Martin Luther King Mountain Top, Freedom speech,

Suburb Hating is Anti-Child

Published on August 15, 2013 by Mike Lanza
Posted in  The Problem.

Back in his childless, law school days, Barack Obama said, “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.” Is his administration as anti-suburb (and anti-child) as Obama was back then?

Sure, suburbs have big problems. Their designs force their inhabitants to drive in cars, instead of walking and bicycling. This diminishes face-to-face interactions, physical health, and the quality of the environment. Aesthetically, many of them, particularly those dreaded “planned communities,” are quite boring. People who live there tend not to have much contact with people who aren’t like them, so suburbs reinforce racial, religious, and class segregation.

A large proportion of intellectuals and politicians, including President Obama, decry these problems with suburbs as reason to hate them and advocate for their elimination, in favor of dense, big cities.

Yeah, I get it. I agree that all these problems exist, and they bother me a lot.

There’s just one big problem with suburb hating. The alternative to suburbs in metropolitan areas, cities, are much worse for children. Sure, adults can have a great time in hip, dense city centers like Manhattan or San Francisco. In fact, if my wife and I never had kids, we’d still be living in San Francisco, going out practically every night.

However, it’s clear that cities are worse for kids than suburbs.

Why do I say this?

First, just look at where newly married urbanites choose to live once they have children. They leave cities in droves. The hipper and denser the city, the more likely are parents to flee to the suburbs.

Richard Florida made his name over a decade ago writing about how cities should attract the “creative class” – a code name for childless urban hipsters. In his book, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, he lists cities he thinks are best for different groups of people. The table here shows the percentage of total population in the United States that is school-aged children (age 5-17) versus that for large cities that Florida lists as best for 20-29 year-olds.

The only two cities that are even close to the national average of 17.5% are Los Angeles and New York. Los Angeles covers an awful lot of land area, and I suspect that if I could get data for what Florida really means by “Los Angeles,” the percentage would be much lower.

New York is also quite large and diverse, but there, fortunately, I have data for what Florida really means by “New York.” I’m sure he’s thinking of Manhattan when he thinks of “creative class.” There, as you can see on the table here, Manhattan’s percentage of the population that is school-aged is 11.8%, far below the national average.

In her suburb-hating book, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving, Leigh Gallagher gushes that Manhattan “has become overloaded with families.” To back up this assertion, she points to US Census data that there were 2,600 more married families with children 0-18 in 2010 than in 2000. Actually, that’s unimpressive for two reasons. First, the census data show that Manhattan’s total population actually increased by more than the population of children, so children as a percentage of the total population actually dropped. Second, even if the percentage of children had increased, the 11.8% figure for school-aged children is horrifically low.

The New York Times contributed to this gushing sentiment for children in Manhattan in a 2005 article. It pointed to a small surge in children under 5 in Manhattan’ census data between 2000 and 2004. Unfortunately, this trend did not extend to school-aged kids.

This disparity hints at the major reason why families leave big cities: public schools in large cities are, by and large, awful. So, for the most part, families that have the means to move out of cities when their children reach school age flee to the ‘burbs. Most middle and upper-middle class families that do stay send their children to private schools. 30% of San Francisco children go to private schools, and my guess is that the figure for Manhattan and other dense, hip urban centers is close to that.

So, to some extent, when you hear people complain that cities are too expensive for families are calculating private school into the cost of living there.

But private schools not only cost a lot of money. They also destroy neighborhood life for children. In big city neighborhoods where many or most children go to private schools, children who live on the same street hardly know each other because they tend to go to different schools that their parents choose.

Beyond running bad schools that force families with the means to go to private school, some big city school systems put the final dagger into neighborhoods by forcing or enticing children to go to a school outside their neighborhoods.

For example, San Francisco has done this for decades in an effort to forcibly integrate students of different races and backgrounds, but instead, what it’s done is destroy neighborhoods and push more families into private schools than any other city in America. In the last year or two, that city has made a small change in its policy in an apparent effort to make it more possible for children to go to school in their own neighborhood, but this change hasn’t gone nearly far enough to pull neighborhoods together.

So, big cities are left with neighborhoods where children spray out to all parts of the city to go to school every day. When school’s over at the end of the day, playing in their neighborhoods isn’t an option because children there don’t know one another.

The families that do flee for the suburbs leave a diverse place where parents like them have a small amount of political power and huge teachers’ unions dominate, to a more homogeneous place where most residents are like them, in terms of socio-economic status, and parents wield great power over schools. Left behind are the less fortunate kids, with their families.

The other primary problem that families have with cities is space. Yes, while it’s trendy these days for urban planners to advocate for dense development, families with children flee from density. Every large city in the United States that has high density – including those in the Richard Florida list above and other dense cities like Miami and Philadelphia – have very low percentages of school-aged children.

To put it simply, play requires space. If all kids have outside their crowded apartment building is a sidewalk, they can’t play a game of soccer, nor can they play even less formal games like hide and seek or tag. Also, sidewalks are a lot less complex, and therefore they’re a lot more boring for kids, than yards that have grass and bushes with hiding spaces.

As Richard Louv writes so eloquently in his book Last Child in the Woods, children really do love being in nature. They’re drawn to play among trees, bushes, grass, and creeks rather than sidewalks and brick walls.

Those who tout the attractiveness of city life for children always cite the importance of public parks. Parks are great for families that live right next to them, but unfortunately, we’re never going to put a park in every other block. The fact is that children don’t roam very far on their own these days. In fact, most preteen children don’t roam on their own more than a few feet from their front doors, whether those front doors are to their single family homes or to their apartment buildings. So, parks are of very limited use, even to most city dwellers. While kids and caregivers go there together, kids hardly every go there on their own to play freely.

Clearly, children can get a great deal of value from a yard outside a single family home, which is one important reason why so many families aim to move to the suburbs. Yes, most families don’t exploit their yards nearly enough once they move there, but that’s a problem with how families live in suburbs. It’s not a blanket condemnation of suburbs.

So, we need to fix suburbs and the way families utilize them. They should be far more pedestrian friendly, and not favor cars so much. Residential yards should be used as social hangouts, not merely admired from afar for their manicured shrubs and flower beds. I’ve written a great deal about these fixes on this blog and in my book Playborhood.

But what we shouldn’t do is try to force families to live in dense city centers. Most families don’t like it there, with good reason.

Suburb hating hurts children. Politicians who advocate anti-suburb policies are hurting children. They are, dare I say, anti-child.

Marinwood's "Solar Svengali", SolEd Benefit Corporation gets fired in St. Helena

On December 17, 2015, I reported how Marinwood's new solar contractor,  Sol Ed Benefit Corporation was fired for "non performance"  I posted documents HERE and the video.   "Mysteriously" within hours, the video of the St. Helena meeting was blocked by an unknown entity.   Coincidence?

What we know from St. Helena City Council, is that Sol Ed Benefit Corporation was derelict in its delivery to provide Solar per the SEED North Bay Contract signed with nine municipal agencies including Marinwood CSD.  (also, San Rafael, Mill Valley and the Southern Marin Fire District  and others)

According to the St. Helena Mayor,  Sol Ed was in serious "breach of contract" and the board UNANIMOUSLY voted to cancel the contract.   Seen in this tape is a discussion of the violation of terms,  the breach of promises,  David Kunhardt's slick defense and a "principal investor" of C2 Special Situations group explaining financing.  C2 Special Situations Group is headed by a 29 year old, Richard Devore, a "financial entrepreneur"  who created a Delaware Corporation in May 2015 to use a shell corporation for the financing of the Marinwood CSD contract. ( If you were fortunate to see the "Big Short", it will give you a good idea where this New York "private equity investor" is from)

Marinwood is not locked into the solar contract with Sol Ed and C2 Beta Holdings.  Prompt action can minimize our financial exposure.   Marinwood CSD Manager, Eric Dreikosan and all Marinwood CSD directors (Justin Kai, Isabela Perry, Leah Kleinman-Green, Bill Shea and Jeff Naylor*)  have been alerted to the problem.  It is now up to them to act swiftly to protect the community just as the City of St. Helena has done.

We have many other vendor options with Solar energy and the taxpayers should have the assurance that our partners will be able to keep their end of the bargain for twenty years. 

Send your letter of concern to Marinwood CSD board to:  edreikosen@marinwood.org 

*Jeff Naylor was the only Marinwood CSD director who did not vote to approve the contract with Sol Ed Benefit Corporation and C2 Beta Holdings on December 8, 2015

The Progressive Left openly embrace Authoritarian Politics of China

Editor's Note:  Plan Bay Area is a determined push for the elimination of local control in favor of a strong regional government that is administered by a technical and political elite.  "It is the only way we can effectively fight climate change, solve transportation needs, housing and social equity", they tell us.  "Modern democracy and market capitalism dont work."   Here is an article recently published in the Atlantic.  Check out the funny video following.

Has China Discovered a Better Political System Than Democracy?

“One person, one vote is not the only morally legitimate way to select leaders,” a political theorist says.
Souvenirs of China's leaders, past and presentKim Kyung Hoon / Reuters



ERIC FISH
OCT 28, 2015
GLOBAL


Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the political theorist and Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell aroused controversy among many China-watchers for challenging this idea. In several op-eds published in prominent Western publications, Bell argued that China’s government, far from being an opaque tyranny, actually presented a “meritocratic” alternative to liberal, multiparty democracy. In a new book titledThe China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Bell expands on that idea.

“I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Bell said at a recent debate hosted by ChinaFile at Asia Society in New York.

Bell is under no illusion that China has already perfected its political recipe, admitting that the ideal “China model” is still very theoretical. This involves a “vertical democratic meritocracy,” as he puts it, with open democratic elections at the local level, meritocratic assessment (like China’s civil-service exam) to choose top national leaders, and experimentation in the middle. In this system, local leaders—who handle relatively basic issues—are still accountable to voters. But national leaders, who must handle more complex issues and make tough decisions that may not be popular (like enacting serious climate-change measures), can be chosen based on experience and knowledge without American-style political gridlock or susceptibility to populist approval.

“This is the political ideal that has informed political reform in China over the past 30 years,” Bell said. “But there’s still a huge gap between the ideal and the practice. This ideal is reasonably good though, and can and should continue to inspire political reform in China in the future.”

Bell dismissed views that he’s an apologist for the CCP, saying that the ideal he writes about requires far more transparency, freedoms, and genuine local democracy than exist in China currently: “There’s a problem in China: There are constraints on free speech, people have visa problems, and that’s terrible. In this sense I’m a card-carrying liberal. I look forward to the day when China has much more political speech than it has.”“There’s a very considerable chance that the model of repressive, authoritarian, elite leadership can persist for a long long time.”

But is it reasonable to expect a transition to Bell’s model of a clean, transparent system that doesn’t elect top leaders democratically? The Columbia University political scientist Andrew Nathan, another participant in the debate, said that what makes liberal democracy better than authoritarian models like China’s isn’t the selection of leaders—it’s checking and balancing them once they’re in power. “Daniel has acknowledged what he calls a gap between the ideal and the practice [of China’s political system],” Nathan said. “That gap is not an accident—[it] is produced by the structure of the political system.”

Timothy Garton Ash, a University of Oxford professor who’s spent decades researching communist and post-communist systems, agreed with Nathan. He said that around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when China still appeared to be evolving toward greater political and social openness, he believed that the country perhaps had cracked a model that could challenge liberal democracy. But then things started moving backward. Now Chinese President Xi Jinping is “bringing all the responsibility back, in a categorical Leninist gamble, to single-party rule.”

The breakneck economic growth that reigned for three decades in China has slowed. GDP, once guaranteed to exceed 8 percent each year, fell to 7.4 percent in 2014 and is expected to continue dropping. Meanwhile, China’s supply of cheap rural labor—essential to the country’s export-led growth model—is drying up and the overall population is rapidly aging. Social circumstances are also shifting, with young Chinese becoming more educated and nurturing aspirations that go beyond mere prosperity. Given these issues, Ash said, the CCP is facing major challenges in maintaining the “performance legitimacy” that’s kept it afloat for decades, and it faces an uphill battle in establishing a political model that bestows “procedural legitimacy.”If there is a coherent China model, it may be more of a “red empire” in which authoritarian leaders choose their successors from a political elite.

“I don’t think the China model yet exists except between the covers of [Daniel Bell’s] book,” Ash added. “For me the question is can [the Chinese] get that—a sustainable model in a complex society that will no doubt be, in many respects, different from classic Western multiparty, liberal democracy. I hope they do because I think the consequences of failure will be disastrous for us all, but I don’t think they’ll get that simply with the methods they’ve so far adopted.”

Nathan said that if there is a coherent China model, it may be more of a “red empire” in which authoritarian leaders choose their own successors from a political elite and remain repressive in order to manage a complex society. “I think actually Daniel and I agree to a considerable extent on what China is today,” Nathan said. “It’s repressive, it’s authoritarian, it’s self-perpetuating. I’m not predicting that it will survive, but I think there’s a very considerable chance that the model of repressive, authoritarian, self-perpetuating elite leadership can persist for a long long time.”

Bell conceded that the drive toward the ideal “China model” is going backward in many ways under the current political tightening, and that rampant corruption within the CCP undermines its potential. But he said Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is having an effective influence on reining in official graft and abuse of power. He suggested that the aggressive suppression of perceived threats to the CCP coincides with Xi’s turbulent and risky fight against corruption.

“I think once this corruption is dealt with, then I would expect the switch to a gradual openness,” Bell said. “And it’s a testable hypothesis. If in 20 years time China becomes more repressive, we see another Tiananmen Square, then I’m lost and I’ll change my views.”rs of China's leaders, past and present
Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters

David Kunhardt, Affordable Housing Finance Salesman sells "Investment Tax Schemes" in Hamilton , Novato

David Kunhardt of Corte Madera, is a well known Marin  Housing Activist and lately  Solar Power salesman from SolEd (contracting with Marinwood CSD on December 8, 2015) who stands to make millions from financing deals.  He is the very definition of a political insider using "social justice and sustainability" to line his pockets with government cash.  As one of the founders of CALM  (www.livablemarin.org) a coalition of affordable housing builders, lobbyists, financiers and non profits, they present themselves as a "grassroots" non profit.  Some speculate that he may seek the seat of Steve Kinsey, Marin Supervisor who will be vacating it at the end of 2016.  


2006 MFE Top 50: Tax Syndicators

Taxing Year: Tax credit firms struggle with high prices but low returns.

By Rachel Azoff

There were a lot of tax credit syndication deals that Todd Crow, senior vice president at PNC Multifamily Capital, simply had to walk away from in 2005. With tax credit pricing eclipsing the watershed mark of a dollar per credit for the first time last year, and yields slipping down into the 5 percent range, some deals that the firm otherwise would have pursued had to be let go because returns simply weren't good enough.

"While we hated to lose the business, we just didn't think those deals were good for our investors," says Crow. "I wish I could say that I've seen some pushback in pricing, but I really haven't. We're still losing deals at very high [tax] credit prices."

Richard MorgensteinDavid Kunhardt, senior vice president of Aegon USA Realty Advisors, stands by Bay Vista, a 220-unit garden-style apartment property in Novato, Calif. Aegon acted as a limited investment partner on the project, which is among the latest affordable housing partnerships between the tax credit firm, Shea Properties, and Centex Homes.

The country's largest tax credit syndicators and investors saw that high-price, low-return story play itself out time and again in 2005 as a flood of equity chased a finite number of affordable housing tax credits. But business was still good: PNC Multifamily, for one, raised a record $500 million in 2005. Yet key players in the tax credit field are betting the trend can't go on forever.

"We are dangerously close to that point where tax credits seem to make less and less economic sense," says Jeff Goldstein, director of real estate at Boston Capital Corp., which syndicated $600 million worth of tax credits in 2005. "There are some very safe investments out there, at rates that are not significantly different than tax credit rates. I think that really illustrates the big challenge for 2006, which is whether there will be an adjustment or a correction in this marketplace."

While credits are awarded to developers who build affordable housing, they can be sold to raise capital from investors or syndicators, who can then use them for their own tax relief. Those credits only represent dollar-for-dollar forgiveness in tax liability, but investors can still squeeze out a positive return at prices that are more than a dollar if they roll them into passive losses or other deductions going forward. Yet as rates on other investments such as energy credits and Treasury bonds have improved, 2006 could offer a different story for tax credit deals.

"I think more and more investors are waking up to the fact that unless their rate of return is guaranteed, things are going to be dicey for anybody who thinks they can do more than a dollar per credit," says David Kunhardt, senior vice president at Aegon USA Realty Advisors, a direct investor that did $206 million in tax credit business in 2005. "It's going to be very touch and go."

Richard MorgensteinDavid Kunhardt and Aegon USA Realty Advisors also partnered with Shea Properties and Centex Homes on Creekside at Meadow Park, which is located in Novato, Calif., on the former Hamilton Army Air Field. Aegon did $206 million in tax credit business in 2005.

Good news for the tax credit industry came in December, when President Bush signed a relief package for the Gulf Opportunity Zone, increasing allocated credits threefold in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Last summer's devastation also underlined the importance of the program in lawmakers' eyes. "The low-income tax credit was part of the solution," Crow says. "I think we're in as good a shape legislatively as we've been in some time."

The increase should lead to more deals being done along the Gulf Coast in 2006. "We haven't seen those deals get allocated yet, but there's certainly an expectation they will," says Michael Lavine, managing director of the tax credit investing group at Wachovia Securities, which generated $468 million in tax credit investing and syndication.

–Joe Bousquin is a freelance writer in Newcastle, Calif.

How Liberals Are the New Autocrats

How Liberals Are the New Autocrats

Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.

The End of Localism

This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

The will to power is unmistakable.California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

The Authoritarian Impulse

Under President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.


Today climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce. But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them and like it, or be labeled a racist.

Already the disconnect between the hoi polloi and the new bureaucratic master race has spawned a powerful blowback, as evidenced by the rise of rightist, even quasi-fascist parties throughout the old continent. The people at the top—including much of the business leadership—may like the idea of a central European master-state, but support for the EU is at record low. Increasingly Europeans want, at the very least, to dial down the centralization and bring back some control to the local level, and something of the primacy of traditional cultures and what are still perceived as “European values.”

In some ways, the extreme discontent in America—epitomized by the xenophobic Trump campaign—reflects a similar opposition to bureaucratic overreach. This conflict can be expected to grow as new federal initiatives—initiatives that seek, among other things, to enforce racial and class “balance” in neighborhoods and high-density housing in low-density suburbs—stomp on even the pretense that cities might have any control over their immediate environment. This policy is being adopted already in some regions, notably Minnesota, where planners now seek to change communities that are too white and affluent populations need to meet new goals of class and economic diversity.

NC could lose federal funds set up for climate change
WSOC - Charlotte, NC






The Rule of the Wise-people

Historically, advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right. Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century, the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national socialism.

In contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition, Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead at the altar of expertise and political correctness.

ArciMoto-an everday narrow electric car for $12k

ARCIMOTO ELECTRIC VEHICLE MOVES CLOSER TO PRODUCTION

“THE LIGHTER YOU MAKE IT, THE MORE FUN IT BECOMES.”

By Kristen Hall-Geisler Posted November 12, 2015

Arcimoto

Arcimoto Generation 8

Since 2007, Mark Frohnmayer and his team at Arcimoto in Eugene, Oregon, have been working to create affordable personal electric-powered transportation for the masses. They knew the numbers: most trips are just one or two people in a vehicle driving an average of 33 miles a day. They also knew that globally, urban parking was the biggest problem people had.

The problem was building a vehicle that solved all these problems and was inexpensive enough for nearly everyone to afford it, especially the half of the global population that lives in urban areas. Through seven iterations, the Arcimoto team worked to create the vehicle that would solve all these problems and run on battery power alone, but it was still too heavy, too expensive, and too awkward.

“We were fighting for ounces on generation 7,” says Frohnmayer. “We kept aiming for global transportation, and we kept landing on a midlife-crisis mobile. Others are building low-volume specialty cars for rich people; that doesn’t move the needle” on reducing carbon emissions and improving the transportation landscape.

The answer came on the winter solstice in 2014 when Frohnmeyer questioned, as he puts it, “the very first thing that had never been questioned”: the steering wheel and pedals. Though the Arcimoto vehicle was always intended to be classified as a motorcycle rather than a car, his first design choice—“made when we had the least information,” he says—was to use car-style controls. Using handlebars similar to those on a motorcycle or snowmobile made all the difference.

Once the controls were changed, Arcimoto was able to add more capabilities in a smaller, lighter, more affordable vehicle, all of which benefits the electric power plant.

Generation 8, which will make its world debut in Eugene November 14, is 700 pounds lighter than generation 7. It’s easier for both occupants to get in and out via a unique Eagle Wing door, and the safety structure is improved. The new design is just short enough to park nose-in in a parallel parking space. Arcimoto calls it the rock-star parking feature and notes that it comes standard on every vehicle.

“The lighter you make it, the more fun it becomes,” Frohnmeyer says. “Less is more has created a much better product.”

That extends to the price as well. Arcimoto is targeting an $11,900 base price for a 70-mile range, though there will be extended range options when the cars go into production at the end of 2016.

Effects of HUD's new ruling, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, on local zoning laws and land use in Five Minutes

Techno-skeptics’ objection growing louder

Techno-skeptics’ objection growing louder

Digital dissenter Astra Taylor in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. (Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post)
By Joel Achenbach December 26

Astra Taylor’s iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade.

Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She’s also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She’s not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on hecr laptop computer — because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds.


Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one of the many technophiles unhappy about the way the tech revolution has played out. Political progressives once embraced the utopian promise of the Internet as a democratizing force, but they’ve been dismayed by the rise of the “surveillance state,” and the near-monopolization of digital platforms by huge corporations.

Last month, Taylor and more than 1,000 activists, scholars and techies gathered at the New School in New York City for a conference to talk about reinventing the Internet. They dream of a co-op model: people dealing directly with one another without having to go through a data-sucking corporate hub.
Jaron Lanier, the dean of the digital dissenters, is also a musician, composer and pioneer of virtual-reality headsets. What he is most famous for is his criticism of the computer culture he helped create. (Nick Otto/For The Washington Post)

“The powerful definitely do not want us to reboot things, and they will go to great lengths to stop us, and they will use brute force or they will use bureaucracy,” Taylor warned the conferees at the close of the two-day session.

We need a movement, she said, “that says no to the existing order.”

Music and Dance from Around the World

privacy

Big Data Means Kids' "Permanent Records" Might Never Be Erased

By David Sirota

Image via Flickr

Back in 1982, the Violent Femmes urged a generation not to get so distressed about something being put on our permanent records. To the band's young followers, it was a comforting reminder that for all the vice principal's rage and all of the demerits in our file, most of our elementary school antics, tween outbursts, and adolescent trouble-making probably wouldn't condemn us to an adulthood of suffering and punishment.

But, then, that was before the rise of Big Data—before the era when "permanent" went from a somewhat figurative to a truly literal description of our personal information. Yes, today because they are electronic, our records are truly permanent. They live in perpetuity and in a forever searchable state. And with data storage costs continuing to drop, the marginal price of indefinitely keeping them is no longer prohibitive. That brings up a big moral question: Is it OK to subject even young children to this brave new world by creating permanent records of their behavior that can electronically follow them for their entire lives?

This was the quandary most recently raised The New York Times in its story about inBloom, a company that collects student information from an increasing number of school districts, allowing those districts to "effortlessly share student records" with private corporations. The publicity surrounding the company should also dispel any illusions that children are being protected from the harsh realities of the surveillance society. As the Times notes, the extent of permanent records that the system creates for its corporate partners includes "contact information, grades and disciplinary data, test scores and curriculum planning." It is so vast, in fact, that the newspaper reports it has raised "the potential for mass-scale surveillance of students" and seems "designed to nudge schools toward maximal data collection."

Of course, modern-day data collection and the permanent records it creates always come with tradeoffs. Permanent records of our entertainment preferences keep Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes sending us personalized film, TV, and musical selections—but they also keep us ensconced in a filter bubble that prevents us from being exposed to different content. Permanent electronic credit reports ostensibly provide a more transparent analysis of consumer credit histories—but the permanence of errors on those reports can doom those consumers to unwarranted punishments. Meanwhile, permanent electronic medical records hold out the promise of better, more customized therapies that aren't inhibited by lost paper records and physicians' notorious penmanship deficiencies. Those records, though, raise legitimate fears of insurance companies circumventing federal law and using genetic records to punitively vary premiums and coverage.

Soon, we all may have a "permanent record"

It is the same thing with permanent electronic records of, say, a seventh graders' discipline problems. Sure, that data may help teachers better plan for disruptive kids and better structure a classroom curriculum. But will the permanence and shareability of student records negatively affect that child's future academic prospects years down the road? It's a more than fair query when, as the Times notes, many school districts have "no policies in place to govern who could see the information, how long it would be kept or whether it would be shared with the colleges to which students applied." 

Will a data point be the difference between a college acceptance letter and a rejection letter?

The higher education scenario is particularly harrowing and illustrative of the potential effects of digital permanent records. We know that college admissions offices (as well as scholarship funds) are keenly interested in the most minute details of prospective students' lives, to the point where a Kaplan survey found more than four out of five admissions officers evaluate students' social media presence. Not surprisingly, as electronic student data has proliferated with the help of technologies like inBloom's, higher education institutions have become obsessed with mining as much information about prospective students as possible, turning the admissions process into what the Chronicle of Higher Education calls "a 'Moneyball' approach to college." 

What happens, then, when a middle school student gets a word like "perpetrator" or a phrase like "principal watch list" on their inBloom permanent record and—like an indelible mark on an electronic credit report—cannot get it expunged, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with who he is as a high school senior? Worse, what happens if that student doesn't even know that word or phrase is there on his record? Will that permanent record nonetheless be shared with colleges? Will that specific data point be run through an admissions officer's algorithm that uses it to negatively score the student's application? Will that data point then be the difference between a college acceptance letter and a rejection letter?

Similar questions abound. Will permanent data points not merely micro-tailor school curriculum for students, but also wrongly condemn certain students to a slower track even after they've overcome a few bumps in the academic road? Will those permanent records end up not only in the hands of for-profit educational technology companies, but also other for-profit corporations—say, health and life insurers—that want to evaluate populations with whom they will eventually do business?

Going down this rabbit hole of possibilities can evoke nostalgia among those of us who grew up in the pre-computer era and can recall the gradual changeover from paper to digital. There were certainly frustrating inefficiencies in all that paper, but there was also a bit of comfort; we knew that the physicality of records meant one piece of information (say a speeding ticket in a different state) couldn't so easily find its way into another pile of information (the file cabinet of our home state's DMV) and therefore couldn't necessarily follow us forever, generating points on our license and raising our insurance premiums. 

We knew, in other words, that "permanent record" was sort of a figure of speech and not necessarily something to be taken literally—especially as it related to our childhood. Sure, we assumed that as kids, we could get in real trouble. But there was also the assumption that nothing could follow us too far into adulthood, both because of record-keeping inefficiencies and because of an unwritten rule against allowing non-criminal childhood transgressions to forever define adulthood.

In the information age, many of those inefficiencies are now a thing of the past, and that's not a bad thing, as long as the attendant rule remains intact. It is a rule whose principles still exist in the way the law often distinguishes between minors and adults. It is a rule which appreciates the fact that we should not create permanent records out of inherently volatile, unpredictable and impermanent childhoods. It is a rule, in short, that needs to now be codified by school districts across the country so that Big Data doesn't turn kids' sudden fads, fleeting obsessions, and frivolous impulses into the digital equivalent of a permanent scarlet letter.

Marin Voice: Silencing the voice of the people

By Susan Kirsch
Guest op-ed column

POSTED:   08/14/2013 08:39:00 PM PDT

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Susan Kirsch, a longtime resident of Mill Valley, is one of the founders of Citizen Marin, an...

IN THE DISCUSSION over the problems and promises of Plan Bay Area, one aspect of the debate was overlooked. The vote to approve Plan Bay Area was taken by a JPA — the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).

JPA is an acronym that can refer to a Joint Powers Agreement, Joint Powers Agency or Joint Powers Authority. A JPA is formed when two or more public authorities (governments, utilities, transport districts, etc.) agree to operate collectively.

The first JPA was formed in the 1920s when San Francisco and Alameda collaborated to combat tuberculosis.

Over the years, hundreds of JPAs have been formed, especially in California. The Marin Energy Authority and the Marin County Open Space District are examples.

The good news about a JPA is it encourages cooperation, can leverage funding, incur debt and sell bonds.

The bad news is JPAs are not approved by the vote of the people, but are formed when public officials negotiate a formal agreement among themselves.

JPAs operate with their own board of directors, selected from among the participating agencies, not by a public vote. The back-room power that is accumulating in groups like ABAG undermines local control.

With ABAG we get a group of city and county elected officials attending public-private meetings alongside agencies that have alliances with corporations, developers, non-governmental organizations and government agencies.

ABAG and its partners have effectively created a layer of regional government that controls information, manipulates public discussion, and uses a carrot/stick approach to gain compliance.

Let's look at how the ABAG-JPA worked in Marin on July 18, when Supervisors Steve Kinsey and Katie Rice, and Pat Eklund voted on Plan Bay Area. The Board of Supervisors appointed Kinsey as its representative to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a separate entity. The supervisors appointed Rice as their representative to ABAG. And the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers selected Novato Mayor Eklund to represent them.

Who represented you and me? For the majority of us, the answer is "no one!"

Typical of JPAs, this failure to have directly elected representatives make decisions undermines local control in four significant ways.

In the case of Plan Bay Area:

• Neither Kinsey, Rice nor Eklund represented a constituency, other than their own small board and the Council of Mayors.

• Not directly representing a constituency, they have no accountability for the outcomes of their decision.

• The plan and the vote were tightly controlled by unelected ABAG staff.

The vote on Plan Bay Area is behind us. However, the next challenge is emerging.

Senators Darryl Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and Mark DeSaulnier, D-Walnut Creek, have introduced SB1, the Sustainable Communities Investment Program, which creates a Sustainable Communities Investment Authority. The SCIA, a JPA, will be a mechanism to implement Plan Bay Area.

SB1 authorizes the establishment of Investment Areas and Investment Plans. Cities and counties that form SCIAs will operate with appointed, not elected members. Its boards will draft policy, issue bonds, borrow money, and use tax increment financing provisions.

All of this will be outside the public eye.

Among many concerns, one is that this new JPA's first audit occurs five years into operations, with no provision to make the findings public.

JPAs like ABAG and SCIA cloud — no, close the window of government transparency. The public is left uninformed, and awareness and commitment to the common good is eroded.

Another JPA will nudge the needle a little closer to "One Bay Area government, diminishing the pesky voice of the people who care about the quality of life in their community and want a vote in determining its future.

Susan Kirsch, a longtime resident of Mill Valley, is one of the founders of Citizen Marin, an organization that raised objections to Plan Bay Area's impact on Marin land-use planning and loss of local control.