Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

current tune:

  WILL's Afternoon Magazine

after arguing at length in the bram cohen thread i post earlier, it was really nice to listen to NPR and hear james kunstler having a decent undersanding of the societal forces that lead to the existance of cities. he was touting his new book:

which would seem like nostradamus crazy ramblings, predicting the end of life as we know it, except that he was exceptionally well-versed in how we got to here. and he is very much pro-public transport, anti-suburb. so you would think i would agree with him. except i don't. i don't think that taking away our main source of energy will cause us to revert to a mid-19th century social structure. society rarely doubles back on itself. if we really have hit the petroleum peak, as he suggests, we'll find a way to prop up the most important energy uses while we find a new way to sustain ourselves. we've done it before and we'll do it again.
oddly enough, another podcast from WILL (which i listen to because WBEZ doesn't do podcasts, so urbana/champaign is the nearest NPR station that does) was with the researchers who performed this study, which was mentioned in the argument about whether New Orleans should be abandoned for economic reasons. btw, my cousin did make it out of n'awlins before the hurricane hit with her car and the clothes on her back(she's not one of hese people who refuses to leave their homes in the face of natural disasters). However, since she teaches grade schoolers, and it's unsure if/when the city, and by extension, the school will re-open its doors, she'll be substitute teaching somewhere else for the time being.
anyway, the Harvard professors.
they actually spent mos of the time discussing the wether the US' privatized health care system is creating a caste system, not discussing moral hazard as it applies to health care (as the article does). apparently their publishers made them remove the word 'caste' from the title of the book, even though most of the people they interviewed thought it so appropriate they didn't question its use.

i keep meaning to post about our trip to victoria, but i haven't really colleced any thoughts about it, mainly because we were so disconnected from the internet the whole time, i sort of forgot my blog existed. and when i remembered, i was more concerned with fixing the code stuff. i actually spent most of my time reading this:

insead of slashdot and osnews. surprisingly, i got through most of it. after failing so miserably with the devil in the white city i thought maybe i no longer had the attention span necessary to read a book. then again, all the daniel burnham parts of devil were things i'd learned in school, so it's not surprising i was bored by them. so i'll have a more personal update some other time.