All the World’s a Trading Zone, and All the Languages Merely Pidgins

I’m not so sure that difference is as big as it used to be. In modern pluralistic societies we’re all franken-humans, built from cultural and subcultural fragments. Unlike a hunter-gatherer tribe or old-timey farming village where everyone shares virtually all of their culture, modern western societies are experiencing unprecedented cultural fragmentation and constant recombination of symbols and meaning.

With people living in their own little one-person culture, all communication becomes cross-cultural, all social spaces start to resemble trading zones and all our languages start to resemble pidgins.

Miniaturization of Nervous Systems and Neurons

When biology tries to make its neural networks smaller.

Models All The Way Down

Pretty explainer of the curation of datasets used to train large image foundation models.

Personality: The Body in Society - Melting Asphalt

This is going to be an important piece of canon.

What is code? - Paul Ford

Not being a CS person, this was an amazing read and teaches me some of the background info that is so, just, necessary to know when you use a computer in this day and age. What is a ‘framework’? What does Javascript do?? How does software development generally look, from the inside? It unlocks some of these terms that I didn’t even know were important.

Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufacturesand Industrial Policy - Richard Sylla

I didn’t know how incredible this man truly was. These quotes are not even all the good bits. Open the link and read it, I beg you.

Hamilton designed his policies to create a sound system of banking and finance for the capital needs of the government and American entrepreneurs; to use infrastructure, innovation, and technology diffusion to speed up economic growth and diversification; and to support industries crucial to US national defense in a world dominated by marauding European empires.

*Manufactures *is one of the first extended commentaries on the Wealth of Nations…

In late eighteenth century Great Britain, what much later would be termed "the Industrial Revolution" snuck up unannounced. By contrast, in the United States, Hamilton and a few others foresaw the Industrial Revolution and espoused public policies to accelerate it. (emphasis added)

????????

Tariff discourse:

Hamilton thought that, with a few exceptions, it was good policy to exempt raw materials used by manufacturers from import duties.

And he wanted technology transfer from other countries to his own, proposing patent protection for the transferer. Or,

As an alternative, toward the end of Manufactures he would suggest (Hamilton 1791, pp. 338–40) the establishment and funding of a Board to encourage and pay for the transfer of important foreign technologies and the migration of workers skilled in them to the United States. Hamilton (1791, pp. 308–09) lamented the "selfish and exclusive policy" of other countries that sought to prevent technological transfers.

H1-B discourse.

How does he do this? HOW does he do this???

Conservatively, this is a case of a man who wrote so much that of course he covered everything that was actually important in the subsequent, 200-year rise of the United States. But the records show that he spent effort pushing for every single one of these policy points, in his day, to his congress, in 1791.

I am reminded of this quote from the musical:

God help and forgive me, I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.

and in reality:

back in 1791, Hamilton had a prescient vision of how America’s economy with governmental backing could shift from an agricultural economy and become a major manufacturing nation. His vision was not far off from the way that future actually unfolded.

Websites, Done Cheap

If you ever want a forever website for 15 dollars. I love its design, it just *feels *reliable.

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