[FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF City Hall; bring friends

Wed Jan 15 15:57:12 EST 2020

Hi Marcus,

My client many years ago was Los Alamos County.  They hired my consulting
firm to design and facilitate a county-wide meeting to discuss the
relationship between LANL and the citizens who lived there.  When I
interviewed local people prior to designing the meeting, I found a lot of
anger about the role of the lab in relation to its surrounding neighbors.
It was quite emotional, and so I brought in a colleague who is a
psychiatrist to help me facilitate.  Toward the end of a difficult weekend
of discussion, he asked:  "We've had deep dialogue together, but I feel
that there is still an "unspoken" here.  What is it?"  A member of the
group raised her hand and said the "unspoken here is that the laboratory
considers the county, the town, and its citizens just "decoration.  We have
practically no relationship, and they feel we do not contribute any added
value."

So sad, and so totally expected.

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 10:30 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> Glen writes:
>
> < I remember moving to Santa Fe and hating Cerrillos Rd with all it's
> little businesses, the trashy look, sections of ill- and un-used
> properties, peppered with upscale stuff in some spots. >
>
> Before brainstorming about how to integrate LANL, etc. into the St.
> Michael / Cerrillos area, it might be worth asking why the town of Los
> Alamos is so abysmal.   Los Alamos county has one of the highest per capita
> incomes in the country, and yet there is not a thing to spend money on up
> there besides real estate.   One reason I've heard is that the folks that
> own the lots in the town find it more profitable to hold on to them and
> rent to the lab when the need arises.   Thus there is no way to build
> anything.   Another is that it is a family town, and oddly enough not a
> town that facilitates workism -- people more-or-less work 9 to 5 and then
> hang out at home, and want to.   Or on the weekends they ski or hike.   Its
> always been astonishing to me that there aren't more restaurants.   The
> only conventional sign of progress is the big Smiths facility.
>
> Marcus
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣ <
> gepropella at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 15, 2020 8:14 AM
> *To:* FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] NO LANL IN SANTA FE! Wednesday, 12; 00 outside SF
> City Hall; bring friends
>
> Just a preamble: I remember moving to Santa Fe and hating Cerrillos Rd
> with all it's little businesses, the trashy look, sections of ill- and
> un-used properties, peppered with upscale stuff in some spots. I'd moved
> there from Dallas, TX, where they'd rather tear down an old building than
> repurpose it. I recognized the "planned" look of Dallas because I grew up
> in Houston, where zoning laws are relatively loose.
>
> But Cerrillos is what taught me the meaning of "organic". So, as an (also
> vague) attempt to answer the question, the only way one can "design" an
> ecosystem is by first studying the already extant ecosystem and nudging it
> in multifarious ways. The primary problem with organically grown systems is
> the lack of executive function ... a high-order feedback (like a cerebral
> cortex) ... to establish and maintain constraints like water limits,
> geographical sprawl, pollution, etc. So, the FIRST part of the plan would
> be to constructively aggregate the extant businesses into some sort of
> scaffolded hierarchy starting with tiny businesses (businesses run by
> people with ZERO spare time, of course), up through boutique businesses
> (coffee shops, breweries, fashion, etc.), up through larger scale
> businesses, etc. ... all the way up to behemoths like LANL or the State of
> NM.
>
> The second part of the plan would be to adopt some trial (non-local)
> constraints like water limitations and experiment with feeding that back
> down the hierarchy (layer by layer *or* cross-trophically, jumping over
> layers) and then following the effects back up the hierarchy. As trials,
> there must be challenge tests, ways to decide whether to abandon or
> iteratively modify the constraints and their up- and down-ward signaling.
> So, this second part of the plan might *start* by formalizing those tests
> (in an "agile" style).
>
> Any interference/manipulation by a behemoth like Amazon or CMU would
> require them to *facilitate* the hierarchy, as opposed to *disrupting* it.
> (As I think someone in this thread has already mentioned, but I don't have
> the bandwidth to farm the posts for who said/implied it.) Following
> co-evolution and multi-objective optimization, the constraints have to be
> at least partially *endogenous*. The executive has to be pretty tightly
> coupled to the rest of the system. Any attempts at decoupled, directed
> evolution of the ecosystem will be fragile to disrupting enterprises. But
> if the disruptions are small/local, then the network of feedbacks can
> adjust, limiting any species collapse in response to that disruption.
>
> That's how I would "define the function" of the behemoth.
>
> On 1/14/20 1:03 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > I know the members on this list mostly don’t have powers of
> implementation, but as idle intellectual exercise, if you/we were portfolio
> managers, or really avant-garde regional planners, what would your design
> look like to get through critical mass thresholds to tip an interior,
> water-limited, relatively low-population region into some kind of
> self-maintaining decent standard of life and opportunity for whoever lived
> there stably for a long time.  (And how many can that be, in water-limited
> regions?)  Intel made a significant impact in ABQ, but putting a
> semiconductor fab in a desert is about as unsustainable a business decision
> as I can imagine.  What resources exist currently?  If you were designing
> the institutional ecosystem, and knew you needed some economic social
> function but couldn’t find an actor to fit it, could you define in somewhat
> operational terms what that function would need to be, and how much of the
> remainder of the context could you populate with specific actors and a plan
> to get them into place?
> >
> > I know this is much too loose and long-term to deal with immediate
> practicalities of interacting wtih the SF city council, but we often speak
> as if long-term future visioning efforts could in principle yield something
> useful.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
merlelefkoff at gmail.com <merlelefoff at gmail.com>
mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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