friend of the built environment

Last night was the first New Years Eve in memory that I did not watch Dick Clark. This was because I was in San Francisco where I do not have a television, rather than for any conscious reason.
Giving it up has crossed my mind many times in the past few years. But the description of [...]

…Unless purchased inside the secure area, of course…
I assume this is another ploy to beef up profits in the concessions? Maybe a way to get us late-adopters to buy eReaders?
This rules out foreign travel for me, ever. Oh well. In the event of emigration, it also rules out ever coming back. We can start calling [...]

Two good quotes from Poppy tonight:
Why should I have to explain precisely how the knife you stuck in my back is hurting me before I can convince you to take it out?
And:
There’s no need to hurt people if you can easily avoid it. So many people online seem to ignore or gleefully defy that.
Agreed. Whilst [...]

If there was ever the need for a sign that consumer culture was in full retreat, this is it.
“Our outlook for retail properties as a whole is bleak,” Severino said in a statement. “… we do not foresee a recovery in the retail sector until late 2012 at the earliest.”
The over-building of the boomtimes, and [...]

A new common argument I’m hearing lately, in response to the question of why we need to torture people, is that “they aren’t even citizens - why are we giving them due process?”
The best answer I can come up with: because they are human beings.
The US constitution is fairly straight-forward that all humans deserve the [...]

Since about 99% of the attempted comments on this site are spam, I have decided to turn off email notifications to myself when new comments appear. Apologies if you post a comment and it takes a while to approve. Blame Ukraine.
If you’ve posted an approved comment before, you won’t require approval.

Spark had a really good interview recently with Matthew Crawford, someone who, like me, rather fetishizes paleo-labor skills. He even wrote a book about how important manual labor skills are.
One thing Nora brought up which really struck me, was how the mobility of jobs may be contributing to our ‘disposable’ culture:
Nora: I mean, you know, [...]

This is the best illustration I’ve found to explain why the 90s were so rad. The only thing missing is the cheap oil on top of it all:

That was basically the 90s: low unemployment, low housing costs, sky-high stock valuations, and dirt-cheap energy. It was a time when I remember talking to friends about how [...]

Of why Richard Florida can be annoying. Note that Chris Potter agrees with me that Florida’s Alantic essay was in fact a total turnaround on his previous sales pitches:
Implicit in all this is the criticism that among the cities Florida is consigning to the scrap heap today, some are places that were paying him to [...]

New new regulations needed for the GFE?
I hope so. When we bought our house in Pittsburgh last year, our GFE ended up being about 30% lower than the final closing statement. Oh, and they didn’t get our final closing statement to us until about 6 hours before the closing appointment.

I think it’s a good idea generally to try to work through institutions that are more functional than our national government/Congress and to build new kinds of institutions/groups/ bodies to get things done:
The courts. Nongovernmental organizations, charities, and philanthropies. Some state and local governments. Mass movements and coalitions. Science labs and research organizations. Social media. [...]

Social and environmental degradation usually happen so slowly that they tend not to be noticed until people start seeing before-after photos…

Bernanke confirmation in trouble? Say it is so. We really need some good news right now.

McMansionators give up a closet.
Although actual square footage of homes didn’t fall until 2009, the percent of homes with four or more bedrooms in them has been falling since 2007, NAHB data show. And in 2009 the number of homes with three or more bathrooms fell for the first time since 1992.
It’s not a huge [...]

From Paz:
I am in my early 20s and soon to be graduating from what I would probably say is a nationally-recognized university with a degree that God-willing has some earning potential. The majority of my friends are in the same boat.
And there I have it: I always thought I was young and had my whole [...]

In the spirit of Sublime Oblivion’s revisitation of old political and social values declarations, I thought it would be fun to do the same: contemplating what I used to think or believe (either from the archives here or just from my memory) and making some values statements that I could use for comparison and review [...]

The single biggest argument coming out of the woodwork is that Apple’s iPad will fail because it’s not a laptop or a phone:
In the case of the iPad, the obvious shortcoming is that it can’t replace a cell phone (not only does it not make calls, it’s simply too big to whip out when you need [...]

Mark Simpson Sez:
Then again, open relationships can be hard work.  And discussing them in public allows people like me to pass unhelpful comment.  Here’s ‘Chris’ and ‘James” rules for their open relationship:
complete disclosure, honesty about all encounters, advance approval of partners, and no sex with strangers — they must both know the other men first. [...]

Obama’s Record Deficit. Obama’s?!?

Not the Nine Inch Nails song, but close.
Survivalists are a type of fetishist. And I say that as someone who spends a lot of time perusing survivalist, peak oil and financial gl00m message boards and weblogs.
Real survival will look a lot different than most survivalists want it to look. I personally prefer the War Nerd’s take [...]

The Economist sez:
…when Jeff Sessions said Mr Abdulmutallab should have been “properly interrogated” as opposed to arrested by FBI agents, read his rights, and interrogated, what he presumably meant was that he should have been treated the way we treated the inmates at Bagram and Guantanamo: locked up extra-legally and tortured [...] As Scott Brown [...]

How nicely put:
The Republican platform is that people are better off on their own. The marketing behind this idea is impressive. Remember Bush’s “ownership society,” which meant that you “owned” your retirement? Given the choice between owning your retirement and having it guaranteed by someone else, why would you possibly choose the former? Yet that’s [...]

James Howard Kunstler amuses me most of the time. He’s sort of a George Carlin with extra academic ammunition under his belt.
But for someone as attuned to the counter-culture as he seems to be, his concepts of cultural best-practices are quite parochial, and his self-assured moral absolutism grates on me.
His Forecast 2010 is a good [...]

Inspired by Randy and Mark Simpson:
Poland: “So what got you in here?”
Britain: “I tried to take on the Nazis”
Poland: “Ooo, tough, man. I never had much of a chance to think about that before Stalin showed up.”
Czech: “Tell me about it.”
Britain: “A least we’re mostly safe with things like they are.”
Georgia: “How do you get [...]

Sorry - just trying to be inflammatory. But considering how hard Democrats are finding it to pose a united front for progressive causes, and how good Republicans are at collectivism, it’s a worthy question.

I’ve taken the dive and given my notice at my job in San Francisco. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern history, and on the cusp of potentially massive social changes, I’m giving up my security blanket in the job I’ve had for 8 years.
I’m doing this so that I can make [...]

Did I mention I just quit my job?
Then I read this:
The weight of this recession has fallen most heavily upon men, who’ve suffered roughly three-quarters of the 8 million job losses since the beginning of 2008. Male-dominated industries (construction, finance, manufacturing) have been particularly hard-hit, while sectors that disproportionately employ women (education, health care) have [...]

I think this post from the Economist best identifies my own ambivalent opinion of Israel.
In lots of ways I admire the guts of a people so willing to work so hard on a national project like Israel. On the other hand I ask myself “why does it matter so much?”
Then there’s the whole race issue…
But [...]

pittsburgh zone 1 transit map

Why, AARP membership and Evil Clowns, of course. And lots of driving links for someone who doesn’t drive:

Climate change is not the opposite of winter.
How long ya think I’ll have my individual health insurance plan before I’m dropped?
I’m thinking of a healthy analogue to the buy nothing challenge: the buy no food in San Francisco challenge. I need to lose some weight, and my impending departure from work and job means I [...]

An interesting thought reading some of Kunstler’s archives recently, on the financial impact of Y2K:
As it turned out, very little happened on New Years Day, 2000. Scoffers exulted in their righteous rightness. The truth, though, was that immense sums of money had been spent — hundreds of billions worldwide — and countless work hours put [...]

I previously noted now well Republicans work collectively right now. Part of this is because Republicans are a more ideological party than Democrats today. They are also able to enforce discipline within the party quite well as a minority, especially considering that as the opposition it eliminates any specific need to demonstrate results. One drawback [...]

So today I called my mortgage lender to ask for my PMI to be cancelled, as my mortgage balance recently fell below 80% of the purchase price of my home. The lender apparently agreed that the home is still worth approximately what was paid for it, since they agreed to eliminate the PMI.
Then after all [...]

Rick Cole, courtesy of the Urbanophile:
Sustainable urbanism doesn’t have to carry the weight of the overhead and egos of mega developers, starchitects, and all the myriad fixers — lobbyists, lawyers, flacks, event planners, consultants etc. — that live off their wake. It doesn’t put the public purse at risk on speculative real estate ventures. The [...]

Regarding my personal addendum to the last post: I noted that I feel re-use should be a foremost priority to sustainable urban planning.
This belief is based around the concept that titles this journal: the built environment. I feel that buildings are a part of the environment, not simply an asset class or capital type.
Without getting [...]

A great bit from Wired (via The Vigorous North):
So what can we do? We should change our focus to the other side of the equation and curtail not the texting but the driving. This may sound a bit facetious, but I’m serious. When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important [...]

Chris Briem and Mike Madison both have some interesting commentary on East Liberty. Some quotes that strike me:
Virtually all of the good news about contemporary East Liberty [...] conveys the impression that the area is being transformed into a generic upscale suburb, with the big box stores, higher end retailers, and chic restaurants preferred everywhere [...]

I sometimes find it amusing that a society so dead-set against taxes, government and social support still expects a first-world level of service from any multi-user institution.
Today I spent an hour stuck on a train that was having electrical problems. Like true troopers, the staff provided incredible customer service and eventually decided to just pile [...]

An interesting thing I observe every day is the declining horizon of basic business, social and personal decision-making. Something I hear time and again is “well you just can’t predict how things will be in X years — things change so fast” — a result of exponential changes to inputs as well as a “blinkers [...]

Great new post from the Urbanophile:
What if instead of spending a huge amount of money to try to save one building, the city found a little bit of money to do basic maintenance to preserve the structural integrity of many buildings – and create a safe path through parts of them that tourists could walk [...]

I just finished Margaret Atwood’s Payback. A great book, but the best part is Chapter 5, which almost stands on its own…
Spoilers ahead:

Being that Canadaian politics is one of my current obsessions, my podcast subscriptions are recently littered with the issue of public asset sales being an agenda item of both the federal and many provincial governments. This issue resonates with me to some degree because I’ve been intensively following the US banking crisis.
I see parallels here [...]

This very misleading and dishonest article tries to tell us that we could be generating 1000% of our electrical needs with renewables. Nice try.
First we have to think of what we use electricity for: right now it doesn’t include things like charging a battery-powered auto fleet. It doesn’t include mining operations or steel furnace heating.
The [...]

An interesting quote from Sublime Oblivion’s latest newslog:
Likewise, following the collapse of Pax Americana, the American Republic will remain; it will be like a crustacean that has shed its shell, and it will, if anything, be enthusiastic about reclaiming its old spheres of influence in a far blunter, more aggresive manner than it maintains Pax Americana today.
The Americas [...]

I remember when I was in grad school, with academic life as my aspiring career focus, how I had a half-dozen professors telling me it was a great time to be preparing for an academic career because of all the professors who were going to be retiring. Whilst academia and other bureaucracies have not been as stiffly [...]

I posted a while back some of the many problems I have with the average self-important cyclist.
Reading Randy’s recent update about biking culture in Toronto also got me thinking: civic resources are not always well-spent on providing the infrastructure for cycle fetishists.
I’m not against biking per se, but the road infrastructure required for biking commuters [...]

This post about Pittsburgh’s subsidy to Delta for keeping a trans-Atlantic flight in the city got me thinking: Economists often talk of “Market Failure” as something that policymakers should control. But the market is just something that behaves a certain way when inputs and outputs touch it. It is what it is. It’s not moral [...]

Casey Mulligan explains why unemployment insurance is a drag on full employment. And talks about Pittsburgh while doing it.
Unemployment insurance is only a small part of the reason why the labor market has so far failed to restore employment to pre-recession levels. But unemployment insurance is not free: It results in less employment and less output, [...]