A deeply flawed redevelopment program has allowed Detroit's historic Brush Park neighborhood to fall into seemingly irreparable disrepair.

Once a community of flourishing town houses and mansions, the district today, according to some experts, should be prime territory for revival given its proximity to downtown Detroit, Comerica Park and Ford Field.

There have been a handful of impressive restorations in the district, along with a successful new housing tract being built by Crosswinds Communities. But the city's development plan, drawn up in 1989 and updated twice, remains largely unfulfilled. It initially called for the construction of 1,500 homes and town houses; the condemnation, purchase and demolition of upwards of 100 buildings; and payment of moving and relocation costs for an estimated 500 people.

The difference between New Orleans and Detroit? It only took 2 days for New Orleans to be a ruined city.

How NOT to rebuild Detroit

Ever since Sam Phillips stuffed some wads of paper into an amplifier, inadvertently creating the fuzzed-up, overdriven electric guitar sound on Ike Turner's 1951 rave-up "Rocket 88," pop musicians and producers have turned happy accidents into great records. But the history of house and techno, in particular, is underpinned with fits of serendipity and creative perversions of recording technology.

aint nothin so great as the eight oh eight!

Six Machines That Changed The Music World

From this base, a small group of determined geeks is using solar- and pedal-powered voice-over-internet-protocol phones and Wi-Fi to bring local, national and international dialing to remote areas of the world, beginning with a few villages in western Uganda where nothing resembling a telephone system has ever existed.

This says two things to me. First, you have a situation where underdeveloped areas of the world can literally leap frog the first world in a few short years. It's very conceivable that these kinds of deployments will become commonplace and will enable tremendous development to happen in these remote areas in a short period of time.

The second thing it says to me is that the $48B market cap of a company like Bellsouth is absolutely ridiculous. Bellsouth isn't worth even a tenth of that if you can put together this kind of infrastructure with off the shelf parts, relatively little cost, and some elbow grease. Sure, things like provisioning, billing, E911 service and network management are not cheap or easy things. But what's that worth? Maybe $500M. Considering that most of Bellsouth's customer base is in highly rural areas, areas that are usually subsidized from urban customers and taxes, it totally makes sense that you could disrupt this entire business model with relatively small capital outlay.

Yes, I'm thinking about doing that again.

VOIP Phones Give Villagers a Buzz

In California's delta, that approach translates into $20 million this year to improve the levees that protect Sacramento, the state capital, at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers, and to strengthen the Folsom Dam, upstream from the city. But virtually no federal money is earmarked for other nearby levees that protect smaller communities, cropland and the conduits that bring drinking water to Southern California.
Skip to next paragraph Multimedia
Graphic
Not Spending as Much

California's state government struggles with that issue. The Schwarzenegger administration has proposed more spending on the levees than the Legislature has been willing to approve. Katrina raised awareness of the benefits to be reaped, but even before Katrina, a 1997 flood damaged or destroyed more than 30,000 homes and businesses, and a rupture in a levee last year resulted in $100 million worth of damage and repairs.

This isn't just about levees and infrastructure spending. It's rampant, and it's completely the fault of the current administration and the Republican's taking power of the legislature in 1996. The aim of the Republican party has been to dismantle the "social" side of the Federal government and replace it with capital expenditures that are farmed out to corporations (think Halliburton). The strategy has been to choke off money that's going to states, which is typically social-type programs (Medicaid, DHS, Special Ed, etc), sending that money to Federal programs where it can be outsourced (highway construction, drilling for oil, etc) or create new/bloated bureacracy (Homeland security, FCC, etc).

This starvation on the part of the states is what is currently creating the problems we're seeing. With eroding tax revenues and no help from the Feds, most states are on the brink of fiscal disaster. One look at the energy crisis in CA, the unemployment in MI, TennCare in TN, and the entire southeast region in fiscal junk bond status, and you can see that the plan is working. And it's not just levees. Healthcare, education, public works, and economic development have pretty much all been abandoned by the Feds so they can go off and fight unwinable wars and fatten their friend's corporate profits.

So when you read about how the Bush administration is incompetent and not intouch with reality, think again. They know exactly what they are doing and are executing with aplumb! This is essentially a scorch the earth strategy, which will transfer wealth from every sector of our society into the most wealth Americans who can afford to invest or be shareholders in major corporations who are reaping the benefits of this strategy. This will leave irrepable damage to our society and our community, as it will takes decades to undue the damage, if at all.

Disasters Waiting to Happen

"I told him not to come to St. Louis from Los Angeles and that (Blues coach Mike) Keenan was an idiot. He said (Keenan) wouldn't be an idiot once he got there. I said, 'He'll never change.'

I'm gonna miss Brett when he finally does retire.

Classic Brett Hull

Detroit has surpassed Cleveland as the nation's most impoverished big city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Survey figures released Tuesday show 33.6 percent - or more than one-third - of Detroit's residents lived at or below the federal poverty line in 2004, the largest percentage of any U.S. city of 250,000 or more people.

Sweet.

Detroit Most Impoverished City

Was Granato among the top 10 forwards on the team? Yes, and it wasn't even close. When she is on the ice, you know something smart and creative is going to happen. But, even if it were close, you wouldn't do this to an icon, especially when this person represents the Olympics ideal; especially when that person is so selfless and classy, not to mention a marketer's dream.

As Bailey said, Granato is "the glue to the team."

How can you cut Cammi? Insane.

Buccigross: Team USA's 'disgusting' decision

The Alter Ego display shows what kind of virtual characters people choose to be in online games and 3D worlds.

This is an article about an exhibit which juxtaposed pictures of "real-life" people, next to images of the characters that they played in MMORPGs. Click on the picture in the article, to be taken to more side-by-side images. I found it very interesting to observe how some people were very different from their avatars, and others were very similar. Though of course the editors seemed to concentrate on the images that provided the most dramatic differences.

BBC NEWS : Virtual gamers reveal themselves

Apple Computer is coming to the rescue of Detroit's schoolchildren and, in doing so, may finally push Michigan to nuke its failed public high school system and start over.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm will announce Tuesday that the California computer maker and master of the red-hot iPod will help finance, equip and advise a small top-quality high school for Detroit students at most risk of being left behind.

Where was this when I was growing up? I had to settle for a seminar at Inacomp for the release of the Apple ][. Favorite moment? Playing Apple Panic.

Apple brings hope to Detroit

In a little over a year the amount of traffic flowing across Linx has risen from approximately 30 gigabits per second to more than 67 Gbit/s. In 2000 it was barely hitting 5 Gbit/s, the equivalent of a DVD film every 10 seconds.

It was bound to happen, but still, when you dig out the projections of net traffic growth from 1997 and compare them to today's numbers, we're spot on. No one was really smoking that much crack.

Maturing net growing more slowly