Disqus - Latest Comments for cruzweb

Re: Archer Creator to Debut New Female-Led Series Cassius and Clay for FXX

John Cruz — Sat, 08 Aug 2015 23:05:10 -0000

Seriously. I missed 1 season of venture bros. and then had no idea what was going on.

Re: Giveaway: Win a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D Mark III DSLR Worth $3,000

John Cruz — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:48:56 -0000

and of course Nikon

Re: Giveaway: Win a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D Mark III DSLR Worth $3,000

John Cruz — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:48:40 -0000

hasselblad

Re: Giveaway: Win a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D Mark III DSLR Worth $3,000

John Cruz — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:48:28 -0000

Fuji

Re: Giveaway: Win a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D Mark III DSLR Worth $3,000

John Cruz — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:48:24 -0000

Yashica

Re: Giveaway: Win a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D Mark III DSLR Worth $3,000

John Cruz — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:48:00 -0000

Mamiya!

Re: Daylight Saving Time Is America's Greatest Shame

John Cruz — Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:22:42 -0000

That was my first thought. I'm very anti DST but there's a lot of things this country has done that are far, far worse. Looks like there's a copy editor that needs a reality check.

Re: Art Director Creates a Hilariously Dramatic Car Ad to Sell His Crappy Old Volvo

John Cruz — Tue, 13 May 2014 10:45:45 -0000

These cars can easily go over 500k miles, thats why so many are still on the road. Hardly a "Crappy" car just because it's old.

Re: St. Louis’ Brick Paradox

John Cruz — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:48:23 -0000

Check this out http://www.stlbrickfilm.com/

Re: In Order to Achieve Individualism, We Must Acknowledge Privilege Exists

John Cruz — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 11:46:16 -0000

I liked this a great deal; Libertarianism at its core stems from the ideals that who we are as people comes directly from the achieved statuses in our lives. While we like to act as though an ascribed status is either meaningless or less important, we often ignore the fact that ascribed statuses influence social interaction - often going as far as to pretend that we are not part of this social system.

Re: Should Cities Ditch Their Mayoral Mansions? - Emily Badger - The Atlantic Cities

John Cruz — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 13:17:05 -0000

Detroit I think is a different kind of situation. When Mayor Bing took office, he had originally planned not to live in the Manoogian Mansion (especially with all the stuff that happened there during the Kilpatrick Administration), but since the city can't sell it and it is somewhat seen as a right of passage for Mayors he felt it was necessary to live there as someone who had moved from the suburbs into the city to run for office. Duggan is in the same boat. And realistically, the location of the mansion doesn't really allow for uses other than residential: there isn't capacity to turn it into something like a museum unless you wanted to run shuttle buses to and from it (something I don't think the neighbors are going to appreciate).

So there's really at this point only two options: keep using it or let it fall into disrepair. While it's ridiculous to try and justify a big upkeep, it would be a bad mark on the city to either maintain and not use it or not maintain it at all. Michigan has gone through similar issues with the governor's residences (summer and winter homes), and ultimately decided that the upkeep is merely a blip in the state budget while selling the properties off wouldn't create much money for the state.

Re: Pushing poor people to the suburbs is bad for the environment

John Cruz — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 10:42:30 -0000

I was really surprised by how good "Green Metropolis" was. I thought it was going to be an overly romanticized version of sustainability, instead I got an amazing amount of harsh realism. Very thought provoking.

Re: Real Downtowns Beat Manufactured Ones—Even in Central Florida

John Cruz — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 17:32:33 -0000

It may not have been "zoning code", but since they owned all the land they got to choose how to set up and divide the lot sizes and use restrictive covenants on the deeds to dictate how the land could be used.

Re: Rosa Parks, Detroit, and the “Brand New” Grand Old Party

John Cruz — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:38:48 -0000

The GOP is probably dispatching Rand Paul to the Detroit center because his father won the Detroit vote in the 2012 GOP primary. Granted the number of GOP presidential primary voters in Detroit is low, but it's still worth noting.

Is Rand Paul the best ambassador from the Republicans to the African American vote? Not by a long shot, but I think it's better to put someone forward who the feel is appropriate (again, I'm sure the logic was that the elder Paul won Detroit's primary) instead of rustling up a "token black republican" to come speak.

When I worked for Global Detroit I did a lot of demographics research on the people in the Detroit area. Your citation about Detroit's Arabic population is incorrect; while the metro Detroit AREA has the highest concentration of Arabs outside of the middle east (Los Angeles being the area with the most total middle-easterners), most of them do no not live in the city of Detroit: they live in the suburban communities of Hamtramck, Dearborn, and Sterling Heights far away from where this new voter center is.

Over time, most of the other ethnic groups have left Detroit: it is over 80% African American, does not attract new immigrant groups, and the only way you can win an election in Detroit is to appeal to the AA vote. The voter turnout is also always very low across all groups, so while there are voters of other ethnic groups, the next biggest ones would be white or Mexican, and those voter numbers are so low that the only people who court votes in those communities are city council candidates (who are elected by district) and state legislature candidates: all of whom only do so during the democratic primaries (where voter turnout is even lower). So calling it a “African American Engagement Outreach center" I think makes sense, and it's also in line with what other organizations in the community call themselves.

Is this going to get anywhere? Probably not, no. But they have a capable AA activist running the center who is well respected in Detroit's AA community and if anyone can at least keep the conversation moving, Wayne Bradley will be able to do it. That being said, he'll probably turn water into wine before he makes a serious dent in that vote. The political culture is a pure nightmare where people get endorsements from "non-profits" in exchange for donations and the church pastors hold the votes of their congregations hostage like its the 1920s.

As for the ignorant tweet, well, that's likely what happens when you let interns make social media posts without sending them to an editor first.

Re: The Safest Suburb In The World Did It By Ending The Culture Of Cars

John Cruz — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 23:24:11 -0000

I was very excited for this release and I was not disappointed. A fun quick read, even if there is some bias. Granted the picture painted is very much over the top idealism, but it's not as though Montgomery shies away from letting it known that this book is somewhat of an advocacy piece.

I can't comment on the Houston thing as I've never been there. That being said, I don't usually hear people from Houston trash Houston, so I have to believe there's something there that's making a lot of people happy.

Re: A 140 acre forest is about to pop up in Detroit

John Cruz — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 17:28:05 -0000

It is my understanding that this is all private funds which will be used to purchase and develop the land. Since Hantz Woodlands will be paying property taxes on the land in addition to the roughly half a million dollars that is being paid to the city to purchase the land, Detroit's taxpayers should not be left on the hook for any unfunded liabilities.

Seattle's Beacon Food Forest is a great project, but it is a very different situation as it is a community-driven initiative with access to public lands.

Re: Rand Paul Thinks He Can Show the GOP How to Court Urban Voters

John Cruz — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 15:36:14 -0000

It's worth noting that in 2012, his father did win the GOP presidential primary among Detroit voters. But to be fair the elder Paul actually has ties to Detroit having done his residency at Henry Ford.

http://www.huffingtonpost.c...

All that aside, these "economic freedom zone" things are pretty cookie-cutter as far as libertarian pubic policies go, there's nothing groundbreaking or new that he said. He is however, right about one very important thing: with the shift to urbanization as a global phenomenon, the GOP's future is completely toast if they can't build up an urban base.

Re: Giving Away 5 Lomography Konstruktor DIY SLR Kits (and Film As Well)

John Cruz — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 19:52:26 -0000

Good stuff! facebook: baronofdetroit twitter: johncruz

Re: Getting Silverfast to work (If you bought an older Plustek or similar scanner) on your Mac

John Cruz — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 19:46:33 -0000

The only driver ViewScan has on their website is a windows driver. I would wager that when you fire up ViewScan's installer the drivers will install. I'm running SilverFast 8 and ViewScan, but installed SilverFast so it may have installed the driver. I would imagine running a trial for SilverFast will install the needed driver as well, so if ViewScan doesn't work right upon install (which I really think it will), then just install the SilverFast 8 demo and see if that fixes it.

Re: Getting Silverfast to work (If you bought an older Plustek or similar scanner) on your Mac

John Cruz — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 10:18:48 -0000

It took me a long time of digging to find clues that lead me to this, why they wouldn't validate a new serial number just seems absurd.

I always figured that my worst case scenario would be that I could throw an old version of windows on a VM and run the scanner software there. It would do the trick, just a pain to go through. Which is a shame because I like the results I've gotten with this scanner.

I also wish Apple hadn't gutted Rosetta support, then we wouldn't have this issue :(

Re: Getting Silverfast to work (If you bought an older Plustek or similar scanner) on your Mac

John Cruz — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 09:22:40 -0000

That's unfortunate, I wonder if it has anything to do with the serial number and how many times it has been activated. The used scanner I picked up looked brand new, so I doubt the software was installed more than once before I owned it.

Maybe VueScan is a better option?

Re: How to choose a graduate school for an Urban Planning degree.

John Cruz — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:58:28 -0000

I was a Web Development undergrad, so I understand first hand where you're coming from except that I didn't decide on planning school until I was out of my undergrad a year. If your school has an urban studies department, I would check that first. If there is any kind of course on the history of your city, that could also be very helpful. Many students make the transition from Geography to Urban Planning and those courses could be helpful as well. Since we deal with a lot of the ills of society as planners there may also be some courses in the sociology department: demographics or anything that teaches you to use census data and quantifying it would be helpful (especially a statistics course. You don't want to be taking stats for the first time in grad school), as well as social problems courses. I'm seeing more and more social workers going into community development so there's some things to consider there. Likewise, you can get a little more specific if you say, felt that you wanted to do economic development instead and took some intro finance courses (many economic development concentrations have course offering for local government / nonprofit financing).

I'd recommend reading at the minimal Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and if you have the time, Lewis Mumford's "The City in History" which is a fantastic read. After that, take whatever time you have off between when your undergrad ends and grad school begins, give yourself a crash course in planning. I went through a bunch of materials on the MIT opencourseware site, lectures, saw what the assignments were like, and it shows you what books to get so if you see something that's interesting, you can pick it up. Some of the good planning books used aren't recent and can be picked up for a very minimal cost. Throughout grad school I spend more less money than one year's worth of books in undergrad. But you want to familiarize yourself with the concepts and learn the names of people like Daniel Burnham, Robert Moses, Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, etc. You're going to start off grad school with groups of people who have been planning undergrads. Some of them might already hold an advanced degree or a JD. Don't be intimidated, show up ready to impress people. Your peers and your instructors will respect and value your opinion because of it. Plus it will just make your work better overall.

Re: 2012's Biggest Transportation Successes - Commute - The Atlantic Cities

John Cruz — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:54:32 -0000

I think Regional Transit Authority for Detroit should definitely be on this list. Real transit in the heart of the auto industry is a great victory.

Re: Special election Wednesday for McCotter replacement

John Cruz — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 23:20:42 -0000

His staff is actually still working under control of the house in his congressional offices in Milford and Livonia. And while I don't agree with his decision to resign, he probably got a heads up that he wouldn't have made the ballot in 2010 either because of the signature fraud. No doubt people would have called for his resignation then.

Re: EDITORIAL: 11th District needs a serious candidate

John Cruz — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:30:33 -0000

I can't believe this is actually being published. Everyone knows "Smoke-filled room" isslang for decisions being made out of the public eye. This is a terribly poor editorial that is no doubt the local GOP using the press to muscle out people they don't like. And it's disgusting.