How Carnegie Mellon handles bogus degrees

That is all.

The fundamental problem, though, is one that seems to plague many public boards and commissions: people just plain don’t show up. We know there have been several resignations, although the complete list isn’t available. Beyond those, there’s another five to ten people who haven’t been seen since the first meeting. There was pretty steep competition to get onto this commission in the first place, and we see a bunch of empty chairs that are itching to be filled. The reason for this non-attendance is unclear, but as far as we can guess, it’s about schedule. We meet Downtown in the early evening, because the city officials who support us want to go home just as much as we do. Problem is, most young people don’t have total control over our work schedules, and if Propel is at the wrong time, then one more Commissioner is SOL.

Of course, such young tech-savvy personages as MetBlog readers might ask: can’t you people just do business over email, have conference calls, and otherwise use technology to quit spewing so much carbon? We could… except for this eensy thing called the Open Records Law. Turns out that as long as we’re a formal Commission, we have to comply with Open Records. That means all meetings scheduled in advance, open to the public, minutes kept, etc. Hard to shoehorn a listserv into that framework. As the years march on, more and more of the world’s governance is going to use electronic mechanisms, and this sort of thing is going to be a royal pain in the butt. Probably a good thing for some enterprising young state legislator to be considering…

In the meantime, despite all these slings and arrows, we actually have gotten some work done, particularly about immigration. More on that in a future post.

Of course, it does raise the question of how long we have before all the hospitals get outsourced to India the same way the mills were…

I saw a glimmer of hope after the Girl Talk incident, and after this past Monday, I think it’s time to change my tune. The good Congressman flexed a bit of muscle and brought the entire FCC to Pittsburgh, so that they could hear from a combination of academics, entrepreneurs, and even neighborhood groups about why a free and open Internet is important to maintain. (Aside from supporting things like bloggers who want to run our mouths off, I mean.) Of course, it doesn’t hurt that with the world’s largest collection of super-geeks sitting right there in Oakland, a lot of the companies who make millions off the future Internet will start right here in Pittsburgh. That’s as good a use of legislative power as I’ve seen lately, and I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.

See, they’re currently working on something called the Transit Development Plan, and as part of it, their market analysis has realized that (gasp!) there is not a good match between where the buses run, where people who use buses live, and where people who use buses want to go. There’s town hall meetings, and there’s even a simplistic online survey, but if my prior experience with PAT town halls is any guide, these are mostly going to be people talking about their ACCESS service. ACCESS is critical, but it’s also not the primary economic function of mass transit. PAT needs to hear from the young professionals and other workers who use the regular bus service, and they need to be told how to use what they have in ways that make more sense. That’d be you, since you’re the type who reads Pittsburgh blogs. Get to work!

Not to worry, though. They’re a “manufacturer” according to state law, and thus aren’t required to pay property taxes. With all that money they’re saving, I’m sure they can put it towards finding, you know, real news to report on once in a while.

But I digress. On this trip, I happened to cross Boston’s
famous <a href=”http://www.thefreedomtrail.org/visitor/visitor.html”>Freedom Trail</a>,
a tourist attraction that allows you to hike through the great events of American history. It
started me wondering: why don’t we have one of those? Pittsburgh may not have quite as many
events that make it into grade-school history books, but we *do* have a big cluster of interesting
museums, buildings, eating spots, and even historical sites, if you consider Downtown, the North
Shore, and the Strip as a collection. We’re also pretty good at painting lines on the ground and
constantly rerouting traffic. Why not develop an official trail to take tourists through Downtown
and its surroundings and help them take in the sights? It’d be as good a marketing tool as anything
else we’ve currently got going on…

All of that aside, I’m taking a few moments out of the lunch break to give you a dire warning: try not to get sick this month. You see, it’s July, which is the month when thousands of freshly-minted doctors, equipped with MDs and not much else, are dispatched to the nation’s hospitals to begin their internship years. In one more year, that’ll be me, and I won’t know much more medicine than I do now. We can talk a pretty good game, but for the first month, we tend to be nervous, uncertain, and still not quite sure how to get things done around our hospitals.

By mid-August, we’ll have worked out the jitters, reminded ourselves that those expensive initials have to be worth *something*, and gotten back to doing our jobs well, but if your family member is hospitalized in July, you’ll do well to go along with them and make sure nothing sets off any warning bells.

More cheerful topics to follow, hopefully…

I’m not sure whether this is a stroke of genius or idiocy. I suppose it has the potential to allow elimination of some patronage jobs in City Hall (good luck, given that Chicago’s Democratic politics put us to shame), and it’s nice to be able to pay by credit card without a “convenience fee”, but do people really fail to pay parking tickets simply because there wasn’t a little ATM thingy in their neighborhood? I, at least, generally fail to pay parking tickets because I’m in traffic court explaining to the judge why said ticket is unfair. (3 for 3 thus far, and kudos to the poor judge who sits there all day and listens to sob stories like mine.)

You tell me: would you want to see these things come to Pittsburgh? Me, I’d rather have more Council to Go.

How, you ask, is a sex tax the same thing as legalized prostitution? Look at the businesses listed as being potentially subject to it. Among them are massage parlors and escort services. Now, perhaps you have not read the back pages of the City Paper recently, but if you have, then it’s pretty obvious what both of those industries sell. The cops know this, and for various reasons (some good, some bad) choose to look the other way 99% of the time. If we move to taxing those businesses, we are tacitly admitting that what they do is considered legal and OK. Moreover, we know exactly what happens when our state finds out that it can profit from “sinful” enterprises.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about the whole mess. I like the idea of more money to fight sexual violence, and the libertarian in me is generally in favor of keeping government out of the bedroom. At the same time, sex workers are not always there by choice — they may start out that way, but their “managers” are not always upstanding citizens committed to womens’ rights. It’s almost impossible to stomach the idea of the state profiting from something that lives next door to slavery, no matter how good the cause.