Have you read Dan Wang's book Breakneck? His idea - China an engineering culture, US now lawyerly. I went to China last summer and like a lot of first time visitors was pretty amazed at the infrastructure.
"I actually want to be in Duluth in January ... when the high is minus two degrees."
Have mercy. I still shiver just at the name of the town. The last time I was there--in the summer!--there were days it never got out of the 40s.
It reminds me of the (true) story of an African university student who had gone to school in the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. He was the first of his village to travel so far, and when he came home everyone wanted to know what it was like. He confessed he was at a loss for words and didn't know where to begin.
So they told him to start with the weather. "Well," he said, "they have a long white winter and then a short green winter."
Grew up in the Twin Ports (Wisconsin side, Superior) in the 1970s and still visit periodically. All fond memories but was a kid so didn’t mind or even notice much that it was effing freezing or that winter lasted five months. Anyway, uh, you’re going next week? I’m seeing some high temps below zero! Consider postponing to the summer, when it might be 50 when you wake up and get all the way to 70. Beautiful for strolling along the Canal Park boardwalk.
I spent time in Duluth for an over the road job about 14 years ago, it will not disappoint. The Lift Bridge, St. Louis River estuary, the iron range, the forests, the port, the food, and the layout of the city (built on the slope of a hill grading to the lake shore) are all impressive and memorable. I loved my time there and don’t know why I haven’t made it back. Wish I could find time to make it to Milwaukee. Don’t skip the Third Ward and River West areas. Another truly great city with amazing history that has fallen to too much neglect.
"China arguably now owns the baton, and their “can-do” ethos is what I appreciate most about being there, which feels like being in an updated version of the U.S. circa 1950, politics aside."
Sorry, but this is bullshit. We got more satellites in the sky than anybody. And the very idea that Erie Canal "Low bridge, everybody down" lol is somehow a greater engineering project than the Moonshot, actually destroys your whole thesis. Oh brother..... You should properly cite Gil Scott Heron you amateur!
My thoughts about Guns, Germs and Steel is that geography also has a long term effect on culture - cultures survive and evolve at least somewhat based on geography. But when I say "long term", that's over the course of centuries and millennia, so it's very much not relevant right now. Here and now the ex-communist countries are still suffering the damage that communism did to their cultures, for example. So yeah, it's much more important to talk about the "can do" ethos than to pontificate what will happen in year 5000 if we never start colonizing space.
I drove the Chicago/Milwaukee/Duluth/Great Falls route in October. Fracking facilities were the most novel to me, the Grand Tetons the most striking. Had a couple of good stops in university towns on the route. Also, I liked the Dylan Nobel Prize tribute statue in Hibbing, MN. Duluth on a warm fall day was delightful.
I was a car mechanic before I got my engineering degree. Now I am, like you, a wanderer (am writing you from Gyeongju, Korea.)
If you have yet to read it, I believe you would like “The Geography of Nowhere” by James Howard Kunstler. I tell the story of how that book affected me personally here:
My speculative go at a historical explanation of the Industrial Revolution...
why did the Industrial Revolution occur in UK among the highly spiritual rather than, say, in what is now the US among Native Americans who were highly spiritual...was it cultural differences?
if you subsume writing/reading as part (or vehicle) of culture, I would agree. Native Americans at the time of the Industrial Revolution had a pictorial written language, but relied almost exclusively at this time on the spoken word. UKers at this time increasingly relied on the written word which was first a vehicle for their spiritual belief (a written bible, which was at some prior time a collection of oral stories much like with the Native Americans).
And what transitioned spoken into written narratives?
A particular spiritual orientation, namely the Christian church.
Seems to be the thesis of "The Ancient Engineers" by L. Sprague DeCamp, except that book was explicitly anti-faith.
Pretty much every educated human knows who Augustus Caesar was, but almost nobody knows the name of the architect of the Roman aqueduct, in spite of the fact that reliable water supply has more real world impact in humans today than anything Augustus did.
I think the claim that our lack of big engineering can-do culture is downstream of offshoring fails the timeline analysis. If you look at the history of container shipping, it had a hard time coming off the ground (which is why America has some of the world's worst container ports), because we already had a vetocratic culture in place to stop it. And manufacturing offshoring only came much later (you can't offshore manufacturing at scale without container shipping).
One small itch for me is how often “culture” ends up taking the blame when what actually changed were very specific decisions. Ports don’t quietly fall out of love with themselves. They get sidelined, defunded, or treated as awkward relics once the spreadsheet says the action is elsewhere. I’m from Tasmania, which is basically a long case study in what happens when infrastructure stops being seen as civic backbone and starts being seen as a cost centre with nostalgia problems.
Same with the moon. Feels less like a dead end than a cancelled subscription. We proved we could do it, nodded solemnly, then decided the return on investment wasn’t exciting enough once the flag was planted.
All of which is to say, I’m completely with you on engineering as civilisation you can touch. If more people treated ports and locks the way others treat museums, we’d already be in better shape. Duluth in January feels like a proper commitment to the bit.
Lived within 45 miles of Lake Erie most of my life. The lake is about ready to freeze over so the lake effect snow will stop for the season. Great Lakes cruises are very popular now in the temperate months. A lot of imports used to come in through the St. Lawrence Seaway, but can't now because the locks aren't wide enough for those container ships.
Have you read Dan Wang's book Breakneck? His idea - China an engineering culture, US now lawyerly. I went to China last summer and like a lot of first time visitors was pretty amazed at the infrastructure.
Fascinating perspective -thank you
"I actually want to be in Duluth in January ... when the high is minus two degrees."
Have mercy. I still shiver just at the name of the town. The last time I was there--in the summer!--there were days it never got out of the 40s.
It reminds me of the (true) story of an African university student who had gone to school in the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. He was the first of his village to travel so far, and when he came home everyone wanted to know what it was like. He confessed he was at a loss for words and didn't know where to begin.
So they told him to start with the weather. "Well," he said, "they have a long white winter and then a short green winter."
So we have traded bridge building (and upkeep) for 15-minute delivery of slop bowls. Oof.
Grew up in the Twin Ports (Wisconsin side, Superior) in the 1970s and still visit periodically. All fond memories but was a kid so didn’t mind or even notice much that it was effing freezing or that winter lasted five months. Anyway, uh, you’re going next week? I’m seeing some high temps below zero! Consider postponing to the summer, when it might be 50 when you wake up and get all the way to 70. Beautiful for strolling along the Canal Park boardwalk.
I spent time in Duluth for an over the road job about 14 years ago, it will not disappoint. The Lift Bridge, St. Louis River estuary, the iron range, the forests, the port, the food, and the layout of the city (built on the slope of a hill grading to the lake shore) are all impressive and memorable. I loved my time there and don’t know why I haven’t made it back. Wish I could find time to make it to Milwaukee. Don’t skip the Third Ward and River West areas. Another truly great city with amazing history that has fallen to too much neglect.
"China arguably now owns the baton, and their “can-do” ethos is what I appreciate most about being there, which feels like being in an updated version of the U.S. circa 1950, politics aside."
Sorry, but this is bullshit. We got more satellites in the sky than anybody. And the very idea that Erie Canal "Low bridge, everybody down" lol is somehow a greater engineering project than the Moonshot, actually destroys your whole thesis. Oh brother..... You should properly cite Gil Scott Heron you amateur!
My thoughts about Guns, Germs and Steel is that geography also has a long term effect on culture - cultures survive and evolve at least somewhat based on geography. But when I say "long term", that's over the course of centuries and millennia, so it's very much not relevant right now. Here and now the ex-communist countries are still suffering the damage that communism did to their cultures, for example. So yeah, it's much more important to talk about the "can do" ethos than to pontificate what will happen in year 5000 if we never start colonizing space.
I drove the Chicago/Milwaukee/Duluth/Great Falls route in October. Fracking facilities were the most novel to me, the Grand Tetons the most striking. Had a couple of good stops in university towns on the route. Also, I liked the Dylan Nobel Prize tribute statue in Hibbing, MN. Duluth on a warm fall day was delightful.
I was a car mechanic before I got my engineering degree. Now I am, like you, a wanderer (am writing you from Gyeongju, Korea.)
If you have yet to read it, I believe you would like “The Geography of Nowhere” by James Howard Kunstler. I tell the story of how that book affected me personally here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/branthuddleston/p/chapter-31-the-geography-of-nowhere?r=1g9mu8&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
My speculative go at a historical explanation of the Industrial Revolution...
why did the Industrial Revolution occur in UK among the highly spiritual rather than, say, in what is now the US among Native Americans who were highly spiritual...was it cultural differences?
if you subsume writing/reading as part (or vehicle) of culture, I would agree. Native Americans at the time of the Industrial Revolution had a pictorial written language, but relied almost exclusively at this time on the spoken word. UKers at this time increasingly relied on the written word which was first a vehicle for their spiritual belief (a written bible, which was at some prior time a collection of oral stories much like with the Native Americans).
And what transitioned spoken into written narratives?
A particular spiritual orientation, namely the Christian church.
I did say speculative...
Seems to be the thesis of "The Ancient Engineers" by L. Sprague DeCamp, except that book was explicitly anti-faith.
Pretty much every educated human knows who Augustus Caesar was, but almost nobody knows the name of the architect of the Roman aqueduct, in spite of the fact that reliable water supply has more real world impact in humans today than anything Augustus did.
You’re going to love Duluth! Make sure to stop at Northern Waters Smokehouse and the railroad museum
I think the claim that our lack of big engineering can-do culture is downstream of offshoring fails the timeline analysis. If you look at the history of container shipping, it had a hard time coming off the ground (which is why America has some of the world's worst container ports), because we already had a vetocratic culture in place to stop it. And manufacturing offshoring only came much later (you can't offshore manufacturing at scale without container shipping).
One small itch for me is how often “culture” ends up taking the blame when what actually changed were very specific decisions. Ports don’t quietly fall out of love with themselves. They get sidelined, defunded, or treated as awkward relics once the spreadsheet says the action is elsewhere. I’m from Tasmania, which is basically a long case study in what happens when infrastructure stops being seen as civic backbone and starts being seen as a cost centre with nostalgia problems.
Same with the moon. Feels less like a dead end than a cancelled subscription. We proved we could do it, nodded solemnly, then decided the return on investment wasn’t exciting enough once the flag was planted.
All of which is to say, I’m completely with you on engineering as civilisation you can touch. If more people treated ports and locks the way others treat museums, we’d already be in better shape. Duluth in January feels like a proper commitment to the bit.
Lived within 45 miles of Lake Erie most of my life. The lake is about ready to freeze over so the lake effect snow will stop for the season. Great Lakes cruises are very popular now in the temperate months. A lot of imports used to come in through the St. Lawrence Seaway, but can't now because the locks aren't wide enough for those container ships.
Walking across Lake Erie to sneak into Canada. Now that would be a real adventure...