friend of the built environment

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, [...]

Just Sayin.
For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash. They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like. If they wish, they can also convert it into interest-earning government bonds [...]