There's one mention of Taiwan, in the eigth paragraph (of twelve).
"We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!"
I support an independent Taiwan, and given China's recent military exercises that encircled Taiwan, everyone's right to be cagey, but the speech itself doesn't focus on Taiwan, nor does it seem to escalate China's rhetoric.
To be fair, the Guardian article does provide the context of the military exercises, so I guess I'm complaining about the headline being overly alarming. A first in journalism, I'm sure /s.
The "trend" is a reference to the sentences preceding what I quoted, in which Xi Jinping celebrates the continued integration of Hong Kong and Macau.
"Not long ago, I attended the opening ceremony of the National Games, and I was glad to see Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao coming together in unity and acting in unison. We should unswervingly implement the policy of One Country, Two Systems, and support Hong Kong and Macao in better integrating into the overall development of our country and maintaining long-term prosperity and stability. We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!"
Given the unrest and bad optics from Hong Kong, which was a gradual, negotiated transfer of power to China, I'm hoping that the threat of invasion remains just a threat. Soft power takes longer and is more easily contested. I think 2026 will determine if America's step back is a blip or the start of a trend. I wouldn't be surprised if China and other countries are waiting to determine the same.
I'd venture a guess that a lot of the examples were part of the Works Progress Administration[1], which employed laborers, craftsmen, engineers, artists, and more as a response to the Great Depression. While it ended during World War II, the humans that worked in it would have continued in the labor force.
There's also the improvements in building techniques like curtain walls in commercial buildings, and truss connector plates and aluminum/vinyl siding in residential allowed for laborers to replace craftsmen like masons and carpenters. While you'd think that would free up more money for beautification, the economic preference for many individual shareholders and taxpayers doesn't seem to support that.
Add in car-centric development and the advent of television, the internet, and smartphones, and what's the point of making things beautiful anymore? You won't appreciate the finials on a lamppost from the inside of your car, and if the world is ugly, you can look at your phone.
But it's not fully explained by the unwillingness to spend money either. I think the postmodern movement's impact on public beautification turned a lot of people off the idea. Eschewing traditional beauty is fine for museums and galleries, but there are a lot of murals out there that ruined perfectly good walls. Chicago's Cloud Gate, Philadelphia's LOVE Park, Minneapolis's Spoonbridge and Cherry, and I'm sure a large number of other instances of public art since the postmodern era can be fun, visually striking, and iconic. But I'd hesitate to call them beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint, especially when compared to their cities' existing monuments and statues. However, that's a matter of taste. And as we've grown more divided almost all matters of life, both literally and figuratively, even if we all agreed to spend $X on public beautification, I doubt we'd be able to meaningfully agree on what's beautiful.
There are 164,121 vacant housing units in the Bay Area[1].
While that's only ~6% of total housing units, it's still a lot of opportunity for both squatters and these businesses.
Generally though, this situation only feels possible due to compounding systemic failures. In some order: Not building enough housing, income inequality, homeless support, and law enforcement (or lack thereof).
Fixing problems further up the chain solves the problems further down, but is more difficult and probably creates other unintended consequences.
Not building enough housing? It seems like they've built 164,121 housing units too many. I think that the more correct explanation is that speculative investors are holding onto property indefinitely rather than selling or renting at a loss, preventing housing from falling back to its true equilibrium value.
It's not "indefinite". Most vacant housing units are not vacant for a long time. They might still be under construction or might just be turning over for the next resident in a week.
And if we built more housing units in the Bay Area (increased supply), do you think that would make speculative investors' housing units increase or decrease in value?
I.e. insufficient land value tax rates. California created a class of feudal lords with prop 13 who get to reap disproportionate societal resources from newcomers.
Edit: the solution to which is not allowing squatters disproportionate access to others’ property via unnecessarily long court procedures. Residental agreements should be filed with the county just like land sales are, so a cop can quickly lookup who legally belongs and act accordingly.
You can claim whatever rental rate you want as a basis for your financialization agreements, but you should have to start paying taxes as though you are receiving that number as actual cash rent after some limited grace period.
That would stop most of the shenanigans by private equity in the rental markets.
I proposed something else. This occupancy tax is paid by the legal person who has the right to reside in the unit. Either the legal renter (and this would require leases be recorded) or if there is no renter, the entity that is legally allowed to reside in the unit is the owner. There needs to be no grace period.
Subtract this amount out of property taxes owed today so we have 2 taxes that would sum, and can even discount the occupancy tax of the renter based on their needs (old, disabled, poor....)
Yes, but the principle here is that a library (system) should function as a repository for physical embodiments of knowledge, and should not be discarding books.
We're going through this at my workplace as well, converting from cubicles to an open floor plan, so workspaces which had decades of accumulated books are being cleared out --- I've rescued as many as I can justify from the recycling bin, but that's a tiny portion, so I'm feeling this sort of decision quite viscerally.
I think the library system does a good job of that. For example, here's the WorldCat entry for Thinking in PostScript[1] that shows its 4 editions physically available at 107 libraries. It's also available as an eBook and (since 2024) on Archive.org[2]
Which highlights why Archive.org is so important as an archival and lending library. It's like the idealized version of microfiche. The content of the books have been made so small that not only can they be trivially stored, but beamed to your pocket at any time, almost anywhere in the world.
There are at least ~158 Million books in existence as of 2023[3], and between 2 and 4 million added every year. To ask that each library be an unopinionated store of physical books is too much, and reduces their function to a well-organized warehouse, when the real power of libraries are its librarians. They are research specialists available to anyone and everyone, and well worth a conversation the next time you want to know just about anything.
I'm not the person you asked, but I assume their basis is that the majority of the Adult US Population is overweight or obese.[1]
However, we're conflating the related problems of hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Food insecurity at its most extreme will result in hunger (a lack of any food), but the affordable food that is available in food deserts (and at food banks) is often ultraprocessed and incompletely nutritious, which can lead to obesity.[2]
Largely, Americans don't seem to be affected by "hunger" as defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization[3], but are very affected by malnutrition and food insecurity (as defined by that same body).
I guess my takeaway from this is: Try not to build your life around AI, but there's so much money being pumped into it that your life will be heavily affected by AI succeeding or failing.
What else can individuals do though?
I remember "doomsday prepping" became a cultural phenomenon after the 2008 financial crisis. But if you avoided the stock market and/or taking on debt at historically low interest rates, you missed out on some significant opportunities. Maybe part of that prepping is to reorder your life so that you don't care about stocks or real estate. Maybe the timeframe I'm looking at is too narrow, and history will lump 2008 and any AI crash together.
But maybe AI would be bailed out. I think we're already seeing private industries treat AI the same as their office real estate after COVID, i.e. "We don't need this, but we have it, so we need to use it."
The only call-to-action that Zitron writes in this piece is, "When the collapse happens, do not let a single person that waved off the economics have a moment’s peace." But I think if the collapse occurs as he is proposing, we won't have time to police the boosters' peace.
Does anyone have a more actionable plan for insulating yourself, your family, your community, or society at-large from a potential AI crash?
Since so much of the US economy (as of 2025) is built on AI, the best thing you can do is effectively de-dollarize: don't hold USD (which has already lost 10% of its value this year) and move your money into European/Asian equities instead of the US stock market.
I could see a case for personal de-dollarization in the long term, but based on previous American financial crises, European and Asian markets are also impacted by the downturn. Even the Shanghai Stock Exchange was hit in 2008[1].
Of course, this time could be different. Do you have any speculation as to why it would be?
Yeah good point, might be impossible to fully insulate yourself then. It just seems like the US economy is more tied to the AI bubble than any other national economy.
Without any context, these transformations are pure spectacle. And it's bad when you take something that had meaning and turn it into a spectacle.
This site could be a commentary on the frivolity of AI, a takedown of "great" art, an attempt to make art more approachable, or a tech demo. But without knowing which, it's an impressive, forgettable spectacle.
Strange that you need the website (author) to tell you how to interpret it. It's like art itself, you're allowed to come up with your own interpretations.
If you live anywhere like Houten[1] anywhere in the US, please tell me ASAP because I'll move there tomorrow.
From my area of the Midwest around Iowa City, there are decent paths that connect the local towns, but intra-town cycling is far less supported. We have bike lanes (good), on some streets (bad), they're unprotected (bad) and they close on Sunday (bad, also what?). The car-free bike path along the river is shared with pedestrians, and some spandex-festooned idiots don't understand that it's not the place to go fast.
I didn't say I live in a place just like Houten, I said I live in a place where you regularly see kids under 10 years old riding bikes together without adults (and like GP said, often with a fishing pole or soccer ball in tow.)
You don't need a place that's the literal "best place for cycling in the world" for this, you just need to (1) build a bike path that's not adjacent to the road (ours is typically 10-20ft away from the road) and (2) have it be along a main thoroughfare where everyone lives a short distance from it.
Based on the census, cars were NOT just as plentiful. The number of cars per household has risen slightly[1] (although they stop keeping track after 3 cars), but the number of households have doubled[2] between 1970 and 2020.
As for the bikes, it's a vicious cycle compounded by distracted driving via cell phone. Less bikes means less drivers expecting to see a bike, making it more dangerous for bikes, meaning less bikes.
sure, population has grown, but unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
also, bike lanes were virtually non-existent back then
That's not the density I was referring to. That doesn't measure city/suburb density. We have many more suburbs (therefore more density overall) but the number of houses within a suburb (where a child might be riding around) is not likely to have increased.
I think we have a disagreement in terms beyond "density". I'm talking about bicycle as transportation, and I believe you may be talking about bicycle as recreation.
To clarify, transportation is a means to get you to a destination. I don't know where you live, but I haven't lived in or ever even seen a suburb that provides all the destinations that a child (assuming they're old enough to ride a bike alone) would want to bike to.
Friends live in different neighborhoods. The mall certainly wasn't in my neighborhood. The video store, my church, the woods, the local pool, the public library, all required crossing streets which have become busier and busier.
The size of the United States has not increased since 1970, but the number of people has. So yes, no shit, (US pop / US land area) has gone up. But the question is, "is the average neighborhood more dense than it was in 1970", and that's not a question you can answer from that number, because obviously cities & towns have spread since then.
If you want an intellectually honest comparison, take a look at the District of Columbia, which is basically 100% city and has been for many decades. It's gone down since 1970.
The other commenter and I were talking about cars.
Car ownership rates increased slightly, number of households nearly doubled, and average population density went up in every state except DC. There are more cars. Cars do not stay in one place, especially in the case of suburbanization.
Also, I'm not sure why/how the DC piece is intellectually honest. The Washington Metropolitan Statistical area has more than doubled in population since 1970[1]. Do you think all of the people who moved to PG County stay out of DC? That must be why the beltway is so easy to maneuver!
> unless density has increased substantially, then on any given ride you're likely to encounter similar number of vehicles than before, not counting major / commute roads of course, but those aren't the ones kids are riding on
This was the original mention of density. Sure, cars don't stay in one place, but if we're talking about kids walking/biking around their suburban neighborhood, how big is the impact if there's a new 50k suburb on the other side of the urban core? Even commuters from the exurbs are taking the dastardly 45mph stroads, not the stopsign-laden 25mph streets through your neighborhood.
The common parlance around here is that "greater density" means smaller houses closer together or multi-unit structures. If you build a new subdivision outside town, nobody says "oh wow the town got so much denser", it just got broader. Waving at "57.5 average people/square mile in 1970, growing to 93.8 in 2020" says absolutely nothing about the experience of the average person on the average streets near their homes.
As an average person, I've observed that both my childhood and current neighborhoods (Mid-Atlantic and Midwest respectively) have increased in the number of cars present, and that's within and between neighborhoods. I have also observed more in-fill subdivisions between neighborhoods. Since the '90s, I've seen just the bike ride that I'd take multiple times a week in my Mid-Atlantic suburb yield one acre lots turned into 8 homes, a small office park being converted into multiple 5-over-1s, a country club being turned into 400 homes. In the past decade in the Midwest, I've seen 2 single family homes torn down to make 8 units with an 8 car garage and 8 more spaces out back, multiple small businesses torn down to make way for "luxury" student housing with a parking spot for every bed room, a shopping center and apartment complex torn down and turned into an even bigger apartment complex with parking for every bedroom. Many of these are on my block or on the bike path around town.
There are more cars. There is more density.
So there you go, I've provided census data, I've provided observations from my own life across multiple geographies that backs up the data.
If you're claiming that there aren't more cars in neighborhoods, please back up that claim.
There's one mention of Taiwan, in the eigth paragraph (of twelve).
"We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!"
I support an independent Taiwan, and given China's recent military exercises that encircled Taiwan, everyone's right to be cagey, but the speech itself doesn't focus on Taiwan, nor does it seem to escalate China's rhetoric.
To be fair, the Guardian article does provide the context of the military exercises, so I guess I'm complaining about the headline being overly alarming. A first in journalism, I'm sure /s.
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