bsmall2

bsmall2, 23 days ago

@otfrom @dusnm @onepict
Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains does something similar to "asking for forgiveness rather than permission"... But in his case.of getting top of the line medical equipment from Boston on Haiti, it easy a vase of asking Harvard ot a big hospital for permission after they had already taken the equipment to Haiti...

bsmall2, 1 month ago

@sundogplanets
What kind are they? It looks like you have a variety.

bsmall2, 2 months ago

Good Work! I was hoping to find a higher resolution at the link for the HIroshima Peace Media Center.. Or maybe text to copy-paste... The closest thing I was able to find didn't have the same people.. If I can cut five or six sections out of a higher resolution image all the sweet old local anti-nuke people in my FB feed might find it easier to read..

https://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?p=140125

@bojacobs @sts @histodons

bsmall2, 3 months ago

Auto-lawmowers tire me out with the need to control a sledgehammer urge. The size must trigger some primordial instincts or something. And they seem to distract from decent, living, social solutions like in Curitiba, Brazil:

> ... a municipal shepherd and
his flock of 30 sheep trimmed the grass in its vast parks.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2005/11/curitiba-and-hope/

This solution would contribute to Resilience too. After a earthquake (any grid-disruption) we could eat sheep, or be intense gardeners with manure.
@strypey

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
> Chomsky argued that the field's heavy use of statistical techniques to pick regularities in masses of data is unlikely to yield the explanatory insight that science ought to offer. For Chomsky, the "new AI"—focused on using statistical learning techniques to better mine and predict data— is unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey

I'm interested in programming computer languages and free software and decentralized SNSs.. But I've started to think that a lot of the tech discussions miss the main point that a lot of sensible solutions are social or even "bio-political" (a recent-for-me word I'm trying to learn from Amitav Ghosh)...

My point here is that sheep or some sort of animal browsing on grass would be better for the community and environment than any sort of tech. More Manure! Less E-Waste!!

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Vacuuming might be over-rated anyway. Look on the bright-side: maybe we need a certain amount of dust so our immune systems don't get bored and start attacking other needed parts of our bodies. Besides, sweeping is quieter, better exercise, and can be done with tools that done contribute to micro-plastic, nano-plastic, and dioxin waste. It all seems like created-want trinkets to me The WasteMakers at work...

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey I saw somewhere that carpets are great for bad microbes or bugs or something. We mostly have tatami and wood floors. My wife bought some carpets but we can hang them outside. Fascinating to see the clouds of stuff that keeps coming off them no matter how long you pound them. I forget how much simpler things can be in Japa. Even with the volcanic dust. I'm wondering if I've had less trouble with allergies since we got less hygienic with chickens and an old house. Just an unfounded guess.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
I was trying to be funny more than trying to justify dirty floors. But living in Japan the way I do got me to do notice that changing any one thing requires changing pretty much everything. The shoe thing at the doorway seems like a pain at times, but it's part of what lets us get by without vacuuming too much. One of the environmental speakers now runs his own company building houses for people with sensitivities to chemical and Electro-Magnetic radiation with nice, expensive wood.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
I get the feeling that we need a "care and repair" society more than tech, robotic solutions to the various problems. You humanoid robot pushing a lawnmower example got me imaging how that could happen, if it became a status symbol: higher than a retinue of Bullshit Jobbers. Like commercial airlines came out of military budgets for bomber aircrafts. The robot-dev budgets would start off with Pentagon excuses then find commercial outlets. Like most tech, I guess?

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
People would forget that the humanoid lawn-mowing and vacuuming robots started out as research on how human balance and joints work, or prosthetics for the battlefield and it would just seem economically feasible to have a certain number robot-induced deaths every year. I've already seen a few reports (from Germany and Korea maybe) of vegetable-washing (and parts-assembly?) robots killing repair people. Arendt talked about the importance of work too, and Graeber comes to mind...

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
I got paid for push-mowing lawns as a teenager. I'd end up doing storm-windows and stuff for the old ladies too. Half the benefit was social I guess, talks to think on. Was it Graeber's example that eplacing subway ticketers with automation leaves the lost, the elderly, and disabled with less access to help. With more leeway and less bullshit in the economy taking care of the floors and what-not could be nice for some. In the 70s a 1-kid nieghbor would help my 5-kid Mom w/ housework.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Wendell Berry has an essay about seeing work as Drudgery and how it makes everything more miserable. His example was the community getting together to do boring tasks together, like harvest tobacco or shuck corn: stuff like that. Local organic farmer friends organize events to get together and hang rice out to dry, or to pound sticky rice into chewy cakes. There are chewy-rice cake machines but their carbohydrate mounds aren't as good: same pattern as "cybernetic AI" texts and photos?

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
My robotic lawnmowing probably helped end most of my hearing.. In Japan I don't see casual work for kids, not even babysitting. It is a shame. And I'm fascinated by the meme I see about replacing grass lawns with shrubs and wildflowers and gardens. Maybe there is a pattern here somewhere. If it can be done by robots we shouldn't be doing it? design houses to be swept not vacuumed, lawns for local biodiversity not grass, texts for thinking not rote repetition.. Maybe I'm a peasant.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Along with Arendt on labor/work the intro to John Bergers Peasant trilogy books (Pig Earth...) comes to mind. He says that the peasant paradise is work without exploitation. We will always have to work. Life and the real world will always need the human touch and judgement no matter how elegant the mechanical solutions seem in some areas.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Thanks for the diagnosis: Luddite would have felt less fearsome. And conversation, it's helping me notice where my attitudes are come from. Berger got me wondering if we mix up labor and exploitation. And Amitav Ghosh keeps mentioning, along with Free Trade, Progress as one of the excuses for colonial destruction of other societies. Tech progress might not support greater diversity or decent leisure as much as we've been sold. Communities might solve things more directly, with grace.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Getting things done directly with grace is an idea from Paul Goodman. And he mentions Borsodi's work on how every gain in scale is lost in packaging and transport. I can't find Langdon Winner's list of judging if tech is democratic(?) or not. It might help me think about why I can't see robot vacuums empowering communities. A 99 year old guy walks by the house every day. A 70 year old woman does housework from him a few days a week. I chat with her at Community events...

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
I wouldn't know that the guy will be a 100 next month if she didn't visit him to help with housework a few times a week. She tells me he can cook our SIlky eggs by himself too. The people that do the care work should be paid more.. but I don't think robots will help with any of this, but just be an excuse to cut off more relationships. Arundhati Roy's basic attitude:
> .. But people could be looked after now, as we know there’s enough surplus..
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/17/arundhati-roy-interview-you-ask-the-questions-the-point-of-the-writer-is-to-be-unpopular

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
In Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth they showed people asking to have their land back so they could grow food. Growing, harvesting food could be part of the care we need to be doing: connecting to the land, the place. All that good stuff. Chomsky mentioned how bad it is to be losing peasant knowledge of place. It's like Rebecca Solnit said about AI being used as solutions to things that aren't problems. There are a lot of writers, AI is not needed to produce rote material...

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
My guess is that robotic lawnmowers and the involved infrastructure they'd require will eat up more of the neighborhood's income/wealth: it'll go to pros not kids. A lot of tech is used, if not designed for, sucking the wealth out communities to enrich whoever controls the longer supply and development lines, like why dev moved from watermills, to coal-fired steam engines, then to oil.

https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/the-dialectic-of-tech-and-society/

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Maybe we can't look at growing food as grunt work, drudgery is the work you don't happen to like? Farmers adjust their land as they go about working. It took a lot of violence to move people away from their land and "gardens." In some places the green deserts are legislated, and I'm guessing they're part of a techie view that everything works like a factory and should look like one. I'll add Kirkpatrick Sales as someone to look to along with David Noble. Michael Pollan helps me too,

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
Michael Pollan talks about the efforts that went into getting people away from cooking, doing something creative. It took a lot of PR attempts. Growing food at the smaller, intense scale that doesn't kill everything is creative work, right? Maybe it takes a while to notice after getting used to cities and suburbs? The people I remember in Dirt! were from rural India I think. Berry and people in Japan mention the importance of the little things that get done while people work land.

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
In some neighborhoods in the States home-buyers have to agree to keep their lawns at a certain height. I think Pollan mentions it, so I noticed it in conversations in USA's PA too. I get the impression that a lot of people are excluded from farming, driven from it because of the susbidies for automation and what-not that make large-scale concentrations possible. Robotic Automation now will just worsen bad trends. Maybe we're disagreeing because of switches between now and a future?

bsmall2, 3 months ago

@strypey
But I don't think automation, robot-servants can work without a huge industrial infrastructure? Unless you are imagining a way that local communities will be able to design and produce the machines that will fit their needs: societies where people can choose between the carpet loom and power loom... But I don't think we are matching our umps from the Now to the Better Futures visions.. That's why the conversation has fallen into some sort of debate mode? maybe?