Geeko friendly's List: Politics

• Politicians do not usually give themselves away so tellingly, and many of us would like to know whether they mean what they are saying. So how are we to know when they are lying?
• Software programs that analyse a person's speech, voice or facial expressions are building upon the work of researchers like Ekman to help us discover when the truth is being stretched, and even by how much.
• Skillicorn has been watching out for verbal "spin".
• He has developed an algorithm that evaluates word usage within the text of a conversation or speech to determine when a person "presents themselves or their content in a way that does not necessarily reflect what they know to be true".
• The algorithm counts usage of first person nouns - "I" tends to indicate less spin than "we", for example. It also searches out phrases that offer qualifications or clarifications of more general statements, since speeches that contain few such amendments tend to be high on spin.
• In general though, Obama's speeches contain considerably higher spin than either McCain
• or Clinton.
• So the analysis appears to back up McCain's claim that he is a "straight talker".
• "When you see these crises come along, the spin goes up," Skillicorn says. "Obama is very good at using stirring rhetoric to deal with the issues. And it seems to work if you look at what happens in the polls afterwards."
• McCain does not seem as adept at using spin to his advantage, and his "straight talk" can make his speeches fall flat from a motivational point of view
• "John McCain's voice analysis profile looks like that of someone who is clinically depressed"
• McCain's voice changes little in pitch as he speaks, and so conveys very little emotion or impact. Whether he is addressing positive prospects or discussing sad facts, his voice always sounds the same.
• Additionally, McCain's voice and facial movements often do not match up
• "Someday soon, computers may be able read us better than any psychologist. I imagine that will be a pretty scary day for politicians."

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• A large percentage of municipal landfill waste is from construction and demolition debris, estimated to be between 20 and 30 percent nationally.
• We recycle cans, bottles and even plastic bags, so why not reuse older buildings? There are many good reasons to do so, and opportunities and benefits abound to reduce such waste.
• First, it's very costly and energy consumptive: Municipal waste that must be loaded, hauled, transferred from trucks to trains, processed and dumped into landfills costs between $50 and $75 per ton.
• Second, it pollutes:
• Third, it's wasteful:
• Most construction debris — such as land clearing, wood, metal, glass, asphalt and concrete rubble — is fully reusable at lower cost than the production of new materials.
• Upstream, reducing construction and demolition waste reduces the need for the extraction and processing of raw materials, product manufacture and eventual disposal.
• And finally, the preservation and adaptive reuse of older buildings — especially historic landmarks — as compared with new construction is considered to be one of the most sustainable "green building" practices achievable.
• Climate-protection strategies must address the issue. In the United States, building construction and operations account for 48 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions.
• While preservation laws help protect our valued historic landmarks, incentives and possibly new regulations are needed to address waste of building stock. For example, Portland, Ore., mandates that all building projects valued at over $50,000 separate on site and recycle all nontoxic construction materials. New York City provides tax incentives, electric rebates and employs rezone strategies to encourage reuse and conversion of commercial buildings to residential.
• • Main thought
• The bottom line: Landfills should no longer be an option for used but otherwise clean and durable building materials.
• Policymakers, preservationists and architects need to push green building practices into the 21st century by promoting the environmental, economic and community benefits of building reuse and recycling.
• State and local governments should establish working guidelines, programs and incentives to promote the reuse, retrofit and reinvestment of older buildings.
• The energy invested in the existing built environment must be seen as a tangible resource of economic, environmental and cultural value, not to be wasted. In this way, preservation and reuse can be our "greenest" tools of sustainability.

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• Since taking power in 2000, Mr. Putin’s Russia has dodged chaos, seen its GDP increase six-fold, its poverty fall by half, average monthly real wages rise by 150% and, with the invasion of Georgia, demonstrated to the world that it can no longer be baited, humiliated or ignored without consequences.
• He’s a Russian authoritarian, in some ways an autocrat, who is leaving his country better than he found it.
• Mr. Bush will go down in history as our worst president ever in terms of what he squandered, and among the worst in terms of criminality.

• Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is currently the most successful leader around and in one very important way, among the most moral and humane.

   

  For in power politics, it is extremely moral to know when to stop and profoundly immoral to posture and preen and make promises you can’t keep and issue threats you can’t back up.
• American neocons have a long relationship with Russia, a viscerally hostile relationship that goes back to the Cold War. Sadly, it’s a relationship they’d like to revive, now that Saddam’s no longer available, Osama’s gone missing and bombing Iran lacks popular sizzle.
• We’d even been allies during World War II. Nor did we have any obvious geographical or economic conflicts. It was just that darn Communism.
• The American neocon movement was born in the aftermath of Vietnam. Its founding generation was composed largely of former liberals and Leftists, even a few cafeteria Trotskyites. Some had drifted away from communism in horror at the excesses of the 1930s, or during the 1950s when the full extent of those excesses began to be known. Many were conventional liberals who broke with the Old Left over Vietnam, which they supported, and with the New Left, whose anti-Vietnam antics they found frivolous, self-centered, self-righteous and self-interested. The neocon movement coalesced during the Carter administration and attained its first real influence during the Reagan years.
• The movement came of age with Ronald Reagan and it had but one overriding purpose: win the Cold War. A few senior neocons, such as movement “Godfather” Irving Kristol, took a broader view.
• His stated purpose was “to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”
• The bipartisan nature of these elder neocons made them very useful to Ronald Reagan, who wisely never got in bed with them, instead keeping them at a distance. As he used to say, “Sometimes the Right hand doesn’t know what the Far Right hand is doing.” But in private, he and his senior advisers would tell the neocons, “We need you to hold our feet to the fire.”
• The elder neocons and, increasingly, their junior clique (many of whom were children of the founding generation) were happy to do so. This is because neocons like to play with fire, especially when it’s other people getting burned. Throughout the 80s, they agitated incessantly for military action, covert and overt, against the Soviets in places like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Afghanistan.
• They were not always wrong.

  • Hm, interesting!

• When Ronald Reagan came to power, most Americans accepted the “mature Cold War” as a permanent fact of international life. This acceptance was based on the perceived realities of Soviet military power. But it was also based on the belief, carefully nurtured by the Soviets and the American academics and CIA types who studied them, that material life was getting continually better for the average Russian.

   

  How nearly everybody got it exactly backwards is a fascinating story in itself. Suffice it to say: Ronald Reagan did not.
• His strategy was cold, it was clear, it was thoughtful and purposeful, and it was very definitely his own. Reagan knew intuitively that the Soviet Union was tottering. But he did not want to fight the Soviets, he wanted to bring them to the negotiating table. To that end, he used little, if any, overt force against the Soviet Union. Instead, he developed what in Pentagonese was known as “competitive strategies.” In plain English, this meant, “Spend ‘em to death.” Reagan’s aim was to force the Soviet Union to spend money, allocate resources, and occupy technical talent that they either had better use for elsewhere or didn’t have. (The best Soviet scientists and engineers were world-class, but they had no real depth, no bench strength.) Supporting the mujahedin in Afghanistan was one way to deplete them. The Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars-perhaps the most successful weapons system never built or intended to be built-was another.

  • RA!
• In short, Ronald Reagan walked the Soviets up to the edge of an economic abyss of their own making, then let them ponder what a revived competition with the United States would mean. Mikhail Gorbachev got the message. He wanted “Perestroika,” or “restructuring.” He got collapse.

• And then we broke our word, which was not so much a set of firm promises as the word that had underlain our attitude toward Russia since 1917. Get rid of communism, call off the global offensive, we’ll be friends. We’ll even help.

   

  But we didn’t. Instead, we pushed them toward their present angry stance. And that is hard to forgive.
• We said the right things, from time to time. But as we’d done with Vietnam and Afghanistan, we lost interest and walked away.

• We even sent them Ivy League economists to screw up what was left of their economy by advocating extraordinarily premature privatization. Whole industries were looted or otherwise acquired by well-placed apparatchiks, former communists who’d printed up new business cards, while inflation soared. Both economic and political problems in the former Soviet Union were compounded by the fact that for generations, private business was a crime and “profit” was itself a criminal concept. The result was that criminal penetration of legitimate business activities is pervasive and profound; while organized crime in Russia became a huge business-and we didn’t particularly care. If anything, trying to get a handle on organized crime kept the Russians busy. And we were pleased when some of the former Soviet Socialist Republics declared independence (like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) or tried to do so (like Chechnya and Dagestan). We could hardly disguise our glee when the Russian Army almost came apart in the First Chechen War.

   

  Democracy, as the neocons liked to gloat, was a’ bustin’ out all over.

  • RA!
• If we’d given a damn, we would have tried to understand this regional fragmentation from their point of view-a point of view that predated communism by five hundred years. If we’d given a damn, we would have helped, seriously helped, the Russians get their economic house in order before making any but the most basic political reforms. We would have understood that a nation with no democratic heritage and no functioning middle class had to go through some messy times, and could not do so on our timetable. We would have understood that a Vladimir Putin had to emerge-because the alternative was worse.
• America needed a Purpose, and helping the Russians just wasn’t sexy enough. So they were assigned their role in America’s New World Order-pathetic, impotent basket case and object lesson-and we left it at that. We had the rest of the planet to play with.

• And so the politics of feeling good about yourself came to dominate post-Cold War foreign policy. The “America’s Purpose” debate of the 1990s must rank as proof of both the inherent idiocy and the inevitable failure of defining the world as a place for us to administer or save. On one side were the liberal “Muscular Humanitarians,” not averse to using force provided we did it “selflessly.” On the other were the neocons, the “America’s Greatness” crowd, casting about for a lifelong crisis worthy of what they deemed their literary and political talents. They-the younger generation of neocons, especially-had no problem with Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, when she asked Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having an army if you don’t use it?” Indeed, they answered the question General Powell was too furious to address. The neocon response: Let’s use force-to turn the Arab world into good little American knock-offs, for starters. And ever since 1991, we’ve been using our muscle on behalf of Muslims: in Kuwait, in Somalia, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

   

  In Iran?

   

  But what of Russia?

  • RA
• While we were nattering about America’s Purpose and getting into war after war, the Russians were slowly putting their internal house in order. But we saw only corruption and crime, suppression and incompetence…when we bothered to look at all. And when we weren’t ignoring or dismissing them, we were humiliating them.
• NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization established in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union, now found itself without a purpose. So, with American blessing and prodding, NATO began an aggressive Drang nach Osten, moving eastward toward a nonexistent threat in order to have something to do.
• And then there was Georgia, still a candidate for membership, along with Ukraine, another former Soviet republic. And today we’re busily planning to establish anti-missile systems in these areas, ostensibly to protect Europe from Iranian attack.
• We call this expanding democracy and strengthening the “international community.” In some ways, it was.
• The Russians didn’t like this militarization of lands near and on their borders. They let us know they didn’t like this. They let us know it for a long time, very loudly. That was always the thing about them during the Cold War. If something really bothered them, they let us know, clearly and in a timely manner. This hasn’t changed, except-until Georgia-we believed we didn’t have to pay attention.

  • RA
• Which brings us to Vladimir Putin, who turns out to be less the Man You Love to Hate than a Russian who intends for his country to be respected…and is prepared to respect us in return. More’s the pity that we’ve given him so little opportunity to do so.
• The ability to compromise is not a diplomatic politeness toward a partner but rather taking into account and respecting your partner’s legitimate interests.”
• “The bloc system of relations must be replaced by an altogether different system based on common rules that are called international law, and those rules should be strictly abided by. At the end of the day, only this may ensure stability and respect for the interest of small nations and not just large ones and superpowers like the United States.”
• He was too polite to state the obvious, that it is in the best interests of the United States to respect Russia’s interests and that those interests will not be disrespected without consequence. An adult, he did his interviewers the courtesy of assuming they were also adults.
• Putin is increasingly demonized, especially in the Murdoch media apparat. The neocons continue their well-co-ordinated muttering about a new Cold War, and seem quite happy to do so. And why not? For eight years, the Bush administration’s acting-out of their fantasies and obsessions have so weakened America, financially and militarily, that only a new threat can justify further expenditures and exertions.
• Not so long ago, the neocons wanted Russia to be a basket case, on the verge of famine, corrupt and impotent, so we could have our way in what used to be their empire-and remains their border area. Now, suddenly, the neocons find their resurgence so deliciously alarming that it’s already being used as justification for that ultimate indicator of Purpose, increased defense spending.

  • RA
• Russia is never going to be an exemplar of democracy and human rights, no more than Iraq or Afghanistan. But that does not mean that Russia cannot be a decent and humane country. The neocons and the administration do not desire that for Russia, and that is the gravamen of all the verbiage about keeping Russia out of the “international community.”
• It helped the demonization process that Putin was former KGB. But even if he’d been a former dissident or priest, it wouldn’t have mattered. We prefer our Russian leaders evil or, failing that, incompetent. Putin is neither. He is, to borrow a favorite neocon phrase, “tough-minded.” And tough-minded people understand that patience is not a limitless virtue.
• We brought him to the end of his patience. For a decade, we had been oblivious to Russian humiliation by our ham-handed pursuit of our interests in their own back yard. Then we began to deliberately bait them in a way we would never have dared to do to the old Soviet Union. The final straws were our recognition of Kosovo, part of the former Yugoslavia, as an independent and sovereign state back in February, over both Serbian and Russian protests, the attempt to extend a US anti-ballistic missile shield into the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine, and an offer of membership in NATO to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, a US-supported drama queen of a democracy that was engaged in some very unwise provocations of its own.

  • RA
• Putin was saying, clearly and publicly, the time for this nonsense was over; it was time for America to come to an adult understanding of its real interests and act accordingly.
• offering NATO membership to parts of the former Soviet Union, like Georgia, threatens Russia’s right to control its own borders and no nation can tolerate that. Nor should any nation tolerate the hostile and threatening militarization of its neighbors. China didn’t in 1950 when US troops approached the Yalu River in Korea. We didn’t in 1962 when Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba.
• In the end, nations who tolerate threats on their borders pay for it. Israel knows about this. So does the United States with-dare we be honest?-Mexico.
• Neither we nor the rest of NATO-including former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and former Soviet Republics like the Baltics-has anything to gain by admitting Georgia (or Ukraine) to NATO over Russian objections. Rather the opposite.
• Russia supplies oil and natural gas to Europe and has been quietly very helpful and cooperative to both America and Europe when dealing with terrorism, Islamic and otherwise. Russia could be of enormous help in dealing with the Iranians, if we gave them any reason to be (the Iranians know better than to bait the Russians; doing so to us is safe). Russia also has a dwindling ethnic Russian population and a 2,600 mile border with China, which has a growing population, including a huge surplus of military-age males; in fact, the natural eastern border between Russia and China is the Ussuri River. Nevertheless, Russia holds lands east of the Ussuri, including the major port of Vladivostok, denying China access to the Sea of Japan. Prudent people wonder how long those lands can remain Russian, and the Russians, who are nothing if not prudent, remember the 1969 Ussuri River fighting. Currently, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and Russia have all signed a treaty limiting troops along their borders, but all those nations know that treaties only last as long as they are in the interests of the signatories.

  • RA!!!
• America might also consider that the United States is for the foreseeable future imprudently dependent on oil, and begin cutting deals with Russia as we wean ourselves, first off Middle Eastern oil, then off of oil itself. America and Europe more generally have an enormous amount to gain from cooperating with Russia, and Russia knows very well it has an enormous amount to gain from cooperating with us.
• In return for infuriating and alienating the Russians the Georgians offer us-what? Two thousand troops whom we have to equip, transport, and train, to maintain the pretense that our Iraq war is really a “coalition” operation.

  • RA

• So how should we deal with the Russians?

   

  For a start, look at a map. Russia’s real enemies are to the south and east, and none of those folks, Chinese or Islamist, wish us well, either.
• The real world is a nasty place and America needs friends and allies. Why are we making an unnecessary enemy of a power that by all rights, as well as by logic and morality, ought to be our friend?

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• Larry Page, co-founder of Google, lobbied the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress Wednesday to open up the "great resource" of unused broadcast spectrum for a new generation of mobile and wireless devices.
• "The time is now for the FCC to act, and I think this will happen before the election," Page told a meeting on Capitol Hill hosted by the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a coalition seeking the unlicensed use of unused TV spectrum often called "white space."
• The FCC has been running field tests to determine whether various devices might interfere with TV or wireless microphone signals on portions of the spectrum.
• The debate over the future of white space pits Google, Microsoft, Motorola, Dell and other tech companies against the broadcasting industry and some cell phone companies.
• Page and other tech leaders argued that the interference issue is not real, and that broadcasters simply want to hold on to unused spectrum for future use.

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• The offer was made during a visit by the EU's energy commissioner to the Nigerian capital. 

  The move is part of plans to reduce EU reliance on Russian energy supplies. 

  It comes after Russia's Gazprom expressed interest in the pipeline and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nigerian government. <!-- E SF -->

  The memorandum covers co-operation in the exploration, development and transportation of gas reserves. 

  Europe is increasingly worried about its dependence on Russian gas, especially after Russia's action in Georgia increased its influence over European energy supply routes through the Caucasus. 

  This wake-up call has made the EU look more urgently for alternatives. 

  And so to Nigeria, which has the world's seventh largest gas reserves.

• Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.

  • the "real-scope" thing is supposedly crap
• Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth.

• Because it’s starting to look like one of the most significant societal changes we’ll have to deal with in the near future is that it may soon become nearly impossible to tell lies. Or, more specifically, to tell lies without a really really good chance of getting caught.
• the accuracy of brain-scanning lie-detectors will become radically better within
   the next few years.
• Technologies based on MRI will almost certainly become accurate enough that we should start using them in court. Whether or not we will is a different question, although having done jury duty a couple of times I’m absolutely convinced that, overall, justice would be much better served than with our current system where the skill (or ineptitude) of the lawyer ends up being far more influential on the verdict than the evidence available in the case.

  • RA

• The Department of Defense certainly believes this is possible - they’ve called for the development of lie detectors that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. (The Department of Homeland Security is also getting in on the act.) And if they’re successful, I’d personally rather have this technology available to the general public than to have it solely controlled by a group of military elites. Not that I’m skeptical of their trustworthiness or anything. <cough><eyeroll><cough>

   

  There is also work being done on algorithms that can detect potential lies purely based on word-choice in written correspondences, and obviously voice-stress analysis is eventually going to get much more sophisticated as well.

   

  Finally, there is some very interesting research going on to detect lies by analyzing the speaker’s face - both via the recognition of microexpressions and with the aid of infrared photography.

  • ways in which this will potentailly be implemented
• Finally, even if many of these technologies don’t all work perfectly, they really don’t have to. As long as people believe that the chance of getting caught in a lie is a significant probability, they will adjust their truthfulness accordingly.

  • very true
• Of course it’s going to be an arms-race, just like everything else. There will be technologies developed that can counteract various lie-detection systems, there will be legislative hurdles put in place to prevent the use of these systems, etc., etc. But ultimately I have to believe that the baseline for how easy it is to tell an untruth will be changed significantly. Which, in turn, could dramatically affect the way that we deal with each other. Can we survive without the little white lies we use as social lubrication? The small untruths (like the foma in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle) that we need to keep us happy?

  • RA
• Even though we may not have the technology yet to accurately and consistently detect when someone is lying, we will eventually be able to look back at the video/audio that is being captured today and determine, after the fact, whether or not the speaker was being truthful.
• certain peoples - I’m thinking specifically of politicians both foreign and domestic - should be made aware that anything they say in public will eventually be subject to retroactive truth-checking… Because it seems to me that someone needs to start recording all the Presidential debates NOW with a nice array of infrared and high-definition cameras. And they need to do it in a public fashion so that every one of these candidates is very aware of it and of why it is being done.

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• The recently announced alliance between technology giants General Electric and Google may provide the lobbying arsenal necessary for the U.S. to overhaul an outdated electric grid widely considered as a barricade to a low-carbon future.
• GE and Google seek to fix an electric utility grid that the American Society of Civil Engineers has described as being "in urgent need of modernization" in its infrastructure report card. Existing transmission lines are overburdened, while the country's electricity demand continues to rise. Congested power lines prevent utilities from accessing cheaper sources of generation that may be located farther away, and instead they often rely on natural-gas facilities that are easier to site near urban areas.
• The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that wind power could supply 20 percent of the country's energy needs if efficient transmission lines are built across the country. Large amounts of renewable energy sources are currently located too far off-the-grid to be tapped, such as the windy mountains of South Dakota or the geothermal hot beds of Nevada's deserts. The department estimates the additional transmission capacity would cost $60 billion, spread out between now and 2030.
• "Our vision is a 21st century U.S. electricity system featuring hundreds of thousands of megawatts of renewable power, millions of plug-in vehicles, and tens of millions of energy efficient homes and businesses," Reicher said. "The biggest impediment to achieving this vision is not technology or finance; it's policy, particularly on the national level."

  • RA

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• The term “affordable housing” has come to   be associated with social programs and government subsidies, but it once   meant commercially built houses that ordinary working people could afford.   A pioneer of affordability was the builder Levitt and Sons, whose famous   “Levittowns” were the first postwar examples of large, ­master-­planned   communities. The story is ­well ­known. After World War II, as GIs   came home and the peacetime economy gathered steam, the demand for housing   grew dramatically. Levitt, an established Long Island builder, set its   sights on this new market. William Levitt, the eldest son, applied his   wartime experience building barracks with the Navy Seabees to traditional   ­wood-­frame construction. He organized the building site like an   assembly line. Teams of workers performed repetitive tasks, one team laying   floor slabs, another erecting framing, another applying siding, and so on.   No one had ever built housing that way ­before.
• Bucks County   development, which began in 1951, was larger and more comprehensively   planned and designed. At that site, the more than 17,000 homes on nearly   6,000 acres were intended chiefly for workers employed at a nearby steel   plant. The largest and most expensive of the six model homes, the Country   Clubber, was for supervisors and executives, but the   ­three-­bedroom Levittowner was the workhorse of the development.   It sold for $9,900, which would equal $82,000 today.
• bserving   the construction of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ­so-­called   Usonian houses, in Great Neck Estates, Long Island. Many of the   Levittowner’s ­cost-­saving features were influenced by this   experience: the efficient ­one-­story plan that combined an   ­eat-­in kitchen with the living room; the concrete floor slab   without a basement; the ­under-­floor heating; the low, spreading   roof with no attic; and the carport instead of a garage.
• Alfred’s own ideas. A folding basswood screen that slid on a metal   track separated a ­so-­called study-bedroom from the   living room, allowing the space to be open or closed. Thermopane (insulated   glass) covered a large section of the ­living-­room wall   overlooking the garden. The kitchen had a large window facing the   ­street—­an early example of a “picture window.”   High window sills in the bedrooms provided ­privacy—­and   reduced cost. Locating the bathroom and the kitchen on the street side   reduced the length of piping to the street mains. There was no mechanical   room; instead, a specially designed furnace fit under the kitchen counter,   its warm top doubling as a hot plate.

  • !
• The Levitts were careful to give   ­penny-­pinching buyers of the Levittowner touches of luxury: the   purchase price included a kitchen exhaust fan, an electric range, a GE   refrigerator, and a Bendix washing machine. The Country Clubber added a   clothes ­dryer.
• A ­two-­way fireplace was located between the   kitchen and the living room. Two-way fireplaces were a standard   Usonian feature, but while the Levittowner had a low, spreading roof and   clean lines, no one would mistake it for a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Yet,   although Alfred Levitt’s design looks unremarkable today, in fact   this early example of the ­so-­called ranch house represented a   revolution in domestic design. ­One-­story living was new to most   Americans, as was the open plan combining kitchen, eating space, and living   room. The undecorated exterior was unabashedly modern. Picture windows had   no precedents in traditional homes; neither did carports. Instead of brick   or wood, the exterior walls of the Levittowner were covered with striated   sheets of Colorbestos (asbestos cement), which had been developed   especially for the Levitts by the Johns Manville Corporation. With integral   color that didn’t require painting, this was an early example of   ­low-­maintenance ­siding.
• They introduced the American public to   modern production building and proved that standardization, mass   production, and technical innovation could be   ­successfully—­and ­profitably—­used by   commercial builders to produce houses for a large market. Moreover, unlike   many architectural experiments that have been dealt with harshly by the   passage of ­time—­the ­high-­rise public-housing   projects of the 1960s come to mind—Levittowns have remained   desirable places to live.

  • !
• buyers of the Levittowner were not given any choices;   although Colorbestos came in seven colors, and the precise location of the   carport varied from one house to another, these alternatives were   predetermined by Alfred Levitt to create variety on the street. But modern   buyers expect to personalize their homes.
• 1,000 square feet of Alfred Levitt’s   design than the 2,469 square feet that is today’s national average   for new houses.
• n 1951, the price   of the original Levittowner ($9,900) was three times the national average   annual wage ($3,300). In 2008, with an estimated national average wage of   $40,500, a similarly affordable house should have a sticker price of   $121,500.
• the median price for a new ­single-­family house in the   first quarter of 2008 approached twice that: $234,100. So, the price of a   modern Levittowner would have to be nearly 50 percent cheaper than that of   today’s average new house. Easy, you say, just make the house 50   percent smaller, about 1,200 instead of 2,469 square feet. But it’s   not that simple. In most metropolitan areas, the selling price of such a   house would still be more than $200,000, considerably more than $121,500.

  • !
• So what’s keeping housing prices high?   It’s not the size, and it’s not the construction costs, either.   The Levittowner cost $4–$5 per square foot to build in 1951,   equivalent to $30–$40 per square foot in 2008
• What’s driving the high cost of houses today is   not increased construction costs or higher profits (the Levitts made $1,000   on the sale of each house), but the cost of serviced land, which is much   greater than in 1951.

• There are two reasons for this increase. The first is   Proposition 13, the 1978 California ballot initiative that required local   governments to reduce property taxes and limit future increases, and   sparked similar ­taxpayer-­driven initiatives in other states.   Henceforth, municipalities were unable to finance the ­up-­front   costs of infrastructure in new communities, as they had previously done,   and instead required developers to pay for roads and sewers, and often for   parks and other public amenities as well. These costs were passed on to   home buyers, drastically increasing the selling price of a house.    

    The other reason that serviced lots cost more is that   there are fewer of them than the market demands. This is a result of widespread resistance to   growth, the infamous not-in-my-backyard phenomenon, which is strongest in   the Northeast, California, and the Northwest. Communities in growing   metropolitan areas contend with increased urbanization, encroachment on   open space, more neighbors, more traffic, and more ­school-­age   children. Roads have to be widened, traffic lights added, and schools   expanded, all of which lead to higher taxes. Voters commonly respond to   these ill effects of growth by demanding restrictions on the number of new   houses that can be built. Usually this is achieved by tightening zoning,   invoking environmental constraints, and generally ­drawing ­out and   complicating the permit process. It is no coincidence that house prices are   highest in the Northeast, California, and the Northwest. According to the   research of economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the   Wharton School, since 1970 the difficulty of getting regulatory approval to   build new homes is the chief cause of increases in new house prices. In   other words, while demand for new houses has been growing, the number of   new houses that can actually be built has been ­shrinking.

  • Reasons for higher prices
• But reducing development has another, less   happy effect: It pushes growth even farther out, thus increasing sprawl.   While ­large-­lot zoning is often done in the name of preserving   open space and fighting sprawl, in fact it has the opposite ­effect.

  • !!!!
• It is a vicious circle. Smaller houses on smaller lots   are the logical solution to the problem of affordability, yet   ­density—­and less affluent ­neighbors—­are   precisely what most communities fear most. In the name of fighting sprawl,   local zoning boards enact regulations that either require larger lots or   restrict development, or both. These strategies decrease the   ­supply—­hence, increase the ­cost—­of   developable land. Since builders pass the cost of lots on to buyers, they   justify the higher land prices by building larger and more expensive   houses—McMansions. This produces more community resistance,   and calls for yet more restrictive regulations. In the process, housing   affordability becomes an even more distant ­chimera.

  • !!

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• a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.
• the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.
• Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted – normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.

  • explanation of aquifers
• So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.
• "It highlights the importance of groundwater resources, which is generally misunderstood or ignored completely compared to surface water."
• The increasing reliance on aquifer groundwater – because there is more of it and it tends to be less contaminated by industrial run-off – has been called the "groundwater revolution".

• Where an aquifer lies relative to an international border is one variable, but others that could be considered include: which nation's geography contributes most to the aquifer's recharge, the size of the respective populations, and the amount of water removed to irrigate crops.

                  

  The UNESCO map merely helps define the geographical extent of an aquifer, which could be useful in defining international agreements.
• aquifers fall into two gross categories: those that are recharged by rainfall permeating from the surface and "fossil" aquifers, such as the famous Nubian sandstone aquifer beneath Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya. These contain water that can be tens of thousands of years old, relics of a much wetter climate. Crucially, they are not recharged by rainwater, making them finite resources.

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• Lost in all the noise of that thirty-six day fiasco in 2000 is the fact that the problem was not really one of politics or shenanigans but of poor design.
• Voters' confusion with ballot instruction and design and voting machines appears to have changed the course of U.S. history."
• many graphic design classes have used the Palm Beach County ballot of 2000 as a good example of bad design
• Below is a photo of the ballot used in Palm Beach County in 2000. It's not hard to imagine how someone with poor eye sight, who is tired and anxious, etc. could make a mistake.

• There are several problems with the ballot above, but one big problem as pointed out in Universal Principles of Design is one of poor alignment:

  "...most confusion probably resulted from a misalignment of the row and punch-hole lines. This conclusion is supported by the improbable number of votes for Patrick Buchanan...as well as the number of double votes that occurred for candidates that were adjacent on the ballot."
• The goal of a graphic designer — in almost every case — is to make things clear and eliminate as much ambiguity as possible. Clarity and ease of use should be the mantra

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• First it was mortgage lenders

  

  . Then large banks began to wobble. Now, entire countries, including Ukraine and Pakistan, are facing financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund is there to help, but its pockets are only so deep.
• A country has reached this final stage if, as a result of war or blatant mismanagement, it has gambled away all trust, can no longer service its debt or convince anyone to lend it any money, no matter how high an interest rate it promises to pay.
• In the end, the rating agencies will have no choice but to downgrade the problem countries to their lowest level of creditworthiness. When that happens, lenders will have no choice but to write off much of their money. For citizens, national bankruptcy would probably lead to massive inflation.
• Countries like Russia and Brazil owe their recent success in large part to the boom in commodities the world has experienced in recent years. But now prices for oil, copper, wheat and corn have plunged and a giant spiral of debt has begun to turn. The companies and banks that borrowed vast amounts of money abroad for their investments can no longer service their debt, and investors are pulling out their capital. As foreign currency becomes scarce and imports unaffordable, the currencies of these countries are losing value, which only increases the mountain of debt.
• The demise of these countries, says Jen, represents the new “epicenter of the global crisis.”
• The looming crisis has the countries in most dire need lining up for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But all they are doing is buying time — a few weeks, or perhaps even months — and hoping that the general situation will soon improve.

• He defied the IMF, which has sought to impose drastic rules on the country. He alienated international creditors by offering to buy back government bonds for only 25 percent of their face value. Since then, Argentina has received almost no new loans in the global financial marketplace.

   

  Nevertheless, the country recovered from the crash with astonishing speed. In recent years, the Argentine economy has grown at impressive rates of 7 to 9 percent.
• This has prompted President Fernandez to discreetly seek rapprochement with the hated IMF and the Club de Paris, a group of lending nations made up of some of the world’s richest countries, in an attempt to reconnect Argentina to the international lending cycle.
• After receiving international credit assurances, neighboring Austria can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Its financial institutions, including Erste Bank, the Raiffeisen savings bank and Austria-Creditanstalt, have a strong presence in Hungary, where they control 22 percent of the banking sector. These days, it is quite possible that a crisis in small countries could end up pulling larger ones into its vortex.
• A vicious circle has already been put in place, now that steel mills are cancelling their coal orders. The coals mines, most of which survive on loans, can no longer pay the utilities, which in turn are shutting off the power supply. Winter is around the corner and Kiev has not yet reached a definitive agreement with Moscow over natural gas prices. Indeed, Moscow could be tempted, once again, to take advantage of the plight of its reviled neighbor.

• But what happens if the IMF runs out of money? The Washington-based financial fire department has already promised to pony up €27 billion ($34.3 billion) for Iceland, Ukraine and Hungary. This is about one-fifth of the funds the IMF currently has available for such packages, and Pakistan is looming.

   

  Should the virus of financial failure continue to spread, the €156 billion currently available to the IMF would soon be exhausted. If that happened, the major industrialized nations would have to inject additional funds and provide the IMF, possibly through loans, with fresh capital for the high-risk countries. Global investors would hardly be interested.
• The entire world is currently spooked by the Argentine ghost. Even if wealthy countries reach out to ailing nations, some governments will not survive the storm. Even this would not be truly dramatic. But if the industrialized nations then decide to leave the threshold countries to their own devices, the ensuing wildfire will burn indefinitely.

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• spremlja naj kakovost in varstvo okolja v Sloveniji ter povezanost s pojavi in akcijami v svetu, s svojimi stališči, mnenji in pobudami pa vpliva na dogajanje. Javnost naj obvešča o ocenah razmer v okolju, o strategiji nacionalne politike varstva okolja in usklajevanju razvojnih interesov republike, o politiki varstva okolja, normativnem urejanju razmer in drugem, kar je značilno za ta spekter problematike.

  • ce prav zastopim so to pristojnosti, ki so enake ali pa zelo podobne tistim, ki jih ima MOP
• Svet za varstvo okolja RS deluje strokovno in neodvisno, ni vladna ali upravna ustanova, vendar ima možnost razpravljanja s temi organi ali projektnimi sveti in drugimi dejavniki.

  • ce jih ne financira drzava, kdo pa jih?
    
    zaka imajo toliko manevrnega prostora in si lahko pomagajo z drzavnimi organi (in lahko torej v praksi trosijo njihov denar, cas in druga sredstva), ceprav (v nadaljevanju tako pise) nimajo raziskave, porocila in odkritja tega "Sveta za varstvo okolja" dovloj teze, da bi jih vlada upostevala. Kako se torej razlikujejo od podobno-usmerjenega kakega oddelka na MOP-u??
• Presoje sveta so lahko le strokovne narave, ker je politična presoja in odločanje naloga Državnega zbora in drugih političnih dejavnikov. S tem pa se svet ne umika od presoje družbenih interesov, vplivov in dogajanj v okolju, ker se zaveda, da smo naravo obremenili in spremenili ljudje zaradi naših potreb ali interesov.
• Zato je okoljska politika važen del gospodarske in razvojne politike oziroma strategije; ni več samo varstvo okolja (določanje in uveljavljanje reda v njem), temveč tudi gospodarjenje z naravnimi dobrinami in vrednotami ob odgovornosti za razmere, ki omogočajo zdravo življenje ljudi.

  • ok, ampak to je tako ali tako ze pristojnost MOP-a, ne?
• Svet upošteva, da pojavi in problemi v okolju zaradi njihove razširjenosti, učinkov ali pomena niso le lokalni in državni, zato spremlja tudi evropska in planetarna dogajanja ter spoznanja znanosti nasploh. Skrb za okolje, ki se kaže s poudarjanjem kakovosti in razvojem okolju primernih tehnologij, je vedno bolj očitna v mednarodnem trženju in sodelovanju. Pomembna je v prizadevanjih za mir in za skladnejši razvoj v svetu.

  • blabla, v praksi se tega (vsaj na njihovi strani) nic kaj dosti ne vidi
• Glavni problemi okolja so globalni in jih obravnavamo skupaj z razmerami v našem okolju. Svet za varstvo okolja RS upošteva dokumente OZN, Svetovne zdravstvene organizacije, Sveta Evrope in Evropske unije, pobude konferenc evropskih ministrov za okolje in stališča drugih mednarodnih organizacij, posebej še naravovarstvenih, kot je IUCN. Samo tako lahko prispeva svoj delež k organiziranim prizadevanjem v Sloveniji za ohranjanje naravnega bogastva in še posebej naravne in kulturne dediščine, kar je bistvena podlaga za skladen civilizacijski in kulturni razvoj ter za zdravo življenjsko okolje v Sloveniji (Ustava RS, 5., 72. in 73. člen).

  • ok, poudarjajo da se informirajo iz celega sveta:
    -kaj imajo za pokazati
    -MOP najbrz le uposteva vsaj direktive EU-ja, itd.
    
    Kje so torej neke blazne razlike med MOP-om in tem "Svetom"?
• Svet za varstvo okolja RS vabi k sodelovanju in na seje ali razprave o okoljskih temah strokovnjake in predstavnike s področij, o katerih je govor, pa tudi poznavalce razmer in strokovnjake iz vrst nevladnih organizacij. Prizadeva si, da bi bilo okoljsko znanje in poznavanje razmer dostopno javnosti in vsem, ki jih to zadeva.

  • ok, ampak imamo ze sop (veliko bolj aktivnih) drustev ki se ukvarjajo s tem.
• Stališča, mnenja in pobude sveta so namenjena vsakomur, ki je osebno ali glede na zaposlitev in funkcijo soodgovoren za razmere v okolju, ali pa ga te zadevajo.

  • MOP MOP MOP

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• In a report assessing economic prospects, the Bank has predicted that the world's annual economic growth will slow to 0.9%, from 2.5% this year.
• The rate of growth for emerging economies is expected to be around 4.5%, down from 7.9% in 2007.
• The World Bank projects China's growth to slow from 11.9% in 2007 to 7.5% in 2009, while India's growth prospects will be cut from 9% to 5.8%.
• Despite the current crisis, the Bank says that the long-term growth prospects for developing countries remain strong, and this will lead to substantial reduction in world poverty rates by 2015, with just 15% of people living on less than $1.25 per day, compared to 25% in 2005.

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• we are getting a one-sided discussion of climate change because most media outlets, politicians, activists and a substantial section of big business have – in a variety of ways – got an interest in keeping it that way. He tells me: ‘This affirms a worldview of many people: “Man is wretched, an agent of doom”; “There’s just about enough of [the moral people] and way too many of everyone else”; “Markets are horrible and the state needs to be much bigger”; “Development is terrible”. All of those movements find refuge in the global warming industry.’
• we are getting a one-sided discussion of climate change because most media outlets, politicians, activists and a substantial section of big business have – in a variety of ways – got an interest in keeping it that way.
• The result, as Horner’s book explains, is an outlook in which criticism of the global warming consensus is regarded as heresy. The world, we are told, is going to burn unless a particular set of emissions-restricting policies are introduced.
• Meanwhile, the wealthy benefactors and corporate interests that have the potential to gain enormously from climate change legislation are barely mentioned.
• But where did Al Gore get $300million, far more than the entire sceptic community has received ever from any source? No one seems to care. How much of this is from George Soros? How much of it is from his buddies at the venture capital companies that are invested in a bunch of dogs-with-fleas that won’t be at all attractive until this regime is put in place? We don’t know – and we don’t have a curious media or state.’
• So what is Horner’s position on the future of our climate? ‘Climate changes. Always has, always will. That makes me a “climate change denier”. The question is: what is man’s role?’, he says. The answer, he believes, is that humanity’s effect is much smaller than suggested by climate alarmists. ‘The notion that “the science is settled, you have to shut up” is offensive. All other things being equal, man should have an impact. We don’t know how much. What we do know is that CO2 doesn’t drive temperature. And here’s the thing: as George W Bush prepares to leave office, the planet is cooler than when he entered office. That’s a tough one for a lot of people to deal with.’
• Whether Horner is right or wrong about what makes our climate tick is, in many ways, immaterial. What matters is that even raising questions about the veracity of the popular presentation of the problem now attracts the label ‘denier’. The term has sinister parallels to ‘Holocaust denier’; some commentators have even called for ‘deniers’ and their alleged supporters to be prosecuted. For example, at a congressional hearing in June this year, the daddy of climate alarmism, NASA’s James Hansen, declared: ‘CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of the long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.
• Sceptical scientists often prefer to keep their heads down rather than admit publicly that they have doubts – and no wonder. Horner recounts the firestorm that hit Bjorn Lomborg after the publication of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001.
• Lomborg was subjected to sustained attempts to rebut his arguments ‘in the name of science’ in prestigious publications like Scientific American and Nature, and was even condemned as ‘dishonest’ by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty – a modern equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition intent on torturing Lomborg’s reputation rather than his body. Yet, as Horner notes, Lomborg is far from a sceptic when it comes to manmade global warming, merely a critic of the policies put forward to counter it.

  • Bjorn Lomborg's story
• Similar controversy surrounded Martin Durkin’s film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, and the contribution of Carl Wunsch, a scientist based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
• CO2 concentrations may be following temperature rise rather than causing it.
• When the very politically incorrect Swindle came out, Wunsch rushed to declare that he had been quoted out of context and would never have taken part if he had known about the polemical nature of the film. But, in truth, he was not misquoted or taken out of context – he was simply terrified to be seen to be on the side of the sceptics.
• Swindle has its flaws, but he argues that they are far fewer than the inaccuracies in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning movie which is compulsory viewing in English schools.
• ‘I served on a panel of the International Association of Political Consultants this week with a man who has made his money. He’s a former CEO and he retired at what seems to be a young age. His position now is that this issue is too important to be left to things like democracy and individual liberties – we need to suspend them for this issue. We need a supernational organisation that we can’t object to, we can’t fight, to create something to control us. That alarmed me beyond belief.’

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• one projection sees 5 million new buildings being built in China over the next 20 years.
• Dongtan will produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Clean technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport. A network of cycle and footpaths will help the city achieve close to zero vehicle emissions. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food.

• Smoke and Mirrors

    

  It wasn’t long before a few skeptical voices joined the discussion. In 2007, Ethical Corporation, a website on responsible business practices, came out against Dongtan. Calling it a Potemkin village (a reference to a Russian story about fake villages erected to impress the Empress Catherine II) and “a masterpiece of greenwashing,” Ethical Corporation claimed that Dongtan was never intended to become a reality.

    

  Rather, as a mythical Shangri-La, the plan would serve China as the ultimate greenwashing tool, greening the country's image while in practice its cities could continue to develop along the same unsustainable path at breakneck speed. The contractors and designers involved in the project, according to this theory, had nothing to lose by cooperating, but invaluable connections in the Chinese government to gain.

• Plans for Dongtan began to falter in 2006, when Shanghai's former mayor Chen Liangyu - Dongtan's most enthusiastic supporter - was arrested for "property-related fraud." In the wake of the scandal, China's Communist Party reorganized the city's leadership and planning structure, leaving Dongtan orphaned.

    

  Since then, the projects permits have lapsed, and the global economic situation has put a damper on construction projects worldwide. On Chongming Island, a number of high-rise apartment buildings have gone up, marketed as green buildings, but using few of the innovative ideas that were part of the original Dongtan design.

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• Terminologija namreč ločuje med elektronskimi in spletnimi volitvami, pri čemer so prve vezane na volišče, kjer namesto skrinjice stoji elektronska naprava, medtem ko so spletne volitve nekaj, kar se izjava od doma in je vezana na identifikacijo volivca. Da ministrstvo v enem stavku omenja spletno povezavo in elektronske volitve, lahko pomeni dve stvari - da bo hkrati z elektronskimi volitvami uvedlo še spletne volitve ali pa, da ne vedo, o čem govorijo.
• Lansko leto je svoj glas na volitvah oddalo 1.070.523 volilcev, kar je dobrega pol milijona manj od vseh volilnih upravičencev. Lastnikov digitalnega podpisa je po zadnjih podatkih veliko manj, grobe ocene se gibljejo okrog številke dvesto tisoč uporabnikov.
• Tako opevana Estonija je namreč specifična - po razpadu Sovjetske zveze so bili Estonci prisiljeni v izgradnjo sistema za javno upravo. Kakršnegakoli sistema. Estonija je namreč ostala brez osnovne infrastrukture za izvajanje javne uprave, volitve pa so ena od osnovnih mehanizmov demokracije.

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