“‘The pessimists left Germany, the optimists ended up in Auschwitz.” The lesson from the Holocaust, he says, is to be on your guard. “We always need a Plan B, even today.’”
Month: June 2024
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The Momentum of a City is Proportional to its Density
I’m stating the obvious, I know, but having lived in Hamburg for a year and then returning to Manhattan, especially midtown, reminds me of the energy that propelled my career when I was younger: the masses of people crammed into giant buildings, filling the wide sidewalks, filling every space available.
It’s not necessarily a good thing. Hamburg is a balance between the advantages of modern life and the needs of humans: many more green spaces, almost no very tall buildings, an emphasis on quality rather than efficiency.
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Doctorow on Real (Climate) Innovation vs Silicon Valley Nonsense
“Silicon Valley is the land of low-capital, low-labor growth. Software development requires fewer people than infrastructure and hard goods manufacturing, both to get started and to run as an ongoing operation. Silicon Valley is the place where you get rich without creating jobs. It’s run by investors who hate the idea of paying people. That’s why AI is so exciting for Silicon Valley types: it lets them fantasize about making humans obsolete. A company without employees is a company without labor issues, without messy co-determination fights, without any moral consideration for others. It’s the natural progression for an industry that started by misclassifying the workers in its buildings as “contractors,” and then graduated to pretending that millions of workers were actually ‘independent small businesses’.”