Author: Aaron Weber

Hostility

There’s a new, and highly-reviewed Boondocks anthology. I’ve got a copy and it is indeed very, very good. I like angry humor. I feel like we do indeed have a right to be hostile. Given that we’ve got misogynistic lying bastards in the White House.

On the other hand, I feel genuinely hostile to things that are a little too sincere and treacly. They make me uncomfortable, and then my discomfort makes me uncomfortable. After all, lots of people like that stuff, and my disdain for it probably indicates snobbery. And what if I end up bitter and alone and writing a book about how democracy really isn’t any good and people should be led by their betters, namely me. Where would I be then?

Linky Link

More voting machine trouble. People wonder why the liberals won’t give up about the 2000 election, but there’s plenty of people who still want to study, say, World War II, or the Roman empire, and you don’t say to them “Why don’t you give up trying to figure it out? It’s over!”

Nor is there a well-organized, well-funded group of people dedicated to thwarting you, like there is for, say, the holocaust or basic science and the evolutionary theory.

Maybe people can take consolation in the fact that the FCC is now going to permit the F word, as long as it doesn’t have to do anything with fucking– you can use it as an adjective, for example, insulting a customer service representative. Although, really, if you’re mean to the CSRs, they won’t be nice and escalate your issue to where it can get fixed.

At large race:
Matt O’Malley, because he has a good platform and a good website to promote it.
Michael F. Flaherty, Maura Hennigan, and Patricia H. White, because the Phoenix likes them. And very much not Roy Owens, who’s a nutjob..

In my district (Eight, Fenway/Back Bay/Kenmore), although I like Carmen Torres because she’s got strong ideas about urban development, I think I’m going to vote for Michael Ross, who has the right kind of experience in urban planning and city management, is younger, and is endorsed by the Phoneix.

For further reference: Candidate Profiles, and Phoneix Endorsements.

Politics in Boston

The single most important issue for me in local politics is housing. A lot of people are in favor of rent control, but I really feel that’s a recipe for disinvestment and disaster. We don’t need to squeeze the landlords, we need more apartments, more condos, more homes. The area has a serious lack of low to moderate priced housing: you can go to the suburbs and get a large house for a 350 and up, or you can live in the city in a condo for 350 and up, but there’s not much under a quarter million.

Some people are opposed to adding apartments, because they think apartment dwellers aren’t invested in their communities. That’s just wrong. The Fenway-area development of new aparment and retail buildings needs to go forward, over the objections of the anti-growth crowd. Yes, it needs to include parking for residents, blah blah blah, but we really need a very large number of units, and scaling it back is not a good idea.

Robert Reich had a good idea about how to make it easier to increase the supply of housing: increase maximum heights, speed up approvals, unify licensing. Designated affordable units in each new development is good, but it’s not enough: we need to increase the actual supply. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that designated affordable units drive up the price of the other units: you end up with one ‘affordable’ and ten very expensive units and nothing in the middle, which is hard on Average Joe, poor guy. I imagine that a dramatically increased supply of housing would make most of those problems go away.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that all this expensive housing is going to hurt the economy, and not just because it’s a bubble. I find that when I think about buying a house, I look at my finances and think of ways to avoid spending any money at all. Like, college-studenty ways of doing things, like spending no money ever, and washing clothes in the sink to avoid spending a buck fifty on laundry. And that can’t be good for the economy.

RDF, RSS, XML

Yes, my XML feed is broken. I don’t know why. I put in the default one from the MT web page. I think this may be some sort of version issue. Once we upgrade to a new MT then things should work. Until then, well, you’ve got bad XML, I guess. It used to work inconsistently but now seems to work not at all.

Roundup

Not very surprising news: people buy and sell drugs, even when they are in mental hospitals. Everyone knows you can get drugs in prison, but in a hospital, where there’s less security? Gee, you think?
In athletics, there is a history of cheating and doping, and we’re not over it yet by a long shot.

Some people have misperceptions about popular holidays.

Psychologists and sociologists are studying brand loyalty. Wow, psychological attachment created in a social setting is being studied by professionals, and scientific learning is being applied to commerce.

And once again, a lot of people like to live alone. This is a slightly better perspective– CSMonitor describes it as a trend rather than a movement, and explores some of the implications, rather than promoting or decrying it. It’s especially noticeable in places like Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. where there are large numbers of young unmarried people– something like a third of Boston is between 18 and 30.