Well, looks like I'll never be using copilot.
329 karma · joined May 29, 2020
I think your impression is likely a result of “deviance amplification”—-i.e, hearing about all the bad shit that goes on in more obscure religions, and taking that as indicative of prevalence.
This morning, my mac wouldn't boot. I tried to write on my iPad instead. It was a nightmare: too cumbersome to move between apps, Zotero nearly unworkable, hard to navigate different file versions. If the OS works more like iOS than macOS, I can't imagine it being as useful as computers save for very specific applications.
First off, if we want to bring the birth rate back up, we would probably do well to implement social policies that makes having kids less of a nightmare for everyone but the very rich or very poor: generous paternal leave, some kind of childcare (a creche-like system), better tax credits, good public schools, etc. I understand that well-paid developers might be less attuned to this kind of thing, but as a non-dev professional in a HCOL city with a young baby, I promise you that economic factors are the major reason we will not have another child.
Second, while I understand that the economy is organized around ever-growing populations, it seems like at some point, we'll have to figure out how to deal with declining or flat birthrates. We can't just grow forever, can we? Could the planet really sustain triple or quadruple the current population?
This kind of moral panic has galvanized conservatives ever since urbanization, industrialization, and first-wave feminism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its impressive how everyone sounding this alarm seems to suffer from (s)elective amnesia, championing the good ol' days without admitting that doing so is more a political posture than a historical one.
Also, people here should stop generalizing their experience in California to the country at large. MA and NJ have pretty good public schools, some of which are in dense and diverse regions of each state.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I strongly suspect the design trend will swing toward hoarder chic. Almost 10 years ago now, I drove from Austin to San Antonio to buy an old stereo for $50. The owner's house was fascinating. He had two large rooms full of stereo equipment that he collected but had little interest in selling. Every item had a story: where got it, what a deal it was, what he traded for it. The stories evoked different times and places in his life. There was a whole biography there, in stereo(s).
Unless a café were really driven by the personality of its owner, it would be hard to reproduce that kind of thing in any meaningful way. But I think designers will at least try. We're obsessed with old things as indices of authenticity, and as the aesthetic pendulum swings, interior designers will differentiate themselves by making spaces marked by superfluity. This kind of thing already exists, of course--largely in bars filled with vintage stuff. In homes, something like it gets called "grandmillenial" or "grandma chic." But it'll ultimately be just as vapid as contemporary design language, because it'll be a simulacrum of something more authentic.
My sister-in-law is a successful interior designer, and her house is the epitome of AirSpace. It is as ephemeral as the Airbnb guest, changing every few months in the name of perennial "updates." It is the most heartless home I've ever been in.
1. The author's entire brand identity follows this format. ("Hi. I'm Alex Murrell. I'm the Strategy Director at Epoch. And I make the complex clear.")
2. This is not a new observation. Apart from the articles he linked to, this is an old conversation, especially among urbanists. Already in the early twentieth century, Frankfurt School critical theorists were worried about the commodification of cities, with buildings becoming as ephemeral as consumer goods. More recently, Paul Connerton described modern space as "space wiped clean."
3. I know the author works in marketing, but I find the conclusion that "bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive" shockingly bland.
I know everyone in comments is griping about selection bias. Sure. There are local differences in commercial establishments, and you'd have to be deliberately dense to deny that. But I also think you have to be willfully blind to not see the convergence in international design trends, which are an obvious consequence of globalization. There are some obvious reasons for this, particularly when it comes to architecture. Lots of these firms are multinational, and homogeneity is an artifact of efficiency. This is not necessarily a bad thing: as someone in an HCOL city, I would happily take "bland" buildings if it meant affordable housing.
But really, I’d like to see more attention to how many of these effects are due to the ways in which marriages are legally recognized and respected in ways that other monogamous long term relationships are not.
I’d also like to know why, if LIBERALS HATE MARRIAGE so much, they spent decades fighting for the right to gay marriage?