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NY and SF Mayors Announce Joint Tech Summits
First time accepted submitter Clarklteveno writes "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his San Francisco counterpart, Ed Lee, said at a news conference Friday that they are sponsoring a pair of technology summits over the next year. The mayors said the 'digital cities' summits — one in New York in September and another in San Francisco early next year — will seek to find ways to use technology to solve problems the cities face. The mayors made the announcement after touring the office of San Francisco-based mobile payment company Square with co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also helped found Twitter. Bloomberg pointed to power outages and dangerous winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy as examples of issues the summits would seek to address."
Define "problems".
Having either one of these two clowns as mayor.
main()
{
printf("To solve the major problems the cities face:\n");
printf("================\n");
printf("Yokels, stop electing idiots.\n");
}
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Living close to large bodies of water is rather necessary if you want to be a port city. Since sea shipping has been for thousands of years, and still is one of the most important transportation methods, port cities make a lot more sense than building a city in the middle of nowhere.
Flooding problems can be solved with ancient technology called "sea walls". Lots of cities in the world use these, or levies, to prevent storm flooding. The Dutch are masters of this technology, and wouldn't have half their country without it. The fact that the US doesn't invest in sea walls is just a symptom of the extreme short-sightedness and corruption that the US suffers from.
Not to diminish the (quite demanding) task faced by civil engineers and workers on large construction projects; but it's arguable that the least well-solved problem in infrastructure is within the realm of political science, rather than engineering.
The actual tech levels required to achieve infrastructure objectives tend to be pretty modest; but building and maintaining infrastructure is a thankless task, that people notice only when it has been neglected for long enough to fall apart, and doesn't come cheap. Societies that enjoy reasonably stable, non-dysfunctional, civic institutions for a solid length of time get it(the actual tech level required to build what the people of a given era regard as 'basic infrastructure' is rarely bleeding-edge); but societies that don't have that tend to discover that there isn't really a substitute for it.
You can only rush build infrastructure so fast, and you need genuine institutional competence to keep it in good shape once you have it.