Brunch

First time at Oki’s.

If I were still in college, I would buy this for “RELEASE” when real drunk.

I’m on Instagram now. I guess this makes me hipster enough to be cool again.

I was pretty disappointed, but not surprised, that Bank of America has chosen to leave 111 Westminster Street. The building is an iconic anchor to downtown Providence. Unfortunately, this space has not been properly refurbished to more modern standards. The entire building has a single, antiquated utilities system– heating, cooling, electricity, etc are all setup for a single tenant. Weighing in at 350,000 square feet, there is simply no one in Providence who needs an old, out of date workspace of that size. Renovations, at this point, are likely to be very expensive, although environmental advocates and businessmen alike should unite around refurbishing over new construction.

Downtown Providence ¹ has no shortage of vacant space. Saving 111 Westminster is going to take creative thinking and substantial investment. Fortunately, there is no better time since the Arcade is undergoing some exciting changes. ²

Because of the near perfect alignment of 111 Westminster and the Arcade, I’d love to see some true, deep collaboration that rethinks the area on Westminster Street between Exchange and Dorrance Streets ³. Activating this space at the street level will be a huge boon to the Arcade, 111 Westminster, and the success of Downtown as a whole. I’ve got a handful of ideas, but I lack the skills to make beautiful pictures to make my visions tangible.

So I’m going to just have to hope that Greater City: Providence recognizes this as the opportunity for a new Reboot, my personal favorite work on the site. In their words,

REBOOT is an occasional series of posts on Greater City: Providence where we identify areas of the city that display poor urbanism and propose ways to improve them. Our interventions may be simple and quite easily realized, or they may at times be grand and possibly take years or decades to complete. Either way, we hope they generate interest and discussion.

Past Reboot’s have featured the Providence Train Station and Olneyville Square, among others. Let’s Reboot 111 Westminster and the Arcade, and the whole area east of Dorrance ⁴.

The original title of this post was unintentionally, overly similar to GCPVD’s post on this issue. I recognized this oversight independently and have edited the title.

As an undergraduate I largely avoided political science because I couldn’t imagine getting interested in reading The Republic, Leviathan, or Wealth of Nations. Political philosophy, and philosophy in general, just seemed like a horrible painful exercise, so I avoided it. Of course now that I’m involved in public policy and not organic chemistry, it feels as though I’ve done a horrible disservice to myself by not going through and systematically exploring more fundamental questions about the role of the state, ethics and morality, justice, etc.

Part of my personal re-education in this area has been much easier by having access to a host of well-written blogs that host great conversations about these issues. These sources are smart, generally trustworthy, and are generally collegial. By reading actual academics apply their knowledge to current events, I am able to get access to a much more sophisticated conversation than is available in most popular media.

One of these sources is Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which seeks to explain how libertarians can have robust participation in social justice. This is a particularly interesting topic since, as I understand it, one of the major critiques of libertarianism is that it does not address social justice in a comprehensive and sufficient way.

Today, commenting on Ron Paul’s response to Wolf Blitzer’s baiting on healthcare¹, BHL contributor Professor Roderick Long brought up one of the libertarian arguments that most confounds me– charity and mutual aid. Long writes that a libertarians second response to an individual’s failure to use basic services ((Specifically, Blitzer presents the case of a healthy young man who foregoes health insurance. However, Professor Long’s suggested response is sufficiently vague that I believe it is safe to say that he would apply the same three stages to any situation where an individual’s circumstances or decisions have jeopardized their access to basic needs. This includes all social safety net programs.)) should be, “talk about how charity and mutual aid are more efficient than government welfare, and how we therefore need to shift the venue of assistance from the latter to the former.”

This argument had always felt extremely classist to me. It seems that those who are most vulnerable have never been the folks who have access to mutual aid or charity through local community organizations, family members, friends, and other contacts. General social capital aside, even people who have strong community ties who are most likely to need access to a social safety net live in communities that overwhelming don’t have the collective resources to offer sufficient aid to promote the welfare of that community. The whole concept seems steeped in a highly culturally informed sense of reality that imagines a small town church community as opposed to the generationally impoverished’s reality.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the argument that it is possible that models of mutual aid and charity could ultimately private superior resource allocation, it’s just that I don’t think that aggregate efficiency is the goal here. I realize that this is a statement of prior moral conviction, but it seems to me that the ostensible purpose of safety nets is to make sure the most coverage against a failure to meet the basic needs of all people. Under this situation, efficiency is desirable but secondary, and I don’t see how mutual aid and charity will provide sufficient coverage to meet the needs of the most important beneficiaries of these policies.

For several years I considered switching to Apple. I’ve been a wannabe believer since OSX. I was using Linuxas my every day operating system. This was one part about learning, one part frustration with Windows perpetual funky instabilities, and part a growing appreciation for things like the command line interface and free and open source software. OSX offered many things I liked– a great CLI I was already getting intimately familiar with, rock hard stability, beautiful graphic effects like those I enjoyed with Compiz, etc. More importantly, OSX could do all this while providing me with a decent experience on some of the software I’d love to dump but simply could not like Microsoft Office. Additionally, I wouldn’t have all kinds of problems on the web surfing pages that were supposedly platform neutral and using browsers that were supposedly cross-platform (Flash on Linux was a joke as recently as two years ago when I abandoned Linux as my every day operating system). Of course, perhaps first and foremost, I would never have to worry about whether an update will cause a conflict because I was forced to use a deprecated driver to get my hardware to work or that some of my hardware would be limited because there wasn’t a fully functional driver available. But every time it came to a decision on purchasing a new machine, I could not bring myself to pay the “Apple tax”. I was a student, and while I’ve generally felt that the Macbook Pro/Powerbook have had reasonable economics and a physical design well beyond their competitors, I just couldn’t justify the price to power ratio. So I continued to build my own desktops and work on an IBM Thinkpad I would buy after finding a good deal.

A year ago that changed when I purchased a 13" Macbook Pro. My laptop had totally crapped out on me and I needed a replacement fast. Combining the education discount (which I used a recently expired student ID for), a free printer and iPod, and tax-free weekend in Massachusetts meant I could buy a brand new MBP for around $900. Nothing really could compete with this– the price was right, the battery life, weight, size, and power were all right and I couldn’t even reach parody with another PC. So I purchased my Macbook Pro.

I was very happy with that laptop. A great keyboard is a must, and the Macbook Pro was the best I used other than my old Thinkpad T43. In addition to the keyboard, I also got a trackpad that was far superior to any I had used before that actually allowed me to ditch the mouse I normally carried with me everywhere I went. The battery life was a ridiculous 8hrs– my previous laptop got 2.5hrs at best and I used to think that was an accomplishment. Power wise I never ran into any hiccups. The stability was solid. OSX was easy to adopt to as a full-time OS and I was on my merry way.

Except one, tiny, problem.

I hate using a laptop if I don’t have to. Whenever I was home I plugged right into a much bigger screen, an external keyboard, and mouse and sat a desk to use my computer. Call me old-fashioned, but I have never been as comfortable working on a laptop as I am using a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor. And laptop speakers? Don’t even get me started.

Now none of this would be a problem because I used my laptop on the go. At the time I purchased my machine, I was just coming off of five years of school, during which I constantly worked in libraries, coffee shops, friends houses, etc. I also had worked as a consultant at several places over the past year, so bringing my workstation with me on the go was a necessity. One month after I got my laptop, I was working a normal desk job but was assigned a desktop from the stone age that was barely functional. I found myself doing a significant amount of my work on my personal laptop that I brought with me from home. But about six months ago, my job purchased me a new desktop that was blazing fast. I work with confidential data virtually all day long, which was a huge hassle when I used an old machine. I often performed various data management activities with no more than one application open on my work computer, prepare the data in non-confidential format, and ship it off to my laptop for more in-depth analysis. The workflow was atrocious. Having a functional desktop made it pointless to bring my laptop to work– most of what I do couldn’t be done on a personal machine anyway. So while my workflow became much more efficient, my laptop lost utility. More and more I found myself simply leaving my laptop plugged in at my desk at home and operating it like a desktop. Fast forward to today and I fried my battery, which now holds only 3-4 hours of charge and I haven’t used my laptop as a portable computer in months.

I decided I should sell my laptop and replace it with a Mac Mini, which brings me to the title of this post. Perhaps the most pleasant experience I’ve had on any computer since I first used a Gateway 2000 c. 1992 came from using Apple’s Migration Assistant. Upon turning on my Mac Mini for the first time, the setup wizard offered  the opportunity to transfer files and settings from another computer. Now this is a feature that browsers and other software have offered for years and the experience has never been all that useful to me. But this time I decided to try it and I plugged my laptop into my Mac Mini using an ethernet cable. Approximate 2 hours later my Mac Mini restarted and the experience was breathtaking.

Everything, and I mean everything, transferred over to my new computer. All my applications were installed. All of my settings, including those made by software like Onyx and Geek Tool, transferred over. All my documents were where I left them. The experience was indistinguishable from logging onto my laptop.

This is an astonishingly great and useful feature. It seems so simple in theory, but execution can easily be botched. Apple hit a home run with Migration Assistant, at least as of the version that comes standard in Lion.

Ultimately, my experience with Migration Assistant, along with the great resale value on my Macbook Pro, has pretty much ensured that my next computer will be an Apple.