friend of the built environment

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 [...]