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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

So is this a case of widescale availability bias and now everyone is nitpicking airline fastener status?

Or is this genuinely a widescale reduction in maintenance frequency, care and engineering?

Could be a bit of both also I suppose

However increasingly I have been asking a question to determine something like this: “If the overall system is improving, would we see more or less of these kind of events?”

In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID. Understandably or not, a core backbone of our infrastructure - hope for the future - is basically gone.

So that’s why to me it’s not just availability bias, you can see it almost everywhere and it’s well documented that “give a shit” is not improving, and that means core infrastructure is going to start failing rapidly.

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I agree on the "not giving a shit" part and in my observation, the effect is also strong in Germany and Italy.

But I believe it's not due to Covid. While Covid was happening, it became blatantly obvious that wealthy investors can still make 40% appreciation from their housing investments even while the majority of the population was struggling just to get by (and pay their rent). Similarly, investors profited handsomely from stock price increases while the same companies (whose market cap went up) were abandoning their employees, in some cases slashing an entire division with just a prerecorded Zoom call.

In short, Covid showed everyone that there's 0 loyalty for the little man and that trickle down doesn't work.

And I can easily understand how the realisation that hard work will almost never earn you a good place in society will lead to people avoiding the hard work.

> and that trickle down doesn't work

This isn't a problem with "trickle down". There's more demand than supply, so prices go up. Make your population grow more slowly, or build more houses, or pay more to live in smaller places. Those are your only options.

Another option would be to distribute wealth more fairly, so e.g. inner city apartments are used for young professionals instead of as occasional holiday homes for the wealthy.

Imagining the state as a perfect parent who'll make everything fair, so should have all the power, is really not a great option, I think. It's better to think of it as a service provider that should get out of the way where possible, including managing things like supply and demand.

The state exists to help solve collective action problems. It’s not about giving it more power, it’s about making it do its job. Taxation is a primary tool for dealing with collective action problems to help align incentives. If people don’t give a shit because the game is rigged, and they know the game is rigged, you have to change incentives so at least people are happy to play the rigged game.

> The state exists to help solve collective action problems. It’s not about giving it more power, it’s about making it do its job.

This is licence to do anything. That's far too broad. E.g. in this case: you're defining too much demand vs supply as a collective action problem, when it's really a political problem (net immigration to country), a state problem (net immigration to particular cities) and another state problem (too costly to build to make it worth people's while). Calling that a "collective action problem" is taking what's a pretty detailed picture and redrawing it in crayon, and then calling for a parent to "solve" it. Just fix the things that need fixing, and leave the things that you want left alone (but you accept the consequences of). Don't give power where it's not needed. Your parents weren't perfect, and the state is far less likely to get it right than your parents were.

Flight attendants on my last flight were joking with people in the exit row that during the pre flight check they are not actually locking the door, all they do is engage/arm the slide. The main male flight attendant said “doors are already locked!” and I said - but are the bolts tight? Guys face went absolutely frozen for a second and then he chuckled and said “we’ll be fine”

> In my experience, it actually is that the level of responsibility that workers are taking for their jobs has plummeted since COVID.

I have heard this repeated a ton. I see it too, but maybe I'm just being trained to see it. Is this an American thing, or do other people in other countries experience this too?

Anecdotally, I don’t feel this way about “giving a shit” in japan. We did have inflation and other issues, but I didn’t notice any big change of the sort here.

The Japanese nut hasn't cracked yet, they're trying pretty hard though. Stay strong.

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