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Working Families Party Builds Progressive Power
The Working Families Party was started in 1998 by a group of labor and community activists who wanted to reinvigorate the fight for economic and social justice in New York. The Nation played a small but significant role in the party's birth, running an e
The Atlantic Online | September 2009 | How American Health Care Killed My Father | David Goldhill
[must read] what about us—the patients? How does a nation that might close down a business for a single illness from a suspicious hamburger tolerate the carnage inflicted by our hospitals? And not just those 100,000 deaths. In April, a Wall Street Journal
Ford's plug-in hybrids will talk to electrical grid - Ars Technica
Ford also envisions the technology as extensible to areas outside the home, for use at malls or offices, with settings for each location or situation. The system would allow each operator to be responsible for the cost of the electricity they are siphonin
What Would High-Speed Rail Do to Suburban Sprawl? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
[wow, and read comments] Despite the lack of any positive evidence linking centralization to high-speed rail, I certainly accept that there is a great deal of uncertainty. To give rail the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that high-speed rail will cause
Top 25 things I wish President Barack Obama knew about hydrogen fuel cell cars and plug-in battery cars « Hydrogen Car Revolution
I think the biggest issue facing the emergence of fuel cells has nothing to do with the products and everything to do with the infrastructure. Despite all the work the auto companies have done to develop the cars, there isn’t a corresponding effort on the
Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms | Wired Science | Wired.com
Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fwiredscience%2F2009%2F05%2Ffood-web-meet-interweb
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FarmsReach
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Three students at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information are trying to create a social network, Squash and Vine, to connect farms, retailers and food consumers. And a handful of activists in Santa Cruz created a service for finding small farms, Local Harvest, that now reaches 4 million people
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Mega-Regions and High-Speed Rail - Richard Florida
The history of capitalist development is the history of the more expansive and intensive use of space. Post-war suburbs, the rise of larger metropolitan areas, the development of multi-nodal regions with edge cities as well as downtown cores are part and
Open Source » Blog Archive » Carlos Fuentes: FDR to BHO: the New Deal Revisited
"it's a matter of the united states demanding the drugs, supplying the guns...and let's see what the president can do about it"...he mentions the Hudson Valley @16 or so
The Green Issue - Batteries Not Included - NYTimes.com
“You always have to start with the science,” Agassi says, riding shotgun in his sister’s hybrid. “There’s nothing better than taking a photon, converting it to an electron and converting that to motion. Physicswise, you can’t beat that. The rules of energ
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Going country by country, his start-up firm has begun to construct what it hopes will ultimately be a worldwide network of millions of small-scale “charging spots,” parking-meter-like posts scattered around downtown areas and along highways. But crucially, he is also building roadside robotized battery-swap stations that provide fresh, fully charged batteries without having to wait hours for a charge. It’s a dual system: on most days, his customers would charge their cars by plugging into a charge spot at home or at work; a long drive would entail pit stops every 100 miles or so for a battery swap. Agassi plans to make his money by buying electricity in bulk from solar arrays and wind farms and then reselling it to his customers.
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a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts. The electric-car business, in fact, could function like the mobile-phone industry: you could pay, say, $10 for 1,000 miles, $20 for 3,000 miles, or perhaps a few hundred a month for unlimited driving.
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Time Warner makes broadband cap "concessions," unlimited plan for $150/month : Obsessable Technology News
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This too reveals that metered broadband isn't really about saving the internet or ensuring great customer experience for the more "polite," less bandwidth-hungry users on the network — it's about setting up a tiered scheme in which Time Warner stands to make an incredible amount of bank as general demand for internet usage is increasing.
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Because they couldn't solve the problem by outright blocking competitors on their networks thanks to net neutrality advocates, the new cable strategy appears to be putting consumers into a mindset of internet rationing, where the commodity is literally so precious you might think twice about streaming that Netflix movie in high definition.
Creating a Citizen Driven Idea Sourcing Platform & Needs Matching System | Government 2.0 Club
Reinventing America’s Cities - The Time Is Now - NYTimes.com
New Orleans, Los Angeles, Buffalo, The Bronx
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Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities.
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In many major cities this void was filled by private developers, who began refurbishing parks and old historic quarters. The result was sanitized versions of real cities organized around themed districts, convention centers and sports complexes. Meanwhile the roads, bridges and sewer systems that held these cities together were allowed to disintegrate.
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Rendell, Schwarzenegger & Bloomberg: Deep Infrastructure Investment Must Be Prioritized - The Washington Note
link to mayors' organization; book recommendation
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Much of the credit for raising public awareness of this issue goes to Governors Ed Rendell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and their new coalition, Building America's Future.
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President Obama's budget includes funding for a small-scale National Infrastructure and Reinvestment Bank, but the case for something far more larger and effective has been made by many leading experts, including Bernard Schwartz and Sherle Schwenninger, John C. Whitehead and Felix Rohatyn -- the author of an important new book, Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now.
Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? - NYTimes.com
“This has never been just about business,” said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, the maker of organic yogurt. “We are here to change the world. We dreamt for decades of having this moment.”
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the celebrity chef Alice Waters recommends that the federal government triple its budget for school lunches to provide youngsters with healthier food. And the author Michael Pollan has called on President Obama to pursue a “reform of the entire food system” by focusing on a Pollan priority: diversified, regional food networks.
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Last year, mandatory spending on farm subsidies was $7.5 billion, compared with $15 million for programs for organic and local foods, according to the House Appropriations Committee.
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Needed: A Fiscal Framework--Not a Stimulus [Extended version]: Scientific American
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America ranks 22nd out of 23 high-income countries in public social outlays as a percent of national income (ahead only of Ireland), for health, pensions, income support, and other social services.
1. Jobs Are The New Assets - 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now - TIME
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If as a society, we turn our attention back to work — if we dote on our jobs as much as we did on our homes and portfolios in an earlier era — then we'll have to start asking deeper questions about why we do what we do.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city’s economy in some unhealthy ways.
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The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.
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Los Angeles is a mecca for media and entertainment; San Jose and Austin developed significant, innovative high-tech industries; Houston became a hub for energy production; Nashville developed a unique niche in low-cost music recording and production; Charlotte emerged as a center for cost-effective banking and low-end finance.
But in the heady days of the housing bubble, some Sun Belt cities—Phoenix and Las Vegas are the best examples—developed economies centered largely on real estate and construction. With sunny weather and plenty of flat, empty land, they got caught in a classic boom cycle. Although these places drew tourists, retirees, and some industry—firms seeking bigger footprints at lower costs—much of the cities’ development came from, well, development itself. At a minimum, these places will take a long, long time to regain the ground they’ve recently lost in local wealth and housing values.
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Talking Points Memo | Broadband Stimulus - Yochai Benkler
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requires grantees not only to adhere to the minimal net neutrality standards adopted by the FCC's Statement of Principles, but also to run both wired and wireless broadband networks on an "open access basis." The FCC is charged with defining what "open access" means within 45 days of the passage of the Act, but historically (that is, before the Bush-appointed FCC reversed course), open access was the loose term applied to the approach that typified the 1996 Telecommunications Act: that is, competition from new entrants would be the best check on incumbent abuses, and competition would be created by forcing the incumbents to let the new entrants use some pieces of the incumbents' network as leverage to overcome the very high startup costs associated with offering any useful service at all to customers.
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