It must gall him that Princeton was one of the
founders of the
uPortal project, an open source web portal for higher education. Check out the link, and you can see that Princeton is one of the institutions running it, albeit only for a subset of their user base.
When we had our first kid, I read a book called The Scientist in the Crib (Gopnik, et al.), which contained a number of stories about studies that were done that show what babies in various stages of development can do and can comprehend. For example, most everyone knows that babies 'learn' persistence of objects --- if you put a toy behind your back in front of a one-month old, the kid thinks the toy has disappeared. Try the same trick with an 11-month old, and the kid knows the toy is still around.
Anyway, one progression of 'learning' is knowledge about knowledge. Kids start out not even knowing that other people are independent beings. Once they figure that out, they also have to learn that these other beings have different opinions than they do (I don't like brussel sprouts, but mommy does). Even later than that comes the knowledge that beliefs can change. For example, you show a young 3-year old a candy box. You ask him what's inside. He says, "candy". You open it up, and show him it contains something else (say, crayons). You will not then be able to get the kid to believe that he ever thought there was anything but crayons inside the box. Even if he acts surprised when he first opens the box, he will tell you he always thought there were crayons in the box. And this is not because 3-year olds have bad memories --- it's been shown they can remember events for months. The problem is that they can't seem to remember their own beliefs and thoughts.
By the age of 4, though, this will change, and the kid will understand that he could have once believed something that was false. There is an aside in the book that says that the point when a child gains this type of knowledge seems to correspond with the point when the child begins to create autobiographical memories (what we adults think of as memory). The authors hypothesize that one cannot 'remember' like an adult until one understands basic concepts about one's own thoughts and feelings (including the concept that one can think something is true and later discover it was not).
Anyway, it's a very interesting book. Also, parents should not be too keen to have their kids learn how to 'remember', as one of the next skills they pick up is how to tell a lie.
My wife had the same question. She hit on the solution of a used software store. There's a local Seattle store called Half Price Books and Software where she picked up something for about $5. It wasn't a perfect program (what Windows software is?), but for $5, you forgive a lot.
Back when I was an undergrad at Berkeley (c 1986), a friend
and I got a job at a place called Unisoft, as Q/A
people for A/UX. Unisoft used to be in far west Berkeley, then moved to Emeryville, and I'm pretty sure they've folded now. The big project was writing/improving A/UX (I'm not sure whether they're the only company that touched the code before or since). I can recall writing bug reports for the new keyboards (ancestors of what Apples still use today) and the man page for sed.
I can also recall a vaguely major release where the engineers dared us to crash the system. Took me all of 5 minutes using an old trick I saw someone do in a lab: while (1) { mkdir x; cd x}
I spent some time yesterday going through the DOJ's reply. I was mostly looking to see if they even attempted to answer my concerns. Not really. It appears that they at least tried to handle the concerns of the 47 'major' commenters, although it's clear their reasoning on many of the points is mostly argument by authority. They appear to believe they will be given a huge amount of deference.
Anyway, the points of mine I didn't see addressed had to do with the ease with which it appears MS can technically exploit the loopholes of the settlement. For example, MS Office is not middleware, but it is ubiquitous, so one can essentially treat it as a backdoor communication conduit without documenting the APIs you use. The example I used: IE sends a message to Office on startup, which relays a message to the OS. If another browser tries to open a URL and the OS hasn't gotten a message from Office, it deliberately kills the browser after a random interval.
Or in another area, I suggest that MS could deliberately disclose cryptographic key information as part of a protocol, then claim the protocol must be kept secret per the clause in the RPFJ.
These are esoteric, I know, but do you think MS wouldn't try things like this if it thought it could?
I have not yet seen anyone point out this fact about Tacoma's system: it was an add-on to a planned upgrade. The city-run public electric utility was planning to add some wires so that they could read people's electric meters without sending someone physically out to the house. They reasoned that running the extra wires to set up a cable system was a small extra cost, conducted some studies, and realized they'd make the money back very quickly.
Many posters' comments I've read are severely misinformed about public power utilities. Particularly in the Pacific Northwest, they are generally viewed as more efficient and more trustworthy. Certainly much more trustworthy than local broadband providers (Qwest and AT&T cable). Stories coming out of California during the energy crisis, where municipal public utilities (like LA's) had plenty of power, while customers of private companies like PG&E suffered rolling blackouts, only reinforce what it common knowledge on the West Coast: municipal public utilities are a good deal.
I bought this in June, as I was very interested in the subject. I read the first 76 pages in a few days, then set it aside and haven't read anything since.
My memories of why I gave up on it are a bit sketchy by this point, but as I recall, at the very least, the book needed a good edit. Much of the prose is clumsy to read. The material is poorly organized.
And at some point, the author starts dragging in jargon from Business School, as if we had all just taken the same Econ 101 course. If that's your cup of tea, then maybe this is the book for you, but it sure wasn't what I wanted.
I bought the book looking for insight as to how to manage a project I've launched. Perhaps the book contains powerful insights later on, but given the poor structure and writing in the first few chapters, I doubt it. I hope a better book on the subject will be available soon.
Coincidentally, here's an excerpt from a book I am currently reading:
Davies promises to "make a strategically-planned program look like a spontaneous explosion of community support for needy corporate clients by using mailing lists and computer databases to identify potential supporters." He claims his telemarketers will make passive supporters appear to be concerned advocates. "We want to assist them with letter writing. We get them on the phone [and say], 'Will you write a letter?' 'Sure.' 'Do you have time to write it?' 'Not really.' 'Could we write it for you?...Just hold, we have a writer standing by.'"
Another Davies employee then helps create what appears to be a personal letter. If the appropriate public official is "close by, we hand-deiver it. We handwrite it out on 'little kitty cat stationery' if it's a little old lady. If it's a business, we take it over to be photocopied on someone's letterhead. [We] use different stamps, different envelopes... Getting a pile of personalized letters that have a different look to them is what you want to strive for."
From "Deforming Consent: The Public Relations Industry's Secret War on Activists, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1995/96. I read it reprinted in Censored 1997: The News that Didn't Make the News by Peter Phillips and Project Censored. (So I'm 4 years behind). Much of this info is probably
available in Stauber and Rampton's 1995 book, Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.
I was one of the main developers of a portal here at the University of Washington, MyUW. We did it all ourselves, although at the time we did look at companies like Campus Pipeline and another product called Blackboard, at least to see what they included. Even if we would have wanted to use these products, it's dubious we could easily do so, due to the wide dispersal of the interesting data here at the UW: one group has the main Student database, with grades, schedules, etc. The Housing and Food Services department has a separate database with dorm info. Financial Aid is elsewhere, etc. I got the feeling that many of the campuses that use services such as this are small enough so that one small group of people is in charge of nearly all the data (as well as probably running the e-mail system and web servers), and thus it's pretty easy for Campus Pipeline or whoever to come in and take over.
After we were pretty much done with version 1.0 of MyUW,
another group of schools started a project dedicated to producing a collaborative University Portal Framework. It's
called the JA-SIG Portal Framework Project (the J means it's being done in Java), and it's about the closest thing to an open-source portal project I've seen. The license is hard to find, and I think they're still working on it, but the last time I looked, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mozilla Public License.
One area where these things are really taking off is Alumni Associations. Companies basically come in, wave some money, offer 'lifetime e-mail' for
members, and then set up a 'portal' that directs the members to cool shopping, travel, credit card, and other (for the company) lucrative offers. Now, it's not as if Alumni Associations were ever adverse to such marketing deals, but this is a whole other level, with essentially a 'lifetime' commitment on the part of the Alumni Association, as opposed to the once-a-year 'buy our life insurance' type of offers that were standard in the '80s.
I was at protests both Monday and Tuesday, including the labor march Tuesday. The odd thing about the march was that it was supposed to go from the Seattle Center (Space Needle, for non-locals) to downtown and back. But once it got downtown, it basically disintegrated, losing more than half the marchers. There wasn't a good reason to go back to the Center, and the protestors downtown were urging marchers to stay, so that's what most people did.
As I left for work today, police were arresting people for sitting down in a downtown park. No other crime than 'protesting' in a 'no protest' zone. It seems to me that what it comes down to is that the WTO is so unpopular that it cannot hold its meetings in anything but a police state.
Those of you who think the union people are only interested in keeping their standard of living high should investigate what exactly the AFL-CIO was demanding in their march yesterday. They want a minimal set of standards for WTO nations, including no child labor, no forced labor, and the right of workers to freely associate (i.e., form unions). There are no demands that everyone make $20/hour, or whatever. They have, in fact, been criticized by some as being too timid. The problem is that the WTO does not allow nations/cities/states to 'discriminate' on the basis of how a good is produced. The soccer ball made by kids in Pakistan is, to them, just the same as a soccer ball made by adults. Frankly, this is appalling.
Finally, as a Seattleite, I'm dismayed but not surprised by our leaders claiming they "didn't know" this was going to happen. The same sort of demonstrations have occurred at past WTO meetings (Geneva was the last one), but they still claim they had no idea of what they were getting into. Hopefully they, along with other American and world leaders might start to get the message: the WTO is not popular, and desperately needs reforming.
Early this year, an eminent computer scientist gave a talk at the University of Washington, where he basically implied that the only broadband choices most people will have in the future are your local cable company and your local telephone company. When you think about it, this is pretty awful, as these entities (here in Seattle: TCI and USWest) are, at least in the United States, near the top of any consumer's list of most-hated corporations.
One of the few rays of hope comes from Tacoma, Washington (of all places). Like many communities in the Pacific Northwest, Tacoma's electric utility is owned by the city itself. A few years ago they were thinking of adding a feature that would require them rewiring most of their network (I think it was to install automatic meter readers), and someone got the bright idea, "Hey, what if we ran an extra cable into every home as well?" The original thought was to get some competition for TCI, which was, as usual, not delivering on its commitments, but the cable could be used for Internet Service as well. Their survey estimated that the cost would be not much more than the original project, and bound to pay for itself within a few years from ISP and Cable fees. They ran a public opinion poll at the same time, which basically found that (a) If they priced their cable service less than TCI, an overwhelming number of citizens would switch. (b) Even if the services were roughly equivalent, 50% would switch (presumably out of disgust with TCI).
So they're in the middle of the switch, and TCI has, predictably, fallen all over themselves upgrading Tacoma's networks. Anyway, I'd like to see more cities adopt this model. First, because I think in the future Internet access will be just as important a utility as our current utilities (phone, cable, water, etc.) and therefore worthy of an extra wire. Second, even if you don't think government-run utilities are a good idea (I think they are, but I won't get into that too much), we need more broadband options. Two isn't enough, especially two that are controlled by such dubious entities as your friendly neighborhood cable company and your friendly neighborhood phone company.
Yeah, this is true, if you think that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are 'consumers' and 'the body politic' (why do you think the interstate highway system was built?). In any event, this is pretty much irrelevant to the original comment, which compared attempts at New Urbanism to the big, arrogant hand of the elite, while the postwar rise of the suburbs was supposed to be the will of the people. By your thinking, if the powers-that-be decide to implement New Urbanism ideas, then that must be the will of the people, too.
I think you're sort of right, and what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. Both postwar and current urban planning (or lack thereof) are heavily influenced by government. It doesn't help to romanticize one as 'natural' and denigrate the other as a manmade abomination, no matter which you think is which.
Of course money is not the only thing, but it is something people take into account. The conditions were in place so that, after World War II, given two objectively equivalent homes, the one in the suburbs would be cheaper than the one in the city. And your discussion of fear does not explain why the suburbs were so popular in the early 1950s, when the threat of crime was much lower.
Your argument might make more sense if you could come up with a reason why people did not create modern suburbs when they had the chance before World War II (say, in the 1920's, to eliminate the obvious anomaly of the Great depression). The heyday of the 'city as cesspool' was at the turn of the century, yet America did not see largescale exodus from the cities then, even though cities were much more dangerous (due to the threat of disease) than they ever were in the 50s and 60s.
In any event, you don't have the empirical evidence you started out with: the fact that suburbs were wildly popular in the postwar period does not, a priori indicate that they are what people wanted. You must take outside factors into account. You can argue that, regardless of these factors, people like the suburbs anyway, which is what you're doing, and which is fine. But you can't argue that their existence in and of itself is sufficient to show how Americans want to live.
I'm not talking about force, I'm talking about market-distorting practices that made suburban homebuying much more attractive that it would be in a purely 'market-driven' society. The government made suburban houses cheaper, and built the highways that made it convenient to live there and work where you pleased. The banks made it easier to buy land and homes there, and made it hard to improve the existing cities. Unless money is no object, the rational homebuyer is naturally going to find suburbs more attractive than the city, at least economically. And as others have pointed out, the postwar GI bill gave many families the opportunity to buy a house after the war than before, provided, of course, that it was sufficiently inexpensive.
Why redline? Well, it was made illegal in the mid sixties by Federal Civil Rights legislation (that's that all the 'Equal Housing Lender' stuff you read about in real estate ads comes from). I'm sure you can figure it out from there.
daviddennis (david@amazing.com) wrote: But remember this: For some reason, people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities. Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful guesses.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper. And finally, banks redlined certain in-city neighborhoods, making them difficult to maintain and improve, while greenlining suburban development, making it easier and cheaper to buy there.
So we do not know that people would naturally have flocked to suburban living, because everything was skewed by these policies. We can debate what policies we ought to put in place now, but it is a mistake to think that because people live in the suburbs now, that is the 'natural' state of affairs.
daviddennis (david@amazing.com) wrote: >But remember this: For some reason, >people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities. >Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful >guesses.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper.
You can also end (most) of the credit-card offers. Here are my notes from when I did this last year. Some of this information might be out of date...
Notify each of the three credit reporting companies (Equifax, [800] 556-4711; Experian, formerly TRW, [800] 353-0809; and Trans Union, [800] 680-7293) that you don't want your name sold to other marketers
According to the Trans Union recording, if you opt out of one you opt out of all 3. The other two don't mention this (it's all done by voicemail --- they send you something in the mail to verify your information).
I like college. Maybe you will or do or did or won't or don't or didn't. There's no way for me to know. College was good for me, but, to be fair, I liked school so much I got a Ph.D. I went to a great public university when tuition was cheap, and only ended up with a few thousand dollars of college loan debt. I got a researchy/software engineering type job at the university where I went to grad school, and am in a great position where I can take off in the middle of the day to attend classes, talk with my old professors, run errands, see a movie, or just go home and sleep (as long as I get my job done, of course). College has been very, very good to me. I can't guarantee the same for you. Apart from everything everyone else has said about 'learning about learning', learning to socialize, the monetary value of a BS degree, etc., it is important to recognize the difference between life before 18 and life with a full-time job. To summarize, and assuming you have a good job, the main difference is that before you are 18, you have more time than money. When you have a full-time job, you have more money than time. The transition can be jarring and difficult to handle. Whereas before you could spend a day playing video games or watching TV or goofing off, when you have a job you find yourself wondering about how to eat quickly and when to go shopping and oh god I haven't cleaned the bathroom in 3 months. Money can be used to solve some of these problems, but it's unlikely you'll be making enough money to pay someone to drive you to and from work or do your grocery shopping just right, or buy you the perfect pair of pants. The great thing about college is that it is as close to the pre-18 state you will get once you've become an adult and until you retire. It thus serves two purposes. First, it allows for a transition period between the two. Second, it provides a benchmark in the time/money continuum. When you're working at your job, you can think back to your college days, and figure out whether your increased salary now is worth your loss of time. If you never go to college, you'll never know how much free time you could have (and likely, how little money you can live on). In the meantime of your college existence, you will have the time to see movies, or plays, or concerts, or to read books, climb mountains, surf, whatever. About the only thing I can safely guarantee about an 18-year old is that they can't be sure exactly what they'll want to be doing in four years time. College gives you the freedom to decide. Conversely, it might be a good idea while in college to do some work. Preferably as a fulltime summer intern, to see what the 'real world' is like, and to make money for the rest of the year, when you'll be in starving student mode. One thing I don't really recommend if you can avoid it is to work during the school year. Do your best to get scholarships, or get money from relatives, or work during the rest of the year, so that when class is in session you can devote your energies to learning.
Slashdot Mirror
It must gall him that Princeton was one of the founders of the uPortal project, an open source web portal for higher education. Check out the link, and you can see that Princeton is one of the institutions running it, albeit only for a subset of their user base.
When we had our first kid, I read a book called The Scientist in the Crib (Gopnik, et al.), which contained a number of stories about studies that were done that show what babies in various stages of development can do and can comprehend. For example, most everyone knows that babies 'learn' persistence of objects --- if you put a toy behind your back in front of a one-month old, the kid thinks the toy has disappeared. Try the same trick with an 11-month old, and the kid knows the toy is still around.
Anyway, one progression of 'learning' is knowledge about knowledge. Kids start out not even knowing that other people are independent beings. Once they figure that out, they also have to learn that these other beings have different opinions than they do (I don't like brussel sprouts, but mommy does). Even later than that comes the knowledge that beliefs can change. For example, you show a young 3-year old a candy box. You ask him what's inside. He says, "candy". You open it up, and show him it contains something else (say, crayons). You will not then be able to get the kid to believe that he ever thought there was anything but crayons inside the box. Even if he acts surprised when he first opens the box, he will tell you he always thought there were crayons in the box. And this is not because 3-year olds have bad memories --- it's been shown they can remember events for months. The problem is that they can't seem to remember their own beliefs and thoughts.
By the age of 4, though, this will change, and the kid will understand that he could have once believed something that was false. There is an aside in the book that says that the point when a child gains this type of knowledge seems to correspond with the point when the child begins to create autobiographical memories (what we adults think of as memory). The authors hypothesize that one cannot 'remember' like an adult until one understands basic concepts about one's own thoughts and feelings (including the concept that one can think something is true and later discover it was not).
Anyway, it's a very interesting book. Also, parents should not be too keen to have their kids learn how to 'remember', as one of the next skills they pick up is how to tell a lie.
My wife had the same question. She hit on the solution of a used software store. There's a local Seattle store called Half Price Books and Software where she picked up something for about $5. It wasn't a perfect program (what Windows software is?), but for $5, you forgive a lot.
Back when I was an undergrad at Berkeley (c 1986), a friend and I got a job at a place called Unisoft, as Q/A people for A/UX. Unisoft used to be in far west Berkeley, then moved to Emeryville, and I'm pretty sure they've folded now. The big project was writing/improving A/UX (I'm not sure whether they're the only company that touched the code before or since). I can recall writing bug reports for the new keyboards (ancestors of what Apples still use today) and the man page for sed.
I can also recall a vaguely major release where the engineers dared us to crash the system. Took me all of 5 minutes using an old trick I saw someone do in a lab: while (1) { mkdir x; cd x}
Exactly how have they defined these "major" commenters? In terms of the number of points they raise or in terms of who they are?
I gather, by length. No, really.
My comment.
I spent some time yesterday going through the DOJ's reply. I was mostly looking to see if they even attempted to answer my concerns. Not really. It appears that they at least tried to handle the concerns of the 47 'major' commenters, although it's clear their reasoning on many of the points is mostly argument by authority. They appear to believe they will be given a huge amount of deference.
Anyway, the points of mine I didn't see addressed had to do with the ease with which it appears MS can technically exploit the loopholes of the settlement. For example, MS Office is not middleware, but it is ubiquitous, so one can essentially treat it as a backdoor communication conduit without documenting the APIs you use. The example I used: IE sends a message to Office on startup, which relays a message to the OS. If another browser tries to open a URL and the OS hasn't gotten a message from Office, it deliberately kills the browser after a random interval.
Or in another area, I suggest that MS could deliberately disclose cryptographic key information as part of a protocol, then claim the protocol must be kept secret per the clause in the RPFJ.
These are esoteric, I know, but do you think MS wouldn't try things like this if it thought it could?
I have not yet seen anyone point out this fact about Tacoma's system: it was an add-on to a planned upgrade. The city-run public electric utility was planning to add some wires so that they could read people's electric meters without sending someone physically out to the house. They reasoned that running the extra wires to set up a cable system was a small extra cost, conducted some studies, and realized they'd make the money back very quickly.
Many posters' comments I've read are severely misinformed about public power utilities. Particularly in the Pacific Northwest, they are generally viewed as more efficient and more trustworthy. Certainly much more trustworthy than local broadband providers (Qwest and AT&T cable). Stories coming out of California during the energy crisis, where municipal public utilities (like LA's) had plenty of power, while customers of private companies like PG&E suffered rolling blackouts, only reinforce what it common knowledge on the West Coast: municipal public utilities are a good deal.
This really is not a good book.
I bought this in June, as I was very interested in the subject. I read the first 76 pages in a few days, then set it aside and haven't read anything since.
My memories of why I gave up on it are a bit sketchy by this point, but as I recall, at the very least, the book needed a good edit. Much of the prose is clumsy to read. The material is poorly organized.
And at some point, the author starts dragging in jargon from Business School, as if we had all just taken the same Econ 101 course. If that's your cup of tea, then maybe this is the book for you, but it sure wasn't what I wanted.
I bought the book looking for insight as to how to manage a project I've launched. Perhaps the book contains powerful insights later on, but given the poor structure and writing in the first few chapters, I doubt it. I hope a better book on the subject will be available soon.
Coincidentally, here's an excerpt from a book I am currently reading:
From "Deforming Consent: The Public Relations Industry's Secret War on Activists, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1995/96. I read it reprinted in Censored 1997: The News that Didn't Make the News by Peter Phillips and Project Censored. (So I'm 4 years behind). Much of this info is probably available in Stauber and Rampton's 1995 book, Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.
I was one of the main developers of a portal here at the University of Washington, MyUW. We did it all ourselves, although at the time we did look at companies like Campus Pipeline and another product called Blackboard, at least to see what they included. Even if we would have wanted to use these products, it's dubious we could easily do so, due to the wide dispersal of the interesting data here at the UW: one group has the main Student database, with grades, schedules, etc. The Housing and Food Services department has a separate database with dorm info. Financial Aid is elsewhere, etc. I got the feeling that many of the campuses that use services such as this are small enough so that one small group of people is in charge of nearly all the data (as well as probably running the e-mail system and web servers), and thus it's pretty easy for Campus Pipeline or whoever to come in and take over.
After we were pretty much done with version 1.0 of MyUW, another group of schools started a project dedicated to producing a collaborative University Portal Framework. It's called the JA-SIG Portal Framework Project (the J means it's being done in Java), and it's about the closest thing to an open-source portal project I've seen. The license is hard to find, and I think they're still working on it, but the last time I looked, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Mozilla Public License.
One area where these things are really taking off is Alumni Associations. Companies basically come in, wave some money, offer 'lifetime e-mail' for members, and then set up a 'portal' that directs the members to cool shopping, travel, credit card, and other (for the company) lucrative offers. Now, it's not as if Alumni Associations were ever adverse to such marketing deals, but this is a whole other level, with essentially a 'lifetime' commitment on the part of the Alumni Association, as opposed to the once-a-year 'buy our life insurance' type of offers that were standard in the '80s.
I was at protests both Monday and Tuesday, including the labor march Tuesday. The odd thing about the march was that it was supposed to go from the Seattle Center (Space Needle, for non-locals) to downtown and back. But once it got downtown, it basically disintegrated, losing more than half the marchers. There wasn't a good reason to go back to the Center, and the protestors downtown were urging marchers to stay, so that's what most people did.
As I left for work today, police were arresting people for sitting down in a downtown park. No other crime than 'protesting' in a 'no protest' zone. It seems to me that what it comes down to is that the WTO is so unpopular that it cannot hold its meetings in anything but a police state.
Those of you who think the union people are only interested in keeping their standard of living high should investigate what exactly the AFL-CIO was demanding in their march yesterday. They want a minimal set of standards for WTO nations, including no child labor, no forced labor, and the right of workers to freely associate (i.e., form unions). There are no demands that everyone make $20/hour, or whatever. They have, in fact, been criticized by some as being too timid. The problem is that the WTO does not allow nations/cities/states to 'discriminate' on the basis of how a good is produced. The soccer ball made by kids in Pakistan is, to them, just the same as a soccer ball made by adults. Frankly, this is appalling.
Finally, as a Seattleite, I'm dismayed but not surprised by our leaders claiming they "didn't know" this was going to happen. The same sort of demonstrations have occurred at past WTO meetings (Geneva was the last one), but they still claim they had no idea of what they were getting into. Hopefully they, along with other American and world leaders might start to get the message: the WTO is not popular, and desperately needs reforming.
Early this year, an eminent computer scientist gave a talk at the University of Washington, where he basically implied that the only broadband choices most people will have in the future are your local cable company and your local telephone company. When you think about it, this is pretty awful, as these entities (here in Seattle: TCI and USWest) are, at least in the United States, near the top of any consumer's list of most-hated corporations.
One of the few rays of hope comes from Tacoma, Washington (of all places). Like many communities in the Pacific Northwest, Tacoma's electric utility is owned by the city itself. A few years ago they were thinking of adding a feature that would require them rewiring most of their network (I think it was to install automatic meter readers), and someone got the bright idea, "Hey, what if we ran an extra cable into every home as well?" The original thought was to get some competition for TCI, which was, as usual, not delivering on its commitments, but the cable could be used for Internet Service as well. Their survey estimated that the cost would be not much more than the original project, and bound to pay for itself within a few years from ISP and Cable fees. They ran a public opinion poll at the same time, which basically found that (a) If they priced their cable service less than TCI, an overwhelming number of citizens would switch. (b) Even if the services were roughly equivalent, 50% would switch (presumably out of disgust with TCI).
So they're in the middle of the switch, and TCI has, predictably, fallen all over themselves upgrading Tacoma's networks. Anyway, I'd like to see more cities adopt this model. First, because I think in the future Internet access will be just as important a utility as our current utilities (phone, cable, water, etc.) and therefore worthy of an extra wire. Second, even if you don't think government-run utilities are a good idea (I think they are, but I won't get into that too much), we need more broadband options. Two isn't enough, especially two that are controlled by such dubious entities as your friendly neighborhood cable company and your friendly neighborhood phone company.
Yeah, this is true, if you think that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are 'consumers' and 'the body politic' (why do you think the interstate highway system was built?). In any event, this is pretty much irrelevant to the original comment, which compared attempts at New Urbanism to the big, arrogant hand of the elite, while the postwar rise of the suburbs was supposed to be the will of the people. By your thinking, if the powers-that-be decide to implement New Urbanism ideas, then that must be the will of the people, too.
I think you're sort of right, and what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. Both postwar and current urban planning (or lack thereof) are heavily influenced by government. It doesn't help to romanticize one as 'natural' and denigrate the other as a manmade abomination, no matter which you think is which.
Of course money is not the only thing, but it is something people take into account. The conditions were in place so that, after World War II, given two objectively equivalent homes, the one in the suburbs would be cheaper than the one in the city. And your discussion of fear does not explain why the suburbs were so popular in the early 1950s, when the threat of crime was much lower.
Your argument might make more sense if you could come up with a reason why people did not create modern suburbs when they had the chance before World War II (say, in the 1920's, to eliminate the obvious anomaly of the Great depression). The heyday of the 'city as cesspool' was at the turn of the century, yet America did not see largescale exodus from the cities then, even though cities were much more dangerous (due to the threat of disease) than they ever were in the 50s and 60s.
In any event, you don't have the empirical evidence you started out with: the fact that suburbs were wildly popular in the postwar period does not, a priori indicate that they are what people wanted. You must take outside factors into account. You can argue that, regardless of these factors, people like the suburbs anyway, which is what you're doing, and which is fine. But you can't argue that their existence in and of itself is sufficient to show how Americans want to live.
I'm not talking about force, I'm talking about market-distorting practices that made suburban homebuying much more attractive that it would be in a purely 'market-driven' society. The government made suburban houses cheaper, and built the highways that made it convenient to live there and work where you pleased. The banks made it easier to buy land and homes there, and made it hard to improve the existing cities. Unless money is no object, the rational homebuyer is naturally going to find suburbs more attractive than the city, at least economically. And as others have pointed out, the postwar GI bill gave many families the opportunity to buy a house after the war than before, provided, of course, that it was sufficiently inexpensive.
Why redline? Well, it was made illegal in the mid sixties by Federal Civil Rights legislation (that's that all the 'Equal Housing Lender' stuff you read about in real estate ads comes from). I'm sure you can figure it out from there.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper. And finally, banks redlined certain in-city neighborhoods, making them difficult to maintain and improve, while greenlining suburban development, making it easier and cheaper to buy there.
So we do not know that people would naturally have flocked to suburban living, because everything was skewed by these policies. We can debate what policies we ought to put in place now, but it is a mistake to think that because people live in the suburbs now, that is the 'natural' state of affairs.
daviddennis (david@amazing.com) wrote:
>But remember this: For some reason,
>people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities.
>Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful
>guesses.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that the creation of the suburbs as they
exist now was a completely 'market-driven' process. In fact, it was not. After World War II, many
subsidies were put in place that made suburban homebuying attractive. First, the construction of the
interstate highway system. Second, the government gave away construction patents that made new home construction significantly cheaper.
You can also end (most) of the credit-card offers. Here are my notes from when I did this last year. Some of this information might be out of date...
Notify each of the three credit reporting companies (Equifax, [800] 556-4711; Experian, formerly TRW, [800] 353-0809; and Trans Union, [800] 680-7293) that you don't want your name sold to other marketers
According to the Trans Union recording, if you opt out of one you opt out of all 3. The other two don't mention this (it's all done by voicemail --- they send you something in the mail to verify your information).
I like college. Maybe you will or do or did or won't or don't or didn't. There's no way for me to know. College was good for me, but, to be fair, I liked school so much I got a Ph.D. I went to a great public university when tuition was cheap, and only ended up with a few thousand dollars of college loan debt. I got a researchy/software engineering type job at the university where I went to grad school, and am in a great position where I can take off in the middle of the day to attend classes, talk with my old professors, run errands, see a movie, or just go home and sleep (as long as I get my job done, of course). College has been very, very good to me. I can't guarantee the same for you.
Apart from everything everyone else has said about 'learning about learning', learning to socialize, the monetary value of a BS degree, etc., it is important to recognize the difference between life before 18 and life with a full-time job. To summarize, and assuming you have a good job, the main difference is that before you are 18, you have more time than money. When you have a full-time job, you have more money than time. The transition can be jarring and difficult to handle. Whereas before you could spend a day playing video games or watching TV or goofing off, when you have a job you find yourself wondering about how to eat quickly and when to go shopping and oh god I haven't cleaned the bathroom in 3 months. Money can be used to solve some of these problems, but it's unlikely you'll be making enough money to pay someone to drive you to and from work or do your grocery shopping just right, or buy you the perfect pair of pants.
The great thing about college is that it is as close to the pre-18 state you will get once you've become an adult and until you retire. It thus serves two purposes. First, it allows for a transition period between the two. Second, it provides a benchmark in the time/money continuum. When you're working at your job, you can think back to your college days, and figure out whether your increased salary now is worth your loss of time. If you never go to college, you'll never know how much free time you could have (and likely, how little money you can live on). In the meantime of your college existence, you will have the time to see movies, or plays, or concerts, or to read books, climb mountains, surf, whatever. About the only thing I can safely guarantee about an 18-year old is that they can't be sure exactly what they'll want to be doing in four years time. College gives you the freedom to decide.
Conversely, it might be a good idea while in college to do some work. Preferably as a fulltime summer intern, to see what the 'real world' is like, and to make money for the rest of the year, when you'll be in starving student mode. One thing I don't really recommend if you can avoid it is to work during the school year. Do your best to get scholarships, or get money from relatives, or work during the rest of the year, so that when class is in session you can devote your energies to learning.