Shanghai's Lagena Primary School is a 5-story, 76 kiloton 85-year-old T-shaped structure that was rotated 21' and relocated 62m down the road over 18 days by means of "walking machines."

cnn.com/style/article/…

1/
These are 198 sensor-studded, actuating mobile supports that alternately raised and lowered in two groups, allowing the building to slowly shuffle around and manoeuvrer into its new position.

2/
The legs were installed by workers who excavated around and beneath the structure, relying on its existing support pillars to support it; when the legs were in place, the pillars were sawn through.

3/
The success of the walking machines is heralded as a reprieve for China's older buildings, which have been razed in vast numbers to clear the way for high-density urban expansions, ending the post-Mao vogue for architectural preservation.

4/
The novel I'm working on now, "The Lost Cause," is a post-GND utopian story about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias who lost the war on the planet and its life.

twitter.com/search?q=from%…

5/
It turns on all kinds of urbanist stuff like this, as people roll up their sleeves and embark on hugely ambitious climate remediation and adaptation projects, like relocating every coastal city ~20km inland.

patreon.com/posts/new-deca…

6/
This kind of stuff absolutely skewers me: whole buildings on the move. It gives me hope that our historic structures may survive as more than future marine habitats.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

2 Nov
Today's Twitter threads (a thread).

Inside: Trump's electoral equilibrium; Trump billed the White House $3 per glass of water; Trustbusting Google; Podcasting part 21 of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2020/11/02/unb…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Trump's electoral equilibrium: Slugs voting for salt.



2/ Image
Trump billed the White House $3 per glass of water: Keeping his campaign promises.



3/ Image
Read 24 tweets
2 Nov
Today, @thedailybeast published "The Justice Department Finally—Finally!—Takes on Google and the Danger of Monopolies," my op-ed on tech antitrust and its connection to the digital rights movement.

thedailybeast.com/the-justice-de…

1/ Image
I'm in my 19th year as a digital rights activist, and while there's a vogue of accusing the movement of being blind to the possibilities of techo-dystopia, that's a revisionist history. You don't devote your life to the cause if you think it's automatically going to be great.

2/
But there was a blind-spot: the assumption that antitrust action would maintain the dynamism, opportunity and variety of the early commercial internet, keeping it from devolving into 5 giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other 4.



3/
Read 23 tweets
2 Nov
Remember the 2016 campaign when Trump kept telling us that

a) The government was hopelessly corrupt, sending vast fortunes to gouging profiteers and beltway bandits; and

b) He knew how it worked because he was really good at it?

He was telling the truth, on both counts.

1/ Image
Here's the invoice Trump's Mar-a-Lago sent to the White House after he held a state dinner with (then-)Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2018:

washingtonpost.com/context/mar-a-…

2/
The bill breakdown shows Trump billed the US taxpayer $3 for each glass of water served that night.

Trump's extracted at least $8.1m via price-gouging that he was on both side of - Trump, Inc billing Pres. Trump, who signed off on the expenses.

washingtonpost.com/politics/ballr…

3/
Read 6 tweets
2 Nov
The equilibrium in US elections is a balance of:

* pleasing rich people (who give party figures sinecures via consulting/speaking/think tank fees) and;

* terrifying the base into turning out by pointing out how awful the other guy is, what with all his plute-osculating.

1/ Image
A feature of this equilibrium is that the unfitness of the other side is a gift to your own side. The worse Trump is, the more establishment-friendly the Dem candidate can be.



2/
In other words, Trump needs to get slugs to vote for salt and Biden needs to get turkeys to vote for Christmas, and the optimal way to do that is by pointing fingers at the other guy. That way, you don't have to promise voter-pleasing policies that upset the donor class.

3/
Read 14 tweets
2 Nov
CREEPSHOW (1982) dir. George A. Romero wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/633637320…
CREEPSHOW (1982) dir. George A. Romero wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/633637320…
CREEPSHOW (1982) dir. George A. Romero wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/633637320…
Read 10 tweets

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