Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
“Trees are sanctuaries”*…
John Lewis-Stempel recounts a day in the life of an oak and the creatures that call it home…
Our friends the trees have an unremarkable life, or so it seems to us. They come into leaf, their fruit drops, or is gorged on by birds and the winds of autumn strip them of their dressing to leave them as the cold, bare sentinels of winter.
However, if we were to stand, tree-like ourselves, in a British copse and watch a single oak tree for an entire 24 hours — say when spring hatches out of winter — what would we see?…
Among their deceptively inert branches, trees shelter feathered Pavarottis, scuttling beetles, opportunistic fungi and fierce owls. A quick– and delightful– course in woodland ecology: “A day in the life of an oak tree, from mistle thrush in the morning to mice at midnight,” from @JLewisStempel in @Countrylifemag.
* Herman Hesse
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As we deliberate on the deciduous, we might send fertile birthday greetings to John Bartram; he was born on this date in 1699. An American botanist, horticulturist, and explorer, based in Philadelphia for most of his career, he was judged by Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to be the “greatest natural botanist in the world.”
He started what is known as Bartram’s Garden in 1728 at his farm in Kingsessing (now part of Philadelphia)– considered the first botanic garden in the United States. His sons and descendants operated it until 1850; it still operates under a partnership between the city of Philadelphia and a non-profit foundation, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that”*…
Noah Smith‘s sobering reflection on the rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism…
[This week] is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — a multi-decade debacle that would see hundreds of thousands of innocents killed, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain, America’s image in the Middle East destroyed, and the acceleration of the end of U.S. hegemony.
[This week] is also the [time] of the summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, in which the leaders of the two authoritarian great powers reiterate their de facto alliance. With one of those powers actively engaged in a war of conquest against a peaceful neighbor, and the other threatening to do the same, the world is in danger of plunging back into the horrors of the early 20th century.
So this is the perfect [time] to repost a fairly melodramatic post that I wrote two years ago, about the rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism. I don’t apologize for the over-the-top language, since I think it’s difficult to overstate the danger; we humans have a strong tendency to stick our heads in the sand until it’s too late, and we need to wake up.
But we also need to remember a crucial piece of this story: It was American folly that began this baleful trend. Our victories in World War 2 and Cold War 1 gave the U.S. the unique opportunity to build a world where countries don’t invade other countries; when we invaded Iraq without cause or provocation, we threw away that opportunity. We brought back the principle of “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”. We opened the gates, and allowed the Darkness back into our world. Now it’s our responsibility to help fix what we broke…
Illiberalism is on the march, all over the world- thoughts on what’s happening, why, and what we can do about it: “The Darkness,” from @Noahpinion. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Martin Luther King Jr.
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As we face the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Germany opened its first concentration camp, Dachau. Initially intended to intern Hitler’s political opponents (communists, social democrats, and other dissidents), it’s “mission” was enlarged to include forced labor, and, eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented. Approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick at the time of liberation by U.S. forces in April of 1945.
“Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair”*…
Mike Konczal unpacks happens when one takes the AEI graphic of items that have had high and low inflation, but extend it to all categories…
This graphic is in the news again:
Its creator is Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, who last posted an update to it in July 2022. He’s been doing a version since at least 2016, and if you read enough economics blogs or content you’ve probably seen some iteration of it.
People are talking about it again after Marc Andreessen posted it under the headline “Why AI Won’t Cause Unemployment.” Andreessen describes what people generally take away from it – blue line capitalism and dynamic, red line government regulations and stagnant…
Matt Yglesias noted on twitter that he’s “come to think it’s misleading — by being very selective in which categories of labor-intensive services it chooses to chart, it’s generated a narrative that relative price shifts are just about government regulation.”
That seems correct to me; these categories are pretty loaded. Let’s see if we can do better by including every possible category… let’s download all of the current Consumer Price Index (CPI) data off the BLS download site…
Since the BLS is constantly changing categories, we have to select the items that exist in both January 2000 and February 2023 to duplicate the chart. That leaves us with 62 categories. Doing a quick glance (and seeing in Perry’s own chart) the year-by-year evolution over time doesn’t really tell us much, so we can go with a simple bar chart for overall change. Let’s chart that here in full:
There are a few key takeaways looking at it this way:
In our version of the AEI chart the number one item isn’t health care but ‘delivery services,’ which is “fees for delivery of items such as letters, documents, and packages at non-US Postal Services facilities.”Think UPS or FedEx. This is pretty far from a government monopoly, indeed it’s the private sector alternative to a government program. But it is services and it is labor intensive.
The biggest thing, to me, isn’t “regulations” but whether it’s a service or a good…
More on how and why that matters in “A Better AEI Graphic of Inflation Over the Past 20 Years.”
* Sam Ewing
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As we ruminate in the rise, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet.
“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them”*…
Bijan Stephen muses on maturity…
What does it mean to be an adult? Is it age? Financial security (or lack thereof)? Responsibility? Or is it some mysterious combination of factors, some alchemical reaction between your life and other people’s?
I ask because I think the answer feels far less clear than it seems — as with pornography, you kinda know an adult when you see one, but I’m not sure there’s a single yardstick that tells you exactly when it happens. That said, it is very clear who is not an adult; childhood is much more obvious…
On growing up: “It can be annoying to be online,” from @bijanstephen in his newsletter You’ve Run Out of Complimentary Articles.
Apposite: “Everyone needs to grow up.”
* Virginia Woolf
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As we appreciate aging, we might recall that it was on this date in 1999 that the first Legoland amusement park in the U.S. opened in Carlsbad, California (there were already two in Europe).
A second park in the United States, Legoland Florida, opened in 2011. A third park, Legoland New York, opened in May 2021.
“It is at Dusk that the most interesting things occur, for that is when simple differences fade away. I could live in everlasting Dusk.”*…
L. M. Sacasas on time and temporality…
… I’m tempted, as I often am, by the grand generalization, and I will yield. Pre-industrial culture was synchronized by the rhythms of nature, rhythms which were often imbued with sacral significance (a unity suggested by the shared root of cult, culture, and cultivate). Industrial culture was, as Lewis Mumford observed, driven not by the steam-engine but by the clock. Industrial time overthrew pre-industrial time—agricultural time, if you like—but yielded a new set of rhythms and patterns, with the 9-5 workday perhaps at its heart. Mass media, which is to say industrialized media, supplied its own public temporalities to the industrial age, a new quasi-sacral calendar with daily, seasonal, and yearly rituals, some of which were artificial simulations of the old pre-industrial rituals.
What we have now is a new temporal order. It is not a negation of industrial time, but a further development built upon the precision of mechanical time. Industrial time enabled the mass synchronizations industrial culture required. But now digital technology enables a new desynchronized society through even more refined timekeeping coupled with the computational capacity to mobilize and organize society along more fluid, just-in-time, and, yes, from a human perspective, stochastic patterns.
To put this another way, a culture ordered in its patterns, language, ethics, and imagination by the rhythms of the natural world gave way to a culture ordered in its patterns, language, ethics, and imagination by the rhythms of industrialized labor and mass media. While we might disagree as to the timing of the transition, it seems safe to say that we now inhabit yet another cultural configuration. To put it this way may seem like a banal restatement of the well-worn and contested pre-modern/modern/post-modern sequence. But I think it is useful to draw out the temporal dimension of these social dynamics. If we press into each of these four categories—patterns, language, ethics, and imagination—we will find surprising and profound links to the temporal heart beating out the dominant cultural rhythms, whether it be nature or the machine.
…
Inhabiting the order of measured, quantified time, as most of us do, already inhibits our capacity to imagine another way of being in time. Our enclosure within the human-built world, in both its analog and digital dimensions, obscures the markers of alternative temporal orders. It is possible, of course, to frame this as a liberation from the limits of time just as it is possible to frame our uprootedness as a liberation from the constraints of place. And, indeed, it sometimes is just that. But it is also possible that our liberation from older cultural forms, forms which were more directly informed by a place and its time, has been used against us. To be disembedded and desynchronized is also to become subject to the stochastic order of the digital economy.
The computer, after all, is, among other things, an agent of social organization and an instrument of control. But what forms of social organization does it enable and what forms of control does it make possible?
…
The most tempting thing is to go back to the kind of empirically verifiable harms which I mentioned in passing at the outset. That’s the surest way to make the case for a different set of practices, but, of course, that is itself part of the problem. Yes, there’s a case to be made on the grounds of basic health and well-being, ours and our fellow creatures, for seeking another way of ordering our material environment.
But I find myself reaching beyond such concerns to something more ambivalent and amorphous, toward not just the healthy but the good, toward a deep recalibration of our being in the world according to a different order of time. And perhaps in thinking again about the meaning of our experience of light and dark and, perhaps especially, the transitions between the two, we can discern a different set of rhythms. “We are not only creatures of the light,” Kohák reminds us. “We are creatures of the rhythm of day and night, and the night, too, is our dwelling place.”…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Whose Time? Which Temporality?” from @LMSacasas.
* Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
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As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1918 that the U.S. Congress “standardized” time: the Standard Time Act (AKA, the Calder Act) became effective. Passed earlier in the year, it implemented across the U.S. both Standard Time (the creation of time zones anchored in UTC, the successor to GMT) and Daylight Saving Time.
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