Tag: politics

Private Cities

this will be a most interesting experiment. if the essentially privately run singapore is any indication, good things will happen.

The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of 3 privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems.

2017-11-20:

Google is building a small city within Toronto: Toronto has 3 km2 of waterfront property awaiting redevelopment, a huge and prime stretch of land that amounts to one of the best opportunities in North America to rethink at scale how housing, streets and infrastructure are built. The government announced that they were partnering with Sidewalk Labs to develop the site.

Bill Gates is thinking even bigger, a 100 km2 site for a new city near Phoenix that might take advantage of Arizona’s forward thinking rules on self-driving cars.

All over the world, we can see the beginnings of a move from nation-states to smaller, more decentralized and agile communities such as common interest developments, special economic zones and proprietary cities. Your Next Government is Tom W. Bell’s primer on this coming revolution.

Science Left Behind

if you thought the right wing has a monopoly on it’s attack on science, i have news for you. the vaccination causes autism assholes are a good example.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning—and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Yet those on the left have numerous fallacies of their own. Aversion to clean energy programs, basic biological research, and even life-saving vaccines come naturally to many progressives. These are positions supported by little more than junk-science and paranoid thinking.

Elections farce

The actual share of voters nationally who are up for grabs is probably 3-5% in this election. The Obama and Romney campaigns are expected to spend on the order of $2B to sway this tiny share of the electorate.

an expensive circus for an outcome that is entirely irrelevant. no party, including the fringe ones, has any clue about our nonlinear world and their recipes stopped being effective decades ago.

OWS is self-parodying

OWS focused more energy on the mundane logistics of camp life than on organizing for social change. Petty decisions such as how to manage laundry (a multi-day debate), what kind of storage bins to buy (they had to be fair trade and procured through Craigslist), and how to put limits on the drumming circles without alienating them (some considered this a civil rights issue) often sucked up hours of valuable time when put to consensus-based discussion in General Assemblies.

this all reads like a camp organized by the park slope coop.