Linkage

In 1988, in a motel room in Atlanta, Georgia, I sat down with Shane to do an interview on the last night of a week-long trip through the American south with the band. It was a Sunday evening as I recall, and Shane, who hated interviews, was for once in a sober and reflective mood. When I asked him about the mixture of tenderness and brutal realism that characterised his songs, he said: “People don’t understand what it takes to write a truthful song, a song that is trying to be pure and honest.” Though I pressed him to elucidate, that was all he would say on the matter.

For a time, some would say too short a time, Shane MacGowan wrote pure and honest songs like no one else. Last week, when I chatted with his friend and fellow songwriter Nick Cave, at a public event in St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, we began with a kind of impromptu tribute to Shane, who had died that morning. Nick spoke candidly about his “pure spirit”, as well as how envious he had once felt about Shane’s ability to cut to the heart of things in his songs, and the empathy he evinced for the outsiders and marginalised who inhabited them. He regarded Shane with obvious awe as “the songwriter of his generation”.

Though this is not the time to go into it too deeply, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that Shane’s lifestyle of dogged excess – and the darkness that sometimes descended in its wake, at considerable cost to himself and those in his sway – diminished his extraordinary talent. “You call it chaos,” he once admonished me, when I asked about his rapidly advancing state of dissolution. “I don’t regard it as chaos. I regard it as natural living.”

Eliminating single-family zoning was part of a broader package of reforms deliberated by Alexandria’s city council known as the Zoning for Housing/Housing for All initiative. While most council members welcomed the reforms, lawns across the city have been littered with “anti-zoning” signs for months in anticipation of the vote. Some residents assumed that by eliminating the codes that restrict what can be built how and where, the city would lose its charm.

Others point out, however, that the pride of the city, Old Town, would not be able to exist within the restrictive zoning that has defined Alexandria for the last half-century. Originally laid out in 1749, Old Town follows a grid pattern and is beloved for its multi-story brick buildings housing a mixture of commercial uses as well as medium-, low-, and high-density residential opportunities. By contrast, the majority of Alexandria is zoned exclusively for low-density, single-family residential housing. In fact, it’d be illegal to replicate Old Town in most of Alexandria under the current zoning regime. 

The bungled opening of the final stage of WestConnex, the Rozelle interchange, is bad enough that veteran transport experts such as Michelle Zeibots at the University of Technology Sydney say only a royal commission can open the lid on how such debacles can happen.

[…] 

“We need to know who thought it up, who pushed for it, who in the private sector and public service designed, sanctioned and signed-off on its various stages and what the nature of the interaction was between government and private sector business interests.”

WestConnex now looks likely to compel a second harbour tunnel, the proposed Beaches motorway and another segment of the M6 tollway.

“It’s a cycle. It goes on and on and on, where they just build a new motorway,” Zeibots said. “You get induced traffic growth, it creates a new bottleneck, a new set of traffic jams, they are bigger and they are more difficult to contend with than the previous one.”

“What a private toll-road company is motivated by is completely and utterly anathema to what a city needs in order to have a good and adequate transport network to support its economic and social exchange functions,” she said.

In 1990s Berlin, baugruppen (building groups) came to the fore in response to the German city’s housing crisis. Building groups are DIY collectives of future resident-owners who come together to develop their new homes. Households become producers rather than consumers, so they save on the developer’s profit margin and have more control over building design and quality.

At its peak, about 17% of new homes in Berlin were baugruppen projects. By 2017 more than 600 projects had been completed. The current master plan for redeveloping Berlin’s former Tegel airport calls for baugruppen to produce 2,000 homes – 40% of the project’s housing.

The success of baugruppen has inspired building groups in Australia. Data from one development and advisory service that assists building group members show members have on average saved around 10% on their new home building costs since 2010.

As well, they save on transfer taxes/stamp duties and mortgage interest payments. So in Victoria, for example, total savings could be as much as 16.5% on a A$1 million house.

I must admit I got a bit teary watching this. There's more with Jeremy on the creators' YouTube channel.

Motorist deaths in Melbourne have fallen by half over the past decade, but there’s been no reduction in deaths among pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicycle riders over the same period.

It is in this context that City of Yarra councillors voted last week to expand a trial of 30km/h speed limits across all of Fitzroy and Collingwood, other than major thoroughfares and pending state government approval.

A growing number of major cities including London, Paris, Toronto and Barcelona are adopting 30km/h limits on their streets and say it has made their cities safer. The World Health Organisation has called for it to be the maximum where vehicles mix with pedestrians and cyclists. But Victoria Police’s chief commissioner, Shane Patton, scoffed at the plan last week, saying he was not aware of any evidence that it would reduce road trauma. “I think no one is going to obey it ... it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Patton’s view – although perhaps widely shared – may have been a shock to Victoria Police’s fellow members of the Victorian Government Road Safety Partnership, made up of the Transport Accident Commission and the Transport, Justice and Health departments.

The partnership told a state parliament inquiry into road trauma earlier this year that successive studies had shown that 30km/h was the “maximum impact speed for a healthy adult before death or very serious injury becomes increasingly likely”.

Someone hit by a car at 50km/h has a 90 per cent chance of being killed, compared with a 10 per cent chance at 30km/h, those studies show.

I must admit I misinterpreted the headline. "Wait! This is the era of post offices? How wonderful! Why has nobody told me?"

Martinez Ferrada said the federal government is looking to support downtown revitalization through several agencies, but there are also opportunities to rethink the core purpose of downtowns, creating new ways to bring people back without relying on office workers.

“One of the opportunities that we see is for those cities to develop kind of a new stream of how can we use downtown cores,” she said.

[…] 

Montreal’s Morizio said the long-term solution may be to re-establish downtowns as a place for social connection rather than just going to an office.

She said Montreal has begun installing pedestrian-only streets to create public spaces, but such projects are costly and not applicable everywhere.

“People aren’t going to come to work more than two or three days a week ? So, I think to be able to counter that, what we need to do is we need our commercial streets to almost be our third place,” she said, referring to a familiar public spot that people can go.

“Besides our dwelling and where we work, we need a space where people can come and connect. That’s a lot of what we lost during the pandemic.”

On Thursday 9/28, I had the opportunity to speak at a virtual roundtable convened by Congressman Bobby Scott on "AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge?". The roundtable was a closed meeting, but sharing our opening remarks is allowed, so I am posting mine here.

The purpose of this white paper is to publicly present the fundamentals of MMT

What is MMT?

MMT began largely a description of Federal Reserve Bank monetary operations, which are best
thought of as debits and credits to accounts as kept by banks, businesses, and individuals.
Warren Mosler independently originated what has been popularized as MMT in 1992. And while
subsequent research has revealed writings of authors who had similar thoughts on some of MMT’s
monetary understandings and insights, including Abba Lerner, George Knapp, Mitchell Innes, Adam
Smith, and former NY Fed chief Beardsley Ruml, MMT is unique in its analysis of monetary
economies, and therefore best considered as its own school of thought.

Two recent papers from York University, from a team led by assistant professor Kinnon MacKinnon, offer a wider sampling. MacKinnon and his team interviewed 28 detransitioners who told them complicated stories of identity evolution, medical complications, and experiences with anti-trans and anti-nonbinary discrimination. Taken together, they suggest ways providers and society as a whole could better support trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people. Spoiler: It’s not by banning care.

Published in PLOS One on Nov. 29, the first paper sought to “qualitatively explore the care experiences and perspectives of individuals who discontinued or reversed their gender transitions.” The second, published in Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity on Nov. 30, took those qualitative findings and attempted to demarcate four discrete subtypes or pathways for detransition.

Of 28 interviewees who answered a call for people in Canada who had shifted or discontinued a transition, 10 were at birth assigned male, and 18 female. They all had negative experiences during their initial transition. But most did not follow the typical sequence that widely shared detransitioner stories follow, of switching genders, then switching back to identifying as cis. A clear majority, 60 percent, had shifted from a binary trans identity when they began transitioning into a nonbinary identity at the time of the interview. By contrast, only six identified as female or a woman, and none identified as male or a man.