““It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. You think the land stops being stolen from indigenous people just because you’re done with the preliminaries and have moved to reading off the minutes?”
The New National Religion has invented its own analog of the Adham. That’s actually legitimately interesting from a sociological viewpoint, though an unspeakable annoyance from any other one.
We should just resolve problems of inclusivity the way billionaires solve their differences: by challenging each other to MMA fights, then realizing we can't fight and making a bunch of excuses until interest dwindles
There needs to be a crossover where Cindy, Larisa, Sky, Hana, and Jane from your previous post appear at the house party-- or at least where you continue their stories. Maybe they could be customers of that reality show thing.
“It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. “
This whole thing is the most tokenistic bull. The height of the performative signalling.
If I were Native American I’d be enraged. “Oh my people used to live here, on this now hugely valuable real estate, and all we get is this acknowledgement of that. Can we have the land back?”
OK, there is the most coherent explanation for Moscow real-estate market here that I've ever seen. I always wondered why PIK developer make their new houses so, so very ugly that they look actually worse than 80's Soviet apartment blocks (e.g. https://www.pik.ru/1dubr), and only this answer makes sense.
“You have to make the new houses worse somehow. We don’t want them to be less liveable. So instead, we make them uglier. So ugly, that no self-respecting person would live in one by choice. The needy will grudgingly choose them over homelessness, but rich people who want to signal class will still prefer the old houses, letting them keep basically all their value. As a bonus, it prevents gentrification and ensures the houses go to poor people who need them.”
“Sounds like it might work.”
“That’s what we thought. But when we took the proposal to the mayor, she said it wasn’t even original. Apparently the whole United States has been doing this for the past seventy-five years!”
I'm actually starting to wonder if this might be true on some level. Modern architecture is really ugly. Maybe the rich just fund all the architects who make these hideous blocky monstrosities because it makes their old houses more valuable.
So, it looks like "progress studies" have been smoothly assimilated into the wider "progressive" movement. To be expected I suppose, it's not like there's a viable alternative paradigm.
Now that I've stopped laughing (and thanking my lucky stars I don't go to parties):
(1) I think the alt-history restaurant isn't that bad an idea, at least no worse than the usual fusion ideas. Germany already has currywurst, I'm sure they'd be open to teriyakiwurst.
I'm pretty sure the Romans did have fried eggs and pepper, but if it's describing food for 'the modern audience' who are historically illiterate, again I think you're on to a winner. From Max Miller's "Tasting History", a Roman recipe for Parthian Chicken:
(2) I fully expect the Automated Land Acknowledger idea to be implemented any day now. Universities would love them. Just stick a bunch up around campus, let them play all day long, and you've appeased the punctilious without spending an actual dime on reparations to the Natives
(3) "nobody in California is religious enough to meet people at church"
Ahem. I think that should be understood as "nobody *of the kind of people we know* in California is religious enough to meet people at church". The diocese of Orange ended up buying the Crystal Cathedral because they needed more space:
"On July 7, 2011, the Diocese of Orange, which had previously purchased land and started planning for construction of a new and larger cathedral in Santa Ana because growth of the diocese had rendered Holy Family Cathedral in Orange too small for diocesan functions, announced that it was "potentially interested" in buying the Crystal Cathedral campus for future use as its diocesan cathedral. There were three major factors that motivated the interest of the Diocese of Orange in the property:
- Its central location within the diocese made it more accessible to parishioners than the Santa Ana site,
- The cost of renovating the Crystal Cathedral building for Catholic worship would be far less than that of constructing a new building from scratch, and
- The other buildings on the campus would provide facilities for diocesan administrative offices and ministries with little modification, further reducing the cost of the whole project.
...To reflect the diversity of the Catholic community in the region, the reliquary of its altar will conceal donated first-class relics connected to saints of American, Korean, Mexican and Vietnamese descent, including the Canadian Martyrs, Andrew Dũng-Lạc, Junípero Serra, Andrew Kim Taegon, and Rafael Guízar y Valencia."
This is hilarious. However, I somehow missed the supposed logic being espoused in this bit. Can anyone explain to me in what way the anitsubscribe makes people uncancellable? “Nah, we’re thinking of it as a sort of ultimate defense of free speech. Imagine deplatforming someone for supporting racism or pedophilia, when you could rake in big bucks from collecting antisubscriptions to them instead! All of a sudden, those people are cancelproof.”
I also love the restaurant idea. I would go eat there, and would probably need to obsessively order everything on the menu over subsequent visits out of pure curiosity.
Every time I see blocks of the “cute”-style housing going up I sigh to myself and think this is the price of being a YIMBY. Though maybe posting here will get get me kicked out of the YIMBY party, the NYT says this is a Nazi blog!
I think that the Land Acknowledgement as shown is Problematic because it erases almost all of the indigenous people who lived there. The Americas were settled some 18000-10000 BCE.
If the Ohlone people were the ones who settled there ~15000 BCE and held onto the land until the Spanish came along, this form of acknowledgement would be appropriate. I think there is every reason to believe that this is not what happened. While the Ohlone lived in fixed settlements and thus their land changed ownership (if they had this concept) less often than it does with nomadic peoples, I still suspect that changes through violence did occur (and the ancestors of the Ohlone may only have arrived from Siberia 1000 BCE).
Also, per Wikipedia, "[in] pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, and did not view themselves as a single unified group." Using a term they did not use to self-identify is probably as sensitive as saying "before Christianization, this land belonged to some pagans".
(I am very much not saying that the genocides committed against the First Nations were ok, just that these token apologies seem completely pointless.)
They just need to put the automated land acknowledger in those new, lower-priced houses. Set the frequency and volume based on the price. I guess you would also want a conservative version too. Maybe it could just play "God Bless the USA" over and over. Or actually, each one should probably alternate land acknowledgement and country music to get a politics-agnostic lower price.
"Unceded land" is why British common law invented the doctrine of "adverse possession" - because of all the civil wars and whatnot, people were showing up with zillion-year-old deeds to property that had been "owned" by other people for ages, and the courts made up a rule that says if you've lived on the land for enough years and its original owner hasn't tried to claim it in all that time, you get to keep it.
Has any Chinese spritual entrepeneur actually ever rigged up some prayer wheels to high-powered electric motors doing tens of thousands of revolutions per second? Or does a digital script repeating the prayer also count?
These are hilarious, but there is also something kind of sad about a city full of such brilliant people being so boring. I also wonder if the boredom is what inspires the innovation, but then again...
I attended a virtual meeting based in the US while I was in Sicily... It started with a land-acknowledgment, I was going to add we should remember the Sicanians, Siculians, Elyminians, phoenecians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Swabians, French, Borbouns, Italians and Mafiosi that this land was taken from... But I thought they would get irritated.
How about a "Motivation Mafia". You give us a contract with milestones on a timeline for your project and sign away our liability for any injuries you incur. To cancel the contract you must give up a significant amount of money to charity (not to us, due to the perverse incentive). Then we regularly send someone to make sure you stay motivated to work on your project. You start missing milestones, you start missing teeth. We get paid only if your project is completed, that way the incentives are perfectly aligned.
You feel like you've been going around the wheel of YIMBY discussions for a long time, when you overhear a discussion on water wheels. A British voice chimes in:
"All I'm saying is you can prove that coal deposits in north central England were not necessary to start the industrial Revolution by making continuous improvements in water wheels instead. 12th century water wheel technology could have produced 14 times more energy if they just continued innovating in that one field: Gravity buckets, Franklin turbines, and eventually more finely controlled flow systems. We could have had industrial Revolution without coal."
The new Max Roser looks skeptical.
"Well that's what my project's about. We purchased 80 acres off the Ohio River in Indiana and are building a modern housing development whose energy needs are supplied by technology exclusively possible in the 14th century. Once successful, we will make an easily producible version of our technology, release the plans open source, and pitch them to townships and municipalities in the developing world."
"Isn't this project more expensive than just using the best and most efficient modern technology?" You ask, not daring to ask what the houses will look like.
"This isn't about development economics. It's about demonstrating a particular theory of economic history."
Well, you are glad this isn't about YIMBY. But still you wonder what this has to do with progress.
““It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. You think the land stops being stolen from indigenous people just because you’re done with the preliminaries and have moved to reading off the minutes?”
I did an actual spit take
>Automated Land Acknowledger
The New National Religion has invented its own analog of the Adham. That’s actually legitimately interesting from a sociological viewpoint, though an unspeakable annoyance from any other one.
We should just resolve problems of inclusivity the way billionaires solve their differences: by challenging each other to MMA fights, then realizing we can't fight and making a bunch of excuses until interest dwindles
Easily one of the funniest things I’ve read today. It’s also unfortunately very accurate.
What does the Automated Land Acknowledger do if you take it to Europe?
THIS IS THE UNCEDED ANCESTRAL LAND OF THE USENET PEOPLE
I laughed really hard many times while reading this. Thanks
Oh, I love the anti-subscribers! I want an anti-vote. I don't want to vote for anyone, but I'm happy to vote against.
After the day I had, I needed a good laugh, and I got one. Thank you for that.
Amazing! Probably my favourite in the entire series.
(𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦)
>You wonder if there is anywhere open at this hour that will serve you a fried egg.
I'll just note that you don't ever need to wonder that. That's why the Denny's chain exists.
In these days, a man who creates a spoof startup pitch is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot raising a seed round for it.
There needs to be a crossover where Cindy, Larisa, Sky, Hana, and Jane from your previous post appear at the house party-- or at least where you continue their stories. Maybe they could be customers of that reality show thing.
Successfully funny. Thanks.
“Too cringe to live, too lindy to die”…I’m going to be using this many many times
That was so fucking funny. Brilliant.
The price-discriminating YIMBY reminds me of Robin Hanson's proposal for Universal Basic Dorms:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/universal-basic-dormshtml
Utterly brilliant.
Well I was at that party too.... and nobody asked me a damn thing or even noticed me or anything.
When we do our indigenous land acknowledgements at work, we specifically dedicate them to the Gods of the Eagles and the Setting Sun.
Not enough to just have it be a pledge, we expressly make it religious, as I guess no one has ever heard of freedom of religion where I work.
Sometimes I worry that the neighborhood birds think that this is unceded therapod land.
If the current Max Roser is a great censor, one worries what the next one will be.
“It seems so tokenist to just acknowledge land once, at the beginning of a meeting, then never talk about it again. “
This whole thing is the most tokenistic bull. The height of the performative signalling.
If I were Native American I’d be enraged. “Oh my people used to live here, on this now hugely valuable real estate, and all we get is this acknowledgement of that. Can we have the land back?”
OK, there is the most coherent explanation for Moscow real-estate market here that I've ever seen. I always wondered why PIK developer make their new houses so, so very ugly that they look actually worse than 80's Soviet apartment blocks (e.g. https://www.pik.ru/1dubr), and only this answer makes sense.
But ancient Romans did have chickens.
PS. Would also antisubscribe to that person - good call.
“You have to make the new houses worse somehow. We don’t want them to be less liveable. So instead, we make them uglier. So ugly, that no self-respecting person would live in one by choice. The needy will grudgingly choose them over homelessness, but rich people who want to signal class will still prefer the old houses, letting them keep basically all their value. As a bonus, it prevents gentrification and ensures the houses go to poor people who need them.”
“Sounds like it might work.”
“That’s what we thought. But when we took the proposal to the mayor, she said it wasn’t even original. Apparently the whole United States has been doing this for the past seventy-five years!”
I'm actually starting to wonder if this might be true on some level. Modern architecture is really ugly. Maybe the rich just fund all the architects who make these hideous blocky monstrosities because it makes their old houses more valuable.
So, it looks like "progress studies" have been smoothly assimilated into the wider "progressive" movement. To be expected I suppose, it's not like there's a viable alternative paradigm.
I have to say that i really like brutalism. Are we not fans here for the most part?
Now that I've stopped laughing (and thanking my lucky stars I don't go to parties):
(1) I think the alt-history restaurant isn't that bad an idea, at least no worse than the usual fusion ideas. Germany already has currywurst, I'm sure they'd be open to teriyakiwurst.
I'm pretty sure the Romans did have fried eggs and pepper, but if it's describing food for 'the modern audience' who are historically illiterate, again I think you're on to a winner. From Max Miller's "Tasting History", a Roman recipe for Parthian Chicken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&list=PLIkaZtzr9JDkCHpSx2Kf2XWRcgqjClDff&index=5
(2) I fully expect the Automated Land Acknowledger idea to be implemented any day now. Universities would love them. Just stick a bunch up around campus, let them play all day long, and you've appeased the punctilious without spending an actual dime on reparations to the Natives
(3) "nobody in California is religious enough to meet people at church"
Ahem. I think that should be understood as "nobody *of the kind of people we know* in California is religious enough to meet people at church". The diocese of Orange ended up buying the Crystal Cathedral because they needed more space:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Cathedral_(Garden_Grove,_California)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA1VRF5cZ8U
"On July 7, 2011, the Diocese of Orange, which had previously purchased land and started planning for construction of a new and larger cathedral in Santa Ana because growth of the diocese had rendered Holy Family Cathedral in Orange too small for diocesan functions, announced that it was "potentially interested" in buying the Crystal Cathedral campus for future use as its diocesan cathedral. There were three major factors that motivated the interest of the Diocese of Orange in the property:
- Its central location within the diocese made it more accessible to parishioners than the Santa Ana site,
- The cost of renovating the Crystal Cathedral building for Catholic worship would be far less than that of constructing a new building from scratch, and
- The other buildings on the campus would provide facilities for diocesan administrative offices and ministries with little modification, further reducing the cost of the whole project.
...To reflect the diversity of the Catholic community in the region, the reliquary of its altar will conceal donated first-class relics connected to saints of American, Korean, Mexican and Vietnamese descent, including the Canadian Martyrs, Andrew Dũng-Lạc, Junípero Serra, Andrew Kim Taegon, and Rafael Guízar y Valencia."
How did lindyman get so popular?
"Too cringe to live, too lindy to die" sounds like something that would be written on the gates of Postrat Purgatory.
Hilarious and lovely, especially the reference to Oakland award winning housing - tee hee.
Antisuscribe 😁
This is hilarious. However, I somehow missed the supposed logic being espoused in this bit. Can anyone explain to me in what way the anitsubscribe makes people uncancellable? “Nah, we’re thinking of it as a sort of ultimate defense of free speech. Imagine deplatforming someone for supporting racism or pedophilia, when you could rake in big bucks from collecting antisubscriptions to them instead! All of a sudden, those people are cancelproof.”
I also love the restaurant idea. I would go eat there, and would probably need to obsessively order everything on the menu over subsequent visits out of pure curiosity.
Every time I see blocks of the “cute”-style housing going up I sigh to myself and think this is the price of being a YIMBY. Though maybe posting here will get get me kicked out of the YIMBY party, the NYT says this is a Nazi blog!
This is so great. What do we have to do to get you to write more longform?
I think that the Land Acknowledgement as shown is Problematic because it erases almost all of the indigenous people who lived there. The Americas were settled some 18000-10000 BCE.
If the Ohlone people were the ones who settled there ~15000 BCE and held onto the land until the Spanish came along, this form of acknowledgement would be appropriate. I think there is every reason to believe that this is not what happened. While the Ohlone lived in fixed settlements and thus their land changed ownership (if they had this concept) less often than it does with nomadic peoples, I still suspect that changes through violence did occur (and the ancestors of the Ohlone may only have arrived from Siberia 1000 BCE).
Also, per Wikipedia, "[in] pre-colonial times, the Ohlone lived in more than 50 distinct landholding groups, and did not view themselves as a single unified group." Using a term they did not use to self-identify is probably as sensitive as saying "before Christianization, this land belonged to some pagans".
(I am very much not saying that the genocides committed against the First Nations were ok, just that these token apologies seem completely pointless.)
Van Glorious.
Srslytho, was it not written that any sufficiently developed parody is indistinguishable from the real thing?
>There is a bird from the jungles of Burma
The Romans had chickens you know. They did augery on them before battles.
"You wonder if there is anywhere open at this hour that will serve you a fried egg."
All-night diners are not a thing in the Bay Area? I thought you people were civilized?
They just need to put the automated land acknowledger in those new, lower-priced houses. Set the frequency and volume based on the price. I guess you would also want a conservative version too. Maybe it could just play "God Bless the USA" over and over. Or actually, each one should probably alternate land acknowledgement and country music to get a politics-agnostic lower price.
"Unceded land" is why British common law invented the doctrine of "adverse possession" - because of all the civil wars and whatnot, people were showing up with zillion-year-old deeds to property that had been "owned" by other people for ages, and the courts made up a rule that says if you've lived on the land for enough years and its original owner hasn't tried to claim it in all that time, you get to keep it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
Has any Chinese spritual entrepeneur actually ever rigged up some prayer wheels to high-powered electric motors doing tens of thousands of revolutions per second? Or does a digital script repeating the prayer also count?
These are hilarious, but there is also something kind of sad about a city full of such brilliant people being so boring. I also wonder if the boredom is what inspires the innovation, but then again...
I attended a virtual meeting based in the US while I was in Sicily... It started with a land-acknowledgment, I was going to add we should remember the Sicanians, Siculians, Elyminians, phoenecians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Swabians, French, Borbouns, Italians and Mafiosi that this land was taken from... But I thought they would get irritated.
Lol. Lmao even. The double land acknowledgement and lindyman bits. Hahahaaa. Thank you!
Man, I read this thinking I could be invited to a hip Bay Area house party. Sigh.
I don't get the title. Why bride?
I think the “antisubscription” is not a terrible idea hahahaha
> “You’re talking about a reality TV dating show, marketed to singles, as a dating strategy.”
It already exists on youtube and gets millions of views. It's called The Button and it's equally hilarious and cringe inducing.
The next generation of affordable housing will have floors made out of of sideways staircases, and ventilation tubes instead of doors.
How about a "Motivation Mafia". You give us a contract with milestones on a timeline for your project and sign away our liability for any injuries you incur. To cancel the contract you must give up a significant amount of money to charity (not to us, due to the perverse incentive). Then we regularly send someone to make sure you stay motivated to work on your project. You start missing milestones, you start missing teeth. We get paid only if your project is completed, that way the incentives are perfectly aligned.
Just brilliant
You feel like you've been going around the wheel of YIMBY discussions for a long time, when you overhear a discussion on water wheels. A British voice chimes in:
"All I'm saying is you can prove that coal deposits in north central England were not necessary to start the industrial Revolution by making continuous improvements in water wheels instead. 12th century water wheel technology could have produced 14 times more energy if they just continued innovating in that one field: Gravity buckets, Franklin turbines, and eventually more finely controlled flow systems. We could have had industrial Revolution without coal."
The new Max Roser looks skeptical.
"Well that's what my project's about. We purchased 80 acres off the Ohio River in Indiana and are building a modern housing development whose energy needs are supplied by technology exclusively possible in the 14th century. Once successful, we will make an easily producible version of our technology, release the plans open source, and pitch them to townships and municipalities in the developing world."
"Isn't this project more expensive than just using the best and most efficient modern technology?" You ask, not daring to ask what the houses will look like.
"This isn't about development economics. It's about demonstrating a particular theory of economic history."
Well, you are glad this isn't about YIMBY. But still you wonder what this has to do with progress.
So funny
Delusion much)
Get help.
Does the fact that I only get about a quarter of these jokes mean that I'm old? Or just out of touch with the Bay Area, these days?
Actually, that last one would make a lot of sense.
Also, I kinda want to go to an alternate history themed restaurant. :D
I am so very glad I moved far, far away from San Franshitsco.