Domesticity

Maybe the single killer feature of the Apple Vision Pro: entire home not desk as office:

Walking around my entire apartment with Vision Pro on my head, strolling between large windows that cover different walls in each space, with specific rooms dedicated to certain kinds of work activities, felt like a radical extension of the standing desk.

Especially useful for those who work at home and have it to themselves for the workday.

Tony Robbins hosts Jordan Peterson ⁠— it’s a bit of a humdinger.

A US-centric Hacker News discussion on domestic appliances, mainly dishwashers. The term “Miele” comes up here and there.

I might as well start addressing my thoughts as my Michael Linds because they appear to be one and the same:

• Missing but Wanted: Children
• The End of Progressive Intellectual Life

Oh my, Michael Lind writes in Tablet exactly what I’ve been thinking, so forgive the extensive quoting:

… The Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism … Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy.
…
The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms ⁠— the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.
…
By now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm.
Having vandalized every premodern tradition, the elite antinomians of the modern West now don’t know what to do next. What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?
The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat.
…
Whatever working-class “normies” believe and enjoy, the most influential tastemakers of the trans-Atlantic ruling class denounce and seek to ban, using one of their three or four specious all-purpose justifications. If non-college-educated Americans were to take up square dancing as a fad, the powers that be in the media and academia would solemnly inform us that square dancing is problematically racist or sexist or worsens climate change.

Dennis Prager laments the pandemic of adult children not speaking to their parents despite the Biblical commandment to honor them being no less than 5th on the list of 10, the first 3 being about God and the 4th about one’s own wellbeing, ie, Shabbat. Prager cites three primary causes for the affliction:

• The ascent of the therapeutic mentality


• Parental alienation … usually caused by one parent against the other during and/or after a divorce
  
• Ideological … there are probably hundreds of thousands of parents who voted for Donald Trump who have a child who will not speak to them because of that vote
  

This parental cutoff is a particularly devastating aspect of post-Judeo-Christian morays and Prager performs a service by pointing it out.

Hugh Howey, author of Wool, the book(s) behind Silo, writes:

I believe future historians will look back and recognize the 1950s or thereabout as the time that we should’ve instituted a universal basic income (UBI).

Science-fiction writers are best-positioned to have something worthwhile to say about society ⁠— though that’s perhaps a tautology; he’s not just supporting a policy, but speculating at which point in time it ideally should have been enacted!

A story most emblematic of Israel’s governmental switchover: Finance Minister Smotrich’s cancellation of Liberman’s tax on plastic plates, as sympathetically reported by JTA.

He of the Cottage Cheese protests, now sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair, finally did it, as Israel applies EU standards for foodstuffs. Lapid’s statement: “The move will lower the cost of living and open the market to competition” ⁠— and what a great pic in his office with the Israeli flag and an array of foodstuffs.

Great interview at Berkeley with alum and local Oakland boy Craig Federighi [Dec 2019].

At last, a British publication (The New Statesman, with muchos kudos for the great rebranding) addresses the bonkers British practice of placing washing machines in kitchens and consequently lacking space for dishwashers (or vice versa, the causality is mysterious):

Non-Brits find having a washing machine in the kitchen hilarious (as well as unhygienic, which it is). But the idea of bringing smelly socks near food preparation surfaces apparently pales in comparison to the shady plastic tub in the sink, its fleet of mugs bobbing in the oily foam.

The article even addresses that other bugbear: “UK residents commonly have separate hot and cold taps, whereas single mixer taps have long been the norm in Europe.”

In The Atlantic, a beautifully ⁠— if overly politely ⁠— written piece on family estrangement, the sting is in the head; no doubt to get it past the young <del>censors</del> editors, the author has expunged all mention of religion and therefore duty from his discussion, save in this first line, which encompasses all that follows: “Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy.” Author Joshua Coleman is a practicing therapist and prolific author. Looking around, his fee per webinar on the topic is $25. And he’s also a tv composer!

Anyhoo, the plot thickens, and my suspicions are correct: while he squeezed them out of the text body, he shoehorned in his convictions at the very edges as frames; look at this 1-star Amazon review of his book by one Acer Girl:

He fails to recognise how the nuclear family itself is being redefined and gay/lesbian parents are becoming more accepted, so it is rather inevitable that people will start to place less emphasis and importance on blood ties alone ⁠— so I really don’t understand the alarmism he tries to create around this. Above all, what I found really demoralising is his attack on one of the founding principles of western civilisation ⁠— autonomy and individual liberty. People’s right to live their lives in whatever way they wish and to associate and disassociate with whomever they wish. He claims this right should be policed.

And the final piece in the puzzle: he himself has been cut off by his own daughter! Estrangement is an underly-noted fault-line in the post-religious West; whether to honor or cast off the 5th commandment to honor one’s father and one’s mother ⁠— that has become a question.

So it seems that video gaming positively impacts childrens’ intelligence

We analyzed 9855 children from the USA who were part of the ABCD dataset with measures of intelligence at baseline (ages 9–10) and after two years. At baseline, time watching (r = − 0.12) and socializing (r = − 0.10) were negatively correlated with intelligence, while gaming did not correlate. After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β =  + 0.17), but socializing had no effect.

Jonathan Haidt is wise enough to note that it is mainly America, not necessary the rest of the world, that has gone particularly mental the past decade. Haidt blames social media. But the word “marriage” does not occur even once in the article, despite the decade having seen same-sex marriage transformed from oxymoronic absurdity to self-evident cudgel. If a human institution so deep ⁠— deeper than the nationstate, than monotheism, even than history itself ⁠— can be so decidedly upended, then what chance has anything else of standing, the collective subconscious must wonder.

In an interview on Israel’s national broadcaster Kan, this is a fair-minded well-informed backgrounder on Temple Mount tensions (Hebrew).

Top-flight series of Hebrew animated shorts חדר וחצי about a bachelor clown and his home.

I’ve been hoping to read a headline like this: “Ministers urge Boris Johnson to rethink net zero plans as cost of living crisis bites” in The Telegraph.

It’s great to be pushing towards renewable energy sources, not because of the climatist calumny but because of the wonderful fact that renewable energy will eventually become a lot cheaper than fossil fuels ever were. As J. Storrs Hall writes in the his transformative Where is My Flying Car, “Counting watts is a better way to measure a people’s standard of living than counting dollars.”

I do understand that sometimes a fire must be lit underneath our collective feet to get things moving, in this case the tarring and feathering of fossil fuels (an unfortunate phrase to be sure). Without this cultural move little might have happened in renewal energy innovation due to the massive interests of energy incumbents.

Meanwhile national leadership’s responsibility is to get this balance right. Deliberately fostering energy poverty is folly, not to mention sadistic ⁠— and has real deleterious geopolitical consequences. Nothing is free, especially that seemingly cost-free thing we increasingly swim in, ie, bullshit, rife with opportunity costs. As pleased as people are to wave utopian ideals and do our little bit, we prefer the political party that enables us to heat our homes.

Reading comprehension is reduced when reading from an electronic device, this study reports.

A decline in reading comprehension on a smartphone may be caused, at least in part, by reduced sighing and increased prefrontal activity compared to that on a paper medium.

These days my favorite way to read is to broadcast my phone’s Kindle app onto the TV via Apple TV, viewing from a distancem which probably mitigates most of the problems discussed in this article.

After doing a house-clearing myself, I can relate to Andy Farnell’s Is techno-clutter ruining your life?.

To render the modern productive class (caring and civic professions) harmless, their power under old-left nomenclature as “working-class” had to be destroyed. Their reinvention as “consumers” necessitated apparatus to warehouse and monitor them. Modern bread and circuses manifests as “techno bling” ⁠— cheap, attractive and addictive but ultimately detrimental technology like smartphones and social media. Though it pains me to utter words like “chav” (The UK version of “trailer-trash” or “bogans”), nothing says first-world poverty quite like two gold iPhones, one in each jeans pocket.

At Starter Story, Ed Baldoni, founder of Concrete Countertop Solutions, tells the story of how his business has reached $1.1m in monthly revenue.

I was a developer/ home builder for over 40 years. As a builder, I was always looking to stay ahead of the curve and offer new ideas to my clients … Our Z Counterform System for countertops and Z Poolform System for concrete pool coping are the go-to solutions for cast-in-place concrete forms. With a small but dedicated team, we grew this business from an idea to over $12M in revenue in 10 years.

Exciting story, exciting product.

The Guardian posts an excerpt from Gillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision. Regarding working from home, a senior trader at JP Morgan observed:

The really big problem was incidental information exchange. “The bit that’s very hard to replicate is the information you didn’t know you needed,” observed Charles Bristow, a senior trader at JP Morgan. “[It’s] where you hear some noise from a desk a corridor away, or you hear a word that triggers a thought. If you’re working from home, you don’t know that you need that information.” Working from home also made it hard to teach younger bankers how to think and behave; physical experiences were crucial for conveying the habits of finance or being an apprentice.

Cute, if harrowing: the no-longer economically viable Simpsons household, a piece in The Atlantic by Dani Alexis Ryskamp.

Ross Douthat in his typical perfect way essays on American childbearing in the really nice magazine Plough.

The Smithsonian posts a nice little piece on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Laurent House, designed for the wheelchair-bound client who clearly adored his wonderful home, which is now thankfully a museum.

A nice straightforward yet telling piece in Prospect Magazine on ambivalence towards domesticity.

David Goldman produces a fact-filled yet overarchingly-theoried analysis of the mid-pandemic race-themed disturbances. Like for Palestinians, he argues it’s about humiliation. Goldman is sympathetic but not sycophantic, analytic but not caustic.

Bret writes a very nice one about his great Mum during these terrible days of Covid-19.

DesignBoom’s sauna page. This is just great work about great work about great living.

From Paul Graham’s essay “Having Kids”, December 2019:

I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment’s notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that?

What a gorgeous country revealed in this photo essay of contemporary life in Iran.

The Smithsonian Magazine excerpts Paul Hendrickson’s Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright. Among the gems:

• “…[Wright’s] 72-year career as an architect and egotist…”
• “…[Wright buildings] come magically out of the American ground looking for the light…”
• “…[Wright,] the old shaman…”
• “…There are certain moments, standing in [Wright homes], if the light is falling right, when it will begin to seem as if Whitman is singing to Emerson, or vice versa…”

Will the author spoil it for me though? Among the crisps are tonal annoyances such as beginning sentences with “Heck,”…

Adam Gopnik’s “Short Husbands” essay.

The sweaters of Succession. By Vulture.

This Gates Foundation presentation on global inequality is clear, straightforward, well-written, nicely illustrated with animated graphs, and surely worth the time of anyone who can access it.

Goodbye, Judith Kerr, goodbye!

Most in-depth article on hoarding I’ve yet seen.

Chronicling from “below the API line”, as Venkatesh Rao calls it, are Austin Murphy with “I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon” in The Atlantic and Lauren Hough with “I Was A Cable Guy. I Saw The Worst Of America” in The Huffington Post.

The depicted harshness of American work life for so many is terrible not just for those involved but for all. (Also these two share a prodigious unmet need to urinate on the job ⁠— is this the top new workplace tribulation?)

“Respected journalist” Joel Golby has pulled off a rather spectacular series of mini-essays for Vice in Choose Your Own Adventure: Friday Night Edition!. More relevant perhaps for people say a quarter of a century younger than me, but one can appreciate.

Cool graphic article in Bloomberg on US land use.

How did I not know about ribbonfarm all these years; truly I’ve been living under a rock for ages. Thoughtful, concise, erudite, relevant: Tendrils of Mess in our Brains by Sarah Perry.

Why was he like this to her? Excerpt from Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ upcoming book about her father Steve.

Well, this an extravaganza of an article, practically a short book, on the American 9.9%.

Michael Chabon on Finnegan’s Wake [2012].

As my year of diving languorously into the murky waters of the Wake wore on, I came to feel that it was this failure, this impossibility, this grand futility of the Wake, that constituted its secret theme, its true aboutness.