February 2017

"This was one of the first acts of Hitler and the Nazis, who had just come to power in Germany a few months earlier, in January 1933. The German labor movement was one of the largest and strongest in the world, with some 7 million members at the time. The Nazis, much like some far-rightists in our own country then and now, saw that unions exercised significant power by representing workers’ interests and promoting a democratic humanitarian outlook among workers. The unions presented a barrier to the Nazi effort to control all areas of life and create a corporate-fascist state. Therefore, the Nazis made a priority of eliminating trade unions in Germany."

Mark Davis, talking about Hannah Arendt and why she was sceptical of the value of political protest. Arendt of course being another person who lived under the Nazis, and who wrote about the 'banality of evil', replacing the big goodies and baddies frameworks we usually use with a series of mundane acts: "Certainly, I think there is a lot to be gained from people gathering together to show solidarity. But in a world where the institutions that we’re protesting in front of are losing their legitimacy and their power, I’m not sure that this has the impact that it once did. If we think of evil as this one person, this one big event, then we tend to want to match that with one big display of resistance. But actually, if evil is banal – a set of ordinary, mundane decisions day by day – then maybe we have to start living differently day by day.”

Cars need to be reined in, without screwing the poor in the process, who need them the most. Cars are filthy (because the internal combustion engine is shit technology), they take over every space they're allowed into, and they're noisy. In your own town or city today, stand still for a moment and just listen. Imagine that same place without car or other vehicle noise. It would seriously change the world, it's amazing we ever got used to the bloody racket vehicles make, it's a disgrace. Barcelona, the same place fighting back against tourism, has an idea.

Sometimes he can be a genius.

Thanks @[606028898:2048:Jason] for this one. If you think unions are corrupt and of no use to you, then you've been got at by the people who have been trying to destroy them for the past 40 years. That's exactly what they want you to think. But they're all that's standing between us and social breakdown. "Unions are, after all, the only real vehicle for workers to defend their interests, whether in the workplace or the political arena. Taking that away from them leaves workers at the mercy of their bosses and politicians."

Always loved bark chips for the garden, we used them a lot when I was a kid. Didn't know then that termites love them. They're like a big welcome mat for the timbers in your house. As are stacks of firewood.

Klee's Twittering Machine. Music is more than anything else a territorial thing. Like dogs pissing to mark territory, music began in the marking out of a space with sound. Refrains. Birds use song for this. Humans do too. And it's not just a physical space, it's an animal's or human's whole being that gets marked out by sound in this way. Teenagers are usually noisy, it's their way to own space in a world that doesn't yet have a place for them. Bikies are noisy for the same reason. An essential part of growing up for most people is having favourite music and musicians. This is a full-on territorial thing, people will defend their favourite artists or type of music viciously, it's an intrinsic part of how they feel themselves as a person. We hate politics but we love music, even though how we use music is very similar to politics, and even more territorial because it helps define our own identities.

Just because.

Light shows aren't the same any more.

Last night I sat in front of this ultra cheapo fan, and decided to calculate what it costs to run (slow TV night). The answer? 1 cent per hour. That means I could run it 24 hours per day, for a whole week, for about $1.50. Running an air conditioner for the same length of time would cost about $85. So, go fans! In a way it all depends how you think about cooling. An air con will definitely bring the temperature of your room down (a fan won't). But on the other hand the ultimate aim is for you to feel cooler. And cooling is not just about temperature, a fan can make you feel comfortably cool even at very high temperatures, provided you aim it at yourself. So you can take the 'temperature' route towards feeling cooler, or the 'cooling' route, targeting the cooling of the body rather than the room. This one cost about $20 too, whereas decent air con would cost $1000 or more, even before paying the electricity bill.

Happy Birthday Peter, I hope you have a day of calm presence :)

Happy Birthday around the corner chick!

Heard that joke about how the private sector is so efficient? Health insurance has gone up 28 percent in the last 4 years, and at the same time the pay packets of its bosses have more than doubled in some cases. This with government assistance to the tune of billions a year (so it's not 'private' at all). This is the battleground in so many ways. The 'public' sector has been smashed for decades by unscrupulous bastards, all about enriching themselves. It's time to put the public first again, in health, in education, in government. We had the best health system in the world before the big privatization push, now we're heading the same way most privatized bullshit goes, into the toilet fast, with a handful of pricks getting rich along the way.

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although that's some peoples' desire. It's more filling the vacuum left when we said politics was just about facts, and not about values. Conservatives have taken over so much of the political space now because they never left values behind. Progressives evoke science instead, saying politics should be about facts. It was the biggest mistake they ever made, surrendering the entire middle ground of politics to the other side. Unfortunately the conservatives who understand this tend to be fundamentalist. So we're getting a very Old Testament sort of shock and awe moralism dominating politics. But nobody is offering an alternative. People send their kids to private schools often because of status, but that in itself is part of values. Values are the centre of everything, and in that way (and disturbingly) Trump is right, the battle lines of politics today are about what people value. Idiot progressives then go on to mock religion and promote atheism, as always politically clueless; sure existing religions might not be the answer for many, but look harder, they're offering something that is just completely missing from the other side. They don't separate facts and values. You can't separate facts and values - as the saying goes, it's not what you say, it's what you do in life that defines you. That's just the everyday way of saying don't separate facts and values.

Was chatting about this today.

We can only hope.

"It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for." Marcel Proust, who really got time

I'll be on the outer with this, but I think politician's entitlements is a bit of a non-issue. The reason politicians have things like generous super and entitlements is that politics is effectively a part-time job, a person may serve 5 or 6 years, and then have to return to the job market. That's quite a long time to be out of a particular industry or job, and it would be difficult to get people to go into parliament if they basically had to give up their career to do it. And yes all the same arguments apply to something like motherhood. But attacking politics and politicians is what gave us Trump. There are corporate interests who cost the country orders of magnitude more than politicians, and for much less gain.

One of the great songs. Miss this guy.

Ever noticed that very, very few great paintings show people smiling?

A little bit of Proust every day, I reckon. Proust used the taste of Madeleine cakes to explain more about memory and how it works. We've all experienced that, how a taste or a smell can immediately throw us back in time, to an earlier part of our lives where we previously experienced that taste or smell. It happens so fast that often we pass over it and don't realise how amazing it is. It's not 'remembering', you're literally THERE again, for that brief moment, the entire past comes rushing back at you. Time doesn't pass, the past is always just there.

Happy Birthday Nige! 49?

This is the pattern the world over. As organisations get more useless, the people at the top of them get paid ever more astronomical salaries. The reasoning is, the place is a mess, let's hire in some expensive talent to fix it. The organisations stay useless, and are then just a lot poorer.

Today's Proust. "The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it."

It's always been called a crazy idea, but these are times of possible emergency. It is interesting to wonder how Australia could be changed by trying to create an inland sea again. Pumping sea water to the interior. Would be hugely expensive and maybe impossible from the engineering point of view. But getting a large body of water back in that red centre could potentially change the climate of the entire country (in a good way, for life). It's that big red centre which bakes in the sun and makes the rest of the country increasingly hostile to life. The Africans are trying to hold back the Sahara with a huge green belt of vegetation, maybe planetary-scale projects have found their time.

Today's Proust. "What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us." Proust understood love in remarkable ways. He saw that the idea that two people could be as one was tragically deluded. That any two people occupy completely different universes, and happiness in love was understanding this, that the other is an endless well of difference to ourselves, rather than some sort of sameness. Jealousy and relationship breakdown is as the quote says, the continuous rediscovery of this basic fact. When the smallest action by one you love reveals these other universes, often suddenly and unexpectedly. Looking into the eyes of the one you love is (or should be) like looking into an endless mystery. Proust also saw that when people don't get this, they repeat the same loves, over and over, with different partners, looking for 'the one' without recognising that each one is multiple.

Thank you FB for reminding me about this one, can't believe it was 3 years ago. For those who love the private sector because it's more 'efficient', and other fantasies. These are the costs in the US health system created by private sector incompetence and corruption. The sort of thing Medicare was invented to help solve.

The 'lowest rise' in 10 years! Go private industry! They know they're in trouble with this one. The product stinks, it's not private at all, billions of public dollars keep it afloat. And they even have to legislate penalties for people who want to drop it because it's rubbish. Can't get any more 'free market' than that.

Don't believe for one second the bullshit in the news, or from moron politicians carrying big lumps of coal into parliament, about South Australia's power problems. NSW prices are some of the highest in the world, and there's barely a windmill or solar panel in sight. There's no coincidence that SA is a Labor state, and that's the one they decided to target. Australia's electricity is expensive and going up more because we sold it off to private companies. Those companies restrict supply so as to be able to charge higher prices, as well as other little tricks to game the energy market. The LNP is going into bat for these companies because - well it's what they do. It's why they still think a thumping $50 billion tax cut for big, zero-tax paying international companies is important, and they'll cut money to pensioners and the young to pay for it.

Warning signs. Australia has been a big casino for about 25 years now, debt is our only real industry.

Today's Proust. More on love, a big topic. Each person is an absolutely singular, unknowable being. In love, and especially in its early stages, this is forgotten, and most of the qualities we say we love in somebody else are projections from ourselves. There are so many quotes that draw this out really well, just a few below. (Some think Proust devalues love, but in fact he was making it something much bigger. Love should be living the differences between you and somebody else, rather than imagined sameness.) "Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us." “The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” "Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.” "The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.” “Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.” "For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. ”

Happy birthday! Loving the heat?

Overheard in a store. Customer: "I want to buy a fan." Salesman: "Give up now."

Amazing. So much great innovation out there, it just needs a chance to get through the wall of stupidity standing in its way.

To be sure.

Oh dear.

With the extended hot weather, dams are becoming a risky place to swim.

Happy birthday Belly :)

It's how nonsense spreads. Somebody writes a post about some long-forgotten information, and how the past was even worse today, so why do we worry? That era IS studied carefully, and even further back and in much more detail and with much more intelligence than this sort of rubbish. Like: http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/voice/scientists-unearth-australias-early-historical-records-of-droughts-and-flooding-rains-20141009-3hl3l.html

We may not survive. You may not agree, in which case I'd ask if you're willing to bet the future of all of humanity for the sake of some solar panels and windmills? If you're right, the worst that can happen is that energy becomes pretty much free. Not much of a sacrifice. "Far from living on a deeply resilient planet, we live on a planet with hair triggers. Industrialised societies are fumbling around with the controls, lulled into a false sense of security by the deceptive stability of the Holocene, the last 11,700 years."

Today's Proust. Social life, society. Proust saw social life as both important, and as the shallowest of all human experiences. For Proust all of life is an apprenticeship to 'signs', signs of love, of art, of social life etc. Each of these areas of life have something to teach us, and we don't grow up until we have learned what the signs are saying to us, in each of these areas of life. Social signs teach us that social life is based on comparison - on comparing ourselves with others - and that while this is important, it's also essentially empty. Being social does not force any real change in us, unlike something like love, which turns our entire universe upside down and forces us to encounter something different to ourselves.

It's all in the framing :)

Dyson makes beautiful (and eye-wateringly expensive) things. Their current crop of fans are interesting because they're also air purifiers. For a lot of years air purifiers were mostly for chronic allergy sufferers, a bit of a fringe product. Now that's changing, because people are slowly realising what a serious problem air pollution is. It's causing a lot of illness and death, and many cities in particular have dangerous levels of pollution. An issue that's been a bit of a slow burn, but will become much bigger. Cars and wood fires are two of the biggest culprits.

Today's Proust. Art. Art is critical for Proust because it's the only thing that allows us to experience the worlds other people live. Art is considered 'subjective', but it's absolutely not. “Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”

I see this submerged tap every morning. There's something soothing about it.

Hmm, what does the book box in the lunch room have in store today...ooh.

"It's like the kids have an entitlement". Thus speaks the most entitled, rapacious generation in human history.

Today's Proust. Travel. Proust saw that each person is essentially unknowable to other people, they occupy their own unique world which we can only catch glimpses of. He thought the same about travel, each place we are desperate to see is more a projection of ourselves than anything about the place itself. And as in relationships, we accumulate more and more places (or lovers, in relationships) in the desperate hope that this will somehow bring us closer to the essence of other places. It won't, as he says, this mindset makes us never really anywhere, we are always projecting ourselves off to somewhere else, while ignoring the essence of where we are. "Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be."

I'm putting it out there, teenager who sits behind me every day on the bus. Deodorant is not a substitute for washing.

I don't know why this made me think of Nicole Stevenson. Is that bad?

It's been an unpopular thing to do, pointing out for the past 20 years that Australia is a house made of straw. Most people who have tried have been howled down. The clock is ticking.

What's in a joke, as we've been discussing. It's not simple.

Housing affordability has nothing to do with supply and demand. (In fact there's almost nothing supply and demand actually explains in the world, but that's another story.) Houses get unaffordable when you turn them into an investment with huge tax advantages, coupled to ridiculously cheap finance.

Today's Proust. God.

Denzel rode the aging gracefully train for so long. He's looking like Pavarotti now.

It's possible PewDiePie isn't anti-semitic (I have no idea), and has fallen victim to passing on jokes created by people who are. Jokes are the original viral marketing, they lower the threshold of what's acceptable and cultivate the ground for nastier things down the track. Often people who repeat the jokes don't even realise this is what's going on. Living in an Anglo country, it's always on evidence just how little many people understand racism, or are able to see it when it's happening. If you're the top dog culturally, you just haven't experienced it.

Good on SBS for its Face Up to Racism set of programmes, and good on Ray Martin for being onboard. Australia doesn't like talking about racism, we're like the Brits, funnily enough. The Anglo world has been the dominant culture, and all dominant cultures struggle to see that dominance themselves. This was a fantastic piece on why the Brits can't shake their obsession with racist jokes about Germans. That's my own history in Australia too, and you get the same mealy-mouthed excuses about it being 'just a joke' here. What's good about this piece is that it points to where the real thin skin is in these jokes.

Today's Proust. Time and memory again. The past never leaves us. Smells and tastes are the door back.

Reminds me of the debate between a prominent Irishman and Englishman, about "what does England mean?" The Englishman waxed lyrical about the beautiful green rolling hills. Another variation on "let them eat cake". If you're in charge, it doesn't mean you see it.

If you want to see just how bad Trump is, this is FOX news ripping him a new one. FOX News! Really just an arm of Trump's own party, set up by Rupert Murdoch, the Lizard of Oz. Normally they act as a PR arm of the Republican Party, so for them to be saying this - it's unprecedented.

Go Gen X. We're going to save the world. The rest of you are nuts.

Every year they change the rules in F1 to try to make the racing interesting. It never works because the rich and powerful in the sport always have the money to make best use of the rules and regulations. So F1 actually looks just like society as a whole. A tiny few winning everything, using all the rules and regulations to their best advantage. And the rest can get stuffed. Unless you address inequality, nothing changes.

Arnold says it how it should be said. Would love to hear an argument against it.

I am happy for her. But this is one reason I rarely go to big gigs any more. They're milking fans with huge ticket prices, often in big stadiums where you spend the gig watching the screen. Would rather watch a band at a pub.

The truth will rarely make you comfortable. A rule of thumb.

Happy Birthday!

Hoping they do use average speed cameras for cars and bikes at some point. There's something unhealthy about a law that's barely observed, as a motorist there are days you feel like you're the only person on the road paying any attention to speed limits. But these cameras aren't just about speed either, they're something very different, they can have enormous positive impacts on driving.

Perfectly said, also sometimes phrased as "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged towards incredibly slowly. Taking sole responsibility off the pilot/driver and adding a whole lot of controls, technological and legal, and collective monitoring. This is what's actually happening with self-driving cars (not really self-driving, more driver-assisted driving). It doesn't occur to many that a huge part of the time they're in the air in a commercial airliner, the plane is on auto pilot.

All the memes about 'mummy needs her wine', or about how much women need their wine or other tipple. The back story. "Some might see women’s increased comfort with alcohol as a sign of liberation, but Jayme sees it as a serious health crisis."

Marshall McLuhan was a thinker well beyond his time, many didn't understand him when he was writing in the mid-20th century. A conservative professor of literature, he took on the job of trying to understand the modern world of communications and other technology that he was living in. And he did it brilliantly, even today a lot of other thinkers haven't caught up. This quote says a lot about how we ended up with Trump. And it's not the kids' fault, it's everybody's fault for letting democracy become this.

Looking at old photos, it's tempting to think of history as something that happens in discrete slices of time. This one, for example, taken in the 19th century, can make you think about the 19th century as a slice of time that 19th century people lived in. Except...time doesn't work like that. In every time you have multiple generations. There are some people who only lived in the 19th century, but there are many more who lived in both the 18th and 19th, or the 19th and 20th. At any given time you have the full range of ages, and what that does is spread time out, so that there's continuity from one time to the next. That's how time looks like it's moving on, because the young of today will carry forward some of today into the world tomorrow, after we're gone. The idea of time 'passing' ignores what makes it pass - ageing, death and multiple generations of people coexisting.

Why we'll get action on climate change even if the twits in charge don't want it. Smart people just get on with running the world without them.

Maths has one clue for why the world is a bit batshit crazy. Exponential growth, even if you haven't done a lot of maths, means something growing at a great rate. So when it's something in the real world, it's something that won't last. The thing that's less noticed is exponential growth is any growth that is the same positive level over time. So for example, if you make only 1% interest on your savings or an economy grows by only 1%, in an ongoing way, it's exponential growth. You don't have to be Einstein to realise this means economics has sold us a turd. Many of us look for ongoing double-digit growth in things like our super or property or stock, which is exponential growth on steroids. It's literally batshit crazy, because experiential growth is obviously a disaster for most real-world situations. It leads to big crashes. And yet it's the foundation of our entire society.

"It may shock you, but Americans spend more than $2 trillion every year on car ownership — more money than we spend on food. What’s even more staggering is that for all the money we spend on them, the 250 million cars in America are only occupied 4% of the time. That’s the equivalent of 240 million of the 250 million cars being parked at all times. For the most part, your car isn’t actually a driving machine at all. It’s a parking machine." The changes going on to motoring and roads are part of a revolution that is beautifully described in this article. He has a product to sell, but the broad trends are spot-on. It's not clear yet which model will be the one that succeeds, but motoring is going to change one way or the other. https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revolution-27860f05fa91#.2hvivyx6r

Monbiot gets this one absolutely right. This is how very rich, ruthless people got millions of people to believe that government, politicians and politics are the problem.

The World Health Organisation has now listed air pollution as the greatest threat to global health. Only 8% of the people in the world breathe healthy air, it's killing millions. You can plug in even regional cities to their new tool, it's great. If you live in a city with good air quality, but have a wood fire, the numbers will be misleading though. Wood fires turn your home and your neighbourhood into downtown Beijing. http://breathelife2030.org

Have been banging on about this for years. 'Hazard reduction burns' are a real problem. They protect property, not people, and what they do to air pollution is off the scale. People die, and many more have health effects that don't show up until much later. If people build in bushfire-prone areas, the risks are known and losing the house is better than poisoning everybody else's air to protect it. You can rebuild houses.

Does it say something about us that there had to be a first man on the moon? Armstrong and Aldrin could have come down that ladder together and shared the honour.

"Another bad time-zone practice – daylight savings time – is still rife globally, as in the UK, and has the same negative effects for half the year that Spain suffers all year long."

Seen the price of sending a package through OzPost lately? Makes your eyes water. And those awful loss-making letters. That's why it was a public service. Ain't the 'efficient' private sector grand, consumers paying shedloads more for gas, electricity, the post, health. And CEOs and shareholders pocketing the profits. You almost want to give up trying with the privatisation crowd, they're stupid zealots who are immune to evidence. (Actually often they're not stupid, they're just getting rich on the proceeds.)

Happy Birthday Bassman! Rock on.

Another way to look at travel. Or rather to look at not travelling, a little bit more. Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

genius.

John Lyons makes the argument here I was thinking about last night. If getting rid of Sunday penalty rates is about increasing jobs, let's test it. If the jobs don't come within a couple of years, put them back up again. Hold the people to account who make this argument. In a way we've been testing this idea already for years, Australian wages have been stagnant for a long time. It hasn't generated jobs.

Brilliant! Now I just need one of these Afro hair brush things. I'm low on hair brushes.

One of the challenges in any debt boom is how much peoples' emotional stability depends on their spending. All booms are really a psychological rather than economic problem - or better economics is really about psychology. To not be a big spender can make you somebody who creates anxiety. Or you'll get called cheap. A bit like somebody who doesn't drink or who drinks little can make friends uncomfortable who are drinking too much. This is an age of excess in all sorts of ways, excess debt, excess emotion, excess booze, excess sentiment. It's all connected.

Happy Birthday Chris!

Another idiot at the helm. No progress will be made. The property ladder is more like Snakes and Ladders. Eventually you slide back down again.

Best quote on the Sunday penalty rates, from Crikey: "Today the Fair Work Commission, reflecting three years of Coalition government appointments to the industrial relations body, decided that Sunday penalty rates are too high for retail and hospitality workers and should be wound back. The hospitality sector, despite evidently being hampered by having to pay its workers too much, has grown its employment by 11.4 per cent since 2011, far outstripping the overall workforce, which grew by just 6.8 per cent. But at least the commission has partially solved the problem of major retailer franchisees like 7-Eleven, Caltex, Domino's and others systematically underpaying their workers — now they don't have to pay them as much in the first place."

And we wonder why men don't teach in primary schools. Most sexual abuse happens within families, not with strangers. It's this sort of extreme reaction that is also behind people sending their kids off to private schools in droves, for fear of them being contaminated by bogans. Fear has its own karma, it produces societies we don't want to live in.

McLuhan said that social science wasted so much money on research, that ads were already doing for it.

DIY vasectomy.

The Big Lap is becoming a bit of a modern obsession in Australia. It probably means lots of things, but like most travel, some of the most interesting things it means are probably unspoken.

Who remembers Capsela?

Michel Serres used this example as a way to ask if we really understand what 'space' is or means. Where does a phone call take place?

Anybody who's endured a hospital knows that medicine struggles to understand this. What patients think, feel and believe.

Probably the most tragic thing about this Oscars moment was Beatty's and Dunaway's face reconstructions. Is there anybody with a real face left in Hollywood?

Lucky they'll use all that money to create jobs, hey. I reckon they need a big tax cut for dessert.

The dark underbelly of Grand Designs. Architecture is a field that has failed almost completely. To succeed it would have to be impacting on a lot more housing and building than it is. Instead it caters for the wealthy, who can indulge the fantasies of architects. All the rubbish about 'bespoke' and 'craftsmanship', just hides the fact that architecture has never managed to make inroads into mass housing. And it's their own fault, they made architecture about architects, and not about people.

Have had gas central heating for ages, because that's what the house came with. And the wisdom was that gas is cheaper than reverse cycle air con. But with the dunderheads flogging off our gas overseas, you can now save up to 70% on your power bills by switching from gas to reverse cycle, for heating.

Want.

Bit more architecture. Some of the most stunning architecture in the world was designed and built by the people who live inside it. And even more importantly, that process covered whole villages and towns, so that everything sort of fit together as a consistent whole. Do we see that any more? I'd say no, not much. And we need to understand why.