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Dead Malls

mall_dead

This adds a whole other dimension to the concept of Lake Eery:

A local billionaire built it, and they did not come. The South China Mall was the most ambitious and largest retail space every conceived in China, if not the world, when it opened in 2005. Constructed smack in the middle of the Pearl River Delta between Shenzhen and Guangzhou, about 4 million people live within six miles of it, 9 million within twelve miles and 40 million within sixty miles. Nonetheless, six years later, the South China Mall only maintains a 1% occupancy rate at best. This unabatedly empty temple to consumerism remains unfinished on top floors and is only sporadically visited thanks to the attached amusement park, Amazing World. For the time being dust and dismembered mannequins reign over the 6.5 million square foot venture. Although China might be the fastest growing consumer market in the world, the South China Mall reveals the vulnerability of this burgeoning economic giant. Also, check out this short film done on the place by Sam Green.

Without looking back through, I’ve written about this before… but, yikes. Not a whole lot to say, just noting the passing of an epoch, I would hope.

Via Romm.

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Mahagonny

In my continuing quest to put together a grand unified theory of everything, I was reading part of the introductory essay in Robert Hughes’ Nothing if Not Critical, The Decline of the City of Mahagonny. Here, he talking about the nefarious influence of mass media (on humans) and you can easily extrapolate this onto our difficulties in moving past now-obsolete notions of growth and expansion. To wit:

This has not been a matter of choice, let alone fault. The power of television goes beyond anything the fine arts have ever wanted or achieved. Nothing like this Niagara of visual gabble had even been imagined a hundred years ago. American network television drains the world of meaning; it makes reality dull, slow and avoidable. It is our “floating world.” It tends to abort the imagination by leaving kids nothing to imagine: every hero and demon is there, raucously explicit, precut – a world of stereotypes, too authoritative for imagination to develop or change. No wonder it has predisposed American artists toward similar stereotypes. It is stupidly compelling, in a way that painting and sculpture, even in their worst moments of propaganda or sentimentality, are not.

Always difficult to figure out what’s wrong with one thing without stumbling onto what’s wrong with another.

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Meecro-Cosmos

That’s how it’s pronounced, anyway, this incredible documentary I watched a couple of nights ago.

Fantastic.

Not so fantastic: Venice is sinking, faster than previously thought.

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What if a New Carbon Pollution Rule fell in the woods?

The ACA case in the Supreme Court is rightfully taking up most of the media oxygen at the moment.

But, via Romm, the EPA is also expected to issue its first limits on carbon pollution from power plants this week:

The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.

Industry officials and environmentalists said in interviews that the rule, which comes on the heels of tough new requirements that the Obama administration imposed on mercury emissions and cross-state pollution from utilities within the past year, dooms any proposal to build a coal-fired plant that does not have costly carbon controls.

While these are ‘new source performance standards,’ they will also ensure that future electricity generation comes from renewable sources. Without the penalty incentive, the new technologies keep poking off down the road, never getting any closer. This is kind of a boring way to bring them into the near(er) future. Let the ennui ensue.

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Funding as punishment

Or defunding, as the case may be. And is.

This was a spot on the Daily Show recently and, not just because I worked with some UNESCO folks a few months ago, this is an idea whose time has passed and show just petty and ineffectual we can be when put our little minds to it:

The US envoy to the UN urged Congress Tuesday to allow America to resume the funding to UNESCO cut off once the body recognized the Palestinians as a member state in October.

US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice argued that the funding reduction – some 22 percent of UNESCO’s annual budget – was hurting American interests and doing little to stem the Palestinians’ efforts for wider recognition at the UN.

But members of the US House foreign operations appropriations subcommittee, before whom Rice was testifying, pushed back against her appeals and indicated little support for providing the Obama administration the waiver it seeks. The funding cutoff was triggered by a law from the 1990s requiring the US to defund any UN body that recognized the Palestinians as a full member state.

The point not to punish yourself while you’re out showing just how tough and principled you can be – also no longer being taught in some of our better kindergartens. Actually, my apologies to kindergartners everywhere for this sort of low-level behavior in high-level places.

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Easy to Miss

Linda Greenhouse is one of the top journalists who cover the Supreme Court – so many of the other few are also women, why is that? Anyway, there is much you just cannot explain to yourself or others without knowing (sounds axiomatic, I swear I wish it was), and Greenhouse brings some light to recent heat in this column:

You remember Lilly Ledbetter, the poised grandmother who addressed the 2008 Democratic National Convention. A native of Possum Trot, Ala. And a former overnight-shift manager at a Goodyear tire factory, where she was the only woman in her job category. Ms. Ledbetter learned only as she neared retirement that despite promotions and regular raises, she was being paid much less than any of the men. The Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 5 to 4 that she should have figured that out years earlier, and threw out her sex-discrimination lawsuit because she was too late in filing a formal complaint.

Two women, a generation apart: one disrespected by the three-day rant of a thuggish talk show host, the other dissed by five members of the Supreme Court. Each is an accidental heroine (as was Anita Hill, more than 20 years ago) whose plight touched a nerve already inflamed by deeper concerns roiling the public sphere.

In Lilly Ledbetter’s case, it was a mix of old and new: the old concern about equal opportunity and fairness in the workplace given new urgency within the Democratic base by distress at the Supreme Court’s abrupt rightward shift following Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement and her replacement by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. It was Justice Alito who wrote the majority opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber.

The decision interpreted the 180-day statute of limitations in the country’s basic law against job discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court held that the 180-day clock for reporting incidents of discrimination starts running with the initial discriminatory act – in this case, the long-ago decision to pay Ms. Ledbetter less than her male peers. The majority rejected her lawyers’ argument that the clock should be deemed re-set with every subsequent paycheck that reflects and carries forward the original discrimination.

Sandra Fluke didn’t ask to become a cipher for contraception, so it’s important to know that more than a woman’s personality stands behind the significance (and durability) of this issue. Same with Lilly Ledbetter; why do you need to understand what the above court case is about? Tell me again, what does green mean?

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Cansville

This really doesn’t have anything to do with green… wait. Yes it does. Aren’t we all tin horns when we start out making something?

At any rate, my new novel is now available via Kindle,

cansvilleweb

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What water are the water greatest water global challenges?

Did I say water? In England they call them ‘hosepipe bans’ but it seems our language brethren are experiencing a wee problem with drought:

The south-east of England and East Anglia are already in the grip of the UK’s worst drought in 30 years. Seven water companies have indicated that they will impose hosepipe bans. Most will begin next month, but some could start earlier.

This in a country known as having one of the wettest and dampest climates in the Northern Hemisphere. So it’s a bit weird to think of the UK in terms of drought. But there it is. Weird = new normal.

And maybe we can begin to understand what drought is like in parts of the world that are not historically wet, which have a lot of people and (already) very little water. It has been happening for years, with tragic consequences for man, land and beast.


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Whining about Obama

barack_obama_2012_decalHe is the glass half-filled, half-empty, trying to do too much, done too little, he’s too different from us, too similar, too cautious, too radical… the President is the ultimate Rorschach. But if you want to take a look at what he’s actually done, there’s a top 50:

1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.

2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.

3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.

The Republicans must try to tear him down – it’s their only chance. Restless progressives and others (I’m endeared of the term ‘totebaggers’ as wielded at BJ and elsewhere) have no excuse other than cynical ennui. Get a hobby, but support the skinny black guy taking names in the toughest job on the list.

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Graphic Inequality

Height

So… after stumbling upon a rather devastating piece by Hitchens on JFK and the Camelot business, I’ve been mining some other back issues of the Atlantic that I found around the house – must’ve had a subscription in 2006. I am no fan of that magazine – the trove seems to run out in 2007 – but this piece on inequality by Clive Crook is worth mentioning for a few reasons, not the least of which is the above graphic and his use of the 1% coinage from this, several years back. Surely things have gotten better, right?

In 1971, Jan Pen, a Dutch economist, published a celebrated treatise with a less-than-gripping title: Income Distribution. The book summoned a memorable image. This is how to think of the pattern of incomes in an economy, Pen said (he was writing about Britain, but bear with me). Suppose that every person in the economy walks by, as if in a parade. Imagine that the parade takes exactly an hour to pass, and that the marchers are arranged in order of income, with the lowest incomes at the front and the highest at the back. Also imagine that the heights of the people in the parade are proportional to what they make: those earning the average income will be of average height, those earning twice the average income will be twice the average height, and so on. We spectators, let us imagine, are also of average height.

Pen then described what the observers would see. Not a series of people of steadily increasing height—that’s far too bland a picture. The observers would see something much stranger. They would see, mostly, a parade of dwarves, and then some unbelievable giants at the very end.

As the parade begins, Pen explained, the marchers cannot be seen at all. They are walking upside down, with their heads underground—owners of loss-making businesses, most likely. Very soon, upright marchers begin to pass by, but they are tiny. For five minutes or so, the observers are peering down at people just inches high—old people and youngsters, mainly; people without regular work, who make a little from odd jobs. Ten minutes in, the full-time labor force has arrived: to begin with, mainly unskilled manual and clerical workers, burger flippers, shop assistants, and the like, standing about waist-high to the observers. And at this point things start to get dull, because there are so very many of these very small people. The minutes pass, and pass, and they keep on coming.

By about halfway through the parade, Pen wrote, the observers might expect to be looking people in the eye—people of average height ought to be in the middle. But no, the marchers are still quite small, these experienced tradespeople, skilled industrial workers, trained office staff, and so on—not yet five feet tall, many of them. On and on they come.