The Best Time Investments You Can Make

The Best Time Investments You Can Make

Some decent recommendations.
I liked this mention: "In other parts of the world, such as India, it’s normal for people to enjoy each others’ company without activity or even conversation" I remember this being one of my favorite things in India.
-Lauren

MOAB

Ralph Waldo Emerson poem on friendship

Friendship (from Essays: First Series, 1841)

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

NY Times Article: Generation Sell

Generation Sell

By: WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ

Published: November 12, 2011

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

click link above for the rest of the article -Lauren

from citiwire.net: rooming houses for Millennials?

Bring Back the Rooming House?

Neal Peirce / Nov 12 2011

For Release Sunday, November 13, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group

Is it time to restore the old-fashioned rooming house — or something akin to it — in America’s cities?

OK, maybe not the century-old stereotype of a dowdy rooming house with doilies on the furniture, tiny rooms with cast iron beds, a shared bathroom down the hall, and meals ruled over by a stern older woman.

Shared meals? Maybe not anymore. But we do need much smaller, more affordable units than today’s market offers, especially for our millions of “millennials” — twenty-somethings who are now selecting cities to live in. Millennials find themselves stuck with meager pay (median income $31,000) in today’s limping economy.

Unquestionably, tens of millions of oncoming youth will disconnect from the American vision of home as a “homestead” — the self-contained units of our pioneer forbears, translated since World War II by a suburban home occupying its own staked out lot.

The shift will shock some. For decades, the popular idea’s been that rooming houses, mother-in-law apartments, garage flats and accessory units should be zoned away to prevent a wave of flophouses and seedy units subverting neighborhood values and stability.

But it’s time to turn a fresh page, argue two keen observers of the current scene: Seattle-based urban designer Mark Hinshaw (writing in Planning, the American Planning Associations’ magazine) and David Smith of Recap Real Estate Advisors in Boston.

Recognize, they urge, that we’re into a new urban age. Cities are “in”, especially with youth. And those millennials are delaying marriage — by a full five years over the previous decade, the Census Bureau reports. And rather than the suburbs where many grew up, they are instead seeking, Hinshaw observes, “cities or older, close-in suburbs that have a rich array of choices — in employment, transit, bicycling, arts and entertainment, and a ‘cafe culture’ similar to what’s found in many European cities.”

Smith argues it’s high time we shake “the tyranny of the homestead vision as expressed in antiquated, restrictive, and exclusionary zoning and building codes.” Examples of such rules include arbitrary density limits based on units per acre, minimum lot sizes, minimum setbacks, minimum bedroom sizes, and prohibitions against dividing flats.

Smith and Hinshaw suggest we even take on the sacred cow of minimum parking requirements for apartment complexes, saving both cash and prime real estate by repealing them. (Many of today’s young urbanites don’t have cars anyway — so why oblige them to rent units with a car stall figured in, inflating the cost?)

And, Smith underscores, do away with Nanny State restrictions on unmarried cohabitation or student occupancy.

Candidate strategies for more compact urban housing units abound. Smith suggests, for example, basement or attic flats that use the “excess” space in larger homes in which an aging homeowner wants to remain but has rooms that are idle and chores that need to be done. “A bargain can be struck,” he suggests, with a younger tenant who pays reduced rent in exchange for upkeep and light maintenance. The net result: “to turn an over-housed, under-maintained single-family dwelling into a multi-household home that benefits both parties.”

In Seattle, developer Jim Potter has put up several buildings specifically for people in their 20s, assuming their basic need is a safe place to sleep that has a private bath. The units are a few hundred square feet in size, rents (WiFi included) just $500 a month. There’s a very compact kitchen in each unit, but in ancient rooming house tradition, larger shared kitchen as well. Potter offers parking stalls but most go untaken.

The Tree House in Palo Alto, Calif., specifically for young singles, has four stories stepped and terraced back to avoid a boxy look. Rents range from $400 to $900 a month, compared to about $1,500 to $2,000 for market rate studios.

But Hinshaw has developed plans for a model 21st century rooming house (still unbuilt) that’s even more imaginative. The small (400-500 square feet) units would have high ceilings, allowing for a low-head-height sleeping loft above the kitchen area and bath.

And he’d seek to make the building even more interesting. There’d be a green roof with grasses to collect and absorb precipitation. And then a ground floor occupied by small shops and cafes, possibly compact start-up businesses– “sort of a street-level commercial incubator.”

This kind of housing, Hinshaw believes, would “be immediately applicable” to urban areas served by subway, light rail, or high-capacity rapid bus transit. But his loft design, he asserts, could fit well into smaller towns or suburbs with underused properties such as strip malls or car dealerships.

To make these strategies work, localities will have to reform ancient zoning laws. It’s easy to imagine apprehensive neighbors turning out in opposition. But all need to be reminded: We’re all in it together in the new limited economy — and the young millennials are America’s future.

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If we changed the way we build houses, this could be different.

-Lauren

article from the Guardian: the power of the Koch brothers

Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind

David and Charles Koch, oil tycoons with strong right-wing views and connections, look set to tighten their grip on US politics

That makes 2012 the first Citizens United presidential election, and in turn offers rich pickings to the Koch brothers. They have already made clear their intentions. At their most recent billionaires' gathering in Vail, Colorado in June, Charles Koch described next year's presidential contest as "the mother of all wars". A tape of his private speech obtained by Mother Jones said the fight for the White House would be a battle "for the life or death of this country".

Ellen Page Talks "Vanishing of the Bees" on Bill Maher

volunteer in Thailand

A good organization for volunteering in Thailand:

Volunteer Thailand: Friends for Asia

I also recommend Pun Pun Center for Self Reliance outside Chiang Mai.

Atlantic article on innovation in India

India: The World's Secret Silicon Valley

For many firms, developing new products for consumers around the world is the most visible manifestation of innovation - the "real deal." But many people still see India as a place where other people's ideas are made or executed and not where innovation begins. (After all, you don't hear about an Indian equivalent to Google, iPod or Viagra.) Bu they're wrong. In more than 600 captive research and development (R&D) centers across India today, corporations are designing and building amazing new things.

For example, GE's John F. Welch Technology Center has developed a string of technological marvels. A transparent roof spanning 300 meters without any central supports. A device to display integrated anatomical information from a CT scan with live functional information from a PET scan. A car bumper that self-destructs on impact (rather than destroying, say, the leg of an unlucky pedestrian). The markets for these wonder products are truly global, encompassing the United States, Europe, Asia and, of course, India itself.

Where great ideas really come from. A special report

Similarly, Intel's R&D center in Bengaluru is its largest unit outside the United States, having recently overtaken the much older Israeli unit. Some of its work is truly "blue-sky" research. For example, the center delivered the world's first tera-scale experimental chip capable of one trillion operations per second.

In addition to GE and Intel, other global companies are also taking advantage of India's innovation skills. Indian R&D units are present in AstraZeneca, EMC, Microsoft, Philips, Pfizer and Alcatel-Lucent - providing striking evidence that Indians can "do" innovation. But global consumers rarely recognize India as the country of origin because most of this innovation is invisible. How so? The innovation occurring in these Indian captive units is visible only to other business units and is not revealed to end consumers.

To understand the nature of this invisibility, consider how new complex multicomponent products such as engines, IT hardware, or even major software are currently developed in multinational companies. Using horizontal segmentation, the various components involved are often developed in parallel, in different countries, only to be assembled at a later date. And India plays a large role in this multi-country orchestration of development of new products.

Because no country unit is solely responsible for the final result, it's difficult to associate any particular place with the innovation. Thus, the head of the GE unit in Bengaluru took great pains to state clearly that the unit in Bengaluru helped develop everything, but would not take sole credit for the aircraft engines and wind turbines. Equally important, no other R&D unit in the GE network can claim sole credit, either, which begs the question: "Where was it really innovated?"

One thing is clear: the availability of high-quality talent is a key innovation driver, and in fact, confidence in the capabilities of India's talent pool has increased. When we look to Microsoft, Bill Gates has noted: Microsoft's India center has exceeded expectations in terms of how quickly it became a contributor to the company's R&D network. This example among others indicates India has become an "unavoidable destination" for R&D and innovation centers.

Given India's historic absence from the innovation arena, many might ask how the country has contributed to outsourced innovation. The global services delivery model was invented in the late 1990s by many Indian IT companies, and this model allows for a key transformation: tightly integrated tasks formerly performed by workers in one location working for a single company now take on a distributed format, such that different parts of the work are executed in different geographies. The advantages are obvious, including the ability to (1) execute work where the best expertise exists at the lowest possible costs, (2) take advantage of time zone differences for round-the-clock efforts, and (3) achieve some level of risk diversification by building redundancy across locations.

These factors and the global delivery model have become fundamental to India's transition to an innovation destination. This process should work well for fairly routine, standardized tasks (e.g., booking flights and making restaurant reservations) as well as high-value-added knowledge work or creative work such as R&D because the global delivery model focuses not on the task itself, but whether the subtask links can be managed across distances.

With this efficient model and high-quality talent in place, India is positioned to be recognized not just for successful offshore services, but as the next global innovation hub.

Atlantic article on correlationg of drop of price of cocaine and drop in violent crime

How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime

It would appear that the "War on Drugs" only forced technology change, competition, better prices, and purer drugs for all. One would think our supposedly capitalist government would have seen that coming...
-Lauren

incredible images of recycling from the Atlantic

Recycling Around the World

Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization

The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) is an international, nonviolent, and democratic membership organisation. Its members are indigenous peoples, minorities, and unrecognised or occupied territories who have joined together to protect and promote their human and cultural rights, to preserve their environments, and to find nonviolent solutions to conflicts which affect them.

http://www.unpo.org/

from the Atlantic: incredible photos of Thai flooding

Thailand's Disastrous, Slow-Moving Flood

sustainable tshirts, cotton and other materials

from the Atlantic:

Sustainable Tees and Kinder Cotton

Tee shirts--the ones in your drawer and stuffed in your gym bag--aren't easily produced. No matter how elegant--or even how paint-spattered, stained, and degraded they are--they still require 400 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to make a single shirt. And jeans require 1,800 gallons. Cotton also takes a great deal of pesticides for it to grow.

Current methods of cotton production are unsustainable. Are there technological solutions here? Some say yes. One group is producing high-tech, GMO cotton that emits a certain poison that kills pests, but is harmless to humans. Given the nature of GMO, this type of cotton is controversial. And by definition, it's non-organic. Cotton hulls also usually end up as cattle feed: that means GMO material and other cotton byproducts such as cellulose and cooking oils could end up in our food supply. And making the matter moot--the various pests targeted by GMO cotton could become resistant to it over time.

In Pakistan, the world's fourth-largest producer of cotton, there is an initiative underway to innovate new, sustainable solutions. The Kissan Welfare Association is working with Pakistani farmers to analyze cotton fields in its area for what's needed--just the right amount of fertilizer and pesticides. Previously, the land had been carpet-bombed with insecticides so as to kill any possible pest that might end up in the field. The average Pakistani field has fewer than five acres and the farmers are often in debt, so using fewer pesticides is good for the farmers themselves--it's healthier and cheaper.

Also, aided by such groups as the World Wildlife Fund and the Better Cotton Initiative, farmers are learning how to use insect predators such as ladybirds on cotton pests. And some natural pesticides are increasingly finding their way onto the fields.

What about water? Farmers are learning how to use less of it. Pakistan doesn't have a great deal of water to spare, so anything to cut down of its use is needed. Basically, efforts are underway to stop flooding the fields, and instead watering the cotton with ditches.

For those of us off the farm and on the city streets, companies such as Adidas are committed to switching over their branded products to one-hundred percent sustainable cotton. Ikea is working directly with farmers in Pakistan to improve their farms. Levi Strauss is manufacturing its jeans using with less water: making jeans softer through the stonewashing process requires a lot of. The new Levi's Water‹Less jeans process will save sixteen million liters--and cost as about the same as conventional jeans.

What about skipping cotton altogether, and going the high-tech route? We can wear shirts made from plastic bottles. PET, the type of plastic coded with a resin ID of number 1 on its bottom, can be turned into a variety of outfits, from tee shirts to fleece. The bottles are cleaned and sorted for color then crushed and chopped into flakes. They are then melted and extruded into strands. Its use is endless: women's business suits (made from bottles) are being offered. Polartec is making its fleece products from bottles, too.

In Hollywood, bamboo is hot. It doesn't require nearly as much water to grow, nor does it require pesticides. It can blend with most fabrics: for example, a bamboo-cotton blend is available as a tee shirt.

What else can we do? Keep our clothing clean with less water. Switch to HE (high efficiency) washers. It also matters what kind of soap is used: in India, Unilever has a brand designed for handwashing, rather than for use in machines, because washers are less common there, even in cities.

What we choose to wear depends on how its grown--it's all interconnected. Whether we're aware or not, the cotton in our tee shirts and jeans may come from a family farmer trying to use less water and fewer pesticides