Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

A focus on manufacturing gives China another advantage in technological competition with the United States. It can simply wait for American scientists to do the fundamental research before Chinese companies take over the production.

The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers.

...it was still common to hear Americans say that Chinese companies couldn’t innovate. China could only copy and steal, they said. Some folks in Silicon Valley knew that there were cool things cooking in Shenzhen, but the broader attitude among Americans was condescension.

The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing.

Each time I left Beijing and Shanghai to enter more remote parts of the country, I was astonished by how even China’s poorest provinces have better infrastructure than America’s richest.

Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded.

Can a government be too efficient? Six years in China taught me that the answer is yes, when it is unbounded by citizen input.

I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

But in order to establish that this new research was in fact research, she must connect it with careful threads to the traditional archives, she must display a thorough grasp of established knowledge, and on pain of disgrace she must not mispronounce any venerable name.

...an insulting categorization, complained the professors of what had then been called the Old Knowledge, which made their discipline appear quaint and useless, affecting their student numbers, always lower than those in the so-called Department of the New Knowledge, and limited their access to space and funding.

It is good, it is bad, it is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page...

At night, she rises from her bed and goes outside. She sits between the woven, rough sides of her skeps. The humming, vibrating noises from within, beginning just after dawn, seem to her the most eloquent, articulate, perfect language there is.

The house has no mice. Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.

She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

Dex sighed. “A leech is a person who takes without giving back. It’s a metaphor.”
Mosscap considered that. “I don’t think it’s very kind to use an entire subclass of animal as a metaphor for behavior that you deem unseemly.”
Dex threw up their hands. “Well, we do it, all the time.”

“I’m surprised you weren’t familiar with crown shyness,” Mosscap said. “You’re so knowledgeable about plants.”
“I know herbs and ornamentals,” Dex said. “I don’t really know trees, just some of their names.”
“Well, that’s the nice thing about trees.” Mosscap put its hands on its hips as it looked around. “They’re not going anywhere. You can take all the time you need to get to know them.”

Dex opened the door to find Mosscap on the other side, knuckles raised mid-knock. In its other hand it grasped a polished wooden cane, which it leaned heavily on. “Good morning, Sibling Dex!” the robot said. “Congratulations on having sex last night.”

Okay, 'Dryad' like is the most romantic poem ever about giving blow jobs to strange men in an idyllic forest. I can imagine David Attenborough narrating it, in sepulchral tones, and then going 'Oh ... fuck!'

“If I wanted to harvest propolis, I’d have to stick my hands in a bee colony,” Mosscap said. “I’d be very well acquainted with where it came from. But if I chose casein for my replacement part, I’d never know what cow I owed my thanks to.”

There were houses made of plastic, of old tires, of shipping crates painted every color a human eye could perceive. Cracks bestowed by age were patched with modern touches, like mycelium or bacterial cement, giving an impression like that of broken teacups mended with gold—a lasting beauty, born out of brief destruction.

“I read a book while you were sleeping,” Mosscap said, holding up its pocket computer. “And I would really like to discuss it with you.” Dex blinked twice.
“You woke me up to talk about a book?”

The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, as were shoes, plumbing, pillows, heaters, washing machines, paint, lamps, soap, refrigeration, and all the other countless trappings humans struggle to imagine life without.

For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak

with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.

“I went through the library and found a book that taught me how. I’ve never read a book before; it was very exciting. They’re not supposed to fall apart when you touch them, though, right?”

Not everything in the Factory Age burned oil. There had been those who had seen the writing on the wall, who had made places such as this to serve as example of what could be. But these were merely islands in a toxic sea. The good intentions of a few individuals had not been enough, could never have been enough to upend a paradigm entirely.

And what did we do before beds? Dex thought angrily. What did we do before showers? The human species did just fine for hundreds of thousands of years without any of that, so why can’t you?

... nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world.

They both watched the light for a few moments—the light, and the pollen dancing within it. A shadow of a bird sailed by. A delicate spider meticulously lay anchor lines of silk between old control levers. A vine stretched, its movement out of sync with human time.