Assorted links I’ve read on the web. I try to extract relevant paragraphs and associate articles with tags.
Corporate Impact
What Precious Things Does The Corporate World Steal From Us?
Solar
How Solar Sales Bros Threaten the Green Energy Transition
…the job of convincing Americans to sign up for solar panels on their rooftops has, in many cases, been hijacked by people with little knowledge about how renewable energy works, and who are just trying to make as much money as possible while the rush is on.
The root of the problem is this: there is no license or training required in most states to sell solar; you don’t even have to work for a specific solar company to get started. Instead, installers farm out sales to networks of freelancers working solely on commission.
…he tells homeowners, for instance, that they’re better off owning solar panels than paying a monthly utility bill while in reality, if you have solar panels, you probably have both a utility bill and solar payments. Though you may save money overall by installing solar, saying that you’re gaining independence from the utility company is not quite true.
Economics
Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History
If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.
The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”
Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes.
Today, we seem to be living through another inflection point in American politics—one that in some ways resembles the ’60s and ’70s. Then and now, previously durable coalitions collapsed, new issues surged to the fore, and policies once considered radical became mainstream. Political leaders in both parties no longer feel the same need to bow at the altar of free markets and small government. But, also like the ’70s, the current moment is defined by a sense of unresolved contestation. Although many old ideas have lost their hold, they have yet to be replaced by a new economic consensus. The old order is crumbling, but a new one has yet to be born.
A 30-Year Trap: The Problem With America’s Weird Mortgages
Only the United States has such an extreme system of winners and losers, in which new buyers face borrowing costs of 7.5 percent or more while two-thirds of existing mortgage holders pay less than 4 percent. On a 1,000 in monthly housing costs.
It isn’t just that new buyers face higher interest rates than existing owners. It’s that the U.S. mortgage system is discouraging existing owners from putting their homes on the market — because if they move to another house, they’ll have to give up their low interest rates and get a much costlier mortgage. Many are choosing to stay put, deciding they can live without the extra bedroom or put up with the long commute a little while longer.
America’s housing shortage explained in one chart
America is short around 3.2 million homes, a big reason why prices are still high.
Engineering
Measuring developer productivity
Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs
Education
It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber
In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life.
No One Knows What Universities Are For
Seattle
The Best Things To Do in Seattle This Month: January 2024
Nate Bargatze: The Be Funny Tour 2023 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour $14 General Admission
Seattle’s Neighborhood Greenway Network Faces a Turning Point
transit Snyder thinks there is some very low-hanging fruit that would turn the greenway into a better neighborhood asset. “Every day, I walk on a poorly lit segment of the greenway that has no shoulders and no sidewalks and serves mostly as a cut-through for people avoiding traffic on MLK or Rainier,” he said. “There is absolutely no good reason not to have a diverter here, or failing that, to make traffic 1-way and install a sidewalk, or really to try anything at all, anything other than what SDOT has done, which is nothing.”
Seattle’s Housing Construction Booms While Permitting Flashes Warning Signs
Literature
H. P. Lovecraft
Randolph Carter
Transit / Urban Planning
SDOT: Weekday biking up 144% after Duwamish Trail connection, freight travel times increased less than 1 second
The thing is, these results should not be a surprise to us in 2023. We’ve done this song and dance for more than a decade now. Results like these happen every time the city completes a significant safety project on a fast and over-designed street like W Marginal Way. People worry that the project will increase traffic and complain loudly, unconvinced by assurances from SDOT’s staff that travel times will not increase significantly. Then the city completes the project and finds that, sure enough, SDOT staff was correct all along. It’s almost like the people SDOT has hired to design safer streets know what they’re doing. Here’s a likely non-exhaustive list followed by the date of the study (typically a year later):
- Stone Way (2010 study)
- Fauntleroy Way (2010 study)
- Nickerson (2012 study)
- NE 125th St (2013 study)
- NE 75th St (2015 study)
- Rainier Ave (2016 study)
- NE 65th St (2020 study)
- W Marginal Way (2023 study)
No City Should Rely Primarily on a Sales Tax for Funding
The sales tax fails to align the interests of a local government and its residents, putting them in tension with one another. The optimum outcome for a local government reliant on the sales tax is for residents to spend their money prolifically then, when they run out, borrow money to spend more. Then, when the household is completely broke, move out of the community and make way for someone else who will spend more.
Cutting Corners
This simple subtraction of pavement results in intersections that are properly sized for their respective communities. By reducing the radius of the corners, we can see the following benefits:
- Less impervious pavement to maintain.
- Shorter pedestrian crossings.
- Slower turning speeds, reinforcing the requirement to come to a stop.
- Improved sight lines for drivers.
If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need To Prioritize Dignity
Creating compliant sidewalks and trails is a high priority for agencies seeking to avoid litigation and serve pedestrians on the most basic level. Although that has some benefits, it isn’t enough. Whether actively undermining walkability (like removing crosswalks to achieve ADA compliance) to simply not doing enough (adding a new curb ramp to an otherwise wheelchair-hostile sidewalk), we need to go much further.
Sound Transit Approves $3 Flat Fare for Link
2023 Seattle bike and scooter share rides reach record 5.1 million rides as Lime consolidates its lead
seattle According to SDOT data based on real-time reporting from all permitted companies, people took 5.1 million trips on shared scooters and bikes in 2023, a 28% increase over 2022 and a 70% increase over the days of $1 pedal bikes in 2017-2018.
Souring on Electric Cars
Cities can’t be about moving cars
Missing Large Housing
Lessons on Development Patterns From America’s Oldest Planned City
Five Reasons Why We Should End Highway Expansion
It’s Not Just Houston That’s Broke. So Are Silicon Valley Cities
urban-planning houston santa-clara The financial struggles of Houston and the cities of the Silicon Valley area—as well as tens of thousands of others across North America—have the same underlying cause. The aggressive outward expansion of cities after World War II was led by California, a state where comparatively little needed to be torn down in order to experience booming growth from each public investment.
What is overwhelmingly obvious today was just too easy to ignore in the exuberance of the day; all of this stuff would someday need to be maintained. Santa Clara City Manager Jovan Grogan explained that their current shortfall is “literally the cost of replacing many of our facilities that were built in the 50’s and 60’s.”
Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents
Oh Great, More Subsidized Housing (No, Not That Kind)
The social ideology of the motorcar
This 1973 essay on how cars have taken over our cities remains as relevant as ever
Politics
Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?
Takeaways from Seattle’s 2023 Election
The 2023 election did not go the way progressives wanted. Four of five candidates that Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell endorsed won. Meanwhile one of the two races that Harrell sat out — Districts 2 and 7 — also went the mayor’s way, with conservative-leaning Bob Kettle pledging to back the mayor’s public safety policies. Harrell wanted a centrist majority on city council; he got it.
In short, the overtures Hudson made to the center didn’t get her much, but it did cost her labor support and did nothing to combat the trend of lower turnout among the key progressive base of renters and young people. Kshama Sawant garnered more than 22,000 votes in 2019 (when the D3 population was smaller, to boot). In 2023, Hudson turned out less than 16,000 votes. The lack of contrast or fiery messaging seemed to mean more voters to just sat the election out. Overall, D3 voters cast 42,956 votes in 2019, but less than 35,000 in 2023.
Why Trump Won’t Win
How Putin Turned a Western Boycott Into a Bonanza
A New York Times investigation traced how Mr. Putin has turned an expected misfortune into an enrichment scheme. Western companies that have announced departures have declared more than $103 billion in losses since the start of the war, according to a Times analysis of financial reports. Mr. Putin has squeezed companies for as much of that wealth as possible by dictating the terms of their departure.
Feelings and Vibes Can’t Sustain a Democracy
Consider, for example, that last month, Americans felt worse about the economy than they did in April 2009. The key word is feel, because by any standard remotely tied to this planet, it is delusional to think that things are worse today than during the meltdown of the Great Recession. As James Surowiecki (a contributing writer for The Atlantic) dryly observed on X about the comparison to 2009, “It’s true that if you ignore the 9% unemployment rate, the financial system melting down, the millions of people being foreclosed on and losing their homes, and the plummeting stock market decimating people’s retirements, it was better. But why would you do that?”
A much deeper and more stubborn problem, however, is that Americans, for at least 30 years or more, have developed immense expectations and a powerful sense of entitlement because of years of rising living standards. They are hypersensitive to any change or setback that produces a gap between how they live and how they expect to live—a disconnect that is unbridgeable by any politician.
In Bid for Immunity, Trump Distorts the History of His Second Impeachment
McConnell explained that he and all but seven of the chamber’s Republican senators had decided that because their vote was coming after Trump had left the White House, there were more appropriate legal avenues where he could be held accountable for his actions as President. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former Presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” McConnell said.
McConnell was echoing a legal argument that Trump’s own lawyer, David Schoen, had made to the Senate just days before. “We have a judicial process in this country; we have an investigative process in this country to which no former officeholder is immune,” Schoen said.
Now Trump’s trying to get the courts to forget all that.
Trump appeared in a D.C. appeals court on Tuesday as his lawyers tried to convince a seemingly skeptical panel of three judges that Trump has broad Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution precisely because the Senate never voted to convict him. Even though Trump’s own impeachment lawyer and McConnell had used the exact opposite reasoning—that Trump could still be held accountable by the courts for his actions as President—as Trump’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card three years earlier.
The Problem With Comparing Today’s Activists to Martin Luther King Jr.
social-justice Those opposed to movements like Black Lives Matter can juxtapose social disruption with the “proper” protests of King’s time. When highways are blocked by protesters, when activists fill congressional offices in sit-ins, when protesters rally en masse, many Americans denounce these movements for their “divisive” and disruptive tactics. They contrast these “bad” movements with the “good” King and the civil rights movement.
For example, a recent editorial decried anti-war activists’ disruptive strategies as “the exact opposite” of those taken by King and his colleagues, who used “orderly and utterly peaceful protests to appeal to the better angels of Americans’ souls.”
This revisionist history enables politicians to roll back civil rights gains from voting rights to affirmative action and repress and silence contemporary democratic dissent.
And it’s all based on a distorted perception of the past. The non-violent tactics practiced by King were called into question and faced similar claims in the 1960s.
Sonia Sotomayor should retire now
Seattle’s Leading Far-Right Personality Is in State of Despair About Boeing
UW Did Not Sicc Cops on Their Students, but They Did Not Divest from Genocide Either
Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump
How Trump Weaponized White Rural America’s Shame
Health
Running vs. Walking: Which Is Better for Lasting Health?
Technology
🌲 A Personal Take on Using LLMs
Everybody has their own use-cases for LLMs, but here are three of my favorites:
- Whenever I’m not sure whether a source has the answers I need, AI can summarize it for me
- Whenever I see a really bad AI suggestion, it motivates me to keep writing.
- Writing stories for children does not take a lot of originality in terms of prose-writing or insight.
Capture to Do
obsidian CD starts with “capture.” Capture all your thoughts and distractions that resonate. It’s kind of like meditation: simply watch these thoughts disappear from your mind to a place you trust.
It ends with “to do.” Don’t just capture “to dos”. “Do.” Lose yourself in the deep work of actually doing a thing. Allow yourself to enter a state of ‘flow’ even for an instant. You’ll see that as you do, you also create.
End the Phone-Based Childhood Now
Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse Centaurs
ai artificial-intelligence capitalism late-stage-capitalism AIs should be the “corrector” of human work rather than making humans correct AI-emitted code.
Uncategorized
https://joanwestenberg.com/cobra-theory-in-action-how-we-fucked-the-internet
https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/plastics-industry-redefine-recyclable-ftc-grocery-bags