Thought-provoking. I’d like to have this in my life.
How is a Pocket Neighborhood different than a regular neighborhood?
A pocket neighborhoodisnotthe wider neighborhood of several hundred households and network of streets, but a realm of a dozen or so neighbors who interact on a daily basis around a shared garden, quiet street or alley — a kind of secludedneighborhood within a neighborhood.
The widerneighborhoodis where you might describe “the red house on the corner of Elm and Main Street”— a local landmark that helps define and give character to a neighborhood. You may know some of these neighbors, but likely not the hundreds that live there. In most neighborhoods, streets are public, yards and gardens are private, but protected semi-public spaces are unusual.
“When we started it was just about technology,” Pahlka said. “Now it’s really about the outcomes of the operations” — outcomes like reducing recidivism or increasing the percentage of people who are eligible for food stamps who actually receive them. And improving government can make tremendous change. “The math shows that at least in safety net services, being 10 percent more effectivewould be as impactful as doubling all philanthropic spending,” she said.
Pahlka wasn’t alone in her initial technological optimism. In Mark Zuckerberg’s 2012letterdescribing Facebook’s IPO, he said the company’s tools for sharing “could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.” For most tech companies, that triumphalism continued all the way through the 2016 election, when revelations about misinformation and foreign meddling forced an industry-wide reckoning with its own power.
But it’s not as if digital tools and services have becomelessimportant in the broader world. Nor does the national political situation obviate the needs of people in local communities all across the country. Code for America now has about 75 full-time employees and 22,000 active volunteers, and in the areas where Code for America has dedicated the most resources, there is huge room for improvement.“If you are vulnerable to that cycle of poverty and incarceration, government services are awful to use and they don’t work very well,” Pahlka said. “It doesn’t have to work that way.”
…as much as this festival is a time and place to hear some great music, it’s also an opportunity for lots of folks—myself included—to dress up and see how others are presenting themselves. It’s a place to explore that means of expression.The profusion of wonderful lookshas been well-documented; in my opinion it is really much of what this festival is about.
This dress up aspect is completely emergent—nothing has been dictated or suggested- audience members have been quoted as saying that their clothing and look choices are improvised and spontaneous, (skills the black community has in abundance, as evidenced by our shared popular music, dance, comedy, sport etc)….this attitude is inclusive and admits to everyone as a creator, and, in a purely visual and sartorial way, it announces that everyone is both proud and brave, yet also vulnerable (you’re really putting yourself out there when you dress like this). To have that bravery and that vulnerability be encouraged and accepted is as a tonic in these times… at ANY time. This is display of looks infers and implies a way of being- and it says as much and maybe more than any words—words are words, but this is about how one can BE. It shows rather than tells.
Attitudes are overwhelmingly cultural, says Sybil Kapoor, author of “Sight Smell Touch Taste Sound: A New Way to Cook”. Compare China and Japan with countries such as Britain and America. Texture is taken far more seriously in the former. According to one study, Americans use just 78 words to describe the texture of food. By contrast, there are more than 400 such terms in Japanese.Puri-puridescribes the feel of biting into something like a prawn, bouncy, with a slight resistance;neba–neba, the slimy, viscous feel of foods such asnatto, fermented soyabeans. Shuko Oda, head chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, says that only Japanese customers order it; the rest balk at the snot-like strings clinging to the beans.
In China, texture is part of the pleasure of food and people praise the feel as much as flavour, says Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer on Chinese food. Ingredients are used for their mouth-feel alone. Birds’ nests and sharks’ fins don’t taste of much, but both contribute a gelatinous texture that is prized. For non-natives, the choicest textures can be puzzling, at best. At Sanxia Renjia, a Sichuan restaurant in London, shredded chicken doused in chilli and soy sauce makes sense to the British palate. The cool, translucent strips of jellyfish that accompany it are more challenging; they feel like a cross between a cucumber and a condom, rubbery but with a tendency to break apart with each bite. The flavour of chicken gizzards, fried and nestling amid wild chilli, is inoffensive. Bite down and appreciating them becomes harder. The tense little muscles once used to grind up food skid between your teeth, forcing you to work as hard to chew them as the gizzards themselves once did. Recipes from Westerners about how best to cook these gristly morsels seem designed to strip them of their texture, with directions to braise them for hours in order to melt the connective tissues before frying them to a crisp.
That misses the point. Dunlop says she ate the knobbly chicken feet and goose intestines set before her only because she had been brought up to be polite. But repeated exposure and experimentation have been transformative. She now relishes the gristle in a roast chicken, she says. The sea cucumber, a slithery yet crisp delicacy revolting to most non-Chinese, has become a beautiful thing to her.
For the past few weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing another me. Wednesday afternoon I left my apartment to walk to the train and I saw her — me — crossing the intersection at the top of the hill, walking briskly. Then over the weekend I was washing dishes and staring out the window, just spacing out, and she was crossing the park, a shape appearing and disappearing among trees. I couldn’t get a good look.
I know you’re thinking it can’t be, that it must just be someone who looks like me. I’ll admit that none of the clothes I see her wearing are mine, but they’re similar — like when I saw her jogging near the gate at the foot of the hill in the park, she was wearing a fleece exactly like my mint one, but purple. In fact, when I saw her the first time, barely a speck in the distance boarding a bus, I thought:I’d buy that handbag. And then:oh my gosh, that’s me.
Across the country, cities are straining. Housing costs are exploding, transportation systems are overwhelmed, infrastructure is crumbling, and inequality is on the rise. Yet there’s little support from federal or state authorities —“infrastructure week”is a punch line in Washington, not a policy. Efforts to raise money for local projects areunder siege from conservative activists, while measures to build more housing are halted byliberal ones.
Into this void march the techies, who come bearing money, jobs and promises of out-of-this-world innovation. But there’s a catch. Corporations are getting wide latitude in determining the future of cities. They are controlling more key services and winning important battles with once-indomitable city governments. Local officials find themselves at the mercy of tech: They can’t live without tech money, even if tech interests have a way of eclipsing every other civic priority.
How did tech companies become America’s most-powerful local power brokers?
Can molecular memories of our ancestors’ experiences affect our own behaviour and physiology? That idea has certainly grabbed hold of the public imagination, under the banner of the seemingly ubiquitous buzzword “epigenetics”.Transgenerational epigenetic inheritanceis the idea that a person’s experiences can somehow mark their genomes in ways that are passed on to their children and grandchildren. Those marks on the genome are then thought to influence gene expression and affect the behaviour and physiology of people who inherit them.
The way this notion is referred to – both in popular pieces and in the scientific literature – you’d be forgiven for thinking it is an established fact in humans, based on mountains of consistent, compelling evidence. In fact, the opposite is true – it is based on the flimsiest of evidence from a very small number of studies with very small sample sizes and serious methodological flaws. [Note that there is, by contrast, very good evidence for this kind of mechanism innematodesandplantsand in specific circumstances involving transposable elements inmice].
To save you the trouble, I dig into the dismal details below.
The economic analysis in my last post led me to read some more articles from the author’s blog. He’s a liberal/progressive economist, with solid-seeming creds. Here are two of particular interest.
The first is a follow-up to that previous post, and looks at concrete ways to improve wealth distribution in the US:
An earlier post on this blog looked at the proximate factors which took substantial growth in GDP per capita (which grew at about the same pace after 1980 as it had before) down to median wages that simply stagnated. As discussed in that post, this was principally due to a shift in distribution from labor to capital, and a shift within labor from the lower paid to the higher paid. (Demographic effects, principally the increased participation of women in the labor force, as well as increases in the prices of items such as medical care relative to the prices of other goods, were also both important during this period. However, both have now become neutral, and are not factors leading to the continuing stagnation in recent years of median wages.)
The purpose of this blog post is to look at concrete policy measures that can be taken to address the problem. The issue is not slow growth: As noted above, per capita growth in GDP since 1980 has been similar to what it was before. The problem, rather, is the distribution of the gains from that growth, which has become terribly skewed.
The second is an explanation of Baumol’s Cost Disease, which I had not heard of before, and which provides a pretty convincing explanation of why the costs in certain sectors, like healthcare and college education, have increased so dramatically over the decades:
A point on which all agree, whether conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, is that the cost of government keeps rising. Whether it is the cost of building new roads or new military jet fighters, or the cost of schools or health services, the cost now is much more than in the past. And this is not simply general inflation. The cost of government services has risen at a significantly faster pace than general inflation.
This is true. But what is not generally recognized if the fundamental cause, nor the implications as we as a nation have struggled to maintain government services. The fundamental cause is not waste and corruption, nor lazy government workers. Rather, it lies in the nature of the goods and services used for the public services the government provides.
This blog post will first review the facts on what has happened to expenditures on government goods and services (which for brevity, will hereafter often simply be referred to as government goods) over the past 60 years. The 60 year period is taken so as to encompass most of the post-World War II period, but to begin once the numbers had stabilized from the very high levels during the war and the immediate post-war fluctuations.
The post will then review the fundamental cause, drawing on the work that has come to be called “Baumol’s Cost Disease”. The post will discuss how this applies to the government sector, and the implications.
As the diagram above shows, real median wages have been stagnant since at least 1980, despite real GDP per capita which is 78% higher now than then. Real median wages are only 5% higher (and in fact unchanged from 1979). In a normally developing economy, one would expect real GDP per capita and real wages to move together, growing at similar rates and certainly not diverging. But that has not been the case in the US since at least the early 1980s.
Why has such a large wedge opened up between worker earnings and GDP per capita? This blog post will look at the immediate factors that lead from one curve to the other. This will all be data and arithmetic, but will allow one to decompose the separation into several key underlying factors.
