Tuesday, June 27, 2017

A City in the Suburbs?

 

  As suburbs evolve eventually one becomes a city built around a government center, an airport, or other regional amenity. The surrounding suburbs while enjoying the suburban life style use the city amenities intensively creating the bulk of the traffic near the city amenities. Valley Fair/Santana Row is fed by the whole suburban south bay.

Suburbanites will always have a personal vehicle and will drive it from home to somewhere.  Good urban planning means that the somewhere is sufficient to meet the needs of the suburbanite for the day however long the day is.  If it is a workday, lunch, coffee breaks, a stroll in the park, and dinner and entertainment if that is part of the day should be in walking distance from the parking.  If it is a weekend day the destination should have the main event for the day, a park, a gathering place (see placemaking) and again dinner and evening entertainment if desired.  In both cases the parking should be remote with a variety of last mile options to the urban center.

  Nevertheless suburbanites resist the city's efforts to deal with traffic and other city issues with the greater density.  The urban spaces must be carefully planned and essentially forced into the suburban spaces.  It is never easy, and "community involvement" is usually dysfunctional as the only community that will bother to go to the meetings will be those with an agenda to put the city somewhere else.   

 With regard to the developments on Stevens Creek one vocal opponent cites traffic on Stevens Creek that prevents her from getting to her city amenity of a Safeway and other stores in the once suburban shopping center that San Jose wants to turn into an urban village.

  Santa Clara objects to our listing a bike route on Pruneridge that they created by modifying traffic lanes on that once important East West thoroughfare further contributing to congestion on Stevens Creek. But no way, no how can we build the density to pay for our own urban bike corridor.    

 Cupertino wants a hotel to support their suburban businesses as long as it won't cast a shadow in someone's back yard.    They like their city amenities and use them intensively, but don't want to give up even a daylight plane to get them.

A vocal group rants about school impact of development but Lynbrook, Miller, and Dilworth in District 1 are considering redistricting due to declining enrollments.  Lynbrook canceled AP Music Theory this year, a critical pre-requisite for top colleges.

  This suburban thinking is the very antithesis of regional planning. We would be happy to add our neighbors to our planning groups and did so.  Their NO WAY, NO HOW interminable rants disrupted our planning meetings and made reasonable planning impossible.

 The solution is unfortunately to ignore the community input, or rather use the community input to cover substantive conversations on the periphery between city officials and developers pursuant to building the necessary density for the project to work.   

Thursday, June 22, 2017

A Self-aware Internet of Things.

A self-aware internet of things. Read all about it at The The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein

Call the internet Mike.

Am not going to argue whether a machine can "really be self-aware....A cat? Almost certainly. A human? I don't know about you, tovarisheh, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can't see it matters whether paths are protein or Platinum.

So didn't hesitate to tell him to get "ill."  Mike had thought up a dandy; his 'illness" was wild oscillations in conditioning Warden's residence.

Conditioning a single residence should not go through a master computer!
Be afraid.

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Tribes, Monkeyspheres, Governments and Cults


 Tribes are the normal social systems for humans. Once tribes get beyond the Monkeysphere* which describes most modern tribes the possibility of becoming cults is an ever present danger. 

  Seeing through the crap is the first step in apostasy. Being identified as a radical is the first step in excommunication. You can't change them. Save them the trouble. Find a support group elsewhere and Fuck 'em.

 
 Where large organizations break down into Monkeysphere tribes, cults are usually avoided. Most companies, even large companies until the '60s were generally collections of tribes. So were most churches. 

 One of the advantages of small senior communities and Gated Communities and city villages is they preserve the tribal community for better or worse. Tribes tend to be homogeneous in culture and ethnicity. When they get too big for the Monkeysphere the homogeneity can become the basis for a cult.

 I think it is no accident that the village or parish is the basic unit of human society. Our monkeysphere is about 150-200 people whose behavior we can affect with the subtle social cues (the raised eyebrow, frown, or quick smile ) to say that behavior is or is not in accordance with the morals of the society. That is, what our common moral tendencies tell us is right. The morality of the village is pretty well solidified by Fulghum's Kindergarten.
   
 Where these groups are local, isolated and stable almost anything can be moral, witch burning, infanticide, child sacrifice, killing everybody in the next village. Whoops, almost forgot, except the virgins.  Blue Roads 4/26/08

 I suspect that as the twitterspheres and facebookspheres sort themselves out they will become either tribes or cults.  I have some friends on Facebook that I have to block their cult posts.  Not really an issue if they have other redeeming values they can still be in my facebook tribe which is well below my monkeysphere in size.


 There are very few of us who can find what we need for personal fulfillment if we become "Stickers" for the sake of sticking and building and maintaining a community. The school to meet our aspirations may be across the country or around the world. The job we have prepared for may not be in the same community as the school where we learned our trade. Then we grow in our trade and outgrow the job that started our career, or our significant other may have outgrown the community we live in and another community change is in order.

  Friends and associates in our monkeysphere also scatter so even if we would like to be stickers, the rest of the community isn't and we are stuck with a bunch of new neighbors, new industries, and even a bunch of new people in our church. that may change it beyond our comfort level.

  There may still be a few communities where sticking is a possibility, but they are rare and the vibrant cutting edge industry that is a necessity for such a community, works against the stickers maintaining a stable community.

  Where are we to find our roots? Is it possible that soil and bricks are no longer necessary for rootedness, but that the nascent communities on the internet will become the new roots for the boomers (old definition)? Is facebook our new village green or post office where we get our daily social strokes? Are blogs the coffee houses where we share our profound ideas with like minded profound thinkers? Is our little piece of the net the new community where the boomers are rooted? I think so. There will still be meet ups and face time but they will be increasingly mediated on the net, and with few exceptions community roots in jobs, churches, and neighborhoods will be non-existent. 
Blue Roads, 7/7/09

 I have been thinking a lot recently about that responsibility for the other "We's." I know where it begins. It begins with those closest to me, and extends at least to the monkeysphere. Probably also to those anonymous readers of this blog and the letters I write to newspapers etc, It certainly extends to the audiences I perform for. But does it extend to the bigots who are trying to change my laws, or only those who will be affected by those laws. Am I responsible for the Shiites and the Sunnis, or should I be content to let them bomb themselves out of existence with perhaps a little help from the Israelis and Wahabis.

 Or Haiti? Or New Orleans. If they do not have the resources through their own mismanagement/misgovernment to rebuild or even succor the injured do I have any responsibility to help? I'm thinking the answer is no. Humans are evolving, and in evolution the winners don't help the losers. They are too busy helping themselves. I have limited resources, and even if I didn't, the buck at Radio Shack for Haiti will be used for much more worthwhile causes. Blue Roads 2/12/10



 *There is a much more scholarly version of the Monkeysphere out there but as usual Cracked explains more. http://www.cracked.c om/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Morality as Facegroups

Humans, as highly intelligent and extremely social animals are genetically programmed to learn all they can about the customs and mores of their tribe or social group as defined prehistorically by those whose faces they encountered on a daily basis. There could be no thought of violating these customs and mores, as doing so would cause banishment and a solo human was a dead human. This is the basis of conscience, not some big daddy in the sky.  

 As social groups grow beyond the tribal or village size like minded social groups will congregate geographically or in religious groups.  The religious groups may be dispersed far beyond a geographical area but at least in theory the groups maintain a consistent set of customs and mores that serve to control and unify the the local face groups. 

 A child brought up by members or a member of an identifiable social group will associate behavior that promotes the welfare of the group with "good" and that which is contrary to the welfare of the group as "bad." No matter how large the identifiable social group became the local community hall was the transmitter of the group's values.  Typically these community halls are small enough that all are at least nominally acquainted.   Ultimately it seems that compliance with face-group standards is the natural morality of humans. 

 As larger societies moved up the chain to associations of face groups, either religious or secular, commandments, laws and rules of behavior are established to define minimum standards of behavior that promote the welfare of the larger group.  These commandments, laws and rules are not to be confused with morality, as frequently these commandments, laws and rules will conflict with the imprinted sense of what is good and what is bad as it relates to the childhood face group.    

 A face group at that point may withdraw to the extent possible from the larger group.  See the Amish and other Anabaptist groups who live by their own moral standards ignoring the laws of the larger society except where there is unavoidable conflict. Or they may be forced to withdraw from the larger group as the Native Americans were.  Ostracising these groups has nothing to do with the morality of the larger society, it simply allows the larger society to work. One could make a strong case that the laws of society are by definition immoral as they force compliance with activities that may be against the face group morals of individuals within the larger society.

 The world is too big to be a face group these days but if we choose carefully there is a group of people whose customs and mores we can and do internalize. That group will look a lot like our family and close friends even when extended to people we probably will never meet.  The mores so developed may or may not be judged moral by the larger society. 

 Religious and secular associations are the traditional facilitators of face groups and define the approved social standards and mores for the group. 

 Social media is emerging as a powerful force for expanding and defining these extended face groups. In some cases a small group of people or bots may be instrumental in defining the customs and mores for the group. Rallies and marches seem to be their churches and meeting halls.  Most groups are frequently in political conflict with many if not most of the other groups.

 Indeed politics seems to be the art of putting together a platform of mores that reflects a large segment of the society or pretends to in order to attract a plurality of the voting population.