h. Play

Rare high rises make them a lot more special, just sayin’

I wrote about Broadacre City before. I just saw a great comment about it and its place in our future:

In my opinion, reviewing the Broadacre City as social reform for everyone actually has a lot to offer… Surely, Urbanists insist that density solves all carbon-emissions concerns, but as we’re learning, the world is shifting to more of a "work from home" model, for one thing.. More concerning, at least to me, is the overwhelming research and evidence that modern urban lifestyles are producing unhealthy and stressed out people.
Just to discuss health, it’s now abundantly clear that human beings were evolved to be on their feet, moving around, in the sun, in the fresh air, eating foods that come right out of the ground… Surely, Wright saw naturalism as an aesthetic value and a philosophical one (in the realm of Whitman). But his concept, as it pertains to healthy lifestyles, offers a remarkable amount of equity in primary human well-being.
We talk about future communities that offer fresh, local produce and animal proteins, grown conscientiously by small farmers. We talk about places to walk and run and ride bicycles where the air is clean and there is minimal danger. We talk about schools that have healthy air circulation* and places for children to run around in grassy fields. We talk about obesity and how lack of these things produce it. We talk about mental health problems, and how lack of these things produce it. Etc.

A 100 percent.

Urbanists don’t have common sense. Life demonstrates constantly that people have different ways of living and you want to cram them closer and closer to deal with it? Sounds like you’re not listening.

Relationships are terrible these days because people are stressed out by this super intense life, it’s so obvious for people who experienced something else at some point. High urban density (outside extremely homogenous population) is a disaster. They say it’s more efficient in terms of carbon-emission, I’d say it’s making people ultra dependent and more sheepish than ever, which is a good thing for many, many companies. It’s good for business, I get it.

It’s bad for our communities and societies though. And this is where FLW’s city concept is far from being naïve or idealist.

I grew up in the countryside, and then in the suburbs. I lived for ten years in a top 10 denser cities in the world. Now in the infinite suburban Los Angeles, I enjoy everything that I enjoyed previously: quiet field of grass if I want to. Busy skatepark if I want to. Fancy restaurant if I want to. Huge movie theater, a bicycle ride, a car ride, I can do it all and I wish that to everyone. It’s the best. Suburbia is queen.

Now give me a small, FLWish house with radiant heating floors and I’m golden, making bloopidy bloops in my workshop.

I mean,

If billions of dollars are spent on AR/VR for decades to show how no one is using it in 2021,

If a company with a failed AR set can still raise $500M in 2021,

If companies can hide billions of dollars in taxes all the time,

If hundreds of people playing games on camera are millionaires,

If the state of California hit by a pandemic, somehow ends up with a surplus of *checks notes* 24 to 75 billion dollars,

If people can pay millions of dollars for a .jpg file “certificate”,

If people can “invest” in crypto and get scammed in the millions of dollars range,

If Los Angeles still allocates $1.76B a year to police when crime is at its lowest in over 20 years,

If Panama and Pandora leaks demonstrate that most world leaders (often demanding austerity from us, citizens) are hiding staggering amounts of wealth all around the world,

What is money, and why are we acting like it’s part of the periodic table? It’s totally made up, foh.

I was talking about how innovation doesn’t drive anything anymore because we pretty much have everything already, capitalism’s end of the road, etc. Well, another example of that (HN comment):

My last company tried really hard to pitch AR/VR projects. Using headsets, phones even the Bose sunglasses. It was a huge struggle to find anything compelling to do with AR even when it worked. We ended up selling a few nifty marketing experiences and artsy installations but they were like 30 second experiences and not useful for anything. The tech "works", it’s just not very compelling.

Think about phone AR which works very smoothly and Apple/Google have been investing in hardware upgrades to enhance AR experiences yet it’s been 5 years since Pokemon Go and no one has figured out another interesting thing to do with it.

It’s not that we can’t innovate, it’s just that that innovation goes nowhere because human beings are completely satisfied, in so many ways. VR/AR don’t bring anything that we don’t already have. Decades, billions of dollars and we’re still facing laptops most of the day because those not only are enough, they’re just perfect for what we do.

Then we leave them on a desk, close them and go do human things around, in the sun maybe.

Alexandra Souverneva, who is suspected of starting the highly destructive Fawn Fire in Shasta County last week, was trying to boil bear urine so she could drink it. The 30-year-old Palo Alto resident’s bear-urine-boiling fire is what allegedly ignited the blaze that scorched more than 7,000 acres and forced hundreds of people to evacuate. [BB]

I very much agree with the assertion that our economy is getting less dynamic, in the sense that everywhere you go in the US it seems like everything, and i mean everything, is being steamrolled by bigger and bigger corps and morphed into a bland, dumbed down, mass appealing corporate monoculture, designed (probably by MBAs) exclusively with profits in mind and no actual interest in developing any sort of soul or true differentiation. Random example, walk into a hardware store (everywhere you go its either lowes, home depot, or maybe ace, cross country) and tell me if there’s a real difference between any of the tool manufacturers. On the one hand, the convenience of cheap and fairly durable goods is great. On the other, it seems like everyone is afraid to stray too far from what works to really innovate or compete. Most cars look pretty similar. The same restaurants exist literally from coast to coast, everywhere you go the US is starting to look more and more generic.

Mostly it probably has to do with economies of scale, but at this point I’d rather spend an extra 10%+ on goods and services if it meant a return to true differentiation and a wider variety of consumer culture.

You guys are not getting it. Capitalism is done. There’s pretty much zero innovation because there’s no need for it. There’s zero new market, there are no new needs. The past twenty years have already been about recycling capitalistic ideas. We went through it all and back in the past forty years. We have too much of everything, and when I say too much I just mean it is grotesque at this point. 30 different cereal, sure. Do we need a new one? Absolutely not. Lately we even created artificial scarcity with tech! The best proof of our collective capitalistic insanity here.

Capitalism is done because capitalism won. It’s not a perpetual cycle and wasn’t meant to be. There was to be an end, and we reached it. Now, let’s freaking redistribute wealth properly, shall we?

The best part about having to go outside for a smoke is you end up standing next to people outside of your normal work hierarchy. You get to have 1v1 conversations with OTHER managers, and people higher than you – whoever at a very casual level. The benefits of this are enormous. I certainly talked more to our director of IT by smoking than I ever did with my own boss.

HN comment. It’s true. The day I stopped having smoke breaks with other folks at companies, is the day my opportunity rate tanked badly.

I chose health over socialization but didn’t know that it would mess with work like that.

I see a lot of conversations about social media, blogs, SEO, ads, RSS, etc.

My take is that a blog is meant to be consumed: read the post, gather your thoughts, digest it and make it your own to share with your people around you (or write a comment to the author). That’s what a blog post is for. It’s not about being at the top of search engines lists or being share 1.5K times, blogging is about to make you think, smile, see. Then you share that on your own, with your own friends and coworkers and whatnot. Whenever.

Say I write something about game audio. I don’t need the post to be shared on social media. I’m not trying to get attention, I’m trying to share my experience and reasoning. Take it and maybe in six months a conversation shows up and you think “that dude had a thoughtful post about this, let me paraphrase what he said to those folks here”. That’s being consumed.

And that’s what blogs are for.

Oh, and another thing: you are a grown person. You’re supposed to curate your own stuff. Losing your mind because you’re not getting an automatic, biased and convenient river of links and videos shows that you need to detox from Big Tech.

Yes, so pretty cool. (but as you can see on the link, it’s rather dangerous, and limited)

Now hear me out because I’ve been thinking about this for years now: 3D printed houses with indoor/outdoor skateboarding, hello!

Banks from the couch to outside patio. Quarters from outside patio to concrete benches, aka ledges.

Basically an habitable tiny skate park. When not used to skate those elements become chilling, reading, lazy areas.

The future of cities and communities lays in 3D-printing factories that we would deploy like we do in a RTS game.

Imagine that you’re eleven right now in 2021.

You’re sent to school. No vaccine for you, everyone says “it’s fine!”

You get COVID-19, get a little sick and recover.

You now have lost your sense of smell and taste. At eleven.

Would you trust any adult ever again?

The future we’re building right now? There won’t be enough therapists for sure.