Every day there are moments of the human digital presence that are indistinguishable from the ordinary senses of life. Investments in this capacity measure growth by producing and sharing data to reveal locations and percentages of people who purchase goods and data services and also bank their information to facilitate exchanges in everything that can be digital. In addition, establishing data connectivity with everything people do suggests a nonorganic capacity for replicating self, community, or company with this new form of existence.
The Report
What is Owned?
As a proprietary issue, the business strategy is to prevent exposure of the power to own a person’s digital existence. Far-fetched, right? Maybe not. The essential sources of old and new uses of money in data streams are, at best, marginally secure and, therefore, unmanageable. Most importantly, the structures of this ownership (list here) have yet to coalesce or dare think of the unification of this power. It is a trend in itself. As a form of shadow ownership, it’s good/evil potential will continue to be exposed and debated. Still, the points made to date have yet to change consumer protection, privacy, and intellectual property.
The central question is how to defragment the intensity of political questions about two issues – the unstructured convergence of individual privacy into cyberspace and the value of data stream participation in forming metadata. But first, what are the stakes in this state of ownership?
Ownership Stakes
Reliable data from trends identified by trading-in unfathomable numbers occur in the digital realm; it is packaged and escapes as feedback. As a machine, it can record every possible action and potential intent. Given that this condition is an exponential process with significant unknowns, the following knowledge steps are necessary:
Recognize the process as unstoppable
A matter of data, proof, and variables
Determine High-Priority Data Streams
Examples: water use per capita, illness reporting, and the chemistry of life at ppm 10-15
Build High Priority Transparency on each selection.
Establish penalties for share non-compliance
Determine Central Agency Authority and Accountability
National legislation
Determine Global Agency Authority and Accountability
Global legislation
Vast data management companies focus client organizations on global data on a per-issue basis. Examples are determining what drives human curiosity (media), encourages innovation (science), and develops trust (politics). With proof, the service yields essential capital for investment with risk assessments. On the other hand, it remains ungrounded by public policies with a sense of priority for adequate consumer protection. You know, the kind that doesn’t get people killed.
Tipping Points
The word “singularity” describes an enormous oneness of something converging. Anything can be stuffed into it, making the word obscure and useless. Nevertheless, impending “tipping point” transformations are available to observe potential convergences. One focuses on “terms of use” and “privacy policy,” and the other is on the value of data stream participation. The significance of “the individual” in the United States is a force that continuously seeks common-law principles to secure personal, civil, and human rights. However, as a digital participant in multiple data streams continues to intensify, the individual is not a priority in the current practice of corporations and other entities. As a result, there are thousands of “terms of use and privacy agreements” to which participants agree with a click with little regard for content. The irony of this condition is that it may take an AI to produce a common-sense summary of implications. Please review and comment on five digital consumption activities with tipping point implications.
Tip(1): Spatial Construction
The routine use of digital methods to imagine architectural space is an active tool for envisioning futures in new ways. The area and mass of an entire city or the furniture layout in a living room can be displayed and explored in detail. The purpose is to envision new spatial opportunities as an experience comparable to a walk around, an apartment, a home, an urban block, or through a park.
The complexity of interpersonal dynamics in a virtual space is equally buildable in the digital realm and recordable for adaptations to avatars. Adding these choices for re-entry into a personal future logically includes the community in which participants share in creating an end experience from which new things begin. In 2020, the Forbes Technology Council imagined the creation of a digital twin, “…a real-time virtual model of our physical selves that constantly acts on our behalf without ever needing to rest or refuel.”
Tip(2): Control Standards
As a participant in this new realm, the quality of ownership over individual behavior as it becomes recorded and reusable requires as much attention as the concept of fee simple has in law today. The absolute tenure of land with the freedom to dispose of it will continue to include human behavior. How soon will people discover it is ongoing with the assurance that the rules of the road are written well and assure safety, freedom from fear, and accountability?
Tip(3): Intellectual Property
What is intellectual property? Is it the result of all actions taken? Is it limited to the products created in implementation and use? Individuals legally own their behavior. They can be punished if bad or rewarded as people, contractual teams, small businesses, giant corporations, and government entities. The accountability of representatives from the smallest district or industry to the presidency of national governments or multinational corporations is governed by statute. To define these actions in the digital realm, first ask, what belongs freely and without restraints to the world?
Tip(4): Deconstruction (ism)
Ambiguities inherent in the themes of control and property reveal contradictions as they occur in a prepared digital space. In Being and Time, Heidegger describes deconstruction as a way to “arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since.” To the architect, the design for an absence of visually evident continuity or symmetry as deconstruction is similar to Heidegger’s observation. The architect reveals the absolute power to manipulate the physical world in every way imaginable. Deconstruction into Heidegger’s primordial world shows every gram of matter as in use forever. Add environmental sensitivity to this modern practice, and every gram of new and old construction would be composed of materials that could do the same.
Tip(5): Berra McLuhan (ism)
“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”
“You have to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.”
Marshal McLuhanand Yogi Berra
Taking a slow ride to nowhere specific is supported by human curiosity, a love of uncertainty and adventure, or simply going for the ride despite trepidation. The positions taken by Berra and McLuhan on the human condition have a strange similarity. On the one hand, the trend toward cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias is growing, but the causes are elusive. One element is how personal location matters little if you have a state of existence that cannot be described as having a place.
Too Late and Too Soon
Thank you for the comments. They have to lead to the following summary.
The ability to digitally construct a fully detailed three-dimensional space offers unlimited choice. This capacity not only makes standards possible but also essential. As tipping points of human transformational capability, the offer of making mistakes in the digital realm at the ppm level leaves the problem of standard setting much like an open battle wound. Its healing will require refinement of what is owned from the human mind outward to what all of humanity holds in common. A deconstruction approach to this standard could solve problems that threaten life-support ecosystems. One result would be to reshape cities as a national security policy.
Has human self-awareness occurred too late to alter its use of Earth’s resources to mutual benefit? Is the damage endangering life support systems occurring too soon for this action? Efforts to mitigate failure involve multiple interdependencies that are frighteningly disjointed. incremental and unrecognized.
The revisions toward success that veers away from cascading collapse include exploring the universe for exoplanets with water. Such a search is reasonable when taking a viewpoint of usefulness over the next millennium. After all, the first exoplanet, discovered by TESS and documented by the Webb telescope (LHS 475 b) in 2123 is forty-one light years from earth. Not exactly a day trip. NASA is also hoping to build a second telescope for deployment (2040) with another salve of hope, calling it Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The far more practical challenge to science in this early part of the 21st Millennium is understanding the new and rapidly changing domain of the Earth’s Anthropocene water cycle. Not as interesting as the wonder offered by the HWO, but a billion times more practical.
Floods are Fast Droughts are Slow
Strong indicators of system collapse include ongoing climate change events associated with extreme weather. For example, in the winter of 2023, more than 34 million people in the southwestern US fell under flood watch. Storms brought chaotic downpours described as an insistent parade of atmospheric rivers, also deemed incapable of reversing the southwest region’s severe decade-long drought. That floods are fast, and droughts are prolonged reveals a disunity of systems that demand recalibration, but how?
Environmental assessments of climate event damage tend to state the post-trauma costs in which the policy is to rebuild with improvements. The alternative is to change urban development to offer higher levels of resilience sufficient to survive threats to life support systems over the next century. Here too, development policy is driven by market demand for change that rests with the vision and intent of private investors. The argument yet to be defeated is that a tight urban development approach will transform life in a way similar to the feudal estates of the clergy and nobility as of the 10th c. (901 to 1000). Inside the walls, safety and water, protection, and livelihood.
The second millennium (1001 to 2000), produces the thrusting emergence of the Anthropocene with horrifying displays of nasty little wars to reveal the likelihood of a repeat global performance. Here too, the argument is to mitigate damage by spreading the assets thinly or building iron domes to ward off threats and attacks. Both are strongly in play as policy.
Timeline: Earth’s Development Timeline
World history is documented with an increased understanding of events (here) and the threads of common human behavior each exhibit. Part of that knowledge includes curiosity about the universe. Today it is known to be filled with the light of billions of galaxies that teach about time and, more recently, how planetary systems are built. For example, just before midnight on Jan. 12, 2023, a green comet sped by the Earth (C/2022 E3) for the first time in 50,000 years. Homo sapiens were dancing with Neanderthals at its last appearance. Today, the movement and location of objects in the universe is an exquisitely sophisticated computational power of space science. Earth science is far more difficult. Here is one example.
An extensive collection of habitable zone planets has just begun to take shape. In 2017, space scientists described the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven Earth-sized planets 40 million light years outside the Milkyway (here). This new ability includes exploring the process of planet formation involving billions of years. The one planet that supports this capacity for curiosity does not have the same quality of science capable of producing a policy that begins with a timeline for successful Earth Development.
Explicit expressions and definitions of success are readily available (list). Knowing what to do is pointless without the persuasion required to produce consequences. An action occurs as a result of chaos or a plan. The work required to succeed beyond catastrophic resolution will require global performance measures that are outcome-driven locally and established using evidence based on interests ranging from knowing the parts per million of a molecular element to the cultural psychology of happiness. That is the challenge of this century and perhaps the Millennium.
The term “climate” defines emotional and psychological conditions in group settings. The climate also describes variations in the Earth’s atmosphere. The word “viral” describes a disease-causing condition and an effort to capitalize on the influence of ads within marketing strategies. The duality of language is an excellent place to examine the “climate change of mind” problem.
In a diverse culture, growth in the depth of shared principles is an excellent place to explore opportunities and draw a line in the sand. Journalism may be the best place to call wide attention to them as separate from values, but what steps would be needed to draw that line? The argument here is to take the opportunity to review “climate change” and “information” in tandem. Communication in this context is the first rung on a ladder of indeterminate height but getting up the first step makes it shorter.
“What if all major newspapers in the USA took one day or several weeks to state American principles unanimously?”
A rule of journalism is not to become the story. However, today’s news business needs to grab the stage on this issue and produce some valuable viral content. Climate change is an excellent place to examine the climate of American principles in response to problems before entering the murky world of values.
values are internal, and therefore subjective, and may change over time, whereas
principles are external rules that are permanent and unchanging
Why doesn’t everyone know this?
Why Five Times
Asking “why” five times, such as “Is climate change dangerous, and how will it affect us?” is an exercise for defining issues with a group of people in problem-finding/solving situations. For instance, a Pourquoi story would produce an essential etiological diagnosis of papers by climate scientists and speeches by political leaders solely for their viral potential for solving climate change problems. Likewise, it could be beneficial to root out how the climate for discourse leads to confusion and violence or positive action with practical results.
Why(1) is climate change dangerous?
The “affect us” question has infinite climate change locations and well-known impact zones. Floods, forest fires, and a rising sea have likely geographies; to a lesser degree, high winds and drought severity are also shared concerns. The conditions for a direct “affect us” situation then falls to historical odds and the number of potential participants in a tragedy. Climate scientists recognize this as a Game of Roulette over which they have little influence. Wondering if that ball (or bullet) can affect “me, my family, and community” creates a complex social climate of “them and not me” and leads to the illusion of location security.
Why(2) is climate change dangerous?
When a dangerous weather event occurs, services involving the city, state, and federal government, charitable organizations, and the help of family and neighbors provide recovery efforts. Without a robust response, the number of economically and physically displaced households increases, and local private and public institutions struggle to provide safety net services. The term resilience describes all types of defensive actions to increase security; however, post-trauma assistance in the name of resilience does not contribute, nor does it prevent, ongoing damage to future generations. The alternatives are vague renewable energy concepts and lifestyle changes. None of these choices feel essential and leads to the “out of our hands” rationalization for the ordinary observer.
Why(3) is climate change dangerous?
The first two examinations of ‘why’ involve the emotional climate of a scientifically predicted change in the Earth’s atmosphere. Using the term existential threat is accurate but unhelpful. The news business examines threat conditions as a “daily history” written to describe events using the other journalistic questions — who, when, what, and how. News of the energy production business, GHGs in the air, and the complexity of that air’s relationship with the star we call our sun are abstract. Some of this news leads to factual information. Examples are the assignment of a personal climate/carbon footprint for households, communities, cities, and nations. The physics of GHGs is well understood, while the demand for scientific authority in governance remains ineffectual. There is no airbag for the planet.
“Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information becomes as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.”
The focus on American principles is disappointing for its sole focus on the U.S. Constitution. But, quickly, they are the rule of law, civil and human rights, free speech, privacy, a procedure for accurate information, and the responsibility to think critically in the public interest through democratic action. As standards of civil society, they allow all people to learn and become their “better selves.”
Institutions that herald these principles can never know the “truth,” only the joy of searching for it with sufficient vigor toward good decisions. The alternative is to accept an authoritarian power over what can be learned. All forms of communication combine mis- and disinformation. False or misleading information that is not necessarily intentional has the prefix “mis” to express the message from the Latin root – wrong. The prefix “dis” means “not.” It is information suggesting that it is something else. The motive of disinformation is to persuade with a purpose. It is a symptom of complex inequalities composed of anger, fear, and distrust. Climate change is dangerous because the information is a product of ineffective, short-term experience and slow scientific methods.
Why(5) is climate change dangerous?
Distressing the Earth’s entire system allows direct actions for change. However, this includes factions in science and public dialogue with the capacity for suppression that narrows characteristics of a problem by furthering a reductive narrative. As a result, the climate of political discourse tends to overlook or underplay the need to respond. For example, the “thoughts and prayers” emotion with low-cost recovery loans are reactions that cannot be rejected, but it diminishes the debate on alternatives. Modern science also contributes to this response by narrowing the evidence needed for selecting solutions with merit and efficacy[1]. The combination of these behaviors limits a vision of new ways to live and how to achieve them.
In this climate of interaction, a realignment of values is needed. The demands of children openly complain about the lack of action, knowing full well that the scientific solutions to eliminate atmospheric GHGs are simple. They are born in the Age of Information, and for them, the answer is simple, end the use of fossil fuels. They know this is a threat to everyone everywhere, and it is on a schedule composed of atmospheric tipping points and geographic disruptions. Yet, the instructions for a radical pivot in alternative energy are wrapped up in its cost.
Once Again, Together or Separately
“What if all major newspapers in the USA took one day or several weeks to state American principles unanimously?”
The Report
If that idea is to get legs, it must confront the values as separate from principles so that both can be openly expressed and held throughout the USA, perhaps the world. The climate state of mind today exacerbates the actions needed now. Traditional American values and principles conflict with the illusion of location security by accepting “odds” coupled with out-of-our-hand rationalization. These beliefs automatically accept catastrophic outcomes in preference to authoritarian controls. The failure to fully understand the “slowness” of established scientific methods contributes to ineffective, short-term mitigation experiences—finally, these points limit a vision of new ways to live and how to achieve them.
The science of predicting what goes “viral” in communications across the new media sphere is impressive, and studies are developing. Terms such as “web-crawling” for critical words offer major media providers an opportunity to produce viral messages using search engine optimization (SEO).
These words establish emotionality, positivity, awe, anger, anxiety, and sadness. Other predictors are messages with practical utility, general interest, and surprise. Related factors involve fame, gender, a missing source, or a byline. Tweet/click counts are aggregated by the time of day, then correlated with related events. In addition, information is developing on the difference between reading a digitally presented text and using a typical book or newspaper. The “Journal of Research in Reading” made such a comparison (here) to find that paper pages offered an advantage in reading nonfiction. At the same time, the benefit of digital services (word definitions, comprehension quizzes) opened up rabbit holes. While useful, they distract from what the whole newspaper page offers in synthesizing the facts.
[1] An example of climate change reductivism is in the title of this article:: Demystifying the roles of single metal site and cluster in CO2 reduction via light and electric dual-responsive polyoxometalate-based metal-organic frameworks. Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader ( 1/2015 – 1/2021), is equally reductive as a consistent climate change denier with statements such as, “For everybody who thinks it’s warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn’t.”
The following post is due to a Twitter account where its owner frequently visited national maps exhibiting extreme weather events and gun violence. An ad aimed at that Twitter account exhibited a series of maps (with uber ads) that web editors thought would interest those who like “facts with maps.” It stimulated a query for The Report.
How should people feel about the lack of protection from injury, harm, or evil? How are the emotions represented? Imagine three factors that support protection: “location-x3, continuum -x2, and sentience-x1?”
Solving for X
Here is our example of the protection problem. A corporation could make 101 quintillion balls and bounce them into the world because of a want to do so without profit, effortless access to resources, and the fun perceived by its deranged leadership. It is logical to think that could never happen.
The cunning language of market growth economists bounces the algorithms of “resources, profit, want/need.” Economists remain confident that this bouncing ball problem could never occur until you think of each ball as a gun or a liter of gas, a barrel of oil, or tons of GHGs exiting as waste into the atmosphere from the vast tracts of human activity, all of it in the context of general militarization. So, it is logical that the dystopian “rubber ball problem” appears routinely. On the other hand, admiring the innovation required to create 101 quintillion balls for its ingenuity leads The Report to discuss and redefine problem solving.
First, “Location 3X” exists as a result of product-making. Saying location three times is a mantra that emphasizes the relative value of land in the world but disregards the earth as the only land of present value in the solar system. These economies remain unregulated until one of their creations endangers a place and its people, and a post-trauma regulatory economy is activated.
Continuum X2 is the second portion of the desire for protection triggering the need to quantify in exquisite detail. Numbers such as the well-known parts per million becoming a quintillion or a sextillion is incomprehensible. Still, within the continuum framework, the power to pre-identify threats and provide methods for managing damage and deterrence is possible.
Sentient X1 is an emerging area. It considers the uniquely human power to quantify all things in a repository. The resources offered by locations and the continuous demand for economic growth suggest an opportunity to open new ways to avert damage and protect the quality of life.
The Report hopes you enjoy exploring the opportunities and dangers of location, continuum, and sentience. Thanks for the comments. You have seen them in the past, present, and future. Authoritative examples provided are greatly appreciated.
The Location X3
“80% of data generated has a location component, yet only 10% of spatial data is actually used by organizations”
Human history is a process that demonstrates a range of powerful extensions of physical existence. The technology used to deliver messages continues to stimulate and reveal changes in society, the family, work, and play. The transition from oral culture to the printed word, film, and TV, moved the cultural emphasis from hearing stories in small groups to seeing and hearing them in much larger groups. Human history also demonstrates the demand for protecting physical existence. What is communicated in these billions of extensions connects to the specifics of the medium used. Technical extensions of culture reveal an attribution problem. The red ball narrative becomes one with multiple layers. Here is an example using maps.
Carto‘s locational data and imaging permit thousands of mapping resource ideas. For example, if a company wanted to reach half of the nation’s population with a message, the red area (map below) would produce that number of people in the smallest space. With global interest in getting this message to half the world’s population, the map on the right illustrates the area that would produce that number. Is that a good strategy? It depends on the distinction between the medium used to offer data and the information selected.
The Internet offers multiple attributions to sources in the small-to-large group formation. For example, the political behavior of businesses in market economies deploys multiple websites to produce something of interest to people. In the map example below, the purpose of displaying them on a Twitter account is to sell ad banners, followed by an enormous array of location-based interpolations and acquisitions (from click counts to sales) for injection into a network. These industry-driven frameworks are gradually attempting to discover what people want and need in compelling detail by location. Of course, this includes the assumption of an invasion of privacy. How dare investors or governments seek that information?
The maps selected above interested The Report in choosing the second layer of attribution — the name of the map producers. The third layer, at this point, becomes entrepreneurial. It is no longer “free to edge” and offered at a price. It is a visualizing service to educate or to enhance the market positions. Product launches by known locations or new options represent enhancements. The data result in direct sales, “in places” and “from places.” is a way to introduce these third-layer offerings.
The data contains click-throughs for what Factable calls “new perspectives.” Their owner, the Hive Media Group, was acquired in January 2022 by OpenWeb for $60M. Given the function, as mentioned earlier, of new forms of digital ownership as continuous in a network, the sources for attribution also change.
The producers present blurry, endless parades of perspectives (mosaic left) that become outsourceable without a concerned, dedicated effort. At this point, everything is reversed, like an upside-down world. Take a brief look at the data providers (using the links above). You will recognize a vast array of tiles and captions designed to identify specific groups of individuals by location and interests.
Several investors in the Gig economy include a “fact-source-check” service to interested viewers and media centers. The purpose is to praise the rules of ethical journalism or the providers of data and products. Expose misinformation in a caveat emptor world, and we enter Continuum 2X.
The Report’sTweet-O-Rama is a drill down to these highly concerned people. It is not without a sense of irony that all these services are located in the urbanized portions of the nation and the most highly populated areas of the earth. However, the facts produced by those most concerned are based on data that exposes patterns and relationships in the “buyer beware” consequence of regulation. That leads us to our second query, will the array of small groups of the internet medium produce sufficient data to regress toward a mean of greater importance?
The Continuum X2
The earliest tokens (ownership symbols) date to almost 10,000 years ago, known today as places such as Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, and Egypt. Tokens today provide a way to represent resources such as raw materials and processed goods. Around 5,000 years ago, a bulla (like a data packet) also held receipts. When sealed, they were capable of tracking multiple items. In today’s terms, they are encrypted until the exchange language is learned. Computer language systems and machine learning capabilities have become best known as artificial intelligence (AI) or the ability to discover patterns and relationships in data like the kind that defeats Chess Masters. Other AI demonstrations win on minutia question game shows. These data-holding systems are entering their third practical decade and closing in on a century since their concept, inception, and implementation. Current AI use is Cyc (encyclopedia) using symbolic programming. These systems require unique “builds” for specific disciplines such as epidemiology. A continuum theme is embedded in another give/take and push-in/pull-out framework based on the neural network design. In this system (e.g. ChatGDP) truth and reason cannot be checked for accuracy within the system. It is left to the judgment of users.
A practical theologian described evolution as beginning in a void until temperature and inorganic material combined to produce organic entities over billions of years with an ability to replicate and continue by surviving (adapting) during changing conditions with the fate of a good “fit.” All organic life entities carry the DNA polymer with instructions for physical development that gave organic entities billions of specializations to become biological, leading to the neurological condition of the human mind. The theologian sees this as a trend that moved from inorganic to organic to biological toward a continuum of self-awareness that leads to the spiritual. One can only hope.
The practical concept of the spiritual idea recognizes the intellectuality possible in a society that can sense and create totalities outside of individual experience. The primary examples are machines that extend sensory power. More recently, these devices generate natural dialogue that is undetectable from a person. After that, the human/machine relationship suggests an evaluation of character that would require evidence of independent thought, leading to perceptions, such as an original idea and the ability to feel. Of course, regardless of the source, when the appearance of thinking and feeling occurs so well, telling the difference doesn’t matter, but this poses the most challenging query of the red ball problem.
The Sentient X1
The software to produce the well-known sounds of Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), and Google Assistant is drawn on the idea of continuity. The software Language Model for Dialog Applications (LMDA) is continuously improving due to the growing percentage of people with the resources to use it in their daily routines.
Nevertheless, it is possible to visualize these machines answering billions of questions simultaneously for hundreds of thousands of interested individuals every second. Sentient or not, whether it matters or not, the idea of location, combined with data stored in a continuum, leads to a global media-forming society. Its place in the universe of billions of galaxies suddenly becomes location relevant. The example given here is the Earth’s most popular asteroid, which forces this question:
What would be necessary to make everyone on Earth ready to be financially secure?
The images below focus on an Asteroid with an orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The interest in this object is due to knowing it exists and the presumed content of this rock as “new land” in our solar system. Its discovery challenges the definition of wealth or value. If mined for its mineral deposits, it could make everyone $93 billion richer if sold today. Overall the total value is estimated in the quintillions. That is any number followed by eighteen zeros. 18 — 000,000,000,000,000,000.
Search: 16 Psyche
Exploring this idea is in the following discussion. Still, our goals take us back to the beginning. Determine the quality of shift from Location 3x away from the dynamics of growth in local markets toward the Earth in a solar system market. So the next set of posts will go back to the beginning under the heading Localism.
The TOC table below has six explorations. They connect writers and contributors to “the news,” AKA present-time history. The aim is to find those who ask if a smart Earth with smart cities is possible. Cities have come first to the task of creating the world we see today. From all the silly little castles of primal organizations to the complexity of what we see now, they remain the intellectual creators of ‘the state’.
Introduction
The Rubber Ball Problem looks at three components needed to solve for X. It asks how much of the Earth’s crust can be extracted and processed until it isn’t the Earth any longer. Good? Bad? What? That leads to the love question entitled, Knowing Earth. How long will it take to bring humanity into a long and restorative look at itself? More than pictures of things millions of light years in the past – the question is how to get a sense of the Earth that is no longer destructive of the grace it offers in the future.
Refinement in the following posts covers signals of change because we are, as the animal once observed, the Cleaver Meat. The Report sustains that viewpoint as a value proposition. We are clever and that forces a demand on writers and researchers. Please critique the seven priorities chosen by The Report for consideration and comment. Finally, two primary obstacles to progress are explored for comment. One examines the dark side of Magical Thinking, the next offers a brief exercise on the language of climate and change. as an “Ask Why” five times experiment. They are fun, everyone should try one. The To Little Too Late segment seeks feedback for the purpose of sharing references, research, and strategic activism.
The Report is thankful for readers’ insight into this unedited convolution of views. One final note, as Report readers know, participants share a “no one is as smart as all of us” approach to the development of ideas. Accordingly, the narrative is in a constant state of revision.
Ten, twenty-five bucks would be fine, but in case you are wondering, the limits on contributions made by persons to candidates (increased to $3,300 per election, per candidate) (52 U.S.C. § 30116(a)(1)(A)); The limits on contributions made by persons to national party committees (increased to $41,300 per calendar year) (52 U.S.C. Feb 2, 2023. (FEC deep-end rules)
So what about the “money is speech” PACs out there? All we have to say is this is no time to be complacent about the jar-shaking.
The promise of planning, architecture, engineering, and construction is helpfulbut not in the way we think.
Designers, planners, architects, and all of us, suffer from several well-documented cognitive failings that distort our ability to predict accurately. But, hey, the future is not that easy to expect, but this could be changing due to two causalities:
Are we more likely not to believe evidence contradicting a commonly adopted meaning of a bright-line or hot-button event? The event is easy to recall, leading to the likelihood of overestimating the significance of each event’s incidence. We are, consequently, less likely to accept contradictory evidence without the bright lines.
We know how to make events recur with increasing accuracy, along with the sunrise and the tide. But, the capacity to build for the future does not include knowing what it will mean to people or do to their lives.
Solid psychological evidence of these abilities and behaviors leads to one of The Report’s favorite things — inevitable conclusions. With human behavior data, governments and businesses use open database connectivity (ODBC) to build businesses. ODBC is a powerful alternative to firms making decisions based on an expert’s track record.
ODBC is complicated because we are all involved. Knowingly and without our knowledge, we are all participants in a massive regression to the mean experiment. New ODBC business partnerships bring unbelievably accurate tools to analyze/improve urban evolution using a delicate participation process with some sticky privacy issues.
New kinds of knowledge capital are consistently built through curiosity and action. General preferences are finely tuned essentials of routine design decisions predicated by the senses of the human body. The ODBC benefit builds on this framework for a reform movement in which designers, planners, architects, and engineers acquire the leadership role and lose their subservience to capital by capturing a higher level of control over its uses. Aside from the political challenges involved, the advancement of certainty is a forceful way to ensure the quality of human life on earth.
The Decline of Expert Discretion
I offer two examples as to why this decline is probable. First, in Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, Ayres describes the replacement of the “expert” whose knowledge is built on experience and track record by step-by-step procedures with fact-holding computers for data modeling. He argues that anything can be predicted. Just before the publication of Super Crunchers, an equally popular book entitled Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner illustrated how extensive analysis of databases reveals hidden causes and new questions replacing the “firm expert” approach to community development services.
These writers explore new business structures that replace the expert. They skillfully illustrate how massive datasets and quantitative analyses make hundreds of real-world decisions using algorithms for people asking better questions. The question posed here does not regard removing the role captured by traditional experts from the policy framework. The question is not when or if but how quickly it becomes inevitable. Is there any solace in this truth? It seems the answer is yes.
The remaining and most important human element is to guess. Guessing requires a test to discover the variables that should and should not be included in statistical analysis. In other words, generating a hypothesis remains ultimately human. To ask “what causes what” remains the most valid human act.
What Causes What?
Our present experience is coupled with a dense urban environment where the exponential growth in the number of variables affecting choice is now instantly available. These “sets” of information are beyond our “intuitive” abilities to use, let alone an individual or team’s skill at defining problems. However, tools, such as telescopes in space or microscopes in laboratories, force new observations. We thought they were stars, but they are galaxies, and we are a little blue marble in one of them. We can’t see the “atom” but know why they are objects of matter smaller than a wave of light. This quality of observational insight is now available regarding human behavior.
The selection of statistical inferences capable of building datasets that explore human behavior is a vital new policy tool. Hours of sleep, the expenditure of dollars on everything-everywhere, miles traveled, even tears shed, and a laugh out loud. It will help designers to see things never seen. Discovering novelty and asking questions will be the source of human insight in regression to the mean data. Still, the origins of data to establish commonality will define the ultimate decision-making structure of every individual. The trade-off could and must be equal. For example, look at this narrative on Earth Day (here).
Consensus on OBDC
Therefore, the consensus on this question is developing: There is a lack of extensive knowledge regarding viable algorithms helpful in defining the aesthetic of the urban living experience as weighed against the privacy sought. New questions:
How will people be added to this group to develop the super-crunching urban design discussion?
How will end-user experience data become a routine product for design and planning firms in dense urban and metropolitan areas?
How is urban design data produced, made accessible, and used to alter urban design practices?
Investments measure participation. Growth in sharing data reveals that a significant percentage of people who purchase data services also bank their information to facilitate exchanges in everything that can be digital. In addition, establishing data connectivity with everything people do suggests a nonorganic capacity for replicating self, community, or company with everything digital.
What is Owned?
As a proprietary issue, the strategy is to prevent exposure of the power to own your digital existence. The essential sources of old and new capital streams are secure but not manageable. Most importantly, the structures of this ownership have yet to coalesce. It is a trend in itself. The good/evil potential will be exposed and debated. The central question is how to defragment the feedback to a useful purpose. That, too, is becoming predictable. More intense questions, however, will develop politically, such as: which party or factions will control two narratives on two issues — privacy and its value.
Reliable data from trends identified by trading unfathomable numbers are linked to the use of the digital realm capable of recording every imaginable purpose. Given this condition is a rapidly growing process with significant unknowns, the following steps are necessary:
Recognize the process as unstoppable
A matter of data, proof, and variables
Determine High-Priority Data Streams
Examples: water use per capita, illness reporting, and ppm 10-15
Build High Priority Transparency on each selection.
Establish penalties for share non-compliance
Determine Central Agency Authority and Accountability
National legislation
Determine Global Agency Authority and Accountability
Global legislation
Vast data management companies focus organizations on global data on a per-issue basis, such as determining what drives human curiosity (media), encouraging innovation (science), and developing trust (politics) with proof, which yields essential capital. On the other hand, it remains ungrounded by national and global policies with a sense of priority for effective international action. The lack of change is one of the signals of impending “tipping point” transformations.
“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent, and all will be lost.”
Charlie Chaplin, 1889-1977
The dark side of magical thinking has been unexamined since the explosive arrival of social media in political dialogue; the desire to wear a pair of lucky socks or to enjoy a vision of the United States as a “shining city on a hill” is joyful and appropriate. However, magical thinking is also a condition in which correlation is mistaken for causation. For example, stubbornly grasping to hate or seeing all events as “fate” is magical thinking to avoid pain. These inferences can lead to benign feelings, and dangerous acts yet seem natural when connections between similarities contribute to causal cognition.
Awareness is Growing Strangely
Journalists should get to know the writers examining the linguists of thought and action. Place “magical thinking” and “political speech” into Google, and you get 146,000 references. Aside from Marshall McLuhan, all of the major influencers are alive.[i] Perhaps interviews with them should ask “how to put the dark side of magical thinking back in the box.” Democracies can come to reasonable conclusions without empirical fact but not without a believable and continuous restatement of principles. So what are they?
Philip Howard’s book, The Death of Common Sense (1994), focused on the hubris of the law; by 2009, Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason examined the acceptance of anti-rational positions and anti-intellectual opinions by a growing percentage of the population involving all walks of life. The level of concern has risen consistently as political leaders seek to dominate with disruptive, often baseless observations. Ostensibly they are using their freedom to speak irrationally only to be persuasive instead of informative.
Several national newspapers have published (and republished) the misrepresentations and lies of the 45th President and others with little impact. In the kingdom of negative press, several journalists are working on amplifying our understanding of this disruption. The BBC editors in Futuremake this “about us” statement “We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don’t accept — we ask why.” The Report recommends the following articles.
Frameworks, such as three equal branches of government, support a mature two-party system plus active recognition of “neo-margins.” Democracies can make room for the superstitions and misconceptions of the electorate because a reasonably sized voting public expects equilibrium. For example, mid-term elections tend to go to another party to express independence and a love of political debate to define issues and solve problems. The 2022 election was practically an exception to the rule, but it was not. It was reactionary. The vote continues to call for a stalemate, lasting decades.
“So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.”
Ezra Klein, “Why We’re Polarized,” American journalist and author
How Partisanship Works Now.
The intent of voting decisions by the electorate includes the causal cognition of balanced representative power. But regrettably, the presumption of fairness in taking this position has become problematic. Why? Elected representatives have begun to exhibit magical thinking in two branches of government, and the third is suspect.
Enter the “fear and loathing” conspiracy theorists as interpreters of the unexplained, using amulets of distrust from the fringe of the unknowable in opposition to the evidence seekers. The desire for balance has slowly become grounded in the suspicious anticipation of the abuse of power. Zero-sum is the result.
General disinterest in the neo-margins as irrelevant also supports the lack of distinctions between truth and fiction. The “no evidence” dismissal only reveals uncertainty, distrust, and fear. However, when the neo-margins become too extreme, they become subject to the power of enforcement actors. As the rule of law adjudicators, these agents are organized in a tiered legal system and employed by the public as interpreters (not the watchdogs) of misconduct from year-to-year and precedent, case by case.
A contemporary example is David Duke, a prominent antisemite and white supremacist. When imprisoned for embezzlement following the George Wallace campaign (2002), the joke was that he was the only one in his entourage that was not an undercover FBI agent. When arrested in Germany (2011), the dismissive humor remained.
In other less volatile areas, the criticism of elected officials and other leaders for harmful and irresponsible rhetoric occurs without effect. For example, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, suggested the National Archives might have coordinated with Democratic officials to investigate Trump’s removal of classified materials. Within social media, the claim of an FBI plot is then injected. Another humorist pointed out, “They are only mad because librarians busted them.”
The proliferation of investigative opinion by disruptive actors mutes the more extended term required to expose baseless distortion. The rebuke of criticism as “surprising, but not unexpected” occurs to neutralize fact-finding by expelling the narrative as “merely political.” Behavior such as Duke and Jordan prefer to use the illusion of truth as they deploy the heuristics of distrust to produce followers. Is it possible to invalidate the political usefulness of uncorroborated acquisitions? Democracies can reach reasonable conclusions with the common ground of trust in American principles. What are they? It is time to state them with unmistakable clarity, everywhere and all at once.
Demand Sum
Suppose a sizeable portion of the voting electorate enters the world of magical thinking and stays there. What can the evidence seekers do if all of the media, the entire fourth estate, is no longer relevant in examining political speech? What can professional journalists do when the only measure of communication is the evidence of persuasion?
Perhaps the time has come for every publisher of news to prepare editorials and above-the-fold headline stories entitled Stop the Lies. Unified, national distribution of this position on days or weeks before the election of 2024 would be a way to reestablish the principles of American journalism by restating those of the Democracy it serves everywhere and all at once.
Do not despair. Unanimity is possible on subjects of importance. Recently Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand all made travel warning statements for visitors to America. The warning statements from these democracies exposed America’s significant gun problem. The German information makes the point best, “it is easy to obtain guns in the United States, leading to increased use of guns and occasional killing sprees.”
The independence of the press has never been more vital. Its integrity is at stake unless it can sustain unity for civil society in distributing facts as friendly and opinion as a fair statement of judgment. In other words, it is time to fight back. The reinjection of this responsibility into the value system of Americans is necessary if the nation is to remain a Democracy in the service of a diverse country. Without fighting for common ground, we clear the path to the world of magical thinking. In closing, this letter to the editor of an Iowa newspaper begs one question. Will a transparent judgment occur, or will obfuscation rule once again?
Deborah VanderGaast ran for an Iowa State Senate Seat as a Democrat and lost.
Note on the news clip: The New York Tribune’s mid-1920s commentary on the second edition of James Melvin Lee’s, The History of American Journalism is sycophantic. The exuberant praise of Lee’s work would be unusual to readers of similar work in the 2020s. On the other hand, the review of Lee’s work by the American Journal of Sociology (1918) has criticisms of manipulated media. (posted here, and an Into the Weeds Wiki is here).
Note on political distortion: Jordan sent the following statement in a letter to the National Archives. “The fact that NARA transmitted to DOJ a referral that launched a criminal investigation of the former president the same day the Democrat Chairwoman of the Committee inquired whether the agency had been in contact with DOJ raises serious Democrats.” The letter implies political collusion for conspiracy theorists to forage. The NARA response is here.
[i] They are Noam Chomsky, Stven Pinker, George Lakoff, Shobhana Chellah, Barbara Partee, Paul Kay, Daniel Juraksky, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker.
Climate Central evaluated future potential flood exposure to the tax base of every county in the United States. For example, the flood zone analysis for Kings County, NY, identified 276,299 land parcels totaling 32,461 acres [? Walt Disney World] assessed at $17.14 billion sea level rise in your county or the national report.
Over thousands of years of recorded human history, people’s organizations continue to prove that all other life forms are weak. That job is done, and with it, a new task. Suspend layers of evolutionary Earth thinking that shape views of the future. The information is available to take a new path.
Evolution as we know it is displayed in the voracious history of our naturally lethal world. The Anthropocene is responsible for all things deadly today. Given the condition of everyone doing everything imaginable to the Earth, all the time requires two pieces of information to proceed. First, it is irreversible; second, everyone means everyone and everything. Therefore, an assessment is necessary to manage the data is now possible.
Vast quantities of raw material are processed from the Earth’s crust to become an endless stream of made-things seen by everyone from the threshold of every shelter outward to the horizon. Today, the vision of a wasteland of discarded material across a dystopian landscape is countered by the ability to catalog all living entities with regenerative communication capacities.
“What should everyone know? How much of it is known? And most importantly, how will everyone obtain trust in what they need to know to do what they need to do? It is becoming necessary to provide the human mind with a new place in the universe.”
Creating new places for the human mind occurs routinely, and the emerging idea of what a machine singularity might be, whether actual or artificial, cannot be ignored. Should it be proprietary? If so, what is exclusive to ownership and inclusive for the public? Establishing a fully transparent public repository is a way to force that decision. But, of course, that depends on the tasks required to make that an idea in the first place. There are obstacles.
People will confuse this effort with Playing God or a vain attempt at omnipotence or omnipresence. But, less ambiguously, the fear of being under the control of an authoritarian system is challenging to measure and consistently disruptive. On the other hand, if AI governing systems occur in a democracy, the additional complexity and the challenge of increased social sensitivity require a plan.
Trending the Earth?
So how will it be possible to recognize the responsibility of artificial intelligence? What role will it play in identifying priorities? Could such entities get the world to “yes?” on any question requiring herculean coordinated action? The United Nations, the signers of the Paris Accord, and every hot and cold war from the beginning of history continue as attempts to control a future. Yet, these failing efforts at control also establish trends worthy of intense focus. Resolution by catastrophe and limited mitigation success amid long-term failure is reversible. Yet, the potential for predictive analysis leading to long-term success is only possible by accepting the massive addition of artificial foresight. Here is an example:
The Milky Way is just one of the billions of galaxies in the universe. The illustration of 100,000 or more galaxies detected near the Milky Way is named Laniakea. The Earth is amidst supercluster networks linked by voids. Nature Video, based on Tully et al. 2014) Nature Video, based on Tully et. al. 2014 Also see: Vox Space Maps.
The Report sees the implementation of global action capable of producing solid, broadly acceptable answers to problems Resources to implement tests with trusted procedures are in constant development. There are well-schooled day-to-day process actors on the national and international stage (developing here). The books and papers on the economics of globalization reveal extreme poverty further complicated by violent climate change, drought, famine, violence, flood, and fire. To believe natural forces create these horrors is a grave error for one reason – the significant places of impact are well-known, and the trends are clear. What trends will reduce these impacts and be helpful for people, their communities, the nation, and the world?
Without the math to sort trends independently, the data provider must be trusted, and its users should be capable of empirical confirmation. Another aspect is the geography of the search location. For example, using the search term “Market Share,” Washington D.C. claims search levels higher than Wall Street. Search one word such as “Energy” in 2021 and reveal Texas and the fracking states on top of the list geographically.
Today’s trends are data-rich catalogs of words and numbers, graphics, and near real-time images. Deconstruction is available in segments of action measured from microseconds to decades and from clicks to buys. To look at how trends are handled, visit Exploding Topics or go to the source of much of it in Google Trends to see top search queries neatly organized in daily search trends. Google offers Year in Search 2021 with a video recap of global searches. For “things,” they offer 2022 Shopping Trends. Quintillions of inquiries packed digitally lead to refreshing questions such as:
“What is the transparency level needed from (the AI search engine company) to claim meaningful trends? Are they accurate to the period, durable as values, resilient in the face of crisis, and adaptable to the prospect of peace or the prevention of violence in a world of unrelenting change?”
RLC
There is a significant probability that transparency will not occur. It can, however, be signaled in the investments made to acquire market positions related to AI development. Other trend-specific investments and capitalization activities are more challenging to identify as products that signal the ability of an AI to create and control. Measuring the rate of acceleration in thought cannot be measured by distance per time period squared for the lack of a worldwide idea of thought governing the signals of change below. In this area, the sixth priority will move upward.
Seven Signals of Change
The Report offers seven signals of global; change introduced below from low to high priority.
Issue
Description
1
Climate change
parts per million per day everywhere
2
Urbanization
coverage per capita/cost per capita
3
Demographic variations
social characteristics, location cohorts
4
Economic disparities
competitive dollar/held equity indicators
5
Health conditions
vital statistics by sensitivity, age, sex
6
Purpose of artificial intelligence
trust in response to questions
7
The threat of high-impact asteroids
find them, have a moving truck strategy
Priority Seven: What is space for other than long-term thinking?
The design of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test revealed several changes in astrophysics. First, the schematic idea was to hit an asteroid 6.7 million miles from Earth with a spacecraft the length of a school bus and around the mass of a dairy cow (570 kilograms). Instead, the impact changed the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes. That means they pushed the small asteroid moon Dimorphos away from the large one, Didymos, on September 26, 2022.
The DART project included SMART and DRACO, LUKE, and LEIA. All are extraordinary accomplishments. The project cost was just $324.5 million. Ninety-five percent of that was for spacecraft development. The remaining expense is the Falcon 9 and a year of mission operations.
Implementation begins with: we can do this but should we, and if yes, where does it fit as a national priority? An act designed to protect all of humanity from an extinction event by intentionally changing the motion of a celestial object was more than a mathematical prediction. See the entire mission as far more than a spatial deflection project in the NASA explainer (here). The integration of endeavors like this will become more holistic.
The viewsDouble Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) began at 75,000 and grew to over a half million in the minute before impact. Only a billionth of humanity was interested in the mission, and another fifth of the world population may confirm a vague awareness of the event. The tech may not have been examined, but it proved that rollable solar arrays could go interplanetary. Thanks to the combination, it used an ion drive that bombards xenon gas with electrically charged atoms to zoom. But to get there, it produced SMART and DRACO, LUKE, and LEIA, all worthy of reflection on their expandable purposes. If this achievement in astronomic physics has value, it would add to long-term thinking about the Earth and its future. The idea of DART was to hit something and make it move. The need to engage five million places in the world in chronic stress and alter its movement toward abject despair is without effect. The idea of equivalency requires examination.
Artemis is the first step by NASA to establish a sustainable presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars. It is a test for the technical capability effect on two phantoms. Helga and Zohar are mannequin torsos for testing organs. They hold 5,600 sensors and 34 radiation detectors. Another deployment sent ten “CubeSats” into several space sectors for additional data-gathering missions. One of them is the first biology experiment (yeast cells) to venture into the radiation of deep space.
Priority Six: The Emergence of Artificial Intelligence.
The rollout of AI is the most crucial issue for sustaining investment representative of the needs of humankind. Much of the world may recognize the capacity of an AI to beat a Chess Master or win on the Jeopardy TV show. However, it has progressed further than games and is progressively more competitive in all fields. Public administrations and private companies will also produce trends in gaining or losing trust as these systems develop.
The AI subject remains exhaustive, complicated, and undecided. It is much like the mysteries that DNA offers the future of all life. Investors in the cloud believe it to be the ultimate tool. The uses and purposes of these machines are without regulations governing issues specific to the needs of people, organizations, and national and international organizations.
The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. Strachey’s checkers (draughts) program ran on the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester, England. Then, in 1956, there was the birth of AI. John McCarthy first coined the term “AI” at the Dartmouth Conference. The first AI laboratory began in 1959 at MIT lab (here) and (here). In 1960, the first robot was introduced to the General Motors assembly line. For more, see Google Scholar (here).
Priority Five: Human Status and Well-being
Human health and well-being require no greater purpose than a sustained investment in reporting. Given the academic and scientific rigor of the health professions, complemented by health data, reporting systems have gained trust given the “all alert” priority driven by the crisis response to the COVID-19 virus and its mutations. However, the focus on determining cause and establishing prevention protocols remains an exhibit of economic and political disparities.
The Budget for 2022-2023 of the World Health Organization is $6.72 billion [? San Francisco Bay Bridge span replacement, 2002-2013] and spread thinly (here). On the other hand, the Department of Health in New York State is $204.3 billion here).
Organized societies care a great deal about high levels of positive function. The volume of information on the “state of the earth” is new, multiplying exponentially, and the subject of hundreds of national and international foundations and corporations with thousands of concerns. The central review of these many efforts is the lack of focus, followed by the fire brigade problem and the lack of distinction between economic living and healthy or safe life. Google Scholar. (here)
Priority Four: Social and Economic Disparities
Public policy, with few exceptions, is limited to keeping the economic stress on a population to a known minimum using various social cohorts and locations. The widening wealth gap is nonempirical and tends to become conspiratorial. Conspiracies “fill in” unknowns based on the joys of imagination and social position. For example, the persistence of poverty is described as a natural occurrence. It is not. Poverty can be ended. How to do so is the unanswered question.
The data required to end poverty is available, but the resource argument remains with evolutionary thinking. A region’s people will flee from sources of degradation they alone cannot stop. Economic hardship, corruption, war, flood, fire, drought, and starvation rise on a well-known global landscape without a hint of an effective long-term resolution.
The design of human status and well-being. However, the identification of differences and the creation of distinctions acquire the most attention. More on Google Scholar (here)
Issue Three: Diversity and Life’s Structure
Diversity is an unknown “want” in the economic sense. As the population becomes increasingly urbanized, social diversity increases and the natural environment changes radically toward safety. Few are sensitive to the enormous importance of want in “a wilderness.” For most people, other than understanding that the primate species of the early Earth became modern humans, the diversity required for that to happen is a vague notion. A debate on the function of diversity in life’s structure is (here).
All living things have differences and distinctions down to the molecular level where, as life would have it, it is all the same. The Human Genome Project (completed in 2003) found humans are 99.9% identical. Without a genetic basis for race, a greater appreciation for common ground and diversity is now a matter of outlook and expectation. More on Google Scholar (here)
Priority Two: The Urbanized Earth
The formation of cities and megaregions defines the Anthropocene with a vast array of uses for land and sea. Yet, it has occurred without a deep understanding of the consequences caused by various levels of dominance.
Dominance unchecked, unevaluated, and ignored yields unintended consequences. Rethinking the purpose and place of “the city” on the earth requires the demand of containment with the opportunity for unlimited growth. More on Google Scholar (here).
Priority One: Climate Change
Definitively proving that human activity can change the weather is the first injection of fear at a global scale. The term “existential drift” is prevalent among those monitoring extremes with measures of human cost. It is an “existential crisis” among those attempting to measure the cost. It is a “hoax” to those grasping to retain a lifestyle connection with seas and rivers, coupled with high investments in land value and policies to retain tax revenue.as long as possible.
Sixty million people live in the shadow of volcanoes worldwide, and another billion will face sea level rise in every coming decade and continue until the remaining gods of the unknown dispense suffering to billions. Fear is a cruel emotion; however, it is the beginning of finding wisdom before blood.
Climate change is long-term, like weather patterns and the ebb and flow of ice at the polls. These changes have a broad range of observed effects best recognized with a global data resource such as NASA (here)
The following section will assume a growing understanding of AI’s role in society, given this entity’s impact on the seven issues above as a filter.
New York City Council Rita Joseph, Member Representing District 40 930 Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11226 Call 718-287-8762 Web: https://council.nyc.gov/district-40/
Facilitate a discussion with the New York City Planning and HPD, EDA, and so on regarding development activity in the area (such as new housing, redevelopment of the Sears location in relationship to the Lowe’s Theater complex, and anything else concerned residents would like to know about the impact (positive and negative) of new development.
U.S. Congress Yvette D. Clarke Representing District 9 123 Linden Boulevard, 4th Floor Brooklyn, NY 11226 Call 718-287-1142 Web: Brooklyn Office
Advise on obtaining State and Federal support for eliminating food deserts and help understand the owner’s position regarding long-term development plans for the property, if any. Federal intervention and resource processes take time and leverage. The community and other stakeholders might as well explore ASAP.
Stop & Shop Plans to End its Lease December 31, 2022 (Reviews) (Other News) 1009 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11226
Primarily concentrated in the northeastern United States, Stop & Shop has a positive reputation. [It’s a] massive supermarket with a relatively decent selection of products and reasonable prices compared to Prospect Heights. The meat department isn’t deficient, and the deli area is large and staffed by accommodating people who will go out of their way to help you. Source
The following data is public information on the ownership and land use of the property. Persons interested in conducting research on properties in this area are sought. The vacant land resource offered in this location is a highly prized commodity.
What if the new market isn’t an improvement?
New stores should be told one truth. The community may be low and moderate-income, but 60% to 70% of their market will be found in just 30% of households. Know that selling to them is fair to everyone. That is why we shop there or do we?
Use the links above for additional detail regarding the representatives of this property, its owners, banks, and creditors linked to the area. Interested researchers, please have a look around. For example, the BISWEB and ACRIS data includes multiple page records of business transactions.
The market area for this location is extensive. A thorough look and the economic power held by the community is based on fair food prices and investment in the community’s future. The responsibility of all property owners is to see well beyond their bottom line. This community’s retail district depends on continuously maintaining and producing affordable housing along with a viable, hardworking, well-organized business association.
Block:5126 Lot:1 Police Precinct:70 Owner: FLATBUSH DELAWARE HO Address:1007FLATBUSH AVENUE, BROOKLYN 11226 Lot Area:107142 sf Lot Frontage:292.08′Lot Depth:224.75 Year Built:1995 Number of Buildings:1 Number of Floors:1 Gross Floor Area:141,599 sf (estimated) Residential Units: 0 Total # of Units: 3 Land Use: Commercial and Office Buildings Zoning: C4-2 Commercial Overlay: Zoning Map #:22C
Interested participants seeking a detailed understanding of the development issues posed by this site are encouraged to leave a reply for coordination with other researchers on this issue.
Triangulation is a common practice in large market areas. The strategy of franchise corporations such as Stop and Shop is to place three in an area, manage the inventory among them, measure profitability and dump the least of them.
Using multiple sources of data or multiple approaches to analyzing information is a means designed to enhance profitability. There are twelve Stop& Stop locations on the map (right). Three are in Brooklyn.
What is the history of openings and closings across the New York Metro Region?
Is there a history of backing away from market areas experiencing stress?
What role does the property tax on this multi-million dollar property play in negotiations?
What government actions are possible to eliminate the disruption anticipated?
The following map is from the Department of City Planning (DCP) Population FactFinder. It details the 8.8 million New Yorkers counted in the 2020 Census.
A typical market area for a grocery store can range outward and stay within a half-mile radius. Thereafter the data is altered by overlapping competition and other factors. The full range of households attracted to this location is best determined by a survey of customers, the nearest intersection of residence, a shot at getting income in a range, and the average amount spent monthly for comparison with 2020 Census data – specifically household median incomes.
The Report finds two ways to look at the future of individual lives today and all those that follow in the Twenty-First Century. It concerns the happiness of those living now and in the future. The despair starvation and deathembedded in climate change will destroy millions of people. Many others will escape the chaos with resources to assure personal safety. With these two views, The Report is unable to decide which will be more impoverished by these events.
A Thought Experiment
The irony of the architectural fascination with the zero-sum city is that it includes the option of never leaving the building, leading to one question. Is it really an option? Answer (1): It depends on what’s outside. Answer (2) If you are prepared, you have that choice. Answer (3) As the third answer to every question is one: What are the necessary preparations? Answers (1) and (2). Come up with a variety of worst cases and prepare for them and hope for precision or develop best cases and prepare for them. Leading to the question: Why is it so difficult to prepare for the future? Answer (1) It is difficult (not impossible) to design for unknowns as it includes the fear of them. Answer (2) The resources to create best cases are highly dependent on what is known and considered incomplete and inefficient. That answer of course always leads to that final unacceptable answer that is not a question. Building the most promising future can occur (3): when humans escape evolution, stop being animals of instinct, and free the mind from the substrate of cognition. The sense of insufficiency and inefficiency is a falsehood of that mind.
Dense urban environments offer high levels of collaboration that support quality micro-changes within firm boundaries and flexible economic regions. When contained, cities reduce latency in the acquisition of complex social and physical change. Fueled by diversity and interdependence, this creates a unique urban intelligence in the abiotic and human world of urban life, and there is one prime rule. First, do not cause harm.
The charts are from “Hunger and Blackouts Are Just the Start of an Emerging Economy Crisis” April 20, 2022, Source: UNFAO, Bloomberg. The article refers to the latest World Economic Outlook. The IMF likened the impact of the war in Ukraine to “seismic waves” rolling over the global economy. In addition, pandemic debt could produce a deluge of defaults among developing nations. However, behind war and pandemics lies the financial assessment of risk associated with climate change. The two photographs below illustrate a very different use of capital when a rising sea includes the risk of extreme and unpredictable weather.
Enclosing space for a preferred climate (left) is “a place to hide strategy,” Building islands for a rising sea is the leading A&E response to “finding a place to watch” climate change.
The Little Island Park officially (image right) opened on May 21, 2021, and cost $260 million [? cost of Airbus A380, the largest passenger airplane]. The public funds could have purchased an Airbus A380, the largest passenger airplane, for a cost comparison. However, the original Olmstead argument produced the cash for this 2.5-acre recreational facility. The public’s investment in this unusual amenity will continue business growth and new housing development along Manhattan’s Hudson Waterfront. These images can be found in Arup’s Journal (here) to exhibit the skills of this A&E giant in addressing climate change issues.
The Cascading Doom Loop
Capital is moving intensely in the interest of resilience experimentation. The investment in NYC’s Little Island at over $100 million [= Large city office buildings] per acre and the exploration of encapsulating cities are notable examples. The cascade possibilities have a global capital structure. The top ten are spread across the Earth.
All cities are affected by nations seeking geopolitical advantages. On the other hand, the “we are doomed” feeling is best known by NGOs acting as muted partners in mitigating the problems caused by wars, pandemics, climate change, fire, and flood events combining natural and capital impacts. Isolated disruption events cascade across a landscape, reduce shelter quality, destroy regional economies, and crush hope in their capacity to produce essential goods and services. The global NGO network in the nations listed above needs a comprehensive insurance policy.
The insurance economy is recognized as a necessary precondition for many activities in today’s global markets. The insurance pool is a critical component of recovery in response to a crisis event. Building a public/private policy for the Earth can produce the discipline essential to answering one question over the next fifteen to twenty years. That question is, “recover from what?” (See Declarations (here).
As cities adapt to climate change on the geopolitical stage, they face unprecedented competition for resources and investment in producing an effective system of urbanization. A new and revolutionary transformational infrastructure is needed to respond to the demand for renewable energy—stability before a rising sea and a path to a sustainable economy. Replacing capital investment in individual resilience projects by nations with a commonwealth vehicle is needed to encompass the Earth.
The garden walls of Albemarle Terrace represent many additions since they were constructed. The following illustrates some of the designs inherited or constructed by individual households.
“Since Citizens United, just 12 mega-donors, eight of them billionaires, have paid one dollar out of every 13 spent in federal elections.” Chisun Lee, GOTHAM GAZETTE
What if dollars were “voting people” vs. 12 mega-donors?
Could the odds be 140 Million voters to 12 in favor of Democracy?
Can small donations from ordinary people produce representatives with resource integrity?
The way to know is to make a Democratic majority. The most recent was the 111th Congress for just two years. The next will be the 117th Congress – four to eight years would be much better. Of the last ten session of Congress, only three were unified and Democrat, seven were divided.
A just society creates trust in government. A Democracy protects us from ourselves by keeping that promise with proof. Democratic governments pool resources to support the public good.
They should warn of poisons, ill health, and disease indicators as they occur. It can attempt to keep people safe from the violence of others. It can strengthen people’s ability to protect themselves. It can regulate, mitigate and eliminate ill impacts.
Democracy in a just society builds on resilience, accountability, and equality.
12-to-1 Odds
It is now an urgent requirement. Send cash to a Democrat or an Independent of your choice running in any state you desire. One party in power for eight years can work if the base of the ordinary commits. Do that first before asking who’s doing what down the billionaire’s rabbit hole.
Before reading the stories linked below, The Report recommends the short versions on Influence Watch. Search names such as Peter Theil, Bill Gates, and George Soros. The involvement of these individuals in the issues reveals two observations. First, twelve people wielding the power of an unfathomable amount of cash has a bad smell, and second, their productivity measures threaten our Democracy.
Three Stories
About a billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s Democracy (here).
A billionaire on sustaining investment in a future outside of politics (here).
A review of a billionaire giving $28.3 million [? Energy industry 2011 political donations] [? Energy industry 2011 political donations] into the Democracy PAC to support the Democratic side of the 2020 election. (here).
The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films, houses, books, and classic midcentury modern furniture. Eames Demetrios, their grandson, shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively, loving tribute to their creative process.
Designers of the Nature City All of the answers are right here in tiny forms as this glimpse from Timothy Beatley, author of Green Urbanism (there are ads)
Would Real-Time Digital Be Useful? Georgia Institute of Technology’s students are using CCTV video to map actual vehicles and people into Google Earth. Would this help or hinder the public dialogue on planning and community development?
Key Components of Ann Arbor’s Main Stree
In comparison to all of the digital animation of urban life out there, the following is fresh air just outside the fantasy world of a movie theater. Thanks Kirk, any other small college towns in MI like Albion, Kalamazoo, or Detroit have a main street. On the point of digital exploration there are exceptions.
To New Yorkers, these “one street wonder – pedestrian pocket” stories are instructive. Our density puts these streets throughout the city, but we tend to disregard their beauty and importance. The urban design investment could help by finding more work like the above or finding a way to send Kirk off to examine places like Denver’s 16th Street for a comparison. The peak at what is possible is illustrated in this early morning walk by a casual observer. It is bumpy but worth a moment, before moving on.
Perhaps it is obligatory is NYC’s plan to reduce space for vehicles with plazas for people, but NY Times reporter David W. Dunlap explains it with a rye sense of history in this NYT video.
All of this aside, one key question has to be asked. How can the places like those selected above become the subject of the ideas briefly outlined in the following bit of instruction from Janine Benyus author of “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”? Please forgive the introduction… it is well worth a few seconds of aggravation.
In 1996, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) deregulated telecom services in NY, promising that increased competition would bring down prices for cable, internet, and phone service and improve service, including bringing high-speed internet to all New Yorkers. Instead, 20 years later, New Yorkers are paying too much and getting too little while a digital divide based on access to information grows, and good-paying jobs are lost. The PSC has started a proceeding to evaluate the state of telecommunications in New York State by issuing a report by its staff (the report is called Staff Assessment and can be accessed here). They have set up public hearings throughout New York State in July and August 2015 (See Update in Oct 2015 here)
The New York City hearing Wednesday 15 July 2015 (See AKNA Testimony)
Common Cause/NY urged anyone concerned with the state of telecommunications (internet, cable, and phone) to testify. A robust turn-out by public and tech community members will get the PSC smart to the real state of telecommunications in New York. If Verizon lies to us, why not to the PSC?
Goal: reliable, affordable high speed internet, cable and telephone service
Following is some of the experience at the AKNA
In early 1972, the telecom schematic for the south side of Albemarle Terrace was drawn as part of a general order to document telephone installations. This is followed by three orders #21710 (1976), #96727 (1982), #27483 (1994), and a final notation to the schematic made in 2001 that looks like the phrase expressed by the term “SNAFU.”
In the Fall of 2001, Verison installed a splice in a good shaft on the gable wall of 2126 Albemarle Terrace was installed. It seals telecom lines for the south side of the terrace (buildings in the photo above on the right). There are no further revisions made to the Tabular Record for Account Code 32C, Tax District 500 P for C.O. Area Brooklyn 050 Division. This is the last recorded project. The result of the reconstruction of “Ragga Muffin,” a retail clothing store on Flatbush Avenue, led to the removal of phone lines on their roof to the roof of the adjacent Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In the Spring of 2011, Cablevision (Optimum) was rolling out 75 Ohm drop cable to the two terrace blocks and sent a representative door to door to pre-sign up customers. They were offering to buy out any Direct TV subscribers who had contracts.
They started, but some of the neighbors (mistakenly) asked them to stop because Cablevision was cutting into the sidewalks and patching them with asphalt. Some homeowners were concerned that they would then be open to Landmark violations because of the damage to the sidewalk and/or responsible for the cost of repairing or replacing the damaged sidewalk sections.
Note: the NYC Landmarks Commission would be concerned, but their jurisdiction is limited to the facades of buildings on the Terraces. Violations to the facades of the district would be the subject of a lien on the property by the City of New York on the property that would have to be cleared before a sale. As for all the rest (gardens, and so on), our care and sensitivity are expected.
Eventually, Cablevision repaired the sidewalks with cement, but Cablevision stopped the fiber rollout. A tragic circumstance of blaming the victims and lack of public leadership in basic enforcement of franchise agreement. Nick and Raina (of Kenmore) called Cablevision several times, trying to get them back. Getting past the customer service reps is impossible, and they have no idea and cannot help.
In the Fall of 2013, AKNA conducted a survey to use the information to lobby for assistance. The lesson learned here was to have the lobbying strategy in place before taking the survey. See the survey data here.
In the Fall of 2015, two Optimum technicians put a ladder up the gable wall of 2126 with a huge spool of 75-ohm drop cable to serve their commercial clients. And in the Spring of 2015, a series of Verizon technicians entered the south side of Albemarle Terrace (even numbers) to repair landlines. The story on the north side of the block is long and needs to be told. I put a brief video presentation for AKNA here to describe our deplorable telecom conditions.
In the Summer of 2015 residents of the south side of Albemarle Terrace managed to get the attention of a Verizon Engineer who after considerable analysis presented a plan for moving forward for the south side and for all of the Terraces with one caveat — the permission of residents to move forward.
The “right of way” process was completed for the FTTP (fiber to the premises (image here) and the details of it are here.
As the Summer of 2016 began to fold over the hope of a Spring installation suggested on the “right of way” documents we signed, a draft was a letter written. The intent is to send it to everyone our small band of patient believers could influence. The first draft read as follows:
We are 390 people in 140 households that have bent over backward to get Cable Vision, Time-Warner or Verizon to provide us with service. We recently completed a project led by Lourdes, Engineering (NJ) in contract with Verizon Engineering with all of the forms required of us to assure the provision of service. Like Cable Vision and Time-Warner, Verizon remains unavailable for comment or the courtesy of a response due to ‘contractual issues’, and franchise agreements all seen by us as the haze of the telecom wars, union/corporate misdirection coupled with the ineptitude of public agencies and political representatives.
I hope you have staff on this or committees put to the task but first find out who is buying their lunch as nothing is happening, information is not flowing and in a democracy, only one group of people pay the price of failed leadership in the brave new world of too big to fail.
In closing, we remind you of Margaret Mead and her point about not doubting the ability of a small group of people to change the world, as it is the only way it ever has changed. We, therefore, leave you with this one thought that we are just 140 households, and given our history of patience, we are now very interested in creating change. Look us up.
Sincerely yours, The Residents.
Winter 2016
Then as winter settled in we received this note:
Dear resident, The local deployment team has indicated that construction is underway. Barring any unforeseen delays, service will be available in January 2017. You will receive confirmation when you can place an order for service.
Representatives from the local deployment team met with Mr. Rex Curry, the owner of 2126 Albemarle Terrace, and went over different design plans. He indicated that he will be in contact with all of his neighbors and will relay information to the association. You might want to check with him for more specific information.
Thank you and best regards,
Will Freshwater Verizon FiOS TV | Sr. Consultant, Contract Management Video Franchise Management Team One Verizon Way, Basking Ridge, NJ 07920 william.freshwater@verizon.com
Rex Curry did meet with some of the guys from Lourds, but not about schedules or sharing update information. But, as you all know we are beg for forgiveness kind of group. The first rule of management Will be, information weakens as it moves toward the top, while decisions remain best when made closest to the source of the relevant information.
The Hopeful Prologue
Well, who knew it would take so long to get service? Our work ranges from being super polite and meeting some really nice people from V to conducting work with enraged groups of researchers trying to find out what is going on. We may never know what worked or didn’t work, but we can always ask for forgiveness.
P.S. if you care to respond, please do so through the website so that all our residents can participate. Anyone wishing to add something about the “existing condition” of your phone, satellite, or internet service, please do so in the COMMENTS section below.
A summary of the communication and data services currently in use by house number would also help us assess needs and/or compare costs. This data was )compiled. Those willing to share ISP provider data (DSL modem, satellite, and so on) and the monthly cost say so, and IT team will follow up directly. It will be used to update the first AKNA Survey
Following is a review of the Special District language. The view expressed in the Department of City Planning’s Zoning Handbook is that the advent of contextual zoning has reduced the demand for special district formation (e.g., Clinton type protection is between the lines of this policy) and thereby raises the bar for the status of special in the zoning text.
For example, the special district player in Washington Heights is made special by the alleged need to build a 7-story deep bathtub in Manhattanville and then go up 10 to 15 stories to serve Columbia’s interest in a 21st c. campus. It is not likely that CD12 (aka displacement city) will need to protect itself (as in Clinton) or promote this form of specialness as a blue zone approach. To give it a try, the following is offered as a method for discovering language or precedents that may prove helpful in determining a course of action on this theme.
Before the passage of contextual zoning, the most widely used affirmative zoning technique was special district zoning. This technique permits areas with unique characteristics to flourish rather than be overwhelmed by standard development. Over the years, the Department of City Planning (DCP) has codified special zoning districts to achieve specific planning and urban design objectives for limited, well-defined areas. Each district stipulates requirements and provides zoning incentives for developers who offer the specific urban qualities the Commission looks to promote in that area. It has proven to be a lawful way of using private capital to carry out public policy, but not without its challenges.
We have an interest in reviewing them all with the assistance of a small graduate team of aspiring planners. The DCP has combined access to these places by Borough — a link will take you to all of them.
Excluding the banner, the special districts in New York City using a simple word count is as follows: Manhattan (30) Brooklyn (13) Staten Island (6) Queens (3) Bronx (4).
Special Atlantic Avenue District (Brooklyn) The Special Atlantic Avenue District was created to preserve the scale and character of Atlantic Avenue, including certain architectural features of the buildings. The special district provides flexibility in arranging building bulk, mandates street-level commercial uses, and establishes design guidelines for renovation and new construction. Demolition of buildings is prohibited except for unsafe structures or to make way for a new development for which a building permit and financial commitments have been secured. To improve the visual character of the avenue, special sign regulations are imposed for commercial establishments.
Special Battery Park City District (Manhattan) The Special Battery Park City District was created to govern extensive residential and commercial development in an area close to the business core of Lower Manhattan, following a master plan for Battery Park City.
The centerpiece of the master plan is the office complex. To the north and south of this complex are two large residential neighborhoods with street-level retail uses. One central element of the plan is a continuous esplanade providing public access to the Hudson River waterfront. In addition, the district contains special design controls concerning floor area ratio, required building walls, and permissible building height.
Special Bay Ridge District (Brooklyn) The Special Bay Ridge District was established to protect the existing scale and character of the Bay Ridge community. The special district distinguishes the scale of development in the midblock from that on the avenue frontage. The midblock street zone encourages two- and three-family homes with a maximum height of three stories. The Avenue Zone promotes the rehabilitation of existing structures and limits new development to a six- to eight-story maximum. In addition, notable setbacks, curb cuts, open space, tree planting, and ground floor commercial requirements have been included to preserve the character of the existing street wall both along the avenues and side streets.
Special City Island District (Bronx) The Special City Island District was adopted to preserve the nautical uses and low-rise residential character. The special district regulations restrict the size and illumination of business signs, limit building heights to three- to five stories, and ensure adequate parking. The only commercial and manufacturing use permitted are those which reflect the nautical flavor of the island or serve the retail needs of the residents.
Special Clinton District (Manhattan) The Special Clinton District in Manhattan was created to preserve and strengthen the community’s residential character, maintain the mixture of income groups present in the area, and ensure that Clinton is not adversely affected by new development.
Special Coney Island Mixed-Use District (Brooklyn) The Special Coney Island Mixed-Use District was established to stabilize residential development while protecting the area’s industrial base. The district allows limited new residential infill and requires special permits for significant new industrial products. Existing residential buildings are permitted for enlargements, alterations, and repairs, and construction of new residential buildings is allowed if the buildings are next to an existing residential or community facility use. New manufacturing is limited to specific light industries compatible with residential uses.
Special Franklin Street Mixed-Use District (Brooklyn) The Special Franklin Street Mixed-Use District was established to balance residential and industrial uses by remapping the area from an M1-1 district to an R6 (M1-1) district. The district allows residential and community facility uses according to R6 district regulations. All existing industrial uses may expand by 3,000 square feet [? Size of a tennis court], or 50 percent, whichever is less. A more extensive expansion may be granted by a special permit from the City Planning Commission.
A new user group, Use Group M, has been established, allowing light industries and commercial uses in Use Groups 6, 7, 9, and 11 to occupy vacant storefronts.
Special Fulton Mall District (Brooklyn) The Special Fulton Mall District in Downtown Brooklyn was established to create an attractive shopping environment in a city street mall plan. Special retail use, sign, facade, and circulation improvement regulations are provided. In addition, a special assessment district has been created, through state legislation, to maintain the mall.
Vehicular traffic (except buses) is prohibited within the mall. Major public amenities required within the district include improved transit access, street furniture, street lighting, tree planting, and special sidewalks and roadbeds.
Special Garment Center District (Manhattan) The Special Garment Center District was created to maintain the viability of apparel production in selected mid-blocks in the city’s Garment Center by making a Preservation Area within which the conversion of manufacturing space to office use is restricted. Conversion to office use in the Preservation Area is permitted only by certification of the City Planning Commission that an equal amount of comparable floor area has been preserved for specified manufacturing uses. The legality of this unique district is currently being litigated.
Special Grand Concourse District (The Bronx) The Special Grand Concourse District was created to protect the distinctive art deco composition and scale of the Grand Concourse by establishing bulk and design regulations and limiting commercial uses to designated locations that will not conflict with the boulevard’s traditional residential character. The district consists of a Residential Preservation Area and three commercial sub-areas. New construction must conform to R8X (Alternate 1) guidelines.
Special Greenwich Street Development District (Manhattan) The Special Greenwich Street Development District was established to foster and promote the orderly expansion of commercial development in Lower Manhattan adjacent to Battery Park City and the World Trade Center.
This district attempts to implement an integrated plan for improved pedestrian and vehicular circulation and to encourage the development of a variety of retail and service establishments to meet the needs of the area’s working population. This is accomplished through a series of pedestrian circulation improvements and certain lot improvements in the district for floor area bonuses.
Some unique features of this district are its provisions for involving both the developer and appropriate public agencies in constructing specific pedestrian circulation improvements.
Special Hillsides Preservation District (Staten Island) The purpose of the Special Hillsides Preservation District is to preserve the hilly terrain and unique natural features of Staten Island by reducing hillside erosion, landslides, and excessive stormwater runoff. The primary concept for regulating development under this special district is the slope coverage approach. As the development site becomes steeper, the permitted building coverage decreases, but the permissible floor area on the site remains the same.
Special Hunters Point Mixed-Use District (Queens) The Special Hunters Point Mixed Use District was created to permit limited as-of-right status for the enlargement/alteration of existing residential buildings and new infill residential construction. All residential and community facility uses are subject to R5 district regulations. In some cases, a special permit is required for certain residential and community facility uses. New manufacturing and commercial uses, or enlargement of existing buildings containing such services, are allowed as-of-right as long as these developments or enlargements contain no residential uses and do not cause significant adverse environmental impacts. In addition, such new developments or enlargements must meet M1 district performance standards.
The Special Court Square Subdistrict has been created within this special district to encourage high-density commercial development in an area well-served by the subway system. Special Jacob K. Javits Convention Center District (Manhattan)
The Special Jacob K. Javits Convention Center District was established to enhance the pedestrian configuration and appearance of the area surrounding the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. In addition, it is intended to promote new development compatible with the Convention Center by mandating street walls and streetscape improvements that supplement the underlying zoning district regulations.
Pedestrian circulation improvements consist of landscaped sidewalk widenings and through-block walkways, street trees, and retail frontage along Eleventh Avenue. Height and setback regulations govern all new buildings along Eleventh Avenue, the Convention Center Plaza streets, and the through block walkways. In addition, mandated street wall setbacks and sky exposure planes regulate the distribution of building bulk to define the public spaces on which each front and frame the edges of the Plaza.
Special Limited Commercial District (Manhattan) The Special Limited Commercial District attempts to preserve the character of commercial areas within historic districts by restricting commercial uses to those compatible with the historic district and mandating that all commercial uses be in completely enclosed buildings. In addition, limitations are also set for the size and illumination of signs within the special district. One such special district has been mapped in Greenwich Village.
Special Lincoln Square District (Manhattan) The Special Lincoln Square District was established to enhance the character of the area surrounding Lincoln Square as an international center for the performing arts. The district mandates the height of building walls along certain streets and the placement of arcades and types of commercial use at street level as a means of guiding the orderly redevelopment of the Lincoln Square area. In addition, the district offers special floor area bonuses by permit from the City Planning Commission for new development. The following public amenities: mandatory arcades, subsurface concourse connections to subways or subway improvements, and lower-income housing as outlined in the provisions of Inclusionary Housing.
Special Little Italy District (Manhattan) The Special Little Italy District was established to preserve and enhance this community’s historical and commercial character. Special use regulations protect the retail area along Mulberry Street. Other regulations encourage residential rehabilitation and new development on a scale consistent with existing buildings, discourage the demolition of noteworthy buildings, and increase the number of street trees in the area.
Special Lower Manhattan Mixed-Use District The Special Lower Manhattan Mixed-Use District was enacted to permit limited residential development in an otherwise industrial 62-block area in Manhattan south of Canal Street. That portion of the district, which is mapped as an overlay on existing manufacturing zones, permits certain older manufacturing buildings to be converted to loft dwellings and joint living-work quarters for artists. New contextual residential development is also permitted where the district is mapped as an overlay on existing commercial zones. At the same time, retention of the underlying zoning protects the economic vitality of this area.
Special Madison Avenue Preservation District (Manhattan) The Special Madison Avenue Preservation District is intended to preserve and reinforce the unique character of Madison Avenue and the surrounding area (from 61st to 96th streets). Bulk and street wall height provisions limit the height of new development to the scale of existing buildings, require a continuous building facade along Madison Avenue, mandate ongoing ground floor development of a selected list of appropriate shops, and require the provision of usable recreation space at rooftop levels. Within this district, the maximum permissible floor area ratio is 10.0. Since building height is limited, greater building coverage is allowed.
Special Manhattan Bridge District The Special Manhattan Bridge District was established to preserve this Lower Manhattan community’s residential character, minimize residential relocation on development sites, and provide for selective demolition and rehabilitation of existing buildings. A special floor area bonus is allowed to provide new community facility space and dwelling units for low- and moderate-income families. It is possible to transfer development rights from a site containing existing buildings to new development within this district. The district mandates that street trees be planted in connection with new development. Unless renewed, this district was designed to “lapse” on September 1, 1991. Have to update this, any of you all have a line on this…
Special Manhattan Landing Development District The Special Manhattan Landing Development District guides off-shore development from Battery Park to the Manhattan Bridge along the East River. This district is under review.
Special Midtown District (Manhattan) The Special Midtown District was established to guide all development within the midtown central business district. The special district includes three areas of special concern that are subject to additional regulations. These sub-districts are the TheatreSubdistrict, the PreservationSubdistrict, and the Fifth AvenueSubdistrict.
The Special Midtown District has a base FAR of 15.0 along avenue frontages and a FAR of 12.0 in the mid-blocks. The base FAR in the Preservation Subdistrict is 8.0 to restrict development on the side streets surrounding the Museum of Modern Art. The base FAR of the Theatre Subdistrict core (on Broadway and Seventh Avenue frontages around Times Square) is set at 14.0 FAR, the FAR in the mid-blocks between Sixth and Seventh Avenues is set at 12.0, and the FAR in the mid-blocks between Broadway and Eighth Avenue is 10.0.
The core of the Theatre Subdistrict has the highest concentration of legitimate theaters and entertainment-related uses. Therefore, the Theatre Subdistrict requires a City Planning Commission special permit to demolish any of the 44 legitimate theaters that are not designated landmarks.
The Theatre Subdistrict has special use and signage requirements (in keeping with the area’s character). A flexible development rights transfer provision has been established for the preservation of landmark theaters. In the Theatre Subdistrict, a new building above a certain size must reserve at least five percent of its floor space (not FAR) for entertainment and theater-related uses. Areas outside the Preservation Subdistrict and the Theatre Subdistrict are eligible for an as-of-right FAR bonus for urban plazas, through-block galleries, and theater retention. The only bonus available in the Theatre Subdistrict core is the City Planning Commission special permit bonus for rehabilitation listed theaters. The Preservation Subdistrict is not eligible for any floor area bonus. Other remaining areas can receive a floor area bonus for subway station improvements and the rehabilitation of theaters.
Certain urban design features, such as continuity of street wall and retail uses, off-street relocation of existing subway stairs, and provision of on-site pedestrian circulation spaces, are mandated. The special district also includes certain use and signage controls for the Fifth Avenue and Theatre Sub-districts. Special daylight evaluation criteria are included to ensure the availability of light and air on midtown streets. The Special Midtown District represents a shift away from discretionary zoning to more predictable, as-of-right development.
Special Natural Area District (the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island) The purpose of the Special Natural Area District is to preserve unique natural characteristics, such as aquatic, biologic, geologic, and topographic features having ecological and conservation values, by reviewing all new developments and site alterations on primarily vacant land. Natural features are protected by limiting topography modifications, preserving trees, plant and marine life, and natural watercourses, and requiring clustered development to maximize the preservation of natural features.
Under the regulations of the special district, the City Planning Commission must certify that all new development in mapped natural area districts meets applicable preservation standards. Special natural area districts have been mapped in the Greenbelt and Von Briesen Park areas of Staten Island, in Riverdale, and in Fort Totten. These areas are endowed with steep slopes, rock outcrops, creeks, and a variety of botanic environments.
Special Northside Mixed Use District (Brooklyn) This mixed-use district is designed to meet the needs of a neighborhood where housing and industry co-exist. The City Planning Commission selectively mapped mixed-use areas — R(M) when the area is primarily residential and M(R) when it is industrial — to allow controlled residential or light manufacturing expansion where such uses can grow and function without conflict. This and the Coney Island district were the forerunners of MX (I know I worked on them).
R(M) and M(R) districts combine the regulations for R6 and M1 areas. In an M(R) district, manufacturing uses are permitted to develop in the same manner as in any other M1 district. Existing residences may be enlarged and new residential construction is permitted as-of-right on blocks that are already primarily residential. New residential construction is permitted on certain other sites after approval of a special permit by the City Planning Commission.
In an R(M) district, residential uses are permitted to develop in the same manner as in any other R6 district. Limited expansion of selected light industries that do not conflict with residential uses is permitted. Other industries become non-conforming and are allowed to remain but not to expand. New industrial development requires a special permit from the Commission.
Special Ocean Parkway District (Brooklyn) The purpose of the Special Ocean Parkway District is to strengthen the existing character and quality of the community and to enhance the scenic landmark designation of Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. All new community facility developments or enlargements are limited, except by special permission, to the residential bulk regulations of the underlying districts. All developments with frontage on Ocean Parkway are required to provide a 30-foot unobstructed front yard, subject to limitations on paving and landscaping, thereby preserving the character envisioned by the original designer of the parkway. Accessory off-street parking for all new developments must be completely enclosed and all new developments along Ocean Parkway are required to provide street trees. Isn’t that special…
Special Park Improvement District (Manhattan) The Special Park Improvement District was created to preserve the character and architectural quality of Fifth and Park Avenues. It limits the height of new buildings to 210 feet or 19 stories, whichever is less, and mandates street wall continuity.
Special Planned Community Preservation District (The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens) The Special Planned Community Preservation District designation protects the unique character of well-planned communities that have been developed as a unit. Those communities characteristically have large landscaped open spaces and a superior relationship of buildings, open spaces, commercial uses, and pedestrian and vehicular circulation. In many cases, they have been threatened by development pressures. No demolition, new development, enlargement, or alteration of landscaping or topography is permitted within the district except by a special permit of the City Planning Commission. Preservation districts have been mapped in Sunnyside Gardens, Fresh Meadows, Parkchester, and Harlem River Houses.
Special Scenic View District (Brooklyn) The Special Scenic View District is intended to prevent outstanding scenic views from a public park, esplanade, or mapped public place. No buildings or structures are allowed to penetrate a scenic view plane except by a special permit of the City Planning Commission. To protect the waterfront view of the Lower Manhattan skyline, Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, a special scenic view district has been mapped for the area west of the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade.
Special Sheepshead Bay District (Brooklyn) The Special Sheepshead Bay District was devised to encourage development that will strengthen and protect the neighborhood’s unique waterfront recreation and commercial character. In the area immediately north of the fishing fleet wharves, commercial uses are restricted to uses that support waterfront and tourism-related activities.
All new development along Emmons Avenue must provide widened sidewalks, street trees, and plazas which may contain sitting areas, landscaping, kiosks, and cafes. Floor area bonuses are provided for plazas, arcades, usable residential open space and additional accessory commercial parking. Special density and height limits have been established. This district is under review.
Special South Richmond Development District (Staten Island) The Special South Richmond Development District was established to guide the development of predominantly vacant land in the southern half of Staten Island. The special district maintains the densities established by the underlying zones and ensures that new development is compatible with existing communities.
To maintain the existing community character, the district mandates tree preservation, planting requirements, controls on changes to the topography, height limits, and setback and curb cut restrictions along railroads and certain roads. It restricts construction within designated open space (a defined network of open space set aside for preservation in its natural state). To preserve designated open space without penalizing the owners of such space, owners are permitted to transfer development rights from the designated open space to the balance of their property. The developer must submit a topographic survey and a report on the availability of public services as a prerequisite to any application for development. A performance bond must also be provided to assure continued maintenance and improvement of public open space.
Special South Street Seaport District (Manhattan) The purpose of the Special South Street Seaport District is to facilitate the preservation and restoration of the seaport’s historic buildings following an approved development plan. The low scale of the port is retained by transferring development rights above the low buildings to specified neighboring locations for commercial development.
Special Transit Land Use District (Manhattan) The Special Transit, Land Use District relates development along Second Avenue to a future subway line. The special district requires builders of developments adjoining subway stations to reserve space in their projects by providing ease for public access to the subway or other subway-related use. The resulting new subway entrances and mezzanines would be airy, attractive, and functional instead of sidewalk obstructions that impede pedestrian circulation. The district is mapped at locations between Chatham Square and East 126th Street.
Special Union Square District (Manhattan) The Special Union Square District was established to revitalize the area around Union Square by encouraging mixed-use development. Its urban design provisions provide compatibility between new products, existing buildings, and Union Square Park. The district mandates ground-floor retail uses, off-street relocation of subway stairs, and the continuity of street walls. In addition, unique streetscape and signage controls enhance the physical appearance of the district. Within this district, a floor area ratio bonus for subway improvements is available by special permit of the City Planning Commission.
Special United Nations Development District (Manhattan) The Special United Nations Development District attempts to guide the midtown area adjacent to the United Nations. A significant feature of the district regulations is a unified design concept. In addition, the primary floor area ratio for the district was increased from 10.0 to 15.0 to promote exceptional public amenities needed in the area and to implement the development plan.
In super generalized terms, by 2030, there will be nearly eight billion people on the earth. About two billion will live in informal settlements throughout the world. Almost one billion people live in those distinctive and creative enough to become projects for investigation.
There are many settlements to discover, and that is your task. Find colleagues and share a phrase from the poetry of Octavio Paz describing the sprawling urban landscape of Mexico City as “a paradise of cages.” Is that an excellent description as well as carefully judgmental? However, a visit to SenseableMIT reveals a different assessment. The tech invasion of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is a unique form of physical research. The MIT site (here) and well worth your time.
The Well Known
The most unwieldy and well-known places are connected to major cities such as Accra (Agbogbloshie), Mumbai (Dharavi), Cape Town (Joe Slovo), and Mexico City (The Favelas, un paraíso de las jaulas). Other settlements within the developed world are far more challenging to locate and define for a cause other than “it’s the best we seem able to do.” As with any other type of constraint, a cage reveals creativity. That, too, is discoverable in the examples below.
Dharavi @ Mumbai
Dharavi slum was founded in 1882 during the British colonial era. For added detail, see Wikipedia. For the context, go to a Google Map.
Agbogbloshie @ Accura
Agbogbloshie is a former wetland known as the dump for locally used electronics from the City of Accra. For added detail, see Wikipedia. For context, go to Google Maps.
Rocinha @ Rio
Rochina is the largest favela in Brazil, located in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone between the districts of São Conrado and Gávea. For added detail, see Wikipedia. For additional context, go to Google Maps. Finally, go to the MIT links above for more detail regarding the 4D video sketch below.
Summary
Sustain this question. How and why are cities producers of homelessness and displacement? List the goals and objectives of a detailed analysis of the cages. Is the conversion of a favela into an explorable fourth dimension, a metaverse, a helpful exercise? How easily could they be made safe and secure? Does the known and possible richness of economic degeneracy of presumed physical decadence produce a quality of life for those who choose to stay, can leave or are willing to return to invest?
C-Span is the only place with Liz Cheney’s whole concession in Wyoming. Watch it and make a decision. (here)
“No citizen of this republic is a bystander. All of us have an obligation to understand what actually hapened.
We cannot abandon the truth…”
Rep. Liz Cheney
Her mission is to end the Trump provocation and put an end to supporters willing to pander to lies throughout the United States. She should not, and will not stand alone. In the most minimal sense that is a call to pay attention, and over the next few months it is a call for a maximum effort against an impending crisis of lawlessness and violence provoked by an unhealthy one-term president. Wyoming is in big trouble environmentally (water/fire/poverty). The hesitation to pull billions of investment out of that state remains valid, but only through the next two elections.
Her district is “at large,” thus the massive loss to the lies of Trump and his allies in their authoritarian reaction to losing an election and willingness to promote and embrace dangerous conspiracies. Watch a person “disappeared” by the GOP’s Russian-style politics. Most important watch what she does next. Again, the challenge, onslaught, test, ordeal, gantlet, and sword is thrown. (here)
“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
If the above is the current “condition of political speech” in America, we suggest a different path. Have all political representatives publish their test results in a manner that sustains transparency and honesty.
Implicit Association Test
Would you take a test to discover the arrangement of biases you may maintain? In high school, I asked my father about race and why people protested for equal rights. A four-word response ended the conversation when he said, “They are not ready!” The interventions to produce readiness continue to this day. The actions necessary to break down thousands of layers of bias implied in his words remain continuous. Still, the effort to do so is a law leveled as us all in the U.S. Constitution. Because of this nation’s founding document, testing the attitudes and beliefs of people that are harmful to others reveals the actions necessary to reduce or eliminate that damage. However, the Constitution cannot stand alone in responding to the call for justice. New methods other than the law will be required. The following will explore strategies and techniques that can reveal the personal and interpersonal structures of bias, beginning with the individual and then to the millions of groups that form a diverse nation.
Scientists from the University of Washington introduced the scientific community to the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in 1998. With over 25 million tests and hundreds of peer review papers, it offers insight into how groups of people perceive the world. The IAT assesses the strength of mental associations stored in memory by measuring how quickly a person can categorize and associate specific stimuli. (here).
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) design reveals “the attitudes and beliefs people may be unwilling or unable to report.” One objective of the IAT is to assess whether one can learn and unlearn implicit attitudes. If that becomes a fact in science, then we are beyond doubt capable of examining the unconscious roots of thinking “right out loud” and our feelings “deep inside.” The website is old code, but numerous scholarly articles are available to sidestep personal experience.
Given this capacity to continuously learn, the next question becomes, how can that level of practice in self-awareness occur and recur in building a nation? Click the image below, explore the idea, and take the test. See how it works and comment on the experience.
Click the Logo to Explore Project Implicit
The authors encourage participation in the test by saying, “The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about.” In addition, the difference between not knowing and being unable to learn is crucial to ending a relapse. It is more so if the recurrence damages others. Proof of control over a process is the ability to produce repetition, but if the action occurs due to an unknown source and is detrimental, how is an intervention possible?
Today, selecting participation in a group has fewer resource implications that affect the individual or the group. One can be a nonmaterial participant with basic expressions of loyalty. Services in exchange for these expressions may range from subsistence aid to offers of great wealth. In other settings, participants may seek full-blown forms of self-actualization. These services are provided by social entities such as governments, university societies, and religious organizations.
These institutions can be a physical presence in a community or, more recently, in digital space isolation. The underlying implicit associations in these digital environments have a massive data stream capable of establishing proof. Data looks into the past. First, it reveals the facts about post-trauma damage and leads to questions such as, “how did we get this condition?” Then, “what are we doing to remove harmful impacts?” and “where can solutions be demonstrated?” After that, the queries on “who” and “why” lead to actions that produce the political resources needed to deliver tangible change.
Implied Change
In The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union(here) by John F. Kowaland Wilfred U. Codrington III, we read all the changes from the initial document produced over the last 230+ years. To sustain it as a living document capable of recognizing new challenges, the authors present all of the flaws and extraordinary power of the founders’ dream to create a system of governance that is incapable of accepting authoritarian concepts of power. It is a story of system change from Prohibition (18th Amendment, 1919) to its repeal (21st Amendment, 1933) that recognizes the limits of power to the ongoing rise of the Equal Rights Amendment (27th Amendment) ratified by 38 States but well after Congress’ deadline of June 30, 1982. In January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA leading to legal challenges. The authors eagerly criticize the idea of Constitutional originalism in recounting many accounts of the grand American experiment.
New methods are needed to reveal the implicit associations established in the desire to strive for controls that would inhibit the ambitions of kings and their makers. But, of course, the advancement of zealots, liars, and racists are free to exhibit and promote behaviors capable of destroying Democracy as ideologues. The American assumption is they remain at the outer boundaries of political discourse until the events leading up to the attack on the Capital provided proof that authoritarian power can be marshaled from the fringe into the action of a mob within weeks.
Consent of the Governed (as an “all of us”)
The ease with which the few govern appears surprising to those seeking change. The President, Vice-President, 435 Representatives, and 100 Senators are the few. Yet, they expect the public to absorb their attitudes, policies, and sentiments. Government work at all service levels in America represents about 15% of the labor force (20 million). We believe a new approach is needed if the electorate remains independent of the manners particular to these leaders and workers.
First, voting will become a mandatory box checked for every federal, state, and citywide election. This requirement can include abstention. See the discussion (here Brookings), (here ASH) (here IDEA), and (here Standford).
In 1924, Australia started issuing fines to citizens who didn’t show up to vote. Turnout increased from 47% of eligible voters to over 95%. A test of this approach has a century of experience and that nation did not implode or self-destruct. Ours can.
Second, use the Charlie Chaplin request (quoted above) if you worked through a couple of Implicit Attitude Tests. Not only can a person improve their “read” of character, but it can also be done with an improved “both sides” bias detector. Suddenly, a long list of choices becomes available to challenge or correct errors. Examples could be the presumed unchangeable structure of the Supreme Court, the antiquity and usefulness of the Electoral College, and the thousands of painful micro-failures and malfunctions possible during periods of rapid change. Exciting and interesting times indeed, but many curses to be cauterized nonetheless.
Third, you must pick one of these significant issues and work it out in every way you can imagine. Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas, actions, and choices. We would have never imagined thirty percent of them submitted to date. Wow. You are a clever bunch.
Adam said it best among the hundreds of writers like David Pepper working to discover a “fix” to our fear of a problem getting out of control.
Search “political leaders” for images – the public sphere is vast.
Critical :: Reflective :: Creative
Critical thinking shows that the characteristics of foolishness can be for good or ill. A critical thought such as a laugh of joy or scream of horror functions in the short term. The product of policy in a Democracy is therefore politically incremental and expedient because Democracy responds well to the demands of a presumed representative majority or an established, passionate minority. The short-term response is well-tempered by using day-to-day data to reveal the lack of fairness, equality, and justice.
On the other hand, reflective thinking will reveal the small steps that introduced critical items such as impact restraints to help people in automobiles. The occurrence of resistance to this introduction fell to respect for life at a level higher than individual freedom. Various pragmatic responses to problems, such as vehicular safety technology, separate the knowledgable from those willing to be unknowing as a form of trust. One can understand how the life-first argument can win as an emotional appeal in the arc of creative talk in a Democracy.
At the national level, reflective and creative thought is dying. It was possible to illustrate the horror of impalement by a steering wheel but not exhibit children’s bodies ripped apart by assault rifles. A reason for the loss of reflection and creativity is how Democracy relies on statistics selected to measure the population’s overall well-being, parsed geographically with indicators that reveal distress capable of opening a rift. The data is an aid in identifying foolishness that allows the potential for violence at the critical scale of change yet retains enough shared, well-validated content to encourage a social movement. Here is an example.
Today one can place “an app” into your computer’s operating system. I have two that illustrate the difference between creatively reflective and foolish. Whenever a dollar amount shows up in an online document, the app provides an equivalent of a whole public education budget of a city with “the cost of a Raptor Jet in 2018.” On the other hand, an app is available that will replace the word “millennials” with the term “snake people” on a webpage. The former is useful and verifiable, the other is nothing more than an ostensibly benign violation. The line is blurred here by political leaders. How will it be possible to reveal its dangers to Democracy?
Implementing creative thought encourages influential events at the local level. As “actions,” each step requires the selection of stepping stones for crossing thousands of the data-rich creeks, rivulets, brooks, and burns that feed the rivers that establish boundaries and the commerce of ideas that build the big communication bridges. Unfortunately, the creative Democracy is slipping away for failing to understand a core change agent. When questions of “ends” become questions of values, the question of promoting an issue without reason makes good listening problematic. After that, the natural bullheadedness of non-compliance and lack of compromise between rival values becomes challenging to resolve. Steps to strengthen reason are not used by political leaders.
Therefore, the next and final post regarding the need to improve political reasoning calls for a review of Methods
The brutality in the life and death of rebellious Luke in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke” was far less than known to exist in the South if he were Black and where “noth’n can be a real cool hand.” Black history writers must have made the connection as prison segregation ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, a reference linking Black History and “Cool Hand Luke” occurred in a New York Magazine Feb 25, 1991 TV listing where Black History 1990 was on at 9 AM, and the film was at noon on Monday. The dire potential of chaos by Lazard is accompanied in the arc of metaphores possible in this film. The sense of strange connection reveals a dangerous cognitive gap in the rawness of it.
Luke concluded that he was doomed and acted according to that view. Similarly, those “in the house” that proved a global warming problem in 1896 represent a similar communication failure. However, the terrifying issue is acting according to that outlook. Over the next century, the fire in the engine of cheap energy could accept the facts as accurate yet still treat them as intolerable. The Earth can become that unjust prison experienced by Luke or, as Lazard forwarns.
Historically these actions begin as a group of advocates small enough to fit in one house. On the other hand, the global structure of these actions in the digital energy regime begins in thousands of “houses” simultaneously. The world will continue to change “the only way it ever has,” as Margaret Mead notes, but today change for good or bad is possible exponentially in the world.
The Lazard proposition presents a set of facts that describe an entirely new set of fires in the engines of commerce with an equally frightening set of systemic waves of unintended economic and environmental consequences. So, again, I urge you to listen carefully to Olivia Lazard before proceeding. Promoting critical, reflective, and creative thought imagines actions and demands a record of how well they are known as good or bad worldwide.
Defined narrowly, Democracy is “the vote,” and that is all people require if they are safe. It becomes essential if they are fearful. For two centuries, the trust behavior in a Democracy functioned well with cheap energy and labor with little thought of consequences, unintended or not. The brutality on the new energy front will be similar without a very different structure for evaluating change. The failure to communicate or recognize choices that must be made produces the lack of foresight that got Luke shot, and the inability to act preventatively as Lazard encourages.
Blind Spots as Control Leaders
The idea of the Lazard Proposition is to expose blind spots with an aggressive information campaign on global issues. Each of these “spots” carries unique local experiences connecting GHGs with Climate Change. Confirmed in math and science, the laboratory for proof is now the Planet Earth, but like an unjust prison from which one cannot escape, the campaign will not argue causality. Instead, each event floats in the high cost of failing to communicate the importance of one as a member of them all.
The transition to blind spots as control leaders encounters the problem of conflict. First, however, Lazard points to the need for violence reduction measures spread across thousands of political jurisdictions. The minerals listed on the Green Minerals Conflict map below offer a clean-energy future. However, getting them will require massive mineral extraction to get the equivalent of that ball in the mine (left). The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts intense mining due to increased demand. For example, the electric car requires six times more mineral inputs today than a conventional vehicle.
According to The World Bank, a 500 percent increase in mining will occur by 2050 for minerals such as graphite and cobalt. Unfortunately, the impact and effect of these new mining activities have multiple blind spots, all associated with the urgency of demand, leading to violence.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development produced this map in 2018
Mineral extraction processes have a regulatory place within a Democracy similar to oil and gas extraction and processing. The framework for this builds on the quality of transparency in government needed to correct past errors. In business and government, the common denominator is to reduce the occurrence of violence. Two methods are in play at all times to do that. The first is building a manageable capacity for collective knowledge in the common interest; the second is the raw military power to acquire land as a power of the state and wealth to buy expertise.
Locally, Eminent domain serves a combination of public/private economic development ideals. Hundreds of trillions of transactions occur from routine urban improvements to the expansion of Russia into Ukraine. Each one produces “dots” along multiple pathways. On the other hand, the placement of these dots recently became a dangerous force. In addition, and only lately has it been possible to record these dots as exhibits in sets of enduring serial data, proving trends as regressions to the mean and, in some cases, probabilistic timelines.
The Daily Crisis
The following deals with global climate health using two components. The first is the power of machine learning systems, called Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the second is the human capacity to manage. The critical question about AI was when Kevin Kelly asked, “what does technology want? It was then that AI separated from its human counterparts. Imagining all aspects of AI entities and observation systems is due to a robust and durable memory that links laptops to quantum panels. The AI design replicates in ways similar to Richard Dawkins’ description in The Selfish Gene. How the miasma of personal experience becomes part of our consciousness aids in automatic responses, most of which are genetic and shared by everyone and every living thing.
Given this bifurcation of information processing, the second component would be composed of leaders capable of standing on facts with enough charisma to produce trust and say, “mining here is OK, there it is not.” The power of enforcement is the blind spot. Here we will find many social groups attempting a system change. The practice presents multiple implications for governance in a Democracy as its leaders confront a series of relentless crises.
Using blind spots as control leaders will define a genuinely systemic, peaceful, and nonviolent foundation for building bridges to a safe future. Not doing so produces intolerable indifference to human suffering. The example all can imagine is how national policy responds in today’s communication economy. Imagine the difference in the policy response if events such as the demonstrations in Ferguson, MO, occurred in fourteen cities during the same week in defiance of local authorities outfitted with surplus military equipment and a large vaguely regulated group of “militias” joining in the proceedings. The policy shifts from a local issue to a national unease in the global shadows of civil war and outright aggression.
What to Do, What to Do
First, create a trusted regime of science. Second, use that trust to build a public-good system with a global decarbonization agenda as a matter of healthy human survival and mitigate inevitable conflicts by location during planetary breakdown events. Third, to do this, it will be necessary to change business economics radically, and fourth, with these in play, promote specific innovations supporting three actions during the reversal of the oil/gas extraction industry:
a steady decarbonization system to assure global environmental integrity with some
big advances in ecological diplomacy and unique new law with a variety of
corruption elimination services with powers dedicated to protecting habitat.
Your sense of hopelessness in Lazard’s recommendations is real.
Total prevention of geopolitical competition is possible with a new foundation of human security in the era of globalization. Exposure to blind spots in responding to this obligation can reveal the pathways that prevent climate-disrupted futures as cascading events. Identifying these ” blind spots” are those that remain aimed at the darkness of failure and lack of transparency.
Yes, it does seem impossible. However, supporting the individual as a member of a change agent group can have powerful consequences in the ongoing globalization process. What is needed is a “so say we all” moment. The means to that end may begin with a few language specialists and the focus of our next post — The Creative Democracy
The key to effectively using a stepping stone such as voting to get across a data stream is recognizing the necessity of balance, which leads to other conflict-reducing efforts.
How does a Democracy successfully serve the structures of social membership in forming a national identity while sustaining the right of difference?
A broadening sense of “existential crisis” occurs among the knowing people. Data gives them proof based on global-to-local factors such as climate extremes and the equally local-to-global experience of winner and loser economics. To succeed, American Democracy needs a new bridge-building system. The one explored here produces the following mandala for us to enjoy. Geometric presentations of thought and meaning present the psychological work of humans unknowing. Those with words tend to say “follow us, we know the way” to focus their attention and form groups.
Here is an excellent example of the thinking required regarding the unknown to self and unknown to others often referred to as the Johari Window situation that Lazard calls blind spots.
Getting Luke
Hundreds of maps using remote sensing satellites and streaming data on the ground put observers such as Olivia Lazard into a global orbit, able to see graphic representations of a warming ocean and the growing incidence of damaging events coupled with a profound recognition of multiple layers of international power structures. All of the measures of all things physical that one can imagine are possible with these observation tools. The stones offered by Lazard set a path toward establishing a new goal for Democracy.
Routine reference to “reduce consumption and maximize well-being” is met with “we ain’t doing that” for the lack of viable demonstrations outside a monastery. Thousands of people such as Ms. Lazard present the grist for developing a new participants pool for producing additional proof. The examples presented below remain lost in the din associated with lies and gross assumptions that create objective proof, such as unjust prisons. If one of those prisons becomes the Earth, the problem has a name: Getting Luke.
The twenty-first century is faced with changing the structure of trust due to the construction of bridges to a new energy regime and decoupling the engines of economic growth from GHGs toward new sources. However, the confidence promised by technology is not hopeful. It is evolving into a terrifying repetition of history. Therefore, I urge, insist, implore and beg readers to examine this issue for an eighteen-minute talk on TED. Then, please follow that experience with four minutes of a scene from the Cool Hand Luke movie.
The next post examines these two media experiences. The analysis sought asks how many “Cool Hands” are out there exploring the blind spots of the global order. Next, The Brutality of Change recognizes the foolishness of catastrophic resolution policy.
The following series of posts attempt to describe how sheer stupidity is fostered in the immediacy of the American Political Condition debate. Foolishness, although considered momentary, now threatens the Great American Experiment. To the extent possible we have avoided reference to individuals in preference to the threads that tie events into a reasonable sense of wholeness.
RLC
Three Plus Two
Five essential characteristics of foolishness are part of everyone’s experience. In this sense, the jibe, “you can’t fix stupid,” is inaccurate but also loving in its acceptance. Occasionally, fixing efforts will also yield the appearance of an attack on government institutions. Therefore, before working to fix or not fix, we recommend revisiting the unique types of foolishness that lead to the stupid world. We remain a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. The work needed to not perish from the Earth and endure for these ideals remains.
First, the probability that anyone can be foolish at any time is a trait independent of all others. Second, the often stated “we all make mistakes” contributes to underestimating the number of stupid actions possible regarding any issue by anyone at any time. Third, foolishness depends on the lack of thinking within social membership. These three aspects – the right to be foolish, everyone can be, so “let’s not talk about it” are intricate deficiencies. Alone or in combination, they reveal a failure to practice the reflective, creative, and critical modifiers of thought in a Democracy. The research on rude behavior as a type of negligence is plentiful. However, the inability to encourage people to examine feelings as finite and facts as friendly tends to suppress reason and dangerously isolate social structures.
Five
The remaining two characteristics of a Democracy stumbling into “the stupid world” reveal a lack of will to find the seeds of shared national purpose using the deep roots of misunderstanding. The fourth exhibit of foolishness, exclusive among the foolish, reveals support for declaratory positions associated with unknown people offering unverified data. Finally, the fifth aspect occurs when a policy becomes a push for morality. This effort tends to be in opposition to personal integrity. It pushes people with varying levels of force and resilience into disproportionate confrontations.
Still, a nation as diverse as the United States will readily accept rebellious clusters because it recognizes the preeminent concept of individual nonviolent freedom and allows the opportunity to persuade others toward a system change. The actions taken under the influence of these moments are proof of effective communication. The right to be foolish because everyone can be, so “let’s not talk about it” is now part of a national personality. It is developing due to the immense bubbling expansion of digital communication as a cheap vehicle for argument. The introduction of an ancient rating system regarding the analysis in modern times is entitled Good Listening. Returning to this practice as an essential part of public awareness is greatly needed.
The transmission of ideas builds on the individual’s experience at their front doors (such as danger), or the thresholds of international expression (this nation under God) exhibits a self-consciousness through language systems composed of sounds, light, and movement interpreted by all living beings. The consciousness of interpersonal argument is vital to public discussion, yet it is treated as ill-advised.
Thwarting the role of false trust or conforming in advance is countered by the authenticity of a Democracy that supports critical, contemplative, and innovative techniques. Implementing creative thought encourages influential events at the local level. As “actions,” each step requires the selection of stepping stones for crossing thousands of the data-rich creeks, rivulets, brooks, and burns that feed the rivers that establish boundaries. The commerce of ideas is what builds bridges to a common ground. Unfortunately, the creative Democracy is slipping away for failing to understand that when questions of “ends” become questions of values, Reason is silent. After that, the natural bullheadedness of non-compliance between rival values becomes challenging to resolve.
The following posts examine these aspects of political change as a question of leadership and foolishness.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation support creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks, building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. MacArthur is placing a few big bets that truly significant progress is possible on some of the world’s most pressing social challenges, including over-incarceration, global climate change, nuclear risk, and significantly increasing financial capital for the social sector.
President John Palfrey defines the values that drive the Foundation and remain accountable to the community. It is also the approach every narrative in search of resources should include.
Creativity encompasses innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking ideas, thinking, and strategies that will have a meaningful impact on large and complex challenges. Bring them inventive ideas that support the creativity of individuals and organizations.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion The Foundation sees Diversity as the characteristics that make people distinct. Equity as treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement while eliminating barriers that have prevented the full participation of some individuals. Inclusion is an environment where all individuals feel welcomed, respected, valued, and feel a sense of belonging.
Compassion is central to respectful and compassionate interpersonal interactions with kindness and caring, reflecting the foundation’s recognition and understanding of integrity as the act of behaving honorably. It is a commitment to sound judgment, honesty, dependability, and accountability. Finally, life-long learning is the practice of seeking new understanding, knowledge, and skill with values acknowledging continuous lessons from staff, grantees, partners, peers, and communities.
Environmental Works is a nonprofit Community Design Center directed founded in Seattle, Washington (1997). EW’s long track record has proven to be pivotal in all areas of need in the Seattle area. For example, the design-resource library for sustainable, affordable communities developed by EW was instrumental in reducing the stormwater impacts and increasing overall energy conservation practices in vulnerable communities.
EW is organized into four studios: housing, community facilities, landscape, and special projects. Each studio is headed by an experienced architect with more than twenty years of experience. It is a nonprofit full-service landscape, and architectural firm that responds to projects that the for-profit architectural community agrees would be unprofitable. This community also recognizes that a substantial record of sustainable practice, material use, and cost impacts of this public service-based agency has been of value to community needs throughout Seattle.
The practice of making logical arguments in Latin began well over 2,000 years ago. Latin arguments used to persuade toward the negative are as follows. Please avoid their use.
Argumentum:
ad hominem – the appeal to personal prejudice
ad populum – an appeal to mass emotions
ad misericordiam – an appeal through the exploitation to pity
ad baculum – the application of brute forces – “to the club.”
ad crumenam – an appeal to money, “the purse.”
ad verecundiam – the playing up of prejudice
ad ignorantiam – stress upon ignorance
ad captandum vulgus – a dishonest argument to “catch the crowd.”
This is an odd post to do at this time. The thoughts of all on Eastern European theaters have only moved a bit north and west of the Middle East. There is more war-detail. No real loss of enthusiasm, but more emphasis on atrosity. I sense dread, but it is not as serious as thinking about my kids, old friends and how tired everyone seems to be. To dig into it, I began this long essay on perspectives. It is unedited. It will be a string of thoughts to come back and review, edit, remove and start again as so do we all.
Urban planning is full of socially conscientious jargon: sustainability, diversity, social action, consensus-building, anti-poverty, ecologically sound, and a recent favorite, decarbonization. Many planners think that planning should be a tool for allocating resources to eliminate the significant inequalities of wealth and power in a society. That sounds more interesting than maintaining and justifying the status quo. It is a popular approach in social science schools of grad and undergrad universities. Thus the charge of a liberal bent. Change is motivating because learning to manage it is encouraging. The motive is reasonable, and it feels right to stand before that massive billboard demanding “A Fair and Just Society.” On the other hand, a drive down a road with that notice includes another. That billboard will always say, “It Will Never Happen.” Why? Progressivism and neoliberalism function in policy as if the proponents were mortal enemies. That is not the case. They are siblings of the same parents who want to keep the kids under control and uncorrupted, especially during a divorce.
When the public attempts to serve ordinary people, the task begins with laws governing the ability to trade freely in a “free market” and a public policy to fill gaps. Democratic solutions to problems become difficult when these two processes define the other as corrupt. For the planner, the control power builds on reforms of past errors in these markets. Buildings fall and kill people – write a safety code. Land uses poison land and lungs – legislate to protect the environment. Much can be done to either embrace or obscure failures. A property is taken by law and redeveloped by public/private partnerships to erase failures blandly defined as entropy. In all of these instances, clever T-shirts that say things like “Blight Me” or “There Is No Planet B” sell very well, along with resistance to a lawful change by lawful means. When these disruptions happen, you have met the parents attempting to distinguish lies from truth.
The Process for Corruption
The quick answer to the “lies” problem is that only the demand for currency and not cash alone will support intangible assets such as health, welfare, and safety. It is the demand that counts. Whether represented by T-shirt sales, or flipping property, the process creates openings during and after the push and pull of a reform movement. The intent is to capitalize on the obstacles used in resistance to “the state” and when it is “the state.” When that happens, you have watched the parents at work on practical matters of intelligence. However, the accompanying values determine likely pathways along the historical arc of questions of currency encountering parental guidance.
Those born after 1944 and before 1965 in New York City accept and understand how truth began to disappear worldwide. For New Yorkers, the disappearance has a date. On November 9, 1965, New York City suddenly lacked electric power for twelve hours, trapping about 800,000 people 2019 now reveal to New Yorkers that these disruptions are part of a continuum. Although this example, among many others throughout the world, is given a specific tipping point, the causes remain meaningless. These many failures have one reason – the rise in the demand for power coupled with systems of organized lying. The ensuing malaise has “tells such as the inadequacy exposed in, “we are doing the best we can,” or the hypocritical “thoughts and prayers,” sentiment.
Nevertheless, the “switch-trip” part of the truth on the cause of events such as a massive power failure remains a source of assurance, if not meaning. A mere nod to the web entangling every person plunged into a sudden market failure and crisis reveals the survival instinct among those with political capital and those without it. Social scientists recognize psychotic elements in the survival instinct embedded in ordinary people can also be found in large corporations as they continue to enlarge.
The defining measures for a reduction of sanity include lack of remorse, unassailable leaders, disturbingly globalized economic structures, and resistance to comprehend the experience of others when damaged. Even war offers this unhopeful truth. With the enforcement of laws and regulations, the public is responding to disruptive behavior only to discover the impossible task of detecting future errors. Hence, the action creates a condition of contrast and comparison necessary to publish new law. That is the parent. The next question is about the currency of that parenthood.
The Mask of Persuasion
The desire for control over creating something that every human on the planet would pay ten dollars to acquire is arousing. Is this feeling similar to “love thy neighbor?” Both motives are undeniably human. But sadly, The Mask of Sanity (here) is on both sides, offering cash and currency. The free-wheeling explorations of the global capital mask are brought under political control all of the time, but not for long periods. These ventures cover the demands of social justice ideas routinely. Yet, the desire to get ten dollars from everyone every day to use a widget remains inevitable.
Despite the production of vast imbalances, recently expressed as a series of dirty little wars, ultimately just war prevails for the lack of headway on other fronts. Progress by its Latin origin would be a combination of pro and gradi and translate to for the stride. The proverb — the road is made by walking is a personal expression of that kind of need for change. The desire to get to a new place or resolve differences through negotiation and compromise unavoidably involves the reallocation of a resource. The walk is through a government willing to enforce standards. The policy examines this demand for change based on risks such as lawlessness, disparate causes, and violent methods—all events representing good reasons for being conservative.
The analysis of Ludwig von Mises (Bureaucracy 1944) and Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom 1944) describes today’s neoliberalism. They characterize the risks associated with FDR’s New Deal as a welfare state expression of communism and ensuing totalitarian control. Hayek’s book sales and the attention of the wealthy, fearful of powerful governments tuned by war, led to the Mont Pelerin Society, an organization dedicated to neoliberalism in 1947. Under these historical conditions and compassion for the status quo, the political aim embraces the spirit of reform. It is a foil against risk factors. A modern social reform will always look to a standard for justice in this granular context of the law built on the inadequacy of measures from one group to the next. Thus, the “he said, no, I said” context believes persuasion is the priority, not fact.
From refugees to American homeowners, the focus on distinct groups (regions) sees resourceful individuals, corporations, and governments agreeing to mitigation regulation, watchdog administration, and planning. Hence, since 1944, the advent of exquisitely refined measures with terabytes of data per issue. Each can measure system conditions in continuous change from one state to another. The first test of this new order has two words – global carbon.
From 1939 to 1944, the spectacular industry growth in steel, rubber, aircraft, munitions, shipbuilding, and aluminum became possible due to the infusion of public capital from 1933 to 1940. During these two periods, it was possible to build a public investment argument to resolve the excesses of business practices in response to an economic collapse and include the stimulus of a massive war in Europe.
Similar to the climax of the industrial era, the technological revolution became equally exponential. An excellent example is the number of internet users at three million people1990 became nearly two billion by 2010 and four billion in 2020, representing over 50% of the earth’s population. It has occurred before, but this was the first time it was global. The macroeconomic impact was recognized early by Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr. in 1995.
“For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth… Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.”
Robert E. Lucas Jr
Parenting
Every parent knows that when you take a kid’s stuff away, privileges, or worse, their phone, or demean their political outlook, all hell can break loose. Setting milestones provide the mitigating factor to this crisis. Examples would be grounding for a week, reduced allowance, or driving privileges for a month. Parents can be very creative when controlling the household until they fail. The parents we are talking about here are very close to losing control of the kids. Very close, but then I came across a video blog by Anderson Cooper on the entire concept of parenthood. As it turns out, his quest to be the best parent possible offers valuable insight into the metaphor used here on the meaning of liberty in a free society.
His first thoughts involved the newness of parenting and the seriousness of doing it well. His first post introduced his desire to have conversations with other parents and people who offer advice. His first interview was with Janet Lansbury regarding her insight into parenting.
Kids’ personalities are constantly growing, and they should be observed and related to as persons. All parents have a unique relationship with kids. In this sense, it is the most private and most public of human relationships. Lansbury quickly clarifies the importance of the differences between parents and children, all parents and children of all ages, their caregivers, educators, and scientists.
The rate and absorption of content in these relationships vary in these relationships. The example given is when a baby reaches for an object. A parent might seek to give it to the child. Being mindful of differences suggests other interests, such as seeing fingers, feeling arm motion, or cloth texture. From the beginning of a relationship, it is essential to not “rush” and consider combinations of perceptions.
Cooper’s inquiry then turned to how vital talking is in this relationship. From describing individual actions to making emotions known, the brains of young children function almost exclusively on sounds. The endeavor absorbs those that are inclusive and personally engaging from other sounds that are less so. At this point in the conversation, the idea of “braving the silence” came up. Like not rushing to give an object to a child, silence in a conversation is equally important in these relationships knowing the kids are not parents. Cooper noted it was a journalism technique to wait and listen for more during an interview to gain information.
The example was how can a new kid not change everything when parent-child becomes parent children. The silence helps to more openly welcome the unstated feelings of change that represent new levels of change, such as confirming being upset about this change in awareness. Confirmation bias remains a confirmation confirmed in the relationship.
As most aunts and uncles will confess, it is easy to wind up the kids with the excitement of play itself. On the other hand, stopping play confirms a unique power component. As the parents will tell the aunts and uncles that the kids are not adults, parenting represents the initial relationship model followed by many others. When it is time to stop play, recognize “the courage to confirm” balance in building a life for the kids outside of the parent relationship is preeminent.
Cooper then turned to a parent and colleague, Clarissa Ward, on the challenges of being a working parent. This portion of the interview hinged on media communications with kids instead of the warmth of a parent’s personal space. When separated, the parents are in pain. On the other hand, the deep emotion comes from knowing the kids are not. Despite the separation, parents struggle to discover what is best for their children. Nevertheless, if the kids still feel love, are being held, appreciated, and sense stability, the parent’s comfort remains strong and perhaps survives the entire journey.
Government
Because it was Anderson Cooper, it felt appropriate to replace parents with governing and the kids with the people as a schema on parallel analysis to determine the number of components needed to uncover the underlying structure of a large set of variables. So the following is a drill down on finding the government and people within a parent and child metaphor.
His first thoughts involved the newness of governing and the seriousness of handling it well. His first post introduced his desire to have conversations with other governments and people who offer governing advice. His first interview was with Janet Lansbury regarding her insight into governing.
People are busy forming their personalities and should always be observed and related as persons. All governments have a unique relationship with the people. In this sense, it is the most private and most public of human relationships. Lansbury quickly clarifies the importance of the differences between the governments and the people, all governments and people of all ages, their caregivers, educators, and scientists.
The rate and absorption of content in these relationships vary in these relationships. The example given is when a baby reaches for an object. A government might seek to give it to the child. Being mindful of differences suggests the potential for other interests, such as seeing fingers, feeling arm motion, or cloth texture. From the beginning of a relationship, consider combinations of perceptions and not “rush.”
The subject then turned to how vital talking is in this relationship. From describing individual actions to making emotions known, the brains of young children function almost exclusively on sounds. The endeavor absorbs those that are inclusive and personally engaging from other sounds that are less so while separating the parents and kids, governments and people.
At this point in the conversation, the idea of “braving the silence” came up. Like not rushing an object into a child’s hand, silence in a conversation is equally important in the relationships between people and governments. Anderson noted that the braving silence technique of journalism, to wait and listen for more during an interview, often gains essential information.
An example was how new people (siblings) change everything is when silence helps to openly welcome the unstated feelings of change. The unsaid parts represent new levels of change, such as confirming being upset about this change in awareness. Confirmation bias remains a confirmation confirmed in the relationship.
As most aunts and uncles will confess, it is easy to wind up the people with the excitement play itself. On the other hand, stopping play confirms a unique power component. The government will tell the aunts and uncles that the people are not adults, and the government represents the initial relationship model followed by many others. When it is time to stop play, recognize “the courage to confirm” balance in building a life for the people outside of your relationship as the government is preeminent.
Cooper then turned to a parent and colleague, Clarissa Ward, on the challenges of being a working parent. The conversation hinged on the “coldness” of media communications compared to the warmth of personal space. When separated, the government will experience severe pain. But, on the other hand, a deep emotion comes from knowing that the people are not. Despite the separation, parents struggle to discover what is best for their children. Nevertheless, if the kids still feel love, are being held, appreciated, and sense stability, the government’s comfort remains strong and perhaps survives the entire journey.
In an all-encompassing life of research and study of the architecture profession, Robert Gutman (1926-2007) published a continuous critique of the state of that profession in a variety of well-grounded essays. It began with a 1965 research grant from the Russel Sage Foundation to explore interactions between architecture and sociology. This inquiry remains open and unresolved.
Architecture is driven by the “status” associated with design in an advanced capitalist society. It can be described as high or low, quality vs. the lack of it, and as a condition that expands to include entire neighborhoods, new and old, restored and gentrified, diverse or isolated, and most recently environmentally terrified.
Proving the Negative
Why do people demand proof, verified, and vetted facts when it comes to making changes in the quality of life in a community but do not apply similar demands to the ghosts and gods of change? Are these not the most dangerous in the world? Are these ghosts not swirling in the fossil fuel of war and terrorism? These are known forces. Why the lack of will to fill the gap between these ghostly and the general expectation that a better world is possible? Gutman saw the raw subjectivity that insists the builders are doing well and called it false. As Robert Gutman put, there is,
“an unreality of the espoused view of the world of practice is perpetuated by the profession itself, by the schools, and to some extent by the architectural press, and these distortions make it more difficult for architects to deal creatively and constructively with the problems which the profession faces.”
Architectural Practice – A Critical View 1988
What is the market for design among people who don’t believe they can afford it and have no respect for it? Are they correct? The provision of design resources is the initial architectural service and the entire built environment by extension. Do we accept that low- and moderate-income people represent an invisible segment in that market? The market exists with personal capital and credit. Others could be served, but only if serious gaps are acknowledged, and new values recognized.
Rarely will community organizations find themselves like a paper in the top drawer of a desk where there is proof can they have the answer to the problems of their community. Instead, a nonprofit institution may find itself responsible for a combination of services meeting the needs of vulnerable families. You will often see them as accountable for producing and managing affordable housing and community facilities. Yet, you may also know them working under poor or deteriorating conditions made tragically complex by meager, sporadic assistance.
To open that desk top, they will need built environment professionals to respond to their needs in a far less autonomous way. Unfortunately, architecture and those who study the structure and functioning of human society remain indecisive associates and silent to the indifference. Gutman, however, countered as a teacher by encouraging a significant segment of future architects to recognize that a form of architectural resistance, regardless of the disturbances caused, can help people demand a better world. These acts create a battle between design as fulfillment vs. corporate practice where the function is all that matters, leaving the work of realization to others.
Sustaining design as a resource for finding complex solutions to complex problems recognizes that design and architecture can lead the way. There will always be projects that have the potential to shift the status of architecture toward comprehensively better places. What is needed is a set of self-renewing political acts and the institutional continuity of a design purpose in a community.
The technique of creating a drawing to envision a future or align intention is one of humanity’s most significant accomplishments. When done well, the design practice formulates what needs doing, and it has been so for thousands of years. In creating environments, whether raw survival or human actualization, the need is increasing among the invisible clients, and like refugees, altering the structure of demand. The entrants to the profession are undersupplied in this sector, often relegated to second-class status within the profession, yet this is the area of greatest need. It is vital to alter society’s perception of the architect as one with short-term relationships in a community. It is time make design a permanent institutional presence in underserved communities and make them as purpose-driven as a public school.
Every urban region’s density and structural complexity are too siloed into rigid regimental structures and components to manage. However, these parts need to be recognized and defined as a whole by a local institution with the primary purpose of structurally understanding all of the connective tissues that make it part of a city. Therefore, this institution needs to be in a community as a permanent entity to ask one question until answers are produced. What is our design? How do we create and renew ourselves?
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