sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
sansampersamp
2mo ago
China's pledge to stop respecting American IP
This is, as far as I can tell, made up
sansampersamp
2mo ago
The hilariously absurd thing is that now that congress has given the exec that power, they have to overcome a veto to get it back.
Same thing happened in 2019 when he couldn't get wall funding from congress, so instead raided DoD (proclamation 9844). Congress tried to reassert spending powers with house joint resolution 46. That passed both house and senate but Trump just vetoed it lmao
sansampersamp
2mo ago
I'm not sure why the US' dominating posture in trade IP keeps being cited as Marvel-branded underwear and not, like, biologics. Pharma is much pointier from a trade partner's perspective.
sansampersamp
1mo ago
Australia is more urban and more educated than the US, with a generally high-skill immigration mix. If coalition wants to abandon previously safe wealthy inner-urban seats over cultural differences to the teals, they'll need to make them up elsewhere, and there's not enough rural or exurban seats to do that.
sansampersamp
2mo ago
Musk also is beginning to show some daylight between himself and the Trump admin on trade (in typical manner)
sansampersamp
2mo ago
I would reduce tariffs on imports to 0
whoever we get a bunch of non-American stuff from and increase tariffs on them
You may be qualified to work in this admin (or the very least, a plum job at American Compass)
sansampersamp
9mo ago
Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?
Eisenman is also a bit of an odd figure to play the part of the socialist hell-bent on the cultural destruction of the west, I doubt he has much sympathy for anything approaching the doctrinaire socialist reorganisation of the economy. He's also a bit too in love with the work of Speer and the italian fascists (see his book on Terragni). In this interview, he largely claims his personal political affinities run conservative and notes his American projects were mostly funded from the right. This also includes this very funny aside:
(The interview is briefly interrupted as Prof. Eisenman takes a phone call from a member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei who wants to know if he would mind being nominated for an architectural prize of theirs in connection with his cultural center in Santiago de Campostela in Spain. He does not, and the interview resumes.)
To the extent I've had much impression of his public persona it has been one that is a bit self-obsessed and if aesthetically radical at one point in time, never really had a broader political project and had since settled back into cantankerousness. The other thing I remember from him recently is him comparing Trump's buildings to Stalin's architecture.
It seems to me that it is far from uncommon for people to be 'high-decouplers' regarding the linguistic/semiotic/philosophical/epistemological observations of the postmodernists and deconstrutionists like Foucault and Derrida, and their political and economic positions. Another classic example: the IDF's use of D&G
sansampersamp
2mo ago
They use the GTAP model.
They have some notes in the appendix of an earlier version
sansampersamp
2mo ago
Other way round: your exports are more competitive if priced in a weaker currency. A weaker currency, i.e. a dollar buying less stuff, is definitionally inflation however if the only way you can get there via expansions in the money supply. Tariffs in the first order effect strengthen the dollar (lower imports, less demand for foreign currencies from the US), but the economic havoc will balance that in the second order by lowering interest rates lowering USD yields relative to other currencies and, well, risking inflation.
It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.
So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.
The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.
I primarily understand harmony and disharmony in terms of cleaving to notions of geometric proportionality, e.g. as formalised by Palladio. You could probably extend that to congruity in style and materials, both internally and in context. Personally, I can see deviations from this as well-executed or ill-considered, but it'd be an exceptional case I'd consider to be psychically harmful.
In the second case, he's saying he wouldn't like it if the entirety of his aesthetic experience was like Mantovani, who he regards as popular, but a bit vapid, saccharine, and unchallenging. I'd agree that some buildings, such as his Berlin memorial, succeed by being more challenging and this is appropriate for it's purpose. Conversely, most people wouldn't style their own house en brut, but it still appeals to some people.
But here you're softening the original statement to make it sound plausible. If he really wanted to "maximize the amount of discomfort and pain" his buildings have an unambitious amount of rusty syringes and razored door handles.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
sansampersamp
9mo ago
That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
sansampersamp
2yr ago
I think more than these questions, it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries. Despite this, the occupants are nearly certainly lost, and would be so even if the vessel had been located by now. The near-zero probability of a rescue was very quickly made apparent to everyone.
It is interesting, to say the least, which imperilled lives cause governments to move mountains without a second thought or rational hope, and which lives may be lucky to see a dime and only then after the case has been proven in a half dozen impact studies and feasibility examinations and pilot programs. Probably one of the more perverse urgency/importance failures yet, but one can't really go around saying the government is too good at reacting to acute crises.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
gymnasium is designed to look like a WW2 bomb shelter that's been riddled with shell holes
This is a funny comparison since my high school gymnasium literally was a a massive concrete structure that was bombed in WW2, which followed its original use as part of an abattoir complex. It was fine, aesthetically, if a bit reverberant, and I don't believe it left any psychic scars on myself or other kids. As a concrete structure built for an actual industrial purpose it was also incredibly, obviously different to that Japanese gymnasium. No one was bothering with sandblasting planks to get 3mm of grain relief in the formwork, I assure you.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.
One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.
There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).
Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.
sansampersamp
8mo ago
What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).
sansampersamp
8mo ago
Joker was a remake of Scorsese's The King of Comedy, more than it was referencing Taxi Driver.
As if they're taking a swipe at the audience themselves for liking someone they weren't supposed to.
You are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to Arthur. With scant exception, you are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to any protagonist, good or bad, but they spend considerable time rationalising him as a character in Joker. The text as written does center typical anti-capitalist grievances more than it does incel ones. The intended message is more proximate to "the Joker is a product of underfunded social services", than sexlessness. The closest analogue to the film's denouement isn't found in Taxi Driver or Fight Club, it's in the (insufferable, imo) Sorry to Bother You.
I find this assumed audience in the quote a bit odd, accordingly: is the media wrong about the movie being a paean to downtrodden inceldom or does the audience for the film in fact consist of power-fantacising incels. I'd assumed a degree of consensus around the former, though I've been seeing some partisan inversion lately on the idea of stochastic terrorism more generally, so who knows.
What IQ would be necessary to understand the statement 'I am an architect. I build buildings that harm your mind.'?
I don't think someone would need a particularly high reading grade level to understand that statement, is this what one would expect someone with low reading grade would take way from Eisenman? Eisenman is saying that comfort and harmony do not constitute the totality of either aesthetic preference or human experience, and just like someone might listen to metal or prefer picasso to kinkade, buildings may accomodate and respond to a broader spectrum of experience. Eisenman's most famous work is the holocaust memorial in Berlin, and it's a good example of both a deconstructive minimalism (removal of ornament and complex form for simple geometry), and pursuit of typically discomfiting vibes: instability, envelopment, angularity. Stripping away detail raises the salience of other aspects of the way the memorial is experienced, e.g. the way the acoustics narrow and quiet, and how temperatures drop as you descend, and how your descent has no clean demarcation between inside and outside, over and under. How the relation to other visitors shifts from the communal ("I am one of visible dozens visiting the memorial") to the incidental ("I bumped into a specific other visitor, who then turned the other way and is again out of sight"). Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial achieves a similar minimalism that is well suited to these kind of structures, which accomodate what Etlin called a 'space of absence' -- visitors can interact with what isn't there, or against what they may have expected to be there. What is appropriate for recognition of tragedy is not necessarily what is appropriate for the home, but our lives have tragedy in them and one of the most difficult and essential functions of art is to articulate and reconcile us to that tragedy.
The first result I see for your 'brutalist high school' search is this Nikken Sekkei project. My own high school's gymnasium was a massive concrete aggregate structure repurposed from a 1917 abattoir, so I am open to arguments my aesthetic baseline is not standard here, but I'd expect kids to mostly regard the scarred-meteor interior there as incredibly cool.
Philosophical perspectives in architecture have also largely moved on from Eisenman's deconstructive minimalism in the (an) opposite direction somewhat towards Heidegger's object-relational ontology/phenomenology via Harman. See Mark Foster Gage's Killing Simplicity.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.
Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?
sansampersamp
1yr ago
I think it's worth considering that one of the most well-written games, by a considerable margin by my estimation, is the nigh-literary Disco Elysium. It's a game that doesn't shy away from ideological conflict, hell, ideological conflict is the game; it's the mechanics, it's the setting, it's the engine under the internal and external dialogue trees and conflicts. Hell, the pale functions less well as a climate change allegory than it functions as a manifestation of nation utterly drowning in ideology, until it all becomes static, noise, meaningless.
The characters are 'diverse' to be sure, but they're too real/inhabited to read as cynical box-ticking, so maybe the answer is just to create good art. If create good art and the characters are in honest service of that art, the internal narrative for their inclusion will be so compelling and self-evident that shoehorning them into culture war narratives will seem silly and reductive. It's when you don't have any reason for your cast choices that you invite a bit more scrutiny.
To sum up the options you've given here it seems pretty obvious based on what kind of game you want to make:
- If you want to make a game that is directly or allegorically about race, then race (or characteristic X) is necessarily salient and needs to be in there
- If you want to make a game that has deep world-building then characters arise naturally out of the world
- If the setting is shallow/incidental and there's no allegory then your character choices aren't grounded by in-world or thematic/allegorical considerations and your choice is arbitrary, in which case why not give yourself more character design space and give players a wider range of roles to inhabit (whether assonant/dissonant with their actual identities)
There are ways to develop sub-themes out of larger themes without making them full-blown allegories, too, e.g. there's room to explore transgender issues within transhumanist Deus Ex settings, that just add some colour/complexity/dimensionality to it with out going all the way.
sansampersamp
9mo ago
That Nikken Sekkei gymnasium was the first example linked to in the OP claim that 'discomforting' architecture was being used in schools. I wouldn't really call it within Eisenman's style, it's much more contemporary than that. It also bears little resemblance to any of the prison cell pictures, which increase in unpleasantness largely with the cheapness and decay of the fixtures, and the dirt and squalor of their upkeep. The gymnasium is very carefully done and very clean, at least in these photos. The materiality and texture of the wooden formwork is trying to emphasise the cavernous qualities of the inner volume. They also realise that these textures perform best under lighting conditions that play light across the surfaces instead of directly onto them. It looks to me to be a little self-conscious though; it's in clear dialogue with Tadao Ando but I don't know if their sidestep into parametricism with the holes as a deviation from him has succeeded. I'd have liked to see them push it a little further and embrace the meteoric affect a bit more, and potentially tie that in with more gradated kinds of permeability (e.g. enabling overwatch of the inner volume from the gantry with a wider range of perforations). I'm not sure how effective the baffles on the roof will be at muting the acoustics either. At the end of the day, though, if I was a teenager playing basketball, I'd vastly prefer to play here than in your replacement-level rec centre. I don't think that'd be an uncommon preference. My own preferences within brutalism lie mainly with the more tropical variations, especially in Brazil with de Rocha, but generally think brutalism needs clever use of either foliage or light to succeed, ideally both.
I wrote praise for Eisenman's berlin holocaust memorial below, but beyond that, I'd hardly consider myself a fan of his more generally. My preferences for American architecture of that period lie much more with Lautner.
The DNC pursuing a perception of being a 'neutral leadership institution' is frequently at ends with its actual institutional purpose: getting democrats elected.
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