Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base.
Interpretation
Smart infrastructure helps municipalities save costs and integrate disadvantaged communities into the economy.
This quote emphasizes the importance of utilizing advanced infrastructure solutions to not only address physical needs but also to improve social conditions. Majora Carter advocates for a transformative approach where the systems in place can turn individuals who were once seen as financial burdens into contributing members of society, thereby enhancing both the community and the economy.
In practice
In a speech about urban development, this quote can highlight the need for innovative infrastructure solutions.
Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.
Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
One thing I noticed working in the Bronx is that leaders come in the craziest places. They don't always show up at community board meetings. Sometimes it's just the guys on the corner that the boys on the block respect.
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.
We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems, and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums, and other tributes to all of our collective failures.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
In the early stages of Internet in Japan, many said that Japanese and Americans are different. There are 10 reasons why Japanese Internet is not taking off. I said none of them are right; it's just a time lag. And, of course, Japanese Internet took off.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
In engineering, as in other creative arts, we must learn to do analysis to support our efforts in synthesis. One cannot build a beautiful and functional bridge without a knowledge of steel and dirt, and a considerable mathematical technique for using this knowledge to compute the properties of structures. Similarly, one cannot build a beautiful computer system without a deep understanding of how to "previsualize" the process generated by the code one writes.
All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news. We must try to squeeze this without stepping on freedom of speech and of the press, but we must also help the reader.
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