Not so secret after all…
Ok, I thought someone would pipe up by now and put this to rest, but I still haven’t seen anyone in the media metion that the VP “secret” bunker was well known, not secret, and known about by the press for years.
The poor tax
We often overlook just how many ways there are in which the way our society is structured serves to keep the poor poor. Growing up very poor in Detroit, I’m closely acquainted with these. One in particular has bothered me since I was young, and that has been the car-centric design of our infrastructure. In Detroit, at least, it is nearly impossible to participate fully in the economy without access to a car.
This affects the poor in many ways, but I was reminded of one while reading this post at The Infrastructurist.
In Los Angeles, poorly maintained roads cost the average driver $700 per year. In Detroit, it’s $525. I’m sure there is some progressive effect caused by wealthier drivers having cars that are more expensive to repair, but I have little doubt that the net effect is regressive.
This is just one way our dependence on cars negatively impacts the poor. License fees are regressive. Insurance costs more if you live in a bad neighborhood, and can even cost more if your credit is bad. And someone finding themselves unable to pay this insurance but depending on a car to get them to work, experiences a pressure to drive without insurance that the non-poor do not experience. If they get caught driving without having paid all of these regressive fees, they are then incarcerated and enter the criminal justice system.
The end result is an institution (our transit system) that works against class mobility and against the poor.
I am still Ambivalent-man
I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, looked at it briefly and dismissed it as dumb. Their poor product positioning prejudiced me, because they market it as a way to “tell your friends what you are doing”. Clearly, though, Twitter is the new biggest innovation in social interaction on the web. So, I signed back into my twitter account a couple days ago and started following some intelligent folks who I know Twitter.
I can see getting hooked. Like social networking sites, it provides multi-person communication, but it has an immediacy that blogs and facebook lack – something that appeals to the kind of person that is fond of their ‘refresh’ button. Yet it doesn’t require your immediate attention like instant messaging.
I think Twitter is actually most similar to message boards in form. It basically gives you the power to create your own message board, populated with only the people you choose.
Message boards have been my primary way of socializing on the web since day one. While a lot of people were creating websites and blogs, I was talking with people over Usenet. I used Usenet for a long time and then switched to a specifc place on Yahoo, and then since 2004 I’ve been posting with some frequency to the Motley Fool discussion boards (the best I’ve come across yet in terms of quality of posters).
The gorilla in the room is the character limit, so let me just say that the imposed brevity is not my favorite feature. I think 240 characters would be much better than 140. Enough for a couple well composed sentences at least.
I understand the haters…there’s something juvenile about trying to reduce everything we say into the most compact form. A lot of twitter feeds read like a dressed up stream of grunts and yelps. Maybe I’ll tire of it. But I’m surprised to find that I’m digging it at the moment.
I am Ambivalent-Man
Pretty interesting article. German suburb does away with auto-centric planning. No street-parking, no garages, no driveways.
I’ve long been a fan of decreasing our dependance on cars. In Detroit, at least, this is a pretty big issue. Sprawl alone decreases our quality of life in significant ways. Then there is my own pinko concern about how automobile-centric urban design impacts the poor – in a city with little to no mass transit, people are forced to depend on cars – which are expensive. A license costs money to get, and more money every year to keep. Insurance makes car ownership intensely burdonsome on families living at subsistence level, and has a regressive effect in that it costs more to insure a car if you are poor due to your potentially lower credit scores (In Michigan, bad credit = higher auto insurance…for now anyway) and the likely higher rates of auto theft in the surrounding area.
Not trying to be a hippie bicycle-supremecist. I love having a car. I try to mentally acknowledge the freedom it allows me, and not only the negative effects. I’m ambivalent about cars-as-good vs. cars-as-bad, but I’m not ambivalent about my belief that the USA could reap some major benefits by adopting a more European attitude toward cars and moving toward an urban model involving more densely populated urban hubs and fewer people living in outer-ring suburbs.
From the conspiricy files…
Gotta love this rant from some dude named JB Williams. Apparently, Obama is sending Acorn to collect intelligence on you for the military, and it has something to do with Swine Flu.
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