SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the ages-come-and-pass-leaving-memories-that-become-legend dept.
The [Woodrow] Wilson Center has a series of articles looking at the idea of the 'Smart City'. In addition to an introduction the 24 page pdf includes articles discussing New York, Ahmedabad, Sao Paulo, and Beijing.
New York: Though not as cutting edge as the gleaming digital solutions imagined by many smart city advocates, New York's procedure for public review of new development is a pragmatic example of how smart technologies can improve public participation in an important city process.
Ahmedabad: Transportation is one of the biggest infrastructure challenges for cities at all stages of development; it affects all layers of society and can have tremendous benefits. It is also a challenge that the concepts and technologies behind "smart cities" are well suited to address.
Sao Paulo: While the transformation of Sao Paulo into a "smart city" - through the adoption of new technological tools and the expansion of physical infrastructure - is the order of the day for many stakeholders, what matters first and foremost for the future of the metropolis is its spatial reorganization, lest these new technologies become accessories to the chaos.
Beijing: As urban agriculture becomes more popular, it's actively reshaping the urban and peri-urban spatial framework, breaking up the monopoly of concrete and strengthening rural-to-urban linkages.
What would be essential in your ideal next-gen smart city?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Sunday July 27 2014, @11:44PM
But but who will sell you dope? Who will keep the liquor stores in business? Who will chat up the white women?
A technological society does not need to use a wide brush (such as skin color) to pre-judge people. Today, if so desired, every citizen can be personally monitored and judged for his deeds, not for guilt by association.
If those sociologists are so much interested in constructing the city of the future, they should first and foremost think of the people who are going to live there. I do not know how they are going to solve the problem of crime and ghettos. But they have to do that, otherwise the new city will be trashed overnight, and there will be insane homeless people under every bridge, and graffiti on every vertical surface.
Logically thinking, there are only two ways. You can force people to behave; or you can expel "bad" people from the city. There are no ways to do the former, as the mind control rays haven't been invented yet. There are ways to do the latter... but it's a continuous process; you have to admit immigrants who are good, and you have to expel locals (children) who went bad. This is not going to be accepted well by the society; that's why this is the hardest problem of them all.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Monday July 28 2014, @02:34AM
Expelling kids that went bad.
I am seeing way too much of that. I like to blame it on the necessity of the two income family which leaves no parent at home for the child to bond to, and the family degenerates like a pair of tame cats giving litters to wild kittens because no-one had the time to pick up the little kittens and love them. Humans paid to care for kids is like me having a machine feed my kittens. If I did that, I guarantee you I would have nothing but wild litters.
It takes a lot of cossetting to raise a decent pet. It also takes a lot of cossetting to raise a decent kid.
Side note: Hat tip to the Mexican restaurant I frequent. The staff ( Mexican ) often have their family nearby while one or two are on the job. The kids will do various things, but I note their parents are teaching them to help keep the place clean. I would specifically name the place, but I am unsure of what the executive view on something like this would be, as its been my observation that highly paid people on the executive level are often quite disconnected from the lower levels where the work is getting done. They may well put an end to it and tell these folk they can't have their kids "loitering". As far as I am concerned - it takes me back to when I was a little kid and people did a lot of things - including work - as a family. The kids learned a heckuva lot more than just how to do a job. They learned about family values, ethics, and personal responsibility that I see sorely lacking in a modern childhood.
( The rest is an offtopic rant, but I feel the need to vent something here...)
I would blame it on lack of religious training, but seeing what religion has degenerated into, I would just as soon send my kids to talk to those people who loiter outside supermarkets asking passerby for a buck than send them into a church where they would have the same experience.
So far, the closest experience I have had with someone I thought has it straight with God is a TV preacher out of Arkansas, yet even he appears to place money above the Word, as he has repeatedly denounced people violating his copyrighted works. My own understanding of God is to spread his Word like Linux. Freely and openly to anyone who wants it. Like Linux, its just a set of instructions. Linux is computer code. God's word is a code of ethics for people. Whether or not this was inspired by an extraterrestrial being is open for inquiry. It could have started out as a leadership tool written by Moses for all I know. Our own religious people have screwed this up into such a mess it flat stinks. Lest you forget, it was the religious people who had even Jesus murdered on the Cross. One thing I have noted... getting between a preacher and his begging bowl is like getting between a hungry cat and his food dish. Mess with that dish and you are gonna get clawed. All that talk about "lilies of the field" and "birds of the air" is just a sales pitch for them - not a lifestyle. If they were what they preached, they would not need to browbeat, beg, or enforce copyright.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @10:19AM
As best as I can tell, "God's word" is more like a framework; one hacked together over many years by numerous people and groups, many of whom didn't get along with each other, or even communicate, and so wrote mutually incompatible features; all of which nevertheless got included into the package. Because of this, no-one can realistically use the entire framework, without it triggering all kinds of logic errors on seemingly arbitrary statements.
But people still find large chunks of it useful, so they selectively take and adapt various parts which fit their own ideas, maybe added a few customisations here and there, and compile them into their own (proprietary) version.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:31AM
My take on it as well. There is a lot of "Nostradumus Code" in it which often bent for interpretation as one is so guided.
Predictions that came true are regarded as prophecy; predictions that did not come to pass did not make canon.
So, we only get the subset of predictions that did come true. Not all of them.
Our great leadership types ( I consider Moses as one of our earliest recorded leaders ) have their own style - and this book chronicles leadership styles and human conditions.
So was there a Creator? Being I am at a complete loss to explain what I see, I am forced to believe there is some intelligent creation mechanism that brought what I see today into play. Just what it is, I do not know. I do not think Moses did either, for he writes that when he asked the creator who he was, he was told "I am that I am". YHVH. Through much phonetic telephone-tag talk, we end up with "Jehovah".
Like you say, looks like everyone has spun off their own proprietary recompile of the source text. And I guess I am doing the same. So I am no better ( or worse ) than the rest of 'em. But at least I am following as so guided by my inner conscience, which I tend to trust more than some guy with a microphone trying to hammer in his point of view with a kilowatt power amplifier.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28 2014, @11:14PM
So when you were little, kids learned the greatness of family values and other stuff they don't bother to teach their own kids.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday July 29 2014, @01:36AM
No, its not that they don't "bother" to teach their own kids. This has gone further than that.
When I was a kid, my family wasn't afloat in debt, we worked for what we had. The whole family did so - and thought of it as completely natural to do so. There was no such thing as a "soccer mom" or gardeners.. we kids did that - and there was no time for "soccer". We did things as a family because we flat did not have the money to hire it out. Besides it gave all of us a lot of time together doing things as a family. Somehow we have let the system warp us that only time we seem to do things as a family anymore is some form of entertainment where the someone else who put us up to it ( marketing professionals ) is getting paid.
Then the debt I referred to, so we can have the "nice" SUV and have it NOW....and have the money for Annual Passes to Disneyland, hire the gardener, whatever, now we have both parents working in the corporate life where the presence of children is not tolerated, trying to meet those "easy monthly payments".
No, its not the parent's not bothering to teach their own kids.... its that very few families have the time anymore to do so, as time is money and can be sold to the corporate world to work off debt.
I think its the same thing I experienced when I had a project go sour, and I spent enormous amounts of time trying to make it work. Momma cat gave litter to kittens, and not a one of them grew up fit for a pet. The little critters hardly knew me.
Supporting Biblical advice: Job 12: 7-10 : Which states roughly "Observe the animals and they will teach you." My animals taught me that if I fail to make time for them, they won't make time for me either, and grow up wild. And they did.
I did it with kittens. Way too many parents unwittingly are doing it to their children - forced by economic debt slavery. We seem to be really vulnerable to alcohol, cigarettes, and debt. Proverbs 22:7 tells me a lot about that.
I will cite the Bible a lot as the root code for my ethics. But please don't lump me in with all those christians who are nothing more than fire insurance salesmen - always passing around their collection plates. Matthew 10:9 talks about that.. *specifically* told us not to go around collecting money. As far as I am concerned, religion is to Christianity as RIAA is to music - just in it for the money.
They were just getting into monetization of faith when I was a kid; I would have a hard time thinking of religious leaders training ethics into my kids if I had any.
As far as I am concerned, they are about as bad as a bunch of dope dealers trying to get my kids hooked on the idea they buy blessings by serving the great prayerhead which will hock up a "powerful prayer" full of "blessings" in exchange for a tithe. Training kids has to be done by someone who *cares* about his kids... the parents. Not someone who looks on kids as a future profit center. No wonder a lot of kids have problems.
We all seem to see this problem, whether it be kids, music, or computer systems. Someone wants to control it all. And some of us fight back. A lot of here are fighting back, and refuse to just lay down and take it without saying a word.
Teach it to your kids, before the "other side" fills your kids full of the selfishness and greed that seems to be so prevalent in our modern capital-based economic system.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]