Comment at Daily Kos on an Article about Free College policies

Let’s talk financing a bit. According to the discretionary budget the White House submitted in February of 2017 — the one where he gutted the CDBG block grant that most states use, at least in part, to fund Meals on Wheels — the current President decided to fund 100 planes for the Air Force instead.

These planes aren’t very good at their job, frankly, but it’s considered bad to declare “back to the drawing board,” so funding for these planes was found. One plane costs $550,000,000; one hundred cost $55,000,000,000. $55 billion can cover a lot. Half a squadron, six planes, cost $3,300,000,000. There’s no reason not to go half, or even a whole squadron, less freeing up at least $3.3 billion to cover health or student debt or even just to have Meals on Wheels back (which as part of the $3.1 billion CDBG block grant only amounted to approximately $155 million).

I’ve always been told “guns or butter” arguments don’t work. But in a world where one plane costs more than Meals on Wheels for 50 states (MoW costs 28% of one plane), I think it’s time to discuss how much military hardware we can trade in for food and shelter.

I used my post of early 2017 for inspiration and figures which I had checked at the time.

Good design: Accessibilty

When I design my ideal community in my head, as I often do, one of the big issues, along with food options, is accessibility. The older the city, the more likely it is to have areas where a wheelchair can't get into a house or arcane solutions have had to be found for public buildings.

Architecture Daily has an article on basic accessibility designs today: here.

In addition, since I live in the city of Gallaudet, I have also been following a project called DeafSpace which codifies ways to make buildings easier for the deaf to navigate. Here are two more articles: the first is about the Sorenson Building on the Gallaudet Campus and the other has references to the Sorenson Building, but is more concerned about the general principles.