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"We've done great at hiring new recruits," he said. |
Pandya will get no argument from Gunter about the pensions causing fiscal headaches. |
But it's not a Salinas problem: Almost every city in California faces steep pension debts, he said. |
That's because many rules for pensions are decided by CalPERS at the state level — the city, he said, has to go along with them. |
Gunter pointed to CalPERS' 2017 decision to cut its expected rate of return on investments, meaning either municipalities or their employees have to make up the difference. In making that move, CalPERS argued — and experts generally agreed — that it was simply stating reality and that previous projections were not real... |
And the city has cut — it froze 12 vacant police officer positions, as well as firefighters and public works jobs, Gunter said. |
The city also put $11 million into its firefighters' pensions, reducing future payments substantially, Gunter said. |
Pandya acknowledged the contribution and said more should be done, saying the lack of action is evidence of the city's shortsightedness. |
Costs in Salinas' housing market, and the homeless crisis connected to it, continue to grow. |
Both Gunter and Pandya say more needs to be done to combat the affordability gap. |
Most recently, Gunter voted in favor of a permanent, and controversial, homeless shelter at 855 E. Laurel Drive, saying it will secure state grants for funding and the site is near key health services. |
He said the current shelter's age, lack of equipment and use of floor mats for the homeless, including about 30 children per night, were unacceptable. |
Pandya said he's long been an advocate for compassionate solutions, but the decision "was shoved down our throats" in the week leading up to the council's vote. |
He said the council could have delayed the decision for a week or two in order to allow time for another town hall, after the city's first such meeting brought fierce criticism. |
Supporters have said they held several public meetings. |
But the homeless issue is only one facet of Salinas' larger housing affordability problem. |
To purchase a typically priced house in Salinas, a buyer would need to earn nearly twice the area's median income. |
Pandya wants to encourage more "granny units," which are outbuildings or other secondary structures converted into residences or built for that purpose. |
He also said the city should offer incentives, such as lower impact fees, in exchange for making a significant part of a housing development affordable for low income individuals. |
The city has used impact fee negotiations to entice developers, but Pandya said Gunter and the city set the bar far too low. |
He'd also like to see the agriculture and certain other industries set up housing for their workers. |
Gunter agrees with Pandya on more employer housing. |
Gunter said several companies, such as Tanimura & Antle, have pursued them. |
But he pointed to many developments in the works, including an 8,000-home development, which includes some affordable housing, north of Boronda Road. |
In addition, he cited several projects around town, such as Midpen and the Hikari developments, which include the apartments on Calle Cebu, as well as the conversion of Oldtown office space into apartments. |
He acknowledged more work has to be done, especially since the Great Recession stalled or ended many developments and there's a need for more workers in the trades. |
The ambitious History of Everything book has been an important genre at least since Sir Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World. |
The most popular example of recent years: Jared Diamond's 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempted to explain the always-interesting question of who conquered whom over the last 13,000 years without mentioning differences in average intelligence among human groups—a factor that he ruled out, a priori, ... |
Now, there's another entry in this genre: Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History : An analysis including the effects of geography and differential evolution (Washington Summit Publishers, pp. 484, $24.95). |
Hart's book serves as a comprehensive refutation of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's an impressive and insightful attempt to provide a more careful and powerful answer to Diamond's question about why some peoples came to rule other peoples. |
Unlike Diamond, Hart is also interested in a second, less bloodthirsty question: who gave what to the entire human race in terms of science, technology, and the arts. |
This is a fascinating topic—but one that the Diamonds of the world shy away from, since measuring contributions rather than conquests don't present an opportunity for the competitive moralism, the public white-guilt breast-beating afforded by the European expansion of 1400-1900. |
Over the same period, as everyone knows deep down, virtually every advance that is now the shared patrimony of humanity was made by Europeans or their offshoots. These days, that's a rather inconvenient truth. |
"The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between human groups (in particular, differences in average native intelligence) have been an important factor in human history." |
Hart is a polymath: a rocket scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who worked at NASA and was a physics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Along the way, he picked up a law degree. |
Every decade or two, Hart publishes a book for a general audience. His best-known: 1978's The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History . |
Now, in Understanding Human History, Hart changes his focus from individuals to racial groups. He begins with a quick (130 pages) but close to state-of-the-art overview of the human sciences relevant to history—physical anthropology, linguistics, population genetics and psychometrics. This section alone would be worth ... |
After reviewing the human sciences, Hart moves on to perhaps the most concise history of the world from the Stone Age to the late 20th Century imaginable. |
"Individuals differ widely in their behavior. Some writers have conjectured that all such differences are due entirely to differences in training, upbringing, and conditioning. Those of us who have reared more than one child usually think otherwise." |
Hart's judgment, while laconic, is generally quite sound. |
In Guns, Germs, & Steel, Diamond purported to explain why Europeans were able to conquer the New World so easily by emphasizing differences between the New and Old Worlds. Thus, Diamond pointed out that Europeans benefited from more exposure (and thus more immunity) to disease; from metal-working technology; from havin... |
Unfortunately, Diamond's reasoning, while clever, was ad hoc. It was clearly whipped up to explain away a politically incorrect reality. A real contribution to our comprehension of history could only come from a set of insights that would apply more globally than Diamond's. And that's exactly what Hart attempts. |
Diamond's celebrated factors are reasonably plausible for explaining the spectacular Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century. But they fail to shed much light on famous subjugations within the Old World, such as the various invasions of India and China or the 19th century European imperialization ... |
In contrast to Mesoamerican Indians, Sub-Saharan Africans had more disease-resistance than Europeans (for example, they had genetic adaptations for surviving malaria). Plus they could make iron; possessed domestic cattle, sheep, and goats; had been exposed to literacy on their northern edge in places like Timbuktu; and... |
And yet, Africans didn't build anything close to comparable to the hidden city of Machu Picchu (Incan) or the pyramids of Chichen Itza (Mayan) and Teotihuacán (Central Mexican). |
"Diamond sets out to reaffirm the equality of humanity by showing the inequality of the continents. … Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection." |
Diamond's millions of fans no doubt assume that evolution couldn't work fast enough to diversify human behavioral tendencies, since modern humans (presumably) emerged from Africa only about 60,000 years ago. But the disingenuous Diamond knows that's not true—evolution can work rather quickly. |
In 2002, Diamond and I were pleasantly chatting after his keynote address at junk bond legend Michael Milken's annual confab when I brought this up. |
Diamond immediately grabbed his things and half-jogged out of the room. |
"This book does not contain any suggestions as to what policies should be adopted—with the sole exception that we should attempt to ascertain the facts before deciding on questions of policy." |
"Throughout history, most of the instances of people from one region attacking and conquering substantial portions of another region have involved 'northerners' invading more southerly lands." |
This overall pattern of north conquering south has long been apparent from the historical record—even though northern lands are generally less populous, due to shorter growing seasons. |
For example, mighty China, a vast empire with a competent bureaucracy chosen by meritocratic tests, was never much threatened by southerners, but it built the vast Great Wall to keep out its much less numerous northern neighbors. Nonetheless, China was twice fully conquered by northerners—the Mongols in the 13th centur... |
Likewise, the vastly populous Indian subcontinent was seldom a threat to its northern neighbors, but was frequently overrun from the northwest. |
This pattern has been validated by recent DNA studies. (Hart fails to mention this, which is surprising considering how otherwise up to date he is on the human sciences.) In populations of mixed background, the male line of descent (as seen in the Y-chromosome) tends to derive from north of the homeland of the female l... |
Examples: Latin Americans (white fathers and Indian or black mothers), African-Americans (whites and blacks), Asian Indians (Aryans and Dravidians), and Icelanders (Vikings and Celts). Similarly, the Han Chinese, the world's largest ethnic group, are more likely to be descended from northern Chinese men and southern Ch... |
Likewise, the man who left the largest footprint yet found on the Y-chromosomes of humanity was Genghis Khan from cold Mongolia. He left roughly 800,000 times more descendants in the direct male line than the average man alive at the time. |
The Manchu founder of the Qing dynasty that ruled China from 1644-1911 shows up as another of history's most fecund forefathers. |
The pattern is even true in England. The main outside infusion of male Y-chromosomes in historic times apparently came from the Vikings. |
Hart offers a simple, deliberately reductionist model for explaining this (and much else): Foresight is needed to survive cold winters. So harsher, more northerly climates select for higher average intelligence. And intelligence is useful in war. |
Indeed, there is a positive correlation between latitude and the average intelligence of modern countries, as summarized in Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations . (Here's my table listing their data.) In 2006, Lynn found a substantial r = 0.67 correlation between national average IQ and the a... |
On the other hand, within continents there often aren't obvious latitude-related IQ disparities. For instance, the IQ differences among most European countries are too small to worry about. |
Northerners have tended to be better at organizing on a large scale. This could be related to intelligence, but doesn't have to be. During WWII, for example, according to military historian John Keegan the Italians were probably the worst soldiers in Europe and the Finns the best. But Finland's average IQ isn't higher ... |
No doubt other factors contribute to the long history of Northern military successes. For example, the ease of raising horses on the Eurasian steppe, varying family structures—and of course the ancient moral explanation, going back to the Roman historian Tacitus, that contrasts northern hardiness, self-sacrifice, and m... |
Enough about conquest. What about contributions? |
The most productive centers of cultural innovation have tended to move north over the millennia, for example, from the Fertile Crescent to Ancient Greece to Renaissance Northern Italy to Enlightenment Northern Europe. Hart attributes this to agriculture tending to arise first in low-to-medium latitude locations with lo... |
Hart's position is likely to accumulate still more scientific support. There are several forthcoming papers that will offer even newer insights into evolution's impact on recent human history. |
For example, Hart assumes, not unreasonably, that higher intelligence has been evolving steadily upward since modern humans first spread out from Africa about 60,000 years ago, under the Darwinian selective pressure of surviving cold winters. But Greg Cochran is now proposing that evolution for intelligence and other b... |
Cochran reasons that a large population is more conducive to increases in intelligence than a small population—the more people in a breeding pool, the higher the chance of favorable mutations. Thus, the combination of temperate climates and large populations in Northeast Asia and Europe would explain the high average I... |
Understanding Human History brings new clarity to the vast sweep of human history. |
I predict, therefore, that it will make only a tiny fraction as much money as Guns, Germs, and Steel. |
But in the long run, it will likely matter more. |
SEATTLE -- Two fifth-grade boys are in custody in Washington state after they brought a knife and gun to school with the goal of killing a schoolmate in a foiled murder plot that shocked their rural town because of their youth, prosecutors said on Friday. |
The boys, accused of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder despite their tender ages of 10 and 11, also planned to harm other students by luring them away one at a time, said Tim Rasmussen, a Stevens County prosecuting attorney. |
The boys are due in court next week, where a judge will determine if they had the mental capacity to carry out the attack and if they can be prosecuted in juvenile court, which in Washington is typically reserved for older defendants between ages 12 and 18. |
Prosecutors said the boys had boarded a school bus on their way to an elementary school in Colville, a city of 4,600 residents in the far northeast part of the state, with the 11-year-old in possession of a knife and the 10-year-old with a functional Remington Model 1911 semi-automatic handgun. |
But a fourth-grade student riding the bus saw the knife and reported it to a teacher's aide, prosecutors said. School officials found the weapons before anyone was hurt, and the two boys were arrested. They are in a juvenile detention facility. |
The boys sought to lure the girl away from school, where the older boy planned to stab her, prosecutors said. |
"I was going to kill her with the knife and (the younger boy) was supposed to use the gun to keep anyone from trying to stop me or mess up our plan," the older boy told police, according to the declaration of probable cause filed in court. |
They intended to kill the girl because "she's rude and always made fun of me and my friends," the younger boy told investigators, according to the documents. |
Attorneys for the boys declined to comment. |
One of the boys had taken the gun, which originally belonged to his grandfather, from an older brother's room, according to a declaration of probable cause. |
The boys also bribed another student with $80 to dissuade him from revealing what he knew about the plot, Rasmussen said. |
In addition to the murder conspiracy, the 10-year-old boy faces charges of being in possession of a firearm and tampering with a witness. |
The 11-year-old faces charges of murder conspiracy, juvenile firearm possession conspiracy and tampering with a witness. |
If they are convicted of all the charges they could be sentenced to over three years in a juvenile treatment facility. |
The Atlantic's Digital subscription includes full magazine issues, access to the iOS app, and exclusive editorial premiums. |
Head to www.theatlantic.com/subscribe to read more about all of The Atlantic's subscription options, including the Digital subscription. |
Digital subscribers will enjoy ten complete downloadable issues of The Atlantic, accessible on virtually any device. Along with the magazine issues, subscribers gain seamless access to the iOS app, can unlock Android editions, and have a library of exclusive editorial pieces to read or listen to. Digital subscribers al... |
Digital subscriptions also come included in memberships to The Masthead. Learn more about The Masthead at www.theatlantic.com/join. |
It is also possible to purchase subscriptions in The Atlantic's iOS app. These subscriptions are purchased through iTunes, managed by Apple Inc., and unlock access to The Atlantic's iOS app only. They do not come with any of the additional subscription benefits included in The Atlantic's digital subscription. To learn ... |
8. Mac Miller "Donald Trump" |
Summer has always been a good time to turn over a new leaf so when Mac Miller's hit "Donald Trump" made its way into our playlist, we had our aspirational jam of the season. Sap Da Beat Man provides the backdrop and Mac Miler keeps his delivery sharp and energetic throughout. It helps with publicity when the subject (t... |
Three Chinese films were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming 72nd Golden Globes Awards, reports 1905.com. |
Chinese directors Peter Chan's Dearest, Zhang Yimou's Coming Home and author Han Han's The Continent each earned a nomination. |
French films Venus in Fur and Mommy and the Russian film Leviathan were also among the nominees this year. |
To qualify for a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, more than 51% of the dialogue in the films must be of a language other than English. |
Last year, five Chinese films were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, including director Feng Xiaogang's 1942, Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin (which won him an award for Best Original Screenplay at the 66th Cannes Film Festival) and Wong Kar-wai's Grandmaster. None of them won. |
The 72nd Golden Globe Awards will be held on Jan 11, 2015. Comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will return as hosts for the third time. |
Zhang Yimou's Coming Home, Peter Chan's Dearest and author Han Han's The Continent were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming 72nd Golden Globes Awards. |
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