🔷 Open Thread

It's a generational thing. Same thing with segregation and miscegenation in the 1960s. As liberal about gays as my parents are I know it's still different for my generation in terms of acceptance.
 
Funny/scathing read over at The Telegraph:

Architect behind the Gherkin says he has finished designing strangely shaped edifices

.....The Birmingham-born Mr Shuttleworth, who is known as "Ken the Pen" because of his draftsmanship, attributes the fad for unconventional shapes to the self-obsession of his colleagues. "I think a lot of architects are really egotistical, almost like artists who see themselves as a one-man show," he said.
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Curbed and Architizer have taken to calling Shuttleworth's affliction "Post Traumatic Post-Modern Syndrome." I think I've got it too, though I don't think of the Gherkin and other blobs as PoMo..
 
gooseberry said:
Hey NIMBY's, I thought people shrivel up and die if there isn't sun on them at all times?
Shade: A weapon against skin cancer, childhood obesity

More mind blowing stupidity courtesy of City Hall.
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Whether or not the motorbikes are used to commit crimes, it sounds like they are a quality-of-life issue (noise, pollution, recklessness) in certain neighborhoods. I wouldn't want them racing up and down my street at all hours.
 
The only thing I see wrong is that the city seems to just be seizing them all over the place. What if someone goes and uses them up in a field in NH or something and not at all here? They went in to a house and just took 13 bikes just like that?
 
Yeah, I'm fine with the city enforcing a no-dirtbikes policy on the city streets (meaning ticketing/confiscating during actual operation of the vehicle), but I think it's ridiculous to start confiscating every dirtbike in this city while they are not in use.

So the suspects fled on dirtbikes, so what? That doesn't prove that dirtbikes are a crime hazard in the least sense. All it proves is that the suspects had a clever escape plan.
 
Anyone want to give up some super secret fireworks viewing locations? Don't really know any public ones if there are any... I'll probably just be down the western most island on the Esplanade, down towards Mass Ave (Then walk fast to Kenmore (Hynes is a cattle drive)).
 
I prefer to watch them from the Cambridge side of the River.

I don't know if your proposed route would work because the Esplanade gets barricaded off and everyone gets hearded in through the entrance at Arlington.
 
datadyne007 said:
I prefer to watch them from the Cambridge side of the River.

I don't know if your proposed route would work because the Esplanade gets barricaded off and everyone gets hearded in through the entrance at Arlington.
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Worked last year. Everyone walked down the westbound Storrow. Most of the people then went up the ramp to Mass Ave and walked down Mass Ave to Hynes (we peeled off at Comm Ave when it became apparent that hundreds of people were meandering down Mass Ave this way).
 
The entrance to the Esplanade at Arlington is actually closed to all pedestrians on July 4th. People get herded over to Berkeley Street. Your plan sounds like a good one. Plenty of folks were already walking and biking up and down that part of Storrow this afternoon.
 
Ron Newman said:
The entrance to the Esplanade at Arlington is actually closed to all pedestrians on July 4th. People get herded over to Berkeley Street. Your plan sounds like a good one. Plenty of folks were already walking and biking up and down that part of Storrow this afternoon.
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My bad. I meant Berkeley (it was "Arlington" (T stop)) in years past due to only the Berkeley entrance being open.
 
So, stuck to the same basic plan as last year but we weren't quite on the western-most island on the Charles, we were even further west from that and still had an amazinggg view. At the end we avoided the Mass Ave ramp crush and continued to the Charlesgate ramps and then scurried down Beacon and popped down the Kenmore busway headhouse. We were so quick that when our trolley got to Hynes, it was still fairly empty. By the time we got to Copley the crowds were definitely coming down upon us. Arlington was a ZOO!

Everything was great for us though, except the trolley on the return trip had no AC... and it was packed...




I love how everyone is able to just mob the Storrow because it's closed, but it would be so much more convenient if it were just gone. The fences, ramps, etc... such a pain. Luckily I actually thought it out before hand though, so it was a quick run. Or maybe they should put gates in the fences in some parts. Chain them up most of the year, open them up for events. Love how there's always a National Gaurdsman shouting "WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON MY FENCE, MAGGOT? GET OFF *MY* FENCE! YOU GO AROUND MY FENCE!".
 
I am meeting Governor Dukakis for a private half-hour discussion later today.

Any questions you'd like him to answer? (And, don't be smarmy!)
 
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/07/04/the-shame-of-the-cities-and-the-shade-of-lbj/


The Shame of the Cities and the Shade of LBJ

Walter Russell Mead
President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires. By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War. More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense. It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this ill-starred venture we are still paying (as we certainly should) pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses.​
The Second Great Johnson Quagmire now destroying the nation is the Medicare/Medicaid complex. These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face. They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change. They not only cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation — they have distorted our entire health system into the world’s most bloated and expensive monstrosity. Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost. (Note, please, that by comparison Social Security can be relatively easily reformed to be solvent for the next 75 years. The New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, was almost infinitely more realistic and sustainable than the Great Society.)​
​
LBJ Signing the Medicare Bill (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

But that is a subject for another day. The third Johnson Quagmire is the War on Poverty, and specifically the attempt to treat inner city poverty primarily as a racial problem. After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy. Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll. Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women. Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.​
This is not a lot to show for almost fifty years of fighting poverty — not a lot of bang for the buck.​
We need to do better. The state of the American inner city is anunacceptable human tragedy, and the costs in money spent and prosperity forfeited create an unsustainable drag on the national economy at a time when we need all the help we can get.​
There is more. Those neighborhoods — and the prisons in which so many young urban men spend large chunks of their lives — threaten the peace and security of the country as a whole. Extremist cults, some domestically based and others relying on foreign money and enthusiasm, fish in these troubled waters for souls, and sometimes they catch a few. This could turn ugly. An old friend who has spent much of his life fighting violence and extremism in the inner city puts the danger like this: think about “The Wire” and think about all the talent, ingenuity and training that goes into the drug gangs. Think about their ability to operate in defiance of the police, think about their connections with international crime and the amount of money they can raise.​
Now think about what life would be like in this country if the leaders of those groups embraced violent religious extremism and sought, as many have done overseas, to finance a terror campaign through drug money.​
This is, I believe, a serious threat down the road; there are already a few early warning signs and while we should not be stampeded into panic about them, the situation is one to watch with concern. Where there is no real hope, people clutch at straws — and on present trends conditions in the inner cities are likely to get significantly worse. Bad and dysfunctional as the remaining Great Society programs are, we are entering an era of government budget cutting. Given the power that unions, middle class and elite lobbies have, inner city residents stand to take a disproportionate share of any cuts. If it’s a choice between helping poor children in the inner city or paying inflated pensions to retired union workers, where will the politicians come down?​
The Great Society legacy is not all bad. The voting rights legislation and the affirmative action programs introduced at that time helped a solid African-American middle class to expand. Increasingly, the country now has second and third generations of African-American families who have college educations and who are represented at all levels of business, the professions, politics and the arts.​
Not that the Great Society deserves as much credit as its backers like to claim. Most of African-American progress since 1965 is due to the dogged hard work of people determined to change their own lives. Government action did play a role, but clearly racial attitudes in the United States have dramatically changed, perhaps especially so among conservatives. When conservative Republicans whose parents were Dixiecrat segregationists cheering on Lester Maddox now swoon at the rhetoric of Herman Cain, give standing ovations to Condoleezza Rice, write angry letters to editors when liberal journalists attack Clarence Thomas and elect an African American Republican to the House of Representatives from Charleston, SC, we must recognize that something has changed.​
In any case, the Johnson-era approach to urban poverty was largely predicated on the idea that our urban problems were a race and justice problem. Discrimination in housing, jobs and education had created the “ghetto”; ending those practices, compensating for them through affirmative action and providing infusions of cash to jump start urban investment and “renew” down at heels urban neighborhoods would win the war on urban poverty.​
To the extent these ideas and the policies they inspired had merit, things got better. The middle class grew and many African Americans moved out of segregated neighborhoods and public housing projects into the suburbs. But this wasn’t the whole story, and even as Great Society era programs worked for some, conditions in the inner cities worsened for many who remained.​
The result is the urban quagmire in which we now find ourselves. We are spending massive amounts of money and conditions are getting worse. Liberals recognize this as a problem in Afghanistan; they are more reluctant to see it in St. Louis — but it is true. What we are doing now isn’t working and while some of the reforms being tried (especially in education and perhaps also new ways of handling drug issues) offer promise, there is no light at the end of the urban tunnel.​
The urban quagmire into which the Johnson administration (blue thought at its zenith) led the United States reflects a massive intellectual failure. We still have racial problems in this country, but the urban problem at its core about much more than race. To think clearly about the inner cities, we are going to have learn to think less racially — to for example learn to think about our inner city problem as if most of the urban poor were white.​
Inner Cities in Context​
The first step is to put the African-American presence in the cities in historical context. The Great Migration of African-Americans from southern farms to northern cities was one of many such movements in the modern era. For hundreds of years now, changes in agriculture have been sending people from the countryside into the city. The rising productivity of agricultural workers, the growing concentration of land ownership in the hands of well-capitalized large proprietors and the mechanization of farm work meant that peasants have been leaving the field for the city all over the world.​
The African American urban migration was one of these mass movements of population. It was not unlike waves of migration to the US from much of Europe; farmers and farm workers were either pushed off the land or drawn to the possibilities of urban life and many of them came to America’s burgeoning cities in search of better lives. As cotton culture was mechanized and sharecropping gave way to large estates directly worked by the owner, millions of African-Americans streamed to northern cities between 1910 and the 1960s just as Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles and Jews had done between the Civil War and the immigration restrictions of the 1920s.​
We are, incidentally, seeing many more Great Migrations today: in North America we have rural Mexicans and Central Americans are streaming into cities in Mexico and across the US. The Turkish migration into Germany followed this pattern; much of the North African migration to western Europe and the internal Chinese migration from country to city is of this kind as well. Rural migrants are swelling the population of African cities from Capetown to Cairo; they are filling the cities of South and Central Asia. Globally we are in the middle of a Great Migration that sometime in this century will put a majority of the world’s population into cities for the first time ever.​
Historically, cities were tough places to move to. Back in the eighteenth century and in most of the nineteenth, mortality rates were often higher and in many cases much higher in cities than in rural areas. Sanitation was primitive; food transport was slow and uncertain and refrigeration did not exist. Social safety nets were porous and weak. The cities were regularly scourged by disease and fire. Urban populations tended to shrink in those years if not continually renewed by fresh migrants from the countryside.​
Economically and culturally it wasn’t easy, either. Back in the country, young people (the bulk of the migrants then and now) were integrated into strong social patterns. They were mostly honest and hardworking. There were relatively few opportunities for the sons and daughters of poor peasants and laborers to be anything else.​
When they got to the city, there were no strong extended family networks to provide a social safety net in bad times — or to enforce social discipline and healthy habits in good ones. Cities, classically, have more temptations than the country does — that is one reason adventurous young people in particular like to move to them. With no social safety net, no public health and no support system, many migrants became statistics on the urban mortality rolls. Drinking badly made gin, eating poorly preserved and often contaminated food, and living in unsanitary neighborhoods was not a recipe for longevity. Throw in venereal disease in an era that knew very little about prevention or treatment, and it is easy to understand why cities needed constant replenishment from the countryside.​

A 1751 engraving of Gin Lane by William Hogarth (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

​
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The old urban migration was a kind of Darwinian test. Migrants had to maintain their social discipline and sharply limit their indulgences in the dangerous but alluring diversions of urban life. Failing to do that meant an early and often very unpleasant death.​
The growing European cities of the eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century had what Marx called a lumpenproletariat of deracinated residents who had lost their footing in the country but been unable to establish themselves on steady terms in the city. They were the petty thieves, prostitutes and hustlers of the day — the pages of Dickens are full of them. Their numbers tended to grow as the pace of urbanization sped up, but epidemics and hunger continued to take their toll.​
Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, urban demography changed. Mortality rates in cities dropped as people grew to understand the importance of clean water, learned how to fight or prevent infectious disease and the quality of the food supply dramatically improved. Add the provision of a social safety net and the conditions existed for what we have seen: the development of a cycle of urban poverty spanning many generations.​
When the Great Migration of rural African-Americans came north, beginning around World War One, they were more like the Mexican immigrants of today than like a Marxist lumpenproletariat. By and large they were hard working and clean living people who were willing and able to work at sometimes backbreaking jobs to provide for their families. Despite the corrosive effect that slavery had on family ties and despite the inevitable strains that great poverty places on family life, African American family ties were much stronger then than they are in today’s inner city.​
Many African Americans established themselves in urban middle class communities; Harlem and Queens (this most glamorous and cosmopolitan of New York boroughs included Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Malcolm X among its residents) contained vibrant, exciting and safe neighborhoods. Schools often worked much better than many do now; the social infrastructure of African-American neighborhoods was comparable and in some cases stronger than in other neighborhoods of recent urban immigrants from around the world.​
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The Louis Armstong House in Corona, Queens (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Over time, two trends appear in such neighborhoods. Some residents (luckier or more talented) establish secure lives in the urban economy. Over time they tend to move away from the old neighborhoods to less crowded parts of the city and to the suburbs. Those who do not for whatever reason make this transition successfully begin to lose the inherited culture and discipline of the country. In the old days a high mortality (and high infant mortality) rate would limit this population. These days, though abortion, violence, drug addiction and crime take a toll, the modern scourges are less effective than the older ones and many more people survive physically in the city while failing to find secure livelihoods there. As one dysfunctional generation gives rise to another, inherited social structures weaken further, and we see what we see.​
African Americans formed the first nucleus of what is likely to be an ongoing underclass not so much because of their skin color (though with many craft unions and employers holding to white only hiring practices discrimination had an effect) as because of their timing. African Americans were the last wave of migrants to hit the American industrial belt; while the 1920s immigration laws cut the flow of European immigrants to a trickle, the African American influx continued into the years when American factory employment stagnated and then began its (so far) inexorable decline. Black America showed up for the party just as the bar was closing down.​
Many African Americans transitioned to the modern economy. Even as factories stopped taking on new workers and laying off old ones, African Americans went to college in record numbers. Like second and third generation European migrants to city life before them, they found middle class jobs on police forces, in schools, in fire departments, sanitation departments and in the civil service. Some pursued military careers and others went into business, finance, politics and law.​
A critical mass, however, did not make the adjustment in time. Early generations of American immigrants headed quickly from the cities onto family farms up through the Civil War; from the Civil War through the Vietnam era the factories provided a bridge into the middle class. For the last forty years that avenue has been closed; new waves of immigrants have been forced to find new paths into the middle class. For some, it is proving difficult, and we have already seen the signs of social and family breakdown and a growing gang culture among some newer immigrant groups.​
Once a community has reached the levels of dysfunction and defeat that characterizes the third, fourth and fifth generations of the modern American underclass, conventional social programs no longer work particularly well. Affirmative action does not help a thirty year old illiterate with a drug habit get a job. The most dedicated teachers in the best schools cannot compensate for the lack of basic parenting at home. A community of young men who have never known a father’s care or even seen a father caring for a family cannot be prepared for adult life by anything the government can do.​
There are no magic solutions to problems this deeply rooted, but we are going to dispel the shadow of LBJ from our urban policy and find new approaches to urban problems that break with the core assumptions of the catastrophically wrongheaded ‘best and the brightest’ of the 1960s. Thinking less racially about urban problems is part of the answer; in future posts I will make more suggestions. This is a complicated subject and clear answers are not easy to find; I will be looking to responses from readers to help me figure things out.

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http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/07/04/the-shame-of-the-cities-and-the-shade-of-lbj/
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...built-on-rosy-scenarios-virginia-postrel.html

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Postrel: Public Works Built on Rosy Scenarios

By Virginia Postrel - Jul 8, 2011
“Infrastructure” may be one of the least glamorous words in the English language, but with the right touch the concrete and steel of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams and railroads can look as alluring as a movie star. Witness the sleekly seductive illustrations produced for today’s California High-Speed Rail Authority or the midcentury pictures of effortlessly flowing superhighways, a genre that reached its apotheosis in Walt Disney’s “Magic Highway U.S.A.” in 1958.
This glamorizing extends not just to imagery but also to forecasts. Project promoters routinely overstate benefits and understate costs -- and not just a little bit.
“Cost overruns in the order of 50 percent in real terms are common for major infrastructure, and overruns above 100 percent are not uncommon,” Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor of major program management at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, writes in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Demand and benefit forecasts that are wrong by 20-70 percent compared with actual development are common.”
To draw these conclusions, Flyvbjerg analyzed results from 258 projects in 20 countries over 70 years, the largest such database ever compiled. Like the “stars without makeup” features in celebrity tabloids, his research provides a disillusioning reality check. “It is not the best projects that get implemented, but the projects that look best on paper,” Flyvbjerg writes. “And the projects that look best on paper are the projects with the largest cost underestimates and benefit overestimates, other things being equal.”
Flyvbjerg got curious about forecasts when, as a young professor in Denmark, he watched the Great Belt rail tunnel, connecting Scandinavia with continental Europe, go “terribly wrong,” with long delays and cost overruns of 120 percent. “I began to wonder not only why that was the case, but also whether it was common or not for that to happen,” he recalls in a telephone conversation. (The tunnel opened in 1997.)
Finding no comprehensive data available, he assembled his own -- and found that the big picture looked very much like the little one. “It’s very common to have cost overruns in big construction projects,” he says. “It’s the norm. It’s not the exception.”
On average, urban and intercity rail projects run over budget by 45 percent, roads by 20 percent, and bridges and tunnels by 34 percent.
And the averages tell only part of the story. Rail projects are especially prone to cost underestimation. Seventy-five percent run at least 24 percent over projections, while 25 percent go over budget by at least 60 percent, Flyvbjerg finds.
By comparison, 75 percent of roads exceed cost estimates by at least 5 percent, and 25 percent do so by at least 32 percent.
California Dreaming
Promoters of rail and toll-road projects also tend to substantially overstate future use, making those projects look more appealing to whoever is footing the bill. Rail projects attract only about half the expected passengers, on average, while in new research still in progress, Flyvbjerg finds that toll roads (including road bridges and tunnels) fall 20 percent short. (Non-toll roads also miss their traffic projections, but their errors go in both directions.)
Rail-ridership predictions are especially over- optimistic in the U.S., where the average gap between expectations and reality is 60 percent, compared with 23 percent in Europe. So a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest that California High-Speed Rail can expect to carry only 15.6 million passengers a year by 2035, rather than the 39 million projected.
Using the average cost overrun, California should also expect to spend almost $8 billion, rather than the estimated $5.5 billion, for the project’s first 100-mile (161-kilometer) leg from Borden to Corcoran, the “train to nowhere” in the Central Valley. Raising the estimate by the average overrun, however, means that you still have a 50 percent chance of spending even more.
As the toll roads suggest, overruns aren’t unique to government projects. Even privately built chemical- processing plants suffer from similar, though less drastic, underestimates of cost and overestimates of capacity. As many a Dilbert comic strip has pointed out, salespeople often close a deal by promising more than they can deliver.
So why do these mistakes happen again and again?
Project managers often blame a combination of bad luck, unexpected delays and changes of plan -- the same things that inflate the costs of remodeling your bathroom, only on a grand scale.
It’s true that planners change their minds. “They decide to have higher safety standards,” Flyvbjerg says, “or higher environmental standards, so the cost of the project goes up. Often you will find that the geology of the project was not well covered. So when you start digging, you find things in the ground that you didn’t expect, and the costs go up.”
But a smart project manager should anticipate the unanticipated and adjust the budget accordingly. Professionals, after all, generally have far more experience than the average homeowner. They know the sorts of things that can go wrong.
“It’s nothing new that geology is difficult,” Flyvbjerg says. “We know that geology is difficult. No matter. It’s ignored in project after project. Therefore, the problem is not geology itself but the fact that we disregard geology.”
Bias of Optimism

A charitable explanation is that promoters are starry- eyed and suffer from what psychologists call optimism bias. But it’s suspicious that forecasters rarely seem to learn, even over decades of experience. Alas, contractors, local governments and other advocates have strong incentives to underplay costs and exaggerate benefits to sell their services or attract funding.
“Some forecasts are so grossly misrepresented that we need to consider not only firing the forecasters but suing them, too -- perhaps even having a few serve time,” Flyvbjerg writes in his Oxford Review of Economic Policy article.
Even with his gloomy findings, Flyvbjerg is an optimist. “Things don’t have to be like this,” he says. “It’s not like the weather. It’s a human artifact that we are producing, and hence we can do differently.”
He would like to see better incentives -- punishment for errors, rewards for accuracy -- combined with a requirement that forecasts not only consider the expected characteristics of the specific project but, once that calculation is made, adjust the estimate based on an “outside view,” reflecting the cost overruns of similar projects. That way, the “unexpected” problems that happen over and over again would be taken into consideration.
Such scrutiny would, of course, make some projects look much less appealing -- which is exactly what has happened in the U.K., where “reference-class forecasting” is now required. “The government stopped a number of projects dead in their tracks when they saw the forecasts,” Flyvbjerg says. “This had never happened before.”
Unfortunately, the world’s biggest infrastructure projects, including the recently opened high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai, are subject to no such checks, or even to scholarly examination. Flyvbjerg has been trying for years to get data on project costs in China, to no avail. “Their data are simply not reliable,” he says. He quotes an unidentified Chinese colleague who said, “If the party says there’s no cost overrun, there’s no cost overrun.”
No wonder promoters look so longingly at China. There, infrastructure glamour is the law.
(Virginia Postrel writes about commerce and culture, innovation, economics and public policy. She is the author of “The Future and Its Enemies” and “The Substance of Style,” and is writing a book on glamour. The opinions expressed are her own.)


To contact the author of this column: Virginia Postrel in Los Angeles at vpostrel@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this column: Mary Duenwald mduenwald@bloomberg.net.


®2011 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
 
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