BLDGBLOG has a scoop on an unusual problem with urban sprawl:

Malfunctioning fire alarms going off inside foreclosed homes have become a major distraction for fire departments in suburban Arizona, according to ABC15 News.

Fire fighters, however, cannot legally enter a property unless they see smoke or have obtained the owner's permission. But in an era of bank ownership and rampant foreclosure, even finding the owners can take weeks.

The result is that "neighbors have to listen to the alarm until the battery dies, which can take days."

SOUNDS LIKE FUN.

I find myself playing meta-games a lot. That is, I find a game I like, then find games within the games when I'm bored of the usual means of playing it. For example, back when I played Age of Empires II, I would see how many troops I could get. In the usual game, you were limited to how many troops you could have by a set limit at the beginning. However, with a monk you could convert others' troops past that limit. So what I would do is try to get the computer to keep sending troops and such ad infinitum into the waiting arms of a huge army of monks. The hardest part was to keep the computer from giving up.

In Team Fortress 2, I often find myself more worried about trying to keep as good a ratio of kills-to-deaths as possible.

In chess, I find myself trying two meta games. The first is to not just win, but to win without losing any pawns and converting all of my own pawns to queens without causing a stalemate or checkmate.  The second is to checkmate with as many pieces as possible. In checkmate, the king cannot move out of its current space into any of the adjacent 3-to-8 spaces (3 if in a corner, 4 on an edge, 8 away from the edges). So far I've accomplished the first meta-game (several times), but have never managed to get the theoretical maximum of 9 pieces causing checkmate. My current best is seven:

That's the conclusion I came to when observing these things in the last week:

• In the last week, after ultimately rejecting the first house we put an offer in, Rachel and I have been looking at a lot of satellite photos of Tucson, to see the houses we were considering, and what the neighborhoods had in store.
• At the beginning of the week, GM declared bankruptcy, and I am now a part-owner in a very large car company.
• The notion of differentiating obsolescence and planned obsolescence came up when considering how best to decorate, customize, furnish, and otherwise improve the house I plan on buying.
• The economy was estimated to be less in free-fall than it was, but a primary concern remained all of the inactive GM dealerships and factories.
  

The satellite photos of neighborhoods in Tucson were striking. While ClearChannel says that there are "only" almost 2 cars per household in Tucson, but I suspect that only includes registered vehicles. When you add up all the non-functioning cars in Tucson, I'd bet that the number doubles at minimum. Dive in on Google, go ahead. The nice neighborhoods have 2-car garages (with a car parked outside), and the rest have a car or two parked outside. Then there's always a few houses that have an unbelievable number of cars. They're not always trashy, even, or a problem to the neighborhood because they're in the back yard. But they're there.  I found one cute little house with just one car in the car port, and sixteen in the back yard.

(ClearChannel also includes the statistic that 86% of all adults go outdoors everyday, and touts it as a high number; I understand why a Minnesotan wouldn't go outside but ... how does everyone get to work? Or does that not count?)

So that already was making me think that Tucson has more cars than it needs. Then GM went bankrupt, and naturally I wanted to know why. So I've read (or listened) quite a few stories and it boils down to:

• Promoting financial wizards instead of people who understood cars. At the beginning of this trend, De Lorean left; Now, after 30 years of this, they actually had to hire outside consultants like Robert Lutz.
• Not understanding cars or what people want from them led to a stagnation of innovation: Stockholders were happy they were making money, so the brass did their best to maintain the status quo, not realizing that that's the surest way to kill a company based on technology.
• Not making cars people wanted gave foreign manufacturers an opportunity to take up market shares. In 1954, GM had an astounding 54 percent of the total market. They bought into the planned obsolecense strategy, but failed to recognize that that only works when people don't or can't go to other choices. Once Toyota and its peers had worn GM's market share to a mere 19%, Americans made the obvious choice not to spend huge amounts of money on things that broke!
  
• That status quo also relied almost entirely on selling the same number of cars every year, and only to the North American continent. GM never seriously competed in foreign markets because they weren't reliable. So when they lost the American market, but kept building the cars, their factories became albatrosses of overspending.
• Finally, the people in charge were so obsessed with that stockholder-pleasing status quo that they continued until they were bankrupt in 2006. Why did they only actually declare bankruptcy in 2009? Basically, they and the financial industry around them stuck their fingers in their ears. Isn't that terrifying?

Anyway, so finally I've been hearing a lot about the economy lately (really? yeah!). In particular, the biggest problem seems to be unemployment (although I admit I'm not an expert). It was particularly problematic for GM, which has a whole lot of factories that are idle.

That's the situation. Like so many things in economics, to me it comes down to supply and demand: GM is making a ton of cars, and there's no demand.

I expect most of the chatter from the news, GM's new bosses, and the President himself will address the demand side: GM must make good cars to survive. Actually, it must start putting out some great cars, if it ever hopes to win back the confidence of the market. It has spent the last 20 years making sure nobody trusted a GM car and all those expensive mechanic bills will not fade from the U.S. collective memory quickly.

However, even if all of the cars to come out of GM really were groundbreaking, affordable, and reliable (and I don't expect that, frankly, because I had more than my share of those mechanic bills myself), the demand side problem remains. Toyota's powertrain warranty lasts half a decade or more (my Prius has a 7-year/100,000-mile warranty). People just don't need to buy cars every two or three years and right now can't afford to. The U.S. has by far the highest number of cars per capita (765 per 1000). Even if they weren't crappy cars, the U.S. just doesn't need to buy as many cars as it used to.

So GM needs to do three things:

1. Design and market good cars. Give the car-buying world a reason to believe that a GM car is better by any standard than a Toyota.
   
2. Sell them not just domestically but export them. China is working furiously on their highway system and yet have just 10 cars per thousant people. India has 12 per thousand. As time goes on, those nations will want to buy cars and if they do a good job, GM might make those sales.
3. Realize that some of those factories are redundant and find something else to do with them besides let them become icons of remote corporate idiocy and local unemployment. Do something else with those factories.

But do what? Well. Several on the left want to convert them to make green technologies and infrastructure of various sorts. I'm wary of that, in that while I'm sure they'd be fine for manufacture, I don't know how good they'd be at designing. I'd say lease 'em. But all three things have to happen.

So it turns out that certain parts of Phoenix isn't quite as rah-rah Conservative Christian as I thought:

A Phoenix church leader has received a suspended 10-day jail sentence
because his tolling church bells violated a city noise ordinance. [ ... ] The bells at the Cathedral of Christ the King in northwest Phoenix normally chime at the top of every hour from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Neighbors said the bells are too loud and ring too often. (via AP)

The church was then limited to 60db and then, only on particular holidays. I'm sure that the 60-db limit was on the ground, but that is very quiet.

The judge was in an awkward spot because the law is very clear about noise and makes no exceptions for churches. What saddens me is that I fully expect to see this incident used as evidence of anti-theist tendencies of the courts - damning those "activist judges!". If anything, the court simply applied the law, and gave the bishop the good grace of suspending the 10-day jail sentence.

The tragedy here is that the bishop should have engaged more with the neighborhood to find a balance. Community involvement is the main purpose of the Church! (I admit I'm inferring that he didn't try, but if it got to this point he obviously didn't succeed.)

Bonus Fail, courtesy of the Republican National Convention:

Stolen from the comments of a Democracy in America post:

The American right wing (and I use that term rather than "conservative", since I see no evidence of conservatism in their actions) is quite adept at formulating a framework of discussion that a 3rd grader could understand.

They reduce and reduce (and quite often deceive: the Death Tax, for instance), get into lockstep with each other, and wind up with something almost pristine in its clarity, if not its underlying essence. It's easy to understand. You don't need to hurt your head thinking about it.

The American left wing is like a herd of Harvard-educated cats. Complicated policy proposals, no one agrees with each other, and no one communicates clearly at a 3rd grade level. I've heard Chomsky speak, and it left me nearly bleeding from the ears.

Brilliant. The Right has terrible policy ideas because they're wrongheadedly simplistic. The Left's terrible policy ideas come from vast overcomplication and unintended consequences.

Rachel's Mom sent us an interesting article about how the ranch style houses that became Ubiquitous in Tucson are getting old enough to be historic. I'm not totally sure I buy that all old ranch houses are worth preserving. I'm not even sure I buy the premise that the Ranch was anything more than a part of history, rather than something capital-H Historic. Still, Rachel and I have been flirting with the idea of making a very 1950's style home and pending a clerical error at the bank that awards us with a few million dollars, the only type of 1950's home we're going to get is a ranch home.

So I guess that makes one ranch house in Tucson that I definitely will be interested in restoring.

Trent Reznor takes part in a fascinating interview, conducted by an able interviewer with questions that were determined by popularity (of course - it's Digg). It's very nice to see an able, professional musician weigh in on interesting questions that largely are about the business and how it's run. After all, I could use advice regarding questions like: "What advice do you have for up and coming bands who chose the internet for distribution over traditional channels?"

It's also nice that the Web allows the interviewer and interviewee stretch a little; there's no time limit really with these sorts of things, unlike on TV or other media that have very specific time restraints. It is a 40-minute interview, but every second is used well because Trent is very good at taking a question with multiple layers and contexts, sorting them out in his head, and explaining his answer thoroughly. I really wish more interviews were formatted like this.

Every time I have a birthday or anniversary with Rachel, I appreciate anew how very easy we have it with each other. We still love each other, we're still in love (well, usually), and it takes very little other than some Magpie's pizza, a good movie and no interruptions to make us happy.

In this particular case, our 5th anniversary yesterday, we got each other a few gifts (which, I must admit are wildly skewed in the cost department): I gave her a quarter-circle of strawberry cheesecake in a bag I decorated, and I got the Complete Calvin & Hobbes. I turned off the phone and computer, and we watched Castle in the Sky.

For the record, the Magpie's Hawaiian pizza, with piñon nuts substituting for peppers, is our new favorite pizza.

BLDG BLOG has (yet another) great post with an interview with Richard Mosse, who ran around taking photos of U.S. troops in Saddam's old palaces. The photographer makes what to me is a very interesting point:

The most interesting thing about the whole endeavor for me was the very fact that the U.S. had chosen to occupy Saddam's palaces in the first place. If you're trying to convince a population that you have liberated them from a terrible dictator, why would you then sit in his throne? A savvier place to station the garrison would have been a place free from associations with Saddam, and the terror and injustices that the occupying forces were convinced they'd done away with.

Perhaps instead we should have taken his advice, but I have to admit it was a thoroughly satisfying feeling to see Saddam's shoddy, ridiculous palaces turned into U.S. garrisons. Then again, they are going through the process of giving them back to Iraq (finally), and that does threaten the possibility that the photographer will ever get a chance to photograph all of the palaces (he visited six out of the eighty one palaces).

Taryn Simon's recent exhibition is for all intents and purposes shorthand for a whole series of things that I find absolutely fascinating: Cryogenics and the financial considerations thereof, means of creating light, pet immigration, government cannabis, and more, with a bonus photo of an actual issue of Playboy in braille.

So, it's time for some more harping on the Torture front. Turns out we could've saved a lot of time, trouble, and face if we'd just had the balls to really take it to these scumbags and ... give them cookies:

Former interrogator/member of the FBI Ali Soufan, who testified to Congress last month, tells TIME: "He was a diabetic ... We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him .... So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures."

Best comment in the thread (of many, so far):

Terrorist: "DEATH TO THE INFIDEL! I'LL NEVER TALK!"
Interrogator: "Cookie?"
Terrorist: "DEATH TO... what? Er, um, thanks. Where was I?"

It's laughable because it's so obvious: Undermine a terrorist's reason for hating you and they'll talk. America got through the Civil War, two World Wars (quite swimmingly, considering), Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and a hundred smaller conflicts without shaming ourselves, but OH NO! There's a bunch of dirty crazy people with jacknives and crowbars!

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney: For people who are so damned concerned with how History views you, you chose a path practically gauranteed to put you in the same company as America's Worst Enemies. Because you'll probably not go to jail, I will have to celebrate the fact that you can't damage my country anymore when you die. Unless Cheney really is Darth Vader and made of more machine than man after all those heart attacks. In that case, I fully expect him to go on a Terminator-style rampage any moment now.