http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/01/condoms-sex-ed-video-how-to-put-on-a-sock
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Saturday, January 31, 2015
North State Hospital parcel could help end homelessness in Salem
Instead of a gift to a private developer, Salem could turn the North State Hospital Parcel into a low/no-car bike and pedestrian-centered housing project to end homelessness in Salem, starting with getting all veterans off the streets and into decent housing where counseling, job training and rehabilitation services are provided and available on site.
Los Angeles to Build Housing for Veterans
Richard A. Oppel, The New York Times
Oppel writes: "Even as Los Angeles became home to the country's largest population of homeless military veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs for years has used much of its 387-acre tract near the city's exclusive Brentwood neighborhood for other purposes, including leasing property to a car rental agency and the laundry facilities of a major hotel chain."
READ MORE
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Richard A. Oppel, The New York Times
Oppel writes: "Even as Los Angeles became home to the country's largest population of homeless military veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs for years has used much of its 387-acre tract near the city's exclusive Brentwood neighborhood for other purposes, including leasing property to a car rental agency and the laundry facilities of a major hotel chain."
READ MORE
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Friday, January 30, 2015
Carhead with a green tint
A brief "Climate Connections" program aired on Salem's KMUZ this morning and it revealed volumes about why our efforts to cut pollution from transportation have failed so dismally.
The Climate Connections series of spots attempts to give a little bit of information in a short digestible fashion for radio audience. The one here today focused on efforts by the Utah Department of Transportation to preserve what it called "flow" in automobile traffic, Presenting flow as an environmental good because autos pollute the most when accelerating or carrying a heavy load.
In other words, if you drink enough pseudo-green Kool-Aid, timing stop lights, increasing travel speeds and avoiding pedestrian impedance — the traffic engineers term for how a pedestrian looks through the driver's windshield — is actually a boon to the environment!
Salem breakfast on bikes blog calls this unthinking view of the world "hydraulic autoism."
Here at LOVESalem, it goes under the name "Carhead."
But it's the same demented, destructive worldview, the one bankrupting cities and states all over America, in a futile effort to maintain the fantasy that you can design a system around the private automobile without marginalizing vast numbers of people and destroying the environment.
As decades of actual experience have shown, whenever you increase traffic speeds, you not only increase the slaughter on the highways – a huge burden for humanity and a net catastrophe for the environment — you also increase the number of people who will choose to drive on the route with a higher speeds.
In other words, mismanagement by measurement of the wrong thing. By focusing solely on one engine and the omissions from that one engine, your ignore the total result of the system, which is more driving and more pollution and more demand for widening and straightening the roads, and adding more capacity to the web of roads, which further increases the amount of driving.
The only way to actually reduce vehicle emissions is to stop moving around in single occupant vehicles so darn much.
You reduce emissions in getting around by providing a complete mobility network, instead of a transportation network, as transportation is the defined today.
A mobility network is one where people have choices about how to get around and the most frequent trips can be taken on foot or bike, or by a form of transit that keeps the individual automobile parked, rather then all trips being designed for an automobile, with the automobile dominating all discussions of transportation.
A mobility network is one where all people, regardless of wealth or physical disability, can participate fully in the life of their community – in civic, social, economic, and recreational activities— Without having to own or have access to an automobile. In other words, automobiles are not prohibited, but they are not required in order to be a full participant in society.
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
The Climate Connections series of spots attempts to give a little bit of information in a short digestible fashion for radio audience. The one here today focused on efforts by the Utah Department of Transportation to preserve what it called "flow" in automobile traffic, Presenting flow as an environmental good because autos pollute the most when accelerating or carrying a heavy load.
In other words, if you drink enough pseudo-green Kool-Aid, timing stop lights, increasing travel speeds and avoiding pedestrian impedance — the traffic engineers term for how a pedestrian looks through the driver's windshield — is actually a boon to the environment!
Salem breakfast on bikes blog calls this unthinking view of the world "hydraulic autoism."
Here at LOVESalem, it goes under the name "Carhead."
But it's the same demented, destructive worldview, the one bankrupting cities and states all over America, in a futile effort to maintain the fantasy that you can design a system around the private automobile without marginalizing vast numbers of people and destroying the environment.
As decades of actual experience have shown, whenever you increase traffic speeds, you not only increase the slaughter on the highways – a huge burden for humanity and a net catastrophe for the environment — you also increase the number of people who will choose to drive on the route with a higher speeds.
In other words, mismanagement by measurement of the wrong thing. By focusing solely on one engine and the omissions from that one engine, your ignore the total result of the system, which is more driving and more pollution and more demand for widening and straightening the roads, and adding more capacity to the web of roads, which further increases the amount of driving.
The only way to actually reduce vehicle emissions is to stop moving around in single occupant vehicles so darn much.
You reduce emissions in getting around by providing a complete mobility network, instead of a transportation network, as transportation is the defined today.
A mobility network is one where people have choices about how to get around and the most frequent trips can be taken on foot or bike, or by a form of transit that keeps the individual automobile parked, rather then all trips being designed for an automobile, with the automobile dominating all discussions of transportation.
A mobility network is one where all people, regardless of wealth or physical disability, can participate fully in the life of their community – in civic, social, economic, and recreational activities— Without having to own or have access to an automobile. In other words, automobiles are not prohibited, but they are not required in order to be a full participant in society.
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Making use of parking lots
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
The Best Idea in a Long Time: Covering Parking Lots With Solar Panels
Chris Mooney, The Washington Post
Mooney writes: "America is a nation of pavement. According to research conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, most cities' surfaces are 35 to 50 percent composed of the stuff."
READ MORE
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
More sense on roads in TN than OR? Let's Applaud a DOT Commissioner
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
NationBuilder
Strong Towns We'd like to introduce you to Tennessee Transportation Commissioner John Schroer.
When asked to build more lane miles in a state lacking money for basic road maintenance, he postponed millions of dollars of projects and said:
"You don't build an addition on your house if the roof leaks. You fix your roof."
And when asked to explain how transportation and local land use were related, this former mayor of Franklin, TN, said:
"I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to build a bypass to a bypass. That's purely bad planning."
And by the way….TDOT is completely debt free. What a breath of fresh air.
We've posted a short interview with Commissioner Schroer that you might find worth seeing. Give it a watch and then pass it on so others will also know what leadership in transportation should sound like.
And if you are on Twitter, please help us highlight the great work being done in Tennessee by sharing this tweet:
Tip of the hat to @tdotcommish John Schroer for being a @strongtowns kind of leader. http://buff.ly/1CcXn2E
Strong Towns
http://www.strongtowns.us/Strong Towns · United States
You can also keep up with Strong Towns on Twitter or Facebook.Created with NationBuilder, the essential toolkit for leaders.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Shadow Transit -- or Superior Transit?
This is the next step in Salem -- instead of fighting against Uber and similar alternatives to drive alone, we must work to integrate such alternative transit models into the public transit system so that we can have a complete, safe, insured transit system that lets everyone in Salem - including the weekend worker or church goer, and the late shift caregiver -- participate fully in social, civic, and economic life, even if they don't own or have access to a car.
With car ownership cost exceeding $8000 per year -- and with the huge poverty tax for low end, low reliability cars imposed on Salem's most vulnerable people -- there is a huge pool of dollars that could be saved and returned to the community by providing a safe, 7 Day, 16 hours daily mobility system at affordable prices.
What we need is to get every group and entity connected with transportation in Salem -- Cherriots, Salem, Keizer, NEDCO, SK Schools, and the local anti poverty social services sector, and major employers, such as the Salem Parking Hospital and the State -- to stop thinking of transportation as consisting of only two or three flavors: The privately owned automobile or the fixed route public transit bus or paratransit for those eligible.
What we need to realize is that we've built an incomplete, discriminatory mobility system that takes money from everyone but only provides much service to those wealthy and healthy enough to be able to afford the price of participation, an expensive automobile. Everyone else is left to shift for themselves -- starting with a starved transit system burdened by having the sole legal obligation to provide mobility for the disabled, an obligation that should be shared with all road users, not just the bus system.
Cherriots is showing some encouraging signs of life with its tiny tiptoe into more flexible transit (albeit in West Salem, a sprawled mess nearly perfectly designed to make transit ineffective) and its discussion of seeking funding to restore weekend service. Time to build on that idea, and to keep building until car ownership is a real choice, not an essential of life.
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Two out of three ain't good, Kurt!
Thanks to the single-member district and the intellectually bankrupt Oregon GOP still struggling to repeal the 20th Century, Kurt gets to vote the way Big Oil and Wall Street demand and pretend that it's bipartisanship.
If we had an actual representative democracy that let people elect from a range of options, instead of just voting for one candidate in the zero-sum "winner take all" we get as a result of our "first past the post" plurality election rules, Kurt wouldn't be confident that he could vote against Oregon and get away with it.
Even without fixing the single member district problem we can do much better just by using ranked choice voting (instant runoff), so that Democrats and progressives in the 5th District would be able to vote for someone not captured by the special interests without having their votes go towards helping to elect a disaster like Tootie Smith.
See Fairvote.org to learn more about how we could put real choices into our elections.
http://www.fairvote.org/reforms/instant-runoff-voting/
KMUZ now on the air throughout Salem! 100.7 fm!
Salem's own Willamette Information, News, and Entertainment Service (WINES) launched its new broadcast translator providing coverage throughout Salem for Salem's only community radio station, KMUZ!
Set your radio dials and push button presets for 100.7 fm if you haven't been able to get reception at 88.5.
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Insanity -- streetlight fee on water bills instead of gas tax
If there was ever a perfect time to raise the gas tax to pay for roadway infrastructure, this is it.
Instead, Salem proposes to make residents pay for streetlights on their water bills, even though the vast majority of the streetlights in Salem are for the benefit of automobiles.
Streetlights don't squeeze funding for road repairs: sprawl and foolish attempts to keep up the growth Ponzi scheme are what squeeze funding for road repairs. Shifting the burden of road repairs -- and streetlights are most definitely part of the road system – onto residents who may not even own or use a car is just more evidence that City Hall has been captured by victims of carhead, the affliction that impairs logical thought and especially decreases or eliminates empathy for persons not merged into a cyborg with their own car.
----
City of Salem Considers New Streetlight Fee (Photo)
// City of Salem
Keeping Salem's more than 10,550 streetlights operating has squeezed funding for road repairs.
What's the crux of the problem? Streetlights and road repairs in Salem both depend on a shrinking pool of gasoline tax revenues. Money for basic road pavement maintenance has largely evaporated.
"We will, at some point, have to decide on whether we want to fix the sidewalks or streets because we won't be able to do both," said Mark Becktel, the city's parks and transportation services manager.
City staff have proposed a solution: a streetlight fee that would be added to city water and sewer bills. The proposed fee -- amounting to $2.80 per month for a single family household --would create a dedicated funding source for operating the city's streetlights and allow more gasoline taxes to be used for road repairs.
In February, Salem City Council is expected to hold a public hearing on the streetlight fee. The fee was first brought before council in July 2013, but councilors asked staff to come back with more information.
Each year, the cost of electricity and maintenance for streetlights consumes approximately $1.4 million of the city's $8.9 million allocation of gasoline taxes.
Meanwhile, street maintenance has sustained the brunt of recent budget cutting, losing all general fund support in the current fiscal year. The Public Works Streets Fund has had a recurring shortfall of $1 million since the end of fiscal year 2013-14.
Revenue from the streetlight fee would pay for electricity and streetlight maintenance, as well as upgrading city-owned streetlights to light-emitting diode lights, better known as LEDs.
About 68 percent of streetlights in Salem are city-owned; the rest are owned by utilities. Portland General Electric has already completed the conversion of its utility-owned streetlights to LEDs, which are more energy efficient than the traditional high-pressure sodium lights they replaced.
The city has met with neighborhood groups, as well as the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, and explained the rationale behind the proposed streetlight fee.
City officials maintain that using the existing utility billing system is the most cost-effective way to implement a fee for service.
Revenue collected from the fee would be placed in a streetlight fund dedicated solely for the operation and expansion of the streetlight system. Gas tax funds, previously used for streetlights, could be directed to street maintenance.
City officials, however, said another funding source for street maintenance will ultimately need to be found. The streetlight fee will stabilize funding for street maintenance for about three years, giving the city time to devise a solution to the funding crunch.
Without the streetlight fee, the city faces deep program cuts, including reductions of staff and services, by fiscal 2016-17.
The gravity of the city's street maintenance problems may not be obvious to casual observers. Main arterial streets are in good-to-fair condition, but many neighborhood streets haven't had preventative maintenance in 15 or 20 years, Becktel said. No pavement maintenance on residential streets was performed in 2014, other than emergency repairs.
Work crews completed only about 6 lane miles of pavement overlays and skin patches on collector and arterial streets in 2014. That compares to the city's 12-year-average of 11.4 lane miles.
Past attempts in Salem to improve transportation funding by imposing a new fee haven't succeeded.
In 2002, Salem City Council passed a "streetscape utility fee" that would have provided funding for streetlights, sidewalks and street trees.
Salem's business community found the streetscape fee unacceptable and mounted a political campaign to overturn it. An initiative petition sent the proposal to voters and it was repealed in 2003.
Becktel said the current streetlight fee proposal stands a better chance of succeeding than the 2002 proposal because it's narrowly focused on streetlights.
"We're not taking on sidewalks, streetlights and street trees all in one fee," he said. "It's just communicating to people that we can't afford to pay for streetlights out of gas tax anymore."
City staff have also addressed several concerns about the version of the streetlight fee presented to city council in 2013.
For example, city staff have recommended expanding a low-income credit on water and sewer bills to offset the fee's cost. About 500 low-income households in Salem would end up paying a little less on city utility bills.
----
Shared via my feedly reader
----
City of Salem Considers New Streetlight Fee (Photo)
// City of Salem
Keeping Salem's more than 10,550 streetlights operating has squeezed funding for road repairs.
What's the crux of the problem? Streetlights and road repairs in Salem both depend on a shrinking pool of gasoline tax revenues. Money for basic road pavement maintenance has largely evaporated.
"We will, at some point, have to decide on whether we want to fix the sidewalks or streets because we won't be able to do both," said Mark Becktel, the city's parks and transportation services manager.
City staff have proposed a solution: a streetlight fee that would be added to city water and sewer bills. The proposed fee -- amounting to $2.80 per month for a single family household --would create a dedicated funding source for operating the city's streetlights and allow more gasoline taxes to be used for road repairs.
In February, Salem City Council is expected to hold a public hearing on the streetlight fee. The fee was first brought before council in July 2013, but councilors asked staff to come back with more information.
Each year, the cost of electricity and maintenance for streetlights consumes approximately $1.4 million of the city's $8.9 million allocation of gasoline taxes.
Meanwhile, street maintenance has sustained the brunt of recent budget cutting, losing all general fund support in the current fiscal year. The Public Works Streets Fund has had a recurring shortfall of $1 million since the end of fiscal year 2013-14.
Revenue from the streetlight fee would pay for electricity and streetlight maintenance, as well as upgrading city-owned streetlights to light-emitting diode lights, better known as LEDs.
About 68 percent of streetlights in Salem are city-owned; the rest are owned by utilities. Portland General Electric has already completed the conversion of its utility-owned streetlights to LEDs, which are more energy efficient than the traditional high-pressure sodium lights they replaced.
The city has met with neighborhood groups, as well as the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, and explained the rationale behind the proposed streetlight fee.
City officials maintain that using the existing utility billing system is the most cost-effective way to implement a fee for service.
Revenue collected from the fee would be placed in a streetlight fund dedicated solely for the operation and expansion of the streetlight system. Gas tax funds, previously used for streetlights, could be directed to street maintenance.
City officials, however, said another funding source for street maintenance will ultimately need to be found. The streetlight fee will stabilize funding for street maintenance for about three years, giving the city time to devise a solution to the funding crunch.
Without the streetlight fee, the city faces deep program cuts, including reductions of staff and services, by fiscal 2016-17.
The gravity of the city's street maintenance problems may not be obvious to casual observers. Main arterial streets are in good-to-fair condition, but many neighborhood streets haven't had preventative maintenance in 15 or 20 years, Becktel said. No pavement maintenance on residential streets was performed in 2014, other than emergency repairs.
Work crews completed only about 6 lane miles of pavement overlays and skin patches on collector and arterial streets in 2014. That compares to the city's 12-year-average of 11.4 lane miles.
Past attempts in Salem to improve transportation funding by imposing a new fee haven't succeeded.
In 2002, Salem City Council passed a "streetscape utility fee" that would have provided funding for streetlights, sidewalks and street trees.
Salem's business community found the streetscape fee unacceptable and mounted a political campaign to overturn it. An initiative petition sent the proposal to voters and it was repealed in 2003.
Becktel said the current streetlight fee proposal stands a better chance of succeeding than the 2002 proposal because it's narrowly focused on streetlights.
"We're not taking on sidewalks, streetlights and street trees all in one fee," he said. "It's just communicating to people that we can't afford to pay for streetlights out of gas tax anymore."
City staff have also addressed several concerns about the version of the streetlight fee presented to city council in 2013.
For example, city staff have recommended expanding a low-income credit on water and sewer bills to offset the fee's cost. About 500 low-income households in Salem would end up paying a little less on city utility bills.
----
Shared via my feedly reader
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
Intuit: profiting off waste and distress
Intuit is a terrible, terrible company -- lobbying to make sure that tax time is as much of a burden as possible, the better to sell millions of software packages. Morally, Intuit is no better than the alarm system company owner who opposes better police services because he doesn't make a profit off preventing crime -- he wants lots of crime so that he sells lots of alarm systems.
This is the perfect example of what the US Supreme Court's worship of corporate people (and loathing for the 99% of sex-having flesh people who don't own a corporate person) has brought us to: we have a company -- one that has been magically granted Free Speech by supposedly conservative, textualist justices -- that would gladly give you cancer if they made money off it.
Changes To TurboTax Lead To Consumer Revolt, Opportunity For Competitors
// The Consumerist
It's important to step back and look at the big picture, too. Intuit has spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government to make sure that American taxpayers still have to file tax returns, even though for most people the IRS could simply pre-populate the form with the information they have and cut us a refund check or send us a bill. The state of California already does this for state income tax returns, and other countries do it. People would be welcome to do their own math and file a return, but they wouldn't have to.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
