Things I Like
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We need to stop thinking a dashing rescuer in a red slicker or yellow fire-resistant shirt should come save us from wildfire. We don’t fight hurricanes. We don’t fight tornadoes. No one assumes there will be an armed defense from an earthquake or a flood. Instead, we bolt our houses to our foundations. We raise our homes on stilts. Now we, Californians of the Anthropocene, need to grow up, take responsibility and stop expecting to be saved.
I've been reading a lot of the long form articles on wild fire as well as listening to podcasts, given where I live and what my area experienced in the fall of 2020, it makes sense. This paragraph is very much a theme I'm seeing emerge from a lot of what I'm reading and listening to. Wild fire is gonna happen and it's up to all of us who live in these regions to start taking some responsibility and stop thinking that it's all the job of government and fire fighters to save us.
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It’s possible that the metaverse idea is too flawed to exist in any incarnation. Connecting services so they can collect our data, track us, and dominate our attention even more completely will likely make the world worse, not better, at least for those of us who aren’t VPs at Meta or Microsoft.
Everything old is new again, at least it feels that way a lot of the time, and with the introduction of the metaverse I fear we aren't seeing anything new, just a rebranding of the same things these companies have been doing for a very long time.
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Americans began thinking about health care decisions this way only recently; during the 1950s polio campaigns, for example, most people saw vaccination as a civic duty. But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies. Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
So many things have been laid bare by this pandemic, but one of the biggest is how we treat health and how much the idea that individuals doing what they think is best for themselves is how we should be living. Is there an idea of common good anymore? Do so many not want to acknowledge that we live in a society together and that means we have a responsibility to each other? I've found this the hardest thing to understand during the past two years.
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So ask yourself this: Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within your community at large? Whom would you support, how would you interact with the world, and what would you fight for?
I think much of my family doesn't really understand my lack of ambition when it comes to work and career. I've thought for a long time that a job is just that, a job. It provides me with money in exchange for my knowledge work and, if I'm lucky, doesn't overtake the rest of my life. I'm very much not my job and that feeling only grows every day as I cultivate hobbies and connections in my community.
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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.