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News:
I will be in NYC later next week where I will be filmed by a team surrounding a very well-known and public figure in these circles. I think it will be part-interview, part Anthony Bourdain walk around and see what happens. I’m looking forward to this, but not as much as many of you are looking forward to seeing how I actually look in real life.
FbF Book Club:
For those who missed it, we’ve started the latest entry in the FbF Book Club. In this iteration, we are looking at the history of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA, with a focus on the actual period itself that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The book is Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (1920). A bestsellter, it’s written in a popular style.
For those already subscribed, I will do my best to put out the next entry of the FbF Book Club tomorrow. For those on the free plan, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and if you do celebrate, try and forget all the stuff that we talk about and read about here, and spread some joy with your loved ones.
I will also ask the latter group to kindly please consider subscribing to my Substack as I do put a lot of work into producing the content that you already enjoy here. By doing so, you will get access to all the rest that is currently hidden behind the paywall.
Is the figure Curtis Yarvin? If possible, consider taking some photos or short video clips of your own and posting them on either your twitter/X or substack accounts. Would love to hear/see more about how the Dark Elves are doing. Is Dimes Square over? What exactly is the new thing?
Of course Poland is going to resemble neocon Ireland, with the blessing of Brussels. Of course PO is going to ignore the law in doing so, of course Brussels and Washington will turn a blind eye.
The Poles can't blame Moscow for their current plight. If they have any sense the Polish conservatives and centrists will wake up and reconsider their attitudes towards Russia.
Sure they can. Putin could cure cancer and they'd whine about the doctors he put out of work. He could walk on water, and they'd say it shows he can't swim.
And since when did Polish conservatives or centrists have any sense?
I really enjoyed this except from Kirn’s piece: “‘Have nothing in your home,’ wrote Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which aimed to elevate the lives of the working and middle classes, ‘that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’”
If there’s any consolation to be had from this generation’s rising consumer product obsolescence, it’s the potential joy of following that dictum. Of course it’s more difficult to find a hardwood dresser from an antique market, let alone build one, than using one-click purchase on Chinese Wayfair, but the reward of doing so is far higher. I believe there are many small companies that have sprung up in the last two decades to fulfill this exact purpose: producing small batch, quality everyday objects. An extreme example: https://www.townsends.us/
I’d welcome a 21st c. Arts and Crafts movement. Maybe it’s already happening. It’s just drowned out by all the noise.
P.S.
If you want to see the confluence of every bad incentive in consumer spending/producing/marketing, turned up to the highest dial imaginable, see the Iraqi-owned “Flip” app.
I doubt someone born in what is currently Bosnia-Herzegovina would know much about the difficulties of forming a functional government across sectarian lines... :P
Unfortunately I forgot to get my interlibrary loan of Okrent's book yesterday and the library is now closed for winter, stupid me.
When saying goodbye for the break to two different colleagues, one Muslim and the other Jewish and both in their late 50s at the youngest, both said "Happy New Year" only. Not even "Holidays" now. Wonder if this is a new thing.
"Season's Greetings" is an acceptable, albeit poor, alternative. It does, however, offer hope to the Pagans and Wiccans among us (and "a Festivus for the rest of us").
The whole subject is deeply retarded and proof of how f####d up the West (above all the US) has become and how urbanity and good humour are draining away. People who feel that their 'identity' is compromised by acknowledging the conventional religious holidays of neighbours and colleagues are sick in the head. Courtesies and acknowledgements are the glue that holds things together.
Did the Festivus idea of "Airing of Grievances" seem unfunny to you when they coined it? No Seinfeld fan, at the time I thought "great, kvetch during the happy times" and sure enough it was a tell.
We will overwrite your holidays. We will complain in the season of joy. We will destroy the most prosperus country on earth. Hyperbole? Projection? Look at Larry David's politics.
(This is not an antisemetic rant, Festivus overwrites Hanukha as well, a holiday I admire for its message)
"Happy Holiday(s)" acknowledges Hanukha AND Christmas. In the secular Year Zero this will not do. Only a number on a grid can be celebrated. What you heard was not a random coincidence.
First they came for Christmas, and I did not speak up as I wasnt a Christian.
The liberalization of Poland and Ireland is going hand in hand with the collapse of Christianity in those countries, particularly among young people. So I need an explanation for why all Christian countries when they become remotely wealthy, completely abandon their millenia long ideology in favor of the liberal secular one.
You look at the Gulf Arabs, they are fabulously wealthy but they remain Muslim. Sure they might not always act according to Islamic law, but they all still identify as Muslim, something you cannot say about the Christian West. You look at Thailand, they all remain Buddhist. Again I am not concerned if they follow Buddhist theology perfectly, just if the population identifies itself as "Buddhist".
Every other religion in the world manages to hold on to their percentage shares except for Christians. Even the poorer Latin Americans are rapidly de-Christianizing. I don't think the beliefs or institutions of Christians are more outlandish or corrupt than any other religion, so don't understand why Christianity is the only religion that is taking the hit.
For what it is worth, I have long thought that the collapse in religious identification is an effect of the disappearance of inherited forms of sociocultural life, above all the family. When established ways of life crumble the beliefs and values of the old order no longer retain their prestige or utility.
Why do other civilizations preserve their faith and traditions - and only Christianity does not?
This is because of the Enlightenment and its products – liberalism and democracy.
The Gulf countries and Thailand are still institutionally trad autocracies, even if they have a kind of farcical "democracy" that usually quickly dies out or becomes meaningless.
Monarchies constrained by tribal tradition, local communal loyalties and religious law. By Arab standards the Gulf monarchies are liberal, tolerant and pragmatic. They have seen what ideology (formed under Western influence) has done to the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent and beyond. IMO the Gulf monarchies have pioneered a stable pathway to modernity. Politically and socially they are a success story, whatever their flaws.
Kuwait has a fake democratic system imposed by the US after its liberation from Saddam in 1991.
Thailand is ruled by the military. Every now and then they try to establish democracy, but these attempts always fail quickly and the army takes over again.
You must believe there's another higher Father & Mother ready to receive your lost children. And high mortality rates in general, but especially children.
When you don't have that very strong psychological motive to believe, outside forces find crumbling rock to chip away at.
Having an oppositional force to foster religious based identity can protect while it lasts, the Muslim world has that for now. Being poor helps too, because you're not distracted by shiny decadence and not getting struck by lightning for it.
But if Islam becomes hegemonic, combined with low child -and -other mortality you'll see a rapid dropping away there too.
Christianity was a necessary precondition for the ideology of liberal democracy to develop. For a while the ideology and religion were taught hand-in-hand, but when you consider that liberal democracy was always meant to weaken the power of the church, it was never going to be a stable arrangement
The history of Europe for around a thousand years was the war between church and crown/state. The latter one some time ago, and now seek to break up the last focus of loyalty beyond them, the family.
Islam does not recognize a separation between mosque and state, which is why even officially secular Ba'athist regimes still grounded their constitutions in the Qur'an.
This is the contention of certain scholars, namely, Brian Tierney. But other scholars, such as Andew Willard Jones, modify that thesis, such that the conflict is not Church v. State, but is City of God v. City of Man, and both Cities are intermingled in both jurisdictions of Church and State. Also, I think to define history as war is to accept the liberal proposition of Hobbes, that human affairs are a "war of all against all." I deny that war is fundamental; war is a derivative of the fundamental peace.
Would be curious to better understand rates of travel in a comparison of countries and look for correlations. The western tradition for the last many years has included significant trade involving lots of people moving around. I suspect we don’t see that as much with the sovereign oil wealth nations or those in the Far and Near East where even if the fruits of labor find their way around the globe, the market participants (mostly labor) don’t follow. Families and communities persist alongside metaphysical manifestations.
It is truly alarming how fast the left goes mask off after winning an election today. Would it be fair to say being a democracy today means being a province of America? I can think of very few exceptions to this, India, Hungary(sort of).
Re Generation Junk, the declining quality in many consumer goods is a corollary of the hollowing out of the Western middle classes and the gradual, but seemingly relentless, convergence in living standards between the West and the Third World.
Fellow readers, this is not keeping with Monsieur Foucault's topics of the week, but I am not an academic and wanted to ask this: Is it normal among academics to share datasets when requested, or do they keep them under lock and key?
Because one Dr. Claudine Gay, president of one Harvard University, seems to have been rather stingy with her datasets in the past:
"These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.
''We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).''
Not an academic, but I have observed that in general, academics are quite unwilling to share their datasets. This is most common in politically sensitive areas, such as climate 'science'.
Thanks...you should read the brief analysis I link to. It sounds...sounds...like Dr. Gay has, well, has gotten creative with her data...and I think it's the dissertation stuff.
Yes, I've read the analysis, and agree with it. IMO, academia has allowed subpar work for decades, and now the general public is starting to be aware of the rot.
I am going to disagree. Many, many scientists do include at least parts of their raw data in the supplemental section of their papers. Some also have downloadable material like Excel spreadsheets, or will get it from publicly available databases and list them. But very, very few people will ever check that data closely when you consider how many papers are basically never cited or read by anyone. There was a controversy in the biology community over a guy who fabricated data on "social spiders" and people noticed it by looking at his spreadsheets in his papers
Climate science often consists of people mathematically "treating" publicly available data. They will cite their method but in this situation, they aren't obligated to show their spreadsheets, so they could do some indefensible things for sure, or do something other than what their method states. And yes they do get more defensive than other fields, but although it's also the furthest left science that also means it's full of backstabbing social climbers who would happily steal things from them
In the social sciences, standards for this stuff are rock bottom though. And I think Claudine Gay was just using public databases and doing basic math of them, though don't quote me on that
2. A peer-to-peer network built on that identity system
3. An operating system where you can run apps that use the peer-to-peer network
Step 1 means you don't need to login to apps or use passwords for things or have "accounts" everywhere. Step 2 means you don't need a central platform like Facebook - when you send a message, you connect directly to the recipient's Urbit. Or, if you visit their virtual home on the Turf app, you're connecting straight to them. No need for a middle man. And finally, step 3 provides a computing platform to run all of these apps.
Each of these pieces has a lot more really cool details that I'm leaving out because I don't want to drown you in technicalia.
I'd be happy to help you get on the network and start exploring. As well as understand the tech and the implications of Urbit's architecture (re things like deplatforming, surveillance, and so on) in as much depth as you're willing/capable of handling.
It's the least I can do in lieu of upgrading to the paid version of your Substack, lol. Btw that offer applies to anyone reading this - if you want to get on Urbit and learn how it works, don't hesitate to reach out!
I have to say the Italians are being a bit unfair to Brussels. I mean they've been a political disaster since the early Roman Empire and an economic disaster since the Medicis left the scene. Rightly or wrongly, and I think mostly rightly, the rest of Europe views them as a perpetual money sink that always threatens to bring the rest of Europe down with it. I think all sides would be happy with an EU Italy divorce except that they can't. The EU's political stability would be in serious questions and Italy would immediately default on its immense debt. It's similar to the UK's intense desire to dump Northern Ireland, but it's political impossibility means they are soldered together for a long time to come.
Merry Christmas Nic ☃️ 🍻
Merry Christmas, Richard!
Click the like button at the top or the bottom of the page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
News:
I will be in NYC later next week where I will be filmed by a team surrounding a very well-known and public figure in these circles. I think it will be part-interview, part Anthony Bourdain walk around and see what happens. I’m looking forward to this, but not as much as many of you are looking forward to seeing how I actually look in real life.
FbF Book Club:
For those who missed it, we’ve started the latest entry in the FbF Book Club. In this iteration, we are looking at the history of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA, with a focus on the actual period itself that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The book is Daniel Okrent’s “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition” (1920). A bestsellter, it’s written in a popular style.
Link - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/prologue-and-chapter-1-thunderous
Christmas:
For those already subscribed, I will do my best to put out the next entry of the FbF Book Club tomorrow. For those on the free plan, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and if you do celebrate, try and forget all the stuff that we talk about and read about here, and spread some joy with your loved ones.
I will also ask the latter group to kindly please consider subscribing to my Substack as I do put a lot of work into producing the content that you already enjoy here. By doing so, you will get access to all the rest that is currently hidden behind the paywall.
Is the figure Curtis Yarvin? If possible, consider taking some photos or short video clips of your own and posting them on either your twitter/X or substack accounts. Would love to hear/see more about how the Dark Elves are doing. Is Dimes Square over? What exactly is the new thing?
Of course Poland is going to resemble neocon Ireland, with the blessing of Brussels. Of course PO is going to ignore the law in doing so, of course Brussels and Washington will turn a blind eye.
What is anyone going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it?
What good does quoting Bible verses to an armed robber do?
Force is the only language that the robber understands.
The Poles can't blame Moscow for their current plight. If they have any sense the Polish conservatives and centrists will wake up and reconsider their attitudes towards Russia.
Sure they can. Putin could cure cancer and they'd whine about the doctors he put out of work. He could walk on water, and they'd say it shows he can't swim.
And since when did Polish conservatives or centrists have any sense?
Bon Natale I Felice Nouevo Anno!
Buon Natale, Andras!
I really enjoyed this except from Kirn’s piece: “‘Have nothing in your home,’ wrote Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which aimed to elevate the lives of the working and middle classes, ‘that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’”
If there’s any consolation to be had from this generation’s rising consumer product obsolescence, it’s the potential joy of following that dictum. Of course it’s more difficult to find a hardwood dresser from an antique market, let alone build one, than using one-click purchase on Chinese Wayfair, but the reward of doing so is far higher. I believe there are many small companies that have sprung up in the last two decades to fulfill this exact purpose: producing small batch, quality everyday objects. An extreme example: https://www.townsends.us/
I’d welcome a 21st c. Arts and Crafts movement. Maybe it’s already happening. It’s just drowned out by all the noise.
P.S.
If you want to see the confluence of every bad incentive in consumer spending/producing/marketing, turned up to the highest dial imaginable, see the Iraqi-owned “Flip” app.
Comfy, smug, ideological bureaucrats... just how high is the global misery quotient for which they are responsible?
I doubt someone born in what is currently Bosnia-Herzegovina would know much about the difficulties of forming a functional government across sectarian lines... :P
Unfortunately I forgot to get my interlibrary loan of Okrent's book yesterday and the library is now closed for winter, stupid me.
When saying goodbye for the break to two different colleagues, one Muslim and the other Jewish and both in their late 50s at the youngest, both said "Happy New Year" only. Not even "Holidays" now. Wonder if this is a new thing.
"Season's Greetings" is an acceptable, albeit poor, alternative. It does, however, offer hope to the Pagans and Wiccans among us (and "a Festivus for the rest of us").
The whole subject is deeply retarded and proof of how f####d up the West (above all the US) has become and how urbanity and good humour are draining away. People who feel that their 'identity' is compromised by acknowledging the conventional religious holidays of neighbours and colleagues are sick in the head. Courtesies and acknowledgements are the glue that holds things together.
Did the Festivus idea of "Airing of Grievances" seem unfunny to you when they coined it? No Seinfeld fan, at the time I thought "great, kvetch during the happy times" and sure enough it was a tell.
We will overwrite your holidays. We will complain in the season of joy. We will destroy the most prosperus country on earth. Hyperbole? Projection? Look at Larry David's politics.
(This is not an antisemetic rant, Festivus overwrites Hanukha as well, a holiday I admire for its message)
Don't go out of your way to wish them their holidays either.
"Happy Holiday(s)" acknowledges Hanukha AND Christmas. In the secular Year Zero this will not do. Only a number on a grid can be celebrated. What you heard was not a random coincidence.
First they came for Christmas, and I did not speak up as I wasnt a Christian.
Then they came for Hanukha......
(An updated post Oct 7 take on it)
The liberalization of Poland and Ireland is going hand in hand with the collapse of Christianity in those countries, particularly among young people. So I need an explanation for why all Christian countries when they become remotely wealthy, completely abandon their millenia long ideology in favor of the liberal secular one.
You look at the Gulf Arabs, they are fabulously wealthy but they remain Muslim. Sure they might not always act according to Islamic law, but they all still identify as Muslim, something you cannot say about the Christian West. You look at Thailand, they all remain Buddhist. Again I am not concerned if they follow Buddhist theology perfectly, just if the population identifies itself as "Buddhist".
Every other religion in the world manages to hold on to their percentage shares except for Christians. Even the poorer Latin Americans are rapidly de-Christianizing. I don't think the beliefs or institutions of Christians are more outlandish or corrupt than any other religion, so don't understand why Christianity is the only religion that is taking the hit.
For what it is worth, I have long thought that the collapse in religious identification is an effect of the disappearance of inherited forms of sociocultural life, above all the family. When established ways of life crumble the beliefs and values of the old order no longer retain their prestige or utility.
Why do other civilizations preserve their faith and traditions - and only Christianity does not?
This is because of the Enlightenment and its products – liberalism and democracy.
The Gulf countries and Thailand are still institutionally trad autocracies, even if they have a kind of farcical "democracy" that usually quickly dies out or becomes meaningless.
For that matter, the gulfie tyrannies don't in any way pretend to democracy. They're absolutist monarchies.
Monarchies constrained by tribal tradition, local communal loyalties and religious law. By Arab standards the Gulf monarchies are liberal, tolerant and pragmatic. They have seen what ideology (formed under Western influence) has done to the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent and beyond. IMO the Gulf monarchies have pioneered a stable pathway to modernity. Politically and socially they are a success story, whatever their flaws.
Kuwait has a fake democratic system imposed by the US after its liberation from Saddam in 1991.
Thailand is ruled by the military. Every now and then they try to establish democracy, but these attempts always fail quickly and the army takes over again.
Forgot about Kuwait.
One could argue that a concerted effort by Marxist feminism dealt quite a blow to Christianity, the family and parenthood. By design.
I believe its child mortality rates.
You must believe there's another higher Father & Mother ready to receive your lost children. And high mortality rates in general, but especially children.
When you don't have that very strong psychological motive to believe, outside forces find crumbling rock to chip away at.
Having an oppositional force to foster religious based identity can protect while it lasts, the Muslim world has that for now. Being poor helps too, because you're not distracted by shiny decadence and not getting struck by lightning for it.
But if Islam becomes hegemonic, combined with low child -and -other mortality you'll see a rapid dropping away there too.
Christianity was a necessary precondition for the ideology of liberal democracy to develop. For a while the ideology and religion were taught hand-in-hand, but when you consider that liberal democracy was always meant to weaken the power of the church, it was never going to be a stable arrangement
The history of Europe for around a thousand years was the war between church and crown/state. The latter one some time ago, and now seek to break up the last focus of loyalty beyond them, the family.
Islam does not recognize a separation between mosque and state, which is why even officially secular Ba'athist regimes still grounded their constitutions in the Qur'an.
Constantine should have just made himself the Pope smh. The precedent was there, with the Ceasars being the (pagan) Pontifex Maximus and all that.
This is the contention of certain scholars, namely, Brian Tierney. But other scholars, such as Andew Willard Jones, modify that thesis, such that the conflict is not Church v. State, but is City of God v. City of Man, and both Cities are intermingled in both jurisdictions of Church and State. Also, I think to define history as war is to accept the liberal proposition of Hobbes, that human affairs are a "war of all against all." I deny that war is fundamental; war is a derivative of the fundamental peace.
Would be curious to better understand rates of travel in a comparison of countries and look for correlations. The western tradition for the last many years has included significant trade involving lots of people moving around. I suspect we don’t see that as much with the sovereign oil wealth nations or those in the Far and Near East where even if the fruits of labor find their way around the globe, the market participants (mostly labor) don’t follow. Families and communities persist alongside metaphysical manifestations.
It’s fun sometimes to compare/contrast the quality & longevity of household appliances in my grandparents’ home to the ones I’m amassing now lol.
The results are jarring.
It is truly alarming how fast the left goes mask off after winning an election today. Would it be fair to say being a democracy today means being a province of America? I can think of very few exceptions to this, India, Hungary(sort of).
Have a merry Christmas Niccolo!
Re Generation Junk, the declining quality in many consumer goods is a corollary of the hollowing out of the Western middle classes and the gradual, but seemingly relentless, convergence in living standards between the West and the Third World.
Yes at the very top of the consumer chain is quality and most other stuff is low grade - matches the decimation of the middle class
Fellow readers, this is not keeping with Monsieur Foucault's topics of the week, but I am not an academic and wanted to ask this: Is it normal among academics to share datasets when requested, or do they keep them under lock and key?
Because one Dr. Claudine Gay, president of one Harvard University, seems to have been rather stingy with her datasets in the past:
"These scholars asked Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.
''We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).''
https://www.dossier.today/p/these-scholars-asked-claudine-gay
Not an academic, but I have observed that in general, academics are quite unwilling to share their datasets. This is most common in politically sensitive areas, such as climate 'science'.
Thanks...you should read the brief analysis I link to. It sounds...sounds...like Dr. Gay has, well, has gotten creative with her data...and I think it's the dissertation stuff.
Yes, I've read the analysis, and agree with it. IMO, academia has allowed subpar work for decades, and now the general public is starting to be aware of the rot.
I am going to disagree. Many, many scientists do include at least parts of their raw data in the supplemental section of their papers. Some also have downloadable material like Excel spreadsheets, or will get it from publicly available databases and list them. But very, very few people will ever check that data closely when you consider how many papers are basically never cited or read by anyone. There was a controversy in the biology community over a guy who fabricated data on "social spiders" and people noticed it by looking at his spreadsheets in his papers
Climate science often consists of people mathematically "treating" publicly available data. They will cite their method but in this situation, they aren't obligated to show their spreadsheets, so they could do some indefensible things for sure, or do something other than what their method states. And yes they do get more defensive than other fields, but although it's also the furthest left science that also means it's full of backstabbing social climbers who would happily steal things from them
In the social sciences, standards for this stuff are rock bottom though. And I think Claudine Gay was just using public databases and doing basic math of them, though don't quote me on that
Merry Xmas and thanks for the all-year-round edutainment via the substack
Merry Christmas, Lobster!
Fresh plagiarism charges breaking now...
https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1738645599346380817
As always, masterful and fun. I'm surprised you're not on Urbit, I think you'd get along with people there.
(happy to help you get on the network if you ever want to)
I still don't understand what Urbit actually is. Send me a FAQ/Primer/whatever, please.
Basically, Urbit consists of three parts:
1. A decentralized identity
2. A peer-to-peer network built on that identity system
3. An operating system where you can run apps that use the peer-to-peer network
Step 1 means you don't need to login to apps or use passwords for things or have "accounts" everywhere. Step 2 means you don't need a central platform like Facebook - when you send a message, you connect directly to the recipient's Urbit. Or, if you visit their virtual home on the Turf app, you're connecting straight to them. No need for a middle man. And finally, step 3 provides a computing platform to run all of these apps.
Each of these pieces has a lot more really cool details that I'm leaving out because I don't want to drown you in technicalia.
You can get a free, easy Urbit here: https://tlon.io/
I'd be happy to help you get on the network and start exploring. As well as understand the tech and the implications of Urbit's architecture (re things like deplatforming, surveillance, and so on) in as much depth as you're willing/capable of handling.
You can email me here: darigo.maxwell@gmail.com.
It's the least I can do in lieu of upgrading to the paid version of your Substack, lol. Btw that offer applies to anyone reading this - if you want to get on Urbit and learn how it works, don't hesitate to reach out!
PS - the official FAQ is here: https://urbit.org/faq
I have to say the Italians are being a bit unfair to Brussels. I mean they've been a political disaster since the early Roman Empire and an economic disaster since the Medicis left the scene. Rightly or wrongly, and I think mostly rightly, the rest of Europe views them as a perpetual money sink that always threatens to bring the rest of Europe down with it. I think all sides would be happy with an EU Italy divorce except that they can't. The EU's political stability would be in serious questions and Italy would immediately default on its immense debt. It's similar to the UK's intense desire to dump Northern Ireland, but it's political impossibility means they are soldered together for a long time to come.