Numerous saltwater evaporation ponds have been built in China’s Qarhan Playa since the early 1990s. Located in Qinghai Province, Qarhan was once a single unitary lake and is now an expansive salt flat covering 2,261 square miles (5,856 square km). It is heavily exploited for its valuable reserves of salt, potash, lithium, iodine and other minerals.
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Since the previous shot was achieved with a lot of post-production work, for this one I decided to go almost full practical. I try not to be too dogmatic about process, or limit myself with preconceived notions of ‘the right way’ to illustrate. In my opinion, no matter what medium or technique you deploy to get the look you want, so long as you’re being intentional about every detail, it’s all good.
The idea germinated from a desire to create some cloning tanks that actually glowed, which meant I would need to learn some minor electrical skills. Luckily, American Science & Surplus had both the equipment and expertise I needed to get into it. If you look closely at 2nd BTS shot you can see the diagram they graciously drew for me, showing how to wire the tanks to a switch and a battery cap.
For the figurines I went by Smash Toys & Collectibles and rooted through the miscellaneous drawers. In addition to the dinos I used as the base for my creatures, I also found an awesome translucent jellyfish I couldn’t help making the main character. This required me to change the shot into an underwater scene, which was a fun challenge to figure out.
“You simply cannot fit more America into a single incident than a man dying a horrifying death in protest of war crimes while a first responder screams at cops to stop pointing their guns at him and go get fire extinguishers. If you were to pick a single moment in history to sum up the essence and expression of the US empire, that would be it.”
If you’d like to support musicians streaming rights and fair pay you should support United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) who are actively working against Spotify and services unfair streaming policies.
This is a link to write a letter urging your state representatives to support UMAW & Rep. Tlaib’s H.Con.Res. 102. Below is a link to their website with other ways to support them further!
Ok everyone I finally got off my butt and published that pattern. You can get it from Ravelry here or if you don’t wanna use Ravelry for whatever reason you can get it here (the decryption key is px_P_CSEn-LcqnpQ5YAhCytDaIyGUWPXvLyfGTLjZLM, it’s in the url actually but some browsers remove it when you click on it for some reason). I tried to pack all the info I thought would be useful into the pattern but feel free to message me if you have questions. Happy knitting!
The United States sells more weapons of war than the rest of the world combined.
I think if you’re responsible for selling more than half the world’s deadly weapons you shouldn’t get to be on the UN “Security Council” with the ability to veto calls for ceasefires and other binding resolutions. Conflict of interest. Major conflict of interest.
The Solarpunk “fantasy” that so many of us tout as a dream vision, converting golf courses into ecological wonderlands, is being implemented across the USA according to this NYT article!
The article covers courses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, and New York that are being bought and turned into habitat and hiking trails.
The article goes more into detail about how sand traps are being turned into sand boxes for kids, endangered local species are being planted, rocks for owl habitat are being installed, and that as these courses become wilder, they are creating more areas for biodiversity to thrive.
Most of the courses in transition are being bought by Local Land Trusts. Apparently the supply of golf courses in the USA is way over the demand, and many have been shut down since the early 2000s. While many are bought up and paved over, land Trusts have been able to buy several and turn them into what the communities want: public areas for people and wildlife. It does make a point to say that not every hold course location lends itself well to habitat for animals (but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make great housing!)
So lets be excited by the fact that people we don’t even know about are working on the solutions we love to see! Turning a private space that needs thousands of gallons of water and fertilizer into an ecologically oriented public space is the future I want to see! I can say when I used to work in water conservation, we were getting a lot of clients that were golf courses that were interested in cutting their resource input, and they ended up planting a lot of natives! So even the golf courses that still operate could be making an effort.
So what I’d encourage you to do is see if there’s any land or community trusts in your area, and see if you can get involved! Maybe even look into how to start one in your community! Through land trusts it’s not always golf course conversions, but community gardens, solar fields, disaster adaptation, or low cost housing! (Here’s a link to the first locator I found, but that doesn’t mean if something isn’t on here it doesn’t exist in your area, do some digging!)
We should just flat-out tell kids as soon as they are old enough to understand it, “Some rules are made to prescribe ideal behavior in
individual people, some rules are made to modify real behavior in the
average person, and most rules exist to make things simpler and easier for the person that makes the rules.”
or, a simpler way of putting it, “Sometimes rules are saying exactly what a person should be doing and you won’t be safe/won’t be successful without following the rule. These rules can only be broken in extreme circumstances OR if you understand what will happen, WHY that will happen, and are ready to deal with the consequences.
"Other rules are meant to change the amount of people doing something, or change the kind of person that is doing something. It’s not actually expected that everyone follows the rule, only that people will break the rule in smaller numbers or only if they have a "good reason” for it. Some rules like this have no consequences, they are just describing what someone would really like you to do, even if that person has no power to make you do it or cause consequences if you don’t. Some rules like this are a kind of secret handshake where you are supposed to be able to figure out that you’re supposed to break the rule if you’re the right kind of person. Some rules will only have consequences if you get caught, and sometimes it’s so easy to not get caught that no one faces consequences unless someone is specifically trying to catch the person breaking a rule.
“Everyone will tell you that all rules are the first type of rule. They are lying, and it’s very important you know that they’re lying, because you will need to break rules and you will need to be safe while doing it.”
Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would
disintermediate the world:
The internet
did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, “middlemen” – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them “VLOPs” (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).
Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries’ sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power.
To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):
When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck (“Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2” or sometimes just “Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2”). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.
I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him
and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:
But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn’t do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a “PUTRID SCUM” sign around their neck.
This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.
TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)
w
what
im
Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue
Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.
The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.
Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.
You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But
we can’t see it.
“Sorry, what the fuck?”
What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have
light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the
color yellow looks like.
Some animals have eyes that
can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:
We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.
Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”
That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will
still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.
So how does magenta factor into this?
Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.
What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?
Fucking
green.
Hey, that’s not gonna
work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.
So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green.
And so it made up magenta.
So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”
No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:
Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.
Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.
The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.
So I googled Stygian Blue and…
Yall.
FORBIDDEN.
HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS
Hyperbolic Orange is the color my soul is
Dark tumblr show me the forbidden colors
We are back on this again.
My brain hurts.
i fucking love the human brain, it’s like if bethesda made an animal
One of a series of stories in the late edo period involving a “Monster Cat” listed as “Illustrated Novel Saga Kainekoden" written by
Kamekichi Kojima, 1898
Not so philosophy and art. These are not techne; that is, these are not skillful or disciplined modes of work with settled criteria of success and operative norms. Scientists ask questions and produce answers. Philosophers and artists, in contrast, raze answers in the quest for concealed questions (…). Scientists know what their answers mean, and they are agreed, almost always, in what counts as evidence for or against them. Success and failure are terms with straightforward meaning when we are in the domain of science. This is not the case with artworks or philosophical products, which are willfully and, sometimes at least,
fruitfully obfuscatory.
Alva Noë. 2023.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
The “I can’t test it” made me sad. There are two other files (an RTF version and an HTML version generated in 1998 from the original file). But can we open the original document?
The original document is 68,608 bytes and file on my Mac says it’s a Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0 file. That matches with TBL’s note on the W3C page saying: “A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990."
Microsoft Office for Mac came out in 1989 with System 6.0. That was Microsoft Word 4.0 so we’re looking for compatibility with Microsoft Word for Macintosh 4.0. Let’s see what modern software can open this. What I really want to be able to do is open it and convert it to, say, PDF with high fidelity.
The USAmerican imagination cannot consider land that is multi-purpose.
A corn field is Corn, an endless monoculture, and all other plants must be eliminated. A residential area is Houses, and absolutely MUST NOT!!! have vegetables or fruits or native plant gardens or small livestock. A drainage ditch is only a drainage ditch, and cannot harbor Sedges and native wetland plants, A sports field is for A Sport, and let no one think of doing any other event on that field, shops and storefronts must have their own special part of town that everybody has to drive to, which requires parking lots…and God forbid we put solar panels on roofs or above parking lots or anywhere they can serve an extra purpose of providing shade, instead of using a large tract of perfectly fine land as a “solar farm.”
Numerous examples. But it is the most annoying with agriculture. The people who crunch all the numbers about sustainability, have calculated that a certain percentage of Earth’s land is “Used up” by agriculture, which is troubling because that leaves less “room” for “Wilderness.” It is a big challenge, they say, to feed Earth’s humans without destroying more ecosystems.
Fools! Agriculture
is an ecosystem—if you respect the ways of the plants, instead of creating monoculture fields by killing everything that moves and almost everything that doesn’t. Most humans throughout history, and many humans today, sustain themselves using a mixture of foraging and agriculture, and the two are
not entirely different things,because all human lifestyles change the ecosystem, and the inhabitants of the ecosystem always change themselves in response.
Even if you are a hunter-gatherer that steps very lightly in the forest and gathers a few berries and leaves here and there, you are being an animal and affecting all other parts of the ecosystem. By walking, breathing, eating, pooping, drinking, climbing, singing, talking, all of those things affect the ecosystem. If you gather leaves to sleep on, that affects the ecosystem…if you pile up waste, that affects the ecosystem…if you break a tree branch, that affects the ecosystem…if you start a fire, if you create a small shelter, if you cut a path, that DEFINITELY affects the ecosystem.
This idea, that human activity destroys the ecosystem and replaces it with something Else, something Not an ecosystem, is so silly. “
But you just said that even the earliest most technologically simple human societies altered their environment!”
Yes, I did.
Becausewe believe that “pre-agricultural” humans could have no effect on their “wilderness” environment, we ALSO believe another false idea: That when humans affect an environment, they destroy “Wilderness” and change it to something else, like Agricultural Land, that can never have biodiversity and never benefit many life forms.
I think it is the European idea of agriculture that it always involves people settling down and relying on a few special plants that are domesticated intentionally and grown in specially dedicated fields. After all, this idea of an agricultural lifestyle, is in contrast with the “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, which is assumed to be what humans do before they “figure out” agriculture. The European mind imagines “pre-agricultural” folks ignorantly bumbling about, thinking plants and animals conveniently pop out of nothing for their benefit.
Bullshit! I shake my head in disappointment when I see websites describing Native Americans using wild plants as if those plants just-so-happened to grow, when those same wild plants
just-so-happen to thrive only in environments disturbed by humans in some way, and
just-so-happen to have declined steeply since colonization, and
just-so-happen to be nonexistent in unspoiled “Wilderness” locations, and (often)
just-so-happen to have an incredibly wide range where they either once were or are incredibly common, making it very…
fortunate that they
just-so-happento have a wide range of uses including food, medicines, and materials for clothing and technology.
Accidentally of course, without any human impact from the humans that were impacting everything. /s
“But if it wasn’t an accident, how did it happen?” Here is how to understand this idea: Look at the weeds! The weeds will teach you.
Look at the plants you always see growing without being planted around human buildings and roads, and learn their history. Often you will learn that these plants have many marvelous properties, and have actually been used by humans for thousands of years.
In fact, some of the most powerful and difficult to control weeds, were once actually some of the most essential and important plants for human civilizations to depend on. The dreaded Kudzu, in its home in East Asia, was one of the main plants used for clothing for over 6,000 years, and not only that, it has been cultivated for food and medicine for millennia. You can make everything from paper to noodles out of Kudzu! And Amaranth, the most expensive agricultural weed in all the USA, produces edible and healthy grains as well as several harvests of greens per growing season, and several species of the genus have been fully domesticated and formed a staple crop of Mesoamerica.
Meanwhile…some people have come up with this neat “new” idea called Polyculture, which is where you plant a field with two crops at once and somehow get better yields from both of them. WITCHCRAFT! Unrelatedly, there are other ideas like “Cover Crops” and “Agroforestry” that for some reason have the same beneficial effect.
Wow…It turns out, sterilizing the whole environment of every plant except one crop…isn’t actually a good way to do agriculture in many places in the world.
Just think about it from an energy point of view…
We have some places used for “Agriculture,” where we wring the land as violently as possible to squeeze green vegetation from light energy.
And we have other places for Other uses, where we spend massive amounts of fossil fuels mowing, chopping, poisoning and trimming to STOP the land from producing its incredible bounty of green vegetation.
And in the agricultural fields, we spend even MORE resources killing the unwanted plants that grow spontaneously
This system is hemorrhaging inefficiency at both ends. It simply isn’t a one-to-one conversion of land and fossil fuels to food energy. The energy expenditure of agriculture is mostly going into
organizing the vegetation’s energy into the shape and configuration we want, not the food itself.
In the Americas, indigenous agricultural systems involve using the plants that exist in the environment to construct an ecosystem that both functions as an ecosystem and provides humans with food, clothing, and other important things. This is the most advanced way.
Most of our successful weeds are edible and useful. A weed is simply a plant that is symbiotic with humans. My hypothesis of plant domestication is that it was initiated by the plants, which became adapted to human environments, and humans bred them to be better crops in response. Symbiosis.
Humans did not pick out a few plants special to intensively domesticate out of an array of equally wild plants, instead they just ate, selected, and bred the plants that were best adapted to live near human civilization. That is my guess about how it happened.
Just think about it. Why would you try to domesticate teosinte (Maize ancestor?) It sucks. Domesticated plants in their wild form are usually like “Why would you put hundreds of years of effort into cultivating this?” Personally I think it’s because the plant grew around humans and humans ate and used it a lot because it was abundant. So we co-evolved with the plant.
Supporting this hypothesis, there are many crop plants that mutated and evolved back into weeds, like “weedy” rice, “weedy” teosinte, and “weedy” radishes. Also weeds develop similar adaptations to crop plants to survive in the agricultural environment.
Consider Kudzu. Everyone in the USA knows it as an invasive weed, but since ancient times in China, it was a crop that provided people with fabric from its bast fibers, food from its enormous starchy roots, and many medicinal and other uses. Kudzu is not evil, it simply has a symbiotic relationship with humans, and just as any other species might serve as a biological control, the main biological control of kudzu in nature is the human species.
Think of the vast fields and mountain sides of the South swallowed by thick mats of Kudzu covering lumps that used to be trees. Think of the people toiling away to clear the Kudzu, while wearing clothes made of cotton that was grown in a faraway place using insecticides and depleting fresh water, using energy from their bodies that came from crops grown in fields far away.
Now imagine people working to harvest the Kudzu, to cut the new vines and dig up the starchy roots and use the plant the way it is used by the people who know its ways. Imagine the people using the starch from the Kudzu root to make flour and noodles and sweet confections. Imagine workers processing the vines into thread which is woven into fabric. The hillsides and fields flourish with plants that used to be suffocated, and hillsides and fields in faraway places also flourish with their own plants, instead of being made to grow cotton and crops to provide for the needs the Kudzu provides for.
Imagine the future where we accept our symbiotic relationship with the plants!
Just wanted to add some supporting citations to everything you’re saying here:
Ūropi, also known by its indigenous name “Europe”, meaning “wide-gazing” or “broad of aspect”, is a small continent first discovered in 1806 by Moehanga of Ngāpuhi, although indigenous Europeans had been living there for many thousands of years. Modern researchers believe the indigenous Europeans originally migrated from the Middle East, and over time split into separate tribes or “kingdoms,” with many retaining their ancient rangatira (called “monarchs” or “nobility”) to this day.
While many see Ūropi as timeless and exotic, indigenous Europeans have actually adapted well to the modern economy, often exporting cultural products like baguettes and vodka, the former of which may be recognisable as the basis for bánh mì.
A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.
At the moment, no outlets seem to have reported a motive for the attack. Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car “was not transporting any riders” when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames. Public Information Officer Robert Rueca of San Francisco’s police department confirmed in an email to The Verge that police responded at “approximately” 8:50PM PT to find the car already on fire, adding that there were “no reports of injuries.”
“I think that in one way or another we will do ourselves in. Sooner or later the generation that says, ‘We’re living our last days,’ really will be. But not because somebody strikes us from heaven. We’ll do it to ourselves. And, to the future.”
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Before “disruption” turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea. Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.
It’s easy (and valid) to dismiss the “disruption” of Uber, which “disrupted” taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to collapse the world’s rival transportation system, while quietly promising its investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.
Uber’s disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the “independence” of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with traditional taxis and transit, but Uber
magnified these problems, under cover of “disrupting” them away.
But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have proven both beneficial and durable.
When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.
But the history of “disruption” features far more examples of tech companies disrupting
other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It’s only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are
other digital businesses.
And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there’s a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?
That’s the contention of “Coopting Disruption,” a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):
The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption. Big companies have some major advantages: they’ve got people and infrastructure they can leverage to bring new products to market more cheaply than startups. They’ve got existing relationships with suppliers, distributors and customers. People trust them.
Diversified, monopolistic companies are also able to capture “involuntary spillovers”: when Google spends money on AI for image recognition, it can improve Google Photos, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps and many other products. A startup with just one product can’t capitalize on these spillovers in the same way, so it doesn’t have the same incentives to spend big on R&D.
Finally, big companies have access to cheap money. They get better credit terms from lenders, they can float bonds, they can tap the public markets, or just spend their own profits on R&D. They can also afford to take a long view, because they’re not tied to VCs whose funds turn over every 5-10 years. Big companies get cheap money, play a long game, pay less to innovate and get more out of innovation.
But those advantages are swamped by the
disadvantages of incumbency, all the various curses of bigness. Take Arrow’s “replacement effect”: new companies that compete with incumbents drive down the incumbents’ prices and tempt their customers away. But an incumbent that
buys a disruptive new company can just shut it down, and whittle down its ideas to “sustaining innovation” (small improvements to existing products), killing “disruptive innovation” (major changes that make the existing products obsolete).
Arrow’s Replacement Effect also comes into play
before a new product even exists. An incumbent that allows a rival to do R&D that would eventually disrupt its product is at risk; but if the incumbent buys this pre-product, R&D-heavy startup, it can turn the research to sustaining innovation and defund any disruptive innovation.
Arrow asks us to look at the innovation question from the point of view of the company as a whole. Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” looks at the motivations of individual decision-makers in large, successful companies. These individuals don’t want to disrupt their own business, because that will render some part of their own company obsolete (perhaps their own division!). They also don’t want to radically change their customers’ businesses, because those customers would also face negative effects from disruption.
A startup, by contrast, has no existing successful divisions and no giant customers to safeguard. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Where a large company has no way for individual employees to initiate major changes in corporate strategy, a startup has fewer hops between employees and management. What’s more, a startup that rewards an employee’s good idea with a stock-grant ties that employee’s future finances to the outcome of that idea – while a giant corporation’s stock bonuses are only incidentally tied to the ideas of any individual worker.
Big companies are where good ideas go to die. If a big company passes on its employees’ cool, disruptive ideas, that’s the end of the story for that idea. But even if 100 VCs pass on a startup’s cool idea and only one VC funds it, the startup still gets to pursue that idea. In startup land, a good idea gets lots of chances – in a big company, it only gets one.
Given how innately disruptable tech companies are, given how hard it is for big companies to innovate, and given how little innovation we’ve gotten from Big Tech, how is it that the tech giants haven’t been disrupted?
I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable
“I designed the 12-bit rainbow palette for use on National Grid: Live. It consists of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive luminance, chroma, and hue … The palette uses a 12-bit colour depth, so each colour requires only four characters when specified as a hexadecimal colour code in a CSS or SVG file”
Wittgenstein wrote fairly little about art. He had more to say about aesthetic inquiry. “In aesthetics the question is not ‘Do you like it?’ but ‘Why do you like it?’” And he explained, “Aesthetics is descriptive. What it does is to
draw one’s attention to certain features, to place things side by side so as to exhibit these features. The aim of aesthetic inquiry is to bring more clearly into view that which is hidden in plain sight, that is to say, that which is not hidden at all. And its method consists, basically, in making “peculiar kinds of comparisons.”
Alva Noë. 2023.
The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
/ Shōmei Tōmatsu , Coca-Cola, Tokyo, 1969, Untitled, Okinawa, 1971, Protest, Tokyo, 1969, Steel Helmut with Skull Bone Fused by Atomic Bomb, Nagasaki, 1963.
TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)
In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior. There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time. Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.
In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.
(The OP’s link leads to a site with a recording of the song sung by both Mary Moran and her mother, Amelia)
“The problem is not: “Technology causes harm.” The problem is: “We live in an unhealthy society where our most vulnerable populations are suffering because we don’t invest in resilience or build social safety nets.””
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