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125 years old, still young and still hot. I love her. I love where she stands, I love her crown of radiant wisdom and her torch and her book of laws, I love Miss Lazarus’ poem, I love that she’s an excellent sculpture on her own terms. I love that you can buy bronze paperweights [...]
Archive for the ‘Built Environment’ Category
October 30th, 2011
Category: Built Environment, Human rights, Immigration, Personal moment, public health, Unions and organizing
October 17th, 2011
A listserv that several RBCers belong to has had a discussion about why the ancient meme that cities are evil, unAmerican congregations of overeducated snobs, while folks in small towns are decent, commonsense types who look out for each other and embody real virtue, persists. To the point that no candidate for office boasts about [...]
August 26th, 2011
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Built Environment, Health Care, Higher education, Illinois, Law Notes, NonProfits, Supreme Court, Taxation, Urban policy
When Harold Pollack wrote about the recent Illinois Department of Revenue decision to withdraw property tax exemptions from three hospitals, he naturally focused on the impact of the decision on health care. But those of us who work in other areas of the nonprofit sector are worried by the decision as well-or, if we aren’t, [...]
May 29th, 2011
Category: Britain, Built Environment, Energy and Environment, Europe, Infrastructure, Technology and Society
A gallery of designer pylons and a British government pylon competition.
May 9th, 2011
The paper SF Chronicle has a front-page story about the crisis of deferred maintenance at California’s state universities. [update 11/V; here's the link] Things are as bad as you think. Dangerous things like leaks into electrical cabinets, power outages, a blackboard that fell off the wall and injured a grad student last fall; “broken windows” [...]
April 28th, 2011
Category: Built Environment, Energy and Environment, Infrastructure, Republican Party, Transportation, Watching Conservatives
The New York Times reports this morning: The Christie administration, lenders and a new developer have reached a deal to revive the vast Xanadu entertainment and retail complex, which sits forlorn and unfinished along a stretch of New Jersey highway after having burned through two owners and $1.9 billion, people involved in the negotiations said [...]
April 8th, 2010
James’ post about the Oxford Circus redesign fails to distinguish three very different ideas about managing movement in urban spaces, though if you follow his links you can parse it out. The culture of traffic engineering is about moving cars (in parts of Europe, bicycles and trams also) quickly, and one of its tropes - [...]
June 26th, 2009
Category: Built Environment, Technology and Society
Metro testing suggests that a single-point failure in the block control system caused Monday’s fatal crash. This is an unacceptable design and Metro should shift to a positive location model with the block control system as back-up.
October 6th, 2008
Category: Built Environment, Economics, Garbage pail, Good news, Macroeconomic Policy, Politics and Leadership
This is written as the Dow is sinking almost 7% through about 9600, after a similar day on foreign markets. The judgment of investors isn’t the rousing endorsement of the bailout some had hoped for. And Floyd Norris passes on the following CNN poll result: As you may know, the U.S. went through a depression [...]
August 1st, 2008
Lots of chatter over the last few days in the blogosphere about Los Angeles’ new ordinance banning new fast-food restaurants in south LA. (Not “South Central”: we don’t call it that anymore). And everyone is wrong. My friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge, whose picture is in many dictionaries next to the word “curmudgeon“, sees it [...]
