LOS Issue

The primary responsibility of Council membership is to formulate City goals. In formulating these goals, the Council must be careful to represent general interests of the City, not special interest groups. Council members must work with the City Manager, but they should not become directly involved in the administration or operation of City departments, and should not direct the administrative staff to initiate programs, conduct studies or establish official policy without approval of the City Council as a whole. As the Municipal Code requires, no Council member is to individually “order” the City Manager, Department Heads, and others to do anything. Only a majority of the council may instruct the City Manager to do something.
The policy process starts by determining that something needs to be done. Such determination is usually based on an awareness of community conditions. In this case the discussion of need is painting the parking stripes and curbs around the Commons.
The process of finding appropriate solutions relates to what resources are available, what the scope of responsibility is, and the manner in which an answer to the problem should be formulated.
The purpose of operational standards for the maintenance of roadway lane line markings, crosswalks and stop lines; as well as the painting of curbs, medians and parking stalls to balance safety and aesthetic performance of the roadway markings with operational and budget constraints.
The three main needs associated with these solutions is pedestrian safety, vehicle safety and parking control. The curb marking are used to delineate “no parking” areas. The City staff has opted to use primarily signage over curb painting to provide for year around visibility and alleviate budget constraints. There are areas and situations where staff still prefers to paint curbs. Parking stall markings are not safety related and are provided to assist in providing for the maximum amount of spaces available. Handicap parking is an enforcement issue and again there is both signage and painting for year around coverage.
The staff has since 2004 completed all street related painting just prior to the start of school in the fall to provide the best marking visibility at the start of the school year. The primary reason for pavement markings is safety related and the beginning of school activities generally demand the most safety needs. The ordering, storing and maintenance of equipment operationally works best with the once a year gearing up for painting. Staff has not painted every area every year. The paint may last up to three years, although the aesthetics may be somewhat lacking.
The Council may want to provide some policy direction for modifying this current administrative practice.

Today's Quote

“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” John Wooden

Understand the workings of dishonesty

Here's a webpage on how to be honest.


http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Honest

Honesty is a hard taskmaster that can teach many a tough lessons to the young man at work and in relationships. Even silence can be dishonest.

Economic Shrinkage

These two articles appeal to me. I think that there is a certain amount of truth to both discussions. Politics will never associate with either discussion and so any fix is probably a long way off.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/bye-bye-american-pie-10-reasons-why-americas-economic-pie-is-rapidly-shrinking

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/16/135464226/reagans-budget-director-taking-no-sides

Majority Voting Rule (Cont’d)

Three factors that determine an individual’s attitudes toward public-goods expenditures:
1. Some may like public goods more than others.
2. Individuals’ incomes may differ. Poor individuals may have a higher marginal utility of private goods than others.
3. Nature of tax system.
Median voter controls majority voting:
1. The majority voting equilibrium level of expenditures is the level that is most preferred by the median voter.
2. Equilibrium for public goods is either inefficient or non-existent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Choice_and_Individual_Values

Just Think

Why do people seem to prefer intuitive rather than equally valid or more valid nonintuitive alternatives? Intuitive decisions arise because intuitions often seem to be common sense that everyone can understand, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence.
Intuition and intuitive knowledge comes to the individual without requiring a slow rational process, not much thinking is required. The intuitive decision is often hard to explain because each individual uses acquired knowledge that is deeply personal and unique to them. It use to be a general belief that intuition was an irrational process but I don’t feel this is true, because a decision is made intuitively does not mean our brain is disconnected from the process, it just means our subconscious recognizes “cues” and signals derived from experience and learning and then the individual reacts based on previous experience and learning. It is misleading to say that such a process is irrational, the process simply doesn’t use the well recognized rational processes of evidence and deduction. Every day there are countless choices that people make without much thought. They tend to apply rules and copy solutions from their own or others past experience rather than solve every problem they encounter on a daily basis.
We need to take this ability seriously as it leads to important insights; it can also betray us because quick judgment is highly influenced by the environment and predispositions.

Why

A person who believes they are telling the truth even though the objective evidence strongly supports the claim that they are lying is deceiving themselves into believing the lie because they desire the results. A belief so motivated is usually considered more flawed than one due to lack of ability to evaluate evidence properly. The former is considered to be a kind of moral flaw, a kind of dishonesty, and irrational. The latter is considered to be a matter of fate: some people are just not gifted enough to make proper inferences from the data of perception and experience.

Hang'in There

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
Bertie C.Forbes

My Whole

Concentration has been defined as "the ability to direct one's thinking in whatever direction one would intend".
I have the ability to concentrate on tasks most of the time. But at other times I can’t focus on the task at hand, my mind keeps returning other issues.
It helps when I’m feeling good physically - i.e. feeling rested, relaxed and comfortable - and my emotions are calm and benevolent, then I tend to be positive about things. This in turn allows me to feel good about what’s going on around me, which makes me more able to concentrate, if only because I don't have to worry about how awful my life is.
Sometimes what I feel responsible for is just too much for me to get my head around. When I think about it, it appears to be beyond my ability to control and I feel helpless. Both contribute to losing concentration because it all feels impossible.
In such circumstances, I need to look for ways of break the task up into smaller discreet parts that feel manageable. Then treat them as individual tasks, summoning up your concentration for each of them separately. It then doesn't need so much effort to fix them all together later on to make a complete whole.

Utilitarianism and Equity

1. Utilitarian Social Welfare Function http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

2. First Theorem: Under certain conditions, competitive markets lead to an allocation where there is no rearrangement of resources (no possible change in production and consumption) such that someone can be made better off without, at the same time, making someone else worse off. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/

3. Second Theorem: If we don’t like the income distribution generated by a competitive market(Crusoe and Friday), we need not abandon the use of the competitive market mechanism. All we need to do is redistribute the initial wealth, and then leave the rest to the competitive market.

4. Two notions of utilitarianism are Pareto-efficiency. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pareto-efficiency.asp

5. and the Kaldor-Hicks principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficiency

Prisoner’s Dilemma

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/
• Outcome of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
1. each player selects “dominant strategy – that which makes the person best off no matter what the other player chooses – each will opt to defect, resulting in the least socially (Pareto) optimal outcome (zero net profits)
2. Neither will have an incentive to change that is independent of the strategy choice of the other.
3. This finding suggests one which individual rational choice leads to a socially irrational outcome.
4. Generalization: If group becomes too large, it becomes extremely difficult to induce individuals to cooperate for the larger common good if they strictly seek to maximize their self-interest.
5. Cooperation is possible only if it is possible to institutionalize some way to enforce agreement among the players.