They Started It

Did some Congressmen behave badly? Perhaps. But as with kicking Members off committees, the Democrats set the precedent. Being horrified when a Congressman screams “liar” during Obama’s presidency was reasonable. But today the Democrats do nothing but lie and insult Republicans. Every chance they get.
David Strom "Nancy Pelosi fans complain Republicans have no decorum"

Mr. Strom doesn't define what he means by "precedent," and so there's no way to understand why Representative Joe Wilson's (R-South Carolina) outburst wasn't one, yet Nancy Pelosi (D-California) tearing up her copy of then-President Trump's speech was. Other than, of course, simple partisanship, which is unable to ever see one's own side as having done anything wrong. After all, Mr. Strom conveniently leaves out the fact that by the time then-Speaker Pelosi tore up her copy of President Trump's speech, the two of them had been feuding for months. and one of President Trump's common go-tos was (and is) hurling insults at his political opponents; the practice had started during the primaries for the 2016 election. It's one of the reasons why so many people were slow to take him seriously. Picking the specific cherry of Speaker Pelosi's action seems to be very short sighted.

But I'm not a Republican partisan, and thus I'm not in David Strom's, or Hot Air's, target audience. Accordingly, any critique from me is simply proof that I'm not a right-thinking American. Eventually, however, I suspect that the political parties will start to wholeheartedly own their behavior, and people like Representative Taylor-Green will run on their willingness to display open and unprovoked disrespect to the people that they understand their target constituents dislike, distrust or fear. It would certainly be more honest than the disingenuous blame game that goes on right now, where neither side has any rational incentive to simply lay their cards on the table.

This is, I suspect, because the American public as a whole understand incivility to be appropriate when, and only when, there are grievances. And so each side goes looking them (not that they have to look very far) and plays them up in order to portray themselves as the put-upon victims of the evil Others on the far side of the proverbial aisle, who, due to their (often cherry-picked) bad acts, deserve to be mistreated. As long as the downward spiral is controlled, it will perpetuate itself, because both parties, and their followers, perceive it as being in their interests. And as long as segments of the public are willing to grant attention and/or money to people willing to tell them that they're the victims in all of this, there will be no shortage of voices proclaiming that selective memories are accurate reflections of the greater reality.

Dispassionate

"There are so many people on the streets. Why don't we have more compassion in the world?" someone asked me. "After all, it doesn't cost anything."

"It does when it actually changes something," I replied.

Seattle's seemingly inescapable homelessness problem is often chalked up to a lack of compassion, an assessment that I, personally, don't subscribe to. I think that people in Seattle have a lot of compassion for the homeless. What's lacking is the willingness to pay the costs that converting that compassion into solutions would entail.

A co-worker recently married, and he and his wife are buying their first home. While I don't have the exact numbers (as they are, after all, none of my business) the couple can expect to pay about two million dollars for the home, and the financing, assuming that they stay in it long enough to pay it off. For that home to become wealth (generational or otherwise) it's going to have to appreciate enough to keep up with the money that they're paying the current owner and their bank. There's no real path to both that happening, and solving the problem of local homelessness.

Sure, one could posit that someone builds a large number of homes and somehow manages to reserve them for the exclusive use of the legitimately homeless, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly realistic outcome, mainly because it would take a remarkable charitable endowment to fund. A better plan would be to remove some (if not all) of the artificial constraints that have been placed on the ability to create sufficient housing stock, like the Growth Management Act, which has been understood for years now (by everyone except rabble-rousing politicians, it seems) to have pushed up housing prices well beyond what one would otherwise expect.

But that, even more so than an economic slowdown, would kick the legs out from under current home prices; at least once construction really ramped up. And while people working to pay off high mortgages may not have a lot of excess resources to spend, it's a safe bet that they'll spend what they can in order to avoid taking a substantial loss on their homes. Because why would anyone expect them to do anything else? Simply to bring local home prices in line with the national average would mean cutting them by nearly 50%. Asking someone to forego nearly half a million dollars to benefit someone else is always a hard sell. And the longer the problem persists, the higher price of homes rises, the greater the sacrifice that people would need to be asked to make. That's a high bar to clear in the name of compassion.

And so nothing happens, outside of complaining and political grandstanding masquerading as public policy.

If the point behind democracy is to have governments act in accordance with the will of the public at large, it's worth remembering that like any other sovereign, the public is not accountable to anyone for what it collectively wants. Its demands don't need to be workable, or even realistic.

The high price of housing in the Seattle area has the effect or making people feel financially straited (often with good reason). This, in turn, makes the ever-increasing costs of a genuine solution even less palatable. And so the cycle continues.

In the end, I think that interrupting (let alone ending) the cycle of increasing home prices putting people on the street and leaving them little means of leaving it again is going to come down to luck more than judgement. Something will begin to pull people away from high-cost cities to lower-cost ones. Maybe it does so quickly, and home prices collapse, or it does so more slowly, and prices drift, rather than plummet. Either way, the solution is likely to come from the demand side of the equation, where compassion need play less of a role.

The Way To Someone's Heart

Being an ineligible bachelor, I have no real use for Valentine's Day. So I typically forget about it (literally) unless someone reminds me that it's coming up. This year, that someone was my bank. Under a stereotypically sugary picture of a couple canoodling over cups of coffee (or maybe hot cocoa), I was told that I'd get cash back on purchases for the month, and bonus points for spending money in the following (among others):

• Jewelry and watch stores
• Candy and chocolate stores
• Restaurants
• Florists and flower shops
• Bakeries

For most people, I suppose, this sort of messaging is more about getting them to use a particular credit card (namely the one issued by their bank) for purchases that they're already going to make. And I guess there is no harm in that. I did find it interesting that in order to receive the cashback, I'd have to spend more than $1,000 on my card this month, given that the average for Valentine's Day spending is somewhere in the area of $170. Of course, the expectation isn't that I'd spend the full $1,000 buying gifts for a significant other, but the email does sort of suggest that maybe I should.

I don't think that I saw this sort of message last year, so I'm curious about how the decision to solicit credit card spending from customers was reached. Maybe inflation worries have prompted people to pull back on their spending (even though conventional wisdom says that in a "high-inflation" environment, it's better to spend sooner, rather than later). Maybe it's just because other businesses are also looking to attract some of the $25.9 billion or so that people are expected to spend this year.

In any event, the message is wasted on me. But still, I'd like to know how well it works overall.

Chillin'

There are, to be sure, places where you might expect this sort of thing to happen in the Winter. Texas, however, is not one of those places. The ice was mainly a problem as I understand it, because of the trees that it brought down. Locals told me that the streets were, for the most part, okay, with the exception of bridges (which don't have the Earth to insulate them from below).

Since the hotel I was staying at was only a couple of blocks away from the office and there were no old, large trees in the area, the ice was a rather fascinating inconvenience, rather than an active hazard.
 

Or Not To Be Like

I was just in Austin, Texas, for a few days. If those days were any indication, their winters are about as random as ours. Either that, or freezing rain is out to get me.

In any event, once everything thawed out, I took some tine out over lunch to drop in on a local bookstore. On the way there, I found this discarded cardboard sign:

Inviting, it isn't?

Given the fact that I live in the United States, most of the people I know identify as Christians, and this sign (at least how I read it) speaks to something that many of them have in common; the idea that the mundane world and the people who inhabit it are wicked and depraved. And thus, not worth emulating. It is, I suppose, part of the nature of the faith; if one believes that mortal life is completely in the thrall of a supernatural Adversary, then the everyday world has little to recommend it.