Regarding Obama's comparison of the Affordable Care Act's website shopping experience to Amazon.com.
Obama and the 'Amazon Experience'
By Bret Stevens, Staff writer
- Searching, not Planning: The development expert William Easterly makes a useful distinction between "planners" and "searchers": The former come to a task with preset ideas about what should work, and then they go about implementing the plan. Searchers, by contrast, spend their time figuring out through trial-and-error what does work.
...the Affordable Care Act is the brainchild of planners, the people who always think they know best - and are always the most shocked when it turns out they don't.
For the Starving, 'Eat Local' Isn't an Option
By Adrianne Johnson, a Ph.D. candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford Univeristy.
The eat-local movement looks a lot like a very old vision for a new America. Thomas Jefferson called farmers "the chosen people of God." His dream for the Argrarian Republic rested on a nation of small subsistence landholders whose modest needs were met by local farmers and artisans. Nowadays, "locavores," as the movement's members are known, urge Americans to return to the self-sufficiency of Jefferson's time.
Yet America wasn't "local" even in the country's early days. When Jefferson advocated for local foods, local farmers and local labor, he was pushing a political vision if self-sufficiency that existed then - as it does now - more as a dream than in reality.
Yet today, with the avid support of government and the media, local foods are quickly outpacing organics as the fastest-growing food market in the US. The eat-local movement shows similar strength in Europe. Activitists argue that local foods support sustainable agriculture and struggling farmers, reduce greenhouse gas enpmissions and carbon footprints. Groceries that are lower in "food miles" are touted as better for the economy, better for the environment and better for the poor.
Recent studies, however, have found that local foods are often neither better for the environment or for the poor. Shipping produce from across the world often emits less greenhouse gases than the same local produce grown with more resource-intensive methods.
According to a Carnegie Mellon University study, more than 80% of emissions occur before the food even leaves the farm. Contrary to the "food miles" perspective, the study found that transportation contributes little to overall environmental impact.
The "return" to local foods and yeoman farmsteads isn't just impossible. It misdirected political attention away from the problem of world hunger. Hunger is an issue that requires a mature social conscience and political will to look beyond the garden into the global.
In [a] global sense, the often- heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naive. It doesn't satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.
We shouldn't have to deny ourselves the privilege (if we have it) of a good meal, but let's not do so under the banner of political action. If you're eating free-range chicken from an organic farm down the road, with side orders of locally-sourced arugula and kale, just remember, you're not acting politically. You're just having dinner.
USC Notes: Part 2 of the LO Comp Plan draft still refers to community gardens as a permitted land use in "Neighborhood Corners" and possibly elsewhere in the city - commercial and industrial areas, etc.. I believe that gardening is a worthwhile activity that residents can request the Parks Dept. to offer [more of] just as they have at Luscher Farm. The city already has ways to address residents' needs without adding new codes.
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