Everything feels the same now.
Websites, they all look like they used Bootstrap.
Smartphones, well they basically are the same as everybody has the latest iPhone.
Fashion. Everybody wears jeans.
Websites, they all look like they used Bootstrap.
Smartphones, well they basically are the same as everybody has the latest iPhone.
Fashion. Everybody wears jeans.
Variety and diversity on the other hand need to be able to discard cost/ROI focused optimization. They need to be inefficient/"wasteful", they need to take time and more resources because they're new or their fundamental variance that makes them appealing are defined by their very state of being sub-optimal. They need to be able to fail and iterate, not fail and die.
I'm a proponent of optimizing on certain factors like cost, time, space and so forth under certain conditions, but I think we need to stand back as humans and be mindful of processes we seek to optimize and ask if some of them are factors we really want to optimize on. Do we want more square footage so we can cram another person or piece of furniture in or do we want to change our target optimization to include aesthetic appeal, variety, mental health... and so forth. We have our priorities way off as a society, I'd argue, and those priorities are being less of a choice and more of a mandate for many.
Right now we're on a runaway freight train across society to optimize on cost and ignore everything else. This pandemic is sure to expedite that problem with the economic toll its taken. That cost saving/ROI optimization strategy, in our economic system, will "win" most times over other choices. If we are able to relax the financial constraints of many, then we can use that slack to focus on other factors that aren't always cost and profit driven.
Shopping at boutique stores certainly offer a more memorable shopping experience, better dining, or more engaging products than Amazon or Walmart, but at substantially greater cost/risk. When efficiency/safety becomes primary among your desiderata, variety and diversity will suffer.
This is the exact conundrum covered well in Kunstler's "The Geography of Nowhere" which bemoaned the social cost arising from city/village design that was optimized to serve too narrow a set of priorities, thereby eliminating opportunity to experience and share common spaces in more than one way.
But is this what's happening? As far as I know, and particularly in the US, square footage is increase despite the reduction in the number of people per household. And are people really cramming stuff with furniture nowadays?
It feels really strange to hear the complaint that the US is optimizing on cost, when from my side of the pond, US lifestyle feels if anything extremely wasteful.
I was trying to explain to one particular such Christian friend that the problem with religion is that "The fish is the last to know that it lives in water". That is: it seems obvious that "Our religion is the one true religion" only if you hadn't travelled and realised that everyone thinks that, but doesn't agree with you. In a context of a Christian country, a Christian upbringing, and a Christian government, this is not so obvious.
She disagreed, and said very firmly that she does notice such consistent trends. "I would know if I lived in water."
We were in a packed lecture hall. In reply, I said simply:
"Everyone single person in this room is wearing jeans, except me."
As a field we've gotten a lot of mileage out of deciding that something simply must be true due to the aesthetics of a set of equations, and our heroes (Dirac and his positron, Higgs and his Boson) are people whose faith in their aesthetic judgment was retroactively rewarded by experiment.
For what it's worth, I don't think this is true. There are a good number of places in the world were people of different religous faiths live alongside each other. Sometimes they try and kill each other, but often they can live fairly peacibly. India's a good example (including both the killing and the peacibly part).
Or to put it another way: they all think their shit don't stink. It's even crazier when you break it down into denominations (see: Iran vs Saudi Arabia).
The entire dichotomy is a fraud. The problem is centralization, not whether the centralized power is a state or a corporation.