flâneur

Cécile Tang

1 followers · 273 views

on the atlas — 39

highlights — 215

  • The significance lies not only in the opportunity to showcase the Burke Museum’s Taiwanese Indigenous collections to the public but also in allowing these century-old objects to narrate their own stories and resonate with similar collections in Taiwan.
    Inherent Powers of Objects: Resonance Across the Online Exhibition  – Taiwan Insight
  • When we believe that there is power behind every object, it signifies our departure from mundane perspectives and a return to the cosmic space we share with our ancestors.
    Inherent Powers of Objects: Resonance Across the Online Exhibition  – Taiwan Insight
  • Scholarly, I created this bibliography regarding the exhibition; as for the personal perspective, I learned more knowledge in the cultures of the Taiwan Indigenous peoples through curating.
    Wandering Back and Forth in The Sea of Books and Cultural Holdings – In Searching of Indigeneity, Positionality, and Self-identity  – Taiwan Insight
  • “How do cultural tourism or the more recent cultural and creative industries affect Indigenous communities?”
    Wandering Back and Forth in The Sea of Books and Cultural Holdings – In Searching of Indigeneity, Positionality, and Self-identity  – Taiwan Insight
  • This misidentification often occurred because the descriptions provided by donors were accepted without question, and sometimes, the specific Indigenous community was not recognized or acknowledged by the authoritative body.
    Wandering Back and Forth in The Sea of Books and Cultural Holdings – In Searching of Indigeneity, Positionality, and Self-identity  – Taiwan Insight
  • stemming from the exploration of my own positionalities as a young scholar at the University of Washington (UW) and a curator coming from Indigenous communities in Taiwan, eager to have my voice to be heard.
    Wandering Back and Forth in The Sea of Books and Cultural Holdings – In Searching of Indigeneity, Positionality, and Self-identity  – Taiwan Insight
  • That’s what I mean when I say that there seems to be collective intelligence at play on longer timescales. The opportunity to generate returns today might not exist if someone hadn’t been willing to lose money decades ago. No venture capitalist does this altruistically – they’re driven by the small, against-all-odds chance that this too-early technology might be the next big thing – but in their mistakes they create opportunity for others.
    Venture Capital & Free Lunch
  • Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • But the incentives are more than just financial. Investors' opinions are explicitly tested: startups come to them and they have to say yes or no, and then, fairly quickly, they learn whether they guessed right. The investors who say no to a Google (and there were several) will remember it for the rest of their lives.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength. A technologically strong America is a force for good in a dangerous world. Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms “slouching toward Utopia” – doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe the Constrained Vision – contra the Unconstrained Vision of Utopia, Communism, and Expertise – means taking people as they are, testing ideas empirically, and liberating people to make their own choices.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a pencil and fail to return it. We should make the same true of all physical goods.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former Communist country. The socialist USSR was far worse for the natural environment than the capitalist US. Google the Aral Sea.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe in Augmented Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward. Comparative advantage increases specialization and trade. Prices fall, freeing up purchasing power, creating demand. Falling prices benefit everyone who buys goods and services, which is to say everyone. Human wants and needs are endless, and entrepreneurs continuously create new goods and services to satisfy those wants and needs, deploying unlimited numbers of people and machines in the process. This upward spiral has been running for hundreds of years, despite continuous howl…
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes. We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural resource utilization, and technology.
    The Techno-Optimist Manifesto | Andreessen Horowitz
  • Another way to think about it is like price anchoring, when a company offers multiple price tiers knowing that you’ll land on the one in the middle and pay more for it than you would have without seeing how little you get for the lower price or how much you’d have to pay to get all of the features.
    Narrative Tug-of-War
  • The Overton Window is the knot in the narrative tug-of-war. The teams pulling on either side don’t actually expect that everyone will agree with and adopt their ideas; they just need to pull hard enough that the Overton Window shifts in their direction.
    Narrative Tug-of-War
  • After World War II, many veterans sought work in L.A.’s oil industry. “Despite the fact that you’re exposed to all kinds of carcinogens, [oil refinery work was] a damn good job,” she said. “It was certainly a stable job, throughout the postwar period.”
    History of how the oil industry shaped Los Angeles - Los Angeles Times
  • “Oil, motion pictures and real estate were like the trifecta of forces that were attracting migrants to come west to L.A.,” said Becky Nicolaides, a research affiliate at USC and UCLA. “Oil was kind of right up there with the glamour of Hollywood.”
    History of how the oil industry shaped Los Angeles - Los Angeles Times
  • In addition to pinpointing the major areas of drilling, Forncrook’s maps, with their exaggeratedly-sized oil wells, seem to emphasize the massive economic and geographic impacts of the oil industry on the region at the time.
    The Los Angeles Oil Boom Through Maps
  • Hydroelectric power, or “white coal,” offered an alternative to fossil fuel-powered electric energy that, for progressive-age Americans, promised social and environmental benefits.
    The Big Dam Era – Energy History
  • These experiments in building solar homes developed during a period of anxiety about postwar energy supplies, and a growing awareness of the globe as an interconnected geophysical system. Where would the energy to heat homes come from, how would it be distributed, and how much would it cost? Solar heating, for a brief period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, seemed like a readily available means to reduce American energy demands without overly compromising quality of life.
    Solar Architecture and Solar Design, 1930s-1950s – Energy History
  • The “solar house principle” involved three main design elements. First, the solar homes used a narrow, stretched out plan that allowed most living areas to face the south, providing maximum exposure to the sun. Second, the southern façade was composed principally of glass to allow the sun’s rays to provide energy efficient light and heat to interior rooms. Third, architects carefully determined the roof overhang so that the roof would block the peak mid-day summer sun, thereby keeping interior rooms from getting overheated, while allowing maximum radiation and warmth from the lower winter sun …
    Solar Architecture and Solar Design, 1930s-1950s – Energy History
  • The postwar experiments with solar architecture emerged as part of American engagement with modern architectural styles. Solar construction used new materials and applied novel designs to achieve both energy efficiency and cultural relevance.
    Solar Architecture and Solar Design, 1930s-1950s – Energy History
  • The sense that China’s march through time has stalled is especially acute among the young, who are contending with stagnant wages and a culture of enervating limits. For a generation raised on the mythology of social mobility, the loss of optimism aches like a phantom limb.
    China’s Age of Malaise | The New Yorker
  • Most of all, I was struck by how many people have come to doubt that China will achieve the heights they once expected. “The word I use to describe China now is ‘grieving,’ ” an entrepreneur told me. “We’re grieving for what was an exceptional time.”
    China’s Age of Malaise | The New Yorker
  • Ask Chinese citizens about their mood nowadays and some of the words you hear most are mimang and jusang—“bewildered” and “frustrated.”
    China’s Age of Malaise | The New Yorker
  • In China, as in much of the world, you can tell a lot about a place by its bookstores. For years, readers in Shanghai, the nation’s most cosmopolitan city, had Jifeng—“Monsoon”—which opened in 1997, just as Wang Xiaobo was breaking through. It was the city’s undisputed liberal outpost, where even the most esoteric speakers drew a crowd. But in 2017 the public library, which owned the building, cancelled the lease, citing “increased regulations” on state-owned property. The owner, Yu Miao, scouted new sites, but, every time, the landlord got a call and Yu was turned away. He ultimately realized…
    China’s Age of Malaise | The New Yorker
  • To spend time in China at the end of Xi’s first decade is to witness a nation slipping from motion to stagnation and, for the first time in a generation, questioning whether a Communist superpower can escape the contradictions that doomed the Soviet Union.
    China’s Age of Malaise | The New Yorker
  • The diverse labor force, which included miners from many racial and ethnic backgrounds, often speaking different languages, provided opportunities for class solidarity across those differences, but also made labor organizing and resistance more difficult and fractured.
    Coal Mining and Labor Conflict – Energy History
  • As urban energy intensification made cities safer, healthier, and more convenient during the Progressive Era, the everyday violence of the energy system was largely hidden from view in rural mining communities.
    Coal Mining and Labor Conflict – Energy History
  • The costly transportation and communications infrastructure was particularly susceptible to so-called natural monopoly. The systems were costly to duplicate and could lead to control of specific geographic markets.
    Antitrust and Monopoly – Energy History
  • These business ventures were integrated horizontally (across a business segment, such as oil refining) and often vertically (across different business stages, such as oil refining and kerosene sales).
    Antitrust and Monopoly – Energy History
  • And by combining steam engines with thousands of miles of iron tracks, the railroad offered the quintessential image of an industrializing nation. The “Iron Horse” spanned the continent, delivered people and goods at high speeds regardless of rain, snow, or mud, and built financial fortunes for a lucky few.
    Rise of Coal in the Nineteenth-Century United States – Energy History
  • Coal was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for large-scale industrialization. It was necessary because industrialization required more concentrated forms of energy than previously available. Human and animal muscle, rivers with falling water, trees to burn, wind to turn windmills and fill sails—these energy sources were limited in their local availability and in their energy density.
    Rise of Coal in the Nineteenth-Century United States – Energy History
  • As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.
    Orion Magazine - The Gospel of Consumption
  • The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself — at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today.
    Orion Magazine - The Gospel of Consumption
  • Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels.
    Orion Magazine - The Gospel of Consumption