The fact that so many people from all over the world are drawn to older architecture with "tons of unnecessary ornamentation" makes you think where we went wrong in recent decades.
I guess I may have phrased that slightly incorrectly. The ornamentation is unnecessary from a functional viewpoint, but that isn't a bad thing. It is one of the reasons those buildings are so good looking, and that is not a bad thing. All the ornamentation is one of the reasons both of those buildings are still tourist attractions and draw thousands of visitors a year. I just meant that the ornamentation is unnecessary from a functional viewpoint, they just did all that stonework to make them look nice. Which is an architectural trend I wish would catch on again.
I think the "form over function" dogma has taken over to such an extent that it's creating miserable, concrete and glass hellscapes that are foisted upon the public by detatched "starchitects". A great point that was mentioned somewhere (maybe in that artlicle I linked) is that unlike other forms of art, architecture is forced into your view, whether you like it or not. If you hate modern art, you can simply avoid that msueum.
With newer stone CNC machines now advancing, hopefully we can recreate the beautiful, intricate craftsmanship of the past, and indeed even develop wacky, creative new forms too and move away from these horrible, bland designs that have taken over everywhere, and made every cityscape look generic and indistinct.
> A secret report by Germany’s Federal Audit Office leaked to the public last week states that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York refuses to allow Bundebank staff to even view the gold, triggering suspicions that the vaults are empty as well as calls for the gold to be shipped back to Berlin.
> The Fed implements stringent security controls, and refuses even Bundesbank staff full access to the German gold hoard. A team of personnel demanding access in 2007 were only allowed to visit the anteroom of the reserves, and when Bundebank auditors visited in May 2011 only one of nine compartments was opened for direct handling.
> The Federal Reserve’s fervent secrecy has engendered suspicion and concern, with some claiming that Germany’s gold has long ago disappeared or been lent out, and that only promissory notes of nominal value are sitting in the vault.
Note that Germany already finished bringing back 300 tons of gold from NYC and about the same amount from Paris in 2016, so this is a bit out of date (that whole transfer was completed ahead of schedule, which indicates, in hindsight, that probably not all the German gold in NYC was missing completely in 2011 :P).
Yes indeed, this article is outdated. But I posted it to counter the other comments here which are trying to draw links to Trump bring the reason that the Bundesbank don’t believe the US Fed. In fact, some in Germany have long mistrusted the Fed’s word on how much German gold is still actually in the vaults.
Here is a very fun, deeply speculative article from Zerohedge on this topic, from 2013:
> That's right, ladies and gentlemen, as a result of our cursory examination, we have learned that the world's largest private, and commercial, gold vault, that belonging once upon a time to Chase Manhattan, and now to JPMorgan Chase, is located, right across the street, and at the same level underground, resting just on top of the Manhattan bedrock, as the vault belonging to the New York Federal Reserve, which according to folklore is the official location of the biggest collection of sovereign, public gold in the world.
> At this point we would hate to be self-referential, and point out what one of our own commentators noted on the topic of the Fed's vault a year ago, namely that:
> Chase Plaza (now the Property of JPM) is linked to the facility via tunnel... I have seen it. The elevators on the Chase side are incredible. They could lift a tank.
> ... but we won't, and instead we will let readers make up their own mind why the the thousands of tons of sovereign gold in the possession of the New York Fed, have to be literally inches across, if not directly connected, to the largest private gold vault in the world.
LLMs (I use ChatGPT) can take a generic process description, spit out the result in mermaid, which can then be imported and refined in something like draw.io. Yes, you’ll have to correct a few things by hand, but it drastically speeds things up. Last time I check draw.io is supported in obsidian.
I recently tried this, but the import to draw.io did not go well. It imported as a single static image rather an editable diagram. Maybe I did something wrong?
Usually in such cases either copy and paste the error message from draw.io, or screenshot it and upload to chatGPT. It will debug it for you.
There’s also a specific sequence of steps to import mermaid scripts, I don’t remember the menu location by heart, ChatGPT can also give you the steps needed to do this.
They also have them in Germany. I used to have the manual "flat roll of fabric" in the past, and upgraded the entire rollers in the house to electric ones (I don't know if it's possible to only upgrade the fabric roll -> electric switch without upgrading the entire shutter).
After you have electric-controlled rollers, you can control them via any automation you want by installing a "Shelly Plus 2PM" device behind each switch.
I connect the Shellys to home assistant, and from there, trigger all the rollers to go down a certain number of minutes after sunset. They all rise at a certain time in the morning. You can always trigger them manually too, of course. ChatGPT can spit out very complex YAML for HA if you want to make life easier, your only limit is your imagination.
x100 this. You can sort of derive the meaning of a complex word if you grasp one or two parts of it and offer a hacked together English translation, even if it doesn’t map directly. I find that people online who haven’t actually studied German like to meme this often.
The Latin-derived cases from the article, on the other hand, are the truly maddening, and makes you appreciate the simplicity of English grammar by comparison.
They're not Latin-derived, they come originally from Proto-Indo-European (which had even more cases). Many other Indo-European languages retain cases (Slavic languages, Greek, etc.), but were lost in English and the Romance languages.
What does come from Latin is the way we name and analyse these cases traditionally.
Interestingly, several different ways of analysis are in use. I first learned German as a third language and then moved to a German-speaking country, and realized that the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
For instance, we first learned what a direct object was (something which is done with/to, e.g. in “I ate the ice cream”, “the ice cream” would be direct object). Then we learned that in German, the direct object is declined in accusative (which primarily affects the article, and adjective declination). This was consistent across multiple classes and teachers and books and schools. But my German German teachers had never heard of the concept “direct object”; for them, only the “accusative object” existed. Of course, the accusative object would be in accusative, but also, its presence would signal e.g. whether to use “haben” or “ist” for “is” in certain situations (for which I learned an entirely different set of rules that they had never heard of).
You would think that this is because my native language (Norwegian) has different concepts, but our entire way of teaching Norwegian grammar was uprooted at some point pre-WW2 _precisely to map well to German_, to prepare students for German classes when that was a more common second language than English was. (There were tons of things I never understood why were important until I got to apply them to German later.) So you'd think they'd match better.
To be technical, "accusative" etc. are cases (i.e. forms of words) while "direct/indirect object" are grammatical roles - those are different categories. In German, for example, the Dative case can mark an indirect object (although some verbs may require the Genitive case for its indirect object), but it can also have other functions. This is even more pronounced in e.g. Latin where the different cases can have a wide range of different functions, not just direct/indirect object.
This is possibly not something that is taught very explicitly in school, but it's what the terminology means. (Or at least it's how I was taught. Linguistics being such an old discipline used to analyse so many different languages means that different people will use terminology differently.)
>the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.
That's true for most languages, native speakers are almost universally terrible at explaining rules because they just intrinsically know them and never have to name or even think of the rule. To the extent that native speakers are formally taught grammar, it's usually edge cases, formal registers, and more sophisticated tools, none of which are the primary concern of language learners.
We learn direct and indirect object in school as well it’s just not what people remember because they either had to grind the Latin for a test or the number (which js stupid on many different levels).
> Also what’s the watchband compatibility? Will this work with the original pebble bands or with standard watch bands or something new and proprietary?
It says it works with standard 22mm watchbands, so it seems like you can just put on any 3rd party band you like.
Seymour Hersh published a detailed piece outlining his case that it was carried out by the US military with assistance from Norway (who have expertise in that part of the seabed), using the cover of a NATO naval exercise as partial cover:
I find it more credible that these were the actors involved. Biden wanted to end a future link between Germany and Russia. In Germany there is significant segment of the population that is distrustful of the US (even before the recent Trump shenanigans) and the potential stronger infrastructure ties to Russia. I find it more credible than a ragtag group of Ukrainians did it personally.
In 2023 - a full year into the war - Hersh asserted "the Russians have yet to put any of their main forces" into Ukraine (https://twitter.com/JimmySecUK/status/1628898816953909251). He's carried water for the Syrian regime repeatedly; the Nordstream report was pretty widely debunked by available open source intelligence. He's not super credible these days.
Hersh never provided ANY evidence and the german investigation is pretty conclusive that it was done by Ukrainians. Which is pretty understandable since the main and openly stated purpose of NS was always to circumvent Ukraine. That might be ok in peace time but when at war and your enemy tries to freeze you to death, things look differently.
"85% of Americans and 77% of Germans see the relationship between their countries as good. This is consistent with recent years, though prior to President Joe Biden’s election in 2020, German views of the relationship were much more negative."
It was as high as 82% positive in 2022. During Trump's first term it was much lower but Trump is an outlier.
That's in the eye of the beholder.
Pertinent HN article + discussion, which I love to revisit every once and a while, even though I do not work in anything related to architecture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582942
The fact that so many people from all over the world are drawn to older architecture with "tons of unnecessary ornamentation" makes you think where we went wrong in recent decades.