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

Wed Jan 15 16:50:08 EST 2020

Elitism at its finest. I applaud whoever finally had the guts to speak the
(their) truth. Did anyone on the LANL side have the guts to admit that that
community member was right? I doubt it.

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 3:57 PM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
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>
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