My Quiet Life

I sorta fell off the wagon. Here’s a twofer:

Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

I was at my friend Chris’s place down the street on 2nd last night helping him with his laptop when there was a shooting right outside.. 3 people (only one of which was involved in the initial confrontation) were hit, but no one killed. One woman in his doorway got hit fairly badly in the side.

Chris says this is becoming a regular occurrence, a concern he has been trying to raise at various downtown residents’ meetings. He says the problem centers around “Mystic” which is an afterhours place on 2nd that also has a “teen night” on Sunday which makes it basically thug central, and that the fights are like clockwork. There’s no easy answer that leaps to mind for me — there are so many different elements in a situation like this — issues of race, local politics, downtown community growing pains, policing strategy (or lack thereof), and so on. Chris wants the club shut down, but admits it’s easier said than done. He also wants a bigger police presence. A friend of mine in the central precinct that was one of the first responders said they had a whopping 3 people on duty at the time. Lots of food for thought — more later, maybe, but for now there are pictures here.

UPDATE: I don’t know how reliable this is, but the lady that works at the shop downstairs at the Quarters (where the one lady was shot last night) said she heard that Mystic is already shut down. She said the mayor ordered it somehow (?)

I dunno if that’s legit, but I’ve never seen her happier!

I have been moderately (okay, excessively) obsessed with Imogen Heap lately. (Listening to “Hide and Seek” on repeat, basically, but more on that later, maybe.) Something to watch while you slack off on this Friday:

(more…)

Check out the fucked up headline and lede from this article:

Was it an obsession with Emily that drove gunman to kill?

This is the face of the teenage student who may have sparked the biggest gun massacre in US history.

.. and now that you are sufficiently outraged, go read Aunt B on this.

I just got back from the press conference for John Edwards down at the farmer’s market. I have a ton of pics, but I’ll process and upload those later.. (Pics are here)

His speech was standard campaign stumping fare.. But there were a few notable things that he announced:

• He did talk about his plans to form a “Rural Economic Advancement Challenge (REACH)” fund to bring capital investment to rural areas, but he didn’t get into specifics.
• He wants to use “existing (anti-trust) legislation” to help scale back agricorp and give small farmers a fighting chance.
• He’s big on bringing rural broadband and plans on paying for it byyyy:
• … rolling back the Bush tax cuts for everyone that makes above $200K/year. This will pay for the aforementioned things, as well as his health care plan, which he thinks will cost between $100-120 billion a year (I think I got that right).

More info is available here at his site. He also took time to let us all know about the Virginia Tech shooting, which is pretty messed up.

Also, on an amusing note. I’m standing there waiting for Edwards to come in, twiddling my thumbs, looking for familiar faces, and I notice the guy next to me looks familiar. Then I realize it’s because it’s Tucker Carlson (sans bowtie). I didn’t realize they had him out workin the normal press beat.

UPDATE: Pictures are up here. I still have a lot to learn about taking pictures of people. Also, I forgot the funniest part of the conference. One of the first questions he fielded was from an older woman in the back who was mumbling incomprehensibly into the mic, which wasn’t loud enough to begin with. He couldn’t hear what she was asking, but I could tell from the key phrases that she was an anti-federalist (and probably a conspiracy theorist) — she was asking him basically about the legality of the federal reserve (see here for background). He handled it well enough once he (sorta) figured out what she was asking, and just said he’d have to learn more about the issue to give a proper answer. True dat.

Apparently I am feeling very black and white this week.

This installment of the Undercover Economist from last month is interesting, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. It discusses how “home ownership” encourages unemployment — which doesn’t sound so much like economics as much as common sense (insert joke about how they are the same here). He focuses specifically on “house” ownership, but it’s clear that what is really at the center of all this is a “home” — and that when the market for your skilled trade dries up in your home, you have to move or be unemployed. And since people don’t like to leave their home, they remain, unemployed.

The increasing liquidity of labor is pretty standard stuff in the world of economics: the increasing commoditization of human capital leading to increasingly fractured communities, impermanent industry locuses, etc etc. It makes the construction of a permanent, productive community more and more difficult. What’s odd about the article is that it seems to take this all in stride, and in fact seems to be encouraging it:

Recent research in the Economic Journal suggests that people who own their own homes form denser local networks, which help unearth local jobs. Still, the jobs tend to be less well-matched and commuting distances are longer. So, professor Oswald is right to argue that we should do everything possible to free up impediments to renting or to selling a house and buying a new one. It would be handy if we were allowed to build houses near Manhattan, too.

Does this not strike anyone as scary? When the primary impediment to some semblance of full employment in our economy has become the complete elimination of any permanance in home or community, I think perhaps we can speculate that something in our system is very broken.

Anyone that has ever had a debate about the inequity in our education system has probably at least once had it end up at the ol’ “well, life isn’t fair” argument. I’ve found that this bit from Savage Inequalities to be particularly good for cutting through that bit of nonsense:

Many people, even those who view themselves as liberals on other issues, tend to grow indignant, even rather agitated, if invited to look closely at these inequalities. “Life isn’t fair,” one parent in Winnetka answered flatly when I pressed the matter. “Wealthy children also go to summer camp. All summer. Poor kids maybe not at all… Weatlhy children have the chance to go to Europe and have the access to good libraries, encylopedias, computers, better doctors, nicer homes. Some of my neighbors send their kids to schools like Exeter and Groton. Is government supposed to equalize these things as well?”

But government, of course, does not assign us to our homes, our summer camps, our doctors–or to Exeter. It does assign us to our public schools. Indeed, it forces us to go to them. Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school–and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.

Nice to see a refreshingly libertarian take on the reality of the situation in a book that is pretty much a holy text in liberal circles. You can’t just wave your hands and dismiss something as being inherently unfair if it is compulsory via authority derived from the state.

Google maps has a fun new (to me, at least) “My maps” feature where you can annotate maps.

I’ve created one for my neighborhood. It would be cool if you could make a group map, cus I got tired of adding stuff after a while, but I am sure other people have interesting stuff. Wikimap.

I had this as a draft — I probably intended to write something more provocative about it, but here’s the quote:

“No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land.”
— Henry Ford