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. [...]