Posts tagged rants
Cultivating Failure - The Atlantic
My reaction when first I came across this article: “Another piece taking down Alice Waters bwahahahahaha- oh, fuck. Caitlin Flanagan wrote it.”
She’s so stupid and awful. Her argument against in-school gardening programs is quite racist (Mexican kids have to farm anyway!…What? And…in the Berkeley school district?). And then, to make her point that urban areas are juuuust fine on the grocery store front, she goes to a Ralph’s in LA and explains that she bought corn and state-grown grapes and nectarines. Which means she was there in August. August, California, where local produce can be grown. Caitlin, honey? Is this the norm?
I cannot stand people who make me side with Alice Waters.
This article drove me mad.
But as much as I wanted to blame Flanagan while reading the piece, she doesn’t really deserve the vitriol. Her mindset, which allows her to paint the ‘immigrant son going to Berkeley only to learn gardening’ as a tragedy, is the very mindset the foodie movement she criticizes aims to disrupt.
Her way of thinking permanently relegates “food work” to lower classes. The local/holistic/organic/whatever food movement aims to help people understand, respect, and cherish the work and human effort that gets food to our table. In doing so, we hope to flatten the class hierarchy around these networks of production. The goal, some might say, is to spur the upper and middle classes to get involved with, pay more for, and pay thoughtfully for their food.
Flanagan only focuses on the actions of people within a class-based apparatus. And in doing so, she ignores the efforts made by people to reform the apparatus itself.
Brutal: Garmin and TomTom stock after Google’s announcement of free navigation.
I hate the stock market herd mentality.
This has been a long time coming. The herd mentality in play here is the joint realization that building your business around single-use, consumer, networked devices is not a good idea. Moore’s Law will obliterate you. The big winners will be the people that create multi-use platforms where unitasker products can be built upon. Apple. Google.
BTW, what was the long term strategy for TomTom and Garmin? Both must have realized that mobile was their end-game, hence their forays into the space: Garmin with an actual device and TomTom with software. The thing is, mobile is a cut-throat space where established businesses with hoards of data and capital have been staking claims within for the last decade.
And we’ve seen this time and time again. Apple developers always feared the kiss of death from Apple: that Cupertino would incorporate their function into their OS. (It’s telling no one really had those fears regarding Redmond.) Google has the data behind it to casually turn on features that kill entire verticals, especially around the maps product.
