed are only finding and using E2EE communication platforms not policy change, because that's not in the window of possibility. |
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| ▲ | hannahstrawbrry a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It also feels like a failure to understand the motivations and mechanisms behind these projects- those "misguided" college students are usually doing these projects to further their studies, as capstone or research projects that they may not be concerned with the funding for. Accessible product development is a side effect of the process, not the goal, and that's why they aren't developing scalable solutions. |
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| ▲ | shemtay a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > perennially underfunded I remember voting to fund high speed rail, and the funding was quite generous... |
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| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there. mind you, tech companies are also lobbyists with money, and are happy to pay politicians to not build infrastructure that would make the self driving or electric cars less useful |
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| ▲ | stevenfoster a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "...the author makes some good points, a lot of the anger feels oddly misplaced."
a significant portion of my internet experience could be boiled down to this single sentence. |
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| ▲ | blks a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The author gave a quite clear example what any web/mobile developer can be doing without turning into architect or construction worker. |
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| ▲ | rurp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded This is simply wrong in a lot of cases. Tech companies absolutely use their immense wealth and influence to alter public policy and spending. Regulation and budget decisions happen all the time to benefit a specific company or industry, at the expense of the overall public. Tech is hardly alone in this, but that industry has more money and mind share than most, and correspondingly more ability to change policies to their benefit. The more money and hype a Disability Dongle company gets, the more interest and ability it will have to degrade less shiny but more effective alternatives. |
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| ▲ | dumberquestions a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ride hailing apps promised to decrease traffic and social media apps promised to make people more social, in both cases the opposite happened and this is just off the top of my head. |
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| ▲ | ElProlactin a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is why raising well-rounded children is so important. Intelligent young people today are too often encouraged/forced to specialize and while it makes sense for them economically given the structure of our society, it produces lots of young, intelligent adults who can't see the forest for the trees. They can be brilliant in one area but unable to see the big picture, which is a real loss to society when they have the ambition to contribute. |
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| ▲ | dualvariable a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there. Disagree there. Tech companies and their owners are part of the system of monied interests that have entirely captured our government, and that's why we don't have the funding to fix all our infrastructure. |
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| ▲ | asdff a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded I mean, it kind of is when the tech company is spending a lot of money lobbying against transit in favor of expanding their product's market share. |
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| ▲ | munk-a a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Sure, spending more on transit is a good idea, but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded I think your overall point is relatively sound but that example is just terrible... Elon Musk has repeatedly lobbied against transit expansion and his Hyperloop pitch arguably derailed HSR talks in California for half a decade while the Las Vegas teslertube prevented the expansion of a monorail to actually service the strip airport corridor. |
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| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I'll grant you Musk being terrible, no argument there, but that's not tech companies as a whole. And California hardly needed any help to sabotage its HSR, the state's whole process for that kind of development is incredibly backwards and broken, sadly. | | |
| ▲ | nemomarx a day ago | parent [-] | | it's not really tech companies fault on this either but it sucks to see large amounts of investor money going to them when it could go to solving the issue more efficiently. (although obviously it would be less profitable for the investors so it won't happen) I think thats the core frustration | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast a day ago | parent [-] | | It all depends on the counterfactual. Could the money solve the problem, if the issues with transportation arent funding? It seems like an institutionally made black hole that will simply consume anything put into it. I dont think flooding it with more money will fix that problem. Investors have poured about 10 billion into waymo prior to 2026. That could only have paid for about 5 to 7 miles of urban light rail given recent project costs in Seattle, San Francisco, or New York. And that's if you completely ignore the challenge around who has the money and assume the state can just collect extra taxes without discontent or impacts | | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent [-] | | What if investors poured 9 billion into making light rail cheaper, and then 1 billion into light rail? Where would we be then? Other countries don't spend 2 billion dollars a mile. Hire the best engineers from Europe and Asia. | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Like the sibling said, It is mostly legal and political gridlock, not engineering. They would have to put that 9 billion into a political takeover of the US government, a major rewriting of environmental and property laws, and silencing/steamrolling opposing interest groups. This is a pretty tall order. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent [-] | | They managed it for AI. How much did it cost for AI? | | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast a day ago | parent [-] | | Humm, interesting idea to compare and contrast the two changes? I dont think AI cost much at all because politicians were largely supportive to begin with, and the legal changes were small if any. It would be different if you had to replace them all or change their mind on a deeply held issue. |
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| ▲ | my123 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | A big chunk of the problem is planning/political: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Line_(Maryland) > A March 2025 report by the Maryland comptroller's office found that permitting and legal fees for the project, originally budgeted at $6 million, had actually consumed roughly $800 million, thanks to two lawsuits and the contract renegotiations Better tech cannot solve that on its own, the problem is not even there. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent [-] | | That's still only 3% of the money per track length that we're talking about here. | | |
| ▲ | tetromino_ 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | My guess is that the indirect impact might have been in the tens of %. One of the biggest (if not the biggest) reasons for enormous construction costs is delays which make an efficient construction timetable impossible, and two lawsuits of course result in a long and enormously unpredictable delay. |
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| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Since the Hyperloop time, China built an entire HSR network starting from nothing. Since the Hyperloop. | |
| ▲ | peter_stokes a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | HSR derailed itself. CA takes 95% of the blame agreed on the LV monorail though |
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| ▲ | bevr1337 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This doesn't hold up to scrutiny because tech companies _do_ provide input at policy level. Sticking to transportation, auto groups and manufacturers were able to popularize "jay walking" a century ago. Tech leadership and politics mingle at the highest levels too. For ex, Trump took Huang, Cook, and Musk with him on a recent trip to China. |
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| ▲ | nitwit005 a day ago | parent [-] | | > I need better doorknobs and or a ramp. I'm not aware of any tech company lobbying against doorknobs or ramps, and I don't see any particular reason for them to care. There's been some general corporate push back against the expense of some ADA fixes. | | |
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| ▲ | make3 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| this type of individualist responsibility diffusion is exactly why nothing happens in the US, & why France has protests the second the govt does anything bad. no one is asking you to solve the whole problem, just be part of fighting for the real solution |
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| ▲ | antonvs a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Maybe, just maybe, that's because inventing something is actually within their grasp The problem is that inventing a solution that no-one needs or wants and then using venture money to hype it up feels like rubbing salt in a wound for the very people they're claiming to try to help. The point is they're not actually trying to help those people. They're using them as a marketing tool to further their own ambition to make money. The anger is understandable. |
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| ▲ | threatofrain a day ago | parent [-] | | These nameless people could very well want to help people. A device that costs as much as a Honda Civic? Yes, that's exactly the kind of stuff that happens as you attempt to mature a product. I was working on a drone automation system at another company. The initial prototypes were also in the Honda Civic multiplier range. The companies that bought into us knew the price tag. The customers who wanted conventional products with conventional pricing... ignored us! Once you develop an actual manufacturing line the costs go away down, but first you must develop that maturity. | | |
| ▲ | antonvs 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > These nameless people could very well want to help people. The criticism is that what they’re choosing to work on is misguided, if the goal is truly to help people. The cost is just one of several factors, and one point about it is that the cost will never come down far enough to make sense, if the fundamental nature of the product isn’t in fact beneficial to the intended users. It seems that there’s a sizable group who just want their ego stroked about how they’re “making the world a better place,” and other such drivel. Whether that’s actually true doesn’t matter to them, and they’re not going to think about it deeply enough to make any difference. |
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| ▲ | watwut a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. There is ideological opposition against from business types and some other tech types. > it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded, it's politicians and the voters who put them there. Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it. |
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| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Many "engineer types" will gladly care about doorknobs and infrastructure details. Some will, and that's great, but as the blog post accurately points out, the invention of these things isn't the primary issue, it's the lack of implementation. And that isn't the fault of the engineers designing better doorknobs or ramps. > Tech companies pushed for exactly that outcome and spent a lot on lobbying and convincing. We totally can blame them for it. Bullshit. The US has had underfunded transit for near a century now because of our obsession with cars. Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse. | | |
| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | next [-] | | the car companies at the time were tech companies that paid the government to kick people off of roads and build communities that require cars to get to. the car obsession didnt quite happen naturally | |
| ▲ | bluefirebrand a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Trying to blame this on tech companies is a lame excuse. Depends. Do car manufacturers count as tech companies? The obsession with cars and car infrastructure isn't accidental either, it's been manufactured and pushed heavily by car companies over decades. Same with the opposition to public transit. None of this stuff is happening 100% organically, it's being pushed by corporate interests via lobbying with government and funding advertising at individuals | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent [-] | | If someone watched a press video for the RAV4, and responded by saying "Toyota Motor Corporation Hates Me and You" and demanding that Toyota fix the bus routes in their city, I would think that's pretty silly. Everything's interrelated, and no consumer demand is 100% organic, but the linkage is just too remote to make sense. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's literal, direct linkage. About a century ago, when cars were starting to become popular, car makers spent a shitload of money on bribes to city governments to make the cities only usable by car. | |
| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | toyota is a late comer though. "jaywalking" is a term made up by car companies because they hate you, as a better example | | |
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| ▲ | thereisnospork a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How are Tech companies fighting public transit? At least in these parts a relatively high fraction of their employees commute by (private) bus. I can only presume that Tech companies would prefer the government provide safe, clean, and timely bussing for the public to save the company the cost and effort. | | |
| ▲ | hamdingers a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Hyperloop and Boring Company were both created as distractions from real proven transit technologies, and the latter has been quite successful at getting rail projects cancelled or at least confusing politicians enough to delay them. | | |
| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent [-] | | So it's basically just Tesla/Musk here, when people say "tech companies"? Musk is an asshole, no argument there, but most tech company CEOs aren't nearly that crazy. | | |
| ▲ | hamdingers a day ago | parent [-] | | No, I provided one particularly eggregious example. Uber/Lyft have also lobbied against transit. The Google shuttles OP alludes to interfered with real transit operations. |
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| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They generally would, though for the most part I imagine they're just ambivalent here. As long as workers can get to work, that's most of what they care about. | |
| ▲ | roughly a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every time a tech company lobbies against taxes, they’re fighting public transit. Every time they spend the exact same money they just argued shouldn’t go to the state on privatized busses, they’re fighting public transit. |
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| ▲ | threatofrain a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Better doorknobs? Better civil infrastructure? A lot of those companies in that space aren't even tech companies, even if they deal with tech. The companies he talks about have a Very different business culture, and thus a very different response to if an in-house tech person wanted to do anything, really. |
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| ▲ | nancyminusone a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I quite enjoy playing with robots, but I'd rather coordinate the design and installation of 1000 ramps than be involved with one walking liability sedan chair. If you care about results and reliability, no shit a competent engineer will be picking the one that has no moving parts and a 10,000 year track record. |
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| ▲ | TulliusCicero a day ago | parent | next [-] | | The fact that this is or isn't happening is basically unrelated to inventing new stuff. It's almost entirely a political issue, not one of engineering. | | |
| ▲ | 8note a day ago | parent | next [-] | | land use and design issue more than anything. ramps have been around for a long time, and are well known to take up a ton of space. especially if every propery gets its own ramp rather than all the properties on a block sharing the same ramp system and having a common porch | |
| ▲ | thatmf a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The two are not unrelated, and perhaps the inventiveness and energy of the latter could be applied to affecting the outcomes of the former. | |
| ▲ | masfuerte a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's very much related because the technology provides an excuse to ignore the infrastructure problems even when it isn't good enough. |
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| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I just don't know what it means to prefer to be involved with the design and installation of ramps. There's a lot of ramps around, and the knowledge of how to build them is widely distributed. Is there some phenomenon I'm not aware of, where lots of people want to have ramps if only they could find a way to design and install them? |
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| ▲ | HoldOnAMinute a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You haven't addressed the grift problem. Without support for traditional nepotism/cronyism grift, how do you expect to motivate politicians? You won't always be able to count on the threat of exposing their sexual habits, which has been working for decades. |
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| ▲ | croes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Changing infrastructure would cost way less than buying hardware for all disabled people. So you don’t solve the problem, you just solve it for a tiny group of wealthy people |
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| ▲ | pavel_lishin a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > but it's not the tech companies' fault that it's perennially underfunded I mean, it's certainly a factor: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/uber-lyft-proposition-l-... |
