Why we need to re-think urban living and development

so, inherently this is something that comes to my mind pretty often. The main proponents and inspiration of this are Barb Chamberlain and James H Kunstler. As a result of Kunstler, Wal-Mart is also in this. Barb Chamberlain is a pretty involved individual in Spokane, WA. and is dedicated to making places bicycle friendly, technologically green, and to borrow from Kunstler- to create a place "worth caring about." Amidst this a big push of Barb's efforts are related to advocating biking (although I advocate longboarding), is to design, re-design, and build a city that is pedestrian and biking friendly. This would inherently have intense ripple effects and would impact every part of society. Everyone should follow her twitter account because she is really that cool. @barbchamberlain and her website is http://www.biketoworkbarb.blogspot.com/ . This could reduce obesity in the region, promote healthier environments (on the ground and air), and build a stronger sense of community. I don't believe the last one is as explicit as the others however, I believe as we strive to put people closer together, we are going to either have amazing communities that have positive impact or we will have more crime. I believe and would hope for thriving communities that could inherently build stronger interpersonal relationships with one another and by golly kids could actually play outside. Above these things though, I think we have to take it one step further into a different perspective and a step into the realization of what this really looks like. Now the above things hinge on two aspects – how far away we live from our job and how well we design our cities. These are not and cannot exist outside of each other and because of that, for any of this to work would be contingent on one thing. People willing to set aside their selfish images, beliefs and take one for the team. For an example, with Kunstler in mind, if say a designer who works in the heart of downtown Spokane says to himself, "I want a home that kind of has a suburb feel that has four bed rooms and two bathrooms, designed super modern," then he would potentially live 20-30 minutes away from the heart of downtown right? Now in perspective we deal with traffic, but this house location could be 20-30 miles away to reach a suburb or relatively country yet modern location to find and raise a family. However, for the example of Spokane, to get from river park square to the south east corner of the valley is about 12miles, 22+minute drive (without traffic). Now I'm not in the most awesome shape and due to my adverse relationship to bikes (I had a bad experience as a child), I would drive my 32mpg car. So every two days I would spend roughly $10 on gas. Please stay with me on this. That's close to $25 a week in gas just driving to work, a huge mortgage payment every month, headaches, and more construction in further areas because you might have 2+ kids who will want homes in 20 years. All of that just because you "wanted" or "needed" that house. You "believed" that you had to attain an "image" and it was all about "you." Sounds pretty selfish eh? Now you might say you have no other option, the city doesn't provide that kind of housing. This is true. That's where the other hinge has to come into play and Kunstler's ideas come in. We must design better urban sprawls because well, it doesn't fit the current need and over-population doesn't help either. This is where Wal-Mart parking lots could stay parking lots but, have structures that provide housing, or schools in an innovative format that is aesthetically pleasing. I may sound idealistic but how come we don't move closer to our jobs? Why don't we revamp River park mall as a giant condo community with stores on the bottom, condos on the top floor and use that whole middle space for a school? Oh you don't want to live that close to work? But what if you could walk 3minutes and have lunch with your son or daughter? Walk 5minutes and be home? Your first thought is, "But Adam, I want *insert desired noun or adjective*." That's nice, but when are you going to take one for the team? Take one for your family, city, and nation? When are you going to be willing to build a place "worth caring about?"

Anonymous, I appreciate you but careful yo

Anonymous just released its #opIran press releases and this weekend plans on setting up to occupy wall-street and camp there for a while. All the while I dont believe in all the methods and integrity they stand with, I agree in most of their campaigns. However with the recent crackdown by foreign authorities and our own government via the FBI, I wonder what the future holds. One thing as I look at the circumstances is that Anonymous needs to be leery of two things. The first I believe is that even though anonymous is supposedly a collective, which in some cases is true, however there is definitely a sub group of leaders and the second is that they are spreading everything pretty thin. Now I dont know know exactly these people do for a living, however the sub-group of leaders may need some time to relax and re-coup and retain their vision for what is going on. The worst thing that could happen is burn out and fatigue. Past that is going broke and being unable to actually do their own conceived work due to poor financial decisions. I know these people range from 16-60 years of age however I cannot help but wonder what their day occupation is. The second point I think is more serious due to the increase in activity not only of #operations but citizens arrested for participating. The more diversified and strangely un-united the efforts are, the less effective they will become in their efforts to make change. E.g. if you have a collective of 500 working on #opIran, but most of those want to work on different #ops, then their going to be down to maybe 200 people on #opIran and when you have 75 raids and 16 people arrested it can make #opIran a bit more difficult to make a difference and easier to trace with the lowered amount of people. The fix to this is to go back to the core #operationpayback and focus on 5 targets max as a much larger collective than to diversify into some many off branches. This would also hopefully reduce in-fighting as well but also retain the integrity of what #anonymous really is. In my mind, Anonymous is a societal watch dog for the American constitution and a force that does good amongst the nations, once they break past that, then I cant believe in their vision. Some Food for thought.