Pittsburgh feels amazingly less .. real. This is psychosomatic, a withdrawl of emotional investment in the town itself, and yet the people I care about don't seem less real at all, just the place. It's like one of those commercials with the technicolour product against the greyscale background. And.. it's also a bit like waking up as a different person. I like this.
I was talking with a friend about public transit, in particular the personal public transit kind. The jump to new architecture is always difficult -- as a sysadmin, I have the ability to take systems down for a bit for revamping, with proper advance notice. I wonder if it would be possible to have a civilisation that would be dynamic enough that people could abandon a city entirely for a month for it to be revamped (roads torn up, etc). The key barrier, I think, is the home issue -- I think people could learn to cope with a different workplace for awhile, and it might be very healthy, mentally, for people's habits to be broken in that way. Perhaps viewed from that light, the New Orleans relocation wasn't entirely a bad thing -- I'm sure people met a lot of other people and traveled during that whole ordeal, even though it was unplanned and kind of a mess. With scheduled downtime of, say, Cleveland, enormous public works could be done, revamping/installing public transit, redoing roads, perhaps even replacing buildings. Could people in general learn to deal with departing their home in that way though? Is our strong notion of ownership and "home as castle" a barrier for really cool things? Would people who had fewer stuff keeping them from mobility be possibly happier?
Grab Bag:
- Chavez cuts ties with Israel, stands with Persia. I have a certain amount of respect for Chavez, but in this I believe it's a terrible decision. I'm not a big fan of the United States, especially in foreign policy, but opposition should be principled and aimed towards building a better world. Persia under its present leadership has nothing to offer on that front. It may be America and Britain's fault that Persia is in the state it's in, and that is lamentable, but the fact remains that they are more a force against advancement of humanity than anything remotely acceptable to ally with.
- What to do if the RIAA comes after you
- Uncool
- Wow! Neat software to play with