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Monthly Archives: March 2016

Trade Deals – Bad Deals?

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Through this populist uprising standing in for an election, one issue unites all the candidates that are left. Sanders was always against free trade agreements, like the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Clinton is too, at least now she is. Cruz doesn’t seem to have much time for them, and after years of talking both ways Trump is now firmly against these “bad deals”.

It’s not about TPP or any new trade pacts, either – it’s about (supposed) horrors of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and our current deal with China.

Going over the past is a way to pin down the establishment, which is to say Clinton. But Trump, at least, once to re-negotiate the old deals and turn them back. Was free trade such a bad deal for the US? Is it worth going over old ground?

For all the noise on this issue this year it’s actually not a good issue outside of its value as a populist rallying cry.

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Original Source

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Robotics season and new work means I have to run a repeat.  This one, while a bit dated, has a message that needs to be repeated anyway.

The internet is a wide, rolling river of information. It can be treacherous and dangerous to wade into if you’re not careful. If you’re looking for a cool drink of truth, the muddy brown of this mighty Mississippi of data often has a harsh stench of bias bubbling along with the waves. What can a reader thirsty for knowledge do?

The answer is to seek the source – the cool, clear stream that feeds into the torment at the headwaters. I call it the “Urquelle”, a German word meaning “original source” favored in the mountains and rolling hills that are the source of so many great rivers in Bavaria and Bohemia. This process of seeking out primary sources is valuable not just for writers, for whom primary sources have long been a staple of good, useful prose. As surely as reading is writing, today’s discerning reader should also seek the Urquelle.
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It Gets Serious

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It’s not a joke anymore. Violence erupted outside a Trump rally in St Louis and a rally later in the evening was canceled, supposedly over security concerns. Where violence inside these rallies has long been ignored the act of it spilling onto the streets has suddenly caught the attention of nearly everyone. This is scary stuff.

Nevermind that it’s been at a boil for months. Somehow, a line was crossed.

This will unquestionably change the nature of the Presidential race, but it’s unclear exactly how at this point. Will it crystallize Republican opposition? Will it escalate by engaging the left? What will the average voter think of this? What will the media report?

The fiery election of 2016 just had a lot of gasoline dumped on it. It’s no longer even remotely predictable.

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Definitely NOT Over

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One week ago, Barataria asked if it was over. “It” meaning the Democratic presidential primary season and “over” meaning decided. The theory was that unless Sanders won at least a few of four key states on Super Tuesday everyone would write his political obit.

He won three of them – and this week a big surprise in Michigan. Combined with the death match in the Republican Party we have an unusually fascinating endorsing season ahead of us as both contests will definitely run through to the convention floors.

But what that is likely to mean is something very different in the case of both parties. One will be fighting to not lose and the other may wind up fighting to not win.

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Flexible Cities

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Predictions of the future are often tricky. It requires an extrapolation of a trend from today to some kind of logical conclusion, taking into account how the object changing connects to the rest of the world. There’s a real showmanship to it all, too, when you start from the logical conclusion and then explain yourself backwards.

Cities will be radically different by 2050, with zoning codes and concepts that are more flexible and the corresponding buildings will have many uses on top of each other. Suburbs, as we know them now, will require extensive rehabilitation that will work well in some places but create wastelands in others.

See how it works? This is simply the logical conclusion of a flexible workforce and a fast-paced economy with people changing careers often. Should all that come to pass, our cities will have to have more flexible structures and more agile concepts of zoning. We can easily imagine how that might look because that is what cities were like before zoning came along about 100 years ago.

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