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Every few minutes another car brakes sharply as it reaches Tangbaguan on Guiyang’s new ring road. Another driver does a double-take. The dual carriageway ends abruptly in a narrow dirt track twisting downwards through heaps of rubble.

The city is eating hungrily into the hillsides, swallowing up maize fields and rice terraces in loops of tarmac and towers of concrete and glass. But the pace of change is so rapid, the transition so sharp, that its citizens are increasingly bewildered by their surroundings. Some, like the migrant workers building the roads, are new to city life. Others no longer recognise their hometown as it sprawls across the land.

This is the year China finally became an urban nation. In April the census revealed that 49.7% of its 1.34 billion population was living in cities, compared with around a fifth as economic reforms got off the ground in 1982. By now, China’s urbanites outnumber their country cousins. “The process they have been going through over three decades took four or five decades in Japan and [South] Korea and 100 years in the west,” says Edward Leman, whose Chreod consultancy has advised numerous Chinese cities on development.

It is not only the extraordinary speed that is “unprecedented and unparalleled”, says Prof Paul James of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne. “It represents the most managed process of urbanisation in human history. The state is involved in every way. It manages the building of new cities. It regulates the housing of internally displaced people. It responds actively and sometimes oppressively to new waves of squatters.”

The new five-year plan pushes urbanisation even further, as the government seeks to raise living standards and promote development in the poorer central and western regions. A hard landing for the economy could slow this process – local government debt is a particular worry – but will not stop it…

And don’t hold your breath expecting a hard landing.

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Another Republican the Kool Aid Party hates

If the debt-ceiling showdown made your blood boil, if the shutdown of air-traffic-control work related to the airline-ticket tax drove you crazy, then you should unplug your TV and power down your computer in late September, as the deadline for extension of the federal gasoline tax draws near.

…A sizable chunk of Republicans, led by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona, want to abolish the tax that pays for the federal highway program and replace the whole system with one overseen by individual states.

This insurgency, inspired by the Tea Party, reflects flawed thinking on economics, transportation policy and even American history.

Like many other excise taxes, the federal highway tax comes up for periodic renewal, which is usually noncontroversial. But not this time. If Congress doesn’t act to renew the tax by Sept. 30, gas stations all over the country have to stop collecting it; the highway trust fund will never get the money; and new work on federal highway projects will come screeching to a halt.

A delay of just 10 days in renewing the tax would mean the permanent loss of $1 billion in highway funding (and layoffs for thousands of workers). Longer delays would measurably increase the national unemployment rate.

…Tea Partiers and their allies on this issue haven’t given up the fight over ending the tax; if they can’t abolish it outright just yet, they’ll push to allow states to opt out.

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Michael Bloomberg, Christine C. Quinn, Mario Cuomo march in 2011 NYC LGBT Pride March
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Many New Yorkers and thousands of visitors this weekend may make last month’s Gay Pride celebrations seem tepid. Beginning Sunday, New York’s same-sex couples will become eligible for marriage licenses. Tens of thousands of those couples are expected to marry over the next few years, and their vows will resonate across America…

New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and city leaders must be cheering the economic shot in the arm as hotels, restaurants, caterers, florists and legions of vendors welcome the wedding and honeymoon brigades. Some estimate nearly $400 million in revenues for the state over the next three years.

These rewards are also the result of changing tides among American corporations and employers over recent decades. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s same-sex marriage legislation was endorsed not only by major corporations like Xerox and Google but by scores of smaller business owners across the state.

First, many employers already “get it.” Beginning in 1982 with New York’s Village Voice, thousands of employers have added spousal-equivalent work benefits including health coverage for their workers with same-sex partners. Today, nearly 60% of Fortune 500 companies do so…

If employers give equal benefits to same-sex couples, why worry about marital status? Ask employers in New Jersey, where same-sex civil unions are the law instead. Civil unions, domestic partnerships and other makeshift legal arrangements offer some measure of legal protection. But real-world experience shows that they do not measure up in crucial ways.

“Marriage lite” not only creates a social apartheid among families, it opens significant gaps, confusion and conflicts that businesses confront in areas such as survivor benefits, pensions and bankruptcies, along with disparate tax treatment at the state and federal level.

Keeping it simple and consistent are important to businesses…Furthermore, administering payrolls and maintaining accurate, timely benefits and tax withholding procedures can strain any employer. When you add the complexity that accompanies different marital and tax status for many couples, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and workplace to workplace, it is another unacceptable and costly burden on business.

Sooner rather than later, chambers of commerce will recognize that their best interests are served by the simplicity, uniformity and cost savings that come with marriage equality across the nation…

Part of today’s political dichotomies is the decline in principles and standards of traditional organizations of all types. Churches, political parties – local and national, trade organizations and national business representatives like the US Chamber of Commerce have walked away from any pretense of representing a broad base.

Just as fundamentalist churches less and less often engage in dialogue with the broad reach of Christianity, the US Chamber of Commerce long ago turned its back on small business. In truth there are whole segments of American commerce ignored or deliberately affronted by the entrenched leadership of the Chamber. If you ain’t from Big Oil or Pharma or Insurance and Finance – just punch their meal ticket; but, don’t waste anyone’s time with issues outside of extraction taxes or capital gains.

Republican Free Market version of a modern railroad

Vice President Joe Biden has announced an ambitious $53 billion U.S. program to build new high-speed rail networks and make existing ones faster over the next six years.

But the plan drew immediate fire from majority Republicans in the House of Representatives, who said building high-speed rail requires private investment rather than a government plan…

The ideological response doesn’t matter. They may as well have said their favorite Wall Street astrologer gets the whim-whams on train rides. They oppose the plan [1] because it’s a Democrat plan; [2] Obama probably thought of it; [3] it doesn’t especially increase profits for Big Oil.

“This is about seizing the future,” he said, making the announcement at Philadelphia’s busy 30th Street station with U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The United States should follow the example of Japan and China and build high-speed rail, Biden said. “If we do not, you tell me how America is going to be able to lead the world in the 21st century,” he said…

Advocates say U.S. investment in high-speed rail lags many other countries and point to China, which plans to invest $451 billion to $602 billion in its high-speed rail network between 2011 and 2015, according to the China Securities Journal.

China turned the portion of the Great Recession that affected their economy into an opportunity to expand and modernize infrastructure. This provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled workers and is laying the groundwork for an internal logistics system completely independent of highways.

The rest of the world gets to look at these questions and how they’re managed in nations with sensible infrastructure vs. the United States and the answers are easy. Rapid freight movement involves trucks and air. Serious freight movement involves rail. Passenger travel can involve rail, road and air. The United States offers the worst case examples for modern solutions.

The 19th Commonwealth Games have ended in Delhi with Australia topping the medals table, winning 74 gold medals.

India edged ahead of England to the second place on Thursday when Saina Nehwal won the 38th gold medal for the host nation in the women’s singles badminton final.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from the Indian capital, Delhi, Pradeep Magazine, a sports journalist, said: “The major thing which has saved the game for India is that [Indian] athletes have won record number of medals and that has pleased Indians quite a lot.”

“The games have been fairly successful because Indians didn’t expect much of it, people were fearing that there will be a lot of glitches, even a major mishap.”

Disappointing the usual suspects in the international media.

In the run-up to the games, the organisers of the games had come in for severe criticism over delayed completion of the athletes’ village and other facilities. Several prominent athletes had even pulled out of the event, citing health and security concerns…

A glitzy ceremony was held amid tight security at Jawharlal Nehru Stadium to mark the end of the games.

Mike Fennell, the Commonwealth Games Federation president, declared the games a success, saying that despite the late completion of the athletes village, lack of ticket sales and transport issues, the athletes enjoyed them.

India has proven themselves in the inevitably political judgement of international sports competitions. A step forward whether you like it or not. It’s part of acceptance as a global leader.

This is an an especially pleasing victory in practice for a developing nation. There was no helping hand from a colonial overseer. Indians accomplished this on their own.

Yes, there are a few Congressional politicians who get it. Not many.
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The United States has been overtaken by Sweden and Singapore in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) competitiveness survey for 2010-11.

The change meant that the US slipped two places to fourth in the WEF’s latest ranking.

Switzerland, which overtook the US last year, remains the top ranked economy.

Germany rose to fifth, and was the best placed eurozone country. The UK, after falling back in recent years, moved up one place to 12th position…

The WEF says the US has lost ground because of what it calls a weakening of its public and private institutions, as well as what it describes as “lingering concerns about the state of its financial markets”…

The WEF report reflects the improving fortunes of the developing world, but shows it still has a long way to go before it matches the developed world for competitiveness…

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, said: “Policy-makers are struggling with ways of managing the present economic challenges while preparing their economies to perform well in a future economic landscape characterized by uncertainty and shifting balances.”

Understand that the Republican Party and their Tea Party flunkeys could give a rats’ ass about a report like this.

As lame and cowardly as is the Democratic Party barely clinging to the economic and political leadership from Obama and the White House cadre, they offer a better chance for growing the United States’ economic performance than the reactionaries lining up on the other side of the aisle for lobbying perks – already planning on the mid-term elections fitting historic patterns.

We found out in June that the stealth robotics company created by iRobot founder Helen Greiner would work on unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for emergency response. Now the company has revealed that these UAVs will also be used to inspect bridges, dams and other infrastructure.

Formerly known as The Droid Works, and now called CyPhy Works, the company has received a NIST grant of $2.4 million. CyPhy Works will work with researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop small, hovering UAVs equipped with video cameras and sensors.

If successful, the project will produce an advanced class of UAVs that would enable entirely novel, efficient, and relatively low-cost techniques for monitoring the health of the nation’s existing civil infrastructure.

While many researchers are working on small, hovering robots for search-and-rescue, surveillance, and structure monitoring, controlling and coordinating these aircraft remains a challenge. Many UAV projects currently use GPS to navigate, but this is not very precise and does not work inside buildings.

CyPhy Works apparently plans to develop a more precise navigation system. It has plans for two types of monitoring: Robotic Assisted Inspection, where a UAV slowly flies along a structure taking high resolution images, and Autonomous Robotic Monitoring, where a UAV stays at a structure and routinely checks for potential dangerous changes on its own. It will be interesting to see if the company can make the latter approach work, and what techniques it develops for stabilizing the UAVs in high wind.

Don’t you love people who ask irrelevant questions? Do we send out helicopters on risky missions when there is the added fillip of, say, a hurricane? Why send out a UAV?

Sorry to be distracted by nonsense. Following iRobot is a delight because they’re never dull enough to offer products that only seem to work in one environment or sell to a single class of customer.

“What we are seeing in the U.S. today in terms of smartphone penetration, 3G data, nobody else is seeing in the rest of the planet,” Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive for mobility and consumer markets at AT&T, told analysts at a conference in New York. “The amount of growth and data that we are seeing in wireless data is unprecedented.”

AT&T is the exclusive United States carrier for the iPhone, whose owners are big users of network capacity as they surf the Web and download videos.

The company has been criticized by owners of the phone for delayed text and voice messages, sluggish download speeds and other network problems….

And it shouldn’t be a surprise to any long-term AT&T customers that AT&T would blame this on the customer.

[De la Vega] emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use. [emphasis mine - ed.]

The company might consider a “pricing scheme that addresses the usage,” Mr. de la Vega said….

Still, [Mr. Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless analyst] said pricing plans based on use were only part of the answer to AT&T’s network congestion.

“They still have to improve things on the back end so they can deal with the issues of multiple users on the network at the same time,” he said.

Mr. de la Vega acknowledged the company’s difficulties in meeting the demands of its customers.

This may sound very familiar to those who, in the late ’90s, were on the “unlimited” dial-up plan. Then also, AT&T lacked the infrastructure to support the commitments it had made to customers.

Today’s AT&T lacks even the limited vision it still possessed back then to deal with customer dissatisfaction. Don’t expect much support from them.

Canada’s northern communities are unprepared to cope with the threat that climate change poses to their roads, buildings and other infrastructure, a new report from the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy says.

“Climate change is moving fastest in Arctic areas, requiring Canada to be a world leader in adaptation practices, more than we had even contemplated,” the group’s chairperson said in a news release.

The independent federal government agency made 16 recommendations, saying a comprehensive effort will be needed to help deal with climate change effects such as degrading permafrost, melting ice roads, storms surges and coastal erosion…

Some of the group’s suggestions include:

updating construction and engineering codes
providing better weather information
insurance system changes
new infrastructure built to withstand climate change

Way too logical.

The report says some of climate-change effects on the North include winter roads melting early, forcing communities to airlift supplies; melting permafrost destabilizing buildings and airport runways; increased snowfall adding additional stress to buildings; and, storm surges putting communities at risk.

Of course, you could turn over advisement to Sarah Palin and her peers in Alaska – who think real freedom lies in having no building codes whatsoever.