NY and SF Mayors Announce Joint Tech Summits 27
First time accepted submitter Clarklteveno writes "New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his San Francisco counterpart, Ed Lee, said at a news conference Friday that they are sponsoring a pair of technology summits over the next year. The mayors said the 'digital cities' summits — one in New York in September and another in San Francisco early next year — will seek to find ways to use technology to solve problems the cities face. The mayors made the announcement after touring the office of San Francisco-based mobile payment company Square with co-founder Jack Dorsey, who also helped found Twitter. Bloomberg pointed to power outages and dangerous winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy as examples of issues the summits would seek to address."
Hmm.... (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
You read my mind.
Hey NY:
"How do we use technology to keep Bloomberg from being a complete and utter moron?"
"How do we use technology to turn the stock market from a slot machine with nanosecond-precision timing into an investment market for stocks and bonds?"
"How do we use technology to clean up New York so that it doesn't look like a landfill with people living in it?"
Hey SF:
"How do we use technology to make housing costs sane?"
"How do we use technology to make electric cars affordable?"
"How do we use tech
Re: (Score:2)
I have to question a few of your points.
"How do we use technology to clean up New York so that it doesn't look like a landfill with people living in it?"
When was the last time you were in NYC, 1985? I can't speak about the Bronx or Queens, but Manhattan these days is a nice place, at least from what I've seen (I live in NJ, not far away, so I get over there occasionally). It's crowded, but so is every dense city in the world. They could stand to clean up some things though; the city is quite old, so a lo
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, not possible.
Turns out the stock market is actually in New Jersey, so not his department.
Drone strikes on everyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Define "problems".
Well, acute under-surveillance and a lack of red-light camera revenue...
Re: (Score:3)
Living close to large bodies of water is rather necessary if you want to be a port city. Since sea shipping has been for thousands of years, and still is one of the most important transportation methods, port cities make a lot more sense than building a city in the middle of nowhere.
Flooding problems can be solved with ancient technology called "sea walls". Lots of cities in the world use these, or levies, to prevent storm flooding. The Dutch are masters of this technology, and wouldn't have half their c
Re:Hmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to diminish the (quite demanding) task faced by civil engineers and workers on large construction projects; but it's arguable that the least well-solved problem in infrastructure is within the realm of political science, rather than engineering.
The actual tech levels required to achieve infrastructure objectives tend to be pretty modest; but building and maintaining infrastructure is a thankless task, that people notice only when it has been neglected for long enough to fall apart, and doesn't come cheap. Societies that enjoy reasonably stable, non-dysfunctional, civic institutions for a solid length of time get it(the actual tech level required to build what the people of a given era regard as 'basic infrastructure' is rarely bleeding-edge); but societies that don't have that tend to discover that there isn't really a substitute for it.
You can only rush build infrastructure so fast, and you need genuine institutional competence to keep it in good shape once you have it.
Re: (Score:2)
Define "problems".
How about cars, can we get rid of them?
It ought to be feasible to make proper public transport both safer and cleaner in big citites.
(Eletric == Clean, self-driving on tracks == safer, how hard can it be)
joint tech (Score:1)
NY and SF Mayors Announce Joint Tech Summits
What's wrong with just rolling them the old-fashioned way?
Better kick Bloomberg out, as a start... (Score:2)
Just remember what happened when New York decided to use technology to solve a little payroll challenge [wnyc.org]...
Hiring SAIC to do something was bad enough, letting the project get so out of hand that the cost increased by a factor of ten, half a billion dollars of which was recovered by the feds as being directly tainted by fraud...
The rest of the participants should probably just tell mean jokes about the Bloomberg terminal's embarrassing little spying-on-customers-who-really-don't-like-that [businessinsider.com] problem until he goe
in lots of places outsourced stuff ends up costing (Score:2)
in lots of places outsourced stuff ends up costing more then it would by having it in house and it does not help when non tech PHB and MBA are calling the shots or pick the lowest bidder.
large sodas (Score:1)
Bloomberg will probably push facial recognition software for self serving soda fountains to prevent people from getting 2 small sodas instead of 1 large one.
Re: (Score:2)
Bloomberg will probably push facial recognition software for self serving soda fountains to prevent people from getting 2 small sodas instead of 1 large one.
I don't know if Bloomberg just doesn't give a fuck about public perception of either issue, or whether the soda thing is a brilliant PR move: He's a walking trainwreck on civil liberties; but the one that leads the pack, front and center, is his terrifying war on our god-given right to Big Gulps. It's genius, really.
Squeegee guys ... (Score:2)
I turn to history to help. (Score:2)
main()
{
printf("To solve the major problems the cities face:\n");
printf("================\n");
printf("Yokels, stop electing idiots.\n");
}
Re: (Score:2)
Empirically, most tech-startup founders seem to disagree with you...
Re: (Score:2)
Empirically, most tech-startup founders seem to disagree with you...
I've always been a trifle puzzled by the 'Everyday Low Prices!' theory of "business friendliness"... There are industries where cost is king(many of them not very good neighbors), and access to cheap, docile, labor and a regulatory environment flexible enough to let you keep your externalities externalized are the overriding factors; but the continued existence of high cost, high status, markets suggests that human capital and network effects count for a lot(especially if you can structure the company so th