Geographies of scale: mobile phones

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Dave Wong in a comment at TheFeature writes:
I live in Hong Kong, a highly competitive city with 6 mobile carriers… not only is airtime 8x cheaper than in the US (US$0.01 per minute on postpaid plans) but handsets are also very competitively priced. While networks have a great deal more geographic area to cover in the US, Asia and Europe have proven that number portability and unlocked phones on GSM networks are clearly the more cost effective solutions going forward for consumers.

Indeed, handsets are usually cheaper in Hong Kong than anywhere else, although that has as much to do with its proximity to Chinese sweatshops as with fierce competition. That said, his numbers do check out: the postpaid plans, even for ultra-high-tech Three, seem almost reasonably priced by US standards even before the US$1=HK$7.8 conversion. There are probably four to six mobile carriers in most US cities, and yet prices here are stuck in the stratosphere — because of the high infrastructure costs associated with sending crews out to stick cell towers atop every grain silo and Interstate-facing billboard in the land. Meanwhile, city dwellers like me (and I don’t even use coverage along the interstates!) are roped into “national” rate plans that just barely underwrite those costs.

Perhaps there’s an opening for a local carrier to rent spectrum only in the large cities, make clear that its coverage isn’t for everyone, and sell it dirt cheap — that is, unless it runs afoul of universal service regulations, but isn’t that what I pay fees for?

Incidentally, I stumbled across TheFeature in the course of a Google search. It’s certainly an interesting idea and looks like nice software: the karma and ranking of Slashcode, plus more in-depth user profiles (bordering on blogs?), intelligent ranking of stories, and an explicitly professional audience (a relief compared to the countless mobile-customer sites out there, filled with .sigs of people’s hot rods and atrocious spelling). All in all, a nice community service from Nokia.

Social insurance privatization abroad not exactly successful

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The American Prospect makes an interesting pair of contrasts in its Social Security package this month: first, from Norma Cohen, that Britain’s privatization schemes have backfired in a big way due to exactly the sort of “price-indexed” benefit cuts that Bush has proposed and due to overly greedy securities brokers (are there any other kinds?); and second, from Dean Baker, that Argentina’s partial privatization and the new public debt it incurred played a significant role in driving that country towards default and fiscal ruin.

Baker says, “[t]he United States is obviously very different from Argentina.” Yeah: we’re running even larger deficits.

Anecdotes

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Two local updates from the front lines of two vast social forces reshaping our city:

“Evil gay dog-walking busybody gentrifiers,”* from David Roeder‘s column:

Regular readers will remember the response I stirred up last summer when I referred to Morse Avenue in Rogers Park as a crime “hellhole.” My diatribe was about how crime kills business activity on a street that should fare better because of its lakefront location and access to the Red Line… it turns out my “hellhole” label inspired a Rogers Park resident, Craig Gernhardt, to start a blog that catalogs the daily indignities, large and small, that occur along the street. Gernhardt, who with his father publishes Gay Chicago magazine, is part of the community group Paws 4 Peace that has its own crime-fighting strategy. A dozen or so dog owners will use their daily walks to make the drug dealers uncomfortable. “We’ll just gather on their corners and start talking about the weather. They don’t like that and they’ll move on,” Gernhardt said. He uses the blog to challenge timid leaders and to embarrass property owners who contribute to Morse’s blight.

Mexican immigrants fleeing to the suburbs, reported by Brendan McCarthy in the Trib:

Marisol Luna, the newest character in the popular American Girl doll line, seems innocent enough. In the [story book accompanying the doll], Marisol moves with her family from Pilsen to Des Plaines after her mother declares that it is “time we get out of this neighborhood.” In another passage, Marisol’s mother tells her daughter that the neighborhood is dangerous, and that it is “no place for [her] to grow up.”

* before anyone gets upset, this is tongue in cheek: “evil” precedes “gentrifier” so often, it’s practically part of the term.

hipster handbook errors

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Robert Lanham’s Hipster Handbook describes Wicker Park in a vignette as “undoubtedly the most deck neighborhood in the city,” which is more or less still true. However, these little errors bug me, no matter how much I try to empathize with New Yorkers who just don’t care about my provincial little Western hamlet:

  • The “Chicago Art Institute” is actually the Art Institute of Chicago.
  • “Morning Edition” is not on at 9:30am here in Central Time-land, so one could not fall back asleep to it then. It ends at 9:30. (I should know, as I fall back asleep to “848,” which starts at 9:30, quite often.)
  • Her bicycle is almost undoubtedly a Schwinn and very well may not have a front basket; they’re rare among the cruisers here.
  • Almost all coffee shops around here are counter service and do not have waitresses.

point of view

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I finally figured out how to fix “keystoning” in my photos during the whole export/optimizing process in Macromedia Fireworks (which I use over Photoshop mostly because it isn’t quite the memory hog). So, I went through and fixed up several of the photos in the Cascadia photo gallery. The difference shouldn’t be all that noticeable — after all, the goal is just to fix something that we see but that cameras exaggerate — but it definitely soothes my perfectionism.

(BTW, the full-size pictures, but not the thumbnails, were fixed.)

Rooftop gardens galore

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The Santa Monica city council will soon consider plans for redeveloping Santa Monica Place. Owner Macerich’s plans, developed by Jon Jerde, will scrape the site for underground parking and extend Third Street through the existing site. (This is an unexpected windfall to Sears, which stands to become the southern terminus of Third Street.) A pair of two-story retail buildings would line an extension of Third Street: small shops at ground level and four anchors (including the existing Macy’s and Robinsons-May) largely on the second level. Atop the podium on the the west half of the block is a rooftop garden with restaurants and an office building. A few live-work units would prop up the street presence on Second Street.

Personally, I’m somewhat puzzled by the sudden interest — as at Block 37, in the last pre-Mills scheme released to the public, but also seen in some lifestyle centers like Paseo Colorado or Clarendon Market Common — in building these rooftop dining gardens and, more importantly, selling them as huge public benefits. Sure, they’re pretty with nice views (in this case, of the ocean and pier), sure, they’re green, and sure, they’re open to the public, but won’t they end up serving mostly as fenced-in outdoor dining? In a location like Santa Monica, is outdoor dining really all that interesting, and (considering how profitable it is) why does anyone consider it to be a public benefit?

And in this case, a better urban design approach would maintain the somewhat higher podium heights found nearby (in the 50-80′ range), possibly by moving the office component from a freestanding tower into the podium. A cluster of high-rise residential towers isn’t the end of the world, but a little more thought should be given to integrating those into the rest of the project — not that Macerich, as a pure-play retail developer, has any interest in thinking about that.

Update 26 Jan: today’s Times has a timely article on how the “food court” atop the Time Warner Center is faring. Seems that, for many in the haute cuisine set, entering a mall is just too gauche for words. Some sort of direct street access would have been preferable, I suppose.

back from the beach

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run, child

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Taken on Miami Beach at the 10th Street lifeguard station, probably around 6pm on 15 January. I’ve also started a flickr feed in the left navbar, showcasing six recent photos uploaded to flickr. It’s a neat service–I’ll probably keep assembling the urban photos into galleries, but will use flickr for snapshots since it’s much easier. (Now, if only there were a quicker way to web-optimize photos or adjust perspective…) Hopefully, this will result in much more frequent photo updates.

Also, Flickr allows comments, which I’ve had to remove here due to a flood of comment spam — even with filters, the spammers are always one step ahead. I’m investigating moving over to WordPress for the blogging software, which would hopefully allow me to open comments back up. (Got the first ping spam attack last week — harumph.)

Third rail

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“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws, you would not hear of that party again… There is a tiny splinter group that believes you can do these things. Among them are… a few Texas oil millionaires… Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Dwight Eisenhower, in a letter to his brother Edgar, 2 May 1956

Leaving the peninsula

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I’m on a train now, waiting at the station in front of Jacksonville after a day spent traveling up the length of Florida’s Atlantic coast.

A curious juxtaposition from yesterday: two neighboring bars on Washington Street in South Miami Beach are called Deep and Bash. Guess which one is the gay bar? Hint: we queers are evidently not quite campy enough for this final frontier of language reclamation.

Note for future research: it would be interesting to see Terraserver aerials of a bunch of what appear (from the atlas) to be questionable Florida “land speculation scams”:http://www.spikowski.com/landscam.htm. Among them: “Rotonda”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=26.887778,-82.271389&spn=0.3,0.3&t=k, “Golden Gate Estates”:http://www.defenders.org/releases/pr1997/pr617972.html, “Port Charlotte”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=15&ll=27.05,-82.105831&spn=0.013989,0.02974&t=k, Port La Belle, Lehigh Acres, “Cape Coral”:http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Cape+Coral,+FL&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=26.684084,-81.972041&spn=0.014034,0.0421&t=k&om=1, Indian Lake Estates, and Clewiston. (Clewiston had the advantage of being platted by John Nolen; the others seem to date from the early 20th century land grabs: grids platted far into the swamp.)

Joel noted that I can now add Florida A1A (the Atlantic coast road) to the list of notable highways I’ve seen from both ends.

That list now includes all of the key transcontinentals:
US Route 66, Chicago & Santa Monica
Interstate 5, San Ysidro, Calif. & Blaine, Wash.
Interstate 10, Santa Monica & Jacksonville
Interstate 40, Barstow, Calif. & Wilmington, N.C.
Interstate 80, San Francisco & New York City
Interstate 90, Seattle & Boston

Almost:
California Highway 1: traveled in 13 of 14 counties, seen southern terminus
Interstate 55: well, at least I plan to eventually take the train down to New Orleans
Interstate 95: traveled in all 15 states, seen southern terminus

However, since both CA 1 and I-95 end in the wilderness of the north, I may never be able to say I’ve properly traversed either. Considering I’ve still never learned to drive, that’s still not a bad record overall.

traveling again

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12-22 January. Schedule includes Orlando, Miami, Raleigh, and Washington. Looking forward to: sun, hearing Vincent Scully, taking Amtrak up the East Coast (Amtrak’s the closest to a road trip that I get), and, of course, celebrating the Re-Coronation with Eastern Establishment Billionaires.

and some schadenfreude: not that I despise the cold, but this is the forecast for Chicago while I’m in Florida:

Weepy Reagan nostalgia

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“The tax system we now have,” [then-Treasury secretary Don Regan] told Reagan, according to [Lou] Cannon [in President Reagan], “is designed to make the avoidance of taxes easy for the rich and has the effect of making it almost impossible for people who work for wages and salaries to do the same.”�

Meanwhile, of course, W. is designing a tax system that makes avoiding taxes not only easy, but matter-of-fact for rich folks with paper profits, while shifting the entire tax burden onto us working stiffs. As ridiculous as the B4B chant of “Tax Work, Not Wealth!” sounds on the face of it, it’s astonishing that not only do people believe that, but that they have the gall to foist such an ugly system upon us.

As Brookings/Urban notes: “Recent tax cuts and current proposals do not move the system toward a well-designed consumption tax or a well-designed wage tax. Instead, tax policy and proposals in the Bush administration move the tax system toward a wage tax that is imposed only on low- and middle-income households, because upper-income households would be able to take disproportionate advantage of the fact that capital income would be increasingly exempt from taxation, but interest payments would still be tax deductible.”

(The quote comes from Jonathan Chait’s article on “tax reform” in the current The New Republic.)