The collapse of the Soviet Union in the eyes of some economists validated the market principles that are the underpinnings of globalism: the view, as รon magazine explores (one can listen to the essay at the link, as well), that government exist for the sole purpose of regulating and sustaining constructed markets and should not be in the business of vouchsafing the welfare of its subjects.
Self-interest redresses and supplants those basic services like mass-transit, food safety, libraries, etc. This increasing popular point of view (championed by many adherents including the US Secretary of State and top diplomat Rexxon-Mobil), characterised as neoliberalism by its critics, signals a major shift in how we talk and think about the nature of work and careers, paradoxically not increasing the feeling of loyalty and job security as countries move towards more and more advanced economies, but rather the opposite. Those marginally engaged in the workforce live in constant worry of becoming redundant at the whims of a corporate entity immeasurably bigger than any single cog (cog perhaps being an over-estimation of one’s importance), and for those fortunate enough to have a more comfortable working arrangement, every position is seen as developmental and an incremental step to the next opportunity. In short, workers are either terrified into obedience or abeyance flattens hierarchy and creates a class of passionate quitters.
Wednesday 9 August 2017
me, inc
Tuesday 8 August 2017
his master’s voice
I fully believe that Nag on the Lake deserves credit for discovering this marketing niche with her tip about a German radio station for canine shut-ins, but it’s pretty nifty nonetheless to learn that there is an audio book guide to help lonely dogs cope with separation anxieties when their humans depart for the day. A renowned animal psychologist conducted research that demonstrated the potential for better unmonitored behaviour in three out of four dogs that were read to (much like humans) and has some recommendations on selecting titles for your pets.
isthmus
Via Super Punch we learn that some influential individuals in Thailand’s business and government sectors are entertaining an ambitious infrastructure project that would create the south east Asia equivalent of the Suez or Panama canals by excavating a shipping lane through the country’s narrow land-bridge at Kra. The short-cut through the Malay peninsula would connect the Pacific and Indian oceans and would yield significant reductions in transit times and allow container ships to bypass territorially disputed and pirate-haunted waters.
Monday 7 August 2017
5x5
in your feed: BBC Culture recommends five-and-twenty arts and history podcasts with recommended episodes to try on for size
qvc: Dear Leader launches a propaganda network with weekly praise-a-thons as a refreshing alternative to fake news
automata: governments issuing guidelines to encourage manufacturers to redress lax security for smart cars and the internet of things
store brand: having accumulated billions of data points on sales, giant retail emporium turns, covertly, to selling its own line of products
zeitgeist: apps and internet dating platforms had already become part of the culture with two clubs in 1920s Berlin that facilitated flirtation via anonymised pneumatic tube, via Messy Nessy Chic
la strada
Click on the images for a larger view.Believing that large cities could be transformed into vertical utopias with good administration, his designs relied heavily on the use of towering skyscrapers—grattanuvole, already familiar to the aspiring architect.
Though perhaps ahead of his time and a cross-town superhighway’s moment has passed for our present (not that other solutions are being proffered) but the overpasses, underpasses and dedicated lanes that are common place may not have been integrated into city planning without Picasso’s appreciation of how complex systems function and intersect and the nature of the snarls and slums to avoid.
Sunday 6 August 2017
being called a nerd wasn’t always taken to be a badge of honour
Collectors’ Weekly features an in depth conversation with historian and cultural ephemera caretaker Rebecca Onion (whose name might strike some of you long-time readers as familiar as the blogger behind The Vault, part of Slate’s constellation of blogs) on her new book that critically and thoughtfully explores the fraught and precocious relation that America (and by extension other nationalities) has had with education and the sciences.
As understudies, surrogates for how society judges itself, children and how they are portrayed and reared as either very modern or paradoxically anti-modern (either as digital natives or digital naรฏves, something potentially pure and innocent, like a wild child) and our concerns, priorities and norms as societies are reflected in either how we encourage or begrudge not just the glamourous, swashbuckling parts of the disciplines but also those yeomen’s tasks that require years of toil and dedication, without even getting into the realm of stereotype and misogyny. The book and its subject of study couldn’t have come at a more crucial juncture with not only the accepted science behind human contribution to global warming and climate degradation being rejected but there’s also a general backlash against expertise and being an informed, stake-holding populace as well as cuts to educationally inspiring programmes. Having read about the role that mega-fauna had played in contributing to the stability of grassland not long ago, it made us angry that one of Dear Leader’s creatures of the court was supposedly trying to sell him on the idea of resurrecting a mammoth—but surely in spite of any environmental good it might do but rather to keep on display at his tacky resorts or let his horrible children hunt on safari for sport. The interview with Onion is really though-provoking and is worth reading in its entirety, which can be found at the link up top plus find out how to pick up a copy there as well.
retrolithic
Geoff Manaugh’s latest speculative piece in BLDGBlog that turns over the aesthetics of civil engineering to an algorithm that has demonstrated a knack for the scenic initially made me think of another trail of a neural network plucking idyllic postcards from vast collections of unprocessed data, but the examination went deeper to question what these heralded breakthroughs in artificial intelligence might mean when the gauge of their success is our hazy ideal.
Humans own sense of taste and proportion are in turn thought to be informed, like our myths and oral traditions, by surveying the plains of Africa and learning that certain configurations of contour and shading invite prey and shelter—and are in tour reflected in the art and landscaping that we find unconsciously resonant. Advertisers exploit these sort of backdrops all the time to draw us in—or at least not to offend by choosing something anodyne and universal. What do you think? I do admit that in a moment of laziness recently that has since proven quite serendipitous and worth repeating I have turned to a PfRC site-specific image search to try to pick illustrations to go with some posts that I don’t have a specific for. With over four thousand articles and more photographs (mostly confusingly captioned or labelled), I’d prefer to recycle one of my own—especially pictures I’ve taken myself rather than accumulating more, I restrict the search criteria to this site and tell the search engine a few topics in the post, and I’ll get results like the one pictured—which is exactly what I had in mind. If our digital amanuensis and analyst is only rewarded for being a feed-back loop that draws on our oldest comforts neither side is challenged and the process seems like atrophy rather than growth.
