I'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.
Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.
It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.
Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
I used to work in investment banking in the city of London and later in Canary Wharf. I loved working in the city as it was a beautiful old place, people were very social and having 2-3 hour boozy lunches with someone who you might do business with one day wasn't a rarity (mind you, I moved out before covid, I understand things have changed quite a bit).
Then I switched jobs and ended up in Canary Wharf. For those who don't know it, Canary Wharf is a newly built finance district in the London Docklands. If you've been to Singapore, Dubai, La Defense in Paris or Songdo in Korea, you know the kind of place. Everything is clean, new, modern. Everything has 90 degree angles. Everything has cameras, security guards and cleaning stuff. What it doesn't have is any resemblance of a real city, any organicity or soul.
I hated it. Every morning I saw the streams of suite dressed worker drones pouring from the tube directly into their office towers (Canary Wharf has a huge underground shopping mall/railway station that allows you to go from the subway directly into your office without ever seeing the sun).
I was unhappy. So I did similar things to the OP. I got up earlier and walked there. (I lived in Mile End). It was a nice walk along the canal for a while and then a not so nice walk through smog and traffic, but I didn't mind. I took my lunch outside on the remaining docks. And finally, I got up so early that I arrived an hour before work began.
I spent this hour in a Cafe. Alone. Having breakfast. I loved this hour. I sat there, as the only one not rushing in, getting their "strong capo", beeping their card against the reader and rushing out. I observed the grey and black dressed stream of people. I day dreamed.
It helped - for a while. It was a band aid before I left London all together and moved to Berlin. But most of all, it is a uniquely calm and joyful experience. It decelerates you. The boheme in Paris or Prague has long figured this out. Sit in a cafe. Enjoy a coffee or a glass of wine. Look at people. Daydream. Reflect, be enough - there's a lot to it.
Singapore to a tea. Spooky that I had a similar path, Sydney -> HK -> New York -> Singapore. Crescendo-ing up to New York, then off a cliff into a full blow school-like world (but great trains).
It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.
Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?
A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.
All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.
Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition
Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.
You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.
Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.
I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.
In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.
If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.
I'm wondering if this overlooks areas where we experience much higher levels of deviation today. Take music, for example. When I grew up, I was basically limited to whatever was playing on the radio or MTV—there was only so much airtime for a small set of popular songs. The mainstream was much more mainstream. Today, I can listen to obscure Swedish power metal bands with fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify without any difficulty.
The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.
Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.
One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.
Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?
I'd also argue the culture of "digital degeneracy" has permeated the internet and is no longer locked away in, say, the bastion of mid/late 2000s 4chan. What used to be violent NSFL liveleaks content is now easily accesible by anyone with a phone. Softcore content is completely widespread on "clean" apps like IG and Tiktok.
If we measure deviance only by the metrics that existed before social media, we will of course find what is expected.
Consuming niche stuff isn't really deviance in any meaningful sense.
There's no risk-taking there, no producing something new for the world, and very little personal actualization beyond getting to consume a thing you like.
Maybe we're looking at this wrong. Maybe 'new' stuff just isn’t that interesting to people any more. I mean the amount of 'new' things out there are huge and we are constantly exposed to them lots of them. Then when you couple that with the massive amount of advertising that is everywhere on every surface and site, people start to brain adblock and focus on patterns they recognize.
we're actually working on a practical implementation of aspects of what Fei-Fei describes - although with a more narrow focus on optimizing operations in the physical space (mining, energy, defense etc) https://hivekit.io/about/our-vision/
Looks amazing- and the point they're making in the article is correct. Switching back and forth from VS to PG Admin creates friction that this seems to solve in a much nicer way
Maybe we need to widen our search for life. Earth is a planet with about 15 degree average temperature and abundant water and oxygen. So that's what live here consumes and where it thrives. But life is all about adaptation. So, father than looking for planets with similar temperatures and resources, shouldn't we be looking for other possible foundations for life? Maybe there's a thriving civilization out there, living happily at 300 degrees, breathing neon and eating sulfur?
I don't think its about devaluing the currency to pay back debt at all. I believe it's about a fundamental vision of an autark USA, decoupled from any international obligations, whether its NATO, WHO or WTO and focused purely on producing and selling domestically whilst having a "beautiful ocean on each side".
I believe that's an unrealistic vision, not least since America's debt means it cannot afford significant shrinkage of its global market or a loss of its status as reserve currency, but I believe autarkie is the goal none the less.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...