It wasn't even industrialisation - it was agriculture. Do people really like cities? I am not so sure - certainly many do, but many also hanker for the village and there are a bunch of interesting theories about us working well at 'village scale' (I could be easily convinced that no-one hankers for the suburbs..) I think if the economic opportunities were not so heavily weighted towards cities we would see much reduced urbanisation.
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
How much of this is because that's where the jobs are? Take that away and where would people choose to live? Wasn't there a notable exodus from SF, for example, during covid when many jobs went remote?
Most of the stuff people do in cities was shut or severely degraded during Covid, not just the jobs. If you can't take a quick walk to your favorite cafe in the morning or stop by a cool art event in the evening, yeah, city living gets relatively less appealing.
I'm genuinely surprised that you don't know lots of people who enjoy living in a city for its own sake and not only because something is keeping them there.
Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.
Yes, especially something that touches DB. Router and shell are stupidly simple and you get auto failover in some 30 minutes. That is something make me stick to mysql.
I have to steal part of the discussion at the Guardian for this - I have read neither translation but this is illuminating and unhelpfully makes me want to read both:
Compare the opening lines:
Fagles:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Wilson:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Wilson translation is TOO distilled/simplified for me. It reads something like Hemingway or a hard-boiled noir detective story.
The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.
However, Wilson made her translation using strict iambic pentameter and matching line count to retain the pace of the original poem. That brings something new to the table. And IIRC her simplified language is supposed to better match the nature of the poem as rooted in oral tradition. It was never meant to be complex and florid — regular folks were enjoying this story as much as anyone else.
If anything, this emphasizes that no single translation will be the definitive one. (And to call Wilson’s “artless” is quite a stretch.)
"It's honestly perplexing how major powers seem incapable of learning from history."
I think you mean it is perplexing how the leaders of certain major powers seem incapable of learning from history. It seems clear the relevant advice has been available. And yes, I also suspect arrogance but the list of problematic personality traits that apply to the current situation have been exhaustively detailed all over the place...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
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