Tag: notes

With best wishes to SRP

Big move, big break, and 10 takeaways from 10 great years at Salt River Project

Much has changed in the last couple months.

I moved out of my apartment and sold most of my stuff.

I quit my job at Salt River Project (SRP), where I’d been working for more than 10 years.

I left Phoenix.

And now I’m in Gdańsk, Poland, living out of a duffle bag, facing an exciting future that’s wide open.

This post gives some background on the big changes underway.

In addition, I wanted to reflect on my experience at SRP and lay out some of the big lessons I learned.

Finally, consider this post my way of sending a big THANK YOU to my friends and colleagues at the Valley’s community-based, not-for-profit, public power and water utility.

Continue reading With best wishes to SRP

“Order without Design” by Alain Bertaud

Highly recommend the book, “Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” by Alain Bertaud.

Especially recommended for professional urban planners, armchair urban planners, people looking to better understand how their cities work, and nerds looking for healthy doses of graphs, statistics, and analysis to inform their municipal commentary and priorities.

For me, this book fed my confirmation bias that it’s all about mobility, and also challenged and changed my views on sprawl and density constraints. It also introduced me to some next-level ways of thinking about housing affordability and cities as labor markets.

Here are some of my notes, comments and favorite excerpts. I put direct excerpts in quotations, and delineate my personal commentary using AF Comment. Everything else is pretty much me picking out takeaways, summarizing and paraphrasing to varying degrees.

For more on these topics, be sure to listen to interviews with author Alain Bertaud on Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen) and EconTalk (Russ Roberts).

Continue reading “Order without Design” by Alain Bertaud

Red Nation: The NBA, China, Hong Kong, and the sounds of silence

I have been absolutely glued to this story over the past couple weeks.

It feels like an immense moment that is underappreciated.

A complex issue that is really quite simple.

A terrifying wake-up call and a breath of fresh air.

A cultural reckoning and a crisis communications case study.

An attack on American soil and an opportunity to bridge divides.

Admittedly, I’m primed to gobble this story up and overreact thanks to a few pre-existing conditions.

Continue reading Red Nation: The NBA, China, Hong Kong, and the sounds of silence