The Tokyo Subway Has Many Amazing Secrets, And Other Facts

​Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: The many tricks of Tokyo's Subway, millennials are broke and when Windows users wanted it to look like OS X.

The Tokyo Subway Just About Does Everything Right

The New York City Subway system is quickly devolving into mess of mismanagement and delays, which as the days tick by will only cost more money and take more time (currently $19 billion, 50 years) to ultimately fix. And of course the man tasked with running all of this, Joseph Lhota, happens to be splitting his time between various lucrative side jobs. He is a public servant who makes millions and doesn't believe he should be taxed to provide the necessary revenue to fix the thing he is responsible for fixing.

If all of that fills with you with anger and disgust, well, do I have the palate cleanser for you. This week, Tokyo native Allan Richarz wrote just the nicest article about all of the subtle things the Tokyo Subway does to make it one of the best public transportation systems in the world.

Reading about how they use subtle design to encourage people to queue properly around trains, lights to calm folks who are thinking about jumping off the platform or relaxing jingles to ease the stress of the inevitable rush-hour jams just makes you realize that government can actually be good! Like, it is possible for a group of people to recognize the societal importance of the thing they are running, and then instead of using that as a political bargaining chip, actually make decisions that improve the thing in real ways. It's clear that from all the ways the Tokyo Metro attempts to work with it's massive ridership there is a deep respect and care for its users that you just don't see here in New York. 

Which isn't to say that there aren't people at the MTA who are trying to do the same! Nor that the Tokyo Metro is perfect and without fault. I think the level of outrage about the MTA isn't just that things are bad, but rather things could be so much better. Public transportation is vital to the health of the city, and to see those in power demonstrate such a lack of respect for the responsibility they signed up for is just so very, very disappointing. 

[CityLab]

Surprise! Millennials Are Broke

Here's a shocker: The generation that went into massive amounts of debt to earn a college degree, then graduated during the implosion of the global economy, and thus forced to put off things like buying a house or saving for retirement is also the generation who's average net worth is 34 percent less than older generations. In other words, you average millennial is earning about a third less than their parents when they were their age. Cool!

Slate's Jordan Weissmann has an excellent analysis of a recent Fed study that examines wealth growth amongst the generations, and things don't look too rosy for those born at the dawn of trickle-down economics. While Boomers and Gen X went into to debt to buy houses, millennials were arguably fed a lie when they were told by their parents and grandparents they should invest in an education for themselves.

Weissmann points out that the study suggests millennials might be able buck the current trend of wealth stagnation — given that they are the most educated generation of Americans yet — but just how many knowledge workers can an economy sustain? Only time will tell.

[Slate]

There Was A Time When People Wanted Everything To Look Like OS X

Mentioning the once-popular media player Winamp inevitably causes someone to bring up Winamp skins. But what I think gets lost in that particular vein of nostalgia is just how crazy everyone was about skinning everything on a computer.

I remember just browsing through forum thread after forum thread of Show Us Your Desktop-type posts and just being blown away with peoples' creativity. It was cool to see that, with enough skin packs and tinkering, you could create something that was wholly unrecognizable from Windows.

This week, Ernie Smith, perhaps the Internet's foremost nostalgist, details the very specific and very real obsession of Windows users trying to make everything look like OS X. Which: I get it! I totally did it. Driven by boredom of looking at the same GUI every single day for hours on end, plus the lack of a disposable income to actually own any Apple products, I worked very hard to turn my copy of Windows XP into an OS X look-alike. The dock is a cool idea! Skeuomorphic design is something that Windows never really had.

My only memories of trying to re-skin my own copy of Windows are that of frustration. Of fighting Windows' insistence on a taskbar, on a start menu, of using desktop icons — all the purposefully designed stuff I was trying to digitally plaster over with freely-available skin packs.

These days my instance of Windows is decidedly less modded. I don't hide the task bar anymore. I've started to use desktop shortcuts again. And I've altogether stopped using third-party programs to alter how Windows works or looks. I have so much more to worry about.

[Tedium]