The problem with capitalist governments (or companies) is that they always run out of other people’s money — either the customers’ money, or the shareholders’ money. No company lasts forever, just as no one is PM forever. {cough}
“…so who was to believe that some crazy mix composed of bits of Ghiradelli and Portmeirion and Valencia and Taliesin and God knows what besides would turn out right when everything else went wrong?”
— John K.H. Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
So there I was, a freshman at Pomona College, in Claremont, Calif. I read that passage, and I really want to figure out what those four sources were. I’ve cheated — I’ve linked them so you can look. But back in those days of 1982 there was no way to do any retrieval in a similar way.
so, down to our monster, Honnold Library I went. I started flipping through the library cards under SUBJECT : ARCHITECTURE. I found a big under the A’s. 1200 some-odd pages. Author by the name of Alexander. I’m lazy, but surely a book that big would point me somewhere. It did. It sent me down the rabbit hole. Didn’t answer the question at all, but oh, what a journey it’s sent me through the years.
Which is why I’ve always felt indebted to Brunner. It wasn’t intentional — but I’ve had fun.
That is, well designed buildings/cities/what-have-you will encourage positive events. Poorly designed, the reverse.
And so, a reason (among many, but still) for the crazy history since… Adolf Loos? “Ornament and crime.” (.PDF)
When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotel’s Café Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, it’s because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if you’re writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page — that way you’ll get results.) Here’s an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but that’s not the only source. What about Social Security’s web site? (Go down to the “Popularity of a Name” box, and fill it in.) They’re using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names… but it’s much less sharp. What’s going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, it’s there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people — a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And that’s why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
I already knew that ssa.gov, the site for Social Security, won’t let you sign in from an iPad. It doesn’t tell you that’s the problem — you get an error message saying there are “technical difficulties” — but that’s what happens.
ttp.cbp.dhs.gov — the site for the Trusted Traveler Program, which includes things like Global Entry — lets you sign in just fine.
irs.gov lets you sign in. Or so I thought. You can look at your account. You can make payments. But set up a payment program to pay your taxes on a monthly schedule? “Technical difficulties” again.
Fortunately I have a Windows 11 laptop in here, so I could do what I needed to do. But the trial and error to find out what is allowed, and what isn’t (especially since they won’t just, you know, tell me) may drive me mad someday. (Statler! Waldorf! Stop that snickering about “someday.”)
It looks like I’ve deleted the original of this post. I’m going to try to reconstruct it.
I was very surprised to find out the main way opponents win sumo bouts isn’t by pinning, as in Greco-Roman wrestling. While that can happen, much more frequently someone pushes their opponent out of the ring.
What occurred to me was that often, in disputes today (especially political), we see the same thing — not persuasion by merit, but tarring one’s adversary with beliefs “all reasonable people” must abhor. Famously, portraying someone as a Nazi is known to work, even though in recent years that runs afoul of Godwin’s Law. Sexism, racism, socialism (at least in the US), communism… all of these accusations are meant to shortcut real argument (“…a connected series of statements, intended to establish a definite proposition.”), and just throw the other person outside the ring.
I am aware of the irony that in writing this, and explaining what I mean if I characterize someone’s speech as a “sumo move,” I am recursively doing the very same thing. But sometimes, that’s how it goes.
EDITED TO ADD: My wife Ulrika, a former graduate student of philosophy, notes the following. I think it’s worth adding.
Except that it is neither recursive nor ironic to point out a sumo move.
What a true sumo move (and it isn’t argumentation, it’s propaganda — re-setting the Overton window so that a particular subject won’t be subject to argument in the first place) does is leverage social pressure and people’s sense of decency/shame to make an entire subject unavailable for discussion by casting that subject as taboo in some way. Sumo moves attack the character of anyone who broaches the subject, thus kick the entire topic outside the ring.
Conversely, observing that a sumo move has been used does nothing to prevent the topic it’s applied to from being discussed. Noting a sumo move is meta-analytic. It talks about the way that a subject is being discussed and, rightly, moves the discussion back to the actual subject, rather than the character, motives, and mental state of the people discussing it. Now, it may be true that an honest broker may experience some shame once they admit to themselves that they have been using an illicit tactic, but eliciting shame isn’t the point of pointing out a sumo move. It absolutely is the point of using one.
TIL: When an ambassador presents their diplomatic credentials to Japan, they take a horse-drawn carriage to the Imperial Palace. Fiji did that today, in the first horsey ride since it was suspended by reaction to the pandemic.
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. It’s of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You won’t even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. I’m proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancy’s daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
This video is 30 minutes long, but worth it. The text version is here. I first read it long ago, either in Co-Evolution Quarterly, or in one of the editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. I had an idea of establishing a fund at Midland to do something similar over all of campus, but like many of my ideas, nothing came of it.