Long articles that are worth reading

[tomsfood]

[MxmHrpr]

http://www.johnkay.com/2004/01/17/obliquity

"Strange as it may seem, overcoming geographic obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting global business targets are the type of goals often best achieved when pursued indirectly. This is the idea of Obliquity. Oblique approaches are most effective in difficult terrain, or where outcomes depend on interactions with other people."

[alby]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/opini ... .html?_r=0

Not the longest article, but I enjoyed reading it. Article is about shame culture and mob/group mentality and I think it's something that I and maybe a lot of other people experience and are a part of.

[WussWayne]

Randomly opened up gmaps and was totally floored to see the public transport feature on and its seems accurate. Apparently some dudes were able to map out
Nairobi's chaotic public transport and submitted the data to google. Seems like it might now get replicated in other cities in developing countries with similar informal public transport systems.

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/nairobi-go ... ogle-maps/

[pirxthepilot]

^ that's amazing, are you in nairobi? have you tried it?

[pirxthepilot]

http://observer.com/2016/03/elle-on-earth/

very entertaining piece, i was a journalist for years and key parts of this ring true. Rei Kuwakabo and her husband discuss Pessoa, the concept of Saudade - and then, given the chance by incompetent editors, churn out some anodyne puff piece.

[WussWayne]

Yeah, I've tried it out.





It seems to be mostly dependent on knowing some sort of a landmark with a name near where you want to get off like an estate name, petrol station, school, pub, name of a stop etc as opposed to individual residential addresses. I'm not sure about the times given since traffic really varies a lot here and there's lots of jams but yeah I'd say it's not too far off for non-rush hour traffic. The walking gps coordinates take you the nearest "frequently used stop" although matatus pretty much stop anywhere so as long as you get on the route you can hail them down from anywhere. Mixing this with old-fashioned asking around would make it pretty hard to get lost.

[rublev]

not an article but an interesting doc from the BBC about the fans of bosnia & hercegovina and serbia meeting in the qualifying rounds for the 2006 world cup.

[ramseames]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

[Ques]

compare and contrast, obama and hillary on foreign policy:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... ne/471525/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magaz ... .html?_r=0

the more I read about hillary the more I start to worry about what future engagements we're going to find ourself in abroad under a clinton presidency

[smiles]

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the ... ny-valley/


http://www.wired.com/2016/04/apec-schools/

[Ques]

follow up to obama/hillary foreign policy articles... the man behind the scenes

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magaz ... nyt-region

this article is kind of ridiculous. im not sure why he allowed most of this to be on the record... if true somewhat concerning that this guy is running the US's national security apparatus. also the way he candidly discussed abusing social media to bend the public to his will on the iran deal is... worrying?

“In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

also i love the bit where he indicts the media for having no credentials or experience and for being too green, when he himself is directing american foreign policy with an MFA while still in his 30s...

[odradek]

just ran across this li'l archive (relevant to undercover fw15) http://www.circulationzero.com/

[Iliam]

[mc-lunar]

[freddy]

[deadkitty]

[Ques]

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/ ... e-dark-net

welcome to the dark net

[anshin]

dont usually like the new yorker but i thought this was interesting

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultur ... -of-a-muse

[bels]

https://libcom.org/blog/fully-automated ... e-14062015

I don't know if this is worth reading. I'd like someone who does know to read it and tell me what's wrong with it (if anything, it seems OK to me)

[nope]

It's ok. The broad message that fully-automated luxury communism (henceforth FALC) isn't going to magically solve everything is good, but I didn't think the specific issues it raised were particularly compelling.

1. Points out that many (most) "luxury" items are Veblen goods, thus scarcity is the whole point. Therefore we can't just give Cartier watches to everyone. This is crashingly obvious. I think to interpret the stated goals of FALC so literally is missing the point. It seems apparent to me that nobody (not even Aaron Bastani) is actually all that fired up for equally distributing ostentatious fountain pens. I've always assumed that all the champs and designer clothes angle is just lolzy memeing and the actual point is that the standard of living that could be given to everyone for "free" thanks to automation is surprisingly high, so it's primarily functioning as a rejection of the "exaltation of frugal living" that often accompanies communist utopian ideas. The intro specifically mentions this, so I don't know why it goes back to such a literal reading of "luxury" to make this point.

2. Claims that even if all work is automated we can still run out of resources. Also fairly obvious. The example given (electricity required for data centres) is terrible though, such energy use is tiny (a couple of %) and could trivially be achieved with renewable sources right now if anyone cared. In terms of raw materials it's almost impossible to actually "run out" of anything, it just gets less and less economical to extract from the earth. Presumably if everything is automated there's basically nothing else to do with what ever post-money concept we'll be dealing with so the economics of well, everything, but mining in particular becomes moot. Again I don't think the point of FALC is actually that we can all live like the (current, ecologically disastrous) rich and famous. If you are taking full automation as a starting point then abundant clean energy doesn't seem like a difficult ask.

3. Points out that actually automating everything is never going to happen, especially so-called "reproductive labour" (this term is really confusing btw, I don't get why it is the standard term for this stuff. Surely "domestic labour" would be better?). This is actually a good point and one that is massively glossed over in almost all UBI chat. Spending more time with your kids / aging parents is usually the top line example of what we'll be doing with all this additional spare time when we don't need to work to survive. Can totally see some really repressive social norms coming up round this if UBI (or similar) ever happens. Will they be predominately directed at women? Yeah almost certainly. Capitalism didn't come up with misogyny, and is not in fact the root cause of everything bad. Sorry, tedious Marxists. Smashing the heteronormative nuclear family seems like a great plan but I'm not sure FALC really needs to be addressing it.

[bels]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00085.html

FLAX is an important clothing brand that we should think about more often.

[khayandhi]

[bels]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... -and-today

maybe along with the synchronised global workers revolution we can have some nice, dehumanising, modernist housing projects

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t-mag ... .html?_r=0

Wish i could find an article like that Karlo one about L A C A N so I can understand what william and miles are talking about when we play table tennis.

[qalandar]

[pirxthepilot]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -ads-staff

this is horrific, but seeing senior management at 'serious' news outlets floundering around without a fucking clue it feels like the future of all journalism

[Ques]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/magaz ... -news&_r=0

[rjbman]

[Ques]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-di ... 1480695454

[khayandhi]

Truly excellent article about Gorky and Tolstoy and their tempestuous bromance and "class" and religion and many other such things http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundta ... nd-laborer