trgn

just on the ellul mention, I still think he has the best distillation of what it means to be a technical society, and it's one in which man internalizes the value system of the machine, and the machine only has one value, efficiency. it's a deceptively simple reduction, but can be applied very widely (e.g. into bureaucracy and statecraft).

the into the wild fate i agree with, it does seem like the drive for some personal reconnection with nature, reality almost logically must end up there. 21st century man cannot become a collection of vagrants striking into the wilderness (at the extreme), but even on the spectrum leading up there there's many wavelengths that seem unworkable (e.g. we also cannot be cabin in the woods vagrants, and maybe all striving for some more pastoral mode de vie, that too, cannot be a shared ethos).

it's incredibly frustrating. I've been somewhat captured by the idea, that while we may not be able to rebuild a localized terroir as an ecosystem for a 21st century knowledge worker, we may be able to reclaim city life. not the degraged mechanized city experiecne of today. but think more of the paris as an outdoor palace for the bourgeois in the 19th century, or vienna as a gay and vivacious center filled with art and music in the 18th, or bruges centuries before that as a intimate verdant cradle, yet also center of world commerce. that is, find that communion again with tactile reality, not in nature, but in the most perfect expressions of the city, its arts. nature then becomes distilled, the beautiful park, the well tended garden, the bonsai tree in the living room, etc etc... the lush spacious city as a sublimation of the the wilderness, the country side.

My street has speedbumps since a few years and its been an amqzing improvement

thanks, will look him up.

rip, sad day for my homestate, he's a giant here. and for me too, as he's one of those rabbit hole authors, revealing a Truth (capital T).

berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.

i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.

the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?

the commodification of everything, just one more example. once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

> to enforce artificial borders and deny everyone this basic freedom.

a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.

that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.

not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.

I think many (if not most) countries in the developed world should reduce immigration, and usa in particular should abolish birthright citizenship.

The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.

Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.

I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.

i wonder about this too.

modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.

the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...

you're agreeing, just harping on slight different (and all valid) uses of the words.

seeing the commons get worse in your lifetime, span of 10-15 years, if we're really precise about it, really is quite a trip.

I believe it, but what's the point of having them then.

That cannot be an emperical statement. Traffic engineers have absolutely wrecked the american city, largely be ause they didnt know the impact of adding lanes.

It's not the only reason. I think that traffic engineers lack/lacked a feel, a certain gut understanding , an inability to feel through the skin. Just look around you. See and hear them at municipal meetings. They are unable to sensually experience the effects of their work, their praxis.

> Sontag has the credentials / writing skills to discuss it well.

100%, and just to give an example, she finds good art is excreted (her words - perfectly chosen) rather than created, and I think her example was how the immaculate constructions of somebody like Flaubert lose a certain impact and potency, precisely because they betrays some sort of methodological process. And this cannot yield Truth.

To me, reading this now, that sort of analysis struck me rather as very much dated, and an example of that flippant iconoclasm of modern literary criticism, basically, of the hippies.

Because, really, who is she to throw Flaubert so casually under the bus? (im joking) Mme bovary is perfect, in a way a classical music composition is perfect, it is the oppressive knowledge that perfection can be willed into the world and it's the artist who has the task to will it in the world, no matter the devotion and commitment required. Causally dismissing this, is at its base adolescent posturing (like the hippies). But more importantly, and this is why I say "dated", is that we now, after 60-80 years very much have witnessed what sort of art we get when creating art should be more akin to some physiological evacuation. It's just no good, and it's being rejected more and more.

it's largely because it's being dumped or littered instead of being disposed in a garbage can.

always great to see reminders that software is not a commodity.

there's a new urbanist community, walkable, bikelanes, etc.. in my part of the midwest and it's teeming with children.

what's that theory?

> logical intelligence

it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job

didnt know, it's on my watchlist now!

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

weight is the easiest measure. wear&tear on road, mpg, damage in accident all scale with weight

I consider myself reasonably competent, reached conventional milestones in a career in tech, did a thing here and there, and I'm reading this, sort of nodding along, and barely understand what's the issue again with cut&paste, there was one, which one ?, anyway, middle age you guys, it's real.

dont know the laws well enough, but would be crazy indeed if companies could borrow against their own stock when they're issuing first new ones with sbc and then buy back on open market.

yep, clearly, just meant they're not cash strapped.

vacationing/digital nomading in belgium atm, it looks erhm rich. traveling between brussels, leuven, ghent, bruges, soon antwerp... people dress well, never been anywhere with so many german luxury cars on the road, meals cost about the same as US.

I'm sure statistics this and that, but something doesn't translate, sanguine reality is different.

i dont think this announcement will boost the stock either, for the same reason we are wondering here why 7% is noteworthy for a globocorp.

but none of this applies to elastic. it's cash flow positive, and has such a cash hoard it's doing stock buybacks.

i dont understand this either. just dont hire for half a year or so, a generic globocorp gets to that 7% easily.

isnt that just a temporary bottleneck? a self-confident generation might make the sacrifice. plus, the opposite of increasing isnt necessarily decreasing, stabilizing is another one.

absent productivity increases, population growth is just there to maintain the welfare state for retirees, it's a perpetuum mobile. apart from that, i dont even know what the benefits of a growing population would be. switzerland is trying a different tack through democratic means.