Please go to http://www.snowyla.com
“The opposite of creativity is cynicism.” —
-Esa Saarinen (via @the99percent)
Via Chris Guillebeau @chrisguillebeau Chris Guillebeau
Rebelling against my Rebellion
It’s not very fashionable to admit this but I needed a cubicle or I was going to go crazy. I genuinely enjoy working when the negative stuff like fear & mean behavior (mine included) is not part of the deal. Or at least kept to a minimum.
The 1990s were the dot com era & we thought we’d enjoy working from the beach in sandals. Then we liked some parts of that since we could go home at 4pm on a Friday and work from home around the kids instead of living in the office all weekend, but then a lot of things suck too.
We have become a society where parents constantly checking their iphones or blackberries during camping trips with their kids for fear of losing their jobs.
Being perpetually connected is not as efficient as we thought it’d be.
A side effect of this are the bizarre, very common interdepartmental email wars with sig lines “written on an iphone” made up mostly of lots of one-liner messages with mysterious triple meanings.
We did change & there’s cool stuff but like even though it’s massively uncool to say this I like dress shirts and work spaces. Especially if they’re not what people expect I’d like.
So here’s my new work space at Plug’n’Play in Sunnyvale, California. The Sunnyvale Skatepark next door had absolutely nothing to do with my decision to apply to be a tenant here. :)
“The future depends on what we do in the present.” — Mahatma Gandhi
A European model in a Hong Kong magazine featuring Japanese fashions… welcome to a connected world!
Builder Magazine, 2007
By Pat Curry
I was really supposed to be researching other things at the library tonight, but I got sucked into this beautiful story of idealistic landowning farmers, feisty developers and lots of help from the community. Affordable housing shouldn’t automatically be ugly or less stylish—there’s so much you can do with what you have.
Homes and communities are not like start-ups—I feel there has to be a balancing act so that more cool places like Green Cay Village.
Too many rules would destroy lots of creativity and innovation as well as standard of living, but too few would create a place where someone has to be either really lucky or risk their business to do the right thing.
Green Cay Village works with four preferred lenders, says sales manager Daniel Travis, to help buyers learn about special loan programs that might be available to them. The lenders are trained and certified by the county and state to locate and access state and local grants for down-payment assistance, first-time home buyer programs, a state bond program for affordable housing, and special mortgages for teachers, healthcare professionals, police, and firefighters.
To make sure that the homes would go to working families, Goray put anti-investor restrictions into the sales contract. Unless the buyer has extenuating circumstances, such as a job transfer, the unit can’t be rented out for two years. If it’s sold within a year, 100 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. In the second year, 50 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. After that point, any profits from a sale will be retained by the owner. “Everybody thought we were crazy because the government didn’t make us [restrict investors] and it was not a condition of the sale of the land,” Goray says. “We thought it was the right thing to do.” It proved to be an incredibly valuable policy when the market turned and investors everywhere started dumping properties and walking away from deposits.
“If we sold to investors, we’d be sitting here with 60 percent cancellations, trying to sell in a soft market,” Goray says. “I think we have 5 percent or 6 percent cancellations, due mostly to job transfers. It’s kind of a fun story.”
I think it’s great to have a home and it is part of the American Dream, but considering the cost of mortgages and that skyrocketing home prices are unsustainable, maybe we can modify that dream and make it OK to live in affordable or low-income housing too.
Maybe not everyone was meant to play the stock market in the United States. Maybe a lot of people are doing great things for society by being schoolteachers or low-paid baseball coaches, right?
a blast from the past.
Fight hard, reconcile, collaborate, win justice and heal peacefully and grow!
“It is from the knowldge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw strength to live and our reasons for acting.” — Simone de Beauvoir
Inspiration from Bob Berkebile in this month’s Dwell Magazine. It’s up to us to step up to the plate, raise our standards, and draw the line when it comes to being green.
He looks like true survivor! It must have been ridiculously difficult to get something like LEEDS pushed through. I hear people complaining about it a lot more than I hear people praising it, which distresses me. Anyone who’s tried to do anything meaningful in an organization knows that you have to give and take in order to get the greater good accomplished.
Great stuff and especially admirable considering architects are often the most powerless people in any project, subject to financial needs and client wishes. I guess they use their incredible people skills to make sure we do the right thing.
I am Japanese at heart because I believe that technology still ultimately benefits us if we aren’t morally lazy in its uses.
Most working class people in the United States and Europe were servants, farmers or housewives not so long ago, and housework was a dreary and neverending task for most women unless they had a fleet of maids.
I have been to developing countries and have even seen family members washing clothes against a washboard. I can’t imagine anyone finding it fun to do that all day long when a washing machine could help.
Use technology well and don’t be morally lazy. Better answer than to either reject or support technology 100%, right?