So, apparently the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just said (as much as we hate to admit it) that the oil industry is better equipped to handle the gulf disaster than the military is. While I know that this is true, I think that this points to a serious flaw in the way we manage resource extraction and other potentially dangerous things that we do to the earth. The problem is, even though BP was trying to shut down this well for the better part of a month, they’re still a business, so they’re still looking out for themselves (in an extremely short-term way, unfortunately for them) and their property before they’re looking out for the rest of the global ecosystem. And even though there has been public outrage about this, I’m still shocked that we would expect BP to act any other way.

What needs to happen, once the dust settles, is a complete shake-up of who does what in the face of an environmental catastrophe. I propose that we beef up the National Guard (and possibly the Coast Guard, once we sack those in charge there too) so that when an environmental crisis threatens the American people, the American people can take care of it themselves. Costs would be covered by exactions from private companies who are actually doing the dangerous work (kind of like how we all pay taxes to fund the police because vigilante justice has proven to be a bad idea). Anyway all these companies would pay into a fund, the fund would support the training of the military on whatever needed to be done, so that they can react swiftly and appropriately if and when the time comes. In addition, this would make following existing regulations, or even making stricter regulations much more palatable for these companies, as now that there are actually consequences that are potentially costly and beyond their control, taking all the requisite safety precautions may seem like a good idea. Think of it as a doomsday weapon in environmental management. “Sure, you can drill if you really want to, but if you screw it up, there’s this big government-mandated deus ex machina over here that will come in and clean house with absolutely no regard for your earnings, your property, or the wishes of your company. But don’t worry, it won’t charge you a dime for its services. Have a nice day!”

Take the BP spill. What if those tasked with shutting it down only had to answer one question?

President Obama: “Is the well shut down?”

No follow-up questions of how much it cost the shareholders, can we start with a cheaper solution first, can we salvage any equipment, can we salvage the well, none of that. The government would just go in, assess the situation, and swat the gawddamn fly with the gawddamn howitzer.

Take yard work for example:

I just moved to a new apartment with a yard!! It’s not exactly big enough for a softball game, but you could definitely play at least half a game of horseshoes. Maybe a quarter game of petanque. On tap is a nice dining enclosure, some non-weed shrubs around the edges, and, if I dare, a compost bin.

Oh, and bicycles, lots and lots of bicycles…

So, I have this plan. I’m now at the point where I have more school behind me than I do in front of me and I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve still got a thesis to think of and put down on paper and a couple more gargantuan classes between me and a masters degree, but I know that there is a life after grad school and it’s not more than a year away at this point.

Anyway, the plan. As some of you may know, I live in the Columbia Waterfront District, a little-known strip of neighborhood on the far side of the BQE next to Carroll Gardens and above Red Hook. When I first moved here I would tell people at social gatherings that I lived in the “Columbia Waterfront District” and then there’d be a long drawn-out explanation of where that is, which would usually end with the other person remarking “Oh.” in a not so enthusiastic tone and excusing themselves to get another drink.

The funny thing is, I’m used to this kind of conversation. When I first left my hometown for college, where I was from was one of the first things new people would ask me. “Valatie,” I’d proudly remark. This would result in a long drawn-out conversation in which the person from Long Island who I was talking to would learn the following things:

1. Westchester County is not upstate New York.
2. The Metro-North does not service the entire state.
3. Comparing the name of my town (Vah-lay-shah) to oral sex is not a new joke.

While this provide unending amusement for me in college, it’s somehow not as much fun when it’s different parts of Brooklyn. Thus, I usually just say one neighborhood or the other, and cause I’m not the biggest fan of Carroll Gardens, I choose Red Hook. Compare the drunken braying on Smith Street to Sunny’s and tell me you don’t disagree.

Which brings me back to the plan. In the next year or two, I want to move further into Red Hook (call it Red Hook proper), and I think I’m at the point where I want to start living alone. This will completely depend on what I can find and how much money I’m making at this point, and will most-likely not happen until after I’m done with school, but this is what I want to do. I envision a whole wall of bicycles, too. A cruiser, a mountain bike, my beater, and maybe some spare ice tires.

Oh, and then there’s the trip across country that I want to take. I’ve got a map started. This is something that I’ve always wanted to do and there are many details to work out, but I’m dead set on checking off as many of these locations as I can. I figure if I write this down that it will hold me to it…

Here we go again, people… I don’t know if I’ve been living under a rock or something and this is old news to everyone, but it’s new to me. I’ve recently gotten into performance underwear. This is mainly because I’m tired of being either frozen or super-sweaty on my bike in the wintertime and I know that there must be a better way. I need something that will keep me warm and will be able to stand up to constant abuse.

Anyway, I’ve been hearing a lot about performance undergarments and it really comes down to two main recommendations, Hot Chillys and Ice Breaker. Both specialize in making clothing that will keep you warm, no matter how cold it is, and no matter what you’re up to out there. From what people were saying to me about one or the other, I thought it was going to be a toss up, but in the end it wasn’t even close!

Turns out, Ice Breaker gear is made of wool, exclusively. And not just any wool, it’s made of wool off of alpine sheep in New Zealand. Hot Chillys gear is made of, um, well, mostly plastic. I think. For me that’s enough. And it speaks to a larger issue, that being the fact that sometimes a complicated, waste-ridden, completely linear, utterly fossel-fuel dependent production process might not be considered innovation if one takes a step back and looks at the entire process as a whole (from material extraction, to production, all the way to ultimate disposal).

Yes, I’m appreciative of all the work that the fine folks of Hot Chillys (an American company, by the way) have done in advancing synthetic protection against the elements, but had they bothered to look, they would have seen that mother nature solved this problem a long, long time ago, and with far fewer petrochemicals involved. There are already animals that exist in the cold, and they do just fine without polyester. Hell, I think I remember from that Planet Earth series that scientists were having trouble locating Musk Ox with infrared cameras because their insulation was just that good. Biomimicry, people, biomimicry.

And as long as we’re comparing full life cycle of both products, I’d say that transportation pretty much zeros out being that plastic comes from oil, which comes from the middle east, and New Zealand wool has to be shipped all the way from the other side of the world. The end life of each product is kind of interesting, though. If one reads the innovations page for Hot Chillys, one sees that each product is polyester with a mix of treatments, some natural, some synthetic. How does one fully recycle that? The natural and the unnatural are completely intertwined. Now, compare that to wool, just wool; something that occurs in nature already. See where I’m going with this?

When it comes to operating costs, industry likes business as usual. Take an industry that I’m a little too familiar with, health insurance. When you’re dealing with mass quantities of people, you can predict how many people are going to have kidney failure, or how many people will end up with diabetes, or how many trips to the emergency room an average person will make in a year. Of course, years of poor diet, or poor health habits (encouraged by other industries) tends to skew these long term predictions in a direction that ends up costing everyone more money in the long run.

Business as usual for the rest of industrial society is threatened, surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) by the very method of production itself. Our linear industrial model threatens to run itself dry in a number of ways (air, water, fuel, land, etc). People suggest radical change of the way we do business and the way we produce. In theory, I agree with them, but I also know that we can’t simply change the way things have always been done over night, especially when so much power and wealth is concentrated on the powerful side.

This is why I’m such a big fan of Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism. While there are many things wrong with capitalism, one of the easiest things to fix, when you think about it, is the externalization of environmental costs. Capitalism is already strictly regulated when it comes to economics. Why not add similar regulations to add value to clean air or water? I know it’s not a perfect solution, but it think that the ideas he proposes in his book have the greatest chance of succeeding in the near term, simply because they allow those in power a way to change their ways, yet not loose their grip on what they have. Yes, some industries will go the way of the dodo, but even the most polluting industries can succeed if they play their cards right and change their model to a service-based business instead of a product-based business (example, GM can sell transportation instead of cars).

Those in charge of some companies have also realized that their resources are limited and that it will be much cheaper for them in the long run if they impose artificial limitations early before actual limitations are imposed upon the whole system. Interface Carpet CEO Ray Anderson, in an interview for the movie The Corporation has a great description of the way our economy runs now, as opposed to how it needs to run. He likens modern industrial business practices to early airplanes before the Wright brothers. These planes would end up coasting for a time, and for a few seconds it must have actually looked like they were flying, but they would inevitably crash to the ground. The only difference between modern industry and those planes is that the ground is a lot farther away. We need to stop coasting and start flying.

I also think that capitalism, much like many types of organized religions that were created before a time when we could actually explain how the Earth rotated around the sun, really came to dominate in a time when our natural resources seemed endless and the consequences of pollution were not fully understood. The same way that religion is having a difficult time with science, capitalism is having a difficult time with finite resources.

There was a map illustrating the increase in Food Stamp usage this year on the front page of the New York Times today. Food Stamp usage in Columbia County, where I’m from, is up 36% since 2007. Across the country the numbers are staggering.

Reading this story brought to mind a road trip I took with my brother two weeks ago. We were listening to the radio for a significant portion of the time in the car (something I haven’t really done since I last had a car in 2003) and I was struck by the contests being advertised on the air. One station was offering the tenth caller a free tank of gas. Another was running a promotion that would dole out free groceries for a year to one lucky listener. The last time I listened to the radio (granted it was a while ago) people were being enticed with offers of concert tickets, cars, and resort vacations. What does it say about our overall standard of living when the driving force behind radio promotions are necessities of daily life?

A recent NY Times article titled Making Renewables Reliable made some very good points about realistic expectations of energy production/consumption in a marking that will be increasingly dependent on renewable sources in the coming years. The problems identified in the article go back to basic supply and demand issues, with supply being something that we can’t control if we depend on wind and solar. I can see how that is a concern now, what with renewables operating in isolated pockets as a small percentage of the total output, and as part of a grid that needs to be made modern and adaptive. I also appreciate that the article identifies that these issues are not deal-breaker for renewable energy. And being that this is the mainstream media, I know that they can’t go too far out of the box or pie in the sky. I just think that there are a few things that could have been added.

Tidal-based energy models. If we need reliability, there’s nothing more reliable than ocean swells or tidal flows, both of which are being developed as potential sources of energy. While they may not be able to generate much now (as noted by this very paper), developing the network will do a lot to provide a stable, reliable energy source that operates with more regularity and dependability than wind or solar energy sources.

Electric cars and plug-in hybrids. The more electric cars and plug-in hybrids we have, the better it is for smoothing out our energy demand (shaving the peak, as it is called). Most users will charge their cars at night when they are sleeping and when rates are lower, which is already ideal for wind power, as it is generated more at night when the wind is blowing. Now, when these people get to their daytime destinations, they can plug their cars in again, but not just for charging. This time, the utility can also siphon off 5 or 10% of the stored charge in the car (from the night before) to help meet demand that day. This could be incentivized by having the power that is used by the utility during the day subtracted from the total energy bill of each motorist who participates. I figure that 5 or 10% of a lot of small sources could add up to a sizable chunk of energy that otherwise would have just remained with the car.

Of course, these are just my unfocused, late night ideas.

Okay, the last six hours were probably some of the nerdiest hours I’ve spent since becoming a planning student. Check the timeline:

6:00pm – 7:00pm: Photograph traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. Ask traffic cops about their jobs managing the intersections around one Brooklyn Bridge exit. Record actions of traffic cops at the exit (how long they have the cars wait vs what the light dictates). Go back to ask follow-up question and be told I’m asking too many questions.

7:00pm – 7:30pm: Bike to class at Pratt Manhattan. Spy the super-secret NYPD Taxi IN ACTION on the way uptown!! I took a picture, but I was too afraid to take a close one cause I thought they might confiscate my camera or something. It’s in mid-strobe, but trust me, that thing was flashing up a storm.

7:30pm – 9:30pm: Talk shop with an awesome DOT guest speaker at my Transportation Planning class. He rides to work, too. Tell him that the DOT is doing a good job with the bike boxes and that they make cyclists feel like they are part of the equation of the intersection. Watch him nod approvingly.

9:30pm – 10:30pm: [Redacted]

10:30pm – 11:00pm: On my way home, find a new protected cyclepath off the Manhattan Bridge that actually brings me within a block from my old apartment almost entirely via bike lane.

11:00pm – 11:15: Gawk at the NYPD Auxillary car parked outside my local bodega. Explain to my bodega owner that part of the magic of the new look for these cars is that they give the appearance of more police on the streets, thus projecting an image of safety. Watch him nod approvingly. Then tell him that the flip side is that at the time when you really need a cop to protect you, the fact that this looks like a squad car works against you. Watch him nod again, this time not so approvingly.

11:15: Finally get home to see that the construction that I thought was a water main repair this morning is actually a bulb-out for the street corner!!

You're never going to sell overpriced two-bedrooms with a banner like that.

It’s only been two days since I officially finished for the semester, so I haven’t had much chance to read up on any of my favorite goings-ons, but I was able to do plenty of thinking and picture taking during my daily treks through downtown Brooklyn on my way to Pratt.

So, we’ve got this whole recession thing on, and now everyone’s being tight with their money, not spending, property values are tanking, and developers are putting the brakes on even the biggest of projects. But because you can’t just stop development the second a global economic crisis hits, there’s bound to be some coasting done.

To make a long story short, downtown Brooklyn was recently rezoned to make room for, well, we’ll get to that later, but the rezoning, combined with the superheated housing market, lead to a proliferation of condo buildings that cropped up all over the place. When I first moved to State St. in 2005, there was an eight story condo going up at the end of my block. This process was repeating on numerous streets in the area, but the development was not that huge, yet. Still, I distinctly remember trying to figure out why anyone in their right mind would pay $600,000 for a “luxury” one-bedroom on the corner of State and Flatbush with tractor trailers engine-braking their way through Brooklyn traffic a mere hundred feet from the bedroom window. I thought an eight story building would have difficulties selling out all its units.

Then, in late 2007, something began to peek out from behind the building across the street from me. What ended up being called Forte had reared its ugly head and by the time I moved out in June 2008, it was ready for occupancy.

Skeleton of Forte, as seen out my old bedroom window.

Of course, Forte was not alone. Thanks to the rezoning, it had friends.

Finished Forte and friend.

And more friends.

You should see these two in person...

Same two from the other side.

And uglier friends.

Really?

The problem here, and this is in addition to all the fundamental reasons why this type of condo development is probably pretty bad for Brooklyn’s existing population, the superficial problem here is: Forte is still mostly empty. I bike past that place every night, and trust me, the lights aren’t on, and nobody’s home. So now we’ve got all these luxury high-rise buildings, all with market-rate housing, all on their way to being finished real soon, and the one building that is already finished is mostly vacant.

And this is just one neighborhood. Look at the waterfront development in Williamsburg, or the stretch of 4th Avenue south of Atlantic Terminal. Rows of massive condo buildings, all mostly finished or newly completed. Would be interesting to fast-forward a few years and see who’s living in them, or what their yearly income is.

I don’t really want to say anything about the plot or the final episode, or any of the other minutea that I’m sure is being discussed on the internetz regarding the intricacies of the plot/characters.  The BSG team gave us four great seasons full of people and events that elicited honest emotional responses from the viewers.  Thank you.  Really, thank you.  Television can go back to completely sucking now.

What I would like to discuss are some conclusions that I drew from the final episode:

[Mandatory Spoiler Alert]

Apparently, God is the Kind of Deity that Makes Its Spouse Tell the Same Story Over and Over Again at Dinner Parties:
I draw that conclusion from the fact that the BSG God has come up with this wonderfully intricate story of creation and destruction, complete with miracles, incredible acts, and the interference of angels, and it’s perfect!  Except for one thing; it’s really short.  Like, “short story written in college by aspiring novelist” short.  So instead of working on developing said short story into a novel, this God decides that it will just repeat the same short story, over, and over, and over again.  No problem with that, but if God is infinite, don’t you think that its spouse may be bored of telling “the Earth story” over and over at divine cocktail parties.

Once Again, Lee Does the Right Thing, Not the Smart Thing:
Okay, opportunity for a fresh start on a new planet.  Great.  Remove from technology from the equation.  Yes and no.  Eliminate ability to keep comprehensive records, thereby not allowing society to learn from its mistakes.  Hm, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

So, weren’t a good number of events involving massive loss of life or general mayhem in the BSG universe caused by a crucial lack of information for the parties involved?  The final five stopped the first Cylon War, but after Cavil wiped their memories (and didn’t tell any of the other skinjobs) the end result was the annihilation of humanity.  If the other skinjobs had the same info Cavil did, would that have happened?  Would Baltar been able to win an election (or continue living) if anyone at all knew his part in the destruction of humanity?  Would the final five have been able to do anything as a cohesive unit if Tyrol had known what Tori did?  And how much time did everyone spend trying to figure out what the frak was going on with all this destiny and prophecy crap?

Which brings me to Lee’s decision to basically ensure that the cycle perpetuates, by entrusting the collective memories, lessons learned, and best practices of the Colonial Fleet on the matters of destiny and the humane treatment of artificial intelligence to cornerless paper at best, and oral storytelling at worst, he basically made a repetition of those same mistakes inevitable.  You think that the lessons of the epic Human-Cylon conflict could survive a 150,000 year game of telephone?  Second verse, same as the first…

Starbuck was One Line Away from Greatness
Going on the above supposition, what if Starbuck had somehow convinced Lee that getting rid of technology (and with it, comprehensive record keeping) was the way to go?  This could have been inserted as an extra couple of lines, or in a slight reworking of a scene.  I think that ensuring the perpetuation of the cycle is good enough to be considered Harbinger of Doom-ish.  I mean, the way I interpret that part of the plot, the Starbuck role in the “all this has happened before, all this has happened again” thing is that she flips the switch and resets the game from the end of one round, to the beginning of the next.  However, in beginning the game again, she is essentially setting everyone up for the ultimate end.

So how great would it have been to have Lee decide to doom the human race to repetition of the same mistakes based on the advice of an “angel” whose sole purpose is to hit the reset button and point humanity toward doom again?

I’ll probably have more thoughts about the last episode, especially after I watch it again, but I will most likely be too lazy to write about them.