Buried in the web

There's so much new text on the web that the valuable old writing is difficult to find. I know that Ali Davis wrote an excellent description of various kinds of answers, with a very lucid example of how some answers open the space of possible conversations and others restrict it. I'm 99% sure she posted it to improvisation.ws, and while archive.org has others of her postings, that one is gone and I can't find it.

Sigh.

So I want to quote this little gem before it becomes impossible to find, from a blog mostly about economics:

The one revelation for me was Austria, especially rural Austria. At first I wondered if what I was seeing was an unrepresentative sample—tourist areas that looked richer than usual. But no, the whole of rural Austria looks extremely impressive—like a Swiss travel poster. It’s makes America’s built environment look shoddy by comparison.

Everything looked high quality and attractive. The trains, trams and buses all looked brand new. The roads had no potholes and were well designed. The drivers were all skilled and the traffic flowed smoothly. Doors and windows seemed as solid as a bank vault, not the flimsy Home Depot crap you get in America.

Yes, I know that America is richer than Austria. I know that there is more to GDP than the quality of the built environment. Services matter (don’t ask about their food). Size of houses matters. But I’d also argue that quality counts for something, and probably gets overlooked in GDP comparisons. If an Austrian (or German) told me that America seemed poorer than their home country, I would not argue with them. It’s all subjective.

The residential buildings in rural Austria were quite attractive, quite unlike the ugly new houses being built in America. I can’t blame America for lacking the beautiful baroque buildings of Vienna and Salzburg; we are too new to have any of those. But why is even the modern architecture in Austria so much better.

At some point I'm going to take my office chair to Salzburg to get about half of it replaced. An long-day bicycle trip each way, with the chair on a trailer. No doubt I will stay at my favourite hotel there, one that's a perfect example of the attitude he describes in that blog posting: Money was spent on something good and while the goodness somehow counts for something, counting it is difficult and not done.

That hotel is just pleasant. There's a bourgeois solidity that isn't visible in photos (on booking sites or here) and isn't visible in economic statistics either.

Meanwhile, here's a photo from a chain hotel in a rich American city. The door looked like plastic to my eyes, the frame too, and then there's the door handle.