I spent the past week in New York city. Here are some thoughts about the vibe.
One of the first thoughts that I had when I got here (I think, as a reflection of my having trouble with the subway system, like a NYC-noob) was "SF wants to present itself as comfortable. NY is very much NOT presenting itself as comfortable."
Living in New York is hard. That's why people are proud of it.
There's a trope of a person who grew up in some neighborhood in NY (Brooklyn or Harlem or the Bronx), and then makes it big somehow, and but insists on living in the neighborhood they grew up in, even if is less safe or less clean or whatever.
"I've lived here my whole life" they say "I'm not going to move just because [X]."
And I get it. I get how you could feel an attachment to Harlem, such that it felt like my HOME in a robust way, in a way that I couldn't imagine feeling an attachment to any place that I've lived.
Part of it is the thing above: living here is hard, and have to be hard in a way to put up with it. And there's a sort of camaraderie with everyone else who is putting up with it with you. There's a pride dealing with it.
But also, there's a vibrancy here which is new to me. The streets feel like they are bustling with _people_. Like, I have a sense that everyone around me here is a person living their life.
There's people on the street in Berkeley, but they feel sort of like...backdrop.
Here, I can pick out any random person, and they seem more like a real person somehow.
A person with plans, and family connections, making their way in the world.
Part of that is just that there are really a bunch of different races around: more black people and more hispanic people than I have frequent opertuntiy to see.
And I think part of what I'm picking up on is just lower class vibe, which is on display in NY in a way it for sure is not in Berkeley, or SF, or Chicago, or Phoenix.
New York is not hiding that that there are differences in classes. The middle class is right next to the lower class. They're all packed into this tiny island.
SF sort of feels like, or presents as if, it is ALL upper middle class. Not New York. New York is OWNING the class diversity.
Overall, I like it. It's refreshing.
It sort of makes me want to not live in Berkeley any more.
One thing that I learned / realized from talking with @jessi_cata this week:
Politeness is largely a matter of "skipping over" or ignoring things that might provoke shame or guilt. It's about pretending (correctly or incorrectly) that person didn't do anything wrong.
Simple example: if you're talking with someone and they fart, it is polite to pretend that you didn't hear it to spare them the embarrassment, or more specifically, the discomfort of causing you discomfort.
Or if you walk in on someone changing but can plausibly pretend to not have seen them, that's the socially smooth thing to do.
A major way that my sense of the world has updated in the past year:
I learned / realized that "class" is a thing. Lots of stuff that I thought was normal, or was the normal background assumption, are basically only normal for the middle class context in which I grew up.
Examples:
[Interestingly, it seems hard to come up with specific examples]
- Generic liberalism in the sense of being in favor of eg Gay marriage
- "School is important"
- "Going to college and getting a job" (I opted out of this one, but it still felt like opting out of the default.)
- "The cops are there to help you"
What software do people use to add a wepage to their stack of things to read?
I'm looking for something that has the following features
1. Allows me to save pages with one click. 2. When reading (as opposed to collecting), has a button that randomizes the order of the somewhat so that I'm not just going in "order added" or "reverse order added"
3. Directs me to the original page, by default, instead of having me read inside the app. (Websites have unique formatting, and I want that formatting to be part of my reading experience.
One obvious thought is that in order to "do colonialism", you need to be powerful enough to dominate other cultures, and Europe got to a technological / military advantage first.
That is obviously part of the story: Many cultures couldn't have pulled of colonialism, even if they wanted to, because of technological limitations.
I'm under the impression that European colonization was much worse for the colonized territory than, eg being conquered by and becoming a province of the Roman empire.
Is that correct? If so, why was that?
I think I have this intuition because...well, it just seems like European colonization did wreak a lot of damage. It led to the abomination of black slavery in America, and The remnants of the natives of North America are, after many massacres, largely confined to reservations.
In my ignorance, this seems to me to be a different, more lasting kind of harm than your culture being a vassal state to the Romans or the Persians or Alexander, for a bit.
Those cultures didn't like it, but I don't think it was an existential catastrophe for them?