This Makes Me Sick

This note today from "Ed" in Windsor Park make me fucking sick to my stomach:

I have noticed an increase in people going around the neighborhood
removing aluminum cans from people's recycling bins. Today someone came
and took mine as well!

I understand these are difficult times we live in, and people are
trying to make ends meet, but I feel like they are stealing from me.

These cans I recycle are not only to do a small part for the
environment, but I think also help subsidise the costs associated with
the trash and recycling pickup. I would imagine the recycling company
makes a small profit from the items they recycle, helping offset the
pickup costs. Surely they take this into consideration when they bid
the contracts.

I know I could collect them and other metals and turn them into the
recycling people myself and make some money, but I don't own a pickup
or large area of land to store metals until I have enough to pay for
gas dropping it off. I don't think my immediate neighbors would approve
either.

Perhaps when the new bins come everything will not be as accessable to
these bandits.

Bandits! Bandits! Stealing what probably amounts to a dollar or two in aluminum. Granted, I don't know how many aluminum cans Ed leaves behind, but let's be generous and say it's not many. But my god, to treat a couple aluminum cans as some sort of loss, as some sort of affront to his property -- all I can say is, I hope Ed gives heartily at church, not because I think the church allocates his money any better, but because I'm sure he's taken to heart his pastor's big fat sermons about charity and the love for your fellow man.

When our old school Democrats, who love to wave the names of Molly Ivins and John Henry Faulk like flags when it suits their own cause, scream like shrill little misers because they've been taken with property value paranoia (say it shrilly: "we're being dumped upon!") , and when others gripe that others who have it worse than they do are picking through their trash to make a living, that's when you know you're living in a mean, pathetic little fucking world. I expect these sorts of attitudes from others. I don't expect it from people in my neighborhood.

Update: Last night after writing this I had a dream in which I had been elected to some WP neighborhood position. My first thought was, I'm going to have to take down that post. Second was, I can lead the neighborhood from Maine.

This morning someone else posted to the listserv about the can thing, and as it was not in my dream, it made me feel some hope for the WP, and for humankind in general:

When I see people taking the aluminum cans, I pray.

When Traffic Becomes News

Britches, meet too big:

"...The city doesn't appear to have the infrastructure or processes in place to handle the number of simultaneous events that are happening downtown," she said.

This isn't news because the traffic was bad; it's news because people's expectations didn't match reality. The new expectation has to be this: if you chose to live in a city whose cultural life is rich enough that large simultaneous events are scheduled in the same area, don't expect to drive up to your destination and park outside the door; if you try it, you'll get stuck, so you're going to be walking, or taking a shuttle, or biking. Basically: expect to arrive sweating. I may be contradicting myself, but I don't think it's the city's job to match reality to expectations. I think it's to provide leadership about -- and certainly to change -- the expectations as well.

Here's a new thought about public transportation: maybe it's not capital-intensive, building streetcars or subways. Rather, maybe it's temporary transport, like flash mobs, shuttling people from one parking area to the event area on the weekends. Riders have to pay for it, of course.

Move

Inevitable. Curious. Unseeing. I don't know what to label how yesterday's NYT Magazine's slew of articles on reducing environmental impact and carbon footprint didn't include one obvious choice that individuals and households can make: moving.

This could be moving to a new part of a city (to reduce commute times), to a new city or region, or even simply to a new style of house (one with a backyard, say, where one can grow some of one's food). Maybe the capital intensivity of this moves it off the table as an option, but I'm not convinced; people buy hybrid vehicles and install solar panels. Maybe it's because it was the New York Times. What if the answer is that big cities make big footprints? I don't know if this is true or not; if it were, the city's newspaper couldn't very well advocate people abandoning it. I think the answer may lie deep in the American psyche: Americans move for jobs or when they retire, not for general economic considerations -- that would be called "migration," and those who "migrate" are called "immigrants."

I'd also want to know where one should move. We have a pretty good situation in Austin: lots of sunlight and our own roof meant we could install solar panels if we wanted to, though not without a lot of other capital improvements. And we have the biggest backyard on the block with proven soil for veggies; a rainwater collection system would give us water for the garden. And chickens! We don't hardly heat the house at all in the winter. On the other hand, we can't walk many places, and riding a bike, though doable, isn't comfortable. Portland is walkable year-round, and the hardcore biking season has just begun, plus things are close: the office supply store and post office are just down the hill, and both Whole Foods and Hannafords are easily reachable by bike trail.

In Maine, They Tell Anti-Gay Activists To Shut Up

Check out this column, the likes of which I don't think has ever been printed in a daily Texas newspaper:

You might not know him by name, but you've probably heard his story.

Hiroo Onoda was a second lieutenant in the Japanese Army. Rather than face reality and surrender when Allied forces overtook his garrison on Lubang Island in the Philippines in early 1945, he headed for the hills.

And there Onoda stayed for 29 years. Convinced that World War II was still being fought, he dismissed overwhelming evidence to the contrary as clever enemy propaganda.

Which brings us to, of all people, Michael Heath.

The executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine announced last week that he's spearheading yet another referendum drive in his never-ending war on homosexuality. But this time, even Heath sounds a little like, well, Hiroo Onoda.

The rest of the column (which accuracy demands I note did not generate all positive comments) is here.

The Grass is Greener Game

This article, about group behavior in a stumbling stock market, seems relevant even to the question about why one might decide to leave an awesomely wicked cool city:

...One model that researchers have used to study contrarian behavior is called the minority game. The game is based on a now-classic problem posed in 1994 by the economist W. Brian Arthur set in a bar called El Farol. Everyone likes El Farol but also knows that the place is not much fun when it’s crowded. What, then, is the best strategy to maximize the fun. Avoid weekends? Try Thursdays and Sundays? Won’t everyone else be doing the same?

Experiments testing various versions of this game have shown that many players flip strategies in the middle of playing, apparently simply because they have set some private threshold for changing, like trying one strategy three times, “and if it doesn’t work, switch to the other one,” said Willemien Kets, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Dr. Kets contends that this switching strategy can be successful precisely because others decide to stick to a congested road. “You see this ‘grass is always greener’ kind of behavior emerging,” Dr. Kets said in an interview, “which suggests that a variety of contrarian strategies will evolve naturally in the course of any such game because there are people who are more conservative in their strategies.”

Once people start thinking in this way, they subconsciously recruit evidence that supports their view, and not only from other investors. Simply bumping into an acquaintance who shares a contrary opinion — at the gym or in line at the grocery store — can seem like an affirmation.