Cocoposts

1964 World's Fair

From Boing Boing comes news of a soundtrack release - Disney at the 1964 Worlds Fair in Queens.     "It's a Small World"  is echoing in my head now.  No need to purchase the soundtrack. 

Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln: Experience the sounds of the original Illinois Pavilion. As a special treat, you'll hear the original recording sessions of the man who gave Mr. Lincoln his voice (Royal Dano) and listen to the lavish original score by Disney legend Buddy Baker also presented as individual tracks.

"It's A Small World": Includes the original demo recording of the legendary song as well as isolated vocals and a grand master mix of the varied international interpretations of the famous tune directly from the attraction soundtrack. Also included is a tour of this charming "little boat ride" with Walt Disney as your guide.

I went  to Flushing Meadow with my parents for the fair and remember these parts very clearly. 

A couple of years later I went to Disneyland and saw the same exhibits which had been moved to California after the fair.  I thought it was, afterall, a small world - audio-animatronic Lincolns coast to coast!

Water Jones Washes Hands of Politics

We have a water deficit, water plans don't have teeth,  political leaders are in denial, and the water utility is above your control.  Lovely.    

John Fleck talks to leaders of the Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly. 

The problem, Wessely explained to me, is that the plans have no teeth. Nothing in the law requires local, regional or state government to act on the uncomfortable truth that New Mexico has a water deficit.  "We don't have the mechanisms to make things happen," Wessely said later in an interview. 

For "water planning" to really mean what the words in its title suggest, that gap between the plans and the legal reality needs to be addressed. We need the mechanisms to come to grips with the reality of New Mexico's water deficits.

Poignant counterpoint news of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.  New ABCWUA Chair, Councilor Trudy Jones, a commercial real estate broker married to a commercial real estate broker, says take your reality someplace else. 

Sean Olson notes:

She said the political decisions should be left up to the city and county governments and the water authority should just be a normal utility.  "We should govern it as such," Jones said.  The issue has come up often in the past two years, with some former water board members advocating building code, water use and growth policies being administered through the water authority. Other members, like Jones, have argued the proper forum for those decisions should be left to an elected body.

This utility was created to sidestep policy constraints of either government - including planning.  It is coming home to roost and she's just parroting the company line.  Like the Nevada utility model it was based on, the ABCWUA was designed to operate outside control of the public and largely independent of public oversight - as if the technical decisions related to water production and delivery were not inherently political.   It is the perfect development servicing machine. 

Just because it is a water utility doesn't make it the place to discuss water, or anything else for that matter. ::Washes hands:: 

May it Please The Court

This art and opinion piece in the New York Times by Maira Kalman just made my morning.  And the Pursuit of Happiness is made meaningful.   It is enough to inspire a person toward the study of law.
 

Irrational Building Exuberance

With my highlight of the little public infrastructure hook to the story,  get this from a friend via The New Republic blog - The Wall Street Journal notes economic risks of silly building.

A one-mile stretch of Atlanta's upscale Buckhead neighborhood shows why commercial real estate is emerging as an obstacle to pulling the U.S. economy out of recession.

Separate developers in Buckhead are building four speculative office buildings at the same time with virtually no leasing activity. The 35 recent condominium projects will help give Atlanta a 40-year supply at the current sales pace. A $600 million outdoor shopping mall under way has suspended construction to save money. ...

Cousins [a developer] led Buckhead's most recent development boom. Taking advantage of a sewage project that made development possible, the company built a glass pinstriped tower called Terminus 100. It filled quickly with financial-services firms and other tenants after opening in 2007. "It riveted the development community," said Ken Ashley, an office-leasing broker with Cushman & Wakefield. ...

The first building to follow Terminus 100 was a project by Regent Properties called the Sovereign. It opened in mid-2008 and has managed to lease three-quarters of its space. After the Regent building came Terminus 200, Cousins's encore to its successful first tower, built next-door. It broke ground in early 2007. Mr. Bell, of Cousins, figured the other companies planning towers would fall away when they saw his bulldozers preparing the site.

But the others didn't stop. Mr. Bell describes stages of bewilderment as the other three projects moved forward so quickly. The Buckhead market on average absorbs 300,000 square feet a year, said Lanie Rea, a research manager at brokers Jones Lang LaSalle. That is less than the size of each tower.

The New Mexico building exuberance  will pound nails into our hands with more SunCal sprawl while half-empty shopping centers and neighborhoods elsewhere languish. 

Bailout Housing

Dr. Housing Bubble connects jobs with the housing market and illustrates the California economy (Compton) with foreclosed house photos and text I cut and paste here.  

How do you make a $312,000 loan on this place?!  If the home sells for the current price it is an 80 percent loss from the peak and puts us back to the early 1990s price range.  (...)

The stinking unemployment rate in California is 11.2 percent!   Have you taken a look at Detroit home prices?  There is a reason why some homes are priced at very low levels.  Unemployment does not help in boosting prices.  And this is one key point I want to drive home to all the bottom dwellers.  Until you stabilize the employment situation, you can focus all you want on mortgages and cheap credit but what use is that when people are struggling to find employment? 

I’ve seen various sources talking about job growth during the housing bubble decade here in California and estimates from 40 to 50 percent of all job growth can be attributed to housing, finance, and industries tied to the real estate market.  With that said, it is important to look at places like Compton since it is good to have an idea of what we have been purchasing through bailouts of the banks and Wall Street.  I think I answered my question as to why banks aren’t dolling the homes up.  With all these bailouts given to any bank, why fix a home when the government is gearing up to buy them as is?

Housing Stimulus

New Mexico is getting stimulus money to build more housing, which seems a little ironic.  Whatever. 

The New Mexico Business Weekly says the state will distribute $37 million to local communities and lists some  happy projects which include rehabilitation at least - then notes officials say the funds will create 152 jobs.

A story commenter, who misses the point about who makes money in the real estate industry, does the simple math and notes that this amounts to $243,000 per job. 

Beware the Geek

The Durango Herald published this anti-intellectual screed by Michael Barone that got my blood pressure up.  He says, don't trust geeks!  Smart people bearing knowledge weren't able to avert the financial crisis.  They  should of stopped that mess and because they didn't, you can't believe in climate science or health care reform. 

Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That's the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The "quants" who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.

The risk models of the financial geeks, the climate models of the environmental geeks and the medical models of the health-care geeks are all ultimately forms of social science. But social science ultimately is not science but art.

Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning.

The lesson seems clear. Don't allow a whole system to become hostage to the workings of some geek's formula. Keep in mind the possibility the real world might not behave as the formula indicates.

But, astonishingly, our society seems about to forget that lesson, just as it should have been learned. Congress is poised, at least if the Obama administration gets its way, to pass new, major laws on carbon emissions and health care whose success depends on geeks bearing formulas.

The climate modelers work with historical data that do not necessarily predict future weather patterns. The medical statisticians cannot know the human factors that prompt a sensitive clinician to make lifesaving decisions. Geeks with formulas can help us understand the world better and make informed decisions. But the collapse of our financial institutions tells us that we would be fools to rely on them completely in ordering our great institutions. 

Nuke Doodoo

From Reuters via Houston Chronicle comes news of the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Beijing.  Officials say it's all looking good for nuke power because of, and in spite of,  costs and crisis.   Win - win.  Go turn on those lights and air conditioners. 

Thierry Dujardin, a deputy director of the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency, said that although the financial crisis was making it more difficult to fund some proposed nuclear power plants, longer-term worries about energy security and global warming were likely to buffer the impact of the crisis on the sector.

"In the short term, it's obvious that it will be more difficult to find the funding for new investments, heavy investment, in energy infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants," Dujardin told a news conference.  "There is a chance that nuclear energy as such will not be so strongly impacted by the current economic crisis, because the need for energy will be there."

For such a complex technology with so many associated risks, this seems like exceedingly simplistic black-box reasoning. So many issues affect demand.  Cost, crisis and security not the least among them.   Yet  the energy industry tells complacent consumers to never mind that economic recession, expense or security.  Demand is everything.  

All thumbs-up.  Asia - all aboard. 

As of the end of August 2008, China topped the list of countries with nuclear power plants under construction, with 5,220 megawatts (MW), followed by India at 2,910 MW and South Korea at 2,880 MW, according to the International Energy Agency.

 But the ambitious plans for nuclear power growth across the developing world also risk straining safety standards and safeguards against weapons proliferation.

Oh that. 

The Fundamental Funeral

Interesting story about the growing and changing funeral business in the New York Times mentions the Green Burial Council, a non-profit located in Santa Fe: 

No one keeps statistics on natural burials, but interest is growing, says Mark Harris, author of a 2007 book, “Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial."  “It’s not just this chic eco-trend for greenies,” he says. “It’s based on simplicity and thrift, and has broad appeal.”

Since 2005, the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization in Santa Fe, N.M., has certified cemeteries and funeral providers that follow certain environmental guidelines. It has a list of 220 funeral homes that identify themselves as willing to handle unembalmed bodies, 17 cemeteries that, among other practices, avoid chemicals, and 14 coffin companies that use nontoxic, biodegradable materials. (...)

Marian Spadone (is)  an artist in Portland, Ore. who designs and makes burial shrouds for her four-year-old company, A Fine Farewell. She says she laughs along when people make wisecracks about her “burial burritos,” and even when they call her the “Death Shroud Lady.”

“A lot of people think it’s weird at first,” she says.

“People spend all this time planning how they will decorate their home or have a wedding,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you do the same when you say goodbye?”

BTW,  a funeral  service at a Catholic Church was held last week for a someone I knew - a single woman with no children.  We listened to the priest bloviate and digress for over 30 minutes about the sacredness of life, family and children - twice mentioning the "selfishness" of those women who don't bear them. 

It reminded me of the fundamental importance, among funeral matters, of assuring that someone who knew you and your values, give your eulogy.

Developer Daskalosed

The Albuquerque Journal says player developer Jason Daskalos is alllll over his legal troubles now and can get back to business. 

That boy sure has some connections.  Not many "folks" can get away with violating the State DOT limited access policy for Paseo del Norte to get a lucrative direct driveway for a shopping center.  That was something the County Fire Department didn't even get. 

Oh yeah, and his driving.  And the drinking. And the call he made to a big dog that got him out of the DWI batmobile that night.  And the 39* other traffic citations.  And the dispute with a girlfriend when he punched her.  

That 's alllll behind him and justice is blind blind blind.

Gorence said there is no longer any legal action pending against Daskalos, and Thursday's dismissal could pave the way for the developer to retreat out of the public eye.  "It's all over and there's no other action pending," Gorence said. "Now he can get back to making the buildings that we all shop, live or dine in."

My hero! 

Not to mention now he can get back to pulling development favors, his "dating" practices and driving like a bat out of hell.

Out of the public eye?  Only if the public is blind too.

* Can you imagine?  What must he pay for insurance, I wonder.  But figure he has connections.