When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful
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Honest question for disability supporters though: Would you support a 1% tax on every able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to help disabled people better live their lives?
Because that's essentially the argument that the article is making in a lot of ways. Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be. It bloats the product spec. Makes the implementation more complex, which in turn makes it harder to understand and maintain in the future. It makes the manufacturing more onerous. In all these ways, when going out of your way to make something more accessible-friendly, it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features.
Hence my question above. Similar to forcing/shaming companies into making their products disabled-friendly, would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?
> Every time you make accessibility a design goal in a technology/product/building/service, it makes the design/production more complicated than it otherwise would be.
If your original design excludes a non-trivial amount of human beings then it's probably not a very good design.
Of course context is necessary here, and I can't just throw a snarky one-liner at you. If you're building a puzzle game, then yeah, blind people might not be able to play it and that's okay. If you're making a signup form, then it is inexcusable to leave out folks using assistive technologies because it's "complicated."
It's worth pointing out that the UK law also covers a businesses website:
For example, I make mobile apps for a living - and both Android and iOS provide many tools that automatically make apps compatible by default with things like braille keyboard and screen readers. But through apathy, carelessness, and bad design/engineering, many apps break this automatic compatibility they got for free.
Ditto for the web - if you're building a website for a puzzle game you'll want at least some kind of reasonable fallback, so to a blind person the website would at least make some kind of comprehensible sense rather than merely be a black hole that eats their screen reader.
There are definitely cases where product creators need to go out of their way for accessibility's sake, but throughout all of software the tools to ensure a rudimentary level of accessibility already exist and are low-effort.
I agree. Considering we're happy to spend loads on the dangerous roads that often put people in wheelchairs, spending a much smaller amount to help people maimed on those roads seems only fair.
Although I think you're being a bit cheeky here in saying "a tax on every able bodied person" when it's really a tax on everyone. Everyone pays the higher price, when it only benefits a few.
> it ends up taxing every single person who doesn't use or need those features.
Yes, which sounds bad when you think of most regular features, implementing things that only benefit a few people. But the problem is those few people need these features on many products, and without them have massively reduced access to a huge range of things.
Regardless, "a person" is not a major inefficiency.
You're also assuming that these things don't provide a net benefit. If my taxes save a life at the age of 20, then we get a huge number of years of productivity and haven't "wasted" all the money on their education. Money used to help drug addicts reduces crime and policing costs. This is not some zero sum game, £1000 from me given to those who need it more than I do can end up benefiting us both.
And finally, I donate to charity not because I think it'll necessarily directly benefit me financially, I just think it's the right thing to do. I would be better off if I didn't, but that doesn't stop me.
I'd rather the author have the option of getting a small amount of help rather than having to spend more money buying pre-cut or pre-made. In his case, it might be enough for someone to come by twice a week and do the cutting and peeling for him. - It would provide him the assistance he needs while not trivializing everything he can do on his own.
Obviously that might have to be scaled somewhat based on the number of people who need assistance in a certain area - maybe in large cities it makes more sense for a person to be able to order what they need so that for some people they'd be getting pre-cut fruits and veggies, others might be getting meals ready to be stuck in the oven, and some might need hot meals delivered. The key to me is to provide everyone the ability to be as independent as possible, and not have it be more expensive for them than it is for someone who isn't disabled.
Hiring someone to come to your house and perform the job of a factory worker makes no economic sense at all if the same job can be done in an actual factory.
The question is, where is that sweet spot, and how do we weigh the environmental consequences into that equation?
Environmental consequences? What environmental consequences come from using a plastic container? That's a whole other argument, but as long as it's being landfilled not burnt, it's not doing any harm for climate change. Landfills are pretty safe places to store unwanted plastic without it affecting the environment. Making plastic consumes finite oil, but the more we turn into plastic, the less we have to burn, so that's good for climate change.
Yes. That was an easy question.
Do you know what The Disabled community call the rest of us? The Not Yet Disabled.
At some point, you're going to get old. You'll need glasses and all of a sudden that ultra-thin grey font on a stylish grey background will be a pain to read.
Or you'll be in an accident and have to spend a week living with your arm in a sling, unable to use a mouse and keyboard simultaneously.
Or you'll get drunk, or try to operate your TV while half asleep. Your cognitive impairment will be an impediment to interacting with the world.
Even if you're the most selfish person in the world, and don't care about accessibility for people who live with an impairment now - you ought to care about how you'll cope once you become disabled.
> And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?
That's like saying "what's a reasonable limit to spend on security?" You spend what's necessary.
A lot of people seem to believe (roughly speaking) that getting old is a lifestyle disease and will be mostly cosmetic as long as they "stay active" and "don't let age slow them down". They point to the anomaly of the guy running a marathon at 90 and don't think to ask why that's so rare when running is so popular...
That doesn't actually tell you anything. Things would be "more secure" if houses were armored like tanks and everyone was prohibited from leaving their homes without a police escort. The question is not necessity, it's cost/benefit.
The whole problem with accessibility is that there are contexts when the required effort is disproportional. When it takes as much or more effort to do the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a skill set the maker doesn't normally possess.
And that's pretty much always when people want to impose it. Because if you can buy a machine for $50 that will peel your oranges, that's what people who need one will do and then nobody else has to do anything. It's when such a machine is too expensive or doesn't work well enough that people want to impose the cost on someone else.
That's what we're talking about here. Because there is nothing wrong with a disabled person needing to buy a peeled orange, but there is something wrong with everyone else doing the same thing. The vast majority of customers don't need it, and in that case it's wasteful and environmentally unsound and should be discouraged.
The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something different, like asking the produce clerk to peel their oranges. But that argument burns itself to the ground. Then everyone needs to use the more expensive accessible version to avoid special-casing the people who specifically need it. Which moves the cost/benefit analysis away from accessibility, because you have to justify the added cost across the whole population rather than only where it is needed. The result would be fewer accessible products that are more expensive for everyone.
Are you really arguing that I should not be able to buy a bagged salad because I can chop my own damn veggies? And I thought I was a moralist.
You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that spends billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker and bitcoin and HFT and...
How about this: put the the convenience products next to their traditional brethren, charge not-outrageously more for them (to pay the extra costs and because they are more convenient) and stop trying to feel morally superior to random other people because you aren't interested in the product?
Not "shouldn't be able to," just "shouldn't."
The underlying problem is that we're not pricing externalities correctly. If the environmental and energy impact of plastic containers was required to be paid up front then the price would increase significantly and companies would stop using them in many cases. But until that happens, if you want to be environmentally conscious, you avoid such products where practical. And if you're an environmentally conscious company, you avoid selling them.
> You do realize most of the people reading this work in an industry that spends billions on giant space heaters to provide snapchat and online poker and bitcoin and HFT and...
...and people are spending billions of dollars to make those space heaters as energy efficient as possible going forward. And some of those practices (like HFT) are criticized for being incredibly wasteful and people have suggested curbing them.
And hypocrisy is not, in any event, a logical fallacy. Two wrongs don't make a right.
> The question is not necessity, it's cost/benefit.
Necessity is everything. Cost-benefit might factor in when comparing different options, but the cost is often very high, especially to retrofit accommodations onto existing systems, when compared to the benefit that the general population receives from those accommodations. But we do it anyway, because we live in a civilized society that recognizes not everybody is the same.
Comparing it to armored houses is stupid, because while armored houses might be sufficient for security, they are certainly not necessary. The threat model imposes a ceiling on any benefits: anything beyond that is not necessary, it's wasteful.
> When it takes as much or more effort to do the accessibility as to create the product in the first place, or requires a skill set the maker doesn't normally possess.
So there are two problems here.
* Accessibility is like (software) security. Both should be treated as part of the process, where they are incorporated into the design from the outset. Just like security, if you try to tack on accessibility after everything is designed and built, then it takes longer to implement, costs more, and integrates poorly due to working around the existing design rather than within it, and generally less convenient/usable.
* The biggest "skill" that people need is simply awareness and perspective -- not everybody is like you! Especially in software, good practices for accessibility are often reflective of generally good practices anyway.
If you're slinging HTML, use semantically correct elements, put alt tags with images, label your forms and make sure they are keyboard-navigable. Are you a web developer that's never heard of ARIA? Shame on you -- you're not much of a web developer if you only cherry-pick the parts you like to use. This stuff is not hard. Again, it's less of a skill and more of a broadening of your world view to recognize that not everybody is like you, and trying to take those people into consideration. Would you build a web site and ignore IE users completely, just because you don't use IE?
> The argument seems to be that disabled people shouldn't have to do something different
That's not the argument at all. They do things differently all the time -- and usually it's fine, as long as the accommodation is reasonable.
The gist of the article, by my reading, is that accessibility, convenience, and being environmentally friendly are often at odds with each other.
The argument is not that Whole Foods has a moral imperative to offer pre-peeled oranges, just that there are certain classes of people that actually do benefit from pre-peeled oranges, while acknowledging there is an environmental impact. Disabled people are acutely aware of the externalities that their handicap imposes on society, so it is a relief when mainstream goods and practices shift towards being more accessible by default, such as supermarkets offering pre-chopped vegetables or, yes, pre-peeled oranges.
We clearly don't do it anyway. There are plenty of things we could do that would help certain people in a big way but we don't because the cost would be prohibitive.
> Would you build a web site and ignore IE users completely, just because you don't use IE?
It has nothing to do with whether you use IE. It's a matter of how many other people do and how much it would cost to support them.
But web development is a completely different context, because then the cost is fixed rather than per-unit. Which means, if your site is at all popular, it is worth the cost most of the time.
It's basically fail fast. The first version isn't going to be particularly accessible because there is little point in doing that work if you're just going to close your doors next year. But if you succeed, now it's worth the effort to go back and do it, because 1% of a billion people can justify a lot of effort.
We certainly can't do everything (and what we can do is subject to constraints of scale), but there are key phrases here: readily achievable, reasonable accommodation. There are a lot of things that are required that are quite expensive, and the burden for providing those is entirely on the facility, service, employer, etc.
You still can't apply a strict cost-benefit analysis, because that would fail almost every time. That's what the ADA is for: to compel (necessitate!) accommodations that would not be made otherwise. Take a look at an ADA checklist sometime: http://www.adachecklist.org/doc/fullchecklist/ada-checklist....
> It's a matter of how many other people do and how much it would cost to support them.
That's not the point. The point is that you're aware there are users different from yourself, so you take them into consideration. Empathy, not market share. That's what accessibility is all about.
> The first version isn't going to be particularly accessible
That doesn't have to be true, if you are aware of the simple things you can do to make pages more accessible. Then it's not difficult to put those in as you're building things. As I keep saying, if accessibility is incorporated into the process from the beginning, then it is much easier to ensure ongoing support. It's not hard.
> it's worth the effort to go back and do it
This kind of mindset is exactly the problem. Going back and re-evaluating your accessibility from scratch is a complete waste of time and resources [1]. Take an afternoon off from faffing around on HN, read up on accessible design, apply those few simple steps as you're building each page. Believe me, you'll feel a lot better about it knowing that your pages are accessible: there is something satisfying as an engineer knowing that your product is resilient and usable in various circumstances.
[1] Most new public construction is required to be ADA compliant at the outset, because there are laws on the books that mandate it. Now imagine if architects didn't actually consider accessibility when designing the facility. Or if they were completely clueless about accessibility issues. That situation is unfortunately exactly what we have with software developers today -- and devs have it even easier, so there is not really an excuse not to make even a passing attempt at accessibility from the outset.
In other words, the cost/benefit has to be reasonable.
> There are a lot of things that are required that are quite expensive, and the burden for providing those is entirely on the facility, service, employer, etc.
Suppose you have something like a wheelchair ramp, which might cost $2000. A particular store has maybe 10 customers who need it, the customers each spend ~$200/month in the store, the store's margin is ~10%, so the store pays for the ramp in less than a year. A rational owner of that store is going to build the ramp regardless of whether the law requires it.
Now consider private homes. The people who need ramps would have installed them regardless and everywhere else they would rarely if ever be used. But it would still cost the same per home as it would for a store with a lot of profitable business. So the law [in most places] doesn't require ramps in private homes.
Here's the problem with the law. Very small shops are in the same boat as private residences. The cost of the ramp is fixed but the value depends on how many people go there and need it. For very small shops that number is often zero. And the cost of the ramp is nothing to Walmart because they do a lot of business, but the same cost is real money to a tiny shop owner. It's the sort of thing that, repeated a few of times in similar contexts, will put the tiny shop out of business. So there is a real case to be made that very small shops shouldn't be required to build ramps.
Because it's all cost/benefit. There is no use building a ramp to a shuttered shop.
> That's not the point. The point is that you're aware there are users different from yourself, so you take them into consideration. Empathy, not market share. That's what accessibility is all about.
Inefficiency is not empathy. Doing the thing that results in the least waste leaves more resources that can be used to improve peoples' lives. Imagine the inefficiently-spent money was instead put toward medical research to cure the people affected. Or do any other thing that benefits them with a higher cost/benefit ratio than the more wasteful thing. How is that not more empathetic than wasting resources that could have been better used to help people?
> Going back and re-evaluating your accessibility from scratch is a complete waste of time and resources
Only if you already know you'll have to. If you're today's Facebook, you know that. If you're a small startup, you don't. You're probably going to fail and then it isn't going to matter.
It can be more efficient to not spend resources doing it right the first time when there is a high probability of failure, because the high cost of doing it over is only paid if you succeed, and in that case you can afford it.
You keep talking about cost-benefit, but the whole reason we have laws like the ADA is because people will not make accommodations, because the math does not work out. Moreover, there is much more to it than just installing (and maintaining!) structural accommodations. And of course a mom-and-pop isn't held to the same standard as Wal-Mart... that is already the case.
> Doing the thing that results in the least waste leaves more resources that can be used to improve peoples' lives.
What? No. I can barely parse the other things you're trying to say about efficiency. The world does not work that way. If it did, we wouldn't have this discussion, because everyone would do the "right thing" and allocate surplus resources towards "improving peoples' lives". They don't.
> It can be more efficient to not spend resources
Read everything I wrote again. You're not spending any resources (in software) except a few extra keystrokes. This stuff is not hard. This is what it sounds like to me: you're trying to justify being a lazy, inconsiderate jerk.
There are actually two pieces of this. One is that some people wouldn't make the accommodations even though it would make economic sense simply because they never considered it. But this could be addressed by, for example, requiring builders to explicitly offer to build the accommodations even if the owner is allowed to decline.
But you want to talk about the case where it doesn't make economic sense. The business is going to spend $1000 in order for customers to buy $50 worth of merchandise. This should be clearly crazy to you. The customer is not receiving $950 worth of value from this arrangement. If you asked the customer whether they would rather have the accommodation in that one shop or the $950, they're going to pick the money.
> And of course a mom-and-pop isn't held to the same standard as Wal-Mart... that is already the case.
Sometimes. And only because cost/benefit has prevailed in those cases. It's a clear case of people asking for something irrational and then clawing it back when the destructive force is actually brought to bear.
> What? No. I can barely parse the other things you're trying to say about efficiency. The world does not work that way. If it did, we wouldn't have this discussion, because everyone would do the "right thing" and allocate surplus resources towards "improving peoples' lives". They don't.
Of course they do, they just improve the lives of different people. They use it to pay for their employees' health insurance and send their own kids to college and make a donation to a local shelter. They buy themselves a sandwich. The money goes somewhere. It's not like they're setting it on fire, which is what building accommodations that are never used is equivalent to.
Realize that you're combining two pieces. The first is that money should be taken from businesses and used to help the disabled, and the second is that the money should be spent on specific accommodations. Since the things are combined it looks like the options are "spend the money on poor cost/benefit accommodations" or "the businesses keep the money". Which are two options, but there are two more: We could build the accommodations but get the money from somewhere else, or we could tax businesses in order to help the disabled but help them in some other way.
The first of those makes a good thought experiment. Imagine the money to build the accommodations came directly from those who need them. Would they still want the same accommodations as are currently required, if they each personally had to pay their proportion of the cost? Clearly not. The ones with poor cost/benefit ratios would be objected to, and there would be no one to oppose the objection because the beneficiaries would be the ones objecting.
That doesn't work if the idea was to be charitable, but I think it makes a certain point that leads directly into the last option. Suppose we've already decided we're going to take money from businesses and use it to help such people. We clearly shouldn't spend it on something that they themselves would not have spent it on if it had been their own money, because we know that those cases benefit them less than would just giving them the money as cold hard cash.
> Read everything I wrote again. You're not spending any resources (in software) except a few extra keystrokes. This stuff is not hard. This is what it sounds like to me: you're trying to justify being a lazy, inconsiderate jerk.
You can't have it both ways. Being lazy implies reduced effort. If you're a small business with so few customers that approximately none of them need special accommodations then you're spending your very limited resources to help no one.
You've made the argument that you're going to have to spend more later when you have to do it over. But it's more likely that you fail before that ever happens. And in the less likely event you do succeed, then you're successful and can easily afford that cost.
There is a common wrongthink among people who believe they're helping some people that if you don't want to help them in exactly the same way, even if that way is demonstrably less effective than helping in other ways, then you're some kind of inconsiderate bastard who deserves to be shot. Try not to be that guy.
And of course that's a universally established and uncontentious amount!
Yep, that happened to me when I was in college; I spent several weeks with my arm in a sling. I was able to use a computer with no trouble. You've obviously never had your arm in a sling; try sitting at a desk in front of a keyboard, and notice the position your arms are in. That's almost the exact same position your arm is in when it's in a sling.
The problem (as I found out) with having your arm in a sling is that you can't easily carry things requiring two arms.
All in all, I really didn't have many problems with having an arm in a sling. It of course did help that I already used a backpack to carry things. Now walking around with a crutch, on the other hand, was a real impediment to my normal mobility and activities...
>At some point, you're going to get old. You'll need glasses and all of a sudden that ultra-thin grey font on a stylish grey background will be a pain to read.
This is totally wrong reasoning. That ultra-thin grey font on a "stylish" grey background is a pain to read no matter what your age. It's an effect of stupid hipsters taking over web design in the last 5 years. Graphic design on web pages has totally gone down the toilet in the last few years, and it's hurting everyone who has a brain and any sense of decency.
Another factor as far as vision goes: the entire population is now becoming near-sighted: http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120
>Or you'll get drunk, or try to operate your TV while half asleep. Your cognitive impairment will be an impediment to interacting with the world.
Then don't get drunk. And operating your TV is not "interacting with the world", it's mindlessly watching drivel and advertising.
Honestly, you sound like you could have made a reasonable argument, but your examples are all completely lousy and just reinforce the other guy's position.
That was not at all my experience when I had my arm in a sling; I was basically one step above being one-handed.
And being one-handed isn't that bad with a computer anyway. You can type one-handed (I do it on occasion for short bursts), and you can adopt one of the one-handed Dvorak keyboard layouts. It's obviously not as fast as regular two-handed typing, but it's not bad.
Also, there's different things you can do to your arm that require a sling. I didn't require a cast for my injury, but even if I did, the sling's purpose is mainly to keep your arm in a neutral position, keep you from bearing weight with it, and keep your upper arm from having to deal with the weight of the cast. It doesn't completely immobilize you; you can usually still rotate your arm enough to use a keyboard. Obviously, though, this depends on your exact injury and what's been done to your arm.
A few years ago I was on crutches for about six months and there's nothing like first-hand experience to realize just how important those accommodations are.
I will concede that it does take extra time/money to bolt on accessibility features after a product has been developed. Which is why it can look like companies are being forced/shamed into fixing their inaccessible products. However, when products are put on the market with faulty or broken parts it is completely reasonable and expected that the company that created the product will pay to fix the issues. Inaccessible products are the same as broken products.
The best slides anybody showed were two different building entrances. One of them had a stairwell plus an ugly looking ramp on the side of the building. On the other one they did some grading in the front so that the ground comes up naturally to the door, which looks great and is better for everybody.
That is, unfortunately, completely untrue. While there are some decisions that can be made (to improve accessibility) that do not impact the cost of development, there are many that do.
While it's true that each small change tends to have only a minor cost, those costs add up when you realize there are thousands of them. They add development time, testing time, and complexity (which impacts maintainability and associated costs).
I think it's worth it in most cases, but it's certainly not free.
Now as I said, this doesn't mean you shouldn't ever bother, but you have to weigh the costs and benefits. Making a product more accessible can get you more customers, which means more money. You can also make the product more appealing to more customers, even non-disabled ones: for instance, suppose you make your software product so that the color scheme can be changed, so that color-blind people can tweak it to see it better. Non-color-blind people may find out about this feature and rave about it because they can also use it to tweak it for their tastes (perhaps with a "dark" theme), rather than being stuck with whatever boring color scheme your designers chose to appeal to the masses. This could drive up your sales, even though the original motivation was disabled people.
Actually that's not always the case. In many instances, designing with accessibility in mind increases your customer base and drives more revenue. It's actually a decent size "market" which makes designing for/implementing with accessibility in mind an investment instead of a burden.
I've always found it funny when people propose some new red tape or requirement and then say "oh, it'll good for business!". Of course, if that were actually the case, the red tape wouldn't be necessary.
I've always found it funny that most people don't realize that anything more than 3 months out is "too long term to worry about" in the business world.
And yes, many large scale end-user facing app teams make a business decision to implement their UIs with accessibility in mind. For web apps specifically it's not that big of a deal these days with screen readers getting reasonably sophisticated making the additional dev effort negligible for medium-large projects.
Yes, absolutely.
I realize it's been tainted by association with Marx, but "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is still the best fundamental social principle I can think of. It doesn't even have to be purely altruistic--I want myself and my loved ones to be cared for when we are sick or hurt or disabled; therefore it's only fair and just that I do the same for others.
> would you support a X% tax on every single able-bodied person, with the proceeds used to better help all disabled people? And if yes, what do you think is a reasonable limit on X?
I haven't studied the problem nearly enough to state a single figure, but broadly the answer is "whatever is necessary and sufficient for the comfort and happiness of both able and disabled." Also "from each according to his ability," of course--in any case I think it's pretty well-established that progressive tax > flat tax.
(That said, I respectfully think there must be a better/less wasteful way to make oranges available to people with limited hand strength. Making peeling a free service from the produce department, available on request, seems reasonable; or possibly supplying a device for the purpose, either a cheap take-home item or a countertop dingus at the store.)
If people choose to live in a Kibbutz then that's the sort of attitude they should have, yes. But if they aren't choosing that, then "from each according to his ability" is slavery. It's not magically okay (and, worse in an argument sense, isn't magically workable) simply because it's a social good in question.
> Making peeling a free service from the produce department, available on request, seems reasonable
For a store to choose, free peeling is fine. The meat department will often do special cuts for you for free if it's not an abusive request. But when you mandate that the store do it you're just stealing from everyone. Labor isn't free and to mandate that someone perform it without compensation means they either won't sell oranges, or will simply jack the prices up. If orange prices go up too much the people who don't need peeled oranges will buy other fruits and the orange demand will dry up.
If you're so set on peeled oranges, why not instead pass a law that makes the government pay all labor charges from orange peeling? Rank it against other things, find space in the budget. Make sure nobody in unevenly penalized in the deal. And the answer of course is that nobody is willing to pay for it. When it's not "free" (ie someone else's burden) nobody wants it enough.
If we really do want the disabled to live better lives we need to make a principled stand and actually pay more tax to fund higher pensions and give them more cash, which they can spend on orange peeling or hawaiian vacations, as they see fit.
Stores could offer free peeling (at a higher base price) to capture this spend, home-care workers would have time (budget) to peel unpeeled oranges, independent orange-peeling services could possibly be economically viable. Perhaps this would spur the invention of an orange-peeling machine, if this really ended up being a pain point.
tl;dr You seem fine with making other people work for goals you see as good. If you really cared (enough to spend your own money too) you'd propose fixing the problem at the source and letting the details work themselves out. It's the attitude, not the quote.
> If we really do want the disabled to live better lives we need to make a principled stand and actually pay more tax to fund higher pensions and give them more cash, which they can spend on orange peeling or hawaiian vacations, as they see fit.
That's what I said. Whack asked if I'd support a 1% tax increase to give better support to the disabled, and I said yes. (I'm assuming that support covers a lot more than orange-peeling!)
So it sounds like, as I said, people saw a Marx quote (it's actually from Louis Blanc, Marx only quoted him, but never mind) and immediately assumed that I was agitating for a command economy and five-year plans and whatever. I think that people should hold down a job and pay taxes if they're able, and if they're not able (due to illness, injury, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, etc.), they should be able to count on the government/society to take care of them. That's all.
Here's what makes it seem like you did:
> Making peeling a free service from the produce department, available on request, seems reasonable
If a store chooses that as one of their features, it certainly is reasonable for them to do so. Yes. But that's so obvious you wouldn't be saying that..?
So the line reads (to me, and I presume, others) as: "It seems like a reasonable thing for us the people to make 'free peeling on request' a thing that produce departments do." ie, an accessibility law.
> "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is still the best fundamental social principle I can think of.
The problem is that needs are infinite and my time is finite. As a loose moral compass it's a nice idea - as a government principle it's nearly slavery.
It's a choice. There's nothing that says we, as a society, have to do this at all. We could leave disabled people to the wolves if we wanted. But we don't. And I choose not to. It's not about some greater or absolute morality, it's simply the morals I choose.
Don't forget, you're just one car wreck away from not being able to peel an orange. Could be tomorrow, could be never. You'll never know until it happens.
If something like this was to really work it'd have to be done economically, from the bottom-up. Rather than dropping an obligation on the world, fund the disabled (higher pensions) to pay to make things accessible. If there aren't enough accessible puzzle game there'll be a large pool of money seeking them, and if nobody cares, nobody is burdened.
As we're discovering with foreign aid - the wrong aid hurts, and the right aid looks like cash handouts.
But that won't work because nobody is actually willing to pay anything to help, they're just willing to legally oblige others to work for free.
There's a certain danger in design spec to the "average" since any individual user is likely to have some diverse collection of needs and targeting what appears to be niche, can end up being much more representative than the "average" might suggest.
It also makes it easier to use for just about everyone. It's the same tradeoff you have to think about whenever you are building something for other people to use instead of just for yourself.
But still, many users seem to think it is a valuable feature, too.
No.
First, you'd have to figure out whether someone is able-bodied or not. Do you think the IRS is equipped to handle disability claims? There are all sorts of disabilities that aren't bad enough to qualify someone for permanent disability because they're not _that_ bad, not permanent, or both.
Then, once collected, where would the money go? Assuming the fund isn't raided to cover for shortfalls elsewhere — something that happens regularly here in California — the money would get handed out to whomever has the most convincing/numerous lobbyists. This seems like a strictly worse solution than what we have already: people go on partial or permanent disability, get a check cut to them, and then they go out and buy whatever'll make their lives better, not what some person in the capital thinks that people "who have a disability" would want. Nevermind that there's _thousands_ of _different_ ways one can be disabled, all requiring different modifications…
There's also a lot of overlap between "good for people with some particular disabilities" and "good for lazy people". Would you be in favor of Procter & Gamble lobbying for and getting federal funds to make Swiffers? I wouldn't, even though I think pre-moistened mopping sheets are great — that's naked corporate welfare!
Most of us have seen poorly-designed enterprise software and have figured out that they're poorly designed, in part, because the end users are not the buyers and have little input into the buying process. I'd expect a "have A tax B and give the money to C ostensibly for D's benefit" to suffer from the same sorts of principal-agent* problem.
Sure, I might buy a peeled orange. Maybe that's wasteful, but maybe I make up for it by being less wasteful elsewhere. That should be a possibility, because it would be a big help for people like the OP for whom the product is much more valuable than normal.
You get much better results when everyone's incentives are set up to be directly aligned with doing the right thing.
If the farmer had to pay even an opportunity cost (like with David Zetland's all-in auctions[1]), then he would cut back his usage immediately and the crisis would be over.
Does that platonically align with "the right thing"? No, but it reduces wasteful uses of water, effectively, without the moral crusade.
[1] It wouldn't take away any water they have a right to, but would simply pay for any water usage rights they waive, meaning that growing $10 of rice would cost them $30 in potential payments for letting someone else use the water. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1658193
There's always an undertone of banishing the political from human activity leaving only economics in conversations like this one that doesn't sit right with me.
As you mentioned, developing the incentive structures is definitely a political process. Consider this a political appeal to put more emphasis on finding solutions at that level.
Being disabled is expensive. Adding to that cost, because being disabled also has more 'externalities' is a pretty vindictive move.
Not to mention the fact that it means rich folks get to do the 'wrong thing' more, and with less significant personal consequences.
Sounds like a terrible system.
It's true the rich do get to waste more, but that's already the case. At least then they would pay for it. That's extra money that could go to help the poor.
I'm not talking about charity, either. I'd want the government to make up the difference.
Here, I can see an easier solution than mason jars being two hemispherical plastic halves shrink wrapped together with a perforated area that's easy to tear, like is found on drink containers. Make it out of a bioplastic and you have something that's accessible and environmentally friendly.
To pre-answer, no, getting the produce person to help you isn't a real good option. It's doubtful that you're going to want the orange right then, and having a peeled orange in even a produce bag is going to be more problematic than a harder container. So, a harder container that's relatively sealed will help keep it a few days until the person's ready to eat it.
If you enter a Wal-Mart hoping to leave with an orange you didn't peel yourself, you're going to get frustrated. If you try the same in Publix, you're going to have a much better experience. But you will pay more on average shopping at the latter, as they very obviously prioritize more highly their employee training, employee wages, and customer service.
Last time I was in Wal-Mart, I had a hard enough time just buying a video game locked up behind glass. No one was on duty in the department. Hey, no problem. I picked up the phone behind the desk and started dialing the internal numbers printed on the sticker for the manager's office, customer service, the checkouts, anywhere, hoping to ask someone to come back and help a customer. Nobody picked up, from any extension I tried, after any number of rings. If I were shopping for myself, I would have left (or having learned from previous experience, never entered the store in the first place). But I was already helping someone else shop, so eventually someone finally showed up to do nothing more than turn a key and operate the sale terminal.
I imagine that there are an awful lot of people who, like me, would prefer to not ask anyone for help with anything. I have occasionally been asked by my fellow customers in a store of smaller stature to help them reach something, and I can tell that it makes them uncomfortable to need to do that when everyone else can just grab anything at will. When I'm in a situation where I am forced by store policy to get the assistance of a store employee in order to make a purchase, and there is no employee there to assist customers, I can easily extrapolate that out to people who need more help than other customers.
In my opinion this complex consist part out of learned behavior decades ago, remainders of slightly masochist protestant life style ethics and prolonged exposure to green-washing.
Plastics are not bad by default compared to all other alternatives¹. Bad is a waste of energy and resources as is littering instead of a closed product life chain.
http://cascade.uoregon.edu/fall2012/expert/expert-article/
¹How many paper tissues and water+detergent is used at home for preparing a single orange compared to an efficient peeling processing line, that also hopefully doesn't discard the peels in a mixed waste disposal.
I would even guess a random pre-peeled orange might even have a higher chance of a smaller footprint in an life-cycle assessment, than a regular orange that has a higher chance of never never being sold or eaten after purchase.
Of course, there's also the problem of things like the garbage gyres in the oceans, and of course litter on the land. The latter is solvable I think through cultural changes. In first-world countries litter isn't that much of a problem any more; it became socially unacceptable to litter, just like it became socially unacceptable to smoke indoors.
I would imagine that mining trash for aluminium might be more feasible but the quantities would have to justify the operation.
Is it really lazy? How much time does it take to peel an orange? How much is your time worth? There you go.
And that's not even getting to the health issues of it. If you buy a peeled orange, you are more likely to eat it than an unpeeled one. Just like placing a candy jar on the other side of the room makes people eat 10x less candy, than when it's conveniently placed next to them. We should put orange peels on unhealthy food.
I know this is true, because I have a bunch of unpeeled oranges going bad, but the other fruit is all eaten. Everytime I think I might like an orange, my brain tells me "eh, maybe later". And they never get eaten.
My opinion is that everyone would be better off in larger living groups where everyone contributes labor for others. To each according to their need, from each according to their ability' and all that nonsense. I understand that this idea is considered ridiculous and naive by prevailing wisdom, but whatever /shrug
If this is really a common issue (I have no idea I haven't thought about peeling oranges before in this way) and these sell at fast pace, I see no problem. But if store only sells a couple each week and rest are just left to rot then I feel like these probably shouldn't be sold. Or maybe author could ask their local store to implement some sort of "pay extra and we'll peel 'em" deal.
In reality grocery stores are incredibly mercenary, if they do something it's almost certain that it contributes to the bottom line.
This is the fundamental issue with meme outrage. It almost always relies on assuming the complex incentive structure that leads to something existing in the world reduces to 'lazy idiots made it happen'. Looking for nuance in the subject of the meme almost always works against this assumption.
when does this end?
Yes disabled people shouldn't have any special rights but they should have the same rights as everyone else, the right to live as functional life as possible, if that requires that the rest of society make some accommodations then that's fine by me.
Any society is the sum of its parts, all its parts and should be judged on how it treats everyone able bodied and not.
This proves too much. If someone living a functional life requires, say $1 billion, then your argument says they have a right to it, while I expect the vast majority would disagree.
I think the problem here is really the negative externality of waste. The proper response is to charge a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax, so the actual societal cost is passed on to the consumer. Then no one can complain that someone's wasting, because their cost perfectly cancels out the effect.
Separately, we can subsidise the cost for people who can't afford it, but that's a different discussion from allowing wasteful products (that people are willing to pay for) to exist in the first place.
A regim loving all of this, and nice desgin/architecture and also going to the conclusion disabled people are a waste ... I don't say it to not win a Godwin point.
But really social networks don't bring the best out of Humanity.
The internet era of NNTP newsgroups, early web had some dark parts but it was more looking like an agora than the arena it has became.
Modern internet is becoming scary.