"Aesthetics he always understood in its original sense as sensation. To study aesthetics is not to study beauty per se, it is to study the materialities of our organs of perception. … This is one reason the lectures are on optical and not visual media. Optics is a subfield of physics; vision is a subfield of physiology, psychology, and culture. The visible spectrum is a narrow band of a huge optical spectrum. … The sense organs are signal processors, relatively weak ones at that, and Kittler rigorously refuses to take human quantities as the measure of all things; for him we cannot know our bodies and senses until they have been externalized in media."
— John Durham Peters, “Introduction” in Friedrick Kittler’s Optical Media
Here is a bike storage solution. It works by holding on to bikes by the top bar The designers apparently never considered that some bikes don’t have a top bar… …Women’s bikes.
For Wilson, society took a wrong turn when it viewed the ideal role of policing as detectives solving a crime or a system following clear rules agreed on in advance. The real purpose of the policeman was to preserve order, pushing the limits of his or her authority in an improvisational, eternal combat against an almost self-conscious disorder.
[…]
Wilson believed that a “growing and not-so-commendable utilitarianism” lead many to believe that the police should only intervene in crimes where there are harms between people. What these people miss, in Wilson’s neoconservative approach, is that disordered individuals, even if they aren’t directly causing harm to people, may sow the seeds of disorder that can take down an entire community of order.
Photographic portfolio featuring technological environments in clinical minimalist compositions. Places captured include the KSAT Svalbard Ground Station, the McLaren Technology Centre, the BMW MINI Factory, and CERN, Switzerland.
“Since we are forced to divulge our itinerary to the police under the new ‘special law’ aimed at restricting the right to associate and demonstrate…” (via Phillippe Fournier on Facebook)
“Nothing is worse, according to Hegel than compassion in politics. It implies that the gap between the rich and poor is growing. I am fairly much in agreement with him on this point, and I believe that the compassion currently demonstrated by our politicians can often be interpreted as a desire…
“Many entrepreneurs hold the opinion that “I did it all on my own,” which may be well adapted to leadership success in certain situations, but it is objectively myopic. The entrepreneur relies on an ecosystem of venture capitalists, risk-taking purchasers, and so on. This ecosystem itself rests on a deeper foundation of collective, government-led enterprise. The delivery of our software, for example, depended on the existence of the Internet, which is the product of a series of government-sponsored R&D efforts, in combination with subsequent massive private commercial development. Government funding has been essential to much of the university science that entrepreneurs have exploited. Honest courts and police are required for functioning capital markets and protection of assets; physical infrastructure is required for the roads and running water without which we would not spend much time thinking about artificial intelligence software. At the absolute foundation, national armed forces protect the whole system against external aggression. All of our exciting technical and economic innovations ultimately require men to stand watch all night looking through Starlight scopes mounted on assault rifles—and die if necessary—to protect our commercial, law-bound society. Would you do this to protect a billionaire hedge-fund manager who sees his country as nothing more than lines on a map?”
Add to this, in my world, the foundational infrastructure of global financial institutions and markets, the extraordinarily complex socioeconomic web of laws, regulations, and conventions which protect, foster, and enable investment and speculation, and the enormously capable and complex bureacratic platforms from which most traders, investment bankers, and investors operate, and you begin to appreciate that these self-proclaimed supermen resemble Prometheus wresting fire from Mount Olympus for the benefit of mankind far less than spoiled rich kids born on third base who grow up convinced they hit a triple. (Not to mention that most of these clowns got rich on a flying trapeze constructed over a free safety net composed of the taxes, retirement savings, and future debt repayment powers of tens of millions of their otherwise completely uncompensated and unrewarded fellow citizens.)
So let me just say that I remain completely unpersuaded that traders, bankers, and private equity investors who have made fortunes over the last ten years deserve to be unconstrained, unregulated, and untaxed because they did it all themselves. Bull—if I may be so bold—fucking-shit. Go pull the other one, sweetheart. I’ve worked in finance for more than two decades. You can’t fool me.
"We face a situation which seems neither to have been contemplated in either the Austrian or the Keynesian theoretical frameworks (since both assume some sort of homeostatic corrective mechanism is ultimately at work) or in the any of the various versions of neoclassical growth theory, where some sort of semi-constant equilibrium growth path is assumed to exist, and be recoverable via the application of an appropriate set of structural reforms. Yet the three oldest societies on the planet – Japan, Germany and Italy – have been losing growth momentum for decades now, and it is quite possible will drift into negative average growth rates at some point in a non too distant future. Traditional theory never really contemplated this possibility."
