Category Archives: Politics

Most people are not hipsters

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Ed Wendler Jr., a developer, noted that most apartment and condominium units are smaller than most families prefer. And influential neighborhood activists, worried about bearing the brunt of growth, could make even those difficult to build along the city-core thoroughfares such as North Lamar Boulevard, South Congress Avenue and Springdale Road, as envisioned in the plan.

That would leave the city’s fringes as the logical place for most growth to happen, Wendler said.

“Families will not stop wanting that lifestyle,” he said. “All (Imagine Austin) is going to do is push families out to Round Rock, Pflugerville, Manor, Kyle, Buda or the unincorporated areas around Austin. There is a lot of reality that will get in the way of this vision.”

- New Austin blueprint envisions new direction for growth

Most folks are still looking for a suburban style place to live. Frankly, even my neighborhood in central Austin is in some ways less dense than the Boston suburb I grew up in which was 20+ miles from downtown. If Austin is going to try to stop suburban style growth and encourage more “urban” development, then San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston should send the Austin city government a thank you note. You can’t make people want condos, townhouses, and apartments just because that’s the only housing you’ll allow to be built. Folks can always move somewhere else.

Staying out in the rain

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Users who “live in” Emacs don’t get trapped paying for software upgrades just so they can continue to do their work or use their data.  They don’t get told that their older computers are no longer supported (there’s a ten-year-old laptop in my living room right now that easily runs the latest version of Emacs).  They don’t have to ponder the cost in time and treasure of switching operating systems.  And they generally don’t have to worry about license agreements, proprietary file formats, or DRM.  Emacs—and programs like it—may require a little more from their users, but in return they offer a remarkable escape hatch from proprietary lock-in and planned obsolescence. - Thoughts on Learning Emacs

I will usually prefer to stand outside in the rain if the alternative is a standing under a roof that comes with house rules. That’s why I carry an umbrella and check the weather before I leave my house.

Libertarianism can creep up on you

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Sometimes I think I’ve woken up in a surreal alternate reality. I was raised in a patriotic glow where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a well-defined, well-reasoned expectation. America is the “land of the free.” I do not think this means what I once thought it meant, particularly if we have no fundamental right to drink the milk from our own cows.

Constitutional law is not my thing, but perhaps it should be. That way I could develop a more cogent argument against the likes of Judge Fielder. As it is, I simply say, “But what of liberty? What of privacy? What of the right to do with my body and my property what I see fit, so long as I do no harm to others?”- Is Your Choice Of Food A Fundamental Right? | Food Renegade

This reads just like a Tea Party epiphany. I hope this blogger can appreciate how many of us are fighting for freedom and autonomy and how diverse we are. We don’t always get along, or even like each other, but there are lots of Americans who want to choose how to live and I hope we can all start to push in the same direction.

Why do so many journalists use Twitter, but not blog?

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Blogging was a direct attack on MSM hegemony at both the micro (fisking) and macro levels (explanation space). I just don’t see Twitter as the same threat. It is a flood of unmermorable chatter that is easy to ignore. Blogging had the potential to break the power of the MSM guild. Bloggers, at their best, presented arguments. Arguments can both change minds on the immediate subject and undermine the credibilty of those establishment pundits who present weak cases on a regular basis.

-Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Twitter is an example of a relatively new medium. When information was expensive to transmit, it tended to be sent in large batches. For examples, books, newspapers, magazines, letters, etc.. When transmission became cheap with the internet, at first we made cheaper versions of what we already had with handcrafted web pages and their blog successors. I think it took a while for the internet to sink in (I think this still hasn’t happened, BTW) and Twitter was a natural outgrowth of the trend of cheap communication. If you can transmit as often as you like, why not just send out messages arbitrarily often? As tweets are more of a creature of the internet, and not a cheaper and faster version of a pre-internet form, I assume that Twitter doesn’t feel like competition to journalists. A blog can do what traditional periodicals can and blogs also have several advantages that periodicals are just now starting to catch-up with (mostly by launching blogs). Twitter is just different and can feel like a compliment to the “Old Media”.

All that said, if you’re as skeptical of traditional media as I am, then you can read the message of the blog post I link to above and remember that blogs are still the medium that can offer what the “Old Media” either can’t or won’t provide. Help save the world, read and write blogs!

It takes a special kind of person to become a teacher

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…Thomas Friedman addressed a group of 4000 university administrators by telling them to ignore “concrete outcomes like grades and test scores”. Teachers should instead try to install passion and curiosity in students because “the job students will hold probably doesn’t even exist today”. How a student was supposed to learn passion from someone who devoted the first half of his adult life to getting lifetime job security is a question Friedman did not address. Nor did Friedman address how a student was supposed to learn curiosity from someone who stayed in the same narrow research area for his or her entire career.

- Another book on lazy college professors: The Faculty Lounges from Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The life of a teacher is so different from the common American experience that it becomes hard to imagine how teachers can impart much wisdom apart from their own particular expertise. Further, since the life and training of teacher is so particular, it also attracts a particular kind of person with a particular sensibility. When we ignore this, we think poorly about teaching and school.