Catch A Fire

, originally uploaded by mousavi1388.

I don't know about you, but I'm riveted by the events in Iran since the weekend. If you've been living under a rock, Twitter has emerged as the critical source for following the events in Tehran. The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan has masterful coverage. A must read. Print media as it lives online has in-depth accounts, images, and analysis. Television has failed. Perhaps today we'll see a difference in the type of coverage that the cable news and major networks will show than the pallid interest it had displayed over the weekend.

I can't help but think if we had Twitter in 2003 during the height of the antiwar protests, would we have had a larger impact on the mainstream media coverage? Would that have stopped the invasion of Iraq? Hindsight remains fuzzy. But now? We have this technological infrastructure to support digital communication. And that communication supports civic engagement and action. Perhaps a revolution.

I'm watching these events very closely. We're getting information in real time. This is the future of journalism. The future is now.

Go-Go Gadget Train!

Yay!

I've wanted this for a very, very, very long time.

A modern and fast moving inter-rail system in the US? Cutting my travel time between New York and Chicago, or Milwaukee to just a few hours? Perhaps reducing my out of pocket travel costs and carbon emissions associated with car or airplane travel? Relieve congestion in the air and on the ground? This will make my grandmother love a little more. Many of my planner geek friends and I have long lamented the fact of how easy it is to travel through Europe because of high speed train service, than it is in the US. Our reliance on cars has been prohibitive for a high-speed rail system to develop.

The Europification of the United States of America. I think we're finally growing up, defining a society that can live sustainably. My carbon footprint is starting to look a lot cuter.

How To Build A Better Robot, Part I

I've been thinking a lot about infrastructure lately.

I hear the word thrown around a lot, but I'm not sure if it's resonating with everyone. If some of you are faithful viewers of the Rachel Maddow show, you hear her geek out about it. I must admit, I do too. I was glad that I was not alone in the obsession about it. My former coworkers in the construction industry found my obsession odd too. It's not like I had ever got my hands dirty in any actual trade to care about joists, masonry, weepholes or footings, the shaping of the physical universe. To them, I was administrator, bean counter, be it a "marketing person." I dealt in a universe of fluff, and they did the real heavy lifting. No pun intended. But as the weeks wore on and the job reached its logical conclusion and the work slowed down, I thought about all of us in how we'd fit into the next job. Would there be a next job? The market conditions and tea leaves last fall suggested an end.

Ah, Endings. They make you think. When the site supervisor and I sat down for our weekly chat to cover the work that's been done on the project, I had this odd moment of lucidity. "Do you think that the American population realizes that we're going to have retrain the entire labor force to be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century?" I asked. He gave me a quizzical look, but then he understood and said, "I don't think they have a clue." I used our building as an example, a residential building with green building systems atypical in the existing housing stock in the New York Area. New York City has a plan campaign to decrease its carbon emissions and footprint (33% of greenhouse gas emissions comes from buildings). They soak up power, water, and air, then send out some very bad juju out into climate. Not to mention construction materials themselves that contaminate ground and water due to its inability to breakdown into a simple or complex sugar or something. You get the point.

The challenge I found in this experience is that while some of us are becoming better educated about how materials we use to shape our world have in fact harmed us, we are still challenged to invest time and resources to do more to minimize these impacts. With the growth of green building as a movement and reality in some places, the maintenance begins with the workforce population understanding the fundamentals of how to maintain the thing we've created to coexist with our ecosystem. If the porters and superintendents don't understand how to run a high efficiency boiler or an air purification system and fix it breaks down, what good have really done to better our city? If plumbers don't learn how to install a blackwater reclamation system for a building so that it reduces water waste when we flush toilets, then how are we contributing to preserving our most critical resource? How does reducing water waste support our reservoirs? Potable water wasted for toilet water doesn't do the world any good.

The ending of the boom in the housing industry presents us with a beginning. An opportunity, even. Building McMansions and condos across the lower 48 seemed like a grand idea at the time because it created wealth and jobs to mitigate the bust of 2000-2001 from the internet boom, but it also paved the way for the excesses that led to our current downturn. And all the homes that we were building didn't necessarily factor in sustainability. Fiscally or ecologically. How could it? The labor force was not schooled in the ways of mitigating impacts on the environment.

So this brings me to my current thinking about infrastructure. Infrastructure is more than the physical universe of roads, bridges, schools, power grids, levees, dams, reservoirs, trains, subways. Think of them as veins and vessels within the body. The body cannot live without the mind. Teachers, firefighters, police officers, servicemen and women flow through that universe. So do you and I. And all of us need to be a bit more educated about how we all are connected in this life. How do we individually complement the stimulus package that was just signed? Infrastructure, beyond the jobs and economic stability it can create, includes you, me and a dose of intellectual curiosity.

America is a young nation with old systems in play. All that American ingenuity we've been taught about has laid fallow for too long. It's time to build a better robot.

Are you ready?

Future Shock

I'm not sure if they get it.

The debate over the economic stimulus package is ideological. Most economists say that we need massive, sweeping and deep intervention in the American economy from the American government. What I remember quite specifically from freshmen year econ: To spend is to beget demand which increases supply which begets production which begets jobs that beget growth in the economy for many generations to come. Amen. To quote the President, "That's the point."

What is the point of government if it's not there to intervene at time of crisis?

The ideologues of the conservative movement is still singing the gospel of Reaganism. The revisionist version.

Last night's press conference was crucial. My mom is a pharmacist tech in Wisconsin. She's not the most sophisticated American when it comes to charts, Keynesian Economics, derivatives and the ilk, but what she said to me over phone was that she likes that Obama takes the time to explain things. The President's campaign to market the stimulus package to the public seemed to work from what I was hearing on the other end of the phone.

The other significant point from the President that seems to be buried underneath chatter of post partisanship, spending, stimulus, Keynesian, is infrastructure. I highlighted the point for my mother. "There are a string of events that occurred over the past 8 years that haven't necessarily been connected in an obvious way," I said to her. "We treat them as separate events. Katrina and the levee failure in New Orleans, the Mississippi River Bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the episodes of train derailments on the east coast, the 2003 blackout, the rolling blackouts in California, the drought conditions last year in Atlanta... I could go on. Infrastructure is critical. Nationally, we haven't invested in these areas in years. If we expect to move forward into the 21st century, we need to modernize."

On the other end of the phone, I could imagine my mother's face. A startled look of comprehension and a frown, "Well, when you put it like that, that makes a lot of sense. You writing about that yet?"

Sort of, I said.