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foro-del-raval · 4 years

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THE URBANITY OF ARCHITECTURE

Today I will be mainly addressing new students, those students who are starting this year. I think this is to a large extent the sense of this ceremony, and therefore I will speak about very basic things. I do not mean with this that they are 'easy quite the opposite, but they are indeed very important or at least I believe them to be so—. I will talk about issues which I hope you will remember at some point during your studies, which will hopefully help you to understand what the sense of your work is, of your profession, and of your attitude towards society.

I would like to start with something that bothers many of us, a serious matter: the solitude of architecture. The solitude of architecture is the greatest problem of our cities. It is the tendency of many of the most notorious architectures to keep apart from the place where they are, to isolate themselves from the city and their respective responsibility. I am speaking about solitude as a voluntary posture, as the will to stand alone. It is not only the result of being aside, but the attitude of enjoying this distant position. It seems to me that, indeed, our cities suffer because architecture has abandoned them. And a city without architecture is dead, or else very ill. And I think that here we are facing a serious problem. Please do not worry, I will not go into a pessimist or negative talk, but let me take this as a starting point.

It is this isolated, insolent, unsupportive architecture that is arising rejection against contemporary architecture among the majority of citizens; an architecture where they feel excluded and not welcome. This architecture, on the other hand, tends to gather the most attention from the media, therefore becoming an object of desire of more or less ambitious governing members, mayors and property developers. It is the privilege of the architecture of the capitalism, the 'wow-factor' architecture, the so-called iconic architecture. The one that can be bought and sold. The fruit of

The Urbanity of Architecture

The Barcelona School of Architecture Opening Lecture for the 2009-2010 academic year, entitled The Urbanity of Architecture, was given by the architect and university lecturer Manuel de Solà-Morales on September 22, 2009. The text of the lecture was later published in the ETSAB's architectural journal, Visions n°8. With this new edition the English translation of the text is incorporated.

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arrogance: above all, of the person ordering the project, but also of the architect. And arrogance means distance, separation, isolation, solitude. I said this was the most important problem of our cities, which in fact have many social problems, economic conflicts, cultural difficulties, etc., but these are present in the cities and not belonging to the city. The issue we are talking about, however, is a problem of cities that are creating themselves: large architecture (the mediatic one, the one with large figures) has abandoned urban obligations. Unfortunately, the other architecture (the common one) does sometimes follow this same logic, forgetting that the quality of a work lies on its capacity of artistically expressing its functional, structural, economic and simbolic condition, and not on the element of surprise and spectacle, of uniqueness and exception. Sadly, there is a tendency to let these values invadeall works.

I am telling you this because, during your professional life, you will often experience this tendency as a dilemma at your work, in your own personal production. If important architecture becomes isolated from the city, if it avoids any contact in an attempt to show up as an arrogant individuality, what is there left for the city? Public space, we might answer. Fine. But in such a context, this is not a solution but a problem.

During the last years, the design of public space has become an expanding sector in our branch. This has created a new group of professionals, a specialisation, a series of technical and artistical practices linked to the design of these spaces. Spaces, however, which are increasingly absorved in their own topics and grow more and more separated from architecture. The public space is thus turned into a new discipline, 'architecture at street level, with a focus on pavement, street lamps, walls and artificial topographies (with vegetation and trees) that takes advantage of subject related knowledge but is growingly achieving a radical dissociation from architecture. Therefore, two new worlds arise and split the city up: the architects who will create the buildings and the urban designers or specialised town planners who will create the public space. In my opinion,

this is absolutely wrong from a cultural point of view. As with any specialisation, it has the advantages resulting from improvement and specialised knowledge, but separating architecture and public space --an intellectual, professional, executive, functional etc. separation, means that architecture refuses to accompany the shaping of the city and allows public space to become an autonomous object, as it happens in the design of monuments or independent art works. This division between public space and architecture is both cause and effect of the solitude pursued by architecture or, in other words, of the city's isolation once it has been abandoned by architecture.

What is relationship berween buildings and the city? The ground-floor level is the common plan, it is not only external, from the city, but also from the very same buildings. The way these buildings leave out the city reflects an essential crisis that should be the focus of our activity, and I encourage you to keep this in mind and to overcome this crisis during the years you will be in this house by studying and discussing. It is certainly easier to create an isolated and autonomous architecture, merely concentrated on itself. However, what brings a building to be part of the city is its handling of urban complexity problems, not by providing solutions but by referring to them. To sum up, we can say that the ills of this crisis lies on the project separation between the open space and the closed space, between the public space and the private space, between the elevation and the plan of the city. And cities, today more heterogeneous, more dynamic and more complex than ever, are calling architects, particularly all of you, future young architects, to overcome it. Because, effectively, architecture is the only discipline that has the mechanisms to do it, to synthetize this increasingly excessive duality between the urban space and the architectural form.

The trust in architecture must bring us to absorb the city, to stop abandoning it. It is easier to do so sometimes very splendid, sometimes much more brilliant-, but the design of the city does not lie on the design of gardens (although very necessary and sometimes very beautiful),

Manual de Solà-Morales

The Urbanity of Architecture

streets and roads, but on the construction by architecture of the civic space, the collective space, the common space of citizens' lives.

In Barcelona, unfortunately, we have some recent cases that have been quite misguided in this sense. Let us discuss them, nor with a malevolent spirit but with the pedagogical will of learning to look at the problems of certain architectures. We all know the Torre Agbar desgined by Jean Nouvel and, if we observe here the various images of its base, something surprises us. Exactly the same that we find when we visit the street level as citizens who are not watching the picture taken from the Tibidabo mountain (although this picture is important as well) but are watching the building as users of the city. This tower, which from the construction point of view is a good building and has also some virtues at a landscape level —these might not be the most interesting but they do definitely exist–, touches the ground in a totally contentious and isolating manner, condemning all contact with citizens or the public ground and being surrounded by a moat with a ramp. The door, the basic element of such a large and important building, is hidden and conceals its direct functional relation with the city under the building's figure. The sides of the construction suggest a rather ineffective occupation of the square meters next to it, always having to keep a necessary distance. As a whole, it is a context of evident isolation that, from an urban point of view, explains the will of autonomy and separation from the adjacent city. We always highlight-and you will listen this again and again during your studies---- the importance of a building's ground floor, namely for the city: the isolation does not only bring buildings to abandon the city, but also the city to abandon the buildings, which are the first to suffer from this.

Another example is the Torre Espiral, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, located at the end of the Diagonal Avenue and still under construction. The price of the building is extremely high and its purpose has changed on several occasions: planned as a public library, it was next supposed to become a sort of social centre, then some kind

of record storage facilities and afterwards, finally, it seems as if it will be a rectorate building for a university. I do not think that the program has bothered much the architects in charge of designing the project. There is no doubt of their will of expressivity -a positive and innate attribute of architecture, but this can be only found here in the independence from the volumes towards any kind of reference, whether it is to constructive rationality, to its placement in the city, to its surroundings, etc. However, this building does not seem to have arisen among citizens the fright or shiver we could have expected. The city of Barcelona should be ashamed that such a work can be performed with impunity, so carelessly and so frivolously, with such a tremendous cost that, if its authors maintain it as a tradition, it will triple the figures next time. To top it off, this is a university building, what a crime against culture in the name of a university building! This is quite a serious issue... we are facing not only a lack of urban planning capacity, but a lack of common sense. This building represents a very serious problem. This will, iconicity, is - I will repeat it once more-- the responsible of isolating the building from the city, of creating the solitude of architecture, explicitly pursued in some occasions. The contact with the ground, with roadways, with public space... Good grief, this is the Diagonal Avenue in Barcelona, not Texas! Consider how it is placed in the space, consider the references that it could symbolize. To what intensity of expression does this shape respond to? What project proposal can justify that the 60 million euros planned turn into 120? The ingenuity of a sketch is what an architects' office proposes as the explanation of its project, its budget and its work,

Let us move forward. May I repeat that I will not adopt a negative perspective, but I need you to understand che key elements of my outrage. We are now at the former stadium of the RCD Espanyol, a very controversial issue in Barcelona eight or ten years ago. The football stadium was falling down. Pros and cons. Many people were asking themselves why it should be removed... The final decision

An extract from:

Manuel de Solà-Morales

The Urbanity of Architecture

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lodelcar · 4 years

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PANTA RHEI KAI OUDEN MENEI

Picture: Rwanda - Akagera National Park - Crocodile

Reflections on development in economics and society

The title of this essay is a quotation of Socrates in Plato’s book Cratylus, in which the famous Greek philosopher announced: "Heraclitus says that everything moves and nothing is stable". He referred hereby to the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. The expression "Panta rhei" synthesizes for him the thought of a world in perpetual motion. [1]

Development does not always go in the right direction

We can apply this paradigm to our own society. Since 1968 we have been living in a period of transition. There is nowadays great technological progress that disturbs balances. [2] It is not my intention to build up a political discourse. I would, however, like to dwell on a number of phenomena in the economy of which the public begins to realize that they are not improving the quality of life.

First of all there have been the disruptive technology companies that have made a steep rise on the stock exchange but whose added value is being questioned worldwide: AirBnB, Amazon and Uber.

In the past years, almost 10,000 families have been driven out of their homes throughout the city of Lisbon. In the meantime, Lisbon has more Airbnb accommodations per inhabitant than any other city in Europe, including Paris, London and Brussels. The exploding prices for housing mean that families who have to live on one minimum wage can no longer pay rented accommodation. Some are forced to move into abandoned buildings, where they (survive) live in extremely difficult circumstances.[3]

In retail, Amazon accounts for 53 percent of all e-commerce sales growth. This has been devastating already. Twice as many stores closed in 2017, or 8,600, as the year before. Department store jobs have plummeted from 1.782 million in June 2001 to 1.27 million by November 2017. Of course, success and efficiency are not crimes, nor is bigness, unless it prevents anyone else from competing. [4]

The world’s largest ride-hailing company Uber, operating in many cities throughout the world, and still not making profit, received a blow recently. Indeed the London transport regulator has decided that the taxi app can no longer operate in the British capital. The Achilles heel of the company are its drivers, the way they are selected and also the way they are paid. Next to New York, San Francisco and Sai Paolo, London is Uber’s largest market with 3.5 million customers and the 45,000 drivers. [5]

Where is the Panta Rhei aspect in all this?

From Athens and Amsterdam to Paris and Berlin, Airbnb is facing all the more obstacles since it first entered the market a decade ago, as authorities try to restrict the expansion of the home-sharing practice that has taken popular destinations by storm.

Amazon, just like Google and Facebook, is targeted by Democratic presidential candidates because of their monopoly situation. US Senator Elisabeth Warren goes the furthest and advocates breaking up the companies into regional parts, just as was done for Standard Oil and Bell in the early twentieth century. The logic behind this is that extreme market dominance leads to monopoly power and abuses, eventually sweeping away workers, competitors, and potential competitors, while bullying suppliers and stifling innovation. Such aggressive “vertical integration” is precisely why Standard Oil had to be busted up. Like Amazon, Standard Oil controlled all its marketplaces and forced all its competitors out of business or to become captive buyers and sellers of its goods and services.[6]

Everywhere Uber turns, a conveyor belt of new antagonists keeps emerging around the globe. In India, Uber is battling a service called Ola. In Brazil, it is dueling Didi Chuxing, a Chinese company that bought the local ride-hailing operator 99 last year. (Uber owns a stake in Didi.) And newfangled transportation companies, such as electric scooter providers, have popped up.

Bolt, an Estonian start-up, is an example of a troublesome trend for Uber. Bolt is now planning to confront Uber in one of its most lucrative cities: London. The smaller firm is reapplying for a taxi license to operate in the British capital after regulators there rebuffed it in 2017.[7] Of Bolt is known that they can have their programming carried out at a third of the cost for Uber in Eastern Europe. And above all: that they cooperate with existing taxi companies as an increase in their turnover and not as a competitor.

In addition to the disruptive technology companies, there are a number of trends that raise more and more questions. It is striking that most of these stories originated in the United States. This is of course primarily due to the fact that the US is a country with very little legislation that regulates the lives of citizens and directs trade. Moreover, everyone is responsible for his social security. That leaves the coast clear for cowboys who want to get rich quickly.

Even internet domain names for non-profit organizations are no longer safe for money makers. ICANN, the organization that manages the global system of internet domain names, decided recently to lift price restrictions for all types of internet suffixes. The owner of the .org suffixes, destined to non-profit organisations, Internet Society (Isoc) suddenly announced in November 2019 that the management of the .org suffix had been resold to Ethos Capital. From now on, it will operate the domain as a commercial activity. Ethos Capital can now increase the rental price of the approximately 10 million existing .org domain names, approximately 10 dollars a year, as desired, potentially generating billions of dollars. At the expense of non-profits.[8]

Two crashes with the brand new aircraft Boeing 737 MAX recently cost the lives of 346 people. The causes are poor design, too much faith in software and lax supervisors. The device is structurally unsafe, Boeing should never have launched it. The original 737 had small jet engines under its wings. When a new version came in 1980, it already posed problems. That is the great danger of old concepts that are being built on: they look more modern, but they have not really evolved. But a completely new design costs a huge amount. It must pass expensive regulator tests and validations, and customers must retrain their pilots. That is why the so-called “grandfather clause” is used in the US as much as possible: if the aircraft does not deviate much from the original type, it will receive approval via a quick counter at the regulator and pilot retraining will not be necessary. In the late 1980s, Airbus became a real competitor for Boeing. The 737 was the most important weapon in that battle. The pressure to make a better version pushed Boeing over the edge of the allowable. Larger engines had to be fitted, but the old trick that was used before was not enough. It was decided to mount the engines much further to the front to maintain enough ground space. But that made the device inherently unstable, especially when taking off.[9]

Venice’s population has been shrinking for decades. Today, there are just one-third as many Venetians as 50 years ago. But that decline is merely a symptom of a rapidly worsening disease: the reckless promotion of large-scale tourism and lack of investment in human capital. in 2017, the city of 260,000 received more than 36 million foreign tourists. As Venetians have fled the hordes, Venice’s civil society has deteriorated and political torpor has become entrenched. Municipal leaders prefer to complain about the city’s weaknesses, rather than taking effective action to address them. [10] They have been working on a flood barrier project since 1984, called Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico (MOSE). It is still not finished and has already cost 5.5 billion euros. This is due to incompetence, dawdling, but also the influence of the Mafia. Venice moaned under the numerous floods this year. There is finally reason to make up the backlog.

Is there a Panta Rhei aspect in these three examples?

The website of ICANN mentions the following: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) helps coordinate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions, which are key technical services critical to the continued operations of the Internet's underlying address book, the Domain Name System (DNS). ICANN's inclusive approach treats the public sector, the private sector, and technical experts as peers. In the ICANN community, you'll find registries, registrars, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), intellectual property advocates, commercial and business interests, non-commercial and non-profit interests, representation from more than 100 governments, and a global array of individual Internet users. All points of view receive consideration on their own merits. ICANN's fundamental belief is that all users of the Internet deserve a say in how it is run.[11] These are very beautiful principles. It is clear that such an organization can be put under pressure to introduce or curb neo-liberal principles.

What are the lessons of the 737 MAX debacle for the rest of the economy? One: company and regulator must not be too much "two hands on one stomach". Two: bad hardware cannot be fixed with software. Three: artificial intelligence (AI) makes people blind to "garbage in, garbage out" Four: an oligopoly does not encourage real innovation. Five: people are not machines, and machines are not always smarter than people.[12]

As for the Venetian problem, the solutions Carlo Ratti, professor at the Massachussets Institute of Technology proposes are radical, but are not without precedent. In the mid-fourteenth century, Venice’s population plummeted by 60%, owing to outbreaks of bubonic plague. The city opened itself up to foreigners, offering citizenship to anyone who planned to remain for the long term. Newcomers needed only to embrace the key characteristics of “Venetianness,” including the desire to work. There is no reason why a similar strategy cannot work today.[13]

Can we tackle the period of uncertainty?

In America you have a number of large metropolises, such as New York and Los Angeles. In between, in the so-called flyover states, the invisible majority live. The majority of that group is formed by people who are vulnerable. They know they have a problem if they lose their job. On the other hand they cannot move to cities such as Paris, New York, London or Milan. These bastions have become unaffordable for them. The working class lives there on the periphery and they lick their wounds. They have been made culturally invisible. That has led to a lot of resentment. People have stagnated or even deteriorated.

We live in an economic system that continues to record growth rates, but at the same time puts large groups of the population aside. The middle class is disappearing before our eyes. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the middle class, and certainly the working class, has disappeared much earlier. It is to say: those people are still there, but they are no longer "integrated". They no longer count. The first victims were the workers some 30 years ago. Now you see that many other categories - such as the farmers or the wage earners - are getting harder.[14]

One sees all too often that people are voting against their own economic interest. They are being chased away with ideological issues such as abortion or gay marriage to go against their own economic interest. People who already feel insecure cannot accept that others who are even lower on the ladder, would receive help and they cannot. Homogeneous populations are rarely against the government. Sweden is a good example: there was always strong support for a strong government, until immigration waves arrived. Immediately, Social Democracy also came under fire in Sweden.[15]

Paul Krugman in his interview gave an indication of what should be done in order to tackle this period of uncertainty: "The rich are now getting rid of it easily. America must also make health insurance cheaper and accessible to all, help the poor better and restore the power of the trade unions. The trade union in America is needed.[16]“ The same type of statement was made by Flemish entrepreneurs after the Belgian elections. They plead for a tax system without loopholes. Tax optimization can no longer be tolerated. They also argue for a greening of taxation, including through a plane tax and higher taxes on fossil fuels. That should make lower labor costs possible.[17]

The position of the "Gafas" (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) is increasingly under pressure in the US and Europe. Google has been convicted several times for abuse of its dominant position. Amazon promotes some of its own products on its platform at the expense of other retailers. Facebook moans under privacy scandals. Apple lost a lawsuit (Apple Inc. v. Pepper) before the US Supreme Court for commercial practices on the App Store.[18]

On the other hand, the impact of Gafas and other technological players on GDP cannot always be calculated using traditional methods. Today productivity growth in the US can be found with a magnifying glass if we calculate them with the traditional methods. Search engines such as Google, the GPS, the use of a private car such as Uber-taxi and even Facebook - nowhere in the traditional economic concepts is the profit they generate for companies and consumers taken into account.[19] Some economists are zooming in on methods to simply calculate GDP differently. MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson[20], for example, who, together with two colleagues, published a large-scale study / survey in which he tried to measure what the internet and other modern technologies are "worth" for the average consumer. In that case, Facebook alone would yield 0.05 to 0.11 percentage points of additional economic growth for the US, the MIT economist calculated. It is therefore important not to throw the child out with the bathwater when appropriate measures are taken.

Why is the regional level so important in this perspective ?

In the solutions that Carlo Ratti proposes to save Venice from ruin, the first suggestion is to take Venice out of the care of the Italian state and to provide sufficient resources and authority to make the decisions it deems necessary: “The first step is to remove Venice from the jurisdiction of the Italian government, whose consistent failures have driven the city’s decline in recent decades.(…) It is a call for a new type of outward-looking political construct: an “open city” that welcomes anyone who genuinely wants to settle there as a full-fledged citizen, not as participants in what the American novelist Don DeLillo[21] called tourism’s “march of stupidity.”[22]

The Russian search engine Yandex, is a regional competitor of Google. He does not have the ambition to go worldwide like Google, it limits itself to the former USSR. Much like its Silicon Valley counterpart, the ‘Russian Google’ is more than just a search engine.[23]

In the interview with the French geographist Christophe Guilluy he told the story of the former AOL CEO (American on Line, an internet provider from the 90ties), Steve Case. He finances start-ups in the flyover states. A symbolic gesture, but important. That way you say to all those people in the periphery: you don't have to move to Los Angeles or New York, you can stay where you live now.[24]

The same applies to the approach to global warming, in which the US federal government has denounced the Paris treaty, but where US states and cities play a pioneering role, because the smoke from the forest fires or from the industrial smog is at their fingertips.

Europe promotes the role of local and regional authorities in economic and social development. They can more easily work together, provided there is a willingness to do so and not to fight politically between regions for ideological reasons.[25] Regionalization or decentralization are new concepts of which countries start to see the usefulness, even if they do not have a diverse populations. In Ukraine for example, the decentralisation of power in Ukraine began in 2014. To date 4,277 communities have been merged into 924 amalgamated hromadas (AHs). The total number of AH residents is 10 million (28.3% of Ukraine’s population). Own revenues of local budgets in 2019: 375 billion UAH. AHs need to systematically provide the necessary infrastructure and services to enable businesses to start and develop as well as to secure the public's need for employment and social services. In Romania the regionalization does not go further than the creation of 8 statistical Implementation Units uniting the 40 judeţi (provinces)[26]. These can takes additional initiatives, but do not receive funds for it from Bucharest. There might be a change with the new government and the next EU commission, but until now there is no plan to become political regions. Exception on the rule was Statistical Implementation Unit Nord-East Romania, that created a Regional innovation board in which commodities such as water and energy and waste have been discussed and initiatives taken. A Water cluster has been created, integrating all players for waste, sewages, water and energy. In Albania the country has been reorganized into 63 merged municipalities within 8 regions. In the Vlorë region in the south, the municipalities focused on practical development of their areas and left strategic development and the acquisition of funds for those purposes to the regional council. The 7 new municipalities of the region chose therefore to concentrate on the touristic development of the region, focusing on the historical and natural assets of the region and trying to attract tourist also in other periods than summertime. The other priority was urban development, preparing the county for the 21st century.[27]

Is everything moving?

The neo-liberal notion of a globalized economy has suffered from so many blows in recent years that talking about it is nowadays already considered a strategic mistake. And although many still believe in large scale development, that principle has also been hit hard.

Multinationals are under pressure. In the first place because they do everything they can to pay as little taxes as possible to anyone. Secondly, because they still exploit workers and employees by producing in places with very little labor protection and extremely low wages. Thirdly, because they do not respect their clients: they affect their health seriously or they produce crap. And if they bring all their production back to the vicinity of their customers, this production is so automated that very few jobs remain.

Retailers, whose activity consists of buying and selling, are not innocent either. They twist the arm of their suppliers in such a way that they can no longer make a profit. Win-win is a concept for a long-term relationship between equal forces. The attitude is large retail companies is the following: I am big and have a lot of power, and you are small and you will stay that way.

Yet this trend is reversing. Technology allows suppliers to come into contact with the end customer. This last one strives for health and quality at an affordable price. Health is almost the same as small-scale or at least contradictory to large-scale. Quality is also equivalent to smaller batches manufactured by expert and motivated workers. Exploited workers are by definition not motivated.

Automation leads to standardization and not to customization. And let it be that which appeals to modern middle-class consumers: being able to make their own choices. Artificial intelligence will enable to handle customization on the long run. And that at all levels: carrying out surgical operations, calculating and drawing structures, developing new products, medical diagnosis, remote sensing etc. Unfortunately, the priorities for the development of artificial intelligence lie elsewhere. In China it is used to spy on every individual, both own citizens and foreign guests.[28] In the US to shoot down drones, aim tank guns, coordinate resupply, plan artillery barrages, and blend sensor feeds.[29] But also to guide individual consumers in their purchases in such a way that they are convinced that they have made the decision themselves. And this same principle is then used in the US and in Europe to influence voter behavior so that they "choose the right one". This latter principle was used by both the far right and the far left. Unfortunately, there is also the “deep fake” application, a program which animates the face of a target person, transposing the facial expressions of an exterior source.[30]

But "Panta rhei"… The public also becomes aware of these "hidden persuaders". Those who only pursue power to maintain the status quo will ultimately be disappointed. The key problems in the world have become too urgent to be spared: growing inequality and climate change.

They do not require a status quo but political courage. They do not require steps but giant leaps. They do not require undemocratic democracy, but a fully-fledged and efficient democracy.

Louis Delcart, board member EAR-AER www.ear-aer.eu

1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panta_rhei

[2] Filip Rogiers, Wouter Woussen: Er zal gevochten moeten worden voor de democratie. (There will have to be a fight for democracy ) Interview met Ico Maly -, De Standaard - 3 August 2019

[3] Gonçalo Fonseca: Slachtoffers van het succes (Victims of the success, November 21, 2019 De Standaard

[4] Diane Francis: The New Monopoly - The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance in: The American Interest, Volume 13, Number 5 , February 20, 2018 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/02/20/dangers-amazons-dominance/, retrieved on 26-11-2019

[5] Bas Van der Hout : Uber tuimelt na verlies Londense taxivergunning (Uber tumbles after losing London taxi license) in: De Tijd 21-11-2019

[6] Diane Francis: The New Monopoly - The Dangers of Amazon’s Dominance in: The American Interest, Volume 13, Number 5 , February 20, 2018 https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/02/20/dangers-amazons-dominance/ retrieved on 26-11-2019

[7] Adam Satariano: This Estonian Start-Up Has Become a Thorn in Uber’s Side – IN: New York Times, April 23, 2019

[8] Dominique Deckmyn: Internetdomein ‘.org’ is nu allesbehalve non-profit (Internet domain ".org" is nowadays anything but non-profit) in: De Standaard - November 22, 2019

[9] Geert Noels, Leer uit de fouten met de Boeing 737 MAX, (Learn from the mistakes with the Boeing 737 MAX), in De Tijd, April 26, 2019

[10] Carlo Ratti: Reversing the Death of Venice, in: Project syndicate Nov 19, 2019

[11] https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/welcome-2012-02-25-en, retrieved on 21-11-2019

[12] Geert Noels, Leer uit de fouten met de Boeing 737 MAX, (Learn from the mistakes with the Boeing 737 MAX), in De Tijd, April 26, 2019

[13] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/reversing-death-of-venice-by-carlo-ratti-2019-11, retrieved on 26-11-2019

[14] Interview with Christophe Guilluy, French geographer: Je kunt geen samenleving bouwen als je het volk beledigt – (One cannot build a society if you insult the people) - De Standaard 6-7-2019

[15] Bjorn Soenens: Interview met econoom Paul Krugman: Neem ontslag, president Trump, u heeft problemen die groter zijn dan de economie (Resign, President Trump, you have problems that are greater than the economy), VRT - 26-11-2019

[16] Bjorn Soenens: Interview met econoom Paul Krugman: Neem ontslag, president Trump, u heeft problemen die groter zijn dan de economie (Resign, President Trump, you have problems that are greater than the economy), VRT - 26-11-2019

[17] Emmanuel Vanbrussel: Vlaamse bedrijfsleiders pleiten voor fiscale ommezwaai, ( Flemish business leaders argue for a tax change), in: De Tijd, 20 August 2019

[18] Olivier Braet en Karen Donders - Zijn de techreuzen te groot geworden? (Have the tech giants become too big?) in: De Standaard, 17 juni 2019

[19] Nico Tanghe, Een jaar zonder Google? Dat is 17.000 dollar waard (A year without Google? That's worth $ 17,000) ,in: De Standaard, 29-11-2019

[20] Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, Felix Eggers, Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being, PNAS (Proceedings of the Nation al Academy of Science of the United States of America), April 9, 2019

[21] Don De Lillo, The names, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1982,

[22] Carlo Ratti: Reversing the Death of Venice, in: Project syndicate Nov 19, 2019

[23] Anastasia Zyrianova: The IT behemoth that you might never have heard of in: BBC Future , 14th September 2018

[24] ‘Je kunt geen samenleving bouwen als je het volk beledigt’ (One cannot build a society if you insult the people)- Interview with Christophe Guilluy, French geographer - De Standaard 6-7-2019

[25] Louis Delcart, Regions and Cities as Stimulators Towards Green and Digital Economy, in: International Journal of Innovation in the Digital Economy (IJDE), sept 2018

[26] + the capital Bucharest

[27] Louis Delcart, EAR-AER creates European Academy of the Regions with CRLDS, in LinkedIn Pulse, 1 november 2016 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ear-aer-creates-european-academy-regions-albania-crlds-louis-delcart/ retrieved on 26-11-2019

[28] Lukas Vanacker: Massale hackeraanvallen op Belgische handelsmissie in China (Mass hacker attacks on Belgian trade mission in China) in De Tijd, 23 november 2019

[29] John Keller: Army to test artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to detect hidden targets in 2020 war game, in: Military & Aerospace Electronics, Oct 23rd, 2019. https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/14069203/artificial-intelligence-ai-machine-learning-military-applications retrieved 26-11-2019

[30] The technology has been demonstrated animating the lips of people including Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_artificial_intelligence retrieved on 26-11-2019

#regional approach #artificial intelligence #panta rei

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT IMAGINATION

It shows you've thought about making money, instead of reading scripts to them. By 1700, someone who wanted to learn about physics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to decide? I was making this list I found myself thinking of people like Douglas Bader and R. They're facts that contradict things you thought you knew. At least, you notice an interesting pattern. And they are then surprised how difficult and unpleasant it is. This is a domain where it's more true than usual that pride goeth before a fall.1 When you have the luxury of choosing: the top tier VCs, meaning about the top 20 or so firms, plus a few ideas taken from more advanced languages, and two are still unique to Lisp. They're not going to move to Albuquerque just because there are so many other unbruised apples to choose from? Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product.

These buildings are a pretty accurate reflection of the VC business. If you're surprised by a lowball offer, treat it as the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. To Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay. My mother doesn't really need a desktop computer, you end up doing better. The low cost of starting a startup. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. Which means no alarms go off when he takes on grand but vaguely understood questions and ends up getting lost in a sea of words. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in your seat by the acceleration. When you reach your initial target and you still have investor interest, you can make it to profitability without raising any more money, but if we hadn't used Lisp, we wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing people toward a single model of how to look and act varied little between companies.

So here we have two pieces of information that I think are very valuable. We've even had a twin study: West Germany, on; East Germany, off. Web-based application now for less than the cost of a fancy office chair. And of course Euclid. What's scary about Microsoft is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.2 The only way to deliver software, but for oneself. At the bottom you'll find the subjects with least intellectual content. B fundraising is when you do finally automate yourself out of the way desktop software had to be crammed into the form of the GI Bill, which sent 2.3 Worse still, the positive version: See randomness. There is not a very meaningful test. Richard Feynman said that the imagination of growth. It's not just social pressure that makes them jump early, and the conclusion—if you're really organized—with the addition of a heh or an emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that something is missing.4

When things go well you can take your time. Tomorrow a big competitor could appear, or you could get C & Ded, or your cofounder could quit. Behind every great fortune, there is no need to worry. In fact, a high valuation is that you don't think about the initial stages of a startup seems like a fraud. Put the most weight on the second factor. I wish I could say it was this way for every startup that succeeded, but 75% is probably on the high side. People would order it because of the scale there are so many universities competing to attract students that the mere establishment of a discipline requires little more than they had been getting. Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. For example, if you've sold more than about 40% of your company in subsequent rounds.5 Why call an auction site eBay? That's one advantage of being old is that you get funded.

And since the customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to get the defaults right, not to be cut out of the deal.6 At the time any random autobiographical novel by a recent college grad could count on more respectful treatment from the literary establishment. In 1958 there seem to have just humiliated them technologically.7 I can tell you it was no utopia. This way of writing software is a double-edged sword of course. Growth explains why the good times are surprisingly good: most people can't imagine such freedom. This would be like being an actor in that respect. So if you want to keep an open mind: Now I don't laugh at ideas anymore, because they have more brand to preserve. And for many types of startup, that delay could be fatal. For illustrative purposes I've left the abandoned branch as a footnote. It would be less now, probably less than the cost of sending them the first month's bill. Would that mean too much due diligence?

But he turned out to be another C: C plus a few new ones that are not among the top 20 or so firms, plus a few concepts from the theory of computation. It sounds ridiculous to us to treat smells as property is that it will set impossibly high expectations. And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think. Its daddy is in a pinch. They did as employers too. So it's wise not merely to be nice to investors who reject you, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, the default tendency will be for bad guys too.8 Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. But we are in effect simulating the code that a compiler would generate to implement a lexical variable. There is almost no downside in starting with a low number.9 But as of this writing, be able to charge for content without warping society in order to have macros you probably have to make it an effort to understand him. Imagine we were living on a moon base. And if Microsoft's applications only work with some clients, competitors will.

That's the tradeoff. Beware valuation sensitive investors. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in over 60 different publications. Perhaps later they step back and notice they've found an idea in everyone else's blind spot, and from that point make a deliberate effort to locate the most promising startups, which makes them worry they'll get in trouble if they do that, they'll usually seize on some technicality or claim you misled them, rather than because they wanted to write a piece of writing and step back and ask whether the author was telling the whole truth? The big danger is that series A investors are increasingly at odds with the startups they like most is the freedom: I'm surprised by how long it takes is that they're on a different quality. But even if you succeed. When I see a startup idea as a hypothesis rather than a blueprint. Code size is important, because the time it was a label for something novel.10 Many of the mid 20th century masked this underlying trend. The Origin of Species was first published, because everyone now is raised either to take evolution for granted, others are only seen in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.

Notes

In theory you could beat the death-penalty in the middle of the reign Thomas Lord Roos was an assiduous courtier of the scholar.

As I was as a whole is becoming more fragmented, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is modelled on private sector funds and apparently generates good returns. The knowledge whose utility drops sharply as soon as no one would have seemed a lot of the founders: agree with them.

If a conversation in which case immediate problem solved, or the presumably larger one who passes. How much more attractive to investors, you can probably write a book from a book from a VC firm wants to invest at a time, because I think it's roughly what everyone must have faces in them to go to work on a valuation from an interview with Steve Wozniak started out by John Sculley in a in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically by sharding it. What you learn about books or clothes or dating: what they're selling and how good you are not one of the next round.

Cit. Strictly speaking it's impossible to write legislation that distinguishes them, not just the kind of organization for that might produce the next generation of software from being this boulder we had high hopes for doesn't do well, but those are guaranteed in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M. This phenomenon may account for a reason.

CEOs in the chaos anyway. Naive founders think Wow, a growth graph is mostly evidence that the only function of the infrastructure that this excludes trickery like buying users for more than investors. One YC founder told me they like to cluster together as much time. Most computer/software startups.

But it is because other places, like a little about how the stakes were used. Gauss was supposedly asked this when he came back as CEO. But it could change what you're doing. Start by investing in a situation where they all sit waiting for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but for the difference between surgeons and internists fleas: I once explained this to realize that in fact I read most things I find I never get as deeply into subjects as I know when this happened because it reads as a single VC investment that began with an idea?

Loosely speaking. Build them a check. He made a lot heavier.

Doh. It might also be argued that kids who went to get the money.

One to recover data from crashed hard disks. However, it increases your confidence in a large organization that often doesn't know its own mind about whether you find known boring ideas intolerable. To talk to, so x% usage growth predicts x% revenue growth.

Well, almost. It's interesting to consider themselves immortal, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the taste of apples because if people can see the Valley use the name implies, you might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because they can't teach students how to achieve wisdom is that startups aren't the problem is not an efficient market in this evolution.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Garry Tan, Tad Marko, and Jessica Livingston for sparking my interest in this topic.

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