Ben > Recent Status Updates

Makes the interesting point that the widespread adoption of the car post-WWII is not the only reason why Aussie cities are so car dependent. Another reason is that the State and Federal governments' post-WWII home building programmes bought large tracts of land where they were cheapest, i.e., on the outskirts of established population centres. Land and housing economics also caused our widespread car dependency.

Seamer finally directly tackles the question of how to stimulate local centres. His two suggestions are to rezone nearby areas for mixed-use residential developments, and to ensure that local centres have a supermarket. After these 2 suggestions, made over 2 paragraphs, he ends lamely by suggesting that ‘surely there are other solutions on the horizon’. But his whole book is about localisation! What a joke!

One thought though is that decentralising cities and CBDs will require a massive increase in the use of micromobility devices such as electric bikes. Otherwise, congestion, although it will be spread ought and decongested, will still increase and reappear in newly mixed-use suburbs. I personally believe that the use of these devices ought to be normalised as much as possible, for many reasons, with this just one.

Seamer himself confirms my suspicion that 'clean' business uses should be broadly permitted in residential locations. Imagine having small offices for dentists, accountants and financial planners, after-school tutors, architects, masseuses, nail salons, and more all within walking or cycling distance of your home. These businesses aren't polluting in any way, creating no noise or anti-social behaviour.

But decentralisation creates a problem for land use planners: how to change zoning to permit the re-entry of previously disallowed businesses and business types into residential zones? This is new to me, but I know that it's been dealt with at least since Jane Jacobs agitated for mixed-use zoning in gentrified suburbs. Permit more co-working spaces, cafes, and unobtrusive home offices for sole-traders?

One unexpected (to me) benefit of increasing access to flexible work is staggering worktimes across the workday and thus reducing road congestion. If everyone starts work at 9am, traffic peaks and crawls. Everyone hates this. So, asynchronous work (i.e., work that does not *have* to be conducted within certain timeframes, i.e., lots of white-collar work) should be made flexible. This improves worker QOL and traffic.

This was published mere months before COVID. Its chapter on WFH is prescient. A tiny increase in people WingFH reduces road congestion by about as much as a major metro project, but at none of the cost, saving billions of dollars. It might also naturally incentivise the creation of local neighbourhood centres, increasing amenity city-wide instead of concentrating it in the CBD. On net, it seems a slam dunk.

Seamer asks: rather than increase housing supply in places people want to live, why not increase the number of places people want to live? I like the idea of decentring capital cities, of creating more local hubs. But the obvious rejoinder is: why isn't this already done? Why are cities such overpowering gravity wells of funds, services? No doubt it works, but I think he's underselling its difficulties.

He moves across the country on a whim and is immediately headhunted by multiple recruiting agencies for a bunch of delivery jobs. The size of the economy in China is so enormous that he never worries about finding work even for jobs with the lowest barriers to entry, which for that reason are flooded with applicants. He has his life beaten out of him by overwork--but not his humanity. The writer is gentle and kind.

On page 65 he talks about a workers village filled with farming folk forcibly resettled by the government as part of its urbanisation push. He talks repeatedly about 'parks', which refers to large areas of land zoned for single uses, such as logistics parks, science parks, etc. He writes of being overawed by the immense size of the delivery warehouses he works in. China's scale overwhelms even the Chinese.

Similar to Bukowski's 'Post Office'. Simple descriptions of low-wage working life in the gig economy of mainland China. It sounds abysmal. Work-life balance is nonexistent: the author often worked 6 days per week, 12 hours per day, with lots of unpaid overtime. He made a measly wage and even making that required him to deliver 1 package every 4 minutes for his whole shift. Its plain language is quietly literary.

One of the best things about being alive is having the opportunity to participate in the story of civilisation. It's one reason why I'm so insatiably curious: there's just so much to learn about what it means for me to be alive, in general as well as in my unique historical moment. Urban planning is part of that story, and it's evolving at unprecedented speed. Its scale in China is mindboggling, its ethics obscene!

Written in a stream of consciousness style, this has made me think differently about a wide range of OCD-like disorders, that is, everything from eating disorders to body dysmorphia to pathological & violent jealousy. OCD-like tendencies are everywhere. It's made me more bullish on meditation and the plasticity-enhancing nature of psychedelics as must-haves for the treatment of mental health generally.

Charlie's a giant whose philosophy has deeply influenced my own. But his intellect & temperament make him underemphasise the importance for the ordinary person of above all avoiding ruin. E.g., he counsels patience & betting heavily & with conviction only when that very rare sure bet arrives. But the average person would do well to heed Taleb, to doubt our convictions, & to cap the downside even of these rare bets.

As other readers have noted, the advice here is stock-standard, but the conversion of the money saved from actioning this advice into years saved paying off the mortgage is enlightening. This conversion is the sole selling point of the book so far, but it's a good one. It makes the true cost of our trade-offs about simple things, such as reducing out grocery bill, explicit and emotionally impactful .

So far, absolutely fantastic. It speaks to me as though I was born to hear it. Specialise late. As per the idea of memory dividends from 'Die with Zero', go out of your way to memorialise your experiences (including aesthetic ones, such as reading books and watching movies) so that they're remembered. DIY: it can be unpleasant but is deeply meaningful. Keep exploring in ways both big and small. Be open, extraverted.

'Willing to take risks for the price of self-knowledge'. For many years, I considered myself risk-averse, prudent, conservative, calculating. I understood these adjectives in a way that's made me feel pathetic, small. But my teens & 20s were filled with intense, sometimes unbelievable in retrospect, risk-taking *in the pursuit of self-knowledge*. Taking risks *for this purpose* is admirable. I like that about myself.

Author says she read 32 books in anticipation of her 1-month experiment with microdosing. And people call *me* prudent!

The second chapter is worse than the first. The author starts making large & unfounded claims about the state of the nation & its history, e.g., his criticism of neoliberalism was opinionated & lacked a single reference to source material of any kind or quality. He claims that Australia isn't egalitarian but literally one sentence later says that it is, relative to England. It lacks the focus of the first chapter.

The first chapter deals with the story of how decades of Liberal Party failure led to the emergence of the Teal movement in the mid-late-2010s and through them to the permanent reshaping of Australian politics, as trends show that the dominance of the Liberal-Labor two party system is on an inexorable decline and that independents, the Teals most conspicuous among them, will figure ever more largely in political life

He redefines democracy to mean only direct democracy, for example as the kind sometimes practiced (to tyrannical effect) in ancient Greece. This is a clear example of the No True Scotsman fallacy and it denies or rejects the widespread contemporary understanding of the term that incorporates the liberal traditions and which presupposes as normal limits on democracy so as to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

von Leddihn is immediately suspect for claiming that the only "true" definition of democracy is direct democracy and that democracy is entirely and irreconcilably at odds with individual liberty. This is bafflingly ignorant because even the America of his day was a representative democracy that was carefully designed to be so by the Founding Fathers from whom he so liberally quotes. A basic category error.

But to cite only the Unabomber as an example is somewhat to mislead, because he is merely the harbinger of much worse things to come. Of course, there are many apparently intelligent but actually stupid lone wolves, such as Breivik, but the truly huge atrocities will be committed by much smarter persons, misanthropes such as antinatalists, deep ecologists, negative utilitarians, who'll wage war against all humankind.

A fantastic novel about the evolution of a family, which after many hundreds of pages transforms perfectly naturally & in a style typical of Houellebecq into a sociopolitical study of something prescient, in this case the increasing power & destructiveness of lone-wolf terrorists, particularly the kind about whom I myself am writing a novel, the rare kind that is intelligent intellectual & effective, eg the Unabomber

Houellebecq has changed. His standard themes return: the penetration of market forces into every corner of life, contemp. politics, terrorism of one kind or another, anomie, the extremes of sex. But other topics, such as love, which were always present in his writings, are now treated with an unprecedented, almost palpable yearning. The enfant terrible is as prescient as ever but he seems finally to have softened.

This is one of my favourite books. Its language is simple, vivid, and rich with understated subtext. I realise now that I was drawn to this book as much by its beautiful, clean prose as by its protagonist, Michael K, who in many ways resembles the Desert Fathers whom I obsessed over when I was young and whom I still revere. Both reduced their desires to almost nothing, and both were deeply, awesomely contented.

The second speech in this volume is ostensibly about Tassie lit. I will not steal from the interested reader the joy of reading such a wonderful essay, but I will say that the true purpose of the essay reveals itself about halfway through in a blaze of righteous anger. The man is a firebrand. Anyone who knows his bugbears can guess at the source of his loathing. Flanagan's is Oz's smart, wrathful social conscience.

But you can't be authentic by being self-absorbed. We're social animals in social worlds & to live at all let alone to live well means continually negotiating with the bits of the external world that impinge on & thereby partly define our sense of self. This is more not less important in free societies as the freer others are the more they can impinge on us. Authenticity implies some degree of identity with the Other

These historical & philosophical similarities between Buddhism & Western thought have led to the bastardisation of meditation as well as the near-total emancipation of it from its rich cultural/historical contexts. Without these contexts, which in the past have tied meditation to highly particular traditions, rituals, ethics, etc., meditation has radically changed into a tool that, like the West, can be narcissistic.

The modern Western understanding of Buddhism & meditation is profoundly tainted by the background assumptions of Western civ as a whole. Buddhism, alone among non-Christian religions, colonised the West because it was uniquely able to dress itself in the universalist languages of science & the post-Enlightenment projects of autonomy & authenticity. Hence also its widespread co-option as a tool for self-development.