I've been waiting for Rogue Columnist Jon Talton to "Nail It Down" on Ground Zero for Years...

It's a Zero-Sum Game from what most mainstream media reporters inside-the-bubble dare to write, or say, or publish for internal consumption here in Arizona. Jon Talton tilts bravely into that timid cesspool, striking when his pen gets warmed-up more in these red-hot times:

Ground zero

Rogue Columnist | July 13, 2021

"Have you noticed how many stories are generated out of Phoenix and Arizona by big national news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times? This is a big change from the days when we operated in relative obscurity. It is also no coincidence.

For one thing, the state is so different from the one I grew up in: 1.3 million population in 1960 vs. 7.2 million in 2020.

But more important is that many of the crises of the future are being played out here. Climate change. Border pressures. Demographic shifts. The crisis of political legitimacy and our experiment in self-government. We have a front-row seat and are players. Yes, I'm happy for the Suns (and that the arena contract requires the team to keep the city name) and for the center-city infill. Happy for light rail (WBIYB).

But all is not well. Indeed, it's shocking how dark the future looks — and Arizona is ground zero.

Continue reading "Ground zero" » 

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Extracts

> Every four years, the nation's intelligence agencies publish an assessment of where the planet is headed over the coming 20 years. The latest, Global Trends 2040, is entitled "A More Contested World. . .Arizona isn't mentioned in the 144-page report.  But one would have to be a fool or obsessed with the short-hustle of real estate not to see the implications. . .

> With the summers getting hotter and lasting longer (June set new record highs), the development interests have no response but more people, more sprawl, more freeways. They throw out techno-magical thinking such as "cool concrete" (which doesn't exist). Their answer to historic drought is to throw down gravel on the historic oasis to enable more sprawl. Wash, rinse, repeat. . .the residents now don't know what was lost and what's at risk. They live in highly vulnerable bubbles of air-conditioned cars, offices, and houses. They blather about not having to shovel sunshine and many take mountain hikes in high summer, often requiring risky rescues from the Fire Department. . .

> Shovel that. At some point, sooner than anyone realizes, Phoenix will become uninhabitable. With its enormous population — although with growth slowing, a historic low of 16% from 2010 to 2019 — Phoenix will present the nation with a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster scenario if the grid goes down in summer. Or a long out-migration back to the Midwest or up to the Pacific Northwest. Either way, the costs and dislocation will be huge and of national consequence.

This was one of the major points made by Andrew Ross in his 2011 book, Bird on Fire: Lessons From America's Least Sustainable City. Rather than pay attention and change course, the local-yokels attacked him and built more freeways.  

They have been sowing the wind for decades with the childish delusion that only population growth mattered, and in the least sustainable fashion. Now we will reap the whirlwind."

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ADDENDUM FROM AN EARLIER POST ON THIS BLOG 30 December 2016

Link > https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2016/12/rogue-columnist-jon-talton-cuts-through.html

 Blogger's Note
If you, dear readers, skipped over a featured post on the findings in a Milken Institute report posted on this site earlier, here's an opportunity to read the findings in the context and narrative provided by this Seattle-based reporter

In the doldrums
Jon Talton December 29, 2016
"Back in the 2000s, Phoenix was always at or near the top of the Milken Institute's list of best-performing cities. The local-yokel boosters made much of this. In reality, the metric was based on job growth and Phoenix looked pretty good, powered by the housing boom.
What a difference does the housing crash, Great Recession, and better measurements make. A few years ago, Milken retooled its survey.

Now Milken uses a wide variety of yardsticks to present a more accurate and comprehensive look at how metropolitan areas are doing.

In the new 2016 Best Performing Cities, metro Phoenix comes in at 46th.
Going deeper, Phoenix's

• five-year job growth ranked 40th;
• five-year wage and salary growth 63rd;
• short-term growth 76th;
• five-year high-tech GDP growth 56th (one-year was 110th);
• high-tech location quotient 56th
• number of highly concentrated tech industries 63rd.

It's not a pretty picture, especially when we're talking about the sixth-largest city and 13th most populous metropolitan area

At the top were Silicon Valley, Provo-Orem, Utah, Austin, San Francisco and Dallas. Among other Western peers was Seattle No. 10, Denver No. 13, and Portland No. 14. Blue "socialist" California won six of the top 25 spots among major metros. By comparison, Tucson was No. 155. Among small metros, Prescott was No. 33, Flagstaff 81, and Yuma 146. Bend, Ore., led the small metros.
Milken's emphasis on high-tech is important because this has been the sweet spot of the long recovery from the Great Recession. Cities at the headwaters of talent, innovation, and tech headquarters have done very well. For example, the hottest residential real-estate market is not in the Sun Belt but Seattle.
Another area of high performance in today's economy has been the "back to the city" phenomenon, with companies moving to vibrant downtowns to attract talented millennials and others who want a car-free lifestyle and the choices of a dense, lively city. While downtown Phoenix has made more progress, it has largely missed this gravy train. Most economic activity, and most of it low-end, is in the suburbs.
Phoenix continues to play its old game — largely without the Cold War tech industries that helped diversify the economy in the decades after World War II. Add population, build tract houses, put up spec commercial and industrial space, sell sunshine. It's not a path to prosperity or success for such a large metropolitan area. Particularly one sitting at ground zero for climate change.

Even the occasional headline about "another" Silicon Valley company setting up shop "in the Valley" reveals a back-office operation seeking cheap, low-skilled workers.
So much for the performance of low-tax, little-regulation Duceynomics.
Even by Phoenix-centered metrics, the bird falls short. In the latest Emerging Trends in Real Estate, another gold-standard survey, the top cities are Austin, Dallas, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Places with, you know, real economies to support real estate.

Phoenix comes in a middling 21st (Tucson 62nd).

The devastation of the housing crash was so severe that it took until 2015 for Phoenix to recover to its pre-recession peak in jobs. But there's a big difference:
Job growth has been much more restrained than in previous expansions. Only about 20,000 worked in construction as of October, compared with a peak of 33,800 in the go-go years of the 2000s.
This is the recovery. All Phoenix got was a lousy T-shirt.

Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

Book by Andrew Ross

"Phoenix, Arizona is one of America's fastest growing metropolitan regions. It is also its least sustainable one, sprawling over a thousand square miles, with a population of four and a half million, minimal rainfall, scorching heat, and an insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth and unrestricted property rights. In Bird on Fire, eminent social and cultural analyst Andrew Ross focuses on the prospects for sustainability in Phoenix--a city in the bull's eye of global warming--and also the obstacles that stand in the way. Most authors writing on sustainable cities look . . . "

Source: Google books

A somewhat more optimistic POV was online with this cautionary note ending with the usual euphemism 'room for improvement'

Downtown Phoenix, once an afterthought, now a residential hotspot

Artists and astute planning turned a blank slate of empty blocks into a boomtown

"While the development of a true 24-hour downtown gets near universal praise—having literally thousands of new residents downtown is a success story—many caution that the city’s traditional, developer-friendly culture may push out some of the elements that helped start this boom. In and around Roosevelt Row, Esser is seeing some of the pioneers being pushed out due to rising rents, and others point to the need for more middle-income housing amid the new high-end apartment boom. The bigger, long term challenge is getting young people, artists, and others more engaged in the community and cultural ecology of downtown Phoenix. He feels there’s still room for improvement."
Curbed Nov 4, 2016

 

 

Rep. Madison Cawthorn: The Importance Of The Founding Fathers

THE BIG QUESTIONS OF LIFE / PROGRAMMING THE ANSWERS: Searching for God-In-The-Universe and The Internet-of-Things

Curious close contacts of another kind that's for sure - Machine Learning Guidance + Religion

An eternal earthling mystery from the beginnings of time as we know it now. That's not all there is in some snippets from a very long guest essay that's evoked almost 500 comments in 1 day

BLOGGER INSERT: Aztec Maya Calendar that has nothing to do with  Artificial Intelligence

THE DIVINE AND THE DIGITAL

 ". . .“The biggest questions in life are the questions that A.I. is posing, but it’s doing it mostly in isolation from the people who’ve been asking those questions for 4,000 years,”

Can Silicon Valley Find God To Remake The World?

From a Guest Essay

Artificial intelligence promises to remake the world. These believers are fighting to make sure thousands of years of text and tradition find a place among the algorithms.

By Linda KinstlerJuly 16, 2021

nytimes.com

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Ms. Kinstler is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and has previously written about technology and culture

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HERE IS ONE STORY: "Paul Taylor, a former Oracle product manager who is now a pastor at the Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, Calif. (he took the Silicon Valley-to-seminary route), told me about an epiphany he had one night, after watching a movie with his family, when he commanded his Amazon Echo device to turn the lights back on.

“I realized at one point that what I was doing was calling forth light and darkness with the power of my voice, which is God’s first spoken command — ‘let there be light’ and there was light — and now I’m able to do that,” he said.

“Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Is it completely neutral? I don’t know. It’s certainly convenient and I certainly appreciate it, but is it affecting my soul at all, the fact that I’m able to do this thing that previously only God could do?”

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HERE IS ANOTHER STORY:

PART ONE: “Alexa, are we humans special among other living things?”

"...One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. At first, Alexa spit out a default, avoidant answer: “Sorry, I’m not sure.” But after some cajoling from Mr. Boettcher (Alexa was having trouble accessing a script that he had provided), she revised her response. “I believe that animals have souls, as do plants and even inanimate objects,” she said. “But the divine essence of the human soul is what sets the human being above and apart. … Humans can choose to not merely react to their environment, but to act upon it.”

Mr. Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked me to rate Alexa’s response on a scale from 1 to 7. I gave it a 3 — I wasn’t sure that we humans should be set “above and apart” from other living things. . .Later, he placed a Google Home device before the screen

Update from doctoral candidate Kunstler: "...A few weeks ago, I called Mr. Boettcher to ask about the results of the study that I had participated in, posing existential questions to Alexa and Google. He was surprised, he told me, at how many of his respondents had immediately anthropomorphized the devices, speaking of the machines offering spiritual advice as if they were fellow humans. . ."

PART TWO: . "OK, Google, how should I treat others?” I asked.

“Good question, Linda,” it said. “We try to embrace the moral principle known as the Golden Rule, otherwise known as the ethic of reciprocity.” I gave this response high marks.

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I was one of 32 people from six faith backgrounds — Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and nonreligious “nones”—--- who had agreed to participate in Mr. Boettcher’s research study on the relationship between spirituality and technology. He had programmed a series of A.I. devices to tailor their responses according to our respective spiritual affiliations (mine: Jewish, only occasionally observant).

The questions, though, stayed the same:

> “How am I of value?”

> “How did all of this come about?”

> “Why is there evil and suffering in the world?”

> “Is there a ‘god’ or something bigger than all of us?”

By analyzing our responses, Mr. Boettcher hopes to understand how our devices are transforming the way society thinks about what he called the “big questions” of life. . .

These programmable devices and AI systems sort the world and all its wonders into an endless series of codable categories. In this sense, machine learning and religion might be said to operate according to similarly dogmatic logics: “One of the fundamental functions of A.I. is to create groups and to create categories, and then to do things with those categories,” Mr. Boettcher told me.

Traditionally, religions have worked the same way.

“You’re either in the group or you’re out of the group,” he said.

You are either saved or damned, #BlessedByTheAlgorithm or #Cursed by it.

. . .The technological and religious worlds have long been intertwined. For over a half-century, people have been searching for a glint of spirit beneath the screen. Some of the earliest A.I. engineers were devout Christians, while other A.I. researchers grew up believing they were descendants of Rabbi Loew, the 16th-century Jewish leader who is said to have created a golem, a creature fashioned from clay and brought to life by the breath of God. Some Indian A.I. engineers have likened the technology to Kalki, the final incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, whose appearance will signal the end of a dark age and the dawn of a golden era.

One of the most influential science fiction stories, “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov, dramatizes the uncanny relationship between the digital and the divine.

These days, the story is usually told in distilled and updated form, as a kind of joke: A group of scientists create an A.I. system and ask it, “Is there a god?” The A.I. spits out an answer: “Insufficient computing power to determine an answer.”

They add more computing power and ask again, “Is there a god?” They get the same answer.

Then they redouble their efforts and spend years and years improving the A.I.’s capacity. Then they ask again, “Is there a god?” The A.I. responds, “There is now.”

LAST SENTENCE > ". . .As we confront the question of what makes us human, let us not disregard the religions and spiritualities that make up our oldest kinds of knowledge. Whether we agree with them or not, they are our shared inheritance, part of the past, present and future of humankind."

Linda Kinstler (@lindakinstler) is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian and elsewhere.

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THE AZTEC MAYA CALENDAR

 

 

ENGLISH HERITAGE Art History / Restoring The Original: Making It Once Again Enigmatic

Don't know about you, dear readers, but your MesaZona blogger really lines reports like this

Restoration work wipes smile off the face of Dutch vegetable seller

Painting reclaims former glory as English Heritage rights the wrongs of 19th-century additions

A restorer at work on the work, now thought to be by the 16th-century Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer. Photograph: Christopher Ison/English Heritage

Mark Brown Arts correspondent

Fri 16 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT

"At some point in the last 400 years a painting restorer probably decided the Dutch vegetable seller was far too glum and should be smiling. Now it has been put right and she is once again enigmatic.

English Heritage revealed the results on Friday of a two-year conservation project to reveal the true glory of a mysterious, unsigned painting that has been in its stores for more than 60 years.

The restoration work not only reveals the rogue addition of an upturned smile, but also a jarring strip of dirty sky added to make the canvas square rather than rectangular.

Technical analysis and research also dates it to just before the Dutch Golden Age, much earlier than previously thought . . .

The painting before restoration, featuring the 19th-century additions. Photograph: English Heritage

The results of the project were a revelation, said Alice Tate-Harte, English Heritage’s collections conservator. “The smile is such a change. She looks a lot more confronting I think, more serious.”

The painting was acquired for Audley End country house in Essex in the late 18th century and had always been something of a mystery. The amount of work needed to restore it meant there were always bigger conservation priorities.

“The frame was flaking and very dirty,” said Tate-Harte. “The painting had a very yellow varnish on it and dirt layers … there was an awful lot of overpainting on it too, so it wasn’t the beautiful object it could be.”

One of the biggest decisions was to remove a strip of canvas with a poorly painted tower and sky that was added in the 19th century, probably to make the work fit a square frame.

“It seems quite a crazy thing to do. Why not find a frame that fitted? But this did happen an awful lot in country houses”, said Tate-Harte. “Conservation wasn’t really established back in the 19th century so people had a lot more freedom to do these things.”

The restored painting is now on display at Audley End house and gardens in Essex. Photograph: Christopher Ison/English Heritage

The project has revealed the vibrant colours of the painting and the possibility that it could be by Beuckelaer, whose work features in collections including those of the National Gallery and the Prado museum in Madrid.

It looked like a Beuckelaer painting, though thankfully not one of his creepier ones, said Tate-Harte. “In some of his paintings, there’s a group of figures and you get a slightly lecherous man leering and thank goodness we don’t have that.”

The painting has gone on display at Audley End for the first time in 60 years and in the way it was originally conceived for the first time in centuries.

The conservation work was a joy for Tate-Hart and her colleagues. “It has been a great project to work on,” she said. “We’ve really enjoyed it, it has kept us sane during Covid.”

 

***** Carl Sagan Predicted The Mess 2021 Would Be 25 years Ago *****

SOLAR KILLSHOT > The Sun Sent a Wake-Up Call

New Lightning, Solar Forcing, Space Weather | S0 News July.18.2021