Post Oakland

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Go! Oakland Warriors!

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

A paid entertainment basketball franchise called the Warriors is apparently planning to move from Oakland to San Francisco, supposedly a turnover by Oakland officials, who are in denial.

Instead, these officials, and all Oaklanders, ought celebrate the shipping off of anti-intellectual violent extortionate spectacle. Pity not shipped off further.

Mayor Jean Quan and others ought be ashamed of lusting after paid entertainment franchise owners at all. Quan and company are fond of calling Oakland “a city of the 99%” and thus should reject the appalling wealth transfer to the tiny fraction of the 1% that is pro sports. The team owners claim “no new taxes” for San Franciscans. Yeah, right, and I have a second Bay Bridge to sell you. All of their incentives point to beggaring the municipality forever more.

Previous: Things that bring all the classes and cultures in a community together.

Posted in Oakland, Peeves, Politics | 2 Comments »

Ban* human drivers somewhere by 2020

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

Read Brad Templeton’s latest post on self-driving cars, which has a number of updates. They’re coming fast, but how fast we drastically reduce transportation deaths, give people back a huge amount of time, reduce stress, and greatly reduce space and other resources dedicated to transportation, and how secure new systems are, is undetermined. Of course there are many reasons to be skeptical — the transition will probably be much slower and more problematic than needed, but in a few decades will still seem a major triumph. But I don’t want the hidden trillions of dollars, hours, lives, carbon emissions, malfunctions, etc. that could be saved sooner to be wasted.

Regarding security, malfunctions, etc., we need to demand use of proven secure protocols and source open to inspection, i.e, not play security through obscurity. Regarding space, planning for urbanity remade (largely, recovered) through autonomous vehicles needs to be the top urban planning priority.

The benefits will be so great that we should also think about how to speed adoption — the only disheartening news in Templeton’s post concerns a survey in which only 20% of car buyers would pay an additional $3,000 for a fully (if I understand correctly) self-driving car. How little respondents value their own time and lives, let alone others’! It’s time to start agitating for road owners to ban human drivers. Most road owners are governments, but not all — consider as an issue of public policy or consumer demand as you wish.

Won’t banning human drivers disadvantage poor people who can’t afford a self-driving car? Possibly very briefly, but on net I expect self-driving cars to have an egalitarian effect — they’ll make owning a vehicle at all unnecessary (a rental can be summoned on demand), reduce housing costs (of which parking is a big part), and allow the recovery of areas walled off and drowned out by highways.

Let’s ban human drivers from at least some roads by 2020. I suggest starting with San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley — because I live close to it! Admittedly a downtown area or certain lanes of a highway might be an easier start.

*In theory it is usually preferable to increase prices rather than ban altogether. In this case, obvious mechanisms would include drastically increasing driver license fees and tolls for vehicles with human drivers. In practice, a ban may be more feasible.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Open Source, Politics | 6 Comments »

Announcing RichClowd: crowdfunding with a $tatus check

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

RichClowd

Oakland, California, USA — 2012 April 1

Today, RichClowd pre-announces the launch of RichClowd.com, an exclusive “crowdfunding” service for the wealthy. Mass crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have demonstrated a business model, but are held back by the high transaction costs of small funds and non-audacious projects proposed by under-capitalized creators. RichClowd will be open exclusively to funders and creators with already substantial access to capital.

The wealthy can fund and create audacious projects without joining together, but mass crowdfunding points to creative, marketing, networking, and status benefits to joint funding. So far mass crowdfunding has improved the marketplace for small projects and trinkets. The wealthy constitute a different strata of the marketplace — in the clouds, relatively — and RichClowd exists to improve the marketplace for monuments, public and personal, and other monumental projects.

“Through exclusivity RichClowd will enable projects with higher class, bigger vision, and that ultimately long-lasting contributions to society”, said RichClowd founder Mike Linksvayer, who continued: “Throughout human history great people have amassed and created the infrastructure, artifacts and knowledge that survives and is celebrated. As the Medicis were to the renaissance, RichClowders will be to the next stage of global society.”

RichClowd will initially have a membership fee of $100,000, which may be applied to project funding pledges. To ensure well-capitalized projects, RichClowd will implement a system called Dominant Assurance Contracts, which align the interests of funders and creators via a refund above the pledged amount for unsuccessful projects. This system will require creators to deposit the potential additional refund amount prior to launching a RichClowd project.

For the intellectual products of RichClowd projects, use of a forthcoming RichClowd Club License (RCCL) will be encouraged, making outputs maximally useful to funders, while maintaining exclusivity. Egalitarian projects will have the option of using a free public license.

The technology powering RichClowd.com will be developed openly and available under an AGPL open source badgeware intellectual property license. “RichClowd believes in public works. In addition to the many that will be created via the RichClowd service, open development of the RichClowd.com technology is the company’s own direct contribution to the extraordinary public work that is the Internet”, said Linksvayer.

About RichClowd

RichClowd is a pre-launch exclusive crowdfunding service with a mission of increasing the efficiency of bringing together great wealth and great projects to make an amazing world. Based in Oakland, California, a city with a reputation for poverty and agitation, RichClowd additionally takes on the local civic duty of pointing out Oakland’s incredible wealth and wealthy residents: to begin with, look up at the hills.

Contact

Mike Linksvayer, Founder
biginfo@richclowd.com

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Oakland, Open Services, Open Source, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

Staten Joseland

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

As a followup to a post comparing the population densities of Manhattan and Brooklyn to those of San Francisco and Oakland (not even close): if San Jose (945,942, 2,000/km2) had the density of Staten Island (468,730, 3,151.8/km2), San Jose would have 1,490,710 residents.

Another bit of San Jose trivia, which I’ve meant to blog ever since I briefly lived there (2005): it is the largest suburb in the U.S. As of 2000 (I haven’t seen newer), it was the only U.S. city with a population above 500,000 with an estimated daytime population significantly lower than its resident population (5.6% daytime population loss).

For ease of reference, the daytime population gains of New York City (obviously if broken out Manhattan’s would be far higher, and Staten Island’s far lower), San Francisco, and Oakland were 7%, 21.7%, and 2.7% respectively.

Posted in Oakland, Peeves | No Comments »

How many people can Sanhattan hold?

Saturday, March 3rd, 2012

There’s a medium length but not very informative article today titled Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold? Very speculatively, if Manhattan remains one of the premier cities in the world into the post-human future, perhaps trillions.

But I mostly use this as an excuse to harp on an old point, closer to home. How many people can San Francisco hold? Oakland? Currently these places are horribly underpopulated, semi-rural outposts, with populations of 805,235 (6,632.9/km2) and 390,724 (2,704.2/km2) respectively. At current Manhattan (27,394/km2) and Brooklyn (14,037/km2) densities respectively, San Francisco’s population would be 3,325,635 and Oakland’s 2,028,175.

That’s right, Brooklyn is twice as dense as San Francisco: this isn’t about skyscrapers.

Considering the immense benefits of density for both creativity and energy efficiency, it is a horrible shame that there does not exist a reasonably dense city in the U.S. outside of New York. Autonomous vehicles will be the next chance to significantly reconfigure cities, not least by vastly reducing the amount of space needed for cars. There are a couple obvious ways to get started in that direction now. Whether a city makes good on this opportunity for reconfiguration will globally be the most significant determinant of success or failure in the coming decades. Pity it is getting zero attention relative to circuses.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Peeves | 7 Comments »

De-skilled, politically inadvisable spam production (social media expertise)

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Oakland Local is a fine web publication that feels to me like a small town weekly or biweekly newspaper, but a bit more worldly, and much, much less the social calendar/reporter and advertiser. But I think these differences can be attributed to locale and moreso era. I recommend checking out OL if you’re OL, and Oakland North too, which looks similar but feels a bit different, presumably because the latter is written by journalism students; they complement each other.

OL has put on a few discussions and parties that I haven’t gotten around to going to. I noticed that they were to hold a news cafe today. I failed to read the description, assuming a news cafe would involve discussion of stuff OL had reported on. Instead:

This second news cafe will focus on how people in Oakland use social media to get the word out about causes and events – with powerful results.

Oops. There’s not much that could interest me less than a socialmediaemergency. I didn’t pay much attention, instead focusing on working through my social mediamail. But I picked up on (or maybe just assumed; these things are certainly not new) two or so things that distress me:

  • I suspect most attendees (and the event was very well attended) are pretty far left. At least one of the panelists mentioned being arrested recently, I assume at an Occupy Oakland protest. The uncritical cheerleading of this crowd for “social media tools” controlled by the 1% (I’m dubious about that split, but I doubt folks getting arrested are) is bizarre. Do you really want “your” social media and graph the the mercy of services that will turn evil and/or moribund soon (show me one that has lasted), and even if there’s a short-term advantage to doing so, is it really politically acceptable?
  • “Social media” is treated as something that many of the gathered are “experts” in, and that organizations ought have strategies around. These propositions also seem slightly bizarre to me. Hundreds of millions of people use “social media” proficiently. There’s nothing remotely difficult about it. Would anyone proclaim themselves to be an “email expert”? Do not self-proclaimed social media experts realize they are the butts of so many jokes? But nevermind jokes — the idea of “social media expertise” seems a warning of some kind of de-skilling that will haunt. And the idea that “social media strategy” is worthy of being on the radar of organizations speaks to creeping PR-ification, non-authenticity, spam, and belief in voodoo. Microblog whatever announcements would’ve been made through other venues anyway and encourage staff and community to communicate whatever they’re doing and excited about via personal accounts. The end. More than that isn’t going to significantly improve fundraising or other actions you care about. Although the term “social media” has gotten ugly, remember that at least it isn’t “promotional media”.

To counter my complaints, I hope to see more political awareness around technology, more up-skilling, and much, much less belief in the goodness of spam, and more recognition thereof. Along these lines, I am happy with several of the things that Mozilla is doing, technically putting things in place to further decentralization, and helping everyone become web makers (up-skill) rather than web spammers (de-skill). There is vast opportunity to take all of these things local, and Oakland ought be ahead of that game.

To be clear, I’m not complaining about Oakland Local above. Actually I want to praise and thank them. As I said, the event was very well attended, very well executed, and people seemed really into it; that says a lot. It also accomplished much for me, not least getting this stored rant off my chest, and perhaps much more. I’m looking forward to other OL events, but I will make sure to read descriptions first. ☻

Addendum: Brief OL writeup of the event.

Posted in Oakland, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

End of the 2011 world

Saturday, December 31st, 2011


I took the above photo near the beginning of 2011. It has spent most of the year near the top (currently #2) of my photos hosted at Flickr ranked by their interestingness metric. Every other photo in the 200 they rank (sadly I don’t think anyone not logged in as me can see this list) has some combination of being on other people’s lists of favorites, comments, or large number of views. The above photo has none of that. Prior to this post it has only been viewed 33 times by other people, according to Flickr, and I don’t think that number has changed in some time. Their (not revealed) code must find something about the image itself interesting. Is their algorithm inaccurate? In any case the image is appropriate as the world of 2011 is ending, and in 2012 I absolutely will migrate my personal media hosting to something autonomous, as since last year someone (happens to be a friend and colleague) has taken on the mantle of building media sharing for the federated social web.

My employer’s office moved from San Francisco to Mountain View in April, contributing to a number of people leaving or transitioning out, which has been a bummer. I’ve been working exclusively from home since May. Still, there have been a number of good developments, which I won’t attempt to catalog here. My favorites include agreement with the Free Software Foundation regarding use of CC0 for public domain software, small improvements in the CC legal user interface, the return and great work of a previous colleague, retirement of two substandard licenses, research, and a global summit/launch of a process toward version 4.0 of the CC licenses, which I hope over the next year prove at least a little bit visionary, long-standing, and have some consideration for how they can make the world a better place.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent more time thinking about social science-y stuff in 2011 than I have in at least several years. I’ll probably have plenty to say regarding this on a range of topics next year, but for now I’ll state one narrow “professionally-related” conclusion: free/libre/open software/culture/etc advocates (me included) have done a wholly inadequate job of characterizing why our preferences matter, both to the general public and to specialists in every social science.

Apart from silly peeves, two moderate ideas unrelated to free/libre/open stuff that I first wrote about in 2011 and I expect I’ll continue to push for years to come: increasing the minimum age and education requirement for soldiers and tearing down highway 980.

I haven’t done much programming in several years, and not full time in about a decade. This has been making me feel like my brain is rotting, and contributes to my lack of prototyping various services that I want to exist. Though I’d been fiddling (that may be generous) with Scala for a couple years, I was never really super excited about tying myself to the JVM. I know and deeply respect lots of people who doing great things with Python, and I’ve occasionally used it for scripts over the past several years because of that, but it leaves me totally non-enthused. I’ve done enough programming in languages that are uglier but more or less the same, time for something new. For a couple months I’ve been learning and doing some prototyping using the Yesod web framework (apparently I had heard of Haskell in 2005 but I didn’t look at it closely until last year). I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, mostly due to unrelated distractions. The biggest substantive hurdle has not been Haskell (and the concepts it stands for), but a lack of Yesod examples and documentation. This seems to be a common complaint. Yesod is rapidly moving to a 1.0 release, documentation is prioritized, and I expect to be really productive with it over the coming year. Thanks to the people who make Yesod and those who have been making Haskell for two decades.

This year I appreciated three music projects that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, much to my detriment: DNA, Moondog, and especially Harry Partch. I also listened a lot again to one of my favorite bands I discovered in college, Violence and the Sacred, which amazingly has released some of its catalog under the CC BY-SA license. Check them out!

Finally, in 2011 I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little bit some people working to make my neighborhood a better place, attending a conference with my sister, seeing one of my brothers start a new job and the other a new gallery, and with my wife of continuing to grow up (in that respect, the “better half” cliche definitely applies). Now for this world to end!

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Music, Oakland, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves, Politics, Programming, Public Domain, Public Goods | 1 Comment »

Things that bring all the classes and cultures in a community together

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Art
Death of famous locals
Earthquakes
Elections
Fairs
Groceries
Journalism
Libraries
Mass transit
Movies
Music
Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils
Parks
Sidewalks
Shops
Volunteering
Work
Year-end cheer

Oh yes, and let’s not forget gladiatorial matches:

Best from Jean Quan: Working to keep the Athletics, Warriors, and Raiders in the East Bay. For all the bad that comes from mega-sports teams, they are one of the few things that bring all the classes and cultures in a community together.

No, merely one of the stupidest things written in the East Bay Express (an excellent weekly, my favorite long before moving to the east bay) this year.

The more than a few items listed at the top are off the top of my head things that bring all classes and cultures together at least as much as do professional sports teams, and for the most part without the lies and direct transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. The characterization of society as comprising those two groups popularized by the Occupy movement may or may not be generally useful, but regarding the relationship of the masses to professional sports team owners, could not be more accurate (except that a decimal point or two is probably called for). There is almost no U.S.-based big league professional sports team owner that is not extremely wealthy (exception is probably the Green Bay Packers, which have dispersed ownership) and no such team that does not transfer wealth from the masses to the team — even mostly privately funded facilities are tax subsidized through dedicated infrastructure improvements at a minimum.

For a supposedly progressive activist such as Oakland mayor Jean Quan to stake a political comeback on collaboration with wealthy team owners to extract wealth from the masses… shame! Perhaps she ought be recalled, after all (not really, such over the top hypocritical pandering is precisely in line with my expectations for mayoral behavior).

Also, what about this bringing classes and cultures together? There is a high price to attend professional sports events in the first place, and the overwhelming trend is for facilities to include skyboxes that completely isolate the wealthiest attendees from others. Not only are mega-sports teams not one of the “few” things that bring all classes and cultures together, mega-sports teams aren’t even one of such things at all.

Good riddance to the Athletics, Raiders, and Warriors and their anti-intellectual, pull-the-wool-over-our-own-eyes, violent, and bland scams. The only disappointing thing is that they all seem to be moving elsewhere in the Bay Area, as opposed to someplace more benighted, say Sacramento, or Las Vegas, or better yet, out of business entirely.

Addendum: Now you know why I didn’t include a stadium in my fanciful list of uses Oakland residents ought dream of for land recovered through demolishing highway 980.

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Peeves, Politics | 4 Comments »

Oakland civics recall

Monday, December 26th, 2011

Efforts to recall Oakland mayor after less than one year in office are pathetic charades. Lots of people on the “left” and “right” are angry with Quan. But does anyone have a good narrative as to why a recall will lead to long-term superior outcomes for Oakland? Note I didn’t vote for her (not as my 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice) and have low expectations for the remainder of her term. But:

  • Evidence lacking that she is more corrupt and incompetent than the average mayor.
  • Her please-nobody equivocation on Occupy Oakland is a fine caricature of political behavior, but more or less how mayors behave.
  • One of the recalls motivated by appointing someone to the Port Commission other than the incumbent, preferred by some group — a ridiculous rationale for recall.
  • Anyone likely to successfully run to replace Quan in 2012 would also be deeply problematic.
  • Far too much focus on a singular “leader” (the mayor) to make Oakland better.

It seems to me that at the level of district- and city-wide politics, the civic culture of Oakland is impoverished. Residents should put their efforts into building that from the ground up rather than helping cargo cult recall campaigns. Sure, a lot of that will involve “fighting city hall” in all of the ways that can be done without another election. Perhaps this can lead to future mayoral and council elections that do not solely feature a rouge’s gallery of idiots, liars, and stooges as candidates.

…

A complaint I’ve seen in a number of articles is that Quan “has not specified the areas of focus in her 100-block crime-fighting plan”. But they look clear in a map excertped from a presentation on the plan.

Note that the area labeled “2” is immediately adjacent to highway 980, which ought be demolished.

Posted in Oakland, Politics | 1 Comment »

Occupy 980

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

I’m in agreement with Timothy B. Lee’s posts a month ago that urban freeways are not needed and harmful, but whether any particular urban freeway ought be actively taken down depends. (Of course no more ought be built and nearly all existing ought not to have been built.)

Lee’s posts got me thinking about which of Oakland’s freeways ought be torn down first.

The map above gives a pretty good idea of Oakland freeways. Clockwise from the top there’s 80/580 going north into Berkeley, 24 into a tunnel through the hills, 580 and 880 continuing on for a long way to the southeast and into San Leandro (there’s also 13 in the hills connecting 24 and 580, the only segment completely off-map), and 80 across the bay to San Francisco. Then there’s 980 connecting 24 and 880. 980 is the obvious segment to go:

  • Traffic volumes on 980 are less than any of the others (excepting 13).
  • 980 cuts West Oakland off from downtown, and causes the former to be completely encircled by freeways.
  • Despite being relatively low traffic, the real estate used by 980 is a city block wide. About 29 core city blocks could be freed for other uses.
  • 980’s primary purpose is apparently for providing access to downtown Oakland. A freeway through downtown is not needed for downtown access. Drivers wanting downtown access need to drive on downtown streets, and can do so just a tiny bit sooner. Downtown Oakland streets have lots of capacity and are rarely congested.
  • In the next decades, autonomous vehicles will push “not needed” to the extreme, as such will enable much, much higher capacity on the same roads. Oakland, like all cities, ought to be planning for autonomous vehicles now.

Before last month, I had not realized that 980 was not completed until 1985, which by itself does not strongly support my understanding of the local narrative (which I must have heard by 1995) concerning the extent to which 980 negatively impacted West Oakland. But apparently construction started in 1964. Planning was underway in the 1950s. I’m don’t know when about 29 blocks were destroyed to make way for 980 (I’d appreciate pointers), but it could have been 20 or more years before completion, and even if not, the knowledge that they would be destroyed must have contributed to isolation.

Perhaps Occupy Oakland ought move to some of the greenery along 980, or Grove-Shafter Park, which is more or less under the interchange where 24, 580, and 980 meet — more than symbolic, a physical barrier separating the poor from the powers that be. They wouldn’t need to make any specific demands about what would come after destroying the segment of the system that is 980. 29 blocks of vertical hemp farms? Mixed income housing? Art studios? “Occupy Park”, a grand urban park named for the movement? Skyscrapers? Ironically nostalgic monorail line? No need to decide now, dream on!

Posted in Economics, Oakland, Politics | 12 Comments »

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