All the more reason that NOW is the time to reach out to the Downtown Project Las Vegas to discuss innovative, sustainable, resilient, nuturing innovations in horticultural and expressive art therapies .... Las Vegas MUST do better and its downtown truly can benefit with the innovations associated with urban agriculture .. cc Indoor Agriculture Innovation Conference Wayne Roberts Food Hub Strategists for Clark County re: slate/blogs/moneybox/2014/10/02/tony_hsieh_and_the_downtown_project_the_dark_side_of_a_las_vegas_techtopia.html The Dark Side of Techtopia here is an excerpt: If theres a dark side of techtopia—of the arrogant-bordering-on-delusional notion that a multimillion dollar investment and a happiness manifesto can remake a struggling city—this is it. There is a danger of happiness as a goal, one anonymous entrepreneur told Re/code. Its lonely. Theres a pressure to socialize and go out. Theres a pressure to party. The notion that simply trying to make people happy—especially those who are not—can be unwise is hardly a radical one. In his article The Pursuit of Happiness, Andrew Solomon writes the following: While being optimistic reduces stress, trying to be optimistic can increase it. The notion that positive thinking is correlated with good health puts enormous pressure on people to cleave to beliefs that they don’t actually trust. Someone develops cancer, and everyone around her tries to encourage her good moods and reprimands her when she is weepy or negative. It makes for a terrible sense of failure. And if she tries to be positive and gets sicker anyway, the tendency is for her to feel guilty, somehow culpable for the degeneration. It should be telling, then, that one of the people Hsieh reportedly hired as part of a suicide response was Mark Rowland, a career coach who goes by the title of the Happy Cheerleader. Or that when Factorli—the project of an entrepreneur who followed Hsieh to Las Vegas as if he were the Pied Piper—began to flail, the Downtown Project team lost interest and killed it off. And that Hsieh, for his part, said he was not involved with Factorli and told Bowles he could not answer questions about it. Its too soon to tell if the Downtown Project was a legitimate venture or the egomaniacal whim of a wealthy technocrat. But the sixth installment in Re/codes series is a dark and deeply disconcerting reminder that delivering happiness to a real community is not so easily distilled into a 272-page book. Alison Griswold is a Slate staff writer covering business and economics.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:34:32 +0000
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