Things I Like
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In his bones, Fuller knows that change is coming as the clock of nature and temporal existence keeps ticking. Old Faithful's eruption seems predictable, reliable and eternal; his tenure in Yellowstone—it's been a longer one than any of his peers in the park's storied history—is ephemeral, he admits, as seasons of memories flash by.
A really lovely piece on a job that may not be existence for much longer. The photos are amazing as well.
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Whether these products achieve that aim is much less certain. What seems more likely than these cameras leading to some semblance of justice is people posting these videos for the same reason we might relate the story of a lost package to a friend: to be heard, to achieve a sense of catharsis.
I absolutely hate it when I walk around my neighborhood thinking about all the doorbells that are cameras, as well as other cameras people have installed. It's kinda awful that we're constantly being surveilled. And I don't think they're at all doing the things people think they're doing.
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Finally, if we are truly serious about protecting the planet, being a good global citizen will take more than driving an electric car or installing solar panels. It means consuming less so that we throw less away. Maybe that means getting by with only one refrigerator or avoiding fast, disposable fashion.
I think a lot about how much is enough, enough clothing, enough yarn for my hobby, enough decorations for the house, etc. And this article, in many ways, expresses a lot of the changes I've been making in my own life this past year. I just bought a book on how to mend demin because I want to make some jeans last that are starting to fail in a few areas and I'm slowing down what I buy and thinking about it a lot. Not just to save money, but also to consume less overall.
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This is Rosen’s savviness brought to tech, a locus of power every bit as consequential as politics. The savvy response is to say everything that’s bad is a humanity problem, or an internet problem, not the result of deliberate choices made by a massive corporation. In the same way that savvy political reporters refuse to acknowledge that, for example, the biggest problem facing the United States is actually the Republican Party, savvy tech commentators won’t take it as a given that Facebook is actually uniquely irresponsible.
Really interesting thoughts on taking the idea of political savviness and applying it to how Facebook is responding to the hard evidence that it is an absolutely awful company.
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What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.
I live in a small town and I can't tell you how hard it is to figure out what is going on in my town. We have only a regional newspaper that is in a deal with Sinclair which skews the news heavily and it ignore the actual civic news that I would love to read. It's a shame and it's no wonder people rely on social media to try and see what's going on.
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I saw this reliability throughout our visits. Because everyone was enrolled with an EBAIS, everyone was contacted individually about a covid vaccination appointment—most at their neighborhood clinic and a few at home. One woman I met explained that she’d learned about her appointment by phone. I asked her what would happen if the EBAIS folks didn’t call. She looked at me puzzled. Maybe something was lost in translation. She repeated that she knew what week they would call, and they called. I persisted: What if they didn’t? She’d wait a couple of days and call herself, she said. It was no big deal. She asked me how things worked where I was from. I could only sigh.
Imagine if this could be the experience of people in the US. We would prioritize the health and safety of everyone rather than the system we currently have which is difficult to navigate, extremely expensive, and prioritizes those who have the time and money to ensure they get good care.
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Despite the gulf between them, both Amazon and the Postal Service function as part of a much larger and much more insidious global supply chain. We can imagine the entities’ two respective workforces as different sectors of the same organization, an organization responsible for bringing everything, everywhere, to everyone. They are all “Delivery Boys,” as Trump put it, running errands for a gluttonous trade ecosystem that funnels billions of manufactured items from the third world to the first. That chain encompasses overseas shipping, transnational freight, package distribution, and parcel drop-off, all of which we can categorize under the heading of “logistics.”
There's so much going on with our systems right now and this article was quite helpful to understanding that we, as individuals, have very little power to change things. The current system is bad for the environment and for people, but the people with power are loathe to let it be changed.
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It’s when conversational styles clash that problems arise. Those who aren’t used to cooperative overlapping can end up feeling interrupted, silenced, maybe even attacked — which clouds their minds and ties their tongues.
I grew up in a family that was all about conversation overlap. I married into a family where that was rude, and I'm glad to finally understand what's going on within all this.
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Perfectly good stuff gets thrown away in these facilities all the time, simply because the financial math of doing anything else doesn’t work out; they’re too inexpensive to be worth the effort, or too much time has passed since they were sold.
Yup, even more about logistics, this time with all the returns that people make all the time when ordering things online. The amount of waste makes me quite sad.
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Even if tracking might eventually help spot symptoms early, the extent to which it nudges us into better behaviour is moot. While some studies have shown step-counting, for example, can boost motivation and activity, others have questioned its overall effect on the population, particularly after the novelty wears off.
So much in this article creeped me out and with all the new tech around our health, how our data is being used is a huge concern. I've shied away from using apps or devices because I don't know that they help me and I worry about what happens with that data.
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To be clear, there is immense privilege in lying flat. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.
I've read a lot this summer about work, how it's changing and how people's attitudes are changing towards it and I've been fascinated that the way I've felt about work for several years now is finally becoming more accepted and mainstream. Work is what makes the other things I want to do possible and I've not cared about having a "career" (what that word means is a bit of a mystery to me) for quite some time.
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What solves all of these problems—the high return rates, the cost-prohibitive last-mile freight, the logistics nightmares, the buyer frustration, and the monumental volume of consumer waste it all sends to landfills—on some level? Stores. Going to a store.
We are go to the store people. I know, we're weird. But the utter waste of having something shipped to me when I could very likely get it at a store within a 20 minute drive stops me from the online ordering. And here's the thing, it's not that bad to go to a store and it gets one out of the house.
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I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had taken my cues from my best friend’s father.
I felt much of what Patchett says in this essay in my soul. For many years we hauled around things that we were given earlier in our lives or that we'd bought thinking it was a good idea at the time. During our last major move that changed and I realized when reading Patchett's words that it was then that I accepted the life I have (and quite like, thank you) and let go of the things that were my younger self's idea of what my life would be or were the ideas of other people.
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The quantitative nature of Thoreau’s deconstruction of eudaimonia was radical, and deserves more attention. In our current moment, we should remember in particular the role of disruption in this intellectual journey. It’s hard to account for the cost of voluntary work if you’re tangled in a cultural context where everyone is getting and spending. Thoreau needed to retreat to a deliberate existence in which the voluntary was rendered obviously voluntarily—only then could he obtain the distance necessary to accurately account for these extra efforts. The Venetian blinds don’t truly feel optional until you’re living in a cabin that cost only twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents.
A bit funny to link to an article about consumer culture and this one that is talking about realizing how much you really need to be happy and raises the question if working long hours to have a lot of stuff is necessary. I acknowledge the privilege that's implicit in asking the question, but as I've found when changing the focus of my own life, it can come across as exceptional to not have all the latest things and to pair down your life.
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In other words, rather than helping us get our own selves out of the way so we can truly attend to others, these platforms encourage us to create thicker selves and to shore them up — defensively, competitively — against other selves we perceive as better off.
Nothing was very shocking in this article, but I found the philosophy underpinnings interesting while at the same time the entire thing made me a bit sad.