I have seen this perspective a lot and I don't understand it at all. When I meet a stranger, I don't wonder if they exercise enough for me to befriend them. Same for their clothes-shopping habits, past some very basic threshold. Same for whether they pay for me.
A lot of this advice for how to improve yourself so that other people like you comes off so incredibly vain, neurotic, and juvenile.
I firmly disagree with this advice as well; it strikes me as the sort of advice one comes up with when sitting around one's room wondering why one doesn't have any friends. The worst part about it is that it will get you doing all these activities that take up your time but don't really solve the friend problem.
Making friends isn't trivial, but it isn't a complex thing - just ask people you sort of vaguely know to hang out sometimes. Asking people to spend time together is about 10,000,000% more effective than any other strategy.
Do you firmly disagree with all of it, or just the clothes and gym part?
I don't have any objection to suggestions like "help people" or "be [a] good friend" or even "cook" and I think they're a core part of making friends. Today I cooked dinner for two friends and just got back from driving one of them home. They've been similarly kind to me in the past. Friendships are built on foundations like this.
It's absolutely correct that you need to invite people to do stuff before you worry about whether you're helpful enough, but you also need to go from being two or more people who kinda sorta know each other to actual friends.
They reflect the traits that OP values in others; these criteria wouldn't be universal. I think the thought experiment still holds: If I met myself on the street, would I like that person? If not, why not, and how can I fix that?
I'm at Paris Baguette, a Korean lower-end coffee shop chain common in the Bay Area. The guy next to me has headphones on and his laptop on a stand. Or it's four middle-aged Latino women celebrating a birthday. Or it's a bunch of local high-school kids.
Do I lean over and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? Really good coffee they have here, huh?"
I'm at the gym. It's a big-box gym. It's full of dudes wearing Airpods Max, a few couples in skintight athletic outfits, a few teens with phones on tripods filming themselves for Tiktok.
Do I come over, gesture for them to take off their headphones, and say, "Hi, how are you guys doing? That's really good form, on that lift, really good form. Keep it up!"
I'm waiting to cross a road. On the other side of the road is a Caltrain crossing. The traffic light cycle takes forever, and then the train comes and preempts it. And then preempts it again when people finish getting on. A crowd of parents with strollers are waiting to cross. People are returning from the farmer's market with bags of vegetables. People on bikes.
Do I lean over and say, "Hey, how are you guys all doing? It sure takes a while to cross. Wow!"
You got it the opposite way. basically some pseudoscientist thought that the schools of people from the Caucasus had the most beautiful skulls when they were dead. and since he was white he thought that this must be where all white people are coming from. So he claimed that white people are Caucasian. Even if this is of course not true that most Anglo-Saxon people are coming from the Caucasian mountains.
In Florida it wouldn’t be confusing to refer to someone from Hawaii as “Hawaiian,” but in Hawaii it means something much more specific about ancestry, and it’s considered rude and even offensive to misuse it.
In NYC they pronounce Oregon as “Ore-gone,” even though Oregonians pronounce it “Ore-gun.” In Portland, mispronunciation marks you as an ignorant outsider.
Every place has idiosyncratic misuses of terms that come from somewhere else. Of course you are correct about “Caucasian,” but wherever you are from, I’m sure you misuse some other term.
Labeling it as uneducated and unaware is a form of snobbery that you’re unlikely to be entitled to. None of us are.
We all have things we misuse, but I think those things may characterize us sometimes. For example, in Russian we often misuse the word Hindu to mean Indian. It may mean that the person is uneducated and maybe even unaware of the difference. A couple of my friends who've been to India or are nerds about other cultures, don't misuse the word, some even go around ranting about it.
I personally feel that the way Americans use "Caucasian" is a more blatant misuse than others, and maybe that's what made me react that way. Like what is exact idea one has to miss and be unaware of to use "Caucasian" for "white"? What adds to it is that, if I understand correctly, using "Caucasian" instead of "white" in English makes you sound more official and important. I guess I can see that it's being used due to legal tradition and that's hard to change.
Race is a tricky topic in the US due to history. The term is an 18th century creation of German academia, but somehow got adopted in the late 19th c in the US, presumably because racial restrictions were written into law and so fancy terminology was adopted.
No, Caucasian is a bogus term whose origin is in a misinterpretation of the Bible.
In the Genesis, humans were partitioned in descendants of Japheth, Ham and Shem, hence terms like Hamites and Semites.
However the meaning of this partition was completely other than its naive interpretation that was common during Medieval times and until recently.
This partition had absolutely nothing to do with race or with the languages spoken by people, which were pretty much irrelevant in the Antiquity. The partition was based purely on political dependence.
The descendants of Ham were the people politically dependent on Egypt and the descendants of Shem were the people dependent on Assyro-Babylonia.
An example of people closely related and who spoke a very similar language, but who were divided based on political allegiance is that the Phoenicians were counted as descendants of Ham, because they belonged to Egypt, while Hebrews were counted as descendants of Shem, because they belonged to Assyro-Babylonia.
Japheth refers to Caucasus and the descendants of Japheth were the people from Anatolia, where Indo-European kingdoms, like that of the Hittites, were dominant.
During Medieval times, this grouping of people from the Bible was completely misunderstood and it was believed that it refers to race, so it was believed that "descendants of Ham" refers to Africans and "descendants of Japheth", i.e. Caucasians, refers to "white" Europeans, hence the stupid name used in America of "Caucasian".
From deep within the essay, another restatement of praise for East Asian street food culture.
> That is because there is an abundance of inexpensive and delightful street food/casual dining establishments (carts, izakayas, takeaways, food courts, night markets, etc.), that make it a rational, and healthy, choice.
I can easily imagine that a world of unregulated food stalls can deliver food that is cheaper, more ubiquitous, and more convenient. I grew up in a version of such a world!
Is street food ever healthy, by any reasonable definition? What does a steady diet of street food do to a body?
The author shows a tendency to give colorful, but opaque names like "gutterballing" to things that can themselves be explained in a short phrase ("working on something that is similar to, but not exactly what you actually want, and getting predictably frustrated").
Where does this tendency come from? My first guess is self-help literature. Or maybe this is a personality trait to write this way? Or a kind of marketing, becasue only your writing has these colorful fun terms?
I was once watching an old school survivalist talk about Native American/First Peoples legends.
These legends often had a bumbling main character who would usually cause some kind of problem b/c he forgot to do the key thing required for survival. For example, he would pick wet wood that wouldn't work for making a fire etc while his smart friend would pick the dry wood or the wood with lots of oil in it. Let's say bumbling dude is name "Chintatook" (made up name).
Now, when someone is starting to do the wrong thing or not think things through, you can say "Hey, don't be a Chintatook!" and everyone knows what you are talking about.
> That's why having goofy names for them matters so much, because it reminds me not to believe the biggest bog lie of all: that I'm stuck in a situation unlike any I, or anyone else, has ever seen before.
Toward the bottom of the article in case you didn't get that far.
“That's why having goofy names for them matters so much, because it reminds me not to believe the biggest bog lie of all: that I'm stuck in a situation unlike any I, or anyone else, has ever seen before.”
This is backwards. You have the privilege of curating who's not there, by not inviting them. The fascinating people you do invite aren't obligated to show up.
Respectfully disagree. COVID and WFH really was a brick wall to Meetup's momentum.
WeWork bought Meetup because tons of tech Meetups used WeWork spaces to host events.
This acquisition made a lot of sense, IMO. Many companies at the time were much more employee-friendly than now and liked having their employees (who mostly worked in the office) host cool events with free food. Nearly everyone was already downtown, free pizza is free pizza, and talking about Ruby or DevOps or whatever sure as shit beat traffic. This was especially true for startups, which were in WeWork offices.
COVID lockdowns were a huge collective wet blanket atop all of that for obvious reasons.
Moreover, everyone working from home added huge inertia to what was previously a very natural chain of events. Driving downtown for events (and dealing with traffic) was/is a huge commitment, free pizza or not (which isn't really free anymore after you account for gas). Those events being in worse spaces (since event space got harder to find) didn't help.
All of this affected social Meetups too, albeit less so. You used to be able to build a calendar of the Meetups you wanted to hit in a day. If you were already at NY Tech Meetup for something, hitting up a social meetup afterwards was easy.
You've got gentlemen's clubs of the kind that Phileas Fogg from "Around the World in 80 Days" belonged to. They were leisure spaces where the rich could socialize with each other, dine from a wider menu than their own domestic staff could offer, access a bigger reading library, and organize group activities like automotive clubs and regattas.
Then you've got private societies like the Freemasons and the Rotary Club, which were usually segregated by gender and race, had a religious component, and offered services like mutual aid and insurance.
A different take: joining one of these spaces (in the bay area) has exposed me to a weird and unpleasant underbelly of society that I barely knew existed. It's like the worst of Reddit, but in real life. People who want you to work on their projects "for the exposure," crypto scammers and people who are very naive and enthusiastic about crypto, depressed unemployable people, people who secretly live on the lobby couches, elderly people just watching videos all day, get-rich-quick people, people who are always "starting to learn" for years at a time, it's quite an array.
Maker spaces declined over time. When I first started going to TechShop, it was people making nozzles for X-Prize rockets, Stanford grad students who needed better machine tools, Burning Man people making props, steampunks making props, and very serious model railroaders making model locomotives. Four milling machines in use all the time, CNC mills, plasma cutters, water jet cutters - heavy equipment. All the usual woodworking stuff.
A paint shop with proper ventilation.
Autodesk Inventor on all the computers. Lots of very smart people with interesting skill sets. The serious maker spaces were descended from the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.[1]
By the time the maker movement collapsed, it was people grinding out crap to sell on Etsy, "hand made" on a CNC laser cutter. High school students doing the maker thing to get it on their college resume. Printing trinkets with a 3D printer. Classes for teenagers where everybody built kits. Arts and crafts at the advanced kindergarten paper folding level.
Yup, your second paragraph describes the place I'm talking about pretty accurately. Nothing wrong with Etsy trinkets in isolation, but not if that's the limit of what the tools are used for.
I've had the urge/idea to start a maker space in the Los Angeles area on and off for years. My motivation isn't as much as a source for social engagement as much as starting to lay out a path to retirement that will have me busy at a lower level of intensity. My work does have me engaging with thousands of people every year through trade shows and sometimes a dozen trips every year both nationally and internationally.
I own enough equipment to start a very nice maker space with nearly zero cost to outfit the place. What you and the other poster have said is, however, of concern. Have generalized maker spaces died off or turned into something unappealing?
I've had varying ideas about this over the years. I was a mentor for our local FRC (high school robotics) team for about five years. I enjoyed that very much. Yes, my kids were involved. I tried to re-enter that world and was faced with, well, stupid obstacles that very much telegraphed that, at least here, these teams have turned into unappealing political/ideological nightmares --rather than the "let's build cool robots!" feeling from the pre-pandemic era.
One thought was to create a maker space with specific focal activities. Three that come to mind are robotics, auto racing and RC flight. I wonder if that type of focus might mitigate the Etsy crowd effect you mentioned. I have nearly zero interest in having a bunch of people use my Haas CNC machines to mass produce crap for Etsy. One way to mitigate this might be to attach a cost to using the equipment for making anything to sell anywhere. For example, using a Haas VF-2 might cost $200 per hour plus consumables, etc. Not sure if that would work. You could also limit this sort of production-level work to a certain schedule and, maybe, it can only be done by or with staff. Not sure.
The business problem with maker spaces is that the "gym model" didn't work. The gym model is that you pay some fixed fee per month, and don't come very often.
People who bought TechShop memberships showed up too much. Many were using the place as their day job.
There are some successes. Maker Nexus in Silicon Valley pivoted to after-school activities for teens. Humanmade in San Francisco is mostly a job training center, and gets some government funding. There are some library-based maker spaces, but they're mostly basic 3D printing and crafts.
There's also pricing. Techshop started at $100/month and rose to $125 before they went bust. Humanmade is at $250. That's too high for casual users. If you raise the price too much, you mostly have customers who are there all the time, and now you don't have enough capacity.
The financial numbers just didn't work out. Most of the remaining maker spaces have some degree of public financing, as part of a college or work training center.
Yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if a more transactional model might work better.
Perhaps something like FedEx Office (formerly Kinkos). No membership. You go in and you pay to use equipment and resources. Of course, there would have to be levels of qualification someone would have to pass before being allowed to touch certain equipment. I suppose you could have classes (Solidworks, 3D printing, CNC machining, welding, etc.).
Writing that, at some level, it starts to feel complex. I say this in the context of my stated objective, which would be to stay busy at a low stress level after retirement. I am not sure that what I just described fits that model.
There's also a reality most don't want to think about. While, for the most part, dealing with the public is fun and interesting, there's always a very small percentage of people who behave badly. It's the old Tragedy of the Commons story. That's the part that none of us enjoy at all.
Noisebridge was a free, open maker space in San Francisco, and they had too many people just hanging out there. Twice, they had to shut down for over a month, clean out all the crap, and start over. The maker spaces that charge don't have that problem.
At TechShop, the big operational problems were tool deterioration and staff burnout. Tools tended to stabilize at the point where they're just above worn out. The drill bits and milling cutters were dull. The sandpaper on the belt sanders was worn almost smooth. The CNC mill needed a coolant change. The laser cutters had laser systems performing at about 50% of rated power, and you had to halve the feed rate. In a commercial shop, you'd fix things before they got that bad, because you're losing production. The same business logic does not apply to maker spaces.
The staff problem with TechShop was that they paid slightly above minimum wage, which is nowhere near enough to keep people with a broad range of shop skills. The big employee benefit was that you could take classes for free, so it was sort of an apprenticeship program.
Over time, the staff tended to become the ones who couldn't get a job in a real shop.
Those are some of the operational problems you have to beat.
Yeah, this is why I never moved on this idea. There's a lot of potential for it to derail into something that isn't pleasant at all (or self-sustaining/profitable).
A lot of this advice for how to improve yourself so that other people like you comes off so incredibly vain, neurotic, and juvenile.
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