rex_gallorum2

There was a connection between deindustrialization in American cities (and the crappy property market in the 80s) and the music and arts scenes in the 80s and 90s. It was relatively cheap and easy to set up studios, galleries, music venues, or just squat in empty industrial buildings. Property owners were happy to have someone to keep the lights on and keep the bums out. Stages and makeshift bars were built out of scraps, and bands were booked, and people came. Music scenes used to require physical spaces (and arguably still do) to breathe and take shape.

I've watched interviews in which veteran musicians from one city in Texas describe how things developed in the 80s - it was all made possible by rock bottom rents and tons of empty warehouse space. I think the situation was similar across much of the US. Space was cheap enough to allow for low-profit activities and businesses to take root. The stakes were very low compared to today.

An analogous situation emerged in other places (in part for different reasons) such as the former East Berlin. I would guess similar circumstances also emerged in the UK around the same time - perhaps someone here can confirm.

Absolutely. The internet stopped being something you accessed and became something you were connected to 24/7, and that you have a persistent, high-speed connection. That was a huge shift.

30 years ago, the internet was a novelty, nothing more, and it remained so easily for another ten years after that. It wasn't until the widespread adoption of smartphones that permanent connectivity came to be taken for granted.

It was actually very easy to get by without any of it until quite recently, when legacy options for all kinds of things began being phased out.

Best comment of them all.

Again, you are absolutely correct, and for more reasons than most casual readers here will know.

You are absolutely correct. Living abroad for any length of time comes with tremendous costs. It changes you permanently.

In the end you can never really go home, because home as you knew it isn't there anymore, and you yourself have changed.

It can be very detrimental in more practical ways too - things few people pause to consider.

Edit:

Beware of the dreaded Ds such as death, divorce, debt, disability, etc. It's easy if you are young and consider a short stay abroad - but growing old abroad is another thing entirely.

Good spot to look - you could try Flagpole Hill. :)

'Cause them women in Deep Ellum got them Deep Ellum blues.

And you know what?

If you go down in Deep Ellum, keep your carbeurator clean, 'cause them women in Deep Ellum'll sell you dirty gasoline.

If you ever get a chance, feed a whole apple to an ostrich. Watching it move down their neck is really funny.

Keeping geese taught me that this phenomenon is quite normal for birds with long necks.

People seem to believe me when I say I don't carry a phone, but they look at me like they're talking to a member of some 'uncontacted tribe'. I don't think it computes.

The good ones at least have a machine where you can pay cash. I found myself having to park in such an area recently, and did some recon the day before, just to make sure there were machines on site - and there were. What I found funny was that the lot was attended by a live human being, too, which made me wonder why the owner of the lot in question had opted for an automated system at all.

It bothers me that they insist on collecting license plate numbers. Why not just number the parking spots so they are classed as 'paid' or 'not paid' and dispense with the unnecessary surveillance?

Is it even illegal to use a fake plate in a situation like that? Certainly if you are driving, but what about parking?

I've read that they have to be reachable in order to get any kind of state benefits, and being unreachable leads to automatic disqualification - which is a big problem as homeless people often lose their phones or have them stolen.

As far as smartphones being a necessity goes, I have never owned a smartphone myself, and do not carry any phone at all most of the time. I have just gone on living like I did before smartphones, though I am aware that I am locked out of more and more things. I am beginning to resent things like parking that requires a smartphone. I don't understand the lack of back up options.

Rather than insisting on 'smartphones as a human right', I'd rather see 'opting out' as a human right.

This one irritated me.

There was (and is) so much to do. People used to talk to each other and interact with other and with their environment more though. It's vastly harder now.

Disconnecting from time to time is refreshing.

Wild strawberries and bilberries... I grew both for years. :) They are wonderful.

Yes but it's all squishy. Bread is not supposed to have that texture, ever. I can only guess that most Americans object to actually having to chew their food.

They exist in some cities, sure, but across wide swathes of the country, they are nowhere to be found. The craft is dead, and in its place we have industry and logistics.

Where I see 'real' bread for sale in the US, it is marketed as a luxury good for the affluent, and the price reflects this. I see this as scandalous - charging a premium for what I would consider ordinary 'natural' food.

What really pains me is that an ordinary loaf of industrial spongebread at Walmart costs the same as a very high quality (and heavier/denser) loaf of proper bread (such as a standard Mischbrot) at a bake shop in Germany. It's obscene given that labor and especially energy costs are considerably higher in Germany, so it isn't like comparing a US price to a dirt cheap low-wage country.

I have noticed that since the pandemic there seems to be a lot more interest in quality home baking in the US, but it seems that people are rediscovering fire in a vacuum without any real training or knowledge - because the traditional craft is dead.

I am growing a little spelt in the garden this year from organic seed sourced in Germany. If it works, I will save my new seed and try it on a larger scale next year.

I've encountered the WhatsApp issue too. It's the communication tool in some parts of the world, but not others. In some circles people cannot imagine that you are a living breathing person who does not have it.

I use a bottom tier flip phone in the US, and a 13 year old Nokia with a pay-as-you go SIM in Europe.

I've noticed that there has been a generational shift towards smartphone-only communications, but I haven't really had to deal with it. I'd like to hear more about that. Oddly I use some of the same communication tools that young kids use, namely Discord, as it doesn't require a phone number. Linking online accounts and communications to a phone number has always put me off.

Banks tend to have some back up, such as a TAN generator. I have used those for Euro bank accounts that require 2FA. US bank accounts are usually fine with a phone number, which can be a dumb phone. There were no real covid restrictions where I live, and no app, so that was not a problem (but that is definitely something people should push back against, as it's horrifying). I would never, ever eat in a restaurant that required you to use a QR code. They can simply go to hell. It's mostly trendy places that do that, anyway, and I prefer hole-in- the-wall restaurants anyway. I understand this stuff is a lot more advanced in some countries, but even in the US it's pretty easy to get by without any of it.

I do. I am beginning to feel the costs though. Even telling people that I don't have one is getting a bit awkward. Imagine the look of incomprehension.

A lot of people talk about 'needing' a smartphone for services/stuff I have never used, and probably would never use. I suppose I just kept living my life as I did before the 2010s, while everyone else changed. I was already in my 30s at that time, so not subject to the same social pressures a younger person would have felt, so perhaps it was easier.

We're increasingly like animals that become dependent on a single source of food or a single watering hole. It's really risky. You could hardly design more fragile systems (or business models) that depend in these very narrow bottlenecks.

It should definitely be illegal. There are so many other options for charging these kinds of fees, all of which were used by public bodies in the US in the past, from dropping envelopes of money in a box to paying a person at a kiosk or using a vending machine to buy passes. Many of these payment methods are still in use at some parks/facilities.

The noose is tightening around the necks of those few of us who do not use smartphones. I hope a future wave of 'tech minimalism' gains enough traction to ensure that there are alternatives, but for now, as we ride the wave of tech-optimism and the mass adoption of intrusive technologies in the name of convenience or cost cutting, most people seem to see asking for alternatives as unreasonable.

There is an element of innate freedom in anonymous, analogue processes, even if they are not entirely 'anonymous' - such as writing a car license plate number on an envelope of cash for a drop box - it might as well be if the information is never entered into a searchable digital database where it will presumably be stored for eternity.

I few years ago I went camping at a state park in a system that had recently introduced usage fees (having always been free in the past). The state apparently partnered with some obscure parking app company to collect the fees. The use of the state park required submitting a considerable amount of information to a third party, with little or no information on how that data might be used, stored, or sold - in essence you had no choice but to submit to a third party's TOS in order to use public facilities at all. I did not like this at all, and having no smartphone, I paid cash at the manned office - only to have them collect my information and enter it into the parking app database.

A few months ago someone here made a comment in another discussion about having a pervasive sense that things are not quite as they should be. That stuck with me.

In Germany for example it's the only way. Join the club and hang around their private bar!

Germany definitely tends to be like that - but it makes it all the more interesting when strangers do talk to you. It could also vary by region and the type of bar. I've done my share of loitering around neighborhood bars in different parts of Germany, and it is sometimes surprising how open people can be - once they get a few drinks in them.

So true. I had a similar experience in Germany. I'd say Ireland is small enough that everyone is connected to everyone else in some way, and people are curious about others, and discovering those remote connections. I've found that in many other places, people just don't care and are not interested.

I too appreciated this one. Fascinating!

I found the discussion here more interesting than the article/blog post.

Most of you are talking at cross purposes, and there are some major intercultural communication problems here that are masked by everyone reading/writing in English.

If we were all part of a single culture and organic community, where the unwritten rules and mechanics of how things work and don't work are known to all, we could have a meaningful discussion, and perhaps debate the ethical aspects of the author's lifestyle.

But we are not and do not and can not.

I would argue that although the author wrote in English, what he wrote really only makes sense within a Swedish cultural context. I see comment after comment projecting foreign norms, values, and circumstances on the author without any knowledge whatsoever of how things work in Sweden.

I am even seeing classic stuff right out of Geert Hofstede's six dimensional culture model such as individualism vs. collectivism.

I don't expect everyone to understand this comment, but someone definitely will!

I think you are quite correct. The kid/teen social sphere today never sleeps, and never forgets, and there is no escaping it.

This reminds me a bit of the recent discussion here about networked security cameras using cloud storage.

Many people seem to have a very simplistic idea about how the law, law enforcement, and courts work.

Laws are always selectively enforced. Police, prosecutors, and courts are not going to simply round up petty criminals such as serial package thieves just because victims suddenly have HD video footage of the (countless) perpetrators. They have other priorities.

Political crime is back with a vengeance, even in the 'liberal' west, and pursuing threats to the existing socio-political and economic order will always take priority. The main issue with pervasive surveillance systems isn't that they are used to detect and prosecute ordinary street crime or nuisance infractions (though the latter can become burdensome). The problem is that these systems will be used to pursue 'special' categories of crime such as political activism. (Expect those categories to creep and expand just as flimsy justifications such as 'conspiracy' and 'incitement' proliferate.)

Expect the full force of the surveillance and control systems being constructed now to be used extensively to maintain public order and pursue threats to public order.

Remember, the primary role of the police is to maintain order. Everything else they might do is secondary to that.

I hate to bring up Julian Assange as he is such a polarizing and widely reviled character - but it is clear now that several governments saw him as a sufficiently dire threat to that they felt justified pouring gargantuan resources into neutralizing him. This never happens with ordinary criminals except in sensational cases where the public is out for blood. I do not know if Assange himself was ever considered such a big threat, but I suspect the systemic risk threatening the whole system was great enough to justify making an example of him to deter others (at least from the perspective of the US and UK governments).

In a slightly unrelated aside, I might also remind some of you of this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kennedy_(police_officer)

And back to the networked cameras. Your own surveillance system is ultimately spying on you and creating records of your activities that probably should not exist - and should you store your data locally, and some of it happens to conveniently go missing, it could incriminate you, whereas this would not be an issue if it never existed in the first place. It brings up the old 'if you have nothing to hide' argument. Yet here we see evidence that largely benign political activities are deemed sufficiently threatening to justify closer scrutiny.

Pardon the sloppiness of this comment. I posted it piecemeal with many edits.

I do not need a dishwasher and I do not own a smartphone either. Why would I want to create all of that extra data about my habits needlessly? :P

Farms use cameras extensively for similar purposes. It makes sense. I think these kinds of specific, limited applications are very different from just setting them up everywhere because you are afraid and leaving them on all the time. I'd say the same if someone had a stalker or a deranged family member who might show up at any time. There are definitely good uses for networked surveillance cameras.

That works! The other thing nobody talks about is how cameras can be used for blackmail or for leverage. It could be a matter of catching someone doing something out of line, or more sinister, extorting money from a cheating neighbor. These are some of the reasons I find ubiquitous camera surveillance so insidious. There is infinite potential for petty abuse and chicanery. In a residential setting, they give busybodies and petty rule enforcers a very powerful weapon.