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Glen -<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:bb1cb48b-f93b-fad8-c853-cffcd1faa5dd@gmail.com">It seems
like the Ebook directly from Lulu is cheaper:
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/jenny-quillien/delights-muse-on-christopher-alexanders-the-nature-of-order-a-summary-and-personal-interpretation/ebook/product-1nq2m2vd.html?q=Delight%27s+Muse&page=1&pageSize=4">https://www.lulu.com/shop/jenny-quillien/delights-muse-on-christopher-alexanders-the-nature-of-order-a-summary-and-personal-interpretation/ebook/product-1nq2m2vd.html?q=Delight%27s+Muse&page=1&pageSize=4</a>
<br>
<br>
Not that Amazon sucks or anything ... Yay! A New Walmart to
destroy small businesses! What will our billionaire overlords
think up next?
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>That's what my grandparents said about <i>Monkey Wards</i> and <i>Sears&Roebuck</i>
as they used the catalog in their outhouses for what they claimed
they were good for (this is before clay-coated glossy-paper of
course). They were giving the average
hilbilly/farmer/rancher/etc options that the local
dry-goods/hardware/blacksmith couldn't begin to compete with, and
sure enough they eventually swamped those folks out of the game.<br>
</p>
<p>I think I'm a bigger luddite than you in this regard but I do
appreciate your patient pro-active help with all of us to be
reminded. You may notice that I usually link to Goodreads which
is not as good of a reference/review site as I would like (the
spotty wisdom/ignorance of crowds being what they are). I
personally avoid buying books from Amazon, though I did recently
discover that the well-respected source of quality used books and
book information Abe Books was purchased (quietly but not
silently) by Bezos & Co. For all I know Goodreads now belongs
to Bezos or Zuck or even (too plebian for?) Musk.<br>
</p>
<p>I was meeting my wife's sister/b-in-law way back in the day
(1981?) in Fayetteville AR, when Sam Walton's empire was just
beginning to metastasize into the world. They and everyone we
met was totally gaga over their local-boy-done-good. They were
full of 'murrican-made rhetoric and so forth. I already saw the
writing on the wall then, even though many small-towns embraced
their onslaught they way they did Wards and Sears a century
before. In my era the only brand-name services where I lived
were "service" stations and even those were operated by an old man
in grubby overalls and you decided on which of the 2 or 3 to
purchase from based on whether you liked or trusted them and
whether or not very many of your friends or neighbors had acutely
good/bad experiences with them, or for many whether they went to
the same church as you. Horse sense rules until gossip trumps
it? But these were tiny towns, etc. Even in the small cities
(large towns) e.g. Silver City/Socorro there were already big
chain name grocery stores and 5&10 stores that everyone
flocked to for the larger selection and the consistency of service
and product quality (consistent sometimes trumps good).</p>
<p>On an offline correspondence we have discussed (very lightly)
negEntropy and the forward march of complex-adaptive-systems. In
this thread we have been discussing frequency/scaling, of late.
I think that is where the "problem" if there is one objectively
(there is definitely a problem *subjectively*). The inevitable
march of self-organizing systems on top of self-organizing systems
yields new substrates (where and how we shop for things whose
where and how of production on top of the where and how of
materials extraction is obscured to us) which we then (are able to
and are required to) treat as "simples"/"atomics". <br>
</p>
<p> Millennia ago, the formation of "civilization" and "cities",
etc. made human beings something of a commodity to one another
(or the rich and powerful, or the institutions formed around
them?). The factory model and interchangeable parts and public
schools systems advanced that to a higher level. I may sometimes
seem to vilify these things, I now just call them "what is" and am
loathe to join the coal-rolling diesel-dually paired flag waving,
(US/Confederate, US/Don't Tread, US/TrumpHumpQ, etc),
open-carrying parade of my brothers to *protest* the very things
they depend deeply on, as if to erode the firmament under their
own feet. I want to shout "Be careful what you ask for!" when I
drive by in my electric car, but I don't want to test my run-flat
tires against their stock of ammunition just aching to be used for
something righteous.<br>
</p>
<p>In another thread EricS references the "erosion of our
institutions" (I think he used another word than erosion) and I
*think* this is part of the larger scale march of negEntropy which
is Life Evolving (in the large). The biosphere has been
"evolving" as a co-evolution of a very large complex set of
creatura capable of having large effects on
(recruiting/subsuming?) the pleroma, but ~10k years ago,
Teilhard's "Noosphere" began to coagulate on the surface of the
language babbling, tool-wielding species that is us, and we have
now become a very thick slime-mold like scum which provides the
substrate (or not) for another leap in complexity. The emergence
of the Amazons and Aliebabas on top of Walmarts and Costcos, and
Home Depots and Menards and Krogers which exploited a niche
created by the Kmarts and TG&Ys and Newberries and Piggly
Wigglys and Safeways and A&Ps, etc. seems just to be this
march of NegEntropy at the next scale. <br>
</p>
<p>I'm sympathetic with your constant reminder of "premature
registration" and in fact would claim as much as it functions as a
"bug" in good analysis and even design it is a "feature" in this
layer-upon-layer buildup of complexity. The urge to pull into a
Starbucks or a McDonalds because it is convenient and
predicatable, even if we know they somehow are helping to deforest
Argentina and subjugate workers, is pretty strong if otherwise
superficial. You and I can (maybe) ignore that urge, even turn
it into an allergy, but they are flooding the streets of the first
(and first-aspiring) world. Many (prematurely or
inappropriately) register their need for some kind of
soothing/familiarity onto a food-service experience and for
branding-affinity or just plain familiarity express it through a
fast-food or themed-restaurant/donut/coffee-shop experience.
Before Amazon, it was Barnes and Noble, Hastings, etc. for books
which (apparently for many) no longer soothe. Sugar-laced
milk-substitutes frothed into (ir)responsibly sourced coffee syrup
is likely to give way to something else (glucose-caffeine-laced
Huel?) in a decade or so too.<br>
</p>
<p>No end to this rant, so I will just stop. What I'm really
getting at is the *pattern*, the *morphodynamics* of evolution of
a human-society "ecosystem" that is both inevitable (in fact, but
not in feature) and right out in the open and presumably within
our power to at least *shape*. *resisting* Walmart/Amazon
*helps* but I don't know what precisely to do *beyond* that.</p>
<p>Yesterday, our 5 month old puppy's collar finally got too tight
for his wellbeing so I was instructed to "pick up a new one" at
the pet store. All they had were brightly colored, nylon
(plastic) jobs that cost $20 and were almost surely constructed in
China and shipped over by the 100,000 in shipping containers. I
bought one with a wince, and on the way home realized that the
half-dozen failed or deprecated USB cords I was waffling about how
to recycle/dispose-of could have quite easily (and fashionably)
been woven (thank you cub-scouts circa 1966) into a perfectly good
collar. Oh well, that would make us seem too much like old
Hippies... so 100 years from now that collar and the discarded
USB cables will be floating in the Pacific Gyre... but our puppy
will be long, long gone and we nearly as long gone, and it will
only be our great grandchildren who will care? The old collar
just went down the time-capsule pipe that is my spiral
staircase... sequestering (interesting?) carbon and precious
metals one tiny bit at a time.<br>
</p>
<p>I said I would stop didn't I? Inertia! Talkaholism!
Ideaphoria!<br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:bb1cb48b-f93b-fad8-c853-cffcd1faa5dd@gmail.com">On
9/27/22 19:02, Steve Smith wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I believe Jenny is still subscribed to
this list but probably isn't following it closely so may not
have seen any of this discussion. I recommend her personal
reflections on Alexander's work: Delight's Muse
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://www.amazon.com/DelightS-Christopher-AlexanderS-Nature-Order/dp/143031317X"><https://www.amazon.com/DelightS-Christopher-AlexanderS-Nature-Order/dp/143031317X></a>
.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</blockquote>
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