9/25/15

1.     9/25/15

a.     Woke bright and early at 7:30. Tried to print the last form I needed for Next at Ode, but Ode was closed. Headed to Fluke and signed in—turns out they had extra copies of the form. About 60 students there, plus mentors and speakers. I almost sat down with Joey in the back, but after a push to get people to the front, I took the plunge and moved up there—a good call. The keynote speaker was the almost-billionare VC Nick Hanauer. Turns out he was one of the big advocates for the $15 minimum wage—he had a reasonable argument for it, but I think it ignored automation replacing labor, and when I got to ask that question, he gave an answer which suggested all people would be able to fill increasingly complex and interesting jobs, which I’m not sure is true. But his speech was interesting, and he linked to some cool math, haven’t gotten a chance to check it out, relating innovation / capita theoretically (fits with empirical data measured in patents, etc.) to city population in a logarithmically increasing way. Then came a panel of people already involved in solving urban problems, which was interesting.

b.     I’m gonna keep this short now cuz I’m getting tired. I found out Ayush was doing the program as well, and met some of his friends. We got assigned to teams, and our team got along really well. We were assigned the “encourage healthy habits” challenge, and debated the problem for a while. We went out and checked out some underutilized spaces (alleys, big medians, grassy areas around parking lots) in the UDistrict vicinity. Then we came back, met our mentors, debated some more, listened to a presentation on design thinking. Finally, we had some pizza for dinner. I hustled over to the floor meeting, which went well—I made a plug for wifi in the lounge and added Don’t Forget to Be Awesome to our list of community guidelines. I set up Slack for our Next team. Then we went to Quad Flicks and watched Pitch Perfect 2 (I got better acquainted with two girls Sierra and Chloey, who looked as if they’d come from Bellingham or Seattle but who had lived abroad in Thailand and Indonesia for the past several years.)

c.      Hung out in the Quad for a bit and watched the marching band perform, then headed back to the dorm, answered more email, wrote this and the preceding logs, and hit the hay.