Friday News Digest

Obviously I was wrong on the Super Bowl last week. What a great game. For those of us in Minnesota, it looks like we are going to hit 40 this weekend. Yahoo! Enjoy your weekend and enjoy the news. 

  • Peter Calthorpe is a planner I admire, although his area of expertise is vastly different than mine. His book The Next American Metropolis was one of my favorite graduate school reads. This opinion piece he wrote on the stimulus package is worth reading.
  • Self-driving cars are going to be a reality in my lifetime, I'm sure. If you want to learn more, click here. As someone who has been in a nasty car accident (nearly head on at highway speed on a two-lane highway), this can't happen soon enough. 
  • This article indicates that Minnesota is actually adding more farms each year, bucking historic trends. I've seen this firsthand. Having grown up on a small hobby-ish farm, today I see more and more people who have, as a lifestyle choice, moved to the farm. 
  • I can't tell you how many council meetings I have been in where having this would have given me comfort.  On the other hand, there are plenty of others where there is more to fear from the council than the crowd. 
  • We like it here. Seriously? It's February and I believe I agree with the majority in this instance. 
  • I have to believe this is a short-term trend, if this analysis is even valid in the first place. In raw numbers, one would expect the places with more people to actually lose more jobs in the current recession. 
  • Once again, here is the next video in the Andres Duancy San Antonio lecture series. Well worth the time.

 

Charles Marohn