Homes need to be built for better internet
I have the privilege of knowing how to troubleshoot this stuff on my own largely due to my profession as a tech journalist. To others, this stuff is a foreign language. Knowing how to set up a home internet system is not a skill everyone has, and the complicated steps required to do it properly make moving to a new place more stressful, especially if you work remotely and need the internet to earn a paycheck.
Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas
Such is the power of the Sphere; at the exact moment you ask yourself What exactly are we all doing here?, the building morphs into a Dali-esque rendering of Elvis, your brain floods with dopamine, and you lose your critical faculties.
And what an excellent title.
When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. 1 Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism, windowless and nearly featureless. Its only apertures are a series of ventilation hoods meant to hide microwave-satellite arrays, which communicate with ground-based relay stations and satellites in space.
The McMansion as harbinger of the American apocalypse
In the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation.
One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up. That’s assuming we manage to plan for the future and come through a political fight antithetical to the mortal coil of capitalism: late, fossil, or otherwise.