[HN Gopher] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a '70s artist who became a h...
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       Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a '70s artist who became a hero to 'garbage
       men'
        
       Author : samclemens
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2025-06-17 22:24 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | duxup wrote:
       | Maintenance never seems to be respected, but without it none of
       | us could do what we do. It applies to garbage men, and even tech.
       | 
       | I worked tech support for nearly 20 years on various things, big
       | networking equipment, mainframe equipment. Some companies paid
       | really well and made their money / stayed afloat through hard
       | times because they had a reputation for providing high quality
       | tech support. But in the end every company seems to devalue it
       | eventually. Quality of management starts to dip, resources are
       | slowly siphoned away, some management mistakes that because
       | problems get reported through support channels that is somehow
       | always support's fault. Things start to turn and it goes bad,
       | someone decides it looks good on a resume to outsource and so on.
       | 
       | Before I left my last support job the local manager decided to
       | cancel the quarterly pizza party (maybe couple hundred bucks in
       | pizza) to save money ... I was taking a buy out (I was fortunate)
       | and as a fun way to go out I held my own pizza party, spent my
       | own money ;) Company pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars
       | and I held the pizza party.
       | 
       | I moved on and now I write code where you get paid more / valued
       | more / more respect making new things. It's hard to avoid the
       | fact that maintenance is just not respected.
        
         | nkrisc wrote:
         | Like a pizza party, the benefits of maintenance can be hard to
         | quantify, but the costs are easy to quantify.
         | 
         | How do you quantify incidences that _didn't_ happen because of
         | proper maintenance? Did you maintain more than necessary to
         | achieve no incidents?
         | 
         | Middle managers are a reflection of leadership.
        
           | mey wrote:
           | I have learned over my career that I can't dictate culture.
           | If I attempt to, I will go insane from the stress, because it
           | always comes top down. I try, I give feedback, I do what I
           | can, but these choices are systemic. You can shelter
           | yourself, peers, and team from some rain, but not the ocean.
        
         | skyyler wrote:
         | I love maintenance. I love keeping things running smoothly.
         | 
         | I sure wish people that sign paychecks valued it as much as I
         | do.
        
         | imnotlost wrote:
         | They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
        
       | Willingham wrote:
       | https://archive.ph/dIQpU
        
       | patcon wrote:
       | I love this.
       | 
       | For anyone interested, The Maintainers conference/community feels
       | like a spiritual successor: https://themaintainers.org/events/
       | 
       | Really interesting to have back-to-back sessions on shipping
       | container infra, cochlear implants, then social care-work
        
       | auto wrote:
       | > Frustrated by the constant intrusions of child care and
       | housework -- "the back half of life," as she called it -- on her
       | creative ambitions, she resolved to simply turn the work into her
       | creative product. "Clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the
       | floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby's
       | diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence,"
       | she wrote in the treatise, which was published by Artforum in
       | 1971. "Clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay
       | young."
       | 
       | There's more here than just the sanitation narrative, she's
       | tapping into the focus Zen puts on the present, that these every
       | day chores ARE the meditation, or in this case, the artistic
       | expression.
        
       | jp191919 wrote:
       | speaking of garbage, the website thinks I'm a robot
        
         | ramon156 wrote:
         | And don't forget the 11 popups telling you to accept cookies,
         | sign up and disable adblock. God I love the internet
        
         | WarOnPrivacy wrote:
         | > the [NYT] website thinks I'm a robot
         | 
         | FYI: Bypass Paywalls plugins are triggering bot-walling at
         | NYT+this week.
         | 
         | This month I'm getting a steady diet of bot walls. Among the
         | triggers are CanvisBlocker, Disable HTML Autoplay, Disabling
         | Auto-Forward in the browser, UBO and Domain Forgetting. Sites
         | get grumpy when users self-protect.
        
           | ctoth wrote:
           | Yeah :( Do you have any replacement for Bypass Paywalls Clean
           | Chrome? I am not willing to just download the random one
           | without the repo history.
        
       | itronitron wrote:
       | >> A year earlier, she paneled a garbage truck with mirrors so
       | that people could see themselves in the waste they created.
       | 
       | Genius.
       | 
       | If I recall correctly, there is a photograph of the mirrored
       | truck in Suzi Gablik's book The Re-enchantment of Art. And here
       | is some additional information and images:
       | 
       | https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/mierle-laderman-ukeless-ode-t...
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-20 23:01 UTC)