Linkage

Where are downtowns headed? One simple answer is intriguing, if somewhat fanciful: Perhaps they are headed to the suburbs.

They may be headed to places like Tempe, Ariz. In the past four years, in this suburban town of 184,000 that’s 10 miles outside Phoenix, a development has begun to rise that is explicitly trying to re-create downtown vitality and ambience in a seemingly unlikely place. Culdesac Tempe, which has drawn a fair amount of publicity, allows no cars inside its 17-acre expanse. Its goal, when built out, is to contain more than 700 apartments, 16,000 feet of retail commerce and 1,000 residents. “The removal of the car,” writes Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism, “allows for a porous, fine-grain urban pattern with a network of narrow, shaded pedestrian-only paseos, intimate courtyards and a central plaza.”

If you are familiar with the Phoenix area, you may be inclined to dismiss the importance of the development because Tempe is a college town, home to Arizona State University, and towns full of students and faculty are often thought to be entities unto themselves. But that’s not the case with Hampstead, a development gradually taking shape 12 miles outside of Montgomery, Ala. It advertises itself bluntly as an attempt to bring the city to the suburbs. “Imagine living in a community where you can walk to work, where your kids can (really) walk to school,” one brochure exults. The project managers tout “an opportunity for an active lifestyle without even reaching for the car keys.” That’s basically the whole selling job.

[…]

All of the experiments seem pointed, to a large extent, at people under 35 years of age, a group that still desires the density and variety of the center-city lifestyle, even as downtown commercial spaces remain disturbingly empty. And intriguingly, all of this is brewing even though conventional suburban office parks are experiencing worrisome vacancy rates.

All these things have increased housing demand, as have the grab bag of government subsidies for homebuyers: first home owner grants, stamp duty concessions, mortgage deposit guarantee schemes and shared equity schemes.

Saul Eslake sardonically calls them “builders’ and land developers’ profit margin expansion grants”, and notes that once again John Howard’s fingerprints are on them.

“Almost 60 years of history – since Menzies introduced the first home owners’ grant scheme at the instigation of the Young Liberals’ then president, John Howard – shows that anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise would have has resulted in more expensive housing, not in more people owning houses.

“Suppose a first homebuyer can afford to spend $500,000. And then the state government comes along and says, ‘Well, you won’t have to pay $50,000 on stamp duty’, then the homebuyer thinks, ‘Well, okay, I can now afford to spend $550,000.’ Probably buying the same house, because there’ll be someone else with the same stamp duty exemption competing for it.”

While HB 1521 does not apply to private businesses like bars, cafés, grocery stores, restaurants, and shopping malls, one of the law’s many insufficiencies is that the average Floridian doesn’t actually know what it does.

According to sources who spoke with The Daily Beast, that lack of information has resulted in vigilante behavior, in which civilians attempt to enforce the statute in venues where it does not actually apply. They say they have been stopped and questioned while using the locker room at the gym and the bathroom at the gas station, among other places. The double whammy of the harm the law already does—and then how broadly it’s being used to target an already vulnerable population—has made it difficult for trans Floridians to participate in the outside world or go about their day just like everyone else.

Gina Duncan, strategic partnerships manager for Equality Florida, says that the “general public is misinterpreting these bills,” resulting in increased reports of harassment to the statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group. A trans woman in central Florida, for instance, recently contacted her after she was prevented from using the restroom at a local cinema. Duncan says that the woman reported that a male customer had appointed himself the bathroom monitor, and was “challenging anyone, who in his opinion, appeared to be transgender.”

Last month, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, Michael Gove MP, announced a new and expanded definition of extremism as part of the Government’s Counter Terrorism Strategy. 

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Extremism is now defined as: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:

1. Negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or
2. Undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or
3. Intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2).”

While to some this may seem like a reasonable measure to protect against threats to democracy, the imprecise language leaves too much room for interpretation and potential misuse. The third of these – aiming to “intentionally create a permissive environment for others” is especially subjective and problematic: merely stating that legitimate grievances or drivers of extremism need to be tackled could be interpreted as falling within this definition.

[…] 

The new guidance is non-statutory, meaning it will not be enshrined in law and will only affect parliamentarians and civil servants who will no longer be allowed to engage with groups that supposedly meet the new definition. The government’s independent reviewer of state threat legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, has warned that this defines people as extremists by “ministerial decree”.

It is important to ask why the government have renewed their focus on extremism since 7 October, without proposing legislative changes and therefore denying parliamentary scrutiny. This may be because a previous attempt to redefine extremism by the Cameron government, failed to find a “legally robust” definition. However, regardless of how the new definition of extremism is applied, there will, no doubt, be a wider chilling effect on free speech.

Based on my recent experience with normal people, I'm not sure if this is satire or reportage.

Thanks for sending this along. I left my comments in the Google Doc.

You don’t see my comments? You’re looking at the old document. I copied your Google Doc and made a new Google Doc called “Proposal v2 – Comments.” Once you have my comments, put everything together in “Proposal v3 FINAL.” Then, if you don’t mind copy-pasting your new document link into the spreadsheet where we keep track of all the document links, that would be perfect. And, of course, make sure you’re in the most current spreadsheet (Copy of Spreadsheet COPY_01).

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what everyone had for lunch yesterday. Here I’ll send it to you again. I just replied to an email to Jeff with the link and asked him to forward it to you. The subject line is “Email.”

A pithy little declaration.

This document articulates W3C’s mission, its values, its organizational principles, and our vision for W3C as an organization in the context of our vision for the Web itself. The goal of this vision is not to predict the future, but to define shared principles to guide our decisions.

The goals of this document are to:

• Help the world understand what W3C is, what it does, and why it matters
• Communicate shared values and principles of the W3C community
• Be opinionated enough to provide a framework for making decisions, particularly on controversial issues
• Be timeless enough to guide W3C yet flexible enough to evolve when needed

This is the preprint version. Later paywalled here.

Despite the prevalence of urban high density, little research to-date has investigated the impacts of apartment living on food practices. Physical constraints of apartment kitchens (size, storage, cooking facilities) and the influence of the surrounding community food environment may present challenges to apartment residents’ healthful food practices, particularly in smaller apartments. This study aimed to determine whether these hypothesised barriers were evident in TikTok videos (n=250) sampled from five popular apartment-related hashtags. Overall, the majority of videos (87%) portrayed apartment living with a positive or neutral sentiment; with only 2% of videos portraying kitchen size and function negatively. Only a small number of videos portrayed the food practices of cooking at home (n=11), grocery shopping (n=5), and eating foods prepared out of the home (n=5). Further research investigating the actual impact of apartment living on the food practices of residents will enable comparison of this public portrayal, to the reality.

In a statement, Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland expressed disappointment “in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”

Dave Hansen, executive director of the Author’s Alliance, a nonprofit that often advocates for expanded digital access to books, also came out against the ruling. “Authors are researchers. Authors are readers,” he says. “IA’s digital library helps those authors create new works and supports their interests in seeing their works be read. This ruling may benefit the bottom line of the largest publishers and most prominent authors, but for most it will end up harming more than it will help.”

The Internet Archive’s legal woes are not over. In 2023, a group of music labels, including Universal Music Group and Sony, sued the archive in a copyright infringement case over a music digitization project. That case is still making its way through the courts. The damages could be up to $400 million, an amount that could pose an existential threat to the nonprofit.

One of the public health doctors that I focus on is a young woman named Alison Berry who was the public health officer for Clallam County. She was effective and smart. She came to grips with the local pandemic. When the state reopened for business, she noticed that there were these huge spikes in infections and that the spikes in infections were concentrated around bars and restaurants. And so she came up with this idea to impose a temporary vaccine mandate to sit indoors at a restaurant or a bar. Very rapidly the infection rates went down. It was a public health success, but it aroused a tremendous local backlash. Because of social media, the opponents were able to coordinate with people all over the world. And so Alison Berry, this anonymous, local public health official, suddenly was getting death threats from 10,000 miles away. You had the local anger. And then you had it amplified on bigger channels like Fox News. And then you had it amplified even more on social media. This is a toxic environment. Unless we get a handle on these technologies, unless we learn to use social media more responsibly, we're heading into a dark period where rumor replaces fact and that makes democracy extremely hard to function.

A really good guide to being an activist in general:

One of the most important things that trans folks need to get before their arguments can work well is that we tend to get pushed pretty hard to the political left when we come out and transition. It’s not some brainwashing thing—we just tend to be poorer, better-educated, and get hit with the shitty side of our capitalistic social structure, all of which pushes voters toward more liberal or leftist political positions. Given that we tend to hang out in groups, particularly online, we get hit pretty hard with the echo chamber effect, which reinforces socially-common political biases through self-sorting.

In simple terms? It means that by hanging out with a bunch of other trans folks, we tend to get entrenched in political stances that are common in the trans community. It’s the Fox News Grandpa effect.

And I’m guessing that it makes you feel a little uncomfortable to hear that.

This is the first and most important thing you need to face if you want to persuade people outside of your social bubble effectively: you are not immune to persuasion or propaganda. You have absorbed a lot without noticing it over the years, both before and after your transition. And those things? People have noticed them, and noticing those things has colored their view of you as a person and a rhetor.

Put a different way: if they know you have a history of arguing for what they see as hard-left stuff, stuff they think is a bad idea, they’re going to treat other things you argue for with a degree of pretty understandable skepticism.