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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
My maternal grandmother was a fantastic cook. She had a wonderful kitchen, too. Really old-school, fully equipped, spacious, clean and organized.
Grandma had wonderful treats for us when we visited every week. She introduced me to this delicious, refreshing vegetable called "jícama". Even though she came from Hungarian descent, she knew the local produce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachyrhizus_erosus
Grandma also taught us how to pour a whole box of crappy cereal into a bowl, and fish out the valuable prize. Grandma always had ice water and schlag (Cool Whip) in the fridge.
Why/how did grandma cook so well? I say it was because of love. She loved her husband, who passed when I was 6. She loved her daughter and son-in-law. She loved her neighbors, her community, her sisters in the card club, her parishioners at church. She loved her grandchildren. She made good things for us, without expecting anything in return, though we provided for all her needs until she passed away too.
And that's the issue with "scaling care", because it's a lack of love. Mercenary caregivers only go so far. If you rip children out of their families and rip families out of their cultures and you tear apart cultures and neighborhoods and communities, inserting foreigner* physicians and teachers and managers amongst them, then of course you'll have a crisis of care. Because those bonds of culture, bonds of ethnicity, and bonds of family blood are way more important than the "Almighty Buck".
So, yes, the care crisis will continue, and it shall worsen, because the endgame here is to destroy the family unit and break down every cultural and ethnic tie until all Americans (and Canadians and Australians and Europeans) have melted down into one faceless, assimilated glob of sub-humanity.
* In my experience, the worst foreigners become highly-skilled physicians, especially psychiatrists, because "health care" is the best way to peacefully oppress and penalize a population from within. You can really tear apart communities by fucking them up with medications and detrimental "treatments", all the while they sincerely trust and believe that you're a healer, you're in fact a destroyer of life.
No, I cannot stop. I am unable to comply!
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.
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.
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.
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.