Be careful what you do: what you practice at, you'll get better at. The difficulties of running infrastructure: CDOT & Broadband, and Thornton and water.
What you practice you get better at.
Something to ponder this morning.
I saw the CPR article a while back and was letting it marinate before posting. I welcome your thoughts on the issue. Please add to the comments if you'd like.
The article itself is a profile of a program running at an Aurora, CO school to help high schoolers cope with stress and their strong emotions.
There are a variety of approaches mentioned, including ones that deal with discussing brain function and anatomy. That last piece reminded me of something I'd heard once about the lizard brain and the wizard brain: the lower, reptilian brain that is responsible for emotions and quick responses to immediate problems and the higher, mammalian brain which includes (for humans and higher apes at least) the forebrain or seat of planning, executive function, and judgment.
I support efforts like this because I think there are some who are gifted naturally with knowing how to handle emotions and stress. And there are those who aren't. For those that aren't, absent some instruction or guidance, the best we can hope for is maturity and age to help people learn.
Why wait if we don't have to though? Imagine the difficulties that could be avoided if one had, at a younger age, an understanding of emotions (how to function around them, how to make good decisions around them), and how to handle stress well.
At the same time, however, I'm left with a couple questions.
Are young ones not getting this sort of guidance at home anymore? I mean, are parents and other family members not providing the example, the strategies they've learned? It's not apparent in the article, but do we lean too much on schools to be the providers of these things?**
Second, and perhaps less of a well-put question, is this: if we get better at the things we practice, do programs like these not teach people to revel in their feelings/stress, equipping them with the "magic words" they'll need later in life to make excuses for not doing what they should?
I suppose it all depends on how you do things and what the expectations are.
If programs like these are coupled with lower standards, if the adults around these kids immediately accept any of the magic words tossed at them without question, then we are reinforcing the idea that these students do have a tough life and that tough life is the ticket to not doing as much.
If the standards stay the same, if the adults around these kids meet the expressions of stress and/or high emotions with understanding but a firm stance on expectations, then I think we are equipping the young ones in programs like these with tools and not crutches.
I can say this too: whatever my young one's school ends up doing, I myself will undertake to make sure she's equipped with the best tools I can offer here. That, to me, is the first job of any parent.
What do you think?
**I frequently see articles and missives by people of all ages saying schools should be doing financial literacy as well. Again, not a bad idea, but is this not taught at home anymore? Is this (financial literacy) something else we want to toss on the pile for schools to handle?
https://www.cpr.org/2023/12/01/colorado-high-school-students-stress-coping/
Two articles on how CDOT is really milking their right of way leases.
Here is some needed context to help you understand what is going on.
The state got a bunch of money from the Feds to run high speed broadband internet to the far reaches of the state--something that would be quite a boon to people living in the far-flung parts of Colorado.**
The problem is that broadband requires fiberoptic cable and that has to be put somewhere; running cable is not like connecting a lamp to a plug with an extension cord where you just sort of make sure the cable goes behind the furniture and not across where people walk.
Laying the fiberoptic cable is not technically difficult (save for the splicing, that can be a technical challenge--this is light traveling down a glass rod after all), but there are a ton of things to do.
You have to stage the cable along the route you're going to run it, you need to bring in heavy equipment which can bury the cable, periodically make junction boxes and splice the free ends, and then lastly you need to remediate the ground where you worked (i.e. come in and put seeds down and mitigate against erosion while the plants come back).
This means land. Land where you can put things. Easements to let the cable live there (and be accessible for repairs in the future).
Can you imagine the nightmare (and thus the cost) of trying to run cable across several parcels of land each of which has a different owner?
The easiest way to lay fiber and get it out to the far-flung areas of the state, the economically feasible way to do it, would be to do what I've seen recently on trips back and forth to Denver: lay the cable next to roads and highways. Think about the logistics problems this would solve. Two that pop immediately to my mind are that you'd have one owner (CDOT) to deal with and ease in getting/moving equipment and materials to the site and around the site.
Now we come to the rub. You see, CDOT has been asking for exorbitant fees that would essentially make it economically unfeasible to run the cable along their roads.
The CDOT whose CORA requests for info on their bidding projects come back looking like they passed a CIA censor first? Yes, that CDOT.
The CDOT whose secret bidding process favors 4 out of state contractors for big projects? Yes, that CDOT.
The CDOT where a state auditor found major problems in how they do their contracting? Yes, that CDOT.
One more.
The CDOT that requires (statewide and even in rural areas) environmental studies and transit before giving money for roadbuilding projects? Yes, that CDOT.
Apparently CDOT's lowered their price a time or two (see the first link below for more context there), but the contractors who would lay the cable still say it's too much. CDOT for their part appears to be starting to get their back up about it and apparently some Democrat and Republican legislators are making noise about the issue (with both parties in the Assembly seeming to want to get CDOT to back off the fees or lower them--more context in the second link).
It's fair for CDOT to ask for money for the right of way easements for cable, but this strikes me as a "dosage dependent" type problem. That is, it's a question to me of how much they want.
The whole point of the Federal money was to induce contractors to lay fiber out to parts of the country where it might not have been economically feasible on its own. Does it make sense, then, to turn around and bemoan (as CDOT Director Lew does in the second link below) that the companies might stand to make money after the cable is laid? Getting them to where they can make money at it IS the point.
Soaking them at the state level to the point where it might interfere with the incentive the Feds put in is stupid. Perhaps CDOT just wanted to award the contracts to their own preferred folks.
**Said by me here meaning more than simply faster internet for rural people to get cat pictures on. I think that one of the real growth potentials for rural areas is having remote workers moving in (or young ones staying and finding economic opportunity doing remote work) and revitalizing economies, remote workers who need high speed internet to do their jobs.
https://tsscolorado.com/firms-fear-proposed-cdot-fee-imperils-colorado-broadband-expansion/
https://tsscolorado.com/legislators-join-voices-questioning-proposed-right-of-way-fees/
Related:
Wonder how fiberoptic cables work and how they can be used to carry data?
The video below is a pretty decent one--a quick little (mostly layman's terms) explainer.
And one more on the difficulty of maneuvering infrastructure through the state, this time with water.
If you didn't read it, the post right prior to this one was at least partially about the difficulty of running fiberoptic cable through the state along CDOT's roads in an effort to get high speed broadband to rural areas.
This one, thematically related, is about getting water from one part of the state over to another. Specifically, taking water from up in Larimer County and bringing it into Thornton.
The article linked below details some of the difficulties involved in running a pipeline across differing governmental entities and private land. It provides a concrete example of what I talked about earlier when I said that the only economically viable way to get fiber to the far-flung corners of this state is by taking it along major roadways. Worth a read in that sense.
The other thing that makes this story noteworthy and unique (at least to me) is that this is an example of two Front Range governments trying to negotiate a water issue and not an urban/rural tug of war.
In the balance here are 10,000 homes that can't be built until this water has been secured. Think about the money and then start to imagine how the pressure on everyone involved will scale up.
I also predict (as you can see glimpses of in the article) ...
--a fight with environmentalists with their framing being that this is about conserving water and climate change
-- with the counter-framing being that this is an affordable housing/homeless issue
Who wins? It ought to be interesting to see.
Meantime, I'm just glad it isn't the ever-thirsty Front Range looking for more water from the rural parts of the state. Let those folks fight among themselves while the rest of us catch our breath.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/11/20/thornton-water-pipeline-larimer-county/