> The Koolhaasian moment in design began to fade, as one might expect, with the coming of the 2008 global economic crisis; since everything in architecture takes longer than in any other field, the full-on rejection is only getting underway now, but already the accelerationist paradigm has been replaced by another: a meliorist one, eco-conscious and modest, international in outlook but more focused on firms working within their communities, especially those in developing countries.
I don't mind it, the use of commas and semicolons to accumulate layers of meaning without resorting to parenthetical interruptions comes across as both deliberative and spontaneous.
It sort of feels like I am reading the author's thoughts as they organically map the domain of their argument, but with all the backtracking pruned out.
But if you want a cute term for this style, how about "run-on sentience?"
How do you mean exactly? Long, complex sentence? FWIW I don't think this is a particularly good one. But if you like this writing style, Jonathan Franzen does it quite a bit, and really well. Check out The Corrections.
From a snarky perspective, n+1 is a "postmodern" type magazine that caters to theorists, critics; the types who attempt to convey abstract meaning (words are just endless signifiers, after-all!) while sniffing their own farts caused by holding their breath writing long sentences. Mark Grief, one of the founders of n+1 wrote a really horrible collection of essays called "Against Everything" that is moderately popular. It's full of this kind of self-absorbed writing.
Anywho, n+1 seems to have gone a bit more mainstream lately, as witnessed by their modern web design and recent presence on HN.
> But, while technically innovative, with a carbon-fiber body, the i3 is essentially a very expensive hatchback.
Yep. When people buy high performance or luxury cars, part of the mystique is that it is the latest evolution of some sort of classic. It's going to be hard for BMW et al to position electric vehicles as belonging to any existing lineage. This puts their brand at risk unless they can figure out how to make a remarkable electric car. But nobody really knows what that would be.
This is storytelling on the part of the automakers, so let me propose 2:
1) Porsche’s got 120 years of work since their first electric car [0]
2) I remember pulling the leg of some Tesla fans a long while ago (maybe when the first roadster came out) about how the “no radiator, front trunk, smooth underbody” sounded a lot like the air-cooled VWs we’ve all been enjoying since the 1930s.
They will just put a badge on it. I remember there was a survey of BMW owners a few years ago, most of the respondents didn't know their car was rear wheel drive.
It is free money until Lambda School actually gets it back. It's up to Lambda School to decide the if money and/or the precedent are worth the public relations cost of fighting about it.
That's hardly symmetrical to the fear of losing the money that you have already invested – investors feel they have no choice but to sell before it gets worse, whereas in the rally you can always choose not to buy.
> That's hardly symmetrical to the fear of losing the money that you have already invested...
It's pretty symmetrical. Choosing not to buy is not as easy as it looks, when you are under pressure to do so. Madoff took advantage of this. The crash of 1929 was preceded by unhinged buying.
I get the impression that the people running Robinhood actually don't understand how difficult it is to implement what they want to offer, both on the reliability side (outages) and on the logical side (infinite margin).
> Industry isn't a culture, it's a combination of skill sets and infrastructure. China is the world's second largest economy...
It's interesting to see those two statements adjacent to each other. China is a tremendous world power, but if I understand the history correctly, it arrived at this point after a series of (sometimes extreme) cultural and economic upheavals that prioritized modernization over traditional culture.
The presentation wasnt the best I agree. The point I was driving towards is that culture can accelerate industrial growth and development but this doesn't mean any /one/ culture or set of beliefs should be presented as superior/better. America became number one (nuanced but I want to avoid another essay) through embracing multi-culturalism, liberty, and being one of the few places that weren't damaged much in WW2 with a nod towards their role in post ww1 decision making as well. China came to be viewed as number 2 and a credible threat to the position of number 1 through radically different cultural processes. So while culture contributed to industrialization in both instances, that doesn't make it sensible to make normative statements supporting either direction as a suggestion for improving the world, or a whole region, at large. These issues are nuanced and if they don't seem nuanced then it's much more likely that we're arguing from a position of ignorance rather than correctness.
> America became number one (nuanced but I want to avoid another essay) through embracing multi-culturalism, liberty, and being one of the few places that weren't damaged much in WW2 with a nod towards their role in post ww1 decision making as well.
The first part is really amusing. America become rich because while Europe was fighting world wars, US was making money on them. US joined WW2 by the very end when it was evident that Germany lost, and arrived just in time to colonize its share of Europe that remains colonized to this day.
Also the fact that US dollar is the world's exchange currency also benefits US immensely. US can print astronomical amounts of money and the whole world becomes poorer with each printed bill. No other country in the world has the same position. If Iran would be in the same position, they would be just as rich without all the "multi-cultural" "liberty" fluff.
> US joined WW2 by the very end when it was evident that Germany lost
Bollocks. The US joined the war because they cut off oil supplies to Japan and Japan saw future conflict as inevitable -- and struck first. They bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 -- and the war didn't end until 1945. In 1941 Germany had beaten France, the UK, Norway, Denmark, and was on a path to steamroll Yugoslavia, Greece, and possibly the USSR.
> just in time to colonize its share of Europe that remains colonized to this day.
The US military is still in Europe because the NATO is fine with the US footing the cost of defense spending. "Colonized" my fat ass, the reason the EU is able to throw around grand farm subsidies is because the US is paying for missile defense and aircraft carriers.
Yeah, forgot to mention that Japan and South Korea are colonized as well.
Footing the cost of defense spending is a sweet lie for the population of the occupied countries. And some of them are actually paying for this "help". South Korea, for example, had to increase the payments for the US "protection". BTW, this is exactly parlance that criminals use to justify racket: "You pay us for protection, pal. Win-win!"
And I also forgot that US spies all over the world. Every computer device has numerous CIA backdoors. This obviously provides huge advantage to US businesses.
Just because it is common doesn't mean it's not shady.
And depending on what the "pseudo-activist role" entails, that could be a massive conflict of interest. If a person at Company A is steering business toward Company B because they have an investment in Company B, that could easily conflict with their obligations toward Company A.
What is this writing style?