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"and Facebook can take them away from you at any time"

Have they actually done that to any website? That would undermine their whole system. They'd do that once and everyone would leave their service. That's like saying "Well Google could publish all your emails! So you definitely shouldn't trust your emails to Google"

Good thing we have license plate readers. Impound the bike for noise pollution and a bonus felony for running away from cops!

Well the first part is very true and the fact that the gov't doesn't really care about quality (just as long as people are working) probably fuels the culture of mediocrity, but this really doesn't apply to the private sector where in a different cultural climate the employers would always demand excellence. I mean at the end of the day it's sorta understandable b/c you just have to not be a ton worse than your competitors - and think of the savings!

I'm sure it's very different from Singapore/Taiwan/HK (though judging by the lack of attention to detail by immigrants in San Francisco I'll wait to see for myself), but this is a country of peasants/farmers run by peasants and farmers. It's going to take a very very long time for the culture to change - I'm talking several generations - b/c it's the culture of the "weakest-link". I guess their only blessing is that they have these other places to learn from.

This is a bit of a question from my lack of understanding of disk IO:

But would this in practice play well with the CPU prefetcher? If you're crunching sequential data can you expect the data in the L1 cache after the initial stall?

Ehhh, I don't buy it's simple a wage/motivation issue

You know cheap immigrant labor in the US also makes squat and they don't do generally do a shabby job. The issue is that no one is held to a high standard here. In the US if you do a sloppy job you'll get fired and they'll find someone who can do it better for the same horrible wage. Here "average" work is expected an no one really seems to mind (as long as "it gets the job done" so to speak), and if you expect more then you're a mean boss or OCD or whatever.

The food is good, why do you care about the windows? The pen clicks and put ink on paper, what more do you need?

??? The demand for pens is pretty elastic. If pens all cost $10 then people would be more careful with them and fewer of them would end up throw away

I'm going to a bit culturally insensitive, but I've been living in China for the past 2 months and I'm convinced they have a huge cultural barrier that makes them absolutely incapable of creating high quality goods.

I was told there is even a Chinese saying that amounts to "the average and not more"

You can even see this in San Francisco. Go to a chinese restaurant on Clement. The food will be amazing, but the windows look like they haven't been washed in years.

One of my friends here is an architect and she told me that her work crews always say she's OCD. When I actually saw one of her projects I was horrified. It's like big-picture okay, but all the details are wrong. Things are misaligned, poured concrete and splashed some on the white wall? who cares! It's just a smudge, no one will notice.

My friend who coordinates manufacturing here says the only way to get what you want is to constantly fly in for inspections and yell at manufacturers till you get what you want (and yes, if you don't yell people don't think you're being very serious)

While I've spent a bit of time in Japan too, (and I think the cultures are actually a lot closer than most people appreciate) - when it comes to quality it's a different planet

Did you even listen to the program? They say exactly that