All Mardi Gras, no brain.

The crucial feature of any buyout plan is how home value is determined.  Hard to believe that five (or is it six now?) months after the flooding, there is no plan in place nor, even harder to believe, any serious and extended discussion of how to determine pre-Katrina home value.  How can you determine what the cost of a buyout plan might or might not be without such a determination?

Mind-boggling, but predictable.

When the Baker Bill was being seriously discussed (if anything is seriously discussed in a political context), it didn’t contain any method of determining home value in its original form.  Just before its demise, however, this was added to the bill (which I reported back in December):

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(h) FACTORS TO BE CONSIDERED IN DETERMINING EQUITY POSITION OF THE OWNER.-In making any determination concerning the equity position of an owner of property immediately before the area in which such property is located was devastated or significantly distressed by Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita for purposes of subsections (b) and (c), the Corporation shall consider all of the following:

(1) A pre-event appraisal in a verifiable loan record held by a federally insured depository institution, federally insured credit union, or housing-related Government-sponsored enterprise.

(2) The pre-event assessed value on record by a unit of local government that serves as the basis for determining property taxes.

(3) The pre-event fair market value as would be determined under existing federal hazard mitigation programs as authorized under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and the National Flood Insurance Act (such as the Hazard Mitigation Program, Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program, and the Flood Mitigation Assistance Program).

(4) Any other valuation of the property under a methodology that the Corporation finds is statistically valid and in broad use.

***

Now, the Louisiana Recovery Athority makes public their buyout plan and, once again, it’s all shooting from the hip without some sort of value determination process for home equity.  The LRA radio interviewees say, “Yes, we are going to have to work on that.”  Yeah, and water is wet, you geniuses you.

Five (six? seven?) months and still waiting for the end of the world.

What play is.

Play is a virtualizer.

So now you know.

It is what it is.

I have little incentive to post here, so I probably won’t.  What I’ll probably do is jot down little pieces of things I’m thinking of putting in this or that paper, just to see how they look on the screen.  But that may be rare, considering.

What I won’t be doing is documenting the trials and tribulations of living in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, because it sucks — and that pretty much says it.  Everything else is a rhetorical doodad constructed for your entertainment pleasure.  If you want proof, just come live in the pudding.

My advice to all concerned is to live somewhere else.  That simple.

What formalism is not.

Formalism is not structuralism. Unlike formalism, structuralism is more concerned with the context of relationships than with relationships themselves. Why? Because structuralism assumes context constructs or causes or biases relationships.

Formalism does not neglect origin or cause or bias, but assumes, because of common and universal characteristics of forms, that origin and cause and bias are DEEP. That is, formalism assumes that origins and causes and biases of forms are capable of discovery but incapable of immediate manipulation or change. For this reason, formalism seeks LAWS of forms (i. e., laws of abstractions and references — or the science of signs).

Structuralism does not prioritize common and universal characteristics of forms. In most cases, structuralism denies such characteristics exist. On the contrary, structuralism finds that different contexts — most particularly different SOCIAL-CULTURAL contexts — construct fundamentally different forms. Therefore, there is no proper science of signs nor laws of forms. Rather, there is the ongoing study of those social, cultural, and political contexts that construct, manipulate, or otherwise impose forms.

If structuralism were then to assign fundamental form to social, cultural, or political context, then the difference between formalism and structuralism would be slight. But, while structuralism isolates context as fundamental to the structure of form, it finds no fundamental mechanism — at least no fundamental formal mechanism — that typifies context. Subsequently, this tends toward relativism, which is not universally associated with structuralism, but is commonly so.

To which, a pity.

These questions highlight the major differences between formalism and structuralism as distinct critical positions.

Are forms universal?  Formalism says yes.  Structuralism says no.

Are forms biological in origin?  Formalism says yes.  Structuralism says no.

Do forms ultimately reference something else (e. g., culture)?  Formalism says no: Forms are most fundamentally self-referential and, for that reason, paradoxical and most interesting. Structuralism says yes: Forms ultimately reference material objects or processes; self-referential and paradoxical forms are, therefore, meaningless and not interesting at all.