Shirt Tales

1. "Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong and our dreams for this beautiful country will never die...Perhaps more strongly still, people are driven by a sense of justice, fairness and balance. Where does the striving for justice come from? If we can't get people to love one another-- at least not for now--or even to like one another, then we can guide them toward being more just. To allow ourselves a greater sense of justice, of fairness. I believe it can be justice that determines the relations between people. I find it difficult to dismiss justice in history; that movement towards justice. The entire Enlightenment program thrived on the sense that we must find a fair arrangement in law and wealth. Against hate violence, greed, opposition, we can see justice emerging as a singular force, perhaps the one rational element in history....I've begun to realize how inequality--I mean, specifically, inequality of opportunity-- can be the source of injustice. For if librty only applies to the privileged and strong, then their expression of liberty can be oppressive. Who else right now can afford to be free except for the rich? Liberty means for some the right to do anything you want. But where does this leave others who are scrambling to survive?" --- Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada
2. "Reason is more than intelligence: it develops only when the brain and the heart are united, when feeling and thinking are integrated, and when both are rational...The loss of the ability to think in terms of constructive vision is in itself a severe threat to survival."-- Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
   

Labels: pensees

# posted by ramblingrose @ 11:19 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

• In 2007, Telecom Ottawa had $16.2 in revenue (1,250 kilometres of fibre-optic cable, about 450 customers and 50 employees);
• as well, Telecom Ottawa had previously bought Trytel Internet, an Ottawa-based Internet provider with 10,000 customers, in order to provide e-mail, web hosting,along with its broadband connectivity;
• "Atria and Hydro Ottawa expect the deal to close shortly. Other suitors can submit better offers to Hydro Ottawa until March 8." (3)

1. “Details of the transaction remain murky, and the municipal leaders involved in the sale remain disturbingly tight-lipped. This is public money, involving the providers of our electricity. The public is owed a detailed accounting of this sale.” ===> raises questions i.e. “After holding forth Atria as a test case for a new era of co-operation and innovation among the successor companies to the old hydro commissions, why suddenly has the situation changed, and what it means for the future of any other co-operative ventures among the hydro
   companies. Most important, are the hydro companies themselves on the block and available to the highest bidder?” (4)
2. "Carl Zehr, who is on the board of Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro Inc., a fully owned subsidiary of Kitchener Power Corp., said because this is a transaction involving a private company, there are legal constraints against being able to divulge the terms of the sale....Zehr said he is concerned with how the deal appears to the public, but he is bound by legal agreements and his duty as a director of the hydro utility to be quiet for now. But the hydro companies selling Atria make annual reports to the municipal councils that own them. This is how the sale price will be made public: "We were such a pimple in the landscape of technology that we would have been totally lost in this, and the value of our interest would have been diminished over a period of time. So we maximized the profit as quickly as we could."***" (5)
3. Steve McCartney, the president of Atria Networks, said, "You don't want your competitors knowing that [i.e. financial details] when you are bidding against them for a contract, .... the company could not expand and grow its market without big-money investment.” (5)==> Steve McCartney was president of the municipally-owned Atria and is currently president of the Birch Hill Equities-owned Atria. For whom was he working at the time: local taxpayers who were paying his salary or for Birch Hill? Gentle reader, please reread and parse McCartney's sentence? as president of the municipally-owned Atria he was required to get the best possible price for local taxpayers cf. Ottawa's situation above: "Other suitors can submit better offers to Hydro Ottawa until March 8."
4. Elsewhere? "Epcor, the power company wholly owned by the City of Edmonton, has expanded its customer base rapidly over the past five years -- and is even investing in wind-generation farms in Ontario. Enmax, the successor company to the City of Calgary's utility company, now serves 460,000 customers across Alberta. In 2003, Enmax got into the natural gas marketing business, and is also providing a high-speed, fibre optics Internet service. It's paid off for the municipalities that own these newly deregulated companies. In 1998, the last full year before electrical deregulation in Alberta, Enmax had equity valued at $315 million. At the end of 2005, it had equity of $1.3 billion." (6)
5. "In Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge, the significant profits generated by the cities' recently
   privatized, but municipally owned, hydro-electric businesses are being increasingly tapped to pay
   for big-ticket items that formerly were left to the business and residential tax base to absorb." (7)===> so why sell off a promising lucrative venture that could reap dividends for local taxpayers?
   
6. Elsewhere, the " fibre-optic network was also used to create WiFi areas in the city and revolutionize the way hydro and gas meters are read." (8) ===> creates labour-savings as these meters can be read from an administration building and do not require personnel to visit each location to complete the reading; by 2012, all municipalities will be required to install smart meters to measure electricity consumption.

Labels: energy, technology

# posted by ramblingrose @ 9:16 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

1. Sources: (1) PETER SCOWEN's walks & explorations with Dr. Florida as reported in Globe and Mail November 10, 2007; December 15, 2007; November 10, 2007; (2) Valerie Hill, half full or half empty?, The Record 9 February 2008.
   

Labels: urban planning

# posted by ramblingrose @ 12:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

1. The first phrase, "the geography of nowhere," appears to have originated with Glen Murray, former Mayor City of Winnipeg & let us trace how he might have arrived at that conclusion: "If you look at the integration in Europe, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and how important cities are, you would conclude that the other end of globalization is localisation." Murray is describing how systems work and that the inevitable outcome of the economic process of imperialism/globalization will require a counter-balancing process that he describes as "localisation." This process appears to take place in cities-- themselves the culmination of the urbanisation process that took us beyond the agricultural society celebrated in the Oasis in the Centre sculpture in the photo above.
2. Murray believes that "cities are the most important tool nations have to build quality, success and prosperity in this century." Moreover, "cities have to be places of choice to live in and increasingly, we have to compete for citizenry, for talent, for creativity and investment like we and no other generation has before, because of the mobility of ideas, of people, and information technology capacity, which is instantaneous."
3. Globalization has been driven by an utilitarian mindset that is price-based..By saving 10 percent and building it ugly, it means you are not leaving a legacy that anyone is going to celebrate. And when you think of the cities in the world that you want to go to and live in, where you’d want to spend your money, where you want to participate in the creation of wealth and ideas, they’re the beautiful places.* The idea of utilitarian values is that geography of nowhere. It’s the K-Marts, it’s the ‘‘everything looks the same." The geography of nowhere results from a mindset which values functionality and consumption and expresses itself in this slogan."Build it cheap, build it ugly." **
4. The second phrase "a sense of place" appears to be cropping up as a reaction to the geography of nowhere. Rambling Rose has seen/heard it in various documents and speeches locally. Did it originate here? with this particular writer?==> "The anchor of place," writes Tony Hiss in The Experience of Place "has an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens of a democracy. As places around us change–the communities that shelter us and the larger regions that support them – we all undergo changes inside. The danger, as we are now beginning to see, is that whenever we make changes in our surroundings, we can all too easily shortchange ourselves by cutting ourselves off from the sights and sounds, the shapes or textures, or other information from a place that have helped mould our understanding and are now necessary for us to thrive." ==> Rambling Rose apologizes as she cannot link to the source; this particular quote comes from personal archives of 2002, culled long before RR ever dreamt blogging for this community.
5. Ultimately, this discourse is a value-driven one and circles around a much larger moral issue. Some years ago Heather Jane Robertson argued against including the huge education sector as a commodity within NAFTA thus:"The presumption that the public good and private interests are synonymous***marks the ideological triumph of neoliberalism, or perhaps the death of history. It takes little effort to demonstrate that, while the marketplace has been an exceedingly effective mechanism to generate wealth, on the whole its success has been achieved because of, not despite, its lack of a moral core. This not a character flaw, but a characteristic. Markets are not moral; they are necessarily preoccupied with self-interest and advantage, and as such are unfit arbiters of what constitutes our collective well being. Public interest cannot be measured or determined by private profit. Neither markets nor their ideological droppings are suitable models for education reform, since the operational imperatives of markets require that those individuals who prosper, those products that survive, and those corporations that succeed do so at the expense of other individuals, products, and corporations. To imagine that the sink-or-swim Darwinism of the markets will somehow translate into success for every student and every school is to forgo consciousness."

Deep & dense readings? Yes, but pertinent locally where:

a) a public good and service, the need for an expanded main branch library, has been subsumed into an issue of private profit disguised as a public-private partnership or "alternative, innovative, creative financing;"

b) the loss of a citizen-owned heritage structure that contained this community's sense of history and pride of place was demolished to make room for what? and why?

Editor's notes: * staff planner commented: " folks drive to Stratford or Guelph" & RR nods knowingly as she does the same; **the new Kitchener market is inherently cheap and ugly building-- a few concrete slabs that chill the soul & RR rambles to the Waterloo farmer's markets for the cultural shopping experience; *** the essential flaw in building a public library on public lands with private monies driving the agenda aka the P3 process.

Recently the North American community mourned the loss of Jane Jacobs, who counted herself a citizen of New York and most recently Toronto, as she advocated for each in turn. The lessons of her life can still be applied by all of us: "With humility and common sense, she taught the world how to understand and value cities through direct observation, persistent questioning and discovery. Her faith in the wisdom of local citizens lives on in the civic battles in which she participated and her wisdom lives on in the writing of her nine seminal books." -- The Center for the Living City at Purchase College

Labels: ethics, urban planning

# posted by ramblingrose @ 4:36 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Labels: ethics

# posted by ramblingrose @ 12:27 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Labels: ethics

# posted by ramblingrose @ 3:05 PM 0 Comments Links to this post