sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
1yr ago
It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.
While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
We now have recognised digital drivers' licenses on your phone, but to be honest I wasn't carrying one before then anyway. A wallet is just one more thing to carry, everything is on the phone. An ID isn't necessary to fly domestically here either, so it's easily left at home as well. I'd currently need to use cash maybe once every two years.
I don't think it is generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy, no. It's worth remembering that these two architects are separated by half a century and the pacific ocean, and that gulf encompasses significant aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and technological developments. I don't know a huge amount about Nikken Sekkei other than them being one of those very old mega-firms that built Tokyo tower had their heyday in the 80s, so I can't speak much to a house style or philosophy, but as I mentioned it seems more in dialogue with Ando than Eisenmannian deconstruction, even if both are pursuing a kind of phenomenological minimalism. Japan also has its own aesthetic philosophies against which Japanese architects play and react. Eisenman never struck me as someone with a huge interest in materiality or light, and his work is explicitly antitectonic in places (a result of Derrida-esque attempts to liberate signifier from signified). The gymnasium is thoroughly tectonic and materiality is clearly front of mind, which is why the care is taken to showcase the formwork. Where the gymnasium bears the marks of its construction process, Eisenman's House VI is a house in abstract, the planes of its walls pushed and pulled without caring to represent the construction process, or even to subvert it. The (mild) parametricism is also an aesthetic development contingent on software-led design processes that simply didn't exist in Eisenman's context.
I do agree that there is a sometimes challenging, sometimes productive interplay between what positively evokes nature and what evokes decay, but I don't think it's as straightforward as béton brut surfaces always and necessarily giving a sense of grime, or that grime necessarily is of negative valence. In Tanizaki's essay on Japanese aesthetics, there is a special attention paid to grime:
Surely this has something to do with our national character. We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.
Of course, this "sheen of antiquity" of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime.
...
I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.
Tanizaki was writing with his tongue in his cheek (much ink is spent on the virtues of wooden toilets), but I do think brutalist structures put decay on an aesthetic knife-edge more than most. I've never seen a brutalist building work when left to impose its monolithic mass on an urban parking lot, but I love how this tension between artifice and nature is completely released in da Rocha's Casa no Butantã. The raw concrete is humanised by surrendering it to the jungle. Appropriately used, decay functions to soften edges, blur boundaries. When homeownership can often feel like a constant, doomed struggle against entropy, a design that reassesses the necessity of this opposition can be incredibly liberating.
I think with your prison cell examples the worst are actually where this tension is amplified, rather than released. I'd certainly find a mess of shit and viscera unpleasant on a dirt cave floor, but would find it significantly more disturbing on broken white tile under fluorescent lights. This is just to illustrate that these qualities, and their humaneness, aren't simple variables to dial up and down, but interplay with each other in context.
Back to the gymnasium, and it wasn't I that picked it as a particular exemplar of anything, I agree that many of the circulation spaces are not particularly inspiring, and the classroom probably the most egregious. But I can see to some extent what they are aiming for, and it is something rather different from what Eisenman pursued. I think it's possible for a design to work in some contexts and not others, and with a design that's on such a knife's edge as this (and I consider it flawed in a few ways), it'd be somewhat miraculous to transport it to a prison typology with the intended effect intact. The one saving grace, if you could call it that, is that the baseline for these environments is already dire. A fancy private school is going to have a slightly different attitude to upkeep as well.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)
Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.
e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).
Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
That's not the correct way to calculate your posterior. The probability that hydrate plugs are to blame given that the pipeline has indeed blown up should be very high.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
apologies for misreading your reddit post then
sansampersamp
2yr ago
Honestly thinking you can opt out of status games, or that obstinate refusal to 'play' doesn't impact how you and your arguments are perceived, is just cope. There's an autistic tendency to conflate a social illiteracy with the kind of practiced sprezzatura that seems effortless on the surface level, or writing off deviations from the norm (a real and valuable thing -- see the 'basic' sneer) as essentially the same.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
I'm not making any contention about the past demographics of the industry. Tired claims of entryism or institutional capture depend on there being a mismatch against revealed consumer preferences. Said mismatch does not exist.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
If it wasn't clear, I don't live in a country with as adversarial a relationship with the cops as the US, but I have a shortcut to pin the app on open, kiosk mode. I've never had to use it in the 2 ish years it's been available but I understand the ID verification flow doesn't require a phone to be handed over, just a QR code displayed and scanned.
Perhaps my literacy level is not as high as yours, so you will need to help me as exactly where you see a desire to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" or "harm your mind", or a claim that "buildings must literally impose psychic harm and pain on the people who view and use the building".
sansampersamp
9mo ago
The low probability of your vote being decisive is obviously balanced by the enormous (world-historical) impact in the case that your vote is decisive. Besides, you aren't the only player of this game, and a party losing an election by 20 points has obvious implications for that party's assessment of it's positioning and strategy in the next election, that a loss by 2 points does not, even if the electoral outcome is nominally the same.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
I believe voting is a duty and I'm happy it is compulsory in Australia. The simplest argument is that:
- The legitimacy of the government is a public good, from which other public goods (safety, unity, prosperity) flow
- Democratically elected governments are legitimated through democratic participation and definite mandates across actual majorities in the population
- You have a general duty to further the public good in scenarios where one can do so at little cost to oneself
- You have a duty to vote
Broader majorities are also better for political operation and discourse. The unactivated voter is less interested in ideological marginalia and more interested in simple material concerns: jobs, crime, schools, security in retirement and so on. Political messaging in high turnout environments must convince the median citizen that his interests are best served by voting in one way or another. A politics of low turnouts is a politics where messaging seeks not to convince the unaligned, but to drive turnout among those nominally on your side already, which means escalating the perceived stakes beyond reason, deference to single-issue groups with GOTV infra, ballooning campaign budgets, and the time spent fundraising to feed them.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
there are a few rivers near port hedland which has rail connections to the major pilbara ore mines
sansampersamp
1yr ago
IRV is simpler to tally and audit in low-tech scenarios because the votes themselves are the physical record of the count, an advantage it shares with FPTP. In FPTP, you sort and bundle votes into e.g rubber bands of 20 and boxes of 1000. You can easily verify a count by checking that a box indeed contains 1000 votes, and they've been sorted appropriately. It's easy to update your count report just by seeing you have X boxes and Y bands.
Approval voting, Score, Borda etc require you to maintain a store of the counts independent of the physical ballots, which introduces more room for human error and complicates recounts/verification. You need to increment up to N counts for a race with N candidates, and even approval voting has 2^N-1 ballot variations that complicates sorting.
If you're thinking of terms of low-tech boxes and counting processes, IRV is an intuitive extension of FPTP because you're just opening up eliminated boxes and resorting them. Practically, it's rare for this process to go particularly deep or be particularly sensitive, and the count of votes rarely exceeds twice the votes cast.
I think we're now able to have do much better than IRV and I think there are potentially clever ways you could do tear-off perforated ballots to make the counts under approval/range more reliable, but a lot of (sometimes conspiratorial) questions about the popularity of IRV miss that it was an intuitive and practical solution at the time. If Australian preschoolers can vote on schoolyard activities with IRV, I'm sure American adults can manage.
Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.
American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.
Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.
Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.
I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
openmeteo has good keyless apis for such things
https://open-meteo.com/en/docs#latitude=44.0029&longitude=-69.6656&hourly=temperature_2m,dewpoint_2m
sansampersamp
2yr ago
To put some numbers around it:
The internal cross-section of the pipe is approximately 1m2, so each bar of pressure differential will push a plug with 100kN of force. That's enough to shoot 10 tons of hydrate at g-like acceleration. Sounds difficult at the best of times.
Also the plug is stuck until it isn't. When you depressurise you move back across that phase diagram until the solid sublimates, which happens radially from the outside, in. The plug is stuck until it shrinks from the walls enough to move (upon which you don't want it to move) and can be melted and cleaned up with pigging and glycol.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
midterms, not presidential
sansampersamp
2yr ago
I see 40% voter turnout for the 2018 midterms, which were a record high. I'm not sure what's projected for these ones.
We compel eligible people to vote here in Australia, and overall I'm a massive fan of it. Part of that is that politicking does not need to drive turnout itself, so ironically the half-panicked "please vote, please vote" stuff doesn't feature.
Not really. OOO recognises that buildings-as-real-objects fade into the background in a Heideggerian sense when they become tools, i.e. the salience of their qualities is flattened to that which is relational (to the observer and the observer's use, to its constituent parts, and to the larger systems in which itself is a part). OOO questions whether it continues to be valuable for the practice of architecture to load potential buildings under a multiplicity of these relations (to zoning, environmental impact, situation within the street, ad infinitum), such that the reality of the building is obscured rather than elucidated. A building is not a 'machine for living' per corbu, it simply is in a way that is necessarily independent of the observer. The reality of the building is simply too dense to be fully described and taxonomised. Architects should become more comfortable with the vibes and ineffables, and the limited accessibility to underlying reality of objects. An invisible tool, per Harman, is a tool whose myriad qualities other than its specific utility--including and especially its aesthetic qualities--have receded from cognisance.
I have some sympathy for it, first because my time in architecture school was mostly spent within (more egological) phenomenological explorations. Second, because I think we're completely oversaturated with psychofauna in general in today's age (I recently became a parent, and it is here where this saturation is perhaps the worst of all). However, I don't much care for Harman's weird realism as a very practicable defense, and I think OOO has some unresolved boundary issues in its attempts to consider objects as real gestalten independent of their constituent parts.
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