thando_SA's Xanga

The conversion of Eden to money

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:50:19 GMT

This entry is in response to a delightfully thoughtful post on The future of the suburbs? Considering how rash it would be for a foreigner, like myself, to make general statements about American suburbs, I thought it best to begin with American penned links related to the subject.

Devastated by the subprime mortgage crisis, hundreds of homes have been foreclosed and thousands of residents have been forced to move, leaving in their wake a not-so-pleasant path of empty houses, unkempt lawns, vacant strip malls, graffiti-sprayed desolate sidewalks and even increased crime.
Is America's suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?

Homeownership is at the core of the American dream. Since the era of the American Revolution, property ownership has been considered the mark of a solid citizen who is a stakeholder in the community. Mortgages enable ordinary people, who do not have the cash to buy a home outright, to join the propertied class. For most people, even today, their prime financial asset is the equity in their home

The mortgage business has long been a tug of war between a social commitment to broad homeownership and the schemes of private financial operators looking to make a quick buck. In the wake of the Great Depression, the U.S. government devised a strikingly effective system for bringing homeownership to the masses.....What's Behind the Sub-Prime Disaster

When people move away as part of normal neighborhood turnover, the people who move in are generally more affluent. Community advocates may argue that succession is just another form of exclusion — if low-income people can't afford to move in — but, still, it doesn't exactly fit the popular perception of individuals being forced from their homes.
Gentrification: Not Ousting the Poor?

~ ~ ~

On the connection between the subprime crisis and the current wave of gentrification. Firstly let me just mention in passing, that having read several articles on the bank and hedge fund losses from sub-prime mortgages, I find it quite intriguing that none of the accounts that I have read made any mention of the obscene profits that were generated from the sub-prime bubble.

For fact is, from the perspective of "the rent gap" and "the movement of capital" concepts, the city space constitutes a huge "growth machine" for particular land-based interest groups. Which land-based interest groups (the loose coalition of big financial institutions and large developers) yield massive profits from the development and underdevelopment of the inner city.

The rent gap that I'm talking about refers to "a gap between the ground rent actually capitalised with a given land use at a specific location and the ground rent that could potentially be appropriated under a higher and better land use at that location". The rapid development of suburbs, in the past decades, via lax lending standards is deemed to have been a systematic movement of capital out of the central cities into the suburbs because profits were higher there. The subsequent neglect of the inner city neighbourhoods thus set the stage for the development of the rent gap. Which in turn enabled developers to persuade financial institutions to finance rehabilitation projects. These efforts were often accompanied by urban boosterism - think sitcoms like “Friends” and “Sex and the City” - that were designed to encourage the return of the middle class to the city.

Thus I'm inclined to consider gentrification a product of the same land-based interest groups who might have engineered the whole sub-prime disaster.

The economic man is predictably irrational

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:11:26 GMT

Dan Ariely, an economist at MIT, noted something odd in the subscription rates for The Economist magazine: The first option, costing $59, got you a year of full access to their web site. The second, costing $125, would get you a year-long print subscription. The last, also costing $125, would get you a year of both the print subscription and the online access. A rather strange set of choices don't you also think, given that these subscription rates were offered at three subscription levels and as such presuppose that they be of varying value? For how else is the homo economicus (economic man) to consider his options to pick the one that maximizes his benefit?

Well, this is the deal according to Ariely: "Most of us would believe that we consistently make rational choices, that we are in control, and that we usually get decisions right. But we often make choices that can only be described as irrational. What's more, it appears we make the same types of mistakes again and again, in a systematic and predictable way".

While the common people might not be aware of what influences their economic/financial choices, I believe the advertising industry has always known that consumers are really far less rational than standard economic theory assumes. Moreover that the type of irrational choices that most of us make are often systematic and consequently are predictable.

Hence it could be argued that The Economist included the print-only option precisely to dupe prospective customers into choosing the highest priced tier. To prove this, consider the results of an experiment that Ariely conducted on 100 of his students at MIT on the same subscription options. 16% of his students chose the online-only option. None of the students chose the print-only option. The remaining 84 % chose the print and online option. But when he removed the print-only option, tables were completely turned around: 68 students chose the online option while only 32 took the $125 combo! The insight here is that the highest priced option, the combo subscription, only emerges as the best choice because of what it is arrayed next to.

"You pays your money and you takes your choice."

Now, go check out how predictably irrational you are: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-predictably-irrational-are-you-the-test-835519.html.

Guru

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:36:30 GMT

Mentioned in Thami Ngubeni's interview with author Deepak Chopra is an interesting definition of the term "guru". Check it out :

THAMI*: You've been called a guru. How do you feel about that?

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Spell guru slowly.

THAMI: G-U-R-U

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Gee, you are you.

THAMI: [Laughs] Aah.

The interview features in the latest print edition of O Magazine South Africa and Thami is the editor thereof.

To aspirant writers

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:27:44 GMT

"The only way to do a thing is to do it", so begins Barry Ronge's response, with a pithy quote he attributes to Gertrude Stein, to an enquiry from an aspirant entertainment writer about getting into feature writing. Barry Ronge is South Africa's most respected film critic and widely read culture columnist. I thought what he had to say was worth sharing:

First find out what you want to do and consult your passion. If you really love the feel and texture of words; if constructing a smart elegant sentence feels like fun to you; and if you stop reading half-way down the page so that you can enjoy a good phrase or a new word, then you will work well with language.

It really is about words and sentences and if you don't love that process it will drive you crazy.

The same thing is true about your topic. Whatever it is - politics or movies, fashion or TV, the subject must be fascinating to you. If not you will come to hate it within a couple of years, no matter how good you are at it. A 1000-word story about something that bores you witless will be an agony to write and also an agony to read.

Spend time planning your goal. Don't say, "I want to write", say, "I want to write the most informative feature on the new medium-price cars of this year", or, "I want to make cricket come alive for someone reading in an armchair". It's all about the information. Opinions are cheap and fleeting.

Go to your local magazine store and list the top 10 magazines in your field, define what you think they are most likely to publish and write as if you were paid to do so.

There are dozens of outlets, from community newspapers to blogs and the degree of specialisation is vast. As things stand, I would not be surprised to see a new magazine dedicated solely to shoelaces. Just know your stuff, write about it with passion and have a couple of finished pieces to offer anyone who shows interest and you will already be ahead of the game.

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On a different note, one of the BBC's longest serving (since the 1950s) foreign correspondent, Charles Wheeler, passed away this past Friday, July 04. Here's The UK Independent's heartfelt tribute to "the reporter's reporter", who always went to where the news was happening and spoke to people who were in the news.

-Excerpts -

"Two words sum up why I am a journalist: Charles Wheeler. As a child growing up in Edinburgh, I wanted to be a doctor. Then I saw Charles Wheeler's BBC reports from the US on the race riots in American cities and I suddenly thought very differently about my career.

In the Edinburgh of that time, I had never seen a black person, and yet night after night I sat transfixed in front of the TV watching Charles explain why I should care. And I did. Looking back at these reports now, what strikes me is their clarity and quiet authority, and also the underlying sense of outrage that human beings could treat each other so badly on account of their skin colour. Charles never patronised his audience, and yet even a child could get the point."

"...He constantly reminded me that while there was a "Religious Right" in America, there was also a "Religious Left" – God-fearing people who side with the underdog, who help illegal immigrants and dislike the intolerance of some on the Religious Right. When it came to tired British stereotypes about supposedly "fat and stupid" Americans, Charles would say softly that he had always found "open minds in the wide open spaces" of the United States."

"...During one tempestuous meeting with a hapless senior BBC manager, involving many reporters, the manager insisted that journalists should become more "specialised" and cited Charles as an example of a "specialist." Charles interrupted. He pointed out that he was "anything but" a specialist. He was a generalist – someone who might not know what was going on in the world, but who did know how to find things out, and that was what reporting was all about. The hapless BBC manager was left speechless."

Yah, they don't make them like they used to...

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:38:21 GMT

On truth

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:15:58 GMT

"The man who says, 'there is no truth', is asking you not to believe him. So don't."

Roger Scruton

Global warming & oil drilling

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:12:56 GMT

The Geezer, posted this very interesting piece on the energy crisis. It reminded me of an article published about 4 years ago about how global warming is helping boost the oil industry:

~~~~

Rising global temperatures will melt areas of the Arctic this century, making them more accessible for oil and natural gas drilling, a report prepared by the United States and seven other nations said on Monday.

It predicts that over the next 100 years, global warming could increase Arctic annual average temperatures 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over land and by up to 13 degrees over water. Warmer temperatures could raise global sea levels by as much as 3 feet.

Such a change would threaten coastal cities, change growing patterns for vegetation and destroy habitats for some wildlife, but an energy-starved world would have new areas for oil and gas exploration, according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report.

The Arctic region, particularly offshore, has huge oil and gas reserves, mostly in Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Norway.

Warmer temperatures would make it easier to drill and ship oil from the Arctic, the report said. It did not attempt to quantify the costs of drilling and shipping Arctic oil and gas, or estimate how high energy prices would have to be to justify drilling in the region.

"Offshore oil exploration and production are likely to benefit from less extensive and thinner sea ice, although equipment will have to be designed to withstand increased wave forces and ice movement," the report said.

However, land access to energy reserves would likely be restricted due to a shorter season during which the ground is frozen hard enough to support heavy drilling equipment.

"The thawing of permafrost, on which buildings, pipelines, airfields and coastal installations supporting oil and gas development are located, is very likely to adversely affect these structures and increase the cost of maintaining them," the report said.

Energy companies would find it easier to transport oil and gas because the warmer temperatures would open sea routes.

"By the end of this century, the length of the navigation season...along the Northern Sea route is projected to increase to about 120 days from the current 20-30 days," the report said.

However, a longer shipping season will increase the risk of oil spills, the report warned.

The report was commissioned by the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. It concluded that global warming is heating the Arctic almost twice as quickly as the rest of the planet in a thaw that threatens millions of livelihoods.

Source: http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=36213&keybold=Arctic%20gas%20oil

Poverty

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:56:00 GMT

Christians believe that Jesus Christ was a man, subject to human grief and mortality and yet also an omnipotent God. In the breadth of his power, Jesus could have chosen to be a human being of any description, stature, degree, condition and yet he chose to be poor....

James Buchan

Karma

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:58:02 GMT

Phrases that express the law of karma:

As you saw, so shall you reap

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction

What goes around comes around

You receive from the world what you give to the world

The Obama effect

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:24:22 GMT

"America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love....Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another -- a journey that will bring a new and better day to America......Tonight, I can stand before you and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States."

Barack Obama's victory has undoubtedly prompted me to reassess my general, political view of America.....