I run the Interactive department for one of the key non-profits involved in this effort. We've been working around the clock since the earthquake to set up online donations, informational pages, disaster-coordination tools like haiti.ushahidi.com, and mobile giving. 100% of the money is going to Haiti, starting tonight (as credit card transactions have cleared.) No one is taking "administrative fees."
They are the only computer store personnel I've ever encountered who both understood computers and could explain them too. When OSX came out I walked into the store in SoHo and asked a random employee if he could show me how to open a terminal on one and he not only did so but dashed off a perl one-liner to demonstrate the robust UNIX heart under the eye candy.
The most important lesson I learned was that when male geeks talk, it's to accomplish something, but when my female geek talks, she does not want to accomplish something or have me fix something. She just wants to talk. Just listening without trying to offer solutions is a challenge when you spend your days in task-oriented pursuits...
It's one thing to have an idea, and another entirely to monetize it and another thing entirely again to run a company that does it profitably. Yes, there are a few young people out there who can do all those things, but mostly they don't have the maturity or experience to do the critical latter two of those three tasks. They wind up blowing all the money on phat office furnishings and pool tables and parties so they can have hip, creative environments to inspire their genius, and only when the bank accounts begin to run dry do they wake up and realize that oh yeah! they need to make money. And from there 99% of the time it turns into a circular firing squad that ruins lives and sends many investors to the poor house. This attitude is, after all, what drove the last dot-com craze and is exactly what brought it down in the end. Same thing is happening to MySpace now, and still guys like Andreesen come back with the same playbook over and over again.
Montana is the state where the Freemen built a compound and refused to pay taxes. It's also one of the very, very few states that absolutely, utterly refused to get onboard with the Federal RealID program. I also grew up in the northwest corner of the state, a fourth-generation Montanan. So I can't believe a real Montanan came up with this stupid idea. Has to be a transplant.
and I'll show you the money. Frankly, American media stopped reporting a long time ago. Because it was too costly and burdensome to think about what you're publishing. Thus all American papers and broadcasts became carbon copies of each other and the great, vapid echo chamber was born.
There are, however, other online news operations that DO provide value, and those I pay for. Stratfor is the prime example. There are really smart analysts there doing deep thinking and cogent writing on geopolitical topics that do matter, and I benefit from reading what they have to say. Crain's New York Business is another such example, and they're still a print publication. They provide useful local reporting, the kind all the other papers long since stopped doing, and I pay for what they produce.
So I firmly maintain that the medium that the media uses is not the challenge, but the quality of their output. If they don't fix that, and remember that they really are supposed to provide a public good, then no amount of paywalls or micropayments or other schemes in the universe will save them.
Or they look at the post and see someone who doesn't like Sony or MS's business practices. Which is fine. A cantankerous connotation in a post does not him or her a troll make, nor does belittling a cantankerous post you a wiseman make. This is/. And if your user # is correct, then you should know better than raise your hoary head at this, of all things, to take potshots at.
I find it interesting that you treat the way our towns and suburbs are and the way our transportation system is laid out is something as eternal and immutable as something given by god or nature. They are neither. You have to have a car to live in our suburbs...because public policy designed them such that you have to have a car to live there. You have to drive to the store...because the zoning boards zoned commercial so far from the residential.
Humans did all these things, and it's liberating to realize that we can un-do them. We can be the architects of the world around us. We can re-design our transportation system to work better. We can change our zoning laws so you don't have to drive absolutely everywhere. Personally I think we should because decades upon decades of building highways has created more highways full of more cars in stand-still traffic that are essentially semi-mobile octane-to-carbon dioxide converters.
Congressional whitepapers on China have been warning for 15-20 years that they are actively working to develop non-traditional means to pursue asymmetrical warfare against the United States. That is, China has been gearing up to go to war with the U.S. that whole time, and we foolishly allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ridiculous Chicken-Little "Terrorists! Terrorists!" meme. It is China, not a bedraggled pack of guys hiding in caves in Pakistan, who poses the existential threat to us.
Everyone acknowledges that Taiwan will be the flash point, meaning that the mainland will forcibly repatriate them if the Taiwanese don't surrender peacefully. Beijing took a run at it about 15 years ago when they started shooting missiles across shipping lanes in the Strait of Taiwan. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down between the two parties and that put a hasty end to that, because the Chinese realized that one tiny part of our navy packed enough firepower to sink the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes.
Since then they've been going at it much more systematically. They've been working hard on the diplomatic front in Africa and South America to develop relationships with resource-rich countries there who are tired of the West lecturing them about morality and corruption. On the business front, they've been moving their corporations closer and closer to strategic locations and critical technology; a shell company for the People's Liberation Army, for example, now administers the Panama Canal, which the U.S. navy uses to redeploy ships between Atlantic and Pacific. Economically, they have built up enormous reserves of U.S. dollars and have now got the entire U.S. economy by the throat--all they'd have to do to throw us into a tailspin is to STOP buying our debt. On the cyberfront they're infiltrating our systems and trying to crack our power grid and military satellites and gain access to classified information. And even their military is catching up. They're actively acquiring Russian Alpha submarines and aircraft carriers, shore-to-ship missiles, amphibious landing craft, and anti-satellite weapons (which they tested last year, you may recall).
The CCP has been very crafty in doing all this, quietly building up their capabilities and pinging us from time to time to test the viability of their strategy, which is to attack first economically and with crackers, and then while we're running around screaming at the chaos, they'll move to seize Taiwan. One of those pings was a couple weeks ago when the Chinese minister expressed doubt about the utility of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. The shockwaves from that one are still reverberating. Another ping was a couple weeks before that when their ships were harassing our boat in the South China Sea. They may believe the time is almost ripe to make their move, because this stuff is coming more frequently now, and because there are signs that the Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, is choosing to employ intelligent, capable people who keep careful watch on things that matter and are winding down the terrorist! terrorist! crap so they can focus on China.
But that's why the decentralized nature of the Chinese crackers is so dangerous, because it may make the cascade of events to open hostilities inevitable--they can't be controlled by the Chinese government and may start things in motion on their own.
Fortunately, for now, the United States still has the ace up its sleeve that instantly puts an end to all the CCP's plans, as well as the crackers. That ace is called nuclear submarines. China's numerical troop advantage matters naught there, and American submariners have been past masters for decades at outclassing Alphas run by Russians who know how to drive them. And 15 minutes after the U.S. president gives the greenlight, the brutal reign of the Chinese leadership would come to an abrupt end.
I hope the guys in Beijing bear that thought in mind, and reel in the yahoos like the crackers before they start real trouble. I'd really like to avoid us having to draft every single male with two legs and a pulse to fight a war with them, and for my baby daughter to have a chance to grow up.
long ago. It has been at least a decade, possibly longer, since American newspapers decided to stop reporting and become repackagers of AP feeds. If you saw Google News when it first started, that fact was so glaringly, embarrassingly obvious that they took it down. That is, every single paper they were pulling from had the exact same articles, pulled from the AP, with perhaps a minor title change or slight change to the wording. The San Jose Mercury looked almost identical to the Boston Globe.
Then you have the abject failure of newspapers to investigate and confront at least two of the biggest disasters to occur in the past decade, the thin fabric of lies the Bush administration peddled to take the country into Iraq, and the financial collapse that we're currently suffering through. They merrily went along with the charade. The Grey Lady, the New York Times, for instance stood four-square behind its shill Judith Miller then, and still employs the hack Adam Nagourney whose spintastic gibberish would have gotten his ass insta-fired at the New York Times of 20 years ago.
And the final vestiges of editorial spine are snapping. George Will published blatant, factually incorrect statements in an op-ed of his last month that the Washington Post has yet to even address, much less issue a retraction for.
Newspapers therefore abandoned their core value proposition, to be sources of useful information, a long time ago because it was cheaper. It's just taken a while for citizens and readers to realize that and act accordingly.
So really, the Internet is only killing what was already dead. But increasingly major investigative style news is being broken by bloggers and citizen journalists, so there is a hope that online real reporting will live again.
You can tell your neighbor maxing out five credit cards after having leveraged his home to the hilt that he's heading for a cliff. You can point out that his neighbor on the other side was just laid off and now will lose everything. You can tell him you read in the company memo that they're planning a 10% headcount reduction in his division.
And he laughs at you while unloading his 100-in. plasma screen TV.
Anyone wants to talk to them at all, or re-use again, for the thousandth time, their same old tired, tired content. I haven't bought any music since Napster. My family went pure indie after that and we couldn't be happier. I don't know anyone who still buys music either. Indeed to do so would be horribly gauche when you can always catch amazing music performed live any given night of the week in any of two-score bars/venues in Brooklyn. Guitar Hero gives the labels one last, golden chance to bridge that void and reach the generations that have come after mine (I'm 36). So, yes, the labels ought to be kissing GH's butt, not pulling stunts like this one. Antagonizing GH is a sure path to complete and final irrelevance.
I must say that the race to the bottom began a long time ago when newspapers stopped doing original reporting in favor of rehashing AP articles and started doing more fluff and spin. They are the ones who devalued their product, because it was cheaper and easier to do and because it puffed up the owners' ideological egos (read: Rupert Murdoch). So why not get equally vapid content and chatter on the web for free?
Anyone who wants real news will turn to the BBC, CBC, NPR, PBS, or foreign-language publications like Der Spiegel. And because they do something valuable, they will survive.
Dear god, I fear history is repeating itself. Didn't we learn this lesson the last time?:
"After millennia of battle the surviving G'Gugvuntt and Vl'hurg realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog."
Oh, I dunno. That feels a bit absolutist to me. Sure, land is expensive in New York, but you'd be surprised how patchwork even Manhattan can be. There are large tracts on the West Side that are rather derelict. And that is also definitely true of the outer boroughs. So turning them into vertical farms wouldn't be the worst thing the city could do with them. Certainly it's better than a basketball stadium or another 99-cent store.
Do the numbers work out to make it worthwhile? Dunno. Figure a 30-story building on a half-acre plot with 4 levels of hydroponics per floor works out to ~60 acres of growing area. 50% of farms in the US are 1-99 acres in size, so roughly one vertical farm = one regular farm. Then you figure you get many growing seasons all-year round where most farms in the U.S. get 2-3. And you figure the produce needs to travel exactly one door over or at most across the street to the consumers, and you save money on the transportation costs too. Light you have from the big windows. Heat can come via heat pumps or waste heat from the subway system. It still might not make sense $-wise, but then again it might.
What I do know is that I live in Brooklyn in a brownstone on the 3rd floor and grow vegetables in pots on my fire-escape. The things I eat (lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, herbs) I can grow, and we can't usually eat all I can grow. That's a crappy fire-escape garden. So it seems with a minor change in mindset and some can-do Yankee attitude we could incorporate agriculture into our cities.
Londoners grew victory gardens during the Blitz, and indeed the New York Times did an article a month or two ago about people converting their yards to gardens here. So scaling it up isn't as bizarre as some of the reactions here suggest.
well in dense urban environments. NYC would have to turn the entire island of Manhattan into a 10-story parking garage to accommodate the millions of people who commute in on subways and buses everyday. Also, the traffic would be a Dantean nightmare, as opposed to the nightmare it already is with a tiny minority of commuters *cough* Jerseyites *cough* driving in.
Mass transit is also much faster and vastly cheaper. Driving from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side would take about 90 minutes with traffic. Subway gets you there in 45 minutes or even 35 if you catch the transfers right. And an $84 monthly pass lets you ride as much as you want, whereas the same money are what it costs you to fuel a Hummer for a couple weeks. But then you also have to pay for parking, and insurance, and tolls, and maintenance....
Last but not least, my subway pass stays in my pocket and somebody else watches the trains. As opposed to leaving $100,000 worth of my personal property on the street where some jackass can mess with it or steal it.
So really, at the end of the day getting on your city's back to get them to build out a better transit system is a much better transportation solution than keeping running on the car and oil industries' hamster wheel.
I've been holding my fire until Obama gets his AG pick confirmed, and the stimulus package passed. No one can expect anyone, even Obama, to change the course of justice overnight. And we do have many pressing issues that must be dealt with now.
But the Senate committee just voted to confirm Holder, and the vote on the general floor is expected to confirm him as well. And the House just passed the stimulus package by a large margin; it looks like it's on the road to passage.
So those two factors, plus the absence of a single Republican vote in support of a response to our national economic emergency, despite Obama's kowtowing to the "concerns" of Republicans, gives me hope that a proper, deep, wide, and comprehensive ass-kicking is coming from the boots of Lady Justice.
If not, then we have definitive proof that some people ARE above the law, and that the law therefore applies to no one. And it becomes the right and duty of the American people to punish their representatives accordingly.
Honestly, folks, I come to/. to get away from the children on Digg who constantly push marijuana articles. I'm not anti- or pro- anything, but headlines like "Marijuana Cures Herpes!" and "Hemp Can Stop Hangnails!" showing up here are quite disappointing because they're a transparent, sophomoric rationalization for chemically-induced reality avoidance.
Fine, go get stoned. But stop bellyaching about how everyone is mean to marijuana. And stop interrupting serious forums where most folks want to talk about serious topics (/., change.gov, etc.) with endless marijuana medical miracles.
Corporations and the power-elite have ripped the US taxpayers off to the tune of trillions of dollars over the past eight years alone. They always have, of course, but it has grown so rampant and egregious that we must put a stop to it once and for all. That means cracking down on offshoring and outsourcing by companies that come to the US taxpayer begging for hand-outs. It means life-sentences or worse for the white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff who are responsible. It means revocation of corporate charters for companies that do wrong, to curb the complicity of Boards of Directors and middle-management in white-collar crime; there must be more cases like Arthur Andersen being put out of business by the government.
And to those who contend that if we hold companies and white-collar criminals responsible for their actions that capital will simply flee the country, I ask, where are they gonna go? Where can they go that the long arm of the American people cannot reach? Mars? Because the US can make life on earth very uncomfortable for any place else that arouses its ire by sheltering them.
Slashdot Mirror
I run the Interactive department for one of the key non-profits involved in this effort. We've been working around the clock since the earthquake to set up online donations, informational pages, disaster-coordination tools like haiti.ushahidi.com, and mobile giving. 100% of the money is going to Haiti, starting tonight (as credit card transactions have cleared.) No one is taking "administrative fees."
Cool feat. Made a lot less cool by the use of the term "homeland" to refer to what used to be known as the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."
They are the only computer store personnel I've ever encountered who both understood computers and could explain them too. When OSX came out I walked into the store in SoHo and asked a random employee if he could show me how to open a terminal on one and he not only did so but dashed off a perl one-liner to demonstrate the robust UNIX heart under the eye candy.
But that doesn't make it easier.
The most important lesson I learned was that when male geeks talk, it's to accomplish something, but when my female geek talks, she does not want to accomplish something or have me fix something. She just wants to talk. Just listening without trying to offer solutions is a challenge when you spend your days in task-oriented pursuits...
It's one thing to have an idea, and another entirely to monetize it and another thing entirely again to run a company that does it profitably. Yes, there are a few young people out there who can do all those things, but mostly they don't have the maturity or experience to do the critical latter two of those three tasks. They wind up blowing all the money on phat office furnishings and pool tables and parties so they can have hip, creative environments to inspire their genius, and only when the bank accounts begin to run dry do they wake up and realize that oh yeah! they need to make money. And from there 99% of the time it turns into a circular firing squad that ruins lives and sends many investors to the poor house. This attitude is, after all, what drove the last dot-com craze and is exactly what brought it down in the end. Same thing is happening to MySpace now, and still guys like Andreesen come back with the same playbook over and over again.
is the only movie that would have pushed the irony meter higher.
Montana is the state where the Freemen built a compound and refused to pay taxes. It's also one of the very, very few states that absolutely, utterly refused to get onboard with the Federal RealID program. I also grew up in the northwest corner of the state, a fourth-generation Montanan. So I can't believe a real Montanan came up with this stupid idea. Has to be a transplant.
the two movies that followed the series felt like the writers and voice actors were out of practice. That said, this is Good News! indeed.
and I'll show you the money. Frankly, American media stopped reporting a long time ago. Because it was too costly and burdensome to think about what you're publishing. Thus all American papers and broadcasts became carbon copies of each other and the great, vapid echo chamber was born.
There are, however, other online news operations that DO provide value, and those I pay for. Stratfor is the prime example. There are really smart analysts there doing deep thinking and cogent writing on geopolitical topics that do matter, and I benefit from reading what they have to say. Crain's New York Business is another such example, and they're still a print publication. They provide useful local reporting, the kind all the other papers long since stopped doing, and I pay for what they produce.
So I firmly maintain that the medium that the media uses is not the challenge, but the quality of their output. If they don't fix that, and remember that they really are supposed to provide a public good, then no amount of paywalls or micropayments or other schemes in the universe will save them.
Or they look at the post and see someone who doesn't like Sony or MS's business practices. Which is fine. A cantankerous connotation in a post does not him or her a troll make, nor does belittling a cantankerous post you a wiseman make. This is /. And if your user # is correct, then you should know better than raise your hoary head at this, of all things, to take potshots at.
I find it interesting that you treat the way our towns and suburbs are and the way our transportation system is laid out is something as eternal and immutable as something given by god or nature. They are neither. You have to have a car to live in our suburbs...because public policy designed them such that you have to have a car to live there. You have to drive to the store...because the zoning boards zoned commercial so far from the residential.
Humans did all these things, and it's liberating to realize that we can un-do them. We can be the architects of the world around us. We can re-design our transportation system to work better. We can change our zoning laws so you don't have to drive absolutely everywhere. Personally I think we should because decades upon decades of building highways has created more highways full of more cars in stand-still traffic that are essentially semi-mobile octane-to-carbon dioxide converters.
...or the collective shudder of Digg users everywhere?
"Here's a news flash: At this rate, things are going to come to a head, one way or another. And only one side of this argument owns guns."
That's where you are quite mistaken. Those on the other side also have guns and are quite good marksmen. It's America, and Progressives pack heat too.
Congressional whitepapers on China have been warning for 15-20 years that they are actively working to develop non-traditional means to pursue asymmetrical warfare against the United States. That is, China has been gearing up to go to war with the U.S. that whole time, and we foolishly allowed ourselves to be distracted by the ridiculous Chicken-Little "Terrorists! Terrorists!" meme. It is China, not a bedraggled pack of guys hiding in caves in Pakistan, who poses the existential threat to us.
Everyone acknowledges that Taiwan will be the flash point, meaning that the mainland will forcibly repatriate them if the Taiwanese don't surrender peacefully. Beijing took a run at it about 15 years ago when they started shooting missiles across shipping lanes in the Strait of Taiwan. The U.S. sent a carrier battlegroup to sail up and down between the two parties and that put a hasty end to that, because the Chinese realized that one tiny part of our navy packed enough firepower to sink the entire Chinese navy in 15 minutes.
Since then they've been going at it much more systematically. They've been working hard on the diplomatic front in Africa and South America to develop relationships with resource-rich countries there who are tired of the West lecturing them about morality and corruption. On the business front, they've been moving their corporations closer and closer to strategic locations and critical technology; a shell company for the People's Liberation Army, for example, now administers the Panama Canal, which the U.S. navy uses to redeploy ships between Atlantic and Pacific. Economically, they have built up enormous reserves of U.S. dollars and have now got the entire U.S. economy by the throat--all they'd have to do to throw us into a tailspin is to STOP buying our debt. On the cyberfront they're infiltrating our systems and trying to crack our power grid and military satellites and gain access to classified information. And even their military is catching up. They're actively acquiring Russian Alpha submarines and aircraft carriers, shore-to-ship missiles, amphibious landing craft, and anti-satellite weapons (which they tested last year, you may recall).
The CCP has been very crafty in doing all this, quietly building up their capabilities and pinging us from time to time to test the viability of their strategy, which is to attack first economically and with crackers, and then while we're running around screaming at the chaos, they'll move to seize Taiwan. One of those pings was a couple weeks ago when the Chinese minister expressed doubt about the utility of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. The shockwaves from that one are still reverberating. Another ping was a couple weeks before that when their ships were harassing our boat in the South China Sea. They may believe the time is almost ripe to make their move, because this stuff is coming more frequently now, and because there are signs that the Obama administration, unlike the Bush administration, is choosing to employ intelligent, capable people who keep careful watch on things that matter and are winding down the terrorist! terrorist! crap so they can focus on China.
But that's why the decentralized nature of the Chinese crackers is so dangerous, because it may make the cascade of events to open hostilities inevitable--they can't be controlled by the Chinese government and may start things in motion on their own.
Fortunately, for now, the United States still has the ace up its sleeve that instantly puts an end to all the CCP's plans, as well as the crackers. That ace is called nuclear submarines. China's numerical troop advantage matters naught there, and American submariners have been past masters for decades at outclassing Alphas run by Russians who know how to drive them. And 15 minutes after the U.S. president gives the greenlight, the brutal reign of the Chinese leadership would come to an abrupt end.
I hope the guys in Beijing bear that thought in mind, and reel in the yahoos like the crackers before they start real trouble. I'd really like to avoid us having to draft every single male with two legs and a pulse to fight a war with them, and for my baby daughter to have a chance to grow up.
long ago. It has been at least a decade, possibly longer, since American newspapers decided to stop reporting and become repackagers of AP feeds. If you saw Google News when it first started, that fact was so glaringly, embarrassingly obvious that they took it down. That is, every single paper they were pulling from had the exact same articles, pulled from the AP, with perhaps a minor title change or slight change to the wording. The San Jose Mercury looked almost identical to the Boston Globe.
Then you have the abject failure of newspapers to investigate and confront at least two of the biggest disasters to occur in the past decade, the thin fabric of lies the Bush administration peddled to take the country into Iraq, and the financial collapse that we're currently suffering through. They merrily went along with the charade. The Grey Lady, the New York Times, for instance stood four-square behind its shill Judith Miller then, and still employs the hack Adam Nagourney whose spintastic gibberish would have gotten his ass insta-fired at the New York Times of 20 years ago.
And the final vestiges of editorial spine are snapping. George Will published blatant, factually incorrect statements in an op-ed of his last month that the Washington Post has yet to even address, much less issue a retraction for.
Newspapers therefore abandoned their core value proposition, to be sources of useful information, a long time ago because it was cheaper. It's just taken a while for citizens and readers to realize that and act accordingly.
So really, the Internet is only killing what was already dead. But increasingly major investigative style news is being broken by bloggers and citizen journalists, so there is a hope that online real reporting will live again.
You can tell your neighbor maxing out five credit cards after having leveraged his home to the hilt that he's heading for a cliff. You can point out that his neighbor on the other side was just laid off and now will lose everything. You can tell him you read in the company memo that they're planning a 10% headcount reduction in his division.
And he laughs at you while unloading his 100-in. plasma screen TV.
passes the sniff test.
Anyone wants to talk to them at all, or re-use again, for the thousandth time, their same old tired, tired content. I haven't bought any music since Napster. My family went pure indie after that and we couldn't be happier. I don't know anyone who still buys music either. Indeed to do so would be horribly gauche when you can always catch amazing music performed live any given night of the week in any of two-score bars/venues in Brooklyn. Guitar Hero gives the labels one last, golden chance to bridge that void and reach the generations that have come after mine (I'm 36). So, yes, the labels ought to be kissing GH's butt, not pulling stunts like this one. Antagonizing GH is a sure path to complete and final irrelevance.
I must say that the race to the bottom began a long time ago when newspapers stopped doing original reporting in favor of rehashing AP articles and started doing more fluff and spin. They are the ones who devalued their product, because it was cheaper and easier to do and because it puffed up the owners' ideological egos (read: Rupert Murdoch). So why not get equally vapid content and chatter on the web for free?
Anyone who wants real news will turn to the BBC, CBC, NPR, PBS, or foreign-language publications like Der Spiegel. And because they do something valuable, they will survive.
Dear god, I fear history is repeating itself. Didn't we learn this lesson the last time?:
"After millennia of battle the surviving G'Gugvuntt and Vl'hurg realised what had actually happened, and joined forces to attack the Milky Way in retaliation. They crossed vast reaches of space in a journey lasting thousands of years before reaching their target where they attacked the first planet they encountered, Earth. Due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog."
Oh, I dunno. That feels a bit absolutist to me. Sure, land is expensive in New York, but you'd be surprised how patchwork even Manhattan can be. There are large tracts on the West Side that are rather derelict. And that is also definitely true of the outer boroughs. So turning them into vertical farms wouldn't be the worst thing the city could do with them. Certainly it's better than a basketball stadium or another 99-cent store.
Do the numbers work out to make it worthwhile? Dunno. Figure a 30-story building on a half-acre plot with 4 levels of hydroponics per floor works out to ~60 acres of growing area. 50% of farms in the US are 1-99 acres in size, so roughly one vertical farm = one regular farm. Then you figure you get many growing seasons all-year round where most farms in the U.S. get 2-3. And you figure the produce needs to travel exactly one door over or at most across the street to the consumers, and you save money on the transportation costs too. Light you have from the big windows. Heat can come via heat pumps or waste heat from the subway system. It still might not make sense $-wise, but then again it might.
What I do know is that I live in Brooklyn in a brownstone on the 3rd floor and grow vegetables in pots on my fire-escape. The things I eat (lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, herbs) I can grow, and we can't usually eat all I can grow. That's a crappy fire-escape garden. So it seems with a minor change in mindset and some can-do Yankee attitude we could incorporate agriculture into our cities.
Londoners grew victory gardens during the Blitz, and indeed the New York Times did an article a month or two ago about people converting their yards to gardens here. So scaling it up isn't as bizarre as some of the reactions here suggest.
well in dense urban environments. NYC would have to turn the entire island of Manhattan into a 10-story parking garage to accommodate the millions of people who commute in on subways and buses everyday. Also, the traffic would be a Dantean nightmare, as opposed to the nightmare it already is with a tiny minority of commuters *cough* Jerseyites *cough* driving in.
Mass transit is also much faster and vastly cheaper. Driving from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side would take about 90 minutes with traffic. Subway gets you there in 45 minutes or even 35 if you catch the transfers right. And an $84 monthly pass lets you ride as much as you want, whereas the same money are what it costs you to fuel a Hummer for a couple weeks. But then you also have to pay for parking, and insurance, and tolls, and maintenance....
Last but not least, my subway pass stays in my pocket and somebody else watches the trains. As opposed to leaving $100,000 worth of my personal property on the street where some jackass can mess with it or steal it.
So really, at the end of the day getting on your city's back to get them to build out a better transit system is a much better transportation solution than keeping running on the car and oil industries' hamster wheel.
I've been holding my fire until Obama gets his AG pick confirmed, and the stimulus package passed. No one can expect anyone, even Obama, to change the course of justice overnight. And we do have many pressing issues that must be dealt with now.
But the Senate committee just voted to confirm Holder, and the vote on the general floor is expected to confirm him as well. And the House just passed the stimulus package by a large margin; it looks like it's on the road to passage.
So those two factors, plus the absence of a single Republican vote in support of a response to our national economic emergency, despite Obama's kowtowing to the "concerns" of Republicans, gives me hope that a proper, deep, wide, and comprehensive ass-kicking is coming from the boots of Lady Justice.
If not, then we have definitive proof that some people ARE above the law, and that the law therefore applies to no one. And it becomes the right and duty of the American people to punish their representatives accordingly.
Honestly, folks, I come to /. to get away from the children on Digg who constantly push marijuana articles. I'm not anti- or pro- anything, but headlines like "Marijuana Cures Herpes!" and "Hemp Can Stop Hangnails!" showing up here are quite disappointing because they're a transparent, sophomoric rationalization for chemically-induced reality avoidance.
Fine, go get stoned. But stop bellyaching about how everyone is mean to marijuana. And stop interrupting serious forums where most folks want to talk about serious topics (/., change.gov, etc.) with endless marijuana medical miracles.
Corporations and the power-elite have ripped the US taxpayers off to the tune of trillions of dollars over the past eight years alone. They always have, of course, but it has grown so rampant and egregious that we must put a stop to it once and for all. That means cracking down on offshoring and outsourcing by companies that come to the US taxpayer begging for hand-outs. It means life-sentences or worse for the white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff who are responsible. It means revocation of corporate charters for companies that do wrong, to curb the complicity of Boards of Directors and middle-management in white-collar crime; there must be more cases like Arthur Andersen being put out of business by the government.
And to those who contend that if we hold companies and white-collar criminals responsible for their actions that capital will simply flee the country, I ask, where are they gonna go? Where can they go that the long arm of the American people cannot reach? Mars? Because the US can make life on earth very uncomfortable for any place else that arouses its ire by sheltering them.