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Rather than just sustaining and delivering public goods, government can evolve from regulating “the tragedy of the commons” to fostering its triumph. In other words, government can be most efficient at delivering value when structured primarily to facilitate the capacity of a community to drive and sustain its own shared value.
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Defining the Worst Type of Street Design – Sarah Goodyear – The Atlantic Cities
There’s a video embedded in this article that nicely sums up the negatives associated with “stroads” by explaining the positives associated with “streets” and “roads.”
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If you want to … truly understand why our development approach is bankrupting us, just watch your speedometer. Anytime you are traveling between 30 and 50 miles per hour, you are basically in an area that is too slow to be efficient yet too fast to provide a framework for capturing a productive rate of return.
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Evgeny Morozov: Hackers, Makers, and the Next Industrial Revolution : The New Yorker
Morozov quotes Mary Dennett here. “He must make what his machine is geared to make” is a very potent phrase, but it also reminds me of “program or be programmed” somehow.
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“The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
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It’s all part of the plan to make throw-away people. Of course it will cost us dearly in the end.
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We live in an era of planned obsolescence, in which designers deliberately make a thing limited in its useful life. Now this planned obsolescene includes human beings. Is it really an efficient use of our human capital to turn experienced workers into Walmart greeters?
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Thatcher’s slow-motion housing timebomb – Boing Boing
Full-on indictment of the public housing sell-off in the UK (initiated by Margaret Thatcher).
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Housing in the UK is a microcosm for everything wrong with neoliberalism: corruption, cronyism, grinding human misery, and funny accounting to prove that it’s all working, honestly.
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Roman Fever – Rob Goodman – POLITICO Magazine
Exigency / decline / disaster IS addictive. And self-fulfilling. Good article.
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In all, it has become the background drone of our politics, the dull hum of impending doom. Let’s understand why this thinking appeals. Envisioning decline is addictive. It offers us the chance to imagine our times as extraordinary and to cast ourselves in heroic roles to meet them. And the thrill demands a higher dose of doom each year.
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One code to rule them all: How big data could help the 1 percent and hurt the little guy – Salon.com
omg, and YIKES.
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A white paper on “Embedded Governance from the Institute for the Future is even more direct:Laws, now written on paper and enforced by people, will be carried on software and enforced through electronically updated and immediately downloadable rules woven into the fabric of our environment. Governance will become automatic, and lawbreaking much more difficult…. Embedded governance will prevent many of the crimes and violations we see today from happening. Firearms will work only when operated by their rightful, registered owners. Office computers will shut down after 40 hours of work unless overtime has been authorized. Disasters and quarantines could also be managed more effectively if information about citizens were known and if laws were downloaded to change behaviors immediately.
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Evgeny vs. the internet : Columbia Journalism Review
Good summary.
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At bottom, Morozov says his work is an attempt to integrate the debates about technology into the broader debates about politics, economics, history, and culture—areas of study with much richer traditions and far greater intellectual resources for tackling the many challenges that technology presents. Such a shift in discourse, he feels, would limit the influence of those advocating narrow technological solutions to what are essentially non-technological problems—like spreading democracy—and would rob a word like “disruption” of the positive connotation it has acquired as a force for progress, allowing it to be seen instead as a painful example of neoliberal economics. When discussed in purely digital terms, for instance, letting a company like Uber transform a city’s taxi service is a no-brainer. When the digital is integrated into the political, however, this becomes a more complicated debate about regulation and infrastructure and the rights of cab drivers.
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