Post Oakland

Somehow relating to and usually written from↑

Dear Jean Quan,

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Congratulations on your election and tomorrow’s inauguration as Oakland mayor.

I ranked ahead of you, but in truth my expressive rationale for doing so could just as well have favored you: a progressive Asian American woman represents a defining characteristic of what makes Oakland special and its future just as much as does a green lesbian (who is also an American and a woman, but such is identity politics).

Expressiveness aside, expectations for positive outcomes from your term as mayor are pretty low (note emphasis on outcomes; everyone knows you’ll put in more hours than recent Oakland mayors). Oakland still has a terrible crime problem, and city finances are beyond terrible. I suspect if there were betting markets on outcomes related to these problems, current prices would predict that under your leadership crime will get worse (relative to comparable cities; of course national trends may determine absolute direction of change), chief police will quit, the city will teeter on bankruptcy, your response will be to ‘social program us to death’, and you will be a one term mayor, succeeded by Kaplan, Joe Tuman, or .

Low expectations can be a blessing, if you’re willing to take steps to smash them and secure your re-election and legacy as Oakland’s most successful mayor in decades.

First, crime. Blaming the problem on poverty, racism, poor schools, unemployment, etc., isn’t going to cut it, neither as discourse nor as the stereotypical actions resulting, loosely characterized as “building youth centers”. Most voters aren’t that stupid (well, they are, but in other directions when it comes to crime). Fortunately, one can be a good progressive, acknowledge that crime is a major problem, especially for the disadvantaged, and take smart, progressive-compatible steps to smash crime. Check out Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Aaron Swartz’s essay on crime:

Such things are a frustration for white suburbanites, but for poor people stuck in the ghetto, they’re a nightmare. Crime is yet another disadvantage and a particularly noxious one at that. Even aside from all the other indignities suffered by the poor, just imagining life in a crime-ridden neighborhood is enough to make your skin crawl.
…
So there’s the question: How can we have less crime with less punishment?

Here are the no-brainer steps you can take on crime:

  • Do not get caught saying anything that could be construed as “blaming society” for the problem or that the solution consists of “building youth centers”.
  • Work with Batts to actually fight crime; defer to his expertise at every opportunity.
  • Provide high-minded leadership on protecting civil liberties; on this defer to nobody. However, limit riot-bait to national and global issues. For example, city proclamations calling for bringing George W. Bush to justice and the like will only cause rioting on right-wing talk radio, leaving Oakland neighborhoods and businesses unscathed.

Next, finances. Similarly no-brainer suggestions:

  • Repeat early, loudly, and clearly that Oakland has an unsustainable spending problem, and everyone, especially your loyal allies in and funded by city government, are going to feel immediate pain.
  • Immediately push through cuts, primarily to areas you favor politically, sparing police and maintenance as much as possible.
  • Immediately push through revenue increases, e.g., tackle mis- and under-priced parking.

Beyond the above mandatory issues, a few less pressing but visionary actions for you to consider adding to your mayoral legacy:

  • Do everything you can to signal (and perhaps do a little of substance too) that you believe Oakland is the eco-city of the future, urban permaculture doers are heroes, and Oakland should be the world leader in marijuana business and education. Each of these increases Oakland’s specialness, and eliminates any future challenge from Kaplan. (If you’re moderately successful on the two major issues above, you also eliminate any traction Tauman or Russo might otherwise gain during your first term.)
  • Make Oakland the leader in “open” policy. There are obvious opportunities around city data, software procurement, and open licensing of city publications. The last would even help improve the article about you on Wikipedia. ☺ I and many other technology professionals and advocates of openness who live in Oakland would love to help. Some of us work for Creative Commons and other organizations with deep expertise in this area.
  • In another decade, autonomous vehicles will reshape cities. Establish some kind of an unpaid citizens committee to investigate how Oakland can prepare.

Here’s to great outcomes for Oakland, and your incredible success as mayor!

Mike Linksvayer
Golden Gate District, Oakland

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Oakland, Open Source, Politics, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 4 Comments »

19th & Kaplan

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Only two endorsements this (U.S.) election, mostly because I haven’t been paying very close attention. Most importantly, for , the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. Stop throwing people in prison over this. Full stop.

Unfortunately recent polls indicate fading support for the initiative. Presumably this is mainly what is reflected by traders, among whom the consensus seems to discount a “Broadus Effect”:

Sadly no contracts are conditioned on the outcome.

Choices in the Oakland (where I’ve lived for almost exactly two years) mayoral race are underwhelming. “V Smoothe” of the excellent A Better Oakland blog (recommended for residents; the only Oakland-centric blog I’ve followed for any length of time … for that matter, the only Oakland-centric news source, not counting a neighborhood mailing list and the only somewhat Oakland-centric East Bay Express) has posted take-downs of leading candidates Rebecca Kaplan (ineffective), Jean Quan (I’d bet on increased probability of bankruptcy), Joe Tuman (ignorant), and is supporting the frontrunner, Don Perata, a leading symbol of corruption in the Bay Area, and a lobbyist for California prison guards, roughly on the grounds that only he can get stuff done and his faults can be explained away.

I don’t have much confidence that Perata would “get stuff done” and even lower confidence that whatever he got done would have good outcomes. Given lack of anyone with an obviously stellar, or even realistic, policy portfolio, I’m discounting projected ability (or lack thereof) to “get stuff done” and rationally indulging in an expressive vote, for — simultaneously the most unusual, and most stereotypically Oakland, of the leading candidates — lesbian, green (formerly Green), and for marijuana legalization.

Oakland has more lesbian couples per capita than any other big city in the U.S. (though Oakland isn’t exactly big) and if Kaplan were elected would as far as I know one of a very few lesbian mayors of significant cities in the U.S. (though way behind the actual big city of ), and is known for being a center of environmental activism of both the political and urban homesteading sorts and as .

I have a weak preference for a jurisdiction to accentuate whatever distinguishing characteristics it has, excepting wholly negative ones (e.g., crime, and gross corruption and incompetence). Kaplan will best accentuate (or rather signal; remember this is an expressive vote) the relatively neutral to good qualities of Oakland (yes, the whether is fantastic, and out of mayoral control) and doesn’t seem likely to cause exacerbation its wholly negative qualities.

(I haven’t investigated closely, but at a glance there doesn’t seem to be a worthy protest vote among those with almost no support in polls — to the contrary, they seem to be a rouge’s gallery of idiots, liars, and stooges — worse than most of the leading candidates. 19th & Kaplan doesn’t seem to exist anywhere, but it’s a intersection in a fictional Oakland.)

Posted in Oakland, Politics, Prediction Markets | 4 Comments »

Bow Copier

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

For the past few years the , the only daily newspaper in , where I grew up, has published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license as part of GateHouse Media.

Furthermore, at least relative to the newspaper industry’s low standards, the SJ-R site is excellent. (Latest indication I’ve noticed of how low newspaper site standards are — visit the ‘s site, click on “home delivery”, and you’ll get the home page content again — actually you get “page not found” but the site returns the home page content for any page it doesn’t know about — see the archived home page and /services.)

Today’s paper has a curious feature that I’ll take advantage of the limited rights granted by GateHouse’s use of the most restrictive CC license to republish, as I did previously with the Google Chrome Comic.


Bow builder Bob Linksvayer has been constructing his own bows, arrows and other hunting equipment since he was a teen-ager. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

Bob Linksvayer makes all types of traditional hunting equipment including bows, arrows, knives and other gear. What he can’t make, he trades with other craftspeople. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

Bow Builder

By Chris Young (chris.young@sj-r.com)
The State Journal-Register
Posted Oct 10, 2009 @ 09:39 AM
Last update Oct 10, 2009 @ 10:13 AM
SPRINGFIELD —

For Bob Linksvayer, building his own bows and arrows is about more than living history and keeping a lost art alive.

Linksvayer, who has made his own archery equipment since he was 13 years old, marvels at those early hunters who calculated the trajectory of arrow flight without math and crafted their bows to compensate.

He shows how the art of making arrows requires patience — it takes up to one year for the wooden shafts to dry.

Ancient hunters needed knowledge. They were masters of the natural history of their area, choosing only the best wood (hickory) for bows and the straightest shoots (arrowwood viburnum) for arrows. They made stain from walnut husks and bowstrings from woven flax. A coyote’s jawbone makes the perfect knife handle — with options for both righties and southpaws.

“For every coyote walking around, there is a right- and left-handed knife handle in the lower jaw,” he says.

And he shows how it all works perfectly when everything is done right.

“These arrows have been through a lot of deer,” he says with a smile.

Linksvayer, who lives east of Springfield between Dawson and Mechanicsburg, has taught the art of building a bow for 20 years. He also participates in historical re-enactments.

He will be demonstrating the art of woodworking today and Sunday during Lincoln Memorial Garden & Nature Center’s Indian Summer Festival.

He’s a hunter who proves the worth of his wares. A pile of antlers testifies to his success rate. His arrows are fletched with the feathers of a turkey he shot.

“I’ve never had a deer mounted,” he says. “Instead, I use the antlers for tools.”

“When I see a buck walk up under my stand, I look at the antlers and wonder how many knife handles I can make.”

The big sporting-goods retailers probably are glad Linksvayer doesn’t have a lot of peers. He says he tries to make or trade for everything he uses.

“It takes me 10 to 12 hours of constant work to build a bow,” he says. “If I am teaching a class, it takes exactly 28 1/2 hours.”

It’s all in the details

Squinting at the trunk of a hickory tree, imagine the curve of the back of the bow just below the surface of the bark.

“The last ring of the tree — the outermost growth ring — is the back of the bow,” Linksvayer says.
He cuts staves from the log and removes all of the heartwood from the center of the tree, preferring a tree trunk at least 10 inches in diameter. The larger the tree, the flatter the back of the bow can be.

“A bow is nothing more than a handle with two springs on it,” he says. “In the process of building a bow, they have to be exactly the same. You can’t deviate from that.”

A bow on full draw has a lot of potential energy ready to be unleashed.

“You never draw back a bow and release it without an arrow,” Linksvayer says. “There has to be a load.”

When the string stops, shock waves of the release of the arrow surge back and forth through the bow. If it’s not constructed properly, it could fail.

Bows have to be carved in one piece, he says. Adding a handle later is no good, as the whole thing will be too weak.

The process of removing wood from the inside of the bow is called tillering.

“Wood is removed from the belly of the bow so you can bend it,” he says.

Ideally, enough wood is removed so both limbs will bend the same.

However, a bit of additional wood is removed from the upper limb to give the arrow a bit of higher trajectory, so as gravity pulls it towards the ground, it can strike its target at 20 yards right where it is intended.

“The falling arrow will cross the line of sight about 20 yards out,” Linksvayer says. “I try to keep my shots within 20 yards or less.”

Linksvayer became interested in bows as a boy of 13. His father wouldn’t turn him loose with a gun to hunt rabbits, but relented when he offered to use a bow.

“I read as many books as I could,” he said. One book was shipped in for him to read, but couldn’t be checked out. He went to the library every day to read, draw pictures and take notes.

“I came to the conclusion that the Indians and our ancestors did not have a written language when they developed bows,” he says — a bit of insight that makes the feat of engineering all the more amazing.

But while Linksvayer has accumulated years of experience building bows, he still can’t speed up the process.

“Nothing is fast by today’s standards.”

Article by Chris Young/The State Journal-Register used under terms of CC BY-NC-ND.

Posted in Creative Commons, Oakland, Peeves | 3 Comments »

Visualizing density of places I’ve lived in 256x256px Open Street Maps

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I enjoyed Tim Lee’s post contrasting the density of various places he’s lived, so I’m reproducing the same for me below. I’ve used the same scale, but the maps are from , a very cool and good project that I hope to contribute to, or at least use and write about, more in the near future.

Knox Knolls (62704), an early (built 1960s?) subdivision on the west side of Springfield, Illinois:

EastWest of the UIUC campus (68120), mostly student housing in Champaign, Illinois:

Sort-of (a block north would be definite) Hayes Valley (94102), mostly subdivided victorians and some later apartment buildings in San Francisco, California:

Lower Haight (94117), commercial hipster and crack addict district a few blocks southwest of previous in San Francisco, California:

Far eastern block of the Castro (94114) before becoming the Mission, mostly subdivided victorians and some later apartment buildings in San Francisco, California:

West of a small Silicon Valley downtown (94086), mix of single family and apartment buildings in Sunnyvale, California:

College Park (95126), mix of single family style homes, some subdivided, many turned into “compounds” with smaller units on same lot, west of downtown San Jose, California:

Western SOMA (94103), almost all multi-unit buildings in San Francisco:

Golden Gate district (94608), mostly subdivided victorians and later, some later apartment buildings in Oakland, California:

Unsurprisingly the second to last is probably my favorite location so far, though I’d prefer much higher density. I also wouldn’t mind more contrast, as Tim Lee’s post exhibits, and I’m sadly lacking non-U.S. locations (unless one counts a few months in Minabe, Japan, which isn’t covered well by OpenStreetMap yet).

Conveniently I seem to have lived nine places, making for a nice square:

Actually I omitted at least three — one or two places in Collinsville, Illinois and one in Springfield that I don’t remember at all (we moved to the first mapped above when I was three) and a dorm in Champaign, Illinois only a few blocks from the mapped location above.

I hope some other people in my feeds create posts like this for my eyes to enjoy. Jon Phillips’, for example, would have some great contrasts I bet.

Posted in Blogs, Oakland | 8 Comments »

Delete the border

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

deleteTheBorder.org, “towards a global network of movements against borders”, is promoting an anti-Minute man protest in San Diego. There’s a benefit for the protest in San Francisco on September 8 that I may attend.

Yes, these folks reject capitalism, whatever that means these days, but their other ideas are good, and if they think eliminating borders is going to sweep away capitalism, well … please continue to work on eliminating borders! I like this:

Migration controls hurt everyone’s freedom and privacy. Some of us are more directly targeted and affected by these policies, but all of our lives are being reshaped by them. We are in this struggle not only to reject and stop these racist attacks, but to move towards a world without borders, a world of liberation for all people.

And add the excellent Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid to your network.

September 21 Peter Laufer, author of Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border (I have not read it), and economist Benjamin Powell are speaking at the Independent Institute near the Oakland airport on Immigration Wars: Open or Closed Borders for America? I doubt I’ll be able to attend, but I expect it to be an informative event.

Posted in Apartheid, Oakland, Politics | 2 Comments »

Newer Entries »