Unwalkable

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and came across a small homeless encampment that's now been there several years. I know that at some point, it wasn't there, but I now can't recall the last time I saw the area devoid of tents.

Normally, the tents are lined up in the parkway between the sidewalk and the street, so that  the sidewalk itself is mostly clear. From time to time, there would be a bicycle or some crates or something taking up some of the sidewalk, but it was generally possible to walk past the tents without needing to walk in the street.

Not this time. The sidewalk is now completely blocked off.

Pedestrians, go elsewhere.

This is the sort of thing that drives resentment of the homeless population of the area, but doesn't actually spark any efforts towards fixing the problem. I will be unsurprised to find that the next time I'm in the area, the sidewalk, if not the entire encampment, has been cleared; this isn't the sort of thing that I expect the local, even in a stereotypically liberal place like Seattle, will suffer gladly. (I'm actually somewhat impressed that the situation was allowed to get to this point, really.)

As housing prices in the greater Puget Sound area continue to rise due to constrained supply (regardless of what some politicians might say), more and more people are going to find themselves living in tents. Last week's brief cold snap and freezing rain notwithstanding, the climate here is generally mild enough that such a lifestyle, if it can be called that, is more workable than in some other places I can think of. (I certainly wouldn't want to be homeless in upstate New York about now.) Which is good, because it's going to be some time before the problem is solved. Allowing for substantial new construction now would likely require at least a decade, if not two, to allow home prices to subside enough that lower-income people could reliably afford them. Failing that, it will take the loss of some of the area's major employers, triggering another "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE - Turn out the lights," moment. Although, unless something happens that makes the area substantially less desirable to live in long-term, this could simply be the opening that housing rental companies and developers need to swoop in.

In any event, homelessness is becoming more and more visible in the city proper. (Not that the suburbs are immune from this; it's common to find tents in out-of-the-way, and therefore not very visible, places.) And that visibility is going to create pressure to do something to move the people elsewhere. It won't be a solution, but as long at it sort of looks like one, that may be enough.

Musty

Okay, sure. But who is going to make them? The United Nations? The people of Afghanistan? A divinity? After all, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan (which people should have seen coming, despite Taliban assurances) can be boiled down to the Taliban structuring their society in the way that they believe that their conceptualization of God wishes it to be structured. And, okay, that's at odds with "Western" understandings of universal human rights and relative gender equality. But it's what works for the Taliban, and they're the ones running the place, because it's not worth it to enough of the populace there to put skin in the game for anyone else to run the place. A state of affairs that the Taliban understand as tacit public approval of their governance.

The various governments that the United States worked to support in Afghanistan all had the basic problem that the Afghan public didn't value them highly enough to stand behind them. And so this is what they have now. The world community can change that, again, but there's little appetite for it. Finger-wagging is unlikely to change that.
 

And That's Terrible

The phenomenon known as "swatting" is a simple one. Someone calls a police department, and says that a serious violent crime and/or hostage situation is occurring at some or another address. The department's SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) team swings into action, only to find out that a hoax has been perpetrated. If everyone involved is fortunate, no-one is killed prior to the deception being uncovered. Otherwise, as has been case on a few occasions, tragedy ensues.

The practice first entered the public's consciousness (and the lexicon) due to the swatting of individuals. But it also happens to organizations. In the case of the National Public Radio story that aired this morning, parties unknown called police departments to falsely report active shooters in schools.

The practice creates problems for a lot of people, not the least of which being the students, faculty and staff of a swatted school. And so this is something that seems newsworthy. Which made it surprising that the story that National Public Radio ran on the phenomenon this morning seemed completely devoid of information. The story purports to be about the lasting consequences of swatting schools, but other than the one mother saying her daughter was basically freaked out by what happened, it doesn't even live up to that.

The piece is basically a human-interest story speaking to the day's event. Which is marginally interesting, but it feels like something between a filler piece and a missed opportunity. Granted, I'm not a journalist myself, but surely, there is something more informative about the practice that could have been the basis for a story. Part of what's going on, I suspect, is that I'm not really in NPR's target audience, and their target audience is into this human-interest stories. There's also just a greater focus on human-interest stories in the media landscape in general, as they allow for news outlets to present their viewpoints by selecting the people whose stories they tell.

Sliders

Starting perhaps late Thursday night, freezing rain started falling in the Seattle area. By yesterday morning, most of the area was doing a passable interpretation of an ice rink. One neighborhood couple literally had their crampons on to go for a walk, and the slope of the street made standing in one place impossible for good stretches of it.

But the problem with the weather here in the Puget Sound area is almost never actually the weather itself; but in how people (mal)adapt to the conditions it brings about. My primary concern, which was that icy power lines would come down nearby and leave the neighborhood in the dark and cold, never materialized. So true to form, it was the people themselves that took it on themselves to cause problems.

I'd just happened to look out the front window when I saw a white SUV barrelling past. This doesn't end well, I thought, as the car exited my field of view. A moment later, my impromptu prophecy came true, as there was a loud bang from the street, followed by the startled clamor of a car alarm. Sure enough, the SUV had been unable to follow the gentle curvature of the street, and slammed into a car parked in front of the home next door.

What, I wondered, possessed someone to drive down the street at anything faster than a snail's pace? It wasn't as if the ice was difficult to see; it was an opaque sheet that in some places was half an inch thick. But that's one of the weird things about driving in this area when the weather is bad. Everyone knows that Seattlites fare poorly in bad road conditions. But really, it's the sizable minority who think that they're exempted from this who are the hazard.

I think it's because the local understanding is that people in the Seattle area are just bad at driving on anything other than bare (and maybe wet) pavement. But as a native of Chicago, I don't remember people there doing much better on expanses of ice; it's just that, back in Chicagoland, the local municipalities and highway departments have snow-removal equipment, protocols for keeping the street open enough to use it and, perhaps most importantly, stockpiles of salt and sand for slick conditions. That's what prevents the place from being one massive pile-up in the Winter, rather than some remarkable level of skill at driving.

The weather has warmed, and we're back to our usual diet of light rain. This is doing the work of de-icing the streets and making places passable again. And, unfortunately, perhaps allowing people to forget that when it comes to cars and driving, gravity always wins. It's just a matter of having the sense to not fight with it, when it's not on your side.

The Kids These Days

“The people we consider to be ‘adults’ are married with kids, sharing houses, sharing finances,” says [sex educator and therapist Liz] Powell. “Whereas ‘wayward adults’, like myself, who live alone, unmarried, are examples of everything wrong with society.”
Does ‘solo polyamory’ mean having it all?

As someone who lives alone, and is unmarried, I have never heard the term “wayward adult” before. No-one has ever described me, to me, that way, certainly. “Failed human being” in the context of being “childless by choice,” yes, but never “wayward adult.” But I wonder: Who is the “we” that Ms. Powell refers to? Part of the reason why I decided to stop using the word “we” when referring to large groups of people that I might be a part of is specifically because it fails to actually point the finger at anyone. And while I understand that there are still noticeable numbers of relatively conservative (or Conservative) people out there for whom nothing less than a monogamous marriage to one’s first and only sex partner resulting in multiple Christian children is acceptable, attributing that attitude to society at large is overstating things.

There is, I think, a certain narcissism that goes into some persecution complexes, stemming from the supposition that whatever it is that one is doing is so threatening to others that they’re motivated to pull out all the stops to put an end to it. This is not to say that there aren’t people who understand that putting a stop to all “non-biblical” forms of human relationships wouldn’t magically fix everything that ails humanity, but their chances of that wish coming true anytime soon are pretty much zero.

There are always going to be people for whom their chosen way of living is seen as the one true way that everyone should follow. That’s not going away. Being aggrieved about it isn’t useful. Change takes time, and while that time is often frustrating, it’s simply part of the process. It doesn’t need to be a matter of us versus them.

Uncommitted

Twitter users just voted for Elon Musk to step down as head of the company. Before votes were cast, Musk said he'd abide by the result.

Mr. Musk also said that he wouldn't take action against the ElonJet Twitter account. So who cares what he said about the results of his poll? Including this in headlines seems like a pointless "gotcha" attempt. It's understood that there is an adversarial relationship between Mr. Musk and many members of established media outlets, whom Mr. Musk tends to see as biased and dishonest. If people didn't care that Mr. Musk created a reason to walk away from other public commitments he's made (which is pretty much the entire story of his relationship to Twitter), it's difficult to see why they would care about this.

Elon Musk, and his supporters, and likely the universe of Twitter users more broadly, don't care enough about what members of the media think of him for them to be able to call him on the carpet. People who were going to leave Twitter have already gone; those who remain are indifferent to it all, or understand that they need Twitter more than Twitter (and, by extension, Elon Musk) needs them.

Rootedness

Today I Learned, as the kids these days like to say, about President Trump's 1776 Commission. I think that I'd heard of it before, but this was near the end of the Trump Administration, and I pretty much stopped paying attention to going's on in Washington, D.C., because keeping up with politics had become such an unpleasant way to spend free time.

The 1776 Commission had no real reason for existence than to perpetuate a particular front in the Culture Wars, namely long-simmering "Right vs Left" dispute over whether the founders of the United States were the best people ever, or simply people, with the good and bad that such a status entails.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. While I will admit that I find the debate utterly trivial, the people on the Right who I know have engaged with it do actually see something important in all of this; namely, the idea that history is (or at least can be) important in the here and now. While the term "American Exceptionalism" is tossed around a lot, I don't know that it has a consistent usage. While there is the idea that specific circumstances of the nation's founding and its specific ideological impulses make the United States both a unique nation and a specifically positive force for overall human well-being and flourishing, there is also the understanding (and this is the one that many of the Conservatives I've talked about it with seem to favor) that the United States is superior to other nations... and that this superiority comes with privileges when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.

I will admit to not having an understanding of the idea that "because the people who came before us were great and wonderful, we're worthy and valuable." I understand the human propensity to pursue feelings of worth and value; back in the day, being considered unworthy or valueless was a quick ticket to being abandoned by one's community. And humans are social animals because as individuals, it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a point where one has a realistic chance of surviving for any length of time. But that's at the individual level. Once one arrives at the scale of the nation-state, that sort of insecurity seems strange.

After all, much of the ways in which nations project power and show their value has little or nothing to do with the past. If each of the group of men we understand to be the "Founding Fathers" of the United States were proven to have been right jackassess tomorrow, the United States would still have the world's largest economy and the financial power that comes from having a ubiquitous reserve currency. Not to mention a military that can do a number of most of its contemporaries. And those are the things that make the United States the current big man on campus.

A status that, of course, will not last forever. And therein, I think, lies the rub. As I see it, American Exceptionalism is a special pleading the the United States, unique among nations, should be immune to the forces of geopolitical gravity. In part, I think, because if one sees history as what goes around comes around, once the United States starts to slip away from the top spot, there are going to be any number of people with scores to settle. (I notice the same thing in domestic politics. I think that part of the reason why "race relations" in the United States are so touchy, so often, is that there are more White Americans than one credits who are of the opinion that once they no longer have the whip hand, the whip is going to be used on them.) But if the United States is legitimately special, then such worries need not be entertained.

Personally, I think that there are any number of former powers that are doing all right for themselves, despite a certain disgust for their histories. And I think that the United States will one day be a member of that club, and it will become evident that the nation will survive being just like everyone else.

Partly Cloudy

A typical Autumn day here in the Seattle area.

 

Wholly Empty

I stopped by Whole Foods today to pick up a couple of things. And, as one might expect for a Sunday afternoon, the store was fairly busy. Despite this, there were two, or maybe three, checkstands open. So there were lines. Event he self-checkout stand had a line, and it didn't appear that it was being actively managed, with customers needing to be on the lookout for the next available register, and if something went sideways, waiting for a Whole Foods employee to come over to assist.

It was your run-of-the-mill substandard retail experience. Which may be fine for your average chain grocery store, but seemed really broken at a place that's often nicknamed "Whole Paycheck." And I think that this is what tends to drive the perception of inflation for a lot of people; the idea that certain experiences, let alone goods and services, are noticeably cut back from what they were, even though the prices haven't changed.

The point behind "shrinkflation," as it's often called, it that the average person isn't going to notice the difference. Okay, that formerly 20 ounce package of snacks is now 18 ounces for the same price, or the allowable percentage of screws in a box has gone from 2% to 3%. That's intended to be invisible to the public at large. (Whether or not it's as invisible as it's made out to be, I'm not sure.) But service industries have a harder time getting away with this, because the service is most of what they're offering as a value proposition.

Whole Foods has, for the most part, its niche of the grocery business to itself, at least on the nationwide level. So it's not in immediate danger of a competitor swooping in and scooping up large segments of its customer base. Which is too bad. Capitalism doesn't do very well when market players aren't subject to decent levels of competition.

Time Off

I've been hearing a lot recently about the falling labor force participation rate, or the percentage of the population that is either working or looking for work. Generally, speaking, the unemployment rate is the percentage of this segment of the population that is unsuccessful in finding work at any given time.

There seems to be a substantial amount of hand-wringing over the relatively low numbers, but reasons for the hand-wringing are less common. This seems to be born of the idea that the American work ethic ("The average worker in the United States clocks more hours each year than those in Canada, Australia, Western Europe and now even Japan.") is a good thing in and of itself.

But work is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. And while the current unemployment rate may be low, the fact that one exists at all proves that the American economy doesn't even need all of the people who present themselves to be workers in order for supply the level of goods and services that people wish to buy. (Okay, so that's not entirely true... but it's unlikely that businesses, or their customers, are going to want to pay the wages that would be needed to make cellular telephones in domestic factories.) In other words, no-one is pointing to any shortages that a boost in workers would cure.

And if people are not working because they don't particularly need to work, I don't see why this should be considered a problem. If people have found something that gives a better return for their time and energy than paid employment, more power to them.

Rate of Change

One of the arguments against the idea that humans evolved to their current state is that it denies the innate "special-ness" of humanity. If humans are not so much different from other animals, the thinking goes, how can it claim a privileged place? Whether humanity is "deserving" of a privileged place in the grant scheme of things is open to debate, but it's pretty clear, to me, anyway, that a lot of people understand that humans should operate under their own set of rules, if they don't already. One way that this manifests itself is in the idea that human evolution should be a matter of political will, at the species level, rather than a response to environmental and/or social pressures, like it is for other lifeforms.

There are a number of ways in which "human nature" gets in the way of people's ideas of what the world should be like. A primary one is the fact that humans have a habit of forming themselves into groups of varying sizes and setting themselves against other groups, if not then remainder of humanity, in ways that produce zero-sum outcomes. Politics the world over produces example after example of this, and it has, for pretty much the entirety of human history (and a good stretch of time prior to that).

For someone who wants to see a golden age of human cooperation and prosperity, this is clearly a sub-optimal state of affairs. And it's not rocket science to understand why. The misery and suffering that humans routinely inflict on one another in the name of marginal gains here or there comes across as utterly pointless. (Now, to be sure, that depends on one's understanding on what it means for something to have a point, and that's really what it at issue here.) But still, this is the way that humans tend to be wired, and there was a point in time during which this not only made sense, but was important to the survival of the species.

And for all that people will concede that point, the follow-on tends to be, "Well, it's time for humanity to evolve beyond that." Which is fine, except for the small problem that this isn't how evolution works. And it never has been. For all that, the idea that human beings should simply be different than they are, and so the change should just happen strikes me as a surprisingly common one, especially in left-leaning political and social circles.

To be sure, I think I understand why. It's not like it takes much to get people to concede that there's a lot about humanity that they would like to see done away with (although what exactly the outcome of that would, or should, be tends to be open to debate). It's easy to look at a massacre and say "we should be able to do better than this." But the reason we don't "do better" is that the underlying reasons for human behavior are varied and complex, and wrapped up in a lot of factors that are much more resistant to change than they are often given credit for.

It's entirely possible for evolutionary pressure to do away with the human propensity for intra-group infighting. But it takes more than wishing to bring that pressure about.

What Now?

It has been, thus far, a typical late Fall/early Winter in the Seattle area; dreary and overcast much of the time. But there's been snow on the ground for about a week now, and that's been something of a twist. There's something of a peculiar phenomenon I've noticed in the past year or so, and that is that deviations from the typical weather and temperature patterns have routinely started to last longer than the initial forecasts say they will. What was originally forecast to be just a couple days' worth of colder-than-average temperatures has stretched into a week, and it may drag on for a couple more days at that.

It brings home the difficulties of making these sorts of predictions, even in a fairly boring climate like that of the Puget Sound area, once things start to change here and there. Once the old patterns begin to suffer disruptions, it can be difficult to determine what the new pattern will be.

I suppose that a lot of things are like that. And I understand a bit more why people can become so bent out of shape when things shift beneath their feet. Predictability can be dull, but it can also be very comforting. It's one less thing to worry about. And although many people seem to be quite good at worrying about things, it's still true that too much of it is not healthy for most. And predictability, or at least the appearance of predictability, can give people a break from that.

Of course, there is more to it than that. A good portion of the local built environment was put in place with the understanding that it would rarely, if ever, be snow-covered. And local services tended to make the same assumption. That prediction no longer being reliably true will mean some significant changes may have to be made. We'll see how the area adapts to it all. In the meantime, I'm learning to live with a bit more uncertainty in what each day will bring. It's been interesting.

Oh, Deer

I hadn't really thought all that much about the shipping involved for holiday items until I came across this box in the aisle at Costco. But this is one of the many items that didn't survive the trip across the Pacific intact. I wonder what happens to all of them.
 

Cleanup on Track 8

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has kept his name at the top of papers by making an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show and making comments like "I like Hitler," and "They did good things, too. We've got to stop dissing Nazis all the time."

I won't belabor the point, given that I brought this up a month ago, but I think it's somewhat irrational to expect someone with known mental illness to be completely, well, rational; even when in front of an audience.

But the train wreck that Ye's life is becoming is going to generate a lot of clicks, and a lot of airtime for random people to denounce him, or hold forth about how harmful his words are. Because people are fascinated to watch him destroy his life in slow-motion and on full public display. It's the dark side of being a celebrity; it's not generally considered exploitative to watch someone go head-to-head with mental illness and have their head handed to them when that someone is already famous.

Of course, there is also the fear factor; the idea, hovering in the background that someone like Ye is, for all of his obvious problems, popular and respectable enough to bring the ethno-nationalist chauvinism of 1930s National Socialism back into vogue and kick off a round of modern pogroms against the Jewish population of the United States. I understand it; there is a similar suspicion in the Black community of the United States that all it takes are a few charismatic people in the right (or wrong) places to bring back Jim Crow, if not all-out slavery again. That said, it still doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility anytime soon. Treating everyone who expresses support (regardless of their mental health) for the atrocities of the past as an open invitation for those atrocities to repeat themselves overdoes it. Those times are gone. They can, of course, return. But it will take more than the flameout of an ill celebrity to restore them.