sewercake

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Patricio Guzman's 'Nostalgia for the Light' is a wonderful documentary 'about' Atacama. It cuts between the scientists using the telescopes and a collection of women who have been scouring the desert for fragments of the bodies of loved ones discarded during the pinochet regime. Both are using the space to probe history, just very different kinds and at very different scales. Very powerful and instructive exploration of the (dead) body, grief, and the necessity of 'witnessing'. Highly recommend it to everyone here!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Light

depends.

I get used to things. I have spent hundreds of hours using modern laptop computers to develop software, read articles, mindlessly consume social media content, watch porn. Because of these hundreds of hours, when I come to interact with my laptop computer, a set of pre-established affordances, feelings, and thought patterns immediately present themselves.

This goes away if I write in my notebook or type on my alphasmart, where a whole other host of feelings and thought patterns immediately appear. Usually, these are feelings and thought patterns that are localized to what I'm writing about, which makes writing (and thinking) much easier.

There's a lot of 'political' content on instagram. do a quick google search for 'politigram' and you'll see what I'm talking about. That being said, there are definitely per-platform affordances that may change the degree and extent to which its expressed (and, crucially, to whom).

While I'm not sure where I stand on this ruling, there's a flaw in this form of reasoning. Namely, I don't think this is merely (or at least usefully) reducible to 'efficiently editing a series of frames'. The ability to do so has emergent effects, and that should be taken seriously!

It's interesting, many people in this comment section are pointing out other places, like greece, the caspian sea, the black sea, where cats are found all over the urban environment. What all of these places share (including istanbul) is their proximity to water, and presumably, ports! When I was in istanbul, I remember someone saying that the cats, historically, would help tame the massive rat populations that often plague both port cities and the hulls of ships. I don't have a source to back this up, but its some food for thought!

Better Place was an early attempt at this strategy that ended in disaster, though I don't think you can attribute it to the underlying strategy. Here's a post-mortem on the company https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

Are you thinking of guifi?

Btr

Could it be that people aren't _just_ becoming more sensitive, but that aspects of modern society are _causing_ mental health issues to appear at higher rates? I won't say 'capitalism is making everyone mentally ill', but it does seem that a large blind-spot in most discourse around mental health is environment. In this sense, 'medicalising' everyday does, in fact, provide a useful lens to examine mental illness.

Just food for thought.

'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!

As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.

While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.

Haven't read the book, but here are two (notably harsh) reviews:

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...

- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors

- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.

- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera

https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...

- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.

- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily

I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.

Looks cool, but I can't seem to find anything referencing 'embodied cognition'. I'm not expert, but that still seems to be a ripe area of research.

I didn't take OPs comment as a 'snipe' -- America has a relatively weak left wing political base / history. Most of the canonical left wing thinkers, events, and successes have occurred outside of America, so it's always nice (and a little surprising) to hear about little tidbits of history like this.

I think you're equating 'society' with 'the market' here.

As another reply mentioned, it seems like hand-written notes are good because the limitations on writing speed force you to synthesize information as it is relayed to you.

Outside of mathematical lectures, I find writing notes in something like notepad++ more fruitful. I can attempt mirror the structure of the speakers' argument using tabs/indentations, and quickly reformat the document as the logical structure becomes clearer.

The critiques are similar insofar as they are both critiques, but differ vastly in their content.

Mark Fisher, and the 'traditional left's' critique of neoliberal identity politics calls for a centering of class -- that is the power relations inherent in capital modes of production. This, many would argue is not an identity, but a _material position_: a specific stance or relationship to the productive forces in society.

The Alt-Right tends to believe societal conflicts arise from 'culture wars' between ethnicities, nationalities, religions, etcetera. In this way, they share an 'identitarian' analysis of political force with the liberals they aim to critique!

what split keyboard are you using? Do you recommend it? Currently in the market for one.

The progression from technocracy to technopoly (and beyond?) reminds me of Forster's famous short story The Machine Stops.

they begin the article by saying pasture raised, organic meat is better for the environment than single-crop, fertilizer grown crops, through a reduction in emissions and and increase in biodiversity and health of the soil. It does not compare it to the obvious alternative of more sustainably grown crops, using crop rotation, cleaner sources of energy for farm equipment, etcetera.

Much like the author, I am skeptical of the role that 'fake news' has in the current political crisis in the united states (and, I would argue, globally). There's something about that critique that seems to a)lack a broader historical context b) lack any 'material' grounding.

I'm still waiting for the article(s) that incorporate these ideas successfully.

well, for one, it provides a common api across a host of different cloud providers (aws, azure, google cloud)

probably referring to the large amounts of capital put into real-estate etcetera starting in the 80's

re Aqueous' reply:

We know that America has a very bad track record when it comes to intervention in the democratic processes of other states.

We also know that Russia is a cynical, kleptocratic regime that has its fair share of moral and tangible crimes.

Your response does not acknowledge the last (and most important, imo) point in Sideloader's reply.

That is: The Russophobia can plausibly be seen as a cynical ploy to divert attention from the lack of proposals to solve a whole slew of domestic issues.

A relatively new podcast has a really enlightening episode on the bail system [1]. Episode two. Highly recommended.

The big takeaways for me: - the process for setting bail prices is very opaque, with little accountability. Many districts have extraordinary or unmanageably high bail for common crimes. - if you are poor, and can't afford bail, you either have to stay in jail, meaning you are apart from your family, unable to work, or more often than not, pay a bail bondsman a non-refundable amount of money to get you out of jail, meaning, before you are charged, before you are guilty (or innocent), you end up paying a fine.

[1] https://twitter.com/justice_podcast?lang=en

I love reading about Systems Theory. It's exciting, and, as other commenter's have mentioned, full of 'aha' moments. But, concretely, what has it done? Where has it gone? I am not being facetious, I'm genuinely curious what concrete benefits, systems, decisions, etcetera, have had 'systems thinking' as the catalyst.

Part of me thinks that many articles and ideas floating around the space are simply over abstractions, like saying the connections between neurons look similar to galaxies, and our universe. It sounds profound, and clearly, there is _some_ pattern there, but then, what does that pattern give us? Is it predictive? Descriptive? Or just simply a pattern with no use outside of increasing 'meaningfulness'.

All of those things would be even easier if the system was rehabilitative!

The scarcity of resources forces social interaction and gives value to life, relationships and property.

Are you saying that the 'cognitive elite' will live unsatisfied, lonely existences, and that's the price they have to pay for material success?

It seems like you're equating material scarcity with a 'mythic' view of human struggle. I.e: we need to challenge ourselves to grow and become better people.

I'm not denying that struggle is 'good' for bettering yourself, but I think there are ways to provide this kind of challenge that doesn't involve encouraging or maintaining material scarcity for vast swaths of the human population.

I don’t have enough experience to say how common my experience (or yours) is, but I don’t know how much luck is involved. I’m sure many institutions have solved these problems without containers and sicker.

But For various reasons, political, personal, technical etcetera, consistent, accessible test environments were not available. It was a huge bottleneck for developers.

This is why docker was so appealing: it allowed devs to circumvent the political and technical issues. We didn’t have to justify provisioning more instances, since we could just use docker compose to run stacks on local machines.

So I’m that sense, the choice and it’s benefits arose from non technical hurdles.