Applying Albion’s Seed to California misses out on Spanish missionary culture and the shipping merchants who came from New York City, which does not have the same puritan roots as New England.
American Nations is a more recent book that describes more of the United States, though with less depth.
The absence of Spanish culture is boggling - it's delibrately avoided ..
A third were born in California,
and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”.
And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures
Clearly there's a third missing (assuming numbers correct, etc).
There's a slew of essays and history entries that begin along the lines of:
The modern state of California was considered part of the Spanish empire for nearly 300 years. The Spanish colonial period had a profound effect on the cultural, religious, and economic development of the state.
The article cited for this thread makes much of Anglo churches in California but makes no mention of, say, the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and other churches that shaped the region (FWiW I'm not religious but as one aware of history Spainish Catholicism had at least as much impact in the region as any other variety)
The Spanish Empire shaped the foundations of land ownership, mineral rights, and water access in the region.
There are shelves of books on the subject - I'm not even in or from the Americas, I'm hardly the person to ask.
The point stands, it's a lousy essay that ignores some substantial American history, likely because it's not "USofA" history.
In general I think as a majority-minority state, applying a primarily UK-focused take on California misses a lot. The largest group in CA is Hispanic-Latino (40% of the population), and that's a group with neither Puritanical nor Scots-Irish background ideology. And 15% of the state is Asian-American... A very small percentage of CA descends from either Puritans/WASPs or Scots-Irish!
An underrated aspect of California, I suspect, is that California's "political class" is not all that representative of the state at large. For example, I seem to recall that Prop 16 was endorsed by numerous major figures, and opposed by none, yet it lost by a large margin in the general election.
If you look at the Latinos and Asians who are politically involved in California, I would predict that they are far from typical, and they're much more likely to be assimilated into the state's progressive political traditions.
My read of Albion’s Seed and American Nations is that they’re more about how a regional culture was germinated and founded, under the idea that the culture (including legal and economic systems) is even more durable than a specific group. So it’s not exactly connected to current demographics.
Reading that the GBC standard specifies 1 ball per second, it’s fun to imagine a module that puts 1,000 balls in slow moving storage, taking 15 minutes to warm up and cool down
I’ve worked on several TS projects that don’t type check but still “compile” (emit non-TS JavaScript). To me that’s the difference between a linter and a compiler, and I wish those projects had stopped compiling when they could no longer type check.
And if woodworking isn't some kind of tactile art, why do people always want to touch wooden furniture or art? Always. Just watch it happen. I'd like to know if that's how all apes react or just we.
I would argue that food "mouth feel" is pretty important (as is the feeling of eating with hands - that's something to turn into art for a third of the planet daily and the rest of us on lucky occasion).
Arguably, whatever's going on with haptics in VR is art. Even if it's porn. Porn is almost as good for spreading art as it is for spreading tech!
There isn't a single fine arts program in the world that will teach you how to draw lines on a piece of paper. If that isn't something you have figured out how to do in the first 18 years of your life, you probably shouldn't be pursuing it at university.
I've been happily hacking on my Ikea Bekant for three years. I replaced the top, replaced the buttons with a double throw rocker switch (1), built a Mac Mini/laptop shelf on the back half, a KVM switch on a little shelf in the front.
Cable management isn't horrible but there's a lot of room for improvement. I'd like to replace all the AC adapters with one big one that can supply everything.
I've built some outlandish and unsatisfying desks in the past, the gradual approach has been better.
1. This is unsafe for children, as they might figure out a way to flip the switch and crush themselves. Please take this consideration into account.
