Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph. Success depends on the extension of one’s culture, on one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and vivacity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Tag: Quotation
Look, if you think the fact that my Internet of Shit door-lock failed because the company that designed it made no plan to let me into my house if they went out of business would make me sympathetic to that company, you are out of your fucking mind.
Cory Doctorow, “Learning from Silicon Valley Bank’s apologists”
The Internet-of-shit is real and we can only hope that the threats associated with their bank collapsing will teach a generalizable lesson.
I’m…..not optimistic.
All those people who had a certain amount of labour experience prior to or into the early 1990s and then carried on, they weren’t necessarily the ones who have seen that sort of precarity and job loss. Their experience carried them through.
People entering the workforce since then have had to contend with the continual erosion of labour standards, labour law, and collective bargaining, as well as all these different kinds of carveouts, especially around self-employment.
It creates what looks like an age divide, but it’s not really. It’s a deregulation divide.
John Peters, from “‘The rich and everybody else’: Financial inequality in Canada keeps growing”
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2021.5.11
We have come a long way in routing the taboos that stand in the way of justice for victims of sexual assault. But there is still a distance to go. The problems are complex and rooted in centuries of culture and myth. The law, imperfect as it may be, is a powerful tool in achieving lasting change. But real justice will come only when we change attitudes—when respect for the autonomy of every person replaces old myths grounded in ownership, control, and power.
– Beverly McLachlin, Truth Be Told: My Journey Through Life and the Law
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The Escalatory Ladder and Cyberspace
If anything, what [Bytes, Bombs and Spies] points out is how little value you can get from traditional political-science terms and concepts. Escalatory ladder makes little sense with a domain where a half-decade of battlefield preparation and pre-placement are required for attacks, where attacks have a more nebulous connection to effect, deniability is a dominant characteristic, and where intelligence gathering and kinetic effect require the same access and where emergent behavior during offensive operations happens far beyond human reaction time.
Dave Aitel, There is no Escalatory Ladder in the Matrix
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2019.1.7
We are now learning that the effect of density is nuanced. For one thing, wealthier people do better in apartment towers than poor people. Not only do they have the money to pay for concierges, maintenance, gardening, decoration, and child care, but, having chosen their residences, they tend to attach greater status to them. Home feels better when it carries a different message about who you are. (A building’s status can be altered without any physical change at all. When they were sold on the open market, once-despised social housing blocks in central London became objects of desire for middle-class buyers who fetishizes their retro modernism.)
Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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2019.1.4
We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with he price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them. How much space, privacy, and distance from other people do we need? How much nature do we need? Are there designs that combine the benefits of dispersal with the dividends of proximity?
Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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2019.1.3
… the meeting place, the agora, the village square are not trivial. They are not civic decoration or merely recreational. The life of a community is incomplete without them, just as the life of the individual is weaker and sicker without face-to-face encounters with other people.
Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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2018.4.12
When we travel we take our expectations with us, our prejudices, our sense of normality. We see what we see through eyes trained by home.
Christopher Priest, The Gradual
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The Cure For Pessimism? Action
GQ has a good interview with Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. It’s far-ranging, covering the company’s attitude to making clothing, to climate change, to politics. But what really struck me was this:
Gradually, the conversation went even darker. About Trump, Chouinard added, “It’s like a kid who’s so frustrated he wants to break everything. That’s what we’ve got.” I asked sarcastically if any part of him was an optimist. Marcario, sitting next to him, laughed loudly. “Did you just ask Yvon if he’s an optimist?” Chouinard smiled and cocked his head. “I’m totally a pessimist. But you know, I’m a happy person. Because the cure for depression is action.”
I would note that I think action is the cure for pessimism, as opposed to depression; one is a state of mindset whereas the other is often a serious mental condition that can require professional assistance. But that nitpick aside, I think he’s correct that you press through pessimism by acting to make the world a little bit better every day than how you started it.
Excited Pixels 