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> There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the hea

> There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for. I'd like to offer some comfort to the author on this score. Food, housing, healthcare broadly... while these are all aspects of being "cared for" by society, they aren't all care in the individual sense you describe. The food system is different from homecooked meals; the housing economy is different from the handsome breakfast nook your family DIYed into their home. We can build systems which scale and make it possible and economical for individual care to happen.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
Although it’s theoretically possible and theoretically economical for individual care ‘to happen’, it doesn’t in practice for the housing economy. If anything it’s decreasing year by year on average. Especially when you look at construction quality, the average quality of say new built condos in any major city has gone way way down since the 90s. Of course on average condo designs have on average gotten fancier with quirkier architecture, and building codes have gotten more complex, so maybe it’s not due to builders caring way less, but the end result is shoddy work either way. Edit: And the average home buyer has no method of separating out all these confounding factors, so it boils down to a single congealed mess.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  Maybe it doesn't in America. Nor here in Australia. Some European cities are showing that better is in fact possible by strongly supporting co-operative housing sectors which are better for residents. But that would break the American taboo against government intervening usefully in private markets for human rights (in this case, shelter). More from a recent report by Australia's business council of coops and mutuals: https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solutions-to-housing-crisis/ https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solu... Anyway, my advice to the author was that systems can enable care at scale. Not to say that our current systems do. Edit: to be more explicit, I'm suggesting that some approaches to the housing sector in some parts of Europe amount to care that scales; society and governments have decided that housing is a right, and have enacted policies to approach that situation. Conversely, a "we don't care" approach also scales very well with the opposite outcome.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    ‘Society and governments’ can also ‘decide’ that the Sun is revolving around the Earth… so decisions and policies on paper cannot be fully credible by themselves… What is the actual tangible evidence that the aforementioned issues are avoided?
    - crabmusket 2y ago
      Yes I did take a slightly different tangent than your build quality argument. I don't actually know whether there's been studies done about that. You've inspired me to go find out.
- Yawrehto 2y ago
  About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours. 1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result was buildings that were more safe than strictly required. But now we can get closer to the line, and so buildings are engineered at the edge of safety. 2) Of course, survival bias plays a role here. Who remembers all the crappy buildings that just vanished? It's the same reason we look at old toasters or mixers or what-have-you and say things were so much better-made in the past - all the crappy cheap toasters, mixers, and houses are gone now. 3) Also, as extreme weather has happened more frequently, areas all over are seeing weather different than what they were designed for. Given that the average temperature in Oregon in July (the hottest month of the year) was typically around 65 degrees Fahrenheit[1]. For the past few years it has generally hovered in the upper 60s. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Oregon before 2021 was 107 degrees Fahrenheit[2], and typically there were one or two days a year that crossed one hundred degrees -- occasionally five, more often none. In 2021, it hit 116 degrees. Since 2021, there has not yet been a year without 4 or more days over a hundred. And, of course, this pattern is repeated all over the world. Houses are being built for one set of extremes and averages and getting another. [1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series/35/tavg/1/7/1895-2024?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla... [2] https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/ https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    1 is in large part a reflection of idiot proofing everything. Every party's judgement gets reduced down to some some quantitative stuff like wire gauges, stud spacing, etc, that even idiots with poor judgement can reliably assess. Instead of failures because people do shoddy work we instead get failures where people are dumbly building things they know won't last because it's easier to just let things be crappy than to try to get permission to deviate from the plan. Basically decision making authority is being abstracted away from the people who have actual context. This limits the screw-ups from people doing work below the minimum at the expense of preventing anyone from who would have done something better than the minimum from doing so.
NBJack 2y ago
Often, it's the act of preparing the meal by hand rather than pressing a button on their hypothetical Food-o-matic that makes the biggest impact. We can certainly scale the provision of needs otherwise. I agree with the author on their assertions about what it means to care and actually connect with people.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  I'm not talking about food preparation, but food systems. E.g. look up the concept of a food desert. Preparing a meal by hand is one thing; having access to quality affordable ingredients is another. A food desert is what you get when the system that would enable care is deficient. And even in a "food oasis" with adequate quality, yes, if you yourself cannot prepare a meal, or have nobody to do that for you, that's a failure of a different kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    I tend to consider food deserts just cheap/fast transportation or personal mobility deserts seeing as they tend to "lack" a whole bunch of other things in addition to food. They lack these things not because people can't get them, but because the cost in time or money of going whatever distance one needs to go to get them makes it not worth it. Food doesn't ship well or keep well in individual use volumes so it is particularly impacted.
dkarl 2y ago
> The food system is different from homecooked meals This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they get enough food when they need it. Food quality has nutritional consequences down the line, and at some point a child that is fed pancakes every day will gain the ability to look back and regret how they were raised, but it doesn't prevent a child from feeling cared for in the moment.
- tripper_27 2y ago
  > Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. Let me fix that for you: Children notoriously prefer heavily marketed food in attractive packaging which is designed/optimized for addictiveness and immediate gratification.
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Eh, if you dumped a container of sugar into a home cooked meal they'd like it more than packaged food.
    - com2kid 2y ago
      There is a famous saying: A professional chef is just some one who is willing to use more butter than a home cook.
- tripper_27 2y ago
  if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others. Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Although it’s theoretically possible and theoretically economical for individual care ‘to happen’, it doesn’t in practice for the housing economy. If anything it’s decreasing year by year on average. Especially when you look at construction quality, the average quality of say new built condos in any major city has gone way way down since the 90s. Of course on average condo designs have on average gotten fancier with quirkier architecture, and building codes have gotten more complex, so maybe it’s not due to builders caring way less, but the end result is shoddy work either way. Edit: And the average home buyer has no method of separating out all these confounding factors, so it boils down to a single congealed mess.

crabmusket 2y ago
Maybe it doesn't in America. Nor here in Australia. Some European cities are showing that better is in fact possible by strongly supporting co-operative housing sectors which are better for residents. But that would break the American taboo against government intervening usefully in private markets for human rights (in this case, shelter). More from a recent report by Australia's business council of coops and mutuals: https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solutions-to-housing-crisis/ https://bccm.coop/australia-urged-to-look-to-europe-for-solu... Anyway, my advice to the author was that systems can enable care at scale. Not to say that our current systems do. Edit: to be more explicit, I'm suggesting that some approaches to the housing sector in some parts of Europe amount to care that scales; society and governments have decided that housing is a right, and have enacted policies to approach that situation. Conversely, a "we don't care" approach also scales very well with the opposite outcome.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  ‘Society and governments’ can also ‘decide’ that the Sun is revolving around the Earth… so decisions and policies on paper cannot be fully credible by themselves… What is the actual tangible evidence that the aforementioned issues are avoided?
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    Yes I did take a slightly different tangent than your build quality argument. I don't actually know whether there's been studies done about that. You've inspired me to go find out.
Yawrehto 2y ago
About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours. 1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result was buildings that were more safe than strictly required. But now we can get closer to the line, and so buildings are engineered at the edge of safety. 2) Of course, survival bias plays a role here. Who remembers all the crappy buildings that just vanished? It's the same reason we look at old toasters or mixers or what-have-you and say things were so much better-made in the past - all the crappy cheap toasters, mixers, and houses are gone now. 3) Also, as extreme weather has happened more frequently, areas all over are seeing weather different than what they were designed for. Given that the average temperature in Oregon in July (the hottest month of the year) was typically around 65 degrees Fahrenheit[1]. For the past few years it has generally hovered in the upper 60s. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Oregon before 2021 was 107 degrees Fahrenheit[2], and typically there were one or two days a year that crossed one hundred degrees -- occasionally five, more often none. In 2021, it hit 116 degrees. Since 2021, there has not yet been a year without 4 or more days over a hundred. And, of course, this pattern is repeated all over the world. Houses are being built for one set of extremes and averages and getting another. [1] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/statewide/time-series/35/tavg/1/7/1895-2024?base_prd=true&begbaseyear=1901&endbaseyear=2000 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-gla... [2] https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/ https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/
- potato3732842 2y ago
  1 is in large part a reflection of idiot proofing everything. Every party's judgement gets reduced down to some some quantitative stuff like wire gauges, stud spacing, etc, that even idiots with poor judgement can reliably assess. Instead of failures because people do shoddy work we instead get failures where people are dumbly building things they know won't last because it's easier to just let things be crappy than to try to get permission to deviate from the plan. Basically decision making authority is being abstracted away from the people who have actual context. This limits the screw-ups from people doing work below the minimum at the expense of preventing anyone from who would have done something better than the minimum from doing so.

NBJack 2y ago

Often, it's the act of preparing the meal by hand rather than pressing a button on their hypothetical Food-o-matic that makes the biggest impact. We can certainly scale the provision of needs otherwise. I agree with the author on their assertions about what it means to care and actually connect with people.

crabmusket 2y ago
I'm not talking about food preparation, but food systems. E.g. look up the concept of a food desert. Preparing a meal by hand is one thing; having access to quality affordable ingredients is another. A food desert is what you get when the system that would enable care is deficient. And even in a "food oasis" with adequate quality, yes, if you yourself cannot prepare a meal, or have nobody to do that for you, that's a failure of a different kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
- potato3732842 2y ago
  I tend to consider food deserts just cheap/fast transportation or personal mobility deserts seeing as they tend to "lack" a whole bunch of other things in addition to food. They lack these things not because people can't get them, but because the cost in time or money of going whatever distance one needs to go to get them makes it not worth it. Food doesn't ship well or keep well in individual use volumes so it is particularly impacted.

dkarl 2y ago

> The food system is different from homecooked meals This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they get enough food when they need it. Food quality has nutritional consequences down the line, and at some point a child that is fed pancakes every day will gain the ability to look back and regret how they were raised, but it doesn't prevent a child from feeling cared for in the moment.

tripper_27 2y ago
> Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. Let me fix that for you: Children notoriously prefer heavily marketed food in attractive packaging which is designed/optimized for addictiveness and immediate gratification.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Eh, if you dumped a container of sugar into a home cooked meal they'd like it more than packaged food.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    There is a famous saying: A professional chef is just some one who is willing to use more butter than a home cook.
tripper_27 2y ago
if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others. Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.