Send Tissues, Chocolate Biscuits

Oh, bollocks. I swear your reply wasn’t there when I typed the above.
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…though Russia is looking expansionist these days.
TBF, given that Siberia is part of Russia, and that is where the “indigenous” North Americans came from, this is nothing new…

These are the questions you will beg, and this is how you will feel, or pretend to feel, like we do.’ The presumptuous overreach is eye-widening. Imagine the kind of personality that could write those demands, proof-read them, circulate them, and still not feel absurd. Or pretentious. Or indeed creepy.
I have been in a few creepy business environments. People just conform. Jane Elliott style diversity class loaded with obvious (to me) things-that-never-happened, this was before Snopes, and people just sit quietly through it. Don’t raise a fuss. The creepiest to me was a failing government project where our meetings, twixt three remote locations, never had the camera on the meeting leader/speaker. Cameras were pointed to the worker bee audiences while a disembodied voice informed us about the progress, or lack thereof, that we were making. Never saw the speaker. What made it most creepy, no matter how bad things were going and how little feedback was going back up the chain (worst of any project I ever worked), near as I could tell I was the only one who found it creepy/weird. Of course I was new to the project that had been going on at that volume of workers for 3 or 4 years so I was more of a fresh frog in the pot. And they were mostly Gen-X workers. Though they would speak privately about how bad the project was going in general, especially the absurd deadlines, horrible leadership (one team leader was known to break down crying in her office…and I had to work somewhat closely, if remotely, with her), horrible development strategy, and excessive overtime. But not too loudly as to make any difference.

[Ivy] completed her PhD from University of Waterloo in Philosophy in 2012
If I recall correctly, that was about the time the various professors at St. Jerome’s (the attached Catholic liberal arts college) began to retire en masse. I expect that’s not a coincidence.
Not just say “no”, but also counterattack
I have referred to this as “normalizing the phrase ‘no, and fuck off'”.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

The “land” dialogue thing is also absurd
Any time I am subject to these I shout “but you’re not going to give it back, are you?”
There are always muffled laughs in the audience.

Any time I am subject to these I shout “but you’re not going to give it back, are you?”
As a rule, it takes quite a bit of provocation to make me disrupt a social gathering. I don’t generally like to cause a scene, and a non-woke version of The Blurting doesn’t appeal to me. But we are, I think, reaching a point where near-continual and quite loud derision does seem warranted, and perhaps necessary. To break the spell, as it were.

“Try this:”

79 multiplied by 12? Give me a minute…

79 dozen.
I like the cut of these chaps’ jibs.

This looks like Hell. Via here, where it is commented “wait i’m wrong, even in neal stephenson’s wildest feverdream he still had windows on all the residence tower rooms”
Would it be impolite to suggest that the 97 year old billionaire who imposed this design should himself be stuffed in a tiny windowless pod and fed bugs until he changes his mind?

Not sure what happened there… maybe html didn’t like apostrophes? Alternatively stated…spelled out in words…
“Beige six foot by five foot (IIRC) cubical…”

This looks like Hell.
I never realized how good I had it as a college undergrad — I feel sorry for todays yutes and the crappy world they are entering.

Meanwhile, white supramacists caught acting like Democrats in Virginia.

Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachel Stirling, appears in almost every episode.
Ah, the vicar’s wife in The Murder at the Vicarage. I thought I knew the face.
What?
Hey, I’m familiar with the white-knuckle adventures of Miss Marple.

Any time I am subject to these I shout “but you’re not going to give it back, are you?”
I like to point out that the so-called “First Nations” are the ones that ethnically cleansed the Zeroth Nations to points further south.

Re the latter, Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachel Stirling, appears in almost every episode.
I did not know that. I know her from The Bletchley Circle and saw her most recently in an episode of Midsomer Murders. My wife didn’t like the Detectorists so we stopped watching half way through the first episode.

My wife didn’t like the Detectorists…
Nekulturny!

1960s hippies . . . against 1960s technocrats
The hippies of the ‘sixties weren’t wrong to put a wrench into the technocracy; but their favored tool was magical thinking. And a woozy idea came to their aid from far-out anthropology: that magic is primitive technology — and primitive is not a pejorative term.
Jerome Rothenberg called primitive poets “Technicians of the Sacred” — everything from Gilgamesh to Oh-Wah-Re-No and beyond: his anthology was a hippie bestseller, and it’s still in print.
Meanwhile the hippie poet Richard Brautigan dreamed of a coming peace-and-happiness, “all watched over by machines of loving grace.” Hippie magic would become the new technology, and from it would come a new technocracy unlike the old technocracy.
It takes a vague and cloudy thought process just to leave such ideas unhooted, and that much cloudier to earnestly pursue them. Alas, the climate of our time has favored the pursuit. At a drowsy pace, to be sure, which incidentally masked the goal or made it seem no real threat. The faith in hippie magic has been internalized, poeticized: never or seldom expressed in frank terms that could be refuted.
True believers, some of them at least, may know that utopian dreams in the past have turned murderous. But they feel that this time will be different. They feel that Real Utopia has never been tried

It seemed that the 1960’s hippies had thoroughly won their cultural war against 1960’s technocrats…
And yet the hippies’ embrace of primitive technology was somewhat ambiguous: For instance, there was much enthusiasm for Paolo Soleri’s Arcologies.

These are political tomatoes. This is political tomato sauce.’
Reading that NYT article, 2 things struck me. 1 – all the companies mentioned were dead certs for the B ark. 2 – the owners and managers of those businesses seemed utterly incapable of exerting authority over their employees; it didn’t seem to even occur to them. Instead we have experienced adults worrying about whether the youngsters who work for them think their emojis are cool.

Ursula K. Le Guin had a similar dream which she described in her Always Coming Home/Kesh stories.
I was struck by how enthusiastically many radical feminists embraced the utopia described by those stories.

Meh. I’ve worked in worse environments
Sorry to hear that. But that doesn’t make that dorm less awful.
These kids will be in and out of the dorm all day. It’s just a place to crash.
Not really. I spent many hours studying in my dorm room. And relaxing, listening to music, reading for pleasure, or talking with a friend or two.
Also, those dorm rooms all use built-in furniture. There is no chance to personalize a room beyond hanging a few pictures etc. In contrast, some of the residents of the dorms I lived in replaced the beds, brought their own desks, and so on.
Again, I do not want to live in a pod, and I do not want billionaire tech oligarchs training kids to live in pods.

“… falling just short of Dhaka, Bangladesh.”
It’s always Dhaka, isn’t it? Never Manhattan, whose population density is, as near as dammit, identical (75,000 people per sq.mi.).
I’m not saying that the building is any good, just that… well, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Having the same population density as Dhaka doesn’t in itself make someplace a shithole.
I mean, sure, we can argue about Manhattan’s shitholosity till the cows come home. But the point is, whatever else is wrong with it, it’s certainly not like Dhaka. The vast majority of its 75k-per-square-mile live comfortably. Therefore, by the same token, whatever else is wrong with Dhaka, it can’t simply be population density.
Bangladesh as a whole has the eleventh highest population density in the world, behind such overpopulated hellholes as Monaco, Singapore, Gibraltar, the Maldives, and Bermuda. It’s just ahead of Guernsey in 12th place.

Also, those dorm rooms all use built-in furniture. There is no chance to personalize a room beyond hanging a few pictures etc
IOW a prison cell … where at least there is a window for natural light.

Reasons to dislike Microsoft, #262.
I think you left off a few zeros. #262,000 maybe?
If there is a large tech company which does not deserve hatred, I have not heard of it. IT technology gives amoral people so many more ways to do wrong.

I think you left off a few zeros.
I leave a more technical appraisal to others, but it seems to me that if you have to deceive your customers into using your products – instead of, you know, making better products – then something is amiss.

Seems like a story ripe for a Hollywood movie yet in all these years, sooo many WWII movies…
Preproduction.
CliffsNotes version.
Or have I mixed you up with Richard Cranium again?
Yes.

if you have to deceive your customers into using your products – instead of, you know, making better products – then something is amiss.
Another kind of deception is to publish glowing but rather general descriptions of what an app can do, but “forget” to publish a User’s Guide which describe exactly what the app can and cannot do. The hope is that customers will start using the app and only later (too late?) discover unfortunate limitations.

There are genuine primitive technologies that (just like modern technology) meet standards of function, design, fitness, and acceptability to the users. At their best these technologies embody sound principles; their appeal to the hippie ethic was that they came without the cultural accretions of our latter-day — and ever-higher — high tech. It was the accretions, not the tech, that the hippies despised.
The very first hippies were practical about the skills of living. They knew how to make and fix things, or to learn how, or to exchange with someone who knew. It was a personal choice to favor simplicity and “low-tech.” They didn’t want to change society, but to live differently in it. Not unlike the later survivalists going off-grid. If they romanticized themselves sometimes as a “primitive” tribe living unnoticed in the shadows of a towering “civilization” — well, that was a fable told to amuse, or to tease out speculation: and must be taken lightly, or best not heed it at all.
But “the very first hippies” were very few in number. Definitely not a “movement.” That came from the flood of publicity in glossy fashion magazines like Esquire, Ramparts, Psychology Today. They weren’t, as they pretended, reporting on a trend, but drumming one up. After that, to be a hippie meant to wear the costume, smoke pot, flash “peace,” smile and say “groovy.”
I came along too late to have been an original hippie, if I was even inclined that way. But I met a few of the real ones. What they told me was, the hippie movement was over the minute it became a movement. At the time I put that down to old-timers chaffing a greenhorn. I wanted the hippie dream to be viable, even if it wasn’t for me. But they were right, those old freaks, God bless ’em, it was over.
Anything original, if it garners attention, gets imitated. A failed imitation, dying, can kill its original. A successful imitation cannot fail to kill its original. Sic transit and so forth.

I tried the simple life. I found it’s not so simple. I mean it’s not like I had to beg or borrow. But now I live life like there’s no tomorrow and all I’ve got I’ve had to steal. But that’s how it is…living at a pace that kills. Consequently I’ve got no love. Well no love you’d call real. Nobody waiting at home, anyway.

Hey WTP, now do ‘Beautiful Girls’, willya?

This looks like Hell

Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances

That cannot possibly satisfy the fire codes.
non-woke version of The Blurting
You’re not wrong. But as Mark Steyn says, politics is downstream from culture and we’ve reached the point where we’re expected to simply nod along with these inanities (insert Dalrymple quote here).
Social graces are a form of Geneva Convention: as long as we all agree to play by the same rules of courtesy we can avoid the kind of scorched-earth arguments that lead to broken relationships. The left abandoned that convention decades ago; we’ve been treating our POWS to coffee and chocolate biscuits while they’ve been shoving bamboo splinters under the fingernails of theirs.
It’s long past time to remind the Left of what the Geneva Convention originally meant: if you don’t use poison gas on the battlefields, we won’t nuke your civilian cities until they glow. But if you step over that line, we’ll come back across it with MIRV-armed ICBMs.

Uma’s Feet, so-called lifestyle coaching has been a marketing strategy since a little before the full-on 1980s. A smart cookie like Martha Stewart aimed for it. An honest broker, like Amy D., gets hoovered up. “Simplicity pumped for buying products,” the instances multiply. When they were high-end mail-order houses, Brookstone’s and Sharper Image offered desktop zen gardens, with a little brass rake for the certified pure sand. The mass popularity of yoga now is as an excuse to buy a cute new outfit….
Anyone remember the Whole Earth Catalogs
I do, thank you, and that prompts thought of Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (1994), in which he formulates an aphorism that can bear on the Munger Hall situation. A library doesn’t need windows, a library is a window. (He doesn’t mean a library building; he’s talking about a room used as a library.) And the bearing is this: the residence hall’s room-pods reminded me at first of my library carrel at university. A place to keep my books, and do a long-ish stretch of reading and writing in private. Long-ish and longer-ish: there were times I would have liked to stay overnight.
But that was in addition to my place of residence. It’s monstrous to deny students the dignity of A Room Of One’s Own.

criticized geodesic domes
I remember reading that but not where specifically — it fits Brand’s view though, so probably yes.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson & Johnson Building leaked too, as I recall. In the Executive Conference Room to make it even better. I think when the firm’s directors complained, Wright advised them to buy a bucket.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson & Johnson Building leaked too, as I recall.
Yes. And his famous Fallingwater house had the notorious cantilever problem. I see now where Wright enthusiasts are wordsmithing Wiki to shift the blame from Wright to wherever they can, either Wrights engineers or the construction engineers. Kind of a metaphor for the whole mess. But if you dig into the source material, Wright’s ego appears to have been something of an obstacle. Some say short man’s disease was a factor.
I have a friend whose new beau builds/refurbishes domed architecture buildings. We may be getting together with them this week. This might be interesting. Depending on how sober they plan to be.

Don’t get me started on Frank Gehry.
With a cat o’ nine tails?