
How to Save a City Through a Website - sonabinu
http://www.lennyletter.com/politics/interviews/a477/how-to-save-a-city-through-a-website/
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Mz
_There was a make-a-payment button, and I thought, What if we collected the
PDF full of account numbers? What if we built a website to find people who
were having problems paying their bills and we get their account numbers and
we say we 'll log into their account and just pay some bills for them? That's
pretty much how we've paid the bulk of the first early bills._

You go, girl.

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mceoin
Anyone know if there's somewhere we can donate to support Tiffani Bell
herself? She's a definite force-multiplier for good.

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daguar
Ping her on Twitter. She might have a structure for accepting a donation to
support project outside the direct to-user context.

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throwaway38466
A really awesome article, however I found this part around the end upsetting:

> The other angle is if I or another POC wants to be an engineer, will I have
> to worry about "culture fit" at different tech companies? I figure that's a
> term that's used to just keep people out at this point. "Oh, you're not a
> culture fit," where the culture-fit definition is "bearded white guy that
> wears flannel shirts," is a problem.

The political correctness using the word POC (Person Of Color I assume) is
annoying. I work in a big tech company, and there's a lot of Asians and
Indians (1st generation or not), definetely more than the national average.
Are they not "POC"? Around me, white people are a minority. And in those white
people, a lot of them are European. The culture fit is definetely not "bearded
white guy that wears flannel shirts". What is not represented is Latino,
Black. It surely is a problem, but propagating the "bearded white guy that
wears flannel shirts" is definitely not going to help.

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saurik
> I work in a big tech company...

This "culture fit" diversity issue is normally describing an issue endemic to
the numerous smaller tech companies; if nothing else, big tech companies often
have HR departments who have dealing with these kinds of problems as one of
their goals, but they also don't have the same default expectation of "these
people are my world so I need to not just work well together aoth them but
also would have them as my best friends".

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saintwind
I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental
right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every
super market or water source and deny people who hadn't paid their bills.

These people are losing a service they're no longer paying for, which is water
delivered directly to their home.

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tbihl
I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though
certainly some have a different interpretation.

I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd
encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit.

The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions
made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal-
only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have
you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you
moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to
see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs
and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden
systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the
public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you
probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high-
speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town.

Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own
largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't
have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away,
and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be
hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or
maybe even unlikely to really happen.

Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and
that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone.
There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot
of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in
to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help
out.

Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more
and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're
going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see
coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined.
Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to
acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it
in the coming decades.

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jomamaxx
This article and SOJ propaganda are insufferable.

Detroit does not lack resources or technology.

They lack intelligent social organization and responsibility.

The lack of economic opportunity is not a cause for violence, otherwise every
farming community in America 100 years ago would have been a bloodbath.

Corruption and stupidity all the way up and down are the problems. Enter into
any Detroit social situation: personal, professional, civic - you will see
tons of really bad behaviours all around.

Moroever, the terrible behaviour of residents compounds the economic problem:
nobody wants to open shop there anymore. Making it a disaster.

People should move out of the worst neighbourhoods, have the bad homes
destroyed, save the ones worth saving, and rebuild. It will gentrify quickly
if there is security and the former residents will probably live much higher
standard of living elsewhere.

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tbihl
People have done what you're describing. They've moved into the city core. A
lot of the outer stuff, at this point, should just be considered ruins. The
problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as ruins.

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jomamaxx
"The problem is that it's hard to write people's long-term residences off as
ruins."

It takes leadership.

Not semi-corrupt status quo.

