well, except for the fact that, as the article states, it doesn't scale. Or rather, it scales poorly: the quality of care provided by a nation state is going to differ in degree and quality compared to the 1:1 care that humans probably need (and certainly traumatised humans).
I'm not sure this comes as a surprise to anyone except for those who have had no interaction with state-provided social services. I'd also say that a level of care that does not reach to that 1:1 standard is still appreciably better than no care, which may be what one might otherwise receive.
The open question is can we work out better, decentralized ways of providing support that take advantage of the new social technologies that we've developed since the construction of the modern state and its welfare services in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Care doesn't scale, but a lot of activities around care should be scalable. A caregiver can be helped so they can spend as little time as possible on auxiliary tasks like admin or logistics.
I don't think there is any contradiction here. Government care can work, but it simply cannot benefit from economies of scale. Gonna need to double the income tax to pay for elders that have been abandoned by their children.
He means that they messed up by investing in their children and providing them a good life instead of putting everything in an index fund. They didn't realize the rug pull they were about to eat.
Just because the government does something, doesn't mean it has to be centralised. Eventually the care has to be given from one human to another human. On the other hand, it shouldn't matter where you live to receive care or how good the care is.
And the week in which private companies will be able to provide this, is the same week which has two Tuesdays.
Care is not something that is magically performed by the state or money.
At some point someone has to physically wash and feed the elderly in the retirement homes.
If past governments or cultural environments messed up demographics, states might end up with a significant fraction (Germany already has 22% aged 65+) of the population in need of that care, which requires another significant share of the population to just do that instead of producing actual stuff.
This will either get ugly in one way or another or we will need scalable tech solutions.
Actually... they kinda can? If they don't work, they get deported back. Also they are in debt to the agency that got them here. It's a hair above modern slavery the way it currently works, especially in EU countries with more... lax standards than Germany.
lol, nice joke, how many illegals has Germany for example deported? Deporting people in the EU is a huge hassle and the source countries often don't want to cooperate in taking back people. You'll have to murder someone to actually get the authorities in the EU go through the hassle of deporting you, but refusing to work shit jobs isn't enough to get you deported, just have your welfare access cut off.
Plus they can also claim asylum once they get here to escape their slave drivers and not get deported.
>especially in EU countries with more... lax standards than Germany
Germany already has lax standards on that regard. Many there are raking in huge profits by bringing in these vulnerable workers and having them work in terrible conditions.
> lol, how many illegals has Germany for example deported? Deporting people in the EU is a huge hassle and the source countries often don't want to cooperate in taking back people.
> Plus they can also claim asylum once they get here to escape their slave employers and not get deported.
You are confusing two groups of people. One group consists of illegal migrants, usually from MENA countries that claim asylum and are a hassle to deport back.
Migrant workers usually come from southeast Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines..) and there is no problem sending them back because those countries are considered safe. Also they got families back home, their motivation is not really to stay here long term but to earn a decent amount of money (from their perspective). And despite sometimes poor treatment and shitty jobs, EU is a much better place to work than gulf countries.
No, I read what you wrote and I meant what I said. Let me explain again: people are willing to do anything, even jobs they dislike, just to get a visa. That doesn't mean they'll want keep doing that shitty job once they get the visa and can start looking for workarounds. Otherwise there wouldn't be a shortage of staff in those sectors if all workers would stick around for long.
I don't think anyone's talking about forcing, or slavery.
Foreign workers are improving their lot (and that of their families back home). In a world where they don't have the same economic opportunities in their home countries, and the locals don't want to do those "shit jobs", it's a win win.
Even talking about shit jobs is pejorative. Foreign workers don't just pick fruit, they're also essential talent in healthcare and other critical areas.
Why is that? Do you think shit jobs don't exist? You think wiping other old people's asses is NOT a shit job? Are you lining up for these kinds of jobs yourself or did you work and study hard to not have to do them because you knew those jobs are shit and are usually given to the lowest underclass class of people who don't have better options due to various factors?
> Foreign workers don't just pick fruit
I never said such thing. The thread I replied was about importing workers for elderly care.
You're trying to project some things I didn't say onto me.
They're promised path to citizenship and an ok money. Then they discover that they work for an agency that takes away big chunk of their money. They can not change the employer since they'll be deported etc. etc. And the worst part is that at the end they still have to leave the country.
The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently than private enterprise.
That means armies, judiciaries, policing municipalities, governance amongst others.
They address issues like management of the commons.
This does not translate into scaled care - care for orphans (from the article) still needs large numbers of skilled manpower, which is in short supply across the world.
These services are also often underfunded, since they are not really a first class citizen for voters.
Voters today, are also deeply targeted by emotional campaigns and identity campaigns, since that is the current political state of the art.
The state can be efficient, but some things don’t scale unless they are also resourced correctly.
Such services will also be amongst the first to cut, since “X will render it obsolete”, is a promise as old as time, and aren’t directly tied to overall societal survival.
Compared to something like defense / emergency funding
My argument is, that care is a public good. There will never be a situation in which care can fund itself. To fund care is a political decision and when the decision is made to to not fund it or leave to a market or private enterprises it will fail, because private enterprises need something which will eventually scale.
> The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently
The government does not provide a more efficient military or education. It compels individuals to pay for something which is in the collective good, but not their personal interest.
Economists argue markets are efficient because of the incentive structure they place on actors. There is a plethora of writing about government inefficiencies due to not having these. It the most distilled form: they are insulated from both positive and negative consequences of behaving efficiently.
Due to this, government entities have a unique set of traits, but efficiency tends to not be one of them. But who cares? Efficiency isn't always the goal. When it comes to making laws, efficiency isn't the goal, long term values are more important.
The post office was created with full knowledge that it would be a net loss, but it was felt to be institutionally important to have universal access to communication across the nation. Now that this is an antiquated method of communication, and there is a market for the remaining services, it is mostly an inefficient make-work program for a well organized voting block.
Now you I can imagine all the distopian problems of a private military, but I'm going to guess efficiency is not one of those (The US Gov believe Blackwater saves them money, btw).
Doing it by a state does not make it magically scale in any way shape or form. You still need something like one-to-one or one-to-a-few for care work to be effective. Trying to provide it through the government does absolutely nothing to change this fact.
I don't think it's implying that at all. Whether or not you agree with the statement, it's referring to a specific moment. Most parents will have many moments with their children.
> With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle.
The point of the article is that you’ll never achieve economies of scale (10, 100, 1000x) for situations that require individualized attention, no matter how much engineering effort you put into it.
No, because normal healthy children do not require 24/7 care, even as newborns.
Children in care do, partly because of the circumstances that led to them being in care, but mostly because the State in general is not willing to accept the same risk profile as individual parents.
I think it comes down to the many meaning of the word "care" in English. The state is certainly willing to accept way greater risk than the individual parent, in many circumstances. If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adults per child (but also less obviously).
The risk profile is different, if you have a newborn in hospital, then that child may have their parent present at all times, plus staff, but it might also be one or two nurses and an on-call doctor for any number of babies. In some sense the potential risk is greater, but it's also more professionally measured.
>The state is certainly willing to accept way greater risk than the individual parent, in many circumstances.
I don't think that's true.
> If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adults per child (but also less obviously).
That's a much lower care ratio than parents accepted before regulation, so I think you're arguing against your own point here.
Those ratios are heavily debated in Denmark for being absolutely terrible. Parents have been complaining for years that the ratio of especially children for 4 to 6 are awful (typically 7 children per adult).
They might be a improvement in other countries, but they are considered a move in the wrong direction here, because they are worse than previously.
No, it's saying that _in any moment_ you can only focus deeply on, and thus care for, one other person. And if you have to care for multiple people, then you have to shift your focus moment to moment.
As a parent, can confirm. To give an example, it's really hard to hold and comfort two crying kids at the same time. When the toddlers are melting, they really want your whole attention and don't want to share it. If they're melting because they got in a fight with each other, it really takes an adult per toddler to help calm them.
That doesn't mean I can't love and care deeply for both kids, it just means you can only implement that caring with one at a time.
I think he's generalizing the point a bit and not all situations are like that. But it's close enough to accurate to be valid. Care doesn't scale.
This is ultimately a dichotomy between having the family unit or "the state" as the central point of governance. Many totalitarian regimes looked at newborns as "belonging to the state". The result is a unified mass person who dresses, thinks and acts in predictable ways.
The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.
Then I'm completely lost on how it is relevant to an article that specifically mentions the care of orphans as its central example for how care does not scale.
I think the idea is that many totalitarian systems treat every child as an orphan, in some cases taking them physically away from their parents and then have people look after the children as a job. Hence the comparable situation.
And, of course, all such systems I've ever read about do not care about the practical limitation of 1 caretaker per 1 child. I believe youth services in the Netherlands, for example, has 1 caretaker (effectively available to the child) per 15 children, or 7 or 8 if they're trouble. Does this work? No, of course not. They don't care. The kids grow up caring for nobody, probably because effectively nobody cares for them. One person watching 15 children can only hope to prevent disasters, if that, they cannot provide decent attention to children. By the standards of this article, there's probably 2 people who work in the same "group". If there's a third one, they will be shared between at least to groups. So 2 to 2.5 per 15 children ... comes to one parent figure per 7 children, which is a third to a fourth of the care children would receive in even a huge family, and much less than in a small family.
> I think the idea is that many totalitarian systems treat every child as an orphan
This idea is just wrong. Wrong isn't strong enough, it's conterfactual. At most some of them treated female bodies as owned by the state. I do not remember any example of totalitarian society where a child of a political opposant would be treated the same as any military child. Maybe Salazar? But even then, it was so corporate-aligned I doubt children from owners were treated the same as children from workers at anytime.
Totalitarian regimes often uphold traditional values like family as a means of control, promoting unity and loyalty to the state-yet they’ll redefine these values whenever it suits their ideology.
That's not really true. Marxism-Leninism famously sought to abolish the family and the Soviet union performed quite a few experiments in communal rearing of children in it's early years.
The reason why totalitarian regimes end up promoting traditional values relations is that to them the only imperative superior to ideology is survival.
There is a reason the Soviet Union backed off from it's repression of religion in the middle of WW2.
Early Soviet Union did try to reshape family, but it went back on it eventually, seeing the value of the conservative family model in building social cohesion and loyalty.
Expressed differently: they tried to abolish the family, found that doing so created more problems then they solved, and backed off in order to avoid tearing their country apart.
They discovered that in some things doing nothing is better than doing something, but Westerners of all political stripes (both for or against authoritarianism) chronically make the mistake of assuming that everything that a totalitarian state does is done with some grand plan in mind rather than them just flailing about to find a centralized policy that kinda-sorta works.
Your comment reminds me a lot of modern speculation about China's grand plans. Sometimes a government chooses not to touch something because they learned from bad experience that they'll break it if they do, not because they're playing 4D chess manipulating it behind the scenes.
Not really, just the notion that trying to abolish family is somehow the hallmark of totalitarianism doesn’t seem like sound reasoning, and indeed it isn’t confirmed by historical examples.
> 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship
> One year after the Bolsheviks took power, they ratified the 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship. The revolutionary jurists, led by Alexander Goikhbarg, adhered to the revolutionary principals of Marx, Engels, and Lenin when drafting the codes. Goikhbarg considered the nuclear family unit to be a necessary but transitive social arrangement that would quickly be phased out by the growing communal resources of the state and would eventually "wither away". The jurists intended for the code to provide a temporary legal framework to maintain protections for women and children until a system of total communal support could be established.
Bolsheviks were absolutely pushing quite radical ideas on sex, rekationships and family in the early 20s e.g. Kollontai with her Glass of water theory.
I would argue that the main reason why USSR changed so spectacularly circa WW2 is because Stalin was personally very socially conservative in many ways. It wasn't just religion during WW2 - the country reverted to traditional gender roles in general in many ways, banned abortion, made homosexuality illegal again etc. Most of the early extreme experiments that really didn't work out were already long abandoned by then.
> the only imperative superior to ideology is survival
I think it's more that well-meaning ideologues are easily replaced by self-serving pragmatists in post-revolutionary turmoil. There were plenty of Marxists in Russia vying for power, in the early days. Lenin didn't win based on ideological purity; he won based on political strength. And say what you will about Lenin—he did have beliefs and he did have a real ideology. Stalin only cared about Stalin, and he claimed to believe whatever was convenient for him in the moment.
> Have you ever been there and met the uniform mass persons?
I was born in Eastern Europe in a society headed in this direction. I observed its transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You felt the overarching power of the state from as early as the kindergarten. Signs of individuality were suppressed and all children were supposed to do things "the right way". When such an institution decided that a child "systematically misbehaves", it was able to take the child away from its parents in another orphanage-like institution that was supposed to teach them good socialist manners. Eventually some of them would end up seriously harassed, physically-ill and sent to an anonymous grave in the backyard of that institution.
I grew up in the USSR, and in the kindergarten, our teacher actually tried to convince us that the correct 5 year old kid's answer to the question, "which person do you love the most?" ought to be Lenin, and not e.g. "mom".
That said, in practice, the quality of indoctrination was extremely variable for the same reason why it was variable for everything else - most people weren't really buying into it themselves, and so even if they were in a position where they were expected to indoctrinate, they did the bare minimum that was demanded of them, which usually wasn't very convincing. I didn't get to witness it as an adult, but according to my mother, by the time you were old enough for Komsomol, very few still had their rose-tinted glasses on.
"Care" doesn't scale. You can't just replace "the family" with some industrialized system of raising children and get the same results. Not being able to scale "care" and make it more efficient is almost tautological, really.
> Besides, what countries are you talking about?
North Korea? Former Soviet Union?
At the very least appearance of conformity was ruthlessly enforced and even private conversations were infiltrated to detect dissent.
You’re describing the extremes on a spectrum, but you only go to one of the extremes, which exposes your bias.
And it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, since shifting more care work towards society doesn’t equate to a path toward totalitarianism. You’re conflating socialism with totalitarianism. Understandable, but misguided.
Frankly, your whole premise is based on a capitalist narrative that keeps workers in their place because individual care work is so inefficient—it drains energy that could otherwise be channeled into organizing worker councils to balance out the power now disproportionately held by banks, IT corporations, political parties, and the military-industrial complex.
I’m aware that I may come across as an arrogant prick in this comment. I wish I had more time to craft a friendlier response with more sources and explanation, but I simply don’t. I need to work to feed my children and their mother, but anyway, here’s a reading list for anyone who’s interested:
"Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher - Fisher discusses how capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, including care work, and critiques the idea that alternatives like socialism lead to totalitarianism.
"Workers of the World: Essays Toward a New History of the Working Class" by Philip A. H. G. D. Van der Linden - This collection explores the historical context of labor movements and the importance of organizing against disproportionate power structures.
"The Care Crisis: What’s Wrong with Care and How to Fix It" by the Institute of Public Policy Research - This report outlines the societal implications of care work and its impact on worker organization.
"Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
The whole point is scaling "care work" is almost oxymoronic. Care is only quality care when there are a small number of carers per those being cared for. To make it "efficient" is to turn children, the addicted, the disabled, and the elderly into cattle.
> "Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
This reveals one of the poorly hid secrets of progressive ideology. Progressives LOVE Capitalism and want to spread it to encompass every human interaction. Caring for your own home, your own children, anything someone might do for a friend or a loved one MUST be turned into a financial transaction with an explicit contract.
> This reveals one of the poorly hid secrets of progressive ideology. Progressives LOVE Capitalism and want to spread it to encompass every human interaction
this is one of the fascinating consequences of "capitalist realism". often people who attempt to criticize the system end up describing a form of capitalism that they would prefer to participate in. picturing a world that isn't the one you know is really difficult. questioning everything is a painful and slow process.
I didn’t advocate for "scaling" care work in any way. The point is that care work needs adequate support and funding—not efficiency measures to turn it into a production line. Right now, schools and childcare services are chronically underfunded, with too few teachers and caregivers for the number of children needing attention. Meanwhile, parents with limited support systems work full-time just to make ends meet, only to watch a large portion of their income go straight to childcare costs.
The conservative approach you’re defending offloads all responsibility to the individual and the nuclear family, which means that in reality, women often end up trapped in unpaid care roles, increasingly dependent on their spouses' income. That’s not freedom, nor does it offer any dignity or choice; it’s a conservative agenda dressed up as “individual responsibility,” which only entrenches inequality and dependence within families.
And let’s address this twisted notion that anyone who wants state-funded support for care services somehow thinks of people as "cattle." It's laughable—except it’s also insulting. So, to put it bluntly: go fuck yourself for even suggesting that. Care, when adequately supported and dignified, recognizes people’s humanity rather than ignoring it.
As for the accusation that progressives want to monetize and commodify every human relationship, look at who benefits from the status quo. Conservatives would rather sacrifice people’s well-being to "traditional values," while keeping corporate interests safe from any pressure to reinvest in the society they profit from. I don’t see any corporate executives or capitalists hesitating to send their own kids off to private schools and exclusive care, expecting other people’s children to manage with nothing.
So let’s be clear: asking for social investments in care isn’t “capitalist.” It’s about making sure people aren’t left to fend for themselves, and about affording everyone—children, the elderly, those with disabilities, and the rest of us—a dignified life. And if that offends the conservative agenda, then good.
Our principal exports, all labelled and packed,
At the ends of the earth are delivered intact:
Our soap or our salmon can travel in tins
Between the two poles and as like as two pins;
So that Lancashire merchants whenever they like
Can water the beer of a man in Klondike
Or poison the meat of a man in Bombay;
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.
Songs of Education: II. Geography by G. K. Chesterton
This is a pretty big realization and one that resonates strongly with me. As an engineer, parenting can be frustrating, of course for the usual reasons, but also because you realize there’s really no way to “hack” it.
I feel like we as a society need to acknowledge that this probably applies to childcare, teaching, health and elder care to a large extent. That no matter how much private sector ingenuity you apply to some field, there is a hard upper bound to how much efficiency you can achieve. Cost savings basically just require making hard choices about who gets what.
I think some of the healthcare changes during my lifetime have increased efficiency and been fine (maybe even good) for patients.
I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
I suspect aspects of this apply to teaching (why does every calc teacher need to give the lecture? Why not have the top 1% of them in that skill record lectures with excellent production quality/editing and have students watch those?)
Yes, there are upper bounds, but I think even +50% or +100% might be possible with minimal (or in the calc case, negative) losses. Those efficiencies can really matter when someone else has to pay the bill.
>I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
The statistical you is paying statistically much more than the historical equivalent. The situation is far more complex than that. There's a million variables here. Changes in services rendered, changes in outcomes, relative wage differences, more parties taking a cut of any given transaction, more "make work" prior to rending specialized care, etc, etc.
Outcomes are better than they were 40yr ago but is that because of the changes or despite them?
> Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse.
Weren't these always done by nurses? The doctor would do the determination of what you get, but nurse being the one executing these is something that was here for decades.
I question your teaching comment. Sitting there and receiving a lecture is a rather small part of learning (varies per student). For the rest of it you're going to find that class size is by far the biggest determiner of success.
I wonder how the best teacher in the world teaching 5 classes of 40 would stack up against 200 people chosen at random from a pool who had already passed that class working 1:1 for 1 hr per day. Probably the ideal case is somewhere in the middle, but the point is that it's allocation of the teacher's time, and not production quality, that's the bottleneck when it comes to scaling teaching.
I meant to expand that to clarify that other aspects (supporting students as they work to apply the lectured material) would/must be done 1:1 in person, but the core lecture can/should be delivered by those with particular skills in that area and that we could apply extra effort to editing/production value.
My son's calc class is taught via watch the lectures online/at-home and then apply them in class and at-home via exercises. The only difference from what I proposed is that the same teacher pre-recorded the lectures, which seems to a practical solution but not an inherently necessary constraint (and there are likely thousands of calc teachers making average quality such videos).
But absolutely a personalized teacher must be available 1:1 for at least part of the overall process.
Yes - to me the OP means solving issues ahead of time.... create the vaccine 1x or treat the virus causing the issue millions of times.
I have spent enough of this year injured due to my own adventure sport aggressive mis steps. I was MUCH less productive during this period than before or now due to injury.
Had I not needed to deal with that, is the most productive self and that has a exponential effect society.
Whats much more important, empathy doesn't scale. Care can be established. But no one will ever know about its quality. I know what I am talking about, I visited a k12 school for the blind, and have a mentally unstable mother. Nobody ever asked me if I am happy/content at home. They all assumed my mother is doing her best. My life only started when I managed to escape from every kind of care. Institutionalized care is the worst, because its lacking empathy the most...
I think in the future, descendants of today's LLM models and some future version of Tesla's Optimus could create a paradigm shift in how care is given.
I'm hopeful that when I get old, and inevitably come to need some help with living, that such a solution will be available.
> I would like the option to die painlessly before I end up needing a robot to change my diaper.
My dad has Parkinson's and needs a human to change his diaper. If he had the option of a robot, I bet he'd take it. Not a painless die now option, though. As I write, where he is it's 8 o'clock in the morning and he's watching an old Larry David and eating an ice cream cone while my mom gets ready for them to go to breakfast.
That’s the idea of an option. Great if it works for him, but having spent a lot of time with Pieter Hintjens (of AMQP and ZeroMQ fame) before he chose the time of his own passing from recurrent cancer, the notion that this is not allowed in order to appease religious zealots is simply barbaric.
Let's then hope that the LLM solution is FOSS so that relatives and the one being cared for can be in control of the service and avoid enshittification.
I think this is a gross and psychopathic vision of the future.
Tell your grandmother that you're going to automate away her need for human connection. What a terrible indignity. I hate my industry.
Psychopathic? I think that's a ridiculous statement. No-one said anything about automating any human connection. I can tell you that my wife is a full time carer for her parents, and though she does it willingly and with love, it exerts a great toll on her, both physically, and mentally. So if we're going to far-too-easily use words like "psychopathic" - I could just as well say that ignoring that cost is psychopathic. Knowing what her role as a carer has cost her in terms of quality of life, I would never want to subject my children to the same. That is entirely different to maintaining human connection with older relatives.
> No-one said anything about automating any human connection
Maybe I was inferring the wrong thing, and if so I apologize, but the context of this comment was invoking LLMs and humanoid robots in a discussion about how "care doesn't scale". Like of course automation and technology should do things to make the lives of the elderly easier, but I would not classify any action done by a machine as "care". My dishwasher is a great convenience, but I would never classify my relationship with it as one of "caring".
> Knowing what her role as a carer has cost her in terms of quality of life, I would never want to subject my children to the same
Of course that's a problem. The answer though, IMO, is creating a society where we value elder care more, and have more programs to provide human support and connection to the elderly. I strongly feel like this isn't something which we can or should automate away.
Perhaps it is a question of the different meanings the word care can take. Care in its normal everyday usage is indeed a natural human emotion, however this was not the subject of my post.
"Carers", are people who perform functions for people unable to do them themselves. Whether they "care" or not for their charges is not directly relevant (though often they are relatives, and certainly do care for, and love the people they are helping very much). Not always though - consider a "care home", which is essentially a dumping ground for the old and inconveniently frail. Having seen the inside of a few such places, I very much do not want to end up in one.
Enter the Robots, and technologies such as the LLM. In my imagination, a robot equipped with some facility with language, could act as an assistant for an elderly person, allowing them to maintain their independence for much longer without a human carer. This is not a replacement for human connection with their loved ones, but it is a replacement for putting them in a care home, or having ones own children spend part of their lives unable to have a job, or a normal social life, due to complex care requirements of some relative.
For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding. However I'm interest to hear your thoughts.
> For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding
I think so as well-- I'm glad you replied.
We certainly agree on the problem of bad care homes. We've all seen and heard the horror stories, and it's really unacceptable what's going on at a lot of these places. The question is, would unscrupulous care homes buy a robot and re-task workers with providing more social care to residents, or would they simply lay off the workers?
For a pretty large chunk of the population, care workers are the only source of regular human interactions. As such, I would make the argument that the necessity for these tasks to be completed by a human is, in many cases, a feature, not a bug.
This has been well-known for ages and is a major subject of feminist studies. Care jobs are mostly feminine, and don't scale, and this dichotomy plays a big role in the overall wage gap.
There's a million examples of tech utopianists walking head-first into ideas and even entire disciplines they previously dismissed as irrelevant or outdated.
I have what I think it's a very good article on the economy of care - making exactly this point and others, but it's in the dungeon of peer review for more than one year. And the reviewers do not even answer my emails.
A lot of what makes society and politics so hard comes from the fact that humans have among the most demanding offspring of any living creature. This starts with pregnancy and birth which is a life threatening medical condition with a high mortality rate without modern medicine. We can’t reproduce and raise our children without dedicating gigantic amounts of energy to it, causing an inherent tension between the need to do so and the desires of both individuals and entities like corporations and states that want claim to that labor.
If we laid eggs and our young were viable more quickly our politics would be orders of magnitude simpler. It would basically be the politics of twenty somethings, but for everyone.
On the plus side, it’s probably why we have among the longest life spans of any land mammal. Grandparents helped with child rearing, so societies with longevity probably did a better job raising children.
That is partly true due to biology. But it's partially culturally inflicted.
In previous decades kids were allowed to do much more unsupervised. And the pressure to prepare for high stakes college admissions from early ages was much less extreme.
Depends on what you mean by "care for". Calling your parents a few times a week to make sure they're doing OK and dropping by on the weekend doesn't take too much time and effort. But as people get older they need more and more care. Caring for one person with dementia or other similar problems that comes with aging is for all intents and purposes a full time job.
And eventually if you can't afford to become unemployed to do it or pay full time caregivers, you need to move them to some kind of care home where there is minor scaling effect. Being housed together, the residents can share caregivers since most do not need continuous help.
A common arrangement is a board and care home with about 4 residents and 2 caregivers who work mostly non-overlapping shifts, and one sleeps onsite to (hopefully) be able to handle overnight care needs.
A larger place can scale a bit better. E.g. 10-20 residents can have 5-10 staff on various shifts. But some staff could be cooks or handle cleaning while others focus more on the residents' needs. And at this level of staffing, they can manage to have an overnight shift with someone who remains awake to keep an eye on things, as well as probably having other(s) sleep onsite to be on call to help with bigger events.
I agree with you, but I read the article as saying you can't care deeply about more than one person at literally the same instant. Your attention is directed to one or the other.
But I think even that's not literally true e.g. the social worker could make dinner for all four kids at once. And probably converse with all four of them while doing it!
But, I think I agree with the broader point that care doesn't scale, even if it does scale slightly greater than 1.
> Scale isn’t bad, at least not necessarily. Industrial is perfectly capable of being better than custom. Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor.
This is not true; consider the argument that there is always a loss of quality in scaling. Industrial maybe better than average custom, but is always worse than best customs. Broadcast lecture is almost always worse than a tutor whose discourse is customised to student's current knowledge. (The word guru (literally, one who leads towards light) is wrongly translated to teacher, for which the word in sanskrit is shikshak.)
I don’t think that holds for everything. Industrial 3nm chips are probably better than whatever you would get if people tried to DIY this. Lots of things get better with scale: materials, precision machinery, process efficiency, power generation.
But there’s also plenty of things that don’t work this way. Care is one of the most extreme things that does not.
I think the argument is that someone with the knowledge to make 3nm chips could probably know how to make some very cool yet very expensive chips, but since they target a lot of people they probably make choices that would satisfy more people but maybe not as well
I agree the average tutor is better than the average lecturer. But if I watch a YouTube lecture, then I might have access to the best lecturer in the world, or at least a 99%ile lecturer, e.g 3blue1brown. This only works because of the scale -- it wouldn't be possible for millions to get access to tutors this good 1 on 1.
but can you argue with them for an indeterminate period of time in earnest dialogue until the idea goes CLICK inside your head? You cannot, and so the value is much lessened because that critical access isn’t present.
Do you always need that kind of prolonged argument whenever you learn a new concept?
> Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor.
University lectures work like that. First the general lecture, which has 300 students and is not interactive. Then the tutorial, where students who want extra help can consult individually with a TA. Attendance for tutorials was typically much lower in my experience, because a lot of students thought the lecture was plenty and wanted to spend the time on something else.
Except the argument is university lecture (classroom structure) doesn't work. A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes. Your argument about sufficiency can be made about books and is not relevant here.
> A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes.
Why are you convinced that personal tutors are so much more effective? I'd expect the average student to be slightly better-served by having a personal tutor, but not by much. After all, personal guidance is available from TAs when necessary—my point is that it typically isn't necessary.
Interesting maybe, but also one that lacks sources. It is entirely possible that this passed by me and I just didn't catch the thing mentioned in the blog post. But, I also can't find much in the way of any reference to it online. Not even a hint using various search terms and combinations as mentioned in the blog post.
It very much gives the impression of it being a story made up as a vehicle for the main point they are trying to make.
There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of.
It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that.
The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility.
And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunctional.
I think the same is true for our personal lives.
But the endless treadmill of self-optimization, side-hustles and ever more commitments leaves us unable to cope.
I can't help you with the title, but with another paragraph from that story, should you want to find it.
Paraphrasing from memory:
> When you are in a major Chinese city you may street sweepers sitting on the side walk chitchatting. The first thing you may think of it as waste that could be eliminated. But it also acts as a buffer.
It was the same problem for JIT supply chains falling apart during COVID.
It's very hard to sell slack to management and so in "well run organizations" it ends up trending towards zero. And then everyone is surprised at the resulting catastrophes.
It's pretty simple no, the model that is reasonable and antifragile is within our grasp, a model that includes degrees of error more than it reifies hewing towards 0 carrying costs. It's more the good will and good faith across the board to use that known simple math, as sneaky monkey minds in our midst see that if they defect they can win some edge in the short term (and again, a better model shows the true utility and total harmed effect) and then it's a race to the bottom and a world of basically the prisoners dilemma. Making that thinking anathema in human culture should be the focus. I don't know that a grass roots effort could out-compete existing networks of power and influence, nor that a total reset of players is possible either.
It's aligning the incentives of top management with the slightly longer term outcomes. If stock grants are based on this quarter's performance, "slack" seems much less important.
Exactly, if you get rewarded for the 5% improvements annually but are out before the once-a-decade near death experiences.. you end up with more Intels, GMs, Boeings, etc.
I think it referred to the classic efficiency vs latency tradeoff. Like when emergency vehicles are always on standby, which is inefficient, but allows them to roll out without delay. Conversely privatised rail lines squeeze out every ounce of capacity from the infrastructure resulting in delays when something, anything goes even slightly wrong.
I use this extensively when planning activities with my children. It's a fun challenge because they're both too young to tell the time, much less read, which are constraints one does not normally encounter in their work life.
I agree efficiency vs latency, but it's also "exploit vs explore" balance, work/life balance and more, leaving time for research, exploration, shooting the sh*t, decorating the office, buying christmas gifts at lunchtime, helping out co-workers etc.
I think "slack" is a much more general concept than efficiency vs latency. The slack itself allows low-latency response to emergencies but the activities that fill the slack time can be valuable in ways that often aren't legible to the org hierarchy.
hey, I hear you. Modern America is full of voices demanding you give them care/attention.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
It is overwhelming. See following comments on the need for slack/margin in capacity. Well, we also need it in emotional demands. Yet every commercially-moderated interaction in our society seems to be optimizing for making us care more about it, because that increases their revenue.
I really resent how our collective attention has been so commoditized. Advertising lies at the core of so many of our problems, and I'm not sure how we can come back.
This is why I recently fell in love with libraries. It is one of the few places where ads/manipulation to part you from your money is extremely limited and the demands are so chill.
"Want to borrow a book? Ok."
"Don't want to? Ok. Whatevs."
And even analysis paralysis is overcome with: "Why not both! Borrow two whole books!"
So, maybe interesting in the context of "creating scalable structures of aid and care", one of the big points I think that makes scaling hard is how much complexity gets pushed onto a central administrator. You have societies like certain Basque communities (see https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... ) where households are literally arranged in circular patterns, and there are obligations of care and service between you and your "first neighbor", "second neighbor", and so on, chains of dependencies moving clockwise and counterclockwise through the circle, allowing a potentially very large structure that still allows you to mostly interact with a small number of "near neighbors".
Quoting directly from the article:
"THE GIVING OF BREAD
Until the 1960’s, a fundamental circular exchange was the giving of blessed bread. Each household regards its neighbor to the right as its first neighbor
(The directions right and left are as viewed from the center of the circle so that right is clockwise and left is counterclockwise.)
The giving of bread took place weekly and was thought of as being given from first neighbor to first neighbor. That is, each Sunday a woman from one particular household, call it H_i, bought two loaves of bread to the church where it was blessed and partially used in a church ritual. Then, before sunset, a portion of the bread was given by H_i to her first neighbor, namely to H_{i+ 1}. The following week H_{i+1} was the bread-giver and H_{i+2} the bread-receiver. Thus, the giving (and receiving) of bread moved around the circle serially, taking about two years to complete one cycle of about 100 households. While each household was both a giver and receiver of bread, this mode differs from simple reciprocity; only if there were a total of two households would H_i and H_{i+1} directly reciprocate as each other’s first neighbor."
There are 4 workers taking turns looking after 4 kids. So while at any given time 1 worker is looking after 4 kids, you need 4 workers to cover all the shifts. Thus one-to-one
That's a very odd framing. So it works out to one worker per one shift/day? Wouldn't that be true if there were 10 or 20 kids yet still 1 worker per shift?
4 people taking care of 4 kids 24/7 in 24 hour shifts. From article:
> To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one. [...] But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost.
I don't think you need the ratio of worker:child to be 1:1 in order to provide 1:1 care.
The alternative might be 20 social workers taking care of a group of 20 kids. It's the same ratio of workers to kids, since no 1 worker will get to deeply know individuals in the group.
I agree 1:1 is confusing and not totally accurate but it's fine for illustrating the point.
Well 1-1 care for any given child at an average of 25% of the time. Which for social work is probably better than most alternatives, yet not as good as having a parent per one or two kids.
Anyway, I don't mean to nit pick. Everyone has to know their limits, and I'm sad to admit that I found I can barely handle two kids with two adults. And families managing 5+ kids strike me as over natural+healthy limits, unless they've a large extended family (who have capacity to help).
It muddies the point, because having 1 worker at a time (watching 4 kids) isn't really 1-to-1. And doing 24h shifts means kids have a different caretaker quite often, which complicates conflict resolution and other things that may span days.
Regardless, it's probably the best they can do and likely far better than orphanages with 20+ kids per adult. So the core message about scaling does stand. Even if the ratio described is actually worse and less scalable.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
‘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?
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.
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 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.
Heh, I know somebody that was really annoyed their builder wouldn't install conduit since it wasn't in the code or something and their gripe was "but its better than code".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Pretty sure no amount of participation in cooking can make children start liking food with specific tastes, like eggplants or celery. If they like it - great! I they don't like it, but parents do - well, _that_ kind of home-cooked food will never be liked.
(Unless you process them so much, and add so many spices, that they no longer have any original taste.. but by that point they are at "pre-packaged" level of cooking)
Speaking as someone who successfully involves their toddler in the kitchen: regardless of her great joy in being alllowed to participate and contribute (which you are completely right about), my daughter would still much rather prepare spaghetti for dinner than veggies.
Also, in some kind of weird benign parentification[0] twist, she now loves to feed me food, even if (or more like especially if) she doesn't like it.
So having fun with cooking food seems quite decoupled from her desire to eat it.
Children notoriously prefer consistent meals over diverse ones, home cooked or not. The issue with serving blueberries for example is that each blueberry is different. My mother home-cooked for me a boiled egg and rice porridge every morning, and it was that consistency that associated me with care.
Yes. And child psychologists will tell you that babies and children crave consistency, variety is not their thing. In fact, one of the reasons we as parents (adults) expose them to variety is so they develop an understanding of how to cope with inconsistencies. And it's always a careful balance, small amount of variety but mostly consistency.
And I can tell you most little kids love hard boiled eggs which I suspect is because they are incredibly consistent in texture and taste, unspoiled by some cook seasoning them or cooking them differently.
> Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love.
In most cases, this is probably due to the care givers training their children to prefer that kind of food because they don't make many home cooked meals.
I don't even know if it's true, though. When I was a kid, the best food in the world were the home made meals my grandmother made, especially on the holidays. Remember as a teenager telling my Grandma her meals were better than any restaurant I had ever eaten at, and meaning it in all sincerity.
Could you please stop posting flamewar- and ideological-battle-style comments to HN? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and it's not what HN is for.
Something to keep in mind is that industrial food usually has a lot of sugar and other additivies added to make it taste as good as possible. . Companies literally spend billions of dollars figuring this stuff out, of course the home made meal can't compete.
During fine dining, a meal may consist of small portions that even when added up together total less calories than a large bag of theater popcorn which many people are quite capable of going through.
No one will argue that the popcorn taste "better".
Simply put the popcorn is less satiating but more addictive to eat.
Meanwhile the fine dining meal, if done well, will be incredibly satiating and not leave one wanting for more.
Hyper-palitability is a thing. There are foods that are hard to stop eating (e.g. potato chips), and that do not fill people up no matter the caloric content.
Starbucks frappes are another example. They can easily have over 1000 calories, barely be satiating, and yet people desire them again and again.
I hope no one claims frappes or potato chips are the best tasting foods in the world. But they are both addictive as hell to consume.
That’s something I hate about other people. They just type out comments. I prefer to trigger the control centers of my brain to cause movement of my peripheral actuators to depress buttons on a purpose built device to compose textual information for transfer across the Internet.
No. Centralization isn't needed to scale, it's just needed to exploit scale. Exploitation has become so commonplace it's replaced everything as the primary "desirable metric". I'm writing this comment on a platform founded on the idea of exploitation being a desirable metric.
Try giving everyone housing without centralized production of things like nails, screws, siding electrical wire...
Decentralizization is fine sometimes, but a single huge nail factory is going to beat thousands backyard forges in (average/95th percentile) quality and especially in prices.
Sure, it's not required to build _some_ houses, but it's required for scale.
Backyard forges are OK if you have few hundred million people, most of them in farming, with most families living in a house with a a single room. But you cannot build New York on without large factories.
This isn't true though. Neither in theory nor in practice. A broad set of individual product quality has consistently declined throughout the industrial era - not least, infamously, one of your own examples: nails.
Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends instead to produce demonstrable reductions in individual quality. We're living in an age of unprecedented consumer waste due to this phenomenon. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent term (& while it may not be real in terms of being intentional it's definitely true in terms of increases in obsolescence-rates).
Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale?
That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever.
Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale and quality is not one of them.
> Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale?
Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails you buy today are wire nails. I don't know if it's possible to buy cut nails today from any large factories, but broadly speaking, manufacture of cut nails does not scale. The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand (nor quality assurance). Cut nails are still considered superior today.
If you look at antique diagrams of nails available for purchase, you'll see 20 or 30 varieties, all with very distinctly different designs. Those designs have converged on a single design for all applications, not because it's a better design, but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture. Flaws in the design are compensated for via material choice & worker skill.
There's likely thousands of such cases in industry.
This an empirical argument about nails. Are you just saying that to emphasize your confidence?
> cut nails
I just googled and there are literally dozens of brands of this product.
Even so this preference appears to be a niche opinion of artisan woodworkers, not a failure mode of furniture and construction.
> The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand
Yes it is. They wanted to pay less for nails and the cheaper manufacturing served that need. If it mattered they would pay more.
> but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture.
In other words, people like to reminisce about hand made goods. But when it comes to paying for them, they usually prefer the ones that work well at a fraction of the cost.
You can’t claim that intricate items with fine details are not manufacturable at scale (see the iPhone?). So your cause and effect are backwards. Manufacturing did not dictate old methods became less prevelant. Consumers did.
And once again, your claim that higher quality ones don’t exist is wrong too. I guarantee we can find a supplier of many varieties of decorative nails. They are just more expensive.
> Are you just saying that to emphasize your confidence? [...] people like to reminisce about hand made goods. [...] I guarantee we can find a supplier of many varieties of decorative nails
A nested HN thread is likely not the best place to go into great detail on the precise practicalities of trade work, & I know I can't expect any given commenter to become an expert in a possibly niche topic just to engage in discussion, but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with. Nobody is buying nails for their "decorative" qualities - they get embedded in materials. They're not a visual feature.
Decorative was my word to summarize your “catalog if 30 styles of nails”
> but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with
Let me summarize the key economic points that I feel have been dismissed:
- any kind of nail you want, you can buy right now.
- You can also buy nails of higher quality than anything that’s existed in preindustrial time
- popularity of which kind of nail is driven by demand
Whether it's a conscious strategy or an implicit outcome, planned obsolescence wouldn't be viable without centralisation. Centralisation is a tool of capitalism to achieve its goals.
yeah centralization is a proxy for trust and stability, it adds some friction on the edge to give you that benefit
i also think that ultimately no single system is best and that regular renegotiation about the amount of central vs decentral is key (something we should help people be better at)
I'd argue that centralization allows a scale that otherwise wouldn't have been possible, but at the cost of added fragility and externalized costs.
We produce way more corn in the US today than we could without a centralized industry, but we do so by subsidizing the hell out of an industry that is driven only by how much volume of corn is produced. Nutritional quality of the food produced is ignored, damage to the land is ignored, damage to the broader environment is ignored, etc.
We grow a small amount of corn on our land. We absolutely don't have as high or consistent yields as an industrial farm, but we also don't spray any poisons on the land and if the soil health was being negatively impacted we would know it pretty darn fast. Rain water from the corn patch runs down into the pond our cows drink from, another reason we wouldn't use poisons on the land. All of these are considerations one will likely make at a smaller scale that just won't happen with a centralized system driven by one or two primary goals (currently that's just money).
I was mainly thinking of care when I wrote this, but I think there is generally a trade off between centralisation and increases in efficiency, in some part given by standardisation, and increased fragility as more comes to depend on fewer things that aren’t a complete fit for what you are trying to do, or that might fail.
What exactly is the evidence, and how is it not exactly centralisation? All the advances in care that I can think of (those that actually unburden more humans from having to give their life to care) are brought to us by some sort of centralisation.
The comment comes from reading the article, then wondering how can societies make things scale? We make things scale by delegating our concerns to people who know and care more about specific outcomes, and helping them to make the differences that are required. Scale comes from people learning that things around them matter and that they are responsible for making them good.
In that case i'll ask for a clarificaiton on the link. From the article it seemed quite a clear cut case about activity types that dont scale.
Outsourcing the responsibility doesn't mean it scale, which seems contradicted by what you are saying. People learning that things matter and that they are responsible, doesn't change this does it?
The article noted that, when you care for someone, you give of yourself and your attention and you cannot spread this to a significant number of people. If you outsource the activity, then whoever you outsource it to has to pay attention in the same way. But the world is full of people that were cared for, and mostly quite well. So in that sense, care scales.
I am only really suggesting that scalable care schemes might be those that help people to support those they already have a connection with, and that organisation/coordination be managed on that level.
The article defines care "scarcity" rather narrowly, almost tautologically
> In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person
Yes, but there are many moments in a day / one's life, and care is needed and appreciated at various levels of "deepness". Further, how much care (and what type) is needed depends enormously on what society has managed to scale with the right organizational patterns etc.
So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need? Mathematically, there are 8 billion exemplars of the species roaming the planet and 1:1 caring takes care (pun) of the 4 billion.
Well, everyone's a kid for the first few years of their life, and children require a lot of care. The elderly require care. The unwell require care. Everyone wants care some of the time.
We do have cultural institutions to do much of this work. Parents care for kids. Adults care for aging parents. Romantic partnerships exist so that people can reciprocally care for each other. Still, we have to fill in the gaps for kids without parents, seniors without kids, and sick people. The demand for therapy and sex work proves that people will pay a lot of money to be cared for, even when they don't need it to survive.
> So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need?
Not only does care not scale, but the fact that other fields do scale is one of the sources of "cost disease" [0]. If software engineering is thousands of times more scalable than teaching, caring for children, injured or elderly people then all of those other jobs will need to pay more to prevent everyone quitting to become a software developer.
Q: How many Silicon Valley software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: They will refuse to change the lightbulb, claiming it "doesn't scale" unless the "lightbulb problem" is fixed globally ;)
In seriousness, enjoyed this article and it's a wise realization. I think the world would be a better place if more people take the time to be a good person to the people around them, rather than focusing so much on big picture issues.
I agree with your central point, but in my estimation, the entire world minus a very small percentage point only work on or care about small, short term solutions to problems.
And that is fine. Engineers are not social & feelers with high individual level empathy scores. So let them/us build large scaleable solutions with the individual 1-to-1 personal interaction removed.
What most don't understand is that the economy IS us caring for each other. When you go to a restaurant when you are hungry, or a store to get what you need, or a hospital when you get sick, you are getting care. Virtually most people are taking care of other people. And yes it doesn't scale because it takes all of us to care for each other.
> What most don't understand is that the economy IS us caring for each other.
But when those businesses we seek care from scale, the system is no longer closed.
A portion of the care I give or receive is siphoned off and sent to shareholders or a wealth business owner. When caring happens through capitalism, a portion of our care is depleted with every transaction.
It's an interesting conflict. As the businesses scales, small losses which would be acceptable in a smaller operation will scale as well. Maybe a mistake people make as they scale is being too quick to give up the extra couple french fries.
This reminds me of Clay Christensen's talk: How Will You Measure Your Life?[0] He compares how most people define success by how high up the hierarchy they get, against the individual effort of making a positive impact on the people around you.
Working well with a three one ratio does not scream scaling to me.
The when you have more need than care workers it falls apart, with no way to scale it besides hiring more out of a pool that may not exist at the price you were paying the previous ones.
If you think in terms of supply and demand, if they are already have the curves met, additional demand is going to scale more than linearly because you need more people at a higher pay.
Which is quite remarkable, because up until less than a century ago when women “entered the workforce” virtually every woman who had ever lived somehow managed to care for her 3+ children.
Incidentally, large families do scale sublinearly with respect to the parents. The reason why is that even with merely natural spacing by the time they have a fourth child, the oldest is in a position to provide significant assistance. Every mother with a large family that I’ve spoken to confirms that the difficulty peaks with the third child and then plateaus.
It is remarkable. I have one child, and it is by far the hardest thing I've ever done - far harder than any job I've had. It doesn't help that both parents are working full time. Maybe parenting has changed recently and we are too hands-on, but I can't imagine having 2, much less 3+ running around. Even if one of us stops working to raise the kids full time, it's way more taxing, physically and mentally, than working a white collar job and paying for child care.
I recall before we lived in nuclear families [somewhat recent phenomenon] communal raising was commonplace. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, neigbours, etc. would come help.
If it's 10, 20, 30, this doesn't work. This is the entire point, that care work does not scale like manufacturing or farming or software or entertainment or...
I disagree. Frustration wouldn't come from having to care for 10-30 people, but from inadequate systems that would fail to facilitate effective care for this many people simultaneously.
Id bet if there was a reliable and effective means for 1 person to take care of 10-30 people, it wouldn't be a problem.
In summary, imho, the problem here isn't capacity to emotionally care for this many people, but means of taking care. I think the problem is we don't collectively invest enough resources (both material and cognitive) to figure out how to do something like this well.
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[ 55.2 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadI'm not sure this comes as a surprise to anyone except for those who have had no interaction with state-provided social services. I'd also say that a level of care that does not reach to that 1:1 standard is still appreciably better than no care, which may be what one might otherwise receive.
The open question is can we work out better, decentralized ways of providing support that take advantage of the new social technologies that we've developed since the construction of the modern state and its welfare services in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Do you really think infirmity is something that can be avoided with the right grindset?
And the week in which private companies will be able to provide this, is the same week which has two Tuesdays.
If past governments or cultural environments messed up demographics, states might end up with a significant fraction (Germany already has 22% aged 65+) of the population in need of that care, which requires another significant share of the population to just do that instead of producing actual stuff.
This will either get ugly in one way or another or we will need scalable tech solutions.
Except you can't force foreign workers to do shit jobs the locals don't want. They're not slaves.
lol, nice joke, how many illegals has Germany for example deported? Deporting people in the EU is a huge hassle and the source countries often don't want to cooperate in taking back people. You'll have to murder someone to actually get the authorities in the EU go through the hassle of deporting you, but refusing to work shit jobs isn't enough to get you deported, just have your welfare access cut off.
Plus they can also claim asylum once they get here to escape their slave drivers and not get deported.
>especially in EU countries with more... lax standards than Germany
Germany already has lax standards on that regard. Many there are raking in huge profits by bringing in these vulnerable workers and having them work in terrible conditions.
> Plus they can also claim asylum once they get here to escape their slave employers and not get deported.
You are confusing two groups of people. One group consists of illegal migrants, usually from MENA countries that claim asylum and are a hassle to deport back.
Migrant workers usually come from southeast Asia (India, Nepal, Philippines..) and there is no problem sending them back because those countries are considered safe. Also they got families back home, their motivation is not really to stay here long term but to earn a decent amount of money (from their perspective). And despite sometimes poor treatment and shitty jobs, EU is a much better place to work than gulf countries.
> They come here willing to do those jobs.
Someone willing to do a job means you don't need to force them to do it. After all, they aren't slaves.
Foreign workers are improving their lot (and that of their families back home). In a world where they don't have the same economic opportunities in their home countries, and the locals don't want to do those "shit jobs", it's a win win.
Even talking about shit jobs is pejorative. Foreign workers don't just pick fruit, they're also essential talent in healthcare and other critical areas.
Why is that? Do you think shit jobs don't exist? You think wiping other old people's asses is NOT a shit job? Are you lining up for these kinds of jobs yourself or did you work and study hard to not have to do them because you knew those jobs are shit and are usually given to the lowest underclass class of people who don't have better options due to various factors?
> Foreign workers don't just pick fruit
I never said such thing. The thread I replied was about importing workers for elderly care.
You're trying to project some things I didn't say onto me.
They're promised path to citizenship and an ok money. Then they discover that they work for an agency that takes away big chunk of their money. They can not change the employer since they'll be deported etc. etc. And the worst part is that at the end they still have to leave the country.
So yeah maybe not technically but they're slaves.
The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently than private enterprise.
That means armies, judiciaries, policing municipalities, governance amongst others.
They address issues like management of the commons.
This does not translate into scaled care - care for orphans (from the article) still needs large numbers of skilled manpower, which is in short supply across the world.
These services are also often underfunded, since they are not really a first class citizen for voters.
Voters today, are also deeply targeted by emotional campaigns and identity campaigns, since that is the current political state of the art.
The state can be efficient, but some things don’t scale unless they are also resourced correctly.
Such services will also be amongst the first to cut, since “X will render it obsolete”, is a promise as old as time, and aren’t directly tied to overall societal survival.
Compared to something like defense / emergency funding
The government does not provide a more efficient military or education. It compels individuals to pay for something which is in the collective good, but not their personal interest.
This is news to me, or a novel use of economic terminology.
Source?
Economists argue markets are efficient because of the incentive structure they place on actors. There is a plethora of writing about government inefficiencies due to not having these. It the most distilled form: they are insulated from both positive and negative consequences of behaving efficiently.
Due to this, government entities have a unique set of traits, but efficiency tends to not be one of them. But who cares? Efficiency isn't always the goal. When it comes to making laws, efficiency isn't the goal, long term values are more important.
The post office was created with full knowledge that it would be a net loss, but it was felt to be institutionally important to have universal access to communication across the nation. Now that this is an antiquated method of communication, and there is a market for the remaining services, it is mostly an inefficient make-work program for a well organized voting block.
Now you I can imagine all the distopian problems of a private military, but I'm going to guess efficiency is not one of those (The US Gov believe Blackwater saves them money, btw).
What does this imply, that two parents cannot care for three children? I disagree.
> With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle.
The point of the article is that you’ll never achieve economies of scale (10, 100, 1000x) for situations that require individualized attention, no matter how much engineering effort you put into it.
At least with today’s technology…
Are the kids not getting enough individual attention something from an outside perspective or from the kids perspective?
Children in care do, partly because of the circumstances that led to them being in care, but mostly because the State in general is not willing to accept the same risk profile as individual parents.
The risk profile is different, if you have a newborn in hospital, then that child may have their parent present at all times, plus staff, but it might also be one or two nurses and an on-call doctor for any number of babies. In some sense the potential risk is greater, but it's also more professionally measured.
I don't think that's true.
> If we take something like daycare, which I presume is included in "care", then it's typically four children per adult until the age of 4, in schools it goes down to 20+ children per one adult, where at home it might be more than two adults per child (but also less obviously).
That's a much lower care ratio than parents accepted before regulation, so I think you're arguing against your own point here.
They might be a improvement in other countries, but they are considered a move in the wrong direction here, because they are worse than previously.
As a parent, can confirm. To give an example, it's really hard to hold and comfort two crying kids at the same time. When the toddlers are melting, they really want your whole attention and don't want to share it. If they're melting because they got in a fight with each other, it really takes an adult per toddler to help calm them.
That doesn't mean I can't love and care deeply for both kids, it just means you can only implement that caring with one at a time.
I think he's generalizing the point a bit and not all situations are like that. But it's close enough to accurate to be valid. Care doesn't scale.
Most of care will not be automated any time soon. And it is a huge part of the economy.
Nice to see this post on HN.
The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.
And, of course, all such systems I've ever read about do not care about the practical limitation of 1 caretaker per 1 child. I believe youth services in the Netherlands, for example, has 1 caretaker (effectively available to the child) per 15 children, or 7 or 8 if they're trouble. Does this work? No, of course not. They don't care. The kids grow up caring for nobody, probably because effectively nobody cares for them. One person watching 15 children can only hope to prevent disasters, if that, they cannot provide decent attention to children. By the standards of this article, there's probably 2 people who work in the same "group". If there's a third one, they will be shared between at least to groups. So 2 to 2.5 per 15 children ... comes to one parent figure per 7 children, which is a third to a fourth of the care children would receive in even a huge family, and much less than in a small family.
This idea is just wrong. Wrong isn't strong enough, it's conterfactual. At most some of them treated female bodies as owned by the state. I do not remember any example of totalitarian society where a child of a political opposant would be treated the same as any military child. Maybe Salazar? But even then, it was so corporate-aligned I doubt children from owners were treated the same as children from workers at anytime.
The reason why totalitarian regimes end up promoting traditional values relations is that to them the only imperative superior to ideology is survival.
There is a reason the Soviet Union backed off from it's repression of religion in the middle of WW2.
They discovered that in some things doing nothing is better than doing something, but Westerners of all political stripes (both for or against authoritarianism) chronically make the mistake of assuming that everything that a totalitarian state does is done with some grand plan in mind rather than them just flailing about to find a centralized policy that kinda-sorta works.
Your comment reminds me a lot of modern speculation about China's grand plans. Sometimes a government chooses not to touch something because they learned from bad experience that they'll break it if they do, not because they're playing 4D chess manipulating it behind the scenes.
They did stuff like legalizing divorce, or collectivization of parenting.
> One year after the Bolsheviks took power, they ratified the 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship. The revolutionary jurists, led by Alexander Goikhbarg, adhered to the revolutionary principals of Marx, Engels, and Lenin when drafting the codes. Goikhbarg considered the nuclear family unit to be a necessary but transitive social arrangement that would quickly be phased out by the growing communal resources of the state and would eventually "wither away". The jurists intended for the code to provide a temporary legal framework to maintain protections for women and children until a system of total communal support could be established.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_the_Soviet_Union#:~:....
Additionally, in the totalitarian phase which started in the late 1920s, family was supported and strengthened:
> the government of the Soviet Union first attempted to weaken the family and then to strengthen it from the 1930s onwards
It’s clear as day isn’t it? Totalitarian regimes can very much be based on family values.
https://poloniainstitute.net/recommended/the-bolshevik-sexua...
I think it's more that well-meaning ideologues are easily replaced by self-serving pragmatists in post-revolutionary turmoil. There were plenty of Marxists in Russia vying for power, in the early days. Lenin didn't win based on ideological purity; he won based on political strength. And say what you will about Lenin—he did have beliefs and he did have a real ideology. Stalin only cared about Stalin, and he claimed to believe whatever was convenient for him in the moment.
Besides, what countries are you talking about? Have you ever been there and met the uniform mass persons?
I was born in Eastern Europe in a society headed in this direction. I observed its transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
You felt the overarching power of the state from as early as the kindergarten. Signs of individuality were suppressed and all children were supposed to do things "the right way". When such an institution decided that a child "systematically misbehaves", it was able to take the child away from its parents in another orphanage-like institution that was supposed to teach them good socialist manners. Eventually some of them would end up seriously harassed, physically-ill and sent to an anonymous grave in the backyard of that institution.
That said, in practice, the quality of indoctrination was extremely variable for the same reason why it was variable for everything else - most people weren't really buying into it themselves, and so even if they were in a position where they were expected to indoctrinate, they did the bare minimum that was demanded of them, which usually wasn't very convincing. I didn't get to witness it as an adult, but according to my mother, by the time you were old enough for Komsomol, very few still had their rose-tinted glasses on.
"Care" doesn't scale. You can't just replace "the family" with some industrialized system of raising children and get the same results. Not being able to scale "care" and make it more efficient is almost tautological, really.
> Besides, what countries are you talking about?
North Korea? Former Soviet Union?
At the very least appearance of conformity was ruthlessly enforced and even private conversations were infiltrated to detect dissent.
And it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, since shifting more care work towards society doesn’t equate to a path toward totalitarianism. You’re conflating socialism with totalitarianism. Understandable, but misguided.
Frankly, your whole premise is based on a capitalist narrative that keeps workers in their place because individual care work is so inefficient—it drains energy that could otherwise be channeled into organizing worker councils to balance out the power now disproportionately held by banks, IT corporations, political parties, and the military-industrial complex.
I’m aware that I may come across as an arrogant prick in this comment. I wish I had more time to craft a friendlier response with more sources and explanation, but I simply don’t. I need to work to feed my children and their mother, but anyway, here’s a reading list for anyone who’s interested:
"Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher - Fisher discusses how capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, including care work, and critiques the idea that alternatives like socialism lead to totalitarianism.
"Workers of the World: Essays Toward a New History of the Working Class" by Philip A. H. G. D. Van der Linden - This collection explores the historical context of labor movements and the importance of organizing against disproportionate power structures.
"The Care Crisis: What’s Wrong with Care and How to Fix It" by the Institute of Public Policy Research - This report outlines the societal implications of care work and its impact on worker organization.
"Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that yes, it does. This is something that is almost completely unknown (except on the extremes).
And history has those two coupled in very complex, hard to understand ways.
Almost every developed country provides a lot of care via government.
The whole point is scaling "care work" is almost oxymoronic. Care is only quality care when there are a small number of carers per those being cared for. To make it "efficient" is to turn children, the addicted, the disabled, and the elderly into cattle.
> "Wages for Housework" by Silvia Federici - Federici argues for the recognition and compensation of domestic labor, linking it to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.
This reveals one of the poorly hid secrets of progressive ideology. Progressives LOVE Capitalism and want to spread it to encompass every human interaction. Caring for your own home, your own children, anything someone might do for a friend or a loved one MUST be turned into a financial transaction with an explicit contract.
this is one of the fascinating consequences of "capitalist realism". often people who attempt to criticize the system end up describing a form of capitalism that they would prefer to participate in. picturing a world that isn't the one you know is really difficult. questioning everything is a painful and slow process.
The conservative approach you’re defending offloads all responsibility to the individual and the nuclear family, which means that in reality, women often end up trapped in unpaid care roles, increasingly dependent on their spouses' income. That’s not freedom, nor does it offer any dignity or choice; it’s a conservative agenda dressed up as “individual responsibility,” which only entrenches inequality and dependence within families.
And let’s address this twisted notion that anyone who wants state-funded support for care services somehow thinks of people as "cattle." It's laughable—except it’s also insulting. So, to put it bluntly: go fuck yourself for even suggesting that. Care, when adequately supported and dignified, recognizes people’s humanity rather than ignoring it.
As for the accusation that progressives want to monetize and commodify every human relationship, look at who benefits from the status quo. Conservatives would rather sacrifice people’s well-being to "traditional values," while keeping corporate interests safe from any pressure to reinvest in the society they profit from. I don’t see any corporate executives or capitalists hesitating to send their own kids off to private schools and exclusive care, expecting other people’s children to manage with nothing.
So let’s be clear: asking for social investments in care isn’t “capitalist.” It’s about making sure people aren’t left to fend for themselves, and about affording everyone—children, the elderly, those with disabilities, and the rest of us—a dignified life. And if that offends the conservative agenda, then good.
Our personal experiences could be very misleading about what others go through.
https://mcnultycounseling.com/moving-past-dysfunctional-fami...
Like in the Democratic, liberal West, where everyone's individuality is created by consuming the same stuff?
I feel like we as a society need to acknowledge that this probably applies to childcare, teaching, health and elder care to a large extent. That no matter how much private sector ingenuity you apply to some field, there is a hard upper bound to how much efficiency you can achieve. Cost savings basically just require making hard choices about who gets what.
I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
I suspect aspects of this apply to teaching (why does every calc teacher need to give the lecture? Why not have the top 1% of them in that skill record lectures with excellent production quality/editing and have students watch those?)
Yes, there are upper bounds, but I think even +50% or +100% might be possible with minimal (or in the calc case, negative) losses. Those efficiencies can really matter when someone else has to pay the bill.
The statistical you is paying statistically much more than the historical equivalent. The situation is far more complex than that. There's a million variables here. Changes in services rendered, changes in outcomes, relative wage differences, more parties taking a cut of any given transaction, more "make work" prior to rending specialized care, etc, etc.
Outcomes are better than they were 40yr ago but is that because of the changes or despite them?
Weren't these always done by nurses? The doctor would do the determination of what you get, but nurse being the one executing these is something that was here for decades.
I wonder how the best teacher in the world teaching 5 classes of 40 would stack up against 200 people chosen at random from a pool who had already passed that class working 1:1 for 1 hr per day. Probably the ideal case is somewhere in the middle, but the point is that it's allocation of the teacher's time, and not production quality, that's the bottleneck when it comes to scaling teaching.
I meant to expand that to clarify that other aspects (supporting students as they work to apply the lectured material) would/must be done 1:1 in person, but the core lecture can/should be delivered by those with particular skills in that area and that we could apply extra effort to editing/production value.
My son's calc class is taught via watch the lectures online/at-home and then apply them in class and at-home via exercises. The only difference from what I proposed is that the same teacher pre-recorded the lectures, which seems to a practical solution but not an inherently necessary constraint (and there are likely thousands of calc teachers making average quality such videos).
But absolutely a personalized teacher must be available 1:1 for at least part of the overall process.
I am reminded of the PG startup advice to “do things that don’t scale”, this seems to be one of those cases.
I have spent enough of this year injured due to my own adventure sport aggressive mis steps. I was MUCH less productive during this period than before or now due to injury.
Had I not needed to deal with that, is the most productive self and that has a exponential effect society.
I'm hopeful that when I get old, and inevitably come to need some help with living, that such a solution will be available.
My dad has Parkinson's and needs a human to change his diaper. If he had the option of a robot, I bet he'd take it. Not a painless die now option, though. As I write, where he is it's 8 o'clock in the morning and he's watching an old Larry David and eating an ice cream cone while my mom gets ready for them to go to breakfast.
Maybe I was inferring the wrong thing, and if so I apologize, but the context of this comment was invoking LLMs and humanoid robots in a discussion about how "care doesn't scale". Like of course automation and technology should do things to make the lives of the elderly easier, but I would not classify any action done by a machine as "care". My dishwasher is a great convenience, but I would never classify my relationship with it as one of "caring".
> Knowing what her role as a carer has cost her in terms of quality of life, I would never want to subject my children to the same
Of course that's a problem. The answer though, IMO, is creating a society where we value elder care more, and have more programs to provide human support and connection to the elderly. I strongly feel like this isn't something which we can or should automate away.
"Carers", are people who perform functions for people unable to do them themselves. Whether they "care" or not for their charges is not directly relevant (though often they are relatives, and certainly do care for, and love the people they are helping very much). Not always though - consider a "care home", which is essentially a dumping ground for the old and inconveniently frail. Having seen the inside of a few such places, I very much do not want to end up in one.
Enter the Robots, and technologies such as the LLM. In my imagination, a robot equipped with some facility with language, could act as an assistant for an elderly person, allowing them to maintain their independence for much longer without a human carer. This is not a replacement for human connection with their loved ones, but it is a replacement for putting them in a care home, or having ones own children spend part of their lives unable to have a job, or a normal social life, due to complex care requirements of some relative.
For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding. However I'm interest to hear your thoughts.
I think so as well-- I'm glad you replied.
We certainly agree on the problem of bad care homes. We've all seen and heard the horror stories, and it's really unacceptable what's going on at a lot of these places. The question is, would unscrupulous care homes buy a robot and re-task workers with providing more social care to residents, or would they simply lay off the workers?
For a pretty large chunk of the population, care workers are the only source of regular human interactions. As such, I would make the argument that the necessity for these tasks to be completed by a human is, in many cases, a feature, not a bug.
There's a million examples of tech utopianists walking head-first into ideas and even entire disciplines they previously dismissed as irrelevant or outdated.
If we laid eggs and our young were viable more quickly our politics would be orders of magnitude simpler. It would basically be the politics of twenty somethings, but for everyone.
On the plus side, it’s probably why we have among the longest life spans of any land mammal. Grandparents helped with child rearing, so societies with longevity probably did a better job raising children.
In previous decades kids were allowed to do much more unsupervised. And the pressure to prepare for high stakes college admissions from early ages was much less extreme.
People have children, in this world we can only care about our spouse or one child?
Hardly.
A common arrangement is a board and care home with about 4 residents and 2 caregivers who work mostly non-overlapping shifts, and one sleeps onsite to (hopefully) be able to handle overnight care needs.
A larger place can scale a bit better. E.g. 10-20 residents can have 5-10 staff on various shifts. But some staff could be cooks or handle cleaning while others focus more on the residents' needs. And at this level of staffing, they can manage to have an overnight shift with someone who remains awake to keep an eye on things, as well as probably having other(s) sleep onsite to be on call to help with bigger events.
But I think even that's not literally true e.g. the social worker could make dinner for all four kids at once. And probably converse with all four of them while doing it!
But, I think I agree with the broader point that care doesn't scale, even if it does scale slightly greater than 1.
This is not true; consider the argument that there is always a loss of quality in scaling. Industrial maybe better than average custom, but is always worse than best customs. Broadcast lecture is almost always worse than a tutor whose discourse is customised to student's current knowledge. (The word guru (literally, one who leads towards light) is wrongly translated to teacher, for which the word in sanskrit is shikshak.)
But there’s also plenty of things that don’t work this way. Care is one of the most extreme things that does not.
Nonetheless the 99th percentile lecturer is still better than the 50th percentile tutor in most cases.
> Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor.
University lectures work like that. First the general lecture, which has 300 students and is not interactive. Then the tutorial, where students who want extra help can consult individually with a TA. Attendance for tutorials was typically much lower in my experience, because a lot of students thought the lecture was plenty and wanted to spend the time on something else.
Why are you convinced that personal tutors are so much more effective? I'd expect the average student to be slightly better-served by having a personal tutor, but not by much. After all, personal guidance is available from TAs when necessary—my point is that it typically isn't necessary.
‘Small Village’ of Supposedly-Deceased Intellectuals Found Alive, Thriving at Caribbean Resort
https://stevenscrawls.com/bucket-bump/
It very much gives the impression of it being a story made up as a vehicle for the main point they are trying to make.
My experience (and I believe it to be common) is that I'm really, really, really out of spare energy to care about anyone or anything else.
Mind you, I'm in my best shape in years and I've explored my limits to find out they're actually way further than I originally thought, but still.
It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that.
The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility. And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunctional.
I think the same is true for our personal lives.
But the endless treadmill of self-optimization, side-hustles and ever more commitments leaves us unable to cope.
> When you are in a major Chinese city you may street sweepers sitting on the side walk chitchatting. The first thing you may think of it as waste that could be eliminated. But it also acts as a buffer.
TL;DR: Pretty much what you said, but he labeled it "margin" instead of "slack". But yeah, you need some.
It's very hard to sell slack to management and so in "well run organizations" it ends up trending towards zero. And then everyone is surprised at the resulting catastrophes.
I use this extensively when planning activities with my children. It's a fun challenge because they're both too young to tell the time, much less read, which are constraints one does not normally encounter in their work life.
I think "slack" is a much more general concept than efficiency vs latency. The slack itself allows low-latency response to emergencies but the activities that fill the slack time can be valuable in ways that often aren't legible to the org hierarchy.
https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack
Care could scale, but we’d need the culture and societal changes to allow it to scale.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
It is overwhelming. See following comments on the need for slack/margin in capacity. Well, we also need it in emotional demands. Yet every commercially-moderated interaction in our society seems to be optimizing for making us care more about it, because that increases their revenue.
"Want to borrow a book? Ok." "Don't want to? Ok. Whatevs."
And even analysis paralysis is overcome with: "Why not both! Borrow two whole books!"
Quoting directly from the article:
"THE GIVING OF BREAD
Until the 1960’s, a fundamental circular exchange was the giving of blessed bread. Each household regards its neighbor to the right as its first neighbor
(The directions right and left are as viewed from the center of the circle so that right is clockwise and left is counterclockwise.)
The giving of bread took place weekly and was thought of as being given from first neighbor to first neighbor. That is, each Sunday a woman from one particular household, call it H_i, bought two loaves of bread to the church where it was blessed and partially used in a church ritual. Then, before sunset, a portion of the bread was given by H_i to her first neighbor, namely to H_{i+ 1}. The following week H_{i+1} was the bread-giver and H_{i+2} the bread-receiver. Thus, the giving (and receiving) of bread moved around the circle serially, taking about two years to complete one cycle of about 100 households. While each household was both a giver and receiver of bread, this mode differs from simple reciprocity; only if there were a total of two households would H_i and H_{i+1} directly reciprocate as each other’s first neighbor."
> To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one. [...] But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost.
I don't think you need the ratio of worker:child to be 1:1 in order to provide 1:1 care.
The alternative might be 20 social workers taking care of a group of 20 kids. It's the same ratio of workers to kids, since no 1 worker will get to deeply know individuals in the group.
I agree 1:1 is confusing and not totally accurate but it's fine for illustrating the point.
Anyway, I don't mean to nit pick. Everyone has to know their limits, and I'm sad to admit that I found I can barely handle two kids with two adults. And families managing 5+ kids strike me as over natural+healthy limits, unless they've a large extended family (who have capacity to help).
Regardless, it's probably the best they can do and likely far better than orphanages with 20+ kids per adult. So the core message about scaling does stand. Even if the ratio described is actually worse and less scalable.
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.
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.
More from a recent report by Australia's business council of coops and mutuals: 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.
What is the actual tangible evidence that the aforementioned issues are avoided?
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-gla...
[2] https://projects.oregonlive.com/weather/temps/
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
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.
Let me fix that for you:
Children notoriously prefer heavily marketed food in attractive packaging which is designed/optimized for addictiveness and immediate gratification.
Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.
(Unless you process them so much, and add so many spices, that they no longer have any original taste.. but by that point they are at "pre-packaged" level of cooking)
Also, in some kind of weird benign parentification[0] twist, she now loves to feed me food, even if (or more like especially if) she doesn't like it.
So having fun with cooking food seems quite decoupled from her desire to eat it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parentification - and I say it's benign because cooking together is completely optional for her
And I can tell you most little kids love hard boiled eggs which I suspect is because they are incredibly consistent in texture and taste, unspoiled by some cook seasoning them or cooking them differently.
In most cases, this is probably due to the care givers training their children to prefer that kind of food because they don't make many home cooked meals.
I don't even know if it's true, though. When I was a kid, the best food in the world were the home made meals my grandmother made, especially on the holidays. Remember as a teenager telling my Grandma her meals were better than any restaurant I had ever eaten at, and meaning it in all sincerity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He though industrial food was awesome as soon as he was exposed to it.
(Obviously bad sample size)
I think it is something about the perfect homogeneous product they like. Or how the taste even out between different ingredients on the shelf.
I regret nothing. Pancakes are and will always be great.
Nearly all people do, food scientists are really damn good at their job.
It isn't even that the stuff tastes better, it just triggers more of the pleasure centers in the brain and causes people to want more.
No one eats an entire bag of doritos because they taste better than a good steak.
What exactly do you think "tastes better" means? If it's triggering more of the pleasure centers of the brain, then it tastes better.
During fine dining, a meal may consist of small portions that even when added up together total less calories than a large bag of theater popcorn which many people are quite capable of going through.
No one will argue that the popcorn taste "better".
Simply put the popcorn is less satiating but more addictive to eat.
Meanwhile the fine dining meal, if done well, will be incredibly satiating and not leave one wanting for more.
Hyper-palitability is a thing. There are foods that are hard to stop eating (e.g. potato chips), and that do not fill people up no matter the caloric content.
Starbucks frappes are another example. They can easily have over 1000 calories, barely be satiating, and yet people desire them again and again.
I hope no one claims frappes or potato chips are the best tasting foods in the world. But they are both addictive as hell to consume.
Decentralizization is fine sometimes, but a single huge nail factory is going to beat thousands backyard forges in (average/95th percentile) quality and especially in prices.
Backyard forges are OK if you have few hundred million people, most of them in farming, with most families living in a house with a a single room. But you cannot build New York on without large factories.
Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends instead to produce demonstrable reductions in individual quality. We're living in an age of unprecedented consumer waste due to this phenomenon. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent term (& while it may not be real in terms of being intentional it's definitely true in terms of increases in obsolescence-rates).
That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever.
Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale and quality is not one of them.
Nails was one of the examples cited by the gp, which I found funny since there is one famous example of nails being lower quality by definition as a result of centralisation. That example isn't the case for all nails (nor for all the gps examples), but it is still an excellent, if isolated, example: cut nails. Most carpentry nails you buy today are wire nails. I don't know if it's possible to buy cut nails today from any large factories, but broadly speaking, manufacture of cut nails does not scale. The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand (nor quality assurance). Cut nails are still considered superior today.
If you look at antique diagrams of nails available for purchase, you'll see 20 or 30 varieties, all with very distinctly different designs. Those designs have converged on a single design for all applications, not because it's a better design, but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture. Flaws in the design are compensated for via material choice & worker skill.
There's likely thousands of such cases in industry.
This an empirical argument about nails. Are you just saying that to emphasize your confidence?
> cut nails
I just googled and there are literally dozens of brands of this product.
Even so this preference appears to be a niche opinion of artisan woodworkers, not a failure mode of furniture and construction.
> The switch to wire was a detail of the manufacturing processes, not of consumer demand
Yes it is. They wanted to pay less for nails and the cheaper manufacturing served that need. If it mattered they would pay more.
> but purely because it's a design that scales for manufacture.
In other words, people like to reminisce about hand made goods. But when it comes to paying for them, they usually prefer the ones that work well at a fraction of the cost.
You can’t claim that intricate items with fine details are not manufacturable at scale (see the iPhone?). So your cause and effect are backwards. Manufacturing did not dictate old methods became less prevelant. Consumers did.
And once again, your claim that higher quality ones don’t exist is wrong too. I guarantee we can find a supplier of many varieties of decorative nails. They are just more expensive.
A nested HN thread is likely not the best place to go into great detail on the precise practicalities of trade work, & I know I can't expect any given commenter to become an expert in a possibly niche topic just to engage in discussion, but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with. Nobody is buying nails for their "decorative" qualities - they get embedded in materials. They're not a visual feature.
> but this level of dismissiveness is a little difficult to reckon with
Let me summarize the key economic points that I feel have been dismissed: - any kind of nail you want, you can buy right now. - You can also buy nails of higher quality than anything that’s existed in preindustrial time - popularity of which kind of nail is driven by demand
i also think that ultimately no single system is best and that regular renegotiation about the amount of central vs decentral is key (something we should help people be better at)
We produce way more corn in the US today than we could without a centralized industry, but we do so by subsidizing the hell out of an industry that is driven only by how much volume of corn is produced. Nutritional quality of the food produced is ignored, damage to the land is ignored, damage to the broader environment is ignored, etc.
We grow a small amount of corn on our land. We absolutely don't have as high or consistent yields as an industrial farm, but we also don't spray any poisons on the land and if the soil health was being negatively impacted we would know it pretty darn fast. Rain water from the corn patch runs down into the pond our cows drink from, another reason we wouldn't use poisons on the land. All of these are considerations one will likely make at a smaller scale that just won't happen with a centralized system driven by one or two primary goals (currently that's just money).
The article had a very specific circumstance it built upon - how much human time time it takes to help kids.
This doesn’t scale, in the context of the article.
Your statement would translate into a point on economics and organization, than individual care.
This still obscures the fact that many critical functions don’t scale.
I would add that these tend to be under resourced in favor of things that do scale.
In that case i'll ask for a clarificaiton on the link. From the article it seemed quite a clear cut case about activity types that dont scale.
Outsourcing the responsibility doesn't mean it scale, which seems contradicted by what you are saying. People learning that things matter and that they are responsible, doesn't change this does it?
I am only really suggesting that scalable care schemes might be those that help people to support those they already have a connection with, and that organisation/coordination be managed on that level.
> In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person
Yes, but there are many moments in a day / one's life, and care is needed and appreciated at various levels of "deepness". Further, how much care (and what type) is needed depends enormously on what society has managed to scale with the right organizational patterns etc.
So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need? Mathematically, there are 8 billion exemplars of the species roaming the planet and 1:1 caring takes care (pun) of the 4 billion.
We do have cultural institutions to do much of this work. Parents care for kids. Adults care for aging parents. Romantic partnerships exist so that people can reciprocally care for each other. Still, we have to fill in the gaps for kids without parents, seniors without kids, and sick people. The demand for therapy and sex work proves that people will pay a lot of money to be cared for, even when they don't need it to survive.
> So in the end the question is: how much of this type of exclusive (and scarce) caring capacity does society really need?
A lot, apparently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
A: They will refuse to change the lightbulb, claiming it "doesn't scale" unless the "lightbulb problem" is fixed globally ;)
In seriousness, enjoyed this article and it's a wise realization. I think the world would be a better place if more people take the time to be a good person to the people around them, rather than focusing so much on big picture issues.
And that is fine. Engineers are not social & feelers with high individual level empathy scores. So let them/us build large scaleable solutions with the individual 1-to-1 personal interaction removed.
But when those businesses we seek care from scale, the system is no longer closed.
A portion of the care I give or receive is siphoned off and sent to shareholders or a wealth business owner. When caring happens through capitalism, a portion of our care is depleted with every transaction.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvos4nORf_Y
Knew a women who worked 100% as foster mom.
Had 3 children at a time, age 6 to 13.
Everything was well organised.
It seemed to me, child care can work pretty well of it's your main job and you get paid by the state.
The when you have more need than care workers it falls apart, with no way to scale it besides hiring more out of a pool that may not exist at the price you were paying the previous ones.
If you think in terms of supply and demand, if they are already have the curves met, additional demand is going to scale more than linearly because you need more people at a higher pay.
Incidentally, large families do scale sublinearly with respect to the parents. The reason why is that even with merely natural spacing by the time they have a fourth child, the oldest is in a position to provide significant assistance. Every mother with a large family that I’ve spoken to confirms that the difficulty peaks with the third child and then plateaus.
It has:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
If it's 10, 20, 30, this doesn't work. This is the entire point, that care work does not scale like manufacturing or farming or software or entertainment or...
Id bet if there was a reliable and effective means for 1 person to take care of 10-30 people, it wouldn't be a problem.
In summary, imho, the problem here isn't capacity to emotionally care for this many people, but means of taking care. I think the problem is we don't collectively invest enough resources (both material and cognitive) to figure out how to do something like this well.