Author: Aaron Weber

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.

Naming Conventions

This is not a new story, but it’s a good take on it: people giving their kids bad, bad names. My favorite is Darvon, which you like to think is an accidental misspelling of “Devon” or something. Who knows though. And it’s long been a joke that Toyota has been stealing the names of black women for its cars, Celica and Corolla being the best examples. Of course, Corolla is actually a place in North Carolina, so there’s no reason you couldn’t be named for that, rather than for the car. But you have to wonder: are these people qualified to name their kids, much less raise them?

Money Sucks

Sometimes, looking at expensive things makes me dream. Sometimes it makes me just feel dirty. Like, I know this won’t make me happy, and I can’t afford it anyway, and what are you thinking? Want want want.

And the economists and politicians keep shouting. Lie lie lie. Fight fight fight. Covering their asses, wanting, waiting, needing, wheedling, distorting. It just makes me feel so dirty to live like this.

I try to live below my means, just on general principle, not because I want to save up for something– just because I think that spending money frivolously is … well, just wasteful. I don’t like to see waste. Maybe I’m more stingy and cheap than I thought. I like to think of it as “fiscal prudence.”

Lies Lies Lies

Oooh, my first hate-mail. Get some integrity?

Why am I in need of integrity? Because I note that the WSJ Editorial page, a noted haunt of the ultra-right ‘starve-the-beast’ economics gurus, has begun to note that Dubya is plundering this country for the benefit of his closest access-capitalist allies?

Look, bucko, he’s not even a good capitalist or a free-marketeer. The steel tarrifs should have showed you that. Or maybe the gay marriage issue, which is strangling our domestic wedding industry. Or was it earlier, with his Harken energy insider trading? Or maybe the way he used his baseball team to seize property using eminent domain, then sell it cheap to close friends, who developed it or flipped it to developers for tidy sums.

Dishonest. Dishonorable. Hypocritical. And worse, ineffective at helping this country, and others.

Six years my ass.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Loners need a club like the anarchist club needs a president.

I am annoyed when people whine about getting Canadian coins instead of US coins but I do like the idea that people might actually just send me some random cash. Oh please world, send me your Euros so that I can insult the French with them. I’ll be sure to mail them all back to the EU government, honest.

I am very suspicious of branding but I am a sucker for Honda motorcycles.

I’m getting tired of LOTR madness. Even the number of things making fun of LOTR. I mean, really, how much time do we need to spend on this?

A lot, I guess. Helen pointed out that we do in fact need manuals telling us what not to wear, and I guess she’s right. There’s a lot of shows for it too– Queer Eye, What Not to Wear, and Fashion Emergency, just for starters.

There was a condo around the street from my house that I ogled. It had a for-sale sign out front so I called. They said it had sold in under 2 weeks for over 600k. This was a condo, mind you, with basement bedrooms.

QuirkyAlone

I mentioned these earlier. Quirkyalones, aka “single people who think they need some label,” now have a quiz and a movement and a book with promotional tour and shirt. Megan came back from the NEBA conference with the shirt and a pamphlet. The whole thing has pissed her off beyond words. It’s like the periodic how-to-be-a-human-being instructional books. Do single people need a manifesto? You’re just… yourself. Nothing wrong with it. People have done it for quite some time. A movement based on everyone doing different stuff? Is that like a uniform, as they say in Cheech and Chong movies, where nobody has to wear the same thing?