Well, I’m finally getting around to writing here again. In the interesting of spicing things up, I’ll try and keep my comments short and excitingly-formatted. Here goes…
I DELETED every damn comment waiting for approval since March! Simple reason for this - they were all spam, and now they are all dead. Take that, comments. If you submitted a legitimate comment, sorry. Try again.
Last semester I had a strong feeling of ownership. It wasn’t that I did particularly well in my classes (although I didn’t do poorly) or anything like that; I just had a strong sense that I was doing the school work that I was doing because I had chosen it. This semester just doesn’t quite live up to that. It might just be some of the luster wearing off of grad school, but I think there’s more too it as well. Last semester was dominated by a very practical class - clear assignments, and a really clear idea of how everything we were assigned would help us as planners in the future. This semester there is no single class that dominates, and the only class that feels really practical has a serious lack of cohesion/instructor ability (not knowledge; teaching ability). My hypothesis is that it’s this lack of practical, applied learning that’s starting to get me down, as much as anything else. I feel like I’m being taught what the professors have decided I should know, not what is needed for me to follow the career path on which I have decided.
I suppose I should just get the hell over it. No one said that all classes would be fun, that I would have free time, or that I would get to learn precisely and exactly what I decided. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great history of getting over these things… I guess it’s time to put the head down and decide that what I really want to do is finish all this work that I don’t feel like doing. Back to editing of papers.
So, from a transportation perspective, HourCar style services (where someone pays a moderate monthly fee for the privilege to rent a car at a low hourly rate to run chores) make a lot of sense - allow people the flexibility of personal vehicles, while reducing their household expenses on cars and reducing the ratio of vehicles required per person at the same time. There are some disadvantages to the system, however - renting a car isn’t the same as owning. Apart from a drop in personal freedom (you can’t quite hop in the car whenever you want), there are issues of personal comfort that seem minor, but in total count for a lot. I’m thinking of things like having the radio programmed the way you like, or having the seat set appropriately for you.
Thinking about this, I realized that solutions to these inconveniences are within the grasp of modern technology. Just like in personal computers, where one can log in as a certain profile and have all the right shortcuts/programs/etc. load, a similar system could be employed for cars. Things like seat controls and radio programming are becoming increasingly electronic (one has only to look at my wife’s 2001 Prius to see that). It would be no difficult thing to implement a system whereby one had only to enter a username and maybe a password to have the car adjust to the previous settings, with no need to try and reset everything. As cars become more and more wired, this could be more and more useful - I’m thinking of integrated mapping services and possibly other electronically controlled settings like mirrors or even child safety features (like locks and windows). Mmmm, the possibilities… I wonder if this has already been done in some services. Might be worth a look.
And I find myself not nearly as excited as at the beginning of last semester. This is neither a huge surprise nor a sign that I’m becoming disappointed with grad school. I think it has more to do with the fact that at the beginning of grad school last semester I was starving for some intellectual conversation (while Lynn and I talk a lot, and often about pretty interesting stuff, last summer I was working full time for Got Junk - not exactly a bastion of in-depth discourse). I also had very little idea of what grad school was going to be like and what would be required of me. Now I have a pretty strong idea of what I’m going back to and what I want to get out of it, and my mind is actually getting some daily exercise at work, not just at home.
There are also a couple of sticky situations related to school that I’m not entirely sure how to deal with - not that I should complain, as they’re definitely of the to-much-of-a-good-thing variety. My internship with MCWD is great, but it has evolved from inspecting construction sites to creating and upgrading a database in Access (with which I have a love/hate relationship). This worries me on two fronts. First, I’m not entirely sure that HHH will consider that kind of work to be appropriate for an Urban Planning internship, no matter how important it is for the district. Second, I’m pretty sure that I want to focus on rural planning, and there is a Center for Rural Design at UMN that, if I could land an internship there, would be the perfect compliment to that track. The problem is that maintaining this database for MCWD is a pretty significant, long-term commitment, because no-one there has any clue how to fix it if something goes wrong. I don’t have the time to be more or less on call for MCWD, working at an internship, and going to grad school full time.
Honestly, though, I shouldn’t bitch. The other first-year MURP students are beginning to make envious comments about the internship I already have while they’re looking around for theirs. It is possible that my new position as DB admin (heh. Now if only I knew a damned thing about SQL/db theory/programming/etc…) will come with a pay raise, which would be pretty nice right now. Finally, the CRD doesn’t even have open positions at the moment, so it isn’t as if I could just start up an internship there tomorrow if I so decided. I’m thinking the best plan is to keep in touch with them, let them know I’m definitely interested, and see if something develops. I should probably just avoid worrying about the situation until there actually is a decision to make.
Well, I had forgotten one of the major drawbacks of school - being constantly judged. One would think, it being such a major component, that it would be impossible to forget about it, but somehow I managed it. After getting a C+ back on one of my papers, I remembered why it was that I didn’t try all that hard in high school or college - I really hate getting bad grades, at least if I feel that I’ve put real work into them. This being grad school, and pretty much everyone here being as smart or smarter than I, I guess I’ll just have to get used to it, and keep on working. There is a distinct advantage to being in a class with a bunch of really bright people - group projects are great. The two I’m doing right now I have a pretty optimistic feeling about.
Something I had thought grad school would change was the whole “random ideas popping into my head” phenom - I was wrong, of course. It just means that my ideas are more closely related to what I’m studying, and I don’t have time to think about them for very long. The earlier post about education is good example, and I’m about to throw up another, so if longwinded explanations of theoretical programs or political changes bore you, now is a good time to stop reading.
We had a lecture about NGOs in one of my Intro to Planning classes, which was all about economic development and reinvestment of income. Given it was in a third world context, but it got me thinking about development in rural America. The traditional way in the U.S. to make your income grow (substantially, insteady of insanely slowly) is by investing it in the stock market. The trouble with this is that most companies in which one may invest don’t really represent a “local investment”. You might work at GM and have stock in the company, which in some ways is a further local investment of money. The problem is that GM is a global company, and so your dollars are going all over the world instead of increasing local capital. A solution might be to set up very small scale rural stock markets for local businesses. I’m not sure that this could work at the city level. Small towns are just too small for a stock market to be stable, I would think. Maybe the better approach would be at the county level, or associations of townships. Either way, I think that this could be a great way for people to 1: reinvest money in the local economy; 2: provide an alternative to banks and credit unions for supplies of money for developing small businesses; 3: create a more healthy economy by providing customers frustrated with poor service provided by a local business to shift resources to a better competitor.
I have to wonder if someone has already thought of this; if so it has probably already proven itself a bad idea and failed, as I have never heard of it. It could be risky, especially because of the small size of the market involved. I think that a good way to minimize risk would be to adopt a couple of rules, more stringent than those on a standard market. First, provide that the originator of the business must always either have half or more of the shares of the company, or always have more shares than any single stockholder. This way hostile takeovers are limited or eliminated, which is important because that kind of economic strategy could be devastating on the social well-being of a tight-knit small town. The first condition would be ironclad protection against takeovers, but would limit potential investment in a business. The second would be much more flexible and allow a far greater amount of investment, but stockholders would have far greater say in how the business was run. The second condition would be to limit how quickly shareholders could purchase and sell shares, to prevent catastrophic changes in available capital for local businesses. If at any time all of the available money could be withdrawn, and the shareholder pool is small enought (and the local rumor mill strong enough) to make instant selling of shares possible, local economies could be completely devestated by panic (think mini-1929s).
I wonder if this idea has any viability at all. It may be completely off the wall.
For no reason whatsoever this morning riding the Hiawatha LRT back to my apartment I started pulling together some thoughts I’ve had about education. I got so distracted that I almost forgot to get off the train at my stop, so I figured that was a good reason to post what I had been thinking about.
It sounds like I decided to take the most time-consuming class in the MURP program this semester, at least according to
other students. On one hand this is a very good thing, as it means that I shouldn’t have quite so much of my time eaten in the coming semesters. The other hand in this case is that the class is likely to only get more difficult, and I have a half semester course starting in a few weeks. I should get my grades on my last few projects back in a week or so, and that should give me an idea of whether or not I’m spending enough time on school work. I feel like I am, for the most part, although I did slack this weekend…
Working at the MCWD is proving to be a good move. Everyone there is fun and interesting, I’m learning a great deal about erosion control and general hydrology (which dovetails quite well with the class-of-crazy-workload), and I’ll get to push people around on construction sites. I’m thinking that maybe the most useful aspect will be an inside perspective on the workings of local government. The district is really it’s own governmental organization, and it’s kind of interesting seeing where it does and where it does not cooperate with the cities that share physical (if not regulatory) jurisdiction. A lot of it seems to be personality based - there are more contacts with the DNR, which shares many of the same goals and values, than with other governmental organizations. I have to wonder if maybe the land aquisition program would go more smoothly and have new opportunities open to it if they, say, partnered with a developing city or a parks and recreation board. Perhaps they already do, to some extent… I’ll have to figure that one out.
Well, in an not-so-shocking turn of events, grad school has eaten up most of my time. This has, of course, lead to less posting, since I have more valuble things to do during my down time. Like playing games on PopCap.
The positive side to this is that I’m back in school, which for the most part rocks. All of the incoming urban planning students seem really damned smart, which makes for fantastic class discussion. We’re assigned insane amounts of reading, which realistically cannot all be done. However, it does mean that there’s always something interesting to think about. The only down side to all of this that I can see is that I feel like I’m at risk for developing some kind of weird inferiority complex, as it seems like everyone in the class has had FAR more experience than I in housing/policy/other planning related fields. Still, this is much much better than being surrounded by a group of of poorly prepared/not that bright/completely uninterested and detached people, which was often the case in college.
My morning-routine website Pharyngula recently posted a link to a fun little potential law passed by the House: HR 2679, which denies lawyers compensation even when they win a case against a government official concerning the establishment of religion. This is a pretty typical tactic of the current far right wing - find a way to completely cripple those who disagree with you, in a way that is complicated enough that the media isn’t going to want to spend the time to explain it fully to those effected. By taking away compensation, this law would remove any incentive (apart from moral, and we all know how well morality serves to motivate people) of lawyers to go after public officials for stamping blatant christianity all over public actions and places. This is a CRUCIAL piece of legal protection against theocracy, but because it can’t be boiled down into a 30 second soundbite, it won’t get any play, ever. Maybe the senate will vote it down; maybe if it does get enacted into law it will be demolished by the first challenge by the ACLU. We can only hope, and maybe vote down the bastards who voted for it.
It has come to my attention that there are actually a couple of “lay” science organizations to which one may belong. For instance, there are various science education groups in many states, like MnCSE, for instance. Then there’s AAAS, which publishes Science magazine - so that’s good. Maybe the frustration I’m feeling is more that for whatever the various science organizations that already exist do a crappy job of rallying their base for and against various social causes. Hard to say.
It has occurred to me recently that there aren’t any lay organizations for the promotion of science. I’m thinking specifically about the way the social agendas of various religious organizations are promoted, versus the complete lack of such a framework for science. Read the rest of this entry »