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Tag: policy

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Future Building Society

A better dream

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Bookmarked What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Village” by Catherynne M. Valente (Welcome to Garbagetown)

“[T]he village” was literally always women’s unpaid labor.

[…]

Whether we’re talking about grandparents and aunties and older siblings … helping out with the next generation or an actual village in which unrelated people band together to share the load for everyone, it still ends up, most of the time, being a gilded metaphor for a vast network of women providing physical, mental, and emotional labor without acknowledgement or payment.

There is no cultural framework where help flows toward working parents but not from them. Where we are beholden to no one but entitled to support. Where we only have to associate with people we choose to at our leisure. Where there’s always someone to pick up slack for us and manage whatever we find unmanageable.

That’s not a village, it’s a wife. Which is why conservatives, faced with the same difficulties, don’t call out for a village, they start changing laws so women can be controlled again.

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Culture Health Social

Reply to gRegor: COVID safety at events

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Replied to More on Health and Safety by gRegor Love (gregorlove.com)

There’s an IndieWeb event in Düsseldorf this weekend, so I’ve been thinking about event health and safety policies again. I think there are two important aspects when it comes to these policies: 1) They should be in place well before the event and communicated clearly in key places… 2) They should consist of more than *only* recommendations.

👏 I appreciate the work you’ve done on this gRegor! I know I’m unlikely to attend any in-person event soon, in part due to not traveling and in part from worry over event logistics, so I haven’t bothered to get into the details of what would make me feel safe to attend. I worried that I’d feel obligated to attend out of guilt if organizers went to the extra effort to make it meet my needs. But since you’ve been brave enough to share your thoughts, I’ll second them.

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Activism Future Building

Can we stop subsidizing harmful things?

Replied to The feds move to speed up development of wind and solar on public land (Grist)

Fossil fuel developers typically pay far lower fees for using public lands than their wind and solar counterparts. For example, before production fees kicked in, as of 2021 oil and gas paid $1.50 to $2 per acre in rental fees each year — although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act increased some of those rates. But for wind and solar, the BLM currently calculates rental fees according to market-rate land values, which can run up to tens of thousands of dollars per acre.

Simply removing subsidies for harmful products like fossil fuels seems like it could go a long way toward fixing our climate problems.

People get mad when gas is expensive because we’ve structured our lives around cheap transportation, but that doesn’t mean our society should continue to incentivize driving personal vehicles when it’s literally destroying the planet’s livability. The suburbs are propped up by subsidies; it really doesn’t make sense for people to drive an hour or more to get to work. The suburbs were initially subsidized by the WWII GI bill that helped white soldiers returning from the war buy houses far from Black people, and now are subsidized by cheap fuel.

No one wants to be the generation to live through the shit years of transition, but someone’s going to have to do it — if we don’t take it on now, we leave the problem worse for the next generation. If we accepted the need for our communities to change and let go of the unobtainable, exclusive 1950s American dream of a fiefdom for every (middle class) family, we could direct redevelopment of our communities to be denser and include local, walkable business districts: re-creating the vibrant small villages destroyed by car culture where all kids could be safe to play, instead of clinging to cul de sacs because they feel safe for our own kids.

(🙋‍♀️ Yes, I live in the suburbs and drive — walkability is only accessible to the wealthy in my region, where even a condo in downtown is over a million bucks. But I can be a YIMBY and advocate for affordable housing and density and road diets, and against gas subsidies and expanding roads.)

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Health

COVID ongoing, COVID eternal?

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Bookmarked The reality gap (johnsnowproject.org)

The failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation.

“You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”

— Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme

👀

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Outreach

The report vs transmedia communications

Bookmarked BACK TO WONKCOMMS AND SUPERHEROES (screensresearchhypertext.com)

Our two literary theory concepts—paratext and transmedia storytelling—map nicely onto alternative approaches for WonkComms.

The big, honking report is The Thing. The blog posts, the op-eds, the roundtable forum, the tweets, the media write ups, the infographics…

all function as paratexts, as “extra stuff” that’s great to have but not always a requirement.

That “extra stuff” exists to “hype, promote, introduce, and discuss” the main text—which is probably a big .

Versus the transmedia model:

This is the  model. It’s one in which you create  that you can remix and push out across multiple channels. No single output is a “main” thing. Rather, each blog post, each tweet, each infographic, each op-ed tells part of the story.

To consider as I start working on reports and plans in government: what is the best format and approach to information? As a long-form print designer I am a fan of making reports better, but alternative formats like websites could be something to consider too.

Categories
Future Building Places Society

Interrogating gentrification

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Liked Gentrification is Inevitable (and Other Lies) by Anne Helen Petersen (Culture Study)

“Unfortunately, these kinds of changes are often portrayed as a natural evolution of city space, rather than as the result of deliberate policy making and sets of choices by powerful actors. We conflate the idea that cities change (of course they do!) with the idea that neighborhoods are inevitably taken over by wealthier, whiter residents.”

Gentrification today is often faster, more radically transformative, and directed by powerful state and corporate actors.

Queering asks us to question the normative values that fuel gentrification: ideas about the home and family, the relationship between property and social acceptance, and what is required for liberation and empowerment. Queering also pushes an anti-gentrification politics to interrogate its own normative assumptions. These could include the unquestioned valorization of working-class identities and spaces, the notion of community, and the foundations of the right to the city.

Categories
Culture Food

Watched On the Job with Priya Krishna

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Watched How To Run Brooklyn’s Legendary Tamale Cart | On the Job | Priya Krishna | NYT Cooking from YouTube

Food carts are everywhere in New York City. Hot dogs, coffee, halal, mangoes … The list goes on. There are 20,000 street vendors fueling the city daily, yet …

There is no way this woman makes enough from the amount of work she puts in. Three days of work to make her tamales and maybe she doesn’t even sell them all?! It’s amazing she’s advocating for herself but also super shitty the risk it poses to her as an undocumented immigrant — she says “I’m not scared anymore” but I’m scared on her behalf. It is infuriating that America can’t see the value this woman brings to the community and grant her legal status to open up more opportunities to someone with this kind of work ethic.

Our approach to immigration is ridiculous. The woman in this video was an accountant in Mexico but couldn’t find a job in the US, so now she illegally sells homemade tamales. Here in Seattle, I know an Indian woman whose husband got a tech job but her visa doesn’t allow her to work even though she is *also* a computer scientist. The Egyptian man whose family owns the gas station downtown is an engineer but wasn’t able to transfer his license here, so he works the counter at a quickie mart. What. The. Fuck. How does it benefit the US to deny these skilled people the ability to work in their fields?

We watched the whole On the Job series and there are a bunch of dedicated entrepreneurs running awesome businesses that support their community — and as an outsider feel totally unsustainable because everything relies on them and the help their families can give. It is exhausting watching them. They have the hustle, but I wish they could get some success without having to burn themselves out.

A guy running a bodega has become TikTok famous and people stop in from around the country to enjoy his friendly service: they can hand over any random ingredient in the shop and ask him to make it “ocky style” and he develops an original sandwich recipe on the fly. Crumbling chips or candy onto the sandwich, using doughnuts as the bread, concocting something delicious and unique for over 100 customers a day — plus making hundreds of standard sandwiches — plus he restocks the shelves and runs the cash register if his ten year old nephew can’t be spared to work it.

A woman running a pop-up Instagram restaurant gets her cousin to drive up from Pennsylvania to help each weekend, and a volunteer delivers the food. She has a full-time job and spends her “free time” running the food business. Her expenses have skyrocketed with inflation — mushrooms went from $14 to $20 — but she wants to keep it affordable. Please tell me you are making money at least.

Categories
Future Building Political Commentary Resources and Reference

Tax justice

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Bookmarked Tax Justice Now (taxjusticenow.org)

America’s runaway inequality has an engine: our unjust tax system.
Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the ultra-rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile, working-class Americans have been asked to pay more.

Tool to see how different tax policies would affect the budget etc.