Rov_Scam's profile

Rov_Scam 16hr ago

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

Series Index:

Parts 6–8: The Hill's Environs

It's been nearly 8 months since the last installment and I apologize for the slow pace of these. As usual, I hope to get these out faster in the future, but I have limited Motte time and these take a while to research and write. The major roadblock though is that the reason I'm here is mainly to comment on regular posts which have a shelf life of about a day, and I'd rather dedicate what little time I have to that than a vanity project. ANYWAY, we'll finally start to inch out of the Hill District by looking at three neighborhoods that are historically associated with it to varying degrees but really aren't part of it. Sugar Top has the biggest claim to being part of the Hill, but its residents are better off and insist that it isn't. Uptown was always sort of the Hill but not really and still sort of is but not really, and Polish Hill was in the same boat as Sugar Top at one time but has now forged its own wholly separate identity.

6. Uptown: Forcing the Issue

Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood is loosely bordered by I-579 on the west, the Birmingham Bridge on the East, and the Monongahela River on the south, though there is very little development on the river itself due to an abrupt elevation change. On the north the boundary is more controversial; the official dividing line is right down the middle of 5th Ave., but a more realistic boundary would include the entirety of 5th plus a few streets that run parallel. The name is also controversial. The aforementioned elevation change means that the neighborhood sits high above the Mon, giving the neighborhood its official name, Bluff. But most Pittsburghers only consider the Bluff to be the highest land in this area. The Bluff itself is entirely occupied by the Duquesne University campus, which is practically a world unto itself, except where it spills down the hill onto Forbes Ave. The area east of Jumonville St. is also known as Soho, though this designation is mostly only used among old timers (it does appear on some maps). To most Pittsburgher’s, though, the entire area is just Uptown, and the local community organization has installed “Welcome to Uptown” signs that only add to the confusion.

The western part of the neighborhood is dominated by institutional uses. In addition to Duquesne University, it includes the Allegheny County Jail (though this is isolated from the rest of the neighborhood and is only included because it doesn’t fit anywhere else), Mercy Hospital, and PPG Paints Arena. While the area around PPG includes a few businesses that largely cater to the pregame hockey crowd, most of the commercial corridor on 5th and Forbes sits underutilized, and the rest of the neighborhood is residential. It was historically a rowhouse neighborhood, but decades of disinvestment have left much of it blighted. Hundreds of historic rowhouses have been demolished at a time when rowhouse neighborhoods in other parts of the city were being revitalized. This presents a conundrum — a neighborhood that’s located on a well-traveled corridor between Pennsylvania’s second and third largest business districts (Downtown and Oakland), and contains a mid-size university, a major hospital, and a hockey arena, should by all accounts be one of the most desirable parts of the city. Yet it’s in pretty rough shape.

Like most of the rest of the city, Uptown was initially an immigrant community, mostly Jews and Eastern Europeans, who came to work in J&L Steel's Soho Works. Fifth Ave. was a thriving commercial district supporting this community. Again, as with countless neighborhoods in cities across America, it started to go in decline after WWII, as everyone who could afford it moved to the suburbs. The population gradually got smaller and poorer. While Uptown was spared the rioting that devastated most of the Hill in the Spring of 1968, it wasn't spared the disinvestment that occurred thereafter. As the heroin trade took over the devastated corners of Center Ave. in the Hill, street prostitution, which had long been established in that area, moved strongly into the Fifth/Forbes corridor. When Pittsburgh hosted the 1979 meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, the Mayor of Milwaukee described Fifth Ave. as the most frightening slum he had ever seen. Most of the redevelopment was at this point focused on the North Side; the destruction of the Lower Hill and subsequent community opposition meant developers wouldn't touch the area with a 99 ½ foot pole. It wsan't until the late 2000s and the construction of the new Penguins arena and anticipated Lower Hill redevelopment that anyone gave Uptown a second thought.

Part of the answer can also be found in the person of Sal Williams. Mr. Williams was an Uptown native who had since decamped to the suburbs (and had mafia connections; his brother was “Godfather of Pittsburgh” Junior Williams) and spent decades buying up properties and demolishing the buildings to build parking lots. At one point his company owned something like 150 parcels in the neighborhood, and he seemingly had no interest in selling to developers. Williams’s apparent strategy was to continually acquire land and make money off of surface parking for Penguins games and downtown commuters until he had obtained a critical mass, then sell it at an inflated price for some large-scale development. Former councilman Sala Udin, whose district included Uptown, has said that he regrets not having pushed harder for a proposed 2000 moratorium on building demolitions and new surface parking.

There’s more to the story, of course. For his part, Williams always claimed that he wasn’t in the parking lot business. He loved Uptown and wanted to be part of the revitalization; there was simply no developer interest, and parking lots allowed him to pay the bills while he waited. Undin’s successor, Tonya Payne, also praised Williams. She noted that the city and Urban Redevelopment Authority owned more land in Uptown than he did, but didn’t have the resources to maintain the properties or demolish the structures. Public ownership of distressed properties is effectively a black hole that the city has spent decades trying to unsuccessfully resolve; Payne said that when she was president of the local community group they would often turn to Williams to purchase crack houses and other undesirable properties before they ended up in the city’s hands. She also noted that he indeed had renovated properties and sold to developers, and that the alternative to his parking lots would be overgrown lots full of trash. People later said that he was willing to sell his properties for tax assessed value to anyone willing to develop them, even if it meant selling at a loss, but there were few takers. One could cynically point to the thousands that Williams gave to Payne’s campaign to unseat Udin, but the woman did have a point.

The bigger problem Uptown has had to deal with, though, is the perception that it’s part of the Hill District. While Uptown was historically a white area, it was nonetheless considered an extension of the Hill, and it declined around the same time and in much the same fashion as the rest of the Hill. While there’s little violence, the neighborhood has plenty of lower-level stuff like prostitution, drug dealing, and car break-ins that make it less-than-ideal. There’s been increasing pressure on the police to simply crack down on the kind of behavior that wouldn’t be tolerated in more affluent areas, but even 100% success does little to change perceptions.

For its part, the city has started to address these issues by effectively eliminating zoning restrictions. Setback requirements have been all but eliminated, mixed-use is encouraged, and height restrictions are so generous that no realistic development is going to exceed them, and even then there are exceptions if they include a certain amount of affordable housing. The result has been several new developments in the past ten years, including renovation of the old 5th Avenue School, which had been a vacant eyesore, into apartments. Several more residential projects are underway, and some of the apartments are supposedly renting for $2900/month.

But aside from a few luxury apartment developments, there has been surprisingly little additional development, and the ground-level retail that has been built has been slow to fill in. $2900/month may not seem like a lot if you're from New York or California, and I doubt the average apartment is priced this high, but it's shockingly expensive considering the lack of surrounding amenities. I get the impression that these exist primarily for foreign doctors working at Mercy Hospital who rent based on proximity, at least until they've lived in the area long enough to realize there are better options.

Given the precarious state of development and history of land speculation in an area that is unquestionably well-located, it would seem that Uptown's history is a good argument for Georgist land policy. If you look closer, however, it seems more like an argument against such policy. As Ms. Payne noted, speculators like Mr. Williams don't end up with large vacant holdings in a competitive market. Sal Williams bought derelict properties for next to nothing because he was the only one willing to take them; it was either that or abandonment, which after a long, laborious process would end up in the black hole of city or URA ownership. Once that happens, getting anything built means getting it past the mayor, council, the URA, and every single demand of every single community group.

If the powers that be decided that a land value tax were the best way to ensure that speculators developed this high-value land (and current tax assessments do value it highly), it would lead to less speculation, but that doesn't necessarily mean more development. It could mean that more properties would end up in the hands of the city or the URA, and all of the nonsense that that entails. The obvious retort to this is that it doesn't work unless we also strip away all of the nonsense, and I agree, but this could also mean that it's the nonsense that's preventing development and the taxation system has nothing to do with it.

But even if you do strip away the nonsense, well, you can lead a horse to water… If Uptown is a run down area that's "theoretically" primed for gentrification based on the opinions of people who don't live there, then the land is only theoretically valuable. There's no guarantee that any developer is going to make money on a project no matter how much red tape you strip away. Red tape is largely just a red herring used to distract the public from the fact that these developers either have no money or aren't willing to spend it. I had a conversation with a URA project manager back in March who told me that the reason these projects seem to end up in development hell is largely because the developers are relying on other people to pay for them. If you take your project to the URA and have the money in the bank or financing already committed it would take an Act of God for them to stop you. Sure, you might have to kick a couple of bucks toward a pet project that some community organization wants, but that's only in rare cases and it's more for PR than a strict necessity. The upshot with respect to Uptown is that it's obvious that for all the hype, developers still see the area as too risky to sink a ton of money into when there are safer bets elsewhere. Two residential projects that have already been approved are on indefinite hold due to projected cost overruns. Meanwhile, the speculators who own the parking lots are making steady income and, with everyone telling them how much their property is worth, they aren't going to let it go for cheap. And $2900/month apartments notwithstanding, anyone with legs or a car can see that, even outside the hockey arena, the area isn't exactly bumping.

Neighborhood Grade: Early Gentrification. Lots of concept articles and long term plans, and just enough new development to convince people that things are moving along, but there's still not enough that anyone wants to go there. It may all be a mirage, but 20 years ago, we didn't even have that. This evaluation may make me seem pessimistic, but I do think that the neighborhood's location and the commitment from residents and the city mean that Uptown will eventually turn the corner, if it hasn't happened already. The question is how much of the old neighborhood will be left standing when it happens.

7. Sugar Top: No Bursting This Bubble

This area goes by a variety of names, none of which is dispositive. The area is officially Upper Hill, but few people call it that, and the official boundaries cover areas that don't quite mesh as a single cohesive neighborhood. Historically it was known as Herron Hill, and still includes the Herron Reservoir, but that's a vestige of the past that also included nearby Polish Hill. The real issue boils down to whether one wants to think of the area as part of the Hill District; residents who want to dissociate themselves from it insist that it's actually a separate area called Schenley Heights. I've chosen Sugar Top because it's the name locals seem to use regardless of their opinion on the matter.

As the name would suggest, Sugar Top is the highest part of the hill. Its western boundary is at Herron Ave., which separates it from the rest of the Hill District, and its eastern boundary is where the land drops off sharply towards Oakland. To the north the Upper Hill officially ends at Bigelow Blvd., but I'm cutting off everything above the Webster Ave. corridor because it's disconnected from the street grid and culturally part of Polish Hill. I'm also putting the southern boundary at the VA Hospital, to include a couple streets that are officially part of the Terrace Village project neighborhood but aren't part of the project and culturally fit in more with Sugar Top.

Sugar Top is a working class black area. In the 1800s it was the site of a village called Minersville that predictably centered around coal mining. Little of this neighborhood survives, except for the old cemetery and an old farmhouse that currently sits vacant but that some group is trying to save. As development crept up the hill in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rural buildings were demolished in favor of more typically urban typologies. The area is small, but the housing stock is diverse, ranging from streetcar suburban to modest rowhouses. Some of the last blocks to be built out were along the aforementioned reservoir, and the area has a suburban feel and incredible views.

As I mentioned in previous installments, the Hill District historically existed on a continuum, with its poorest residents living in the Lower Hill adjacent to Downtown and the neighborhood getting progressively wealthier as you went east. Well, this was about as east as you could get and still be in the Hill District. It had a leafy, pastoral feel that the rest of the Hill lacked. In 1940 this was a predominantly white area, but over a third of its residents were black. Countless black professionals—barbers, teachers, lawyers, ministers, doctors—began to settle there. This part of Herron Hill became Sugar Top, the place a black family moved when they made it. While the white population gradually left, Sugar Top was able to maintain its cachet well into the 1970s.

While this cachet no longer exists among the black community, Sugar Top has nonetheless managed to largely avoid the blight and crime that plagued the rest of the Hill. The biggest issue is that residents continue to age and haven't been replaced by a new cohort of black professionals. Like Uptown, its reputation as part of the Hill holds it back from investment. Unlike Uptown, it's isolated and lacks any kind of business district. There was once a small one on Herron Ave., but it was mostly destroyed in the 1968 riots, and only scattered remnants exist today. Back in 2009 one of the community groups produced a plan for its revitalization, but nothing has happened, and the link I found to the plan is dead.

Neighborhood Grade: Stable. This has been a quiet, working class black area for decades, and there's little sign of that changing. There were some heavy breathing moments in the 90s and 2000s when it looked like gang violence from the Hill was creeping in, but those were just that, moments, and crime remains low. It seems unlikely to decline further absent any major changes. Most of the housing is owner-occupied. The closure and redevelopment of Terrace Village and the overall reduction of crime in the Hill means there's less potential for spillover, and what crime remains is centered around Bedford Dwellings, which is on the chopping block. Yet this is a double-edged sword; as crime in the rest of the Hill has gone down and areas closer to Downtown have been redeveloped, those areas become more desirable to local residents, and Sugar Top's cachet is lowered even further. Compounding the problem is the bottom-up approach the city has taken when it comes to redeveloping the Hill. With new development starting downtown and slowly creeping into increasingly less desirable areas, it will be a long time before new investment reaches the area. Combine this with the deficiencies I've already outlined, and it's understandable why the long-term outlook isn't great. This isn't to say that the area is going downhill fast or anything, but aspiring black professionals will either move into the newer developments or leave the area entirely, leaving Sugar Top for the black tow truck drivers and LPNs who have kids to raise and got a good deal on grandma's house when she went to the home.

8. Polish Hill: "Not Fully Gentrified"

Polish Hill is the final neighborhood we will be discussing before we (finally!) leave the Greater Hill District. It's a relatively small neighborhood and has the distinction of being the only area on the Hill that is majority white and the only area that has seen significant investment in recent years. The borders I'm using are slightly different that the official ones but mostly comport with them. To the north the practical border is the East Busway. To the west it's where Brereton and Stockholm streets dead end, and to the east it's at the Bloomfield Bridge. The only truly big change I made was to the south, where I include the predominantly white areas south of Bigelow. Polish Hill was rural until the 1870s, when a small community called Millwood formed at the bottom of Herron Ave. neat the railroad tracks. This crept up the hillside beginning around 1885, as a large influx of immigrants from—you guessed it—Poland arrived, though plenty of Irish, German and black families settled in the area as well. As was typical of Pittsburgh hillside neighborhoods, wood was the building material of choice for residential structures, though atypical for Pittsburgh, many of these were purpose-built as multi-family tenements. For the first half of the 20th century, the area was known as Herron Hill, along with what is now officially the Upper Hill, as that area was still majority white.

While the neighborhood did not experience any appreciable white flight, by the late 1960s it was nonetheless in dire economic straits. Pittsburgh was selected to participate in the Model Cities program, a Great Society-era anti-poverty experiment that lasted from 1966 to 1974. By this point, the enthusiasm for postwar urban renewal projects was losing steam, largely driven by local residents' concerns that it was being driven by distant bureaucrats with little respect for local concerns. Model Cities would allow a greater degree of citizen participation and grassroots involvement. The issue for Polish Hill was that, while it was poor and in need of development, it had no identity apart from the Hill District. There's sporadic use of the name "Polish Hill" to refer to the area prior to this, but it wasn't until around 1968 that it fully developed a separate identity, and the Polish Hill Civic Association was founded in 1969.

The neighborhood's association with Model Cities was contentious, to say the least. The new neighborhood withdrew from the project in 1968 after the Feds rejected all of their proposed program administrators in favor of an outsider (supposedly due to conflicts of interest). That wasn't the end of it, though; when the city officially drew the southern boundary at Bigelow, the white portions south of there came under the aegis of the Hill District's Model Cities program, and HUD sought to build housing what they considered part of their neighborhood. It doesn't appear that these were actually built, and Model Cities was largely considered a failure (the attempts at giving more local control only served to make the bureaucracy more complicated), but the events solidified Polish Hill's identity as a separate area.

I brought this up because the name is more recent that most Pittsburghers think. Most of our geographic names have either been used since time immemorial (the Hill District isn't in need of an origin story) or are obvious fabrications (the North Shore). This is a fabrication that nobody wants to admit was a fabrication because the origins are slightly racist. In fact, the name itself wasn't without controversy. After it started catching on in the early 1970s, police cruisers started bearing the names of their assigned neighborhoods to keep wayward cops from wandering too far afield. Polish-Americans who saw the name "Polish Hill" complained that it was an ethnic slur. Pointing out that the name had been in use for a while and was selected by its residents didn't seem to mollify them.

The neighborhood stayed pretty much the same into the 2000s; white, dumpy, the kind of sketchy place where crime is low statistically but former residents "can tell you stories". It wasn't an obvious spot for gentrification to take hold. There's no real business district, the houses are small and lower quality, and it was so insular that homes rarely came on the market. There were some rentals available, but these only appealed to the kind of punks whose desire for "authenticity" is so strong that they want to wallow in shittiness. But as other parts of the East End started to improve, there was some pressure on the market, and the small town feel and extreme closeness to Downtown (via low-traffic, high-volume Bigelow Blvd, no less), made it desirable. It still remained hard to break into. If you wanted to buy there you had to do so via off-market transaction (know a guy who knows a guy), as the sellers thought no one outside the family would be interested, but this gave the dingy, working-class neighborhood an air of exclusivity. The dam finally broke around 2011, when the old-timers caught on that their humble abodes were in high demand and started selling in droves. The nature of the off-market transactions kept the selling prices almost comically low; well into the 2000s the average price was under $50,000 and was often closer to $30,000. These would dectuple in a decade with the right renovations and appreciate considerably without them provided they weren't gut jobs.

As for the neighborhood itself, as I said, it lacks a true business district, but it's still semi-walkable, with scattered businesses, several of which are trendy. There's a coffee shop, a records store, a comic book store, and several bars. One of these is Gooski's a dank "hipster dive" as I call it (a place with the aesthetics of a dive but craft beer and a trendy clientele). The other is The Rock Room; the best way I can describe it is it's a bar from a 90s movie where the characters have the kind of aesthetic where the 50s are supposed to be cool. Everyone in there is a worse-looking version of Christian Slater's character in True Romance. Brereton St. is the closest thing it has to a main drag, if only because it is home to the aforementioned Gooski's and Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, which is the visual heart of the neighborhood and dominates its modest skyline. The housing stock is mostly these weird "semi-rows" that Pittsburgh seems to have a lot of. They're basically row houses with a small gap in between for the express purpose of making a wall that's impossible to repair or update.

8A. What I Meant by the Subtitle

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette features a local for-sale home in the Real Estate section of each week's Sunday paper, and earlier this year they featured a house that was on the market for $710,000. I've linked to an archived version of the article, but the gist of it is that the owners are doctors from New York City who bought a newly-built contemporary townhouse in 2023 because they thought they would be moving here. Those plans changed, and now, after $50,000 in additional upgrades, they're selling it for what would be the highest price ever paid in Polish Hill for a single residence. The whole thing came across as a bit over the top for most Pittsburghers, but what really set people off was their statement that the area wasn't completely gentrified.

Well, sort-of statement. It's unclear what they actually said because that quote was from the writer, but the wife did say that " I like that — it’s a little edgy, a little rough around the edges, but it’s cool, I like the vibe." The idea that someone would have the gall to list a house for a record-setting price in a working class neighborhood (with the implication that they expected people would pay it) while saying that the area wasn't fully gentrified struck people as ridiculous. Especially when they've seen prices skyrocket in a relatively brief period.

The thing is, though, they're kind of right. First, while the price may not have been justified—it ultimately sold for $690,000, short of the record—the house wasn't typical of the neighborhood. It was built in 2023, is about double the size of most houses in the area, and doesn't have the grey "cheap flip coture" so common in these cases but real, high-end fixtures. It also has a series of decks with incredible views. More importantly, the neighborhood could still improve further. It will never get a true business district, even though it is zoned for it, but I don't consider gentrification to be complete if the renovations are done with cost in mind. Putting vinyl over Inselbric is much different than taking it down to the wood, or replacing the siding with Hardee Board. Vinyl flooring isn't the same as hardwood (especially when the house already has hardwood you don't want to refinish). You get the idea. I imagine that if it were to gentrify completely, it would look similar to Mt. Adams in Cincinnati.

Neighborhood Grade: Heavy gentrification. The future of Polish Hill seems bright, and I can only expect it to get brighter as more homes are renovated. I think prices are going to top off at a lower level than in other parts of the city. Due to small population and geographic isolation it will never be able to develop a true business district, even though it's allowed by zoning. The population was over 3,000 in 1970, and though it's been gaining residents (1,200 in 2010 vs. 1,800 in 2020), declining household size and conversion of apartments back to single family homes will limit this growth, and there isn't much space for new construction. That being said, I'm surprised that this place gentrified at all given its limitations. As one final note, the areas south of Bigelow that aren't officially part of Polish Hill will be completely excluded from this process. The development is sparse and somewhat blighted, almost West Virginia in some places and this may give the best sense of the kind of people who used to live in the rest of the neighborhood.

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Rov_Scam 1d ago

Even the license plate is easy to obscure. If you're carrying a bike on a rear rack a plate reader won't work. Some hitch racks fold up when not in use and will block the plate on some sedans. I rode the turnpike for free for years with a rack like this until I got pulled over for it and decided I didn't want to risk the ticket, but that only happens if a cop is directly behind you and can't read the plate, and is bored enough to make an issue out of it. There was a news article a while back about how much revenue the turnpike was losing from people carrying bikes, saying that they were pulling some people over for foiling the readers, but this isn't something a cop is realistically going to pull you over for in and of itself (the cop who pulled me over said that they wouldn't do it if someone were carrying a bike), only if you were getting free rides as a consequence. I think that they realistically understand that this is a lost cause, though.

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Rov_Scam 1d ago

It sounds like he split the purchase, putting part of it on cash and part of it on a card. When I was a cashier in high school people would occasionally do this, though these days I don't know the motivation (back then it was people using food stamps and paying the balance in cash or using cash they had and charging the rest before charging was a thing rich people did to rack up points).

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Rov_Scam 1d ago

Discovery is something the Plaintiff gets from the Defendant. It's also something you get from a company, not a private person. Those statements aren't technically 100% true all the time, but realistically, that's the way it works. I represent defendants and I do send out discovery requests to plaintiffs. These consist exclusively of interrogatories and requests for admission, and I send them out to protect the record and not because I expect them to contain any useful information. Half the time I don't get responses. Actually, I don't know how often they respond because when they do respond I seldom look at the responses. Private citizens simply don't have the kind of records that companies do. If Wal-Mart doesn't plow their parking lot and I slip on ice and get hurt I can request copies of relevant policies, the employee schedule for the day, a copy of their plow contract, and all kinds of other stuff. If I slip on some random guy's driveway, what do you think I'm requesting? If there really is some kind of government conspiracy here, do you seriously think that Shauni Kerkhoff has been keeping records of it in her possession for the past 5 years? The most discovery they'll get is the opportunity to depose her, which might not even be their deposition if her attorneys put her up first. They might even have to put her up first to avoid summary judgment. But there will be no lawsuit, because any attorney worth his retainer will have The Blaze on the horn immediately and tell them he has a release ready to go if the price is right. No lawsuit necessary.

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Rov_Scam 1d ago

Looping in @netstack, @Quantumfreakonomics, and @greyenlightenment

I discussed this when the case first came out, and while I said at the time that I didn't need to get into the deep dive I did on gait analysis while at the DMV, it's apparent that I now do. First, to reiterate, when they say 94% match or whatever, what they're saying is that they measure certain features of gait like knee flexion angle and come up with a profile. If 6% of the population is expected to have a similar gait profile, then it would be a 94% match because it theoretically excludes 94% of the population. The reason I went through all the categories of description in my previous post was to demonstrate that anything below 90% isn't even really a match, and anything below 99% is of extremely limited utility. Identifying the suspect is a black female is a 94% match right there, because about 12% of the population is black and half of those are female. Given that the comment was well-received without much pushback and awarded an AAQC, I naively thought that I had made my case, evidently I was wrong. So let's get into why that 94% or 98% is bullshit in and of itself:

Forensic gait analysis relies on the assumption that every person has a unique or nearly unique gait. While this may be true, the extent to which we can determine that it is true is limited by the accuracy with which we can make the relevant measurements. There is currently no evidence to support this assertion.
In some cases, the level of accuracy is not good to begin with if relying on video. For instance, I read about one angle that we could accurately measure to within five degrees. But the total normal variation was seven degrees.
Most of the available research into gait was conducted in a clinical setting. Most of what we know about normal gait comes from studies where we were comparing broadly-defined normal gait to abnormal gait, not from studies where we were looking to categorize subtle differences among normal gaits. This second kind of research has been limited.
There is accordingly no credible database that allows us to assess the frequency of either normal or abnormal gait characteristics.
In the research that exists (which is again mostly clinical), the subjects are analyzed walking at a designated speed indoors, barefoot, wearing minimal clothing to facilitate measurement, are well lit, and are photographed from fixed angles. In other words, the process is standardized.
This standardization, however, is limited to the individual experiment. There is no industry-wide standardized methodology for analyzing, comparing, and reporting gait characteristics.
Gait characteristics are usually dependent, i.e. someone with Characteristic A may be more likely to have Characteristic B. For example, if statistics show that 1 in 17 people have their right knee pointing inwards and 1 in 17 have their right foot pointing inwards, it may be tempting to say that 1 in 238 have both pointing inwards. But in the study I pulled that number from, 1 in 27 had both pointing inwards. Unless we can determine the level of dependence for each gait characteristic, we have to treat any frequency estimates with caution.
Gait on an individual can change over time based on: Walking speed, evenness of surface, grade, footwear, whether the person is carrying something, whether the person is trying to avoid obstacles (as in a crowd), minor injuries/aches and pains, clothing, how tired the person is, and even whether they're talking on a cell phone.
The best available method to determine the reliability of gait analysis would be to conduct a study where various practitioners would view video footage similar to what is used in court proceedings. Some clips would be paired with the same individual and others would be paired with different individuals. The results would then be used to calculate false positive and false negative rates. No such study has ever been conducted.
The only similar study that was ever done asked seven "experienced analysts" to match one individual from five examples. The failure rate was 29%.
Ideally, sample data should be reviewed by three independent experts. Expert A reviews the reference sample, Expert B reviews the comparison sample, and Expert C performs the comparison. Ideally, the reference sample should be of the suspect walking in a standardized manner.

Take all that into consideration and further consider that we don't even have a reference sample here. We're talking about two different surveillance videos of varying quality, in one of which the suspect is intentionally wearing bulky clothing, is carrying a backpack, and is moseying at varying speed along a vacant sidewalk. In the other, the accused woman is in a police uniform with all the police accessories wearing different footwear and working in a crowded area. The Blaze hasn't posted the video they're using for comparison, only screenshots of it, and those look like they were taken at an entirely different angle than the surveillance video of the suspect. And they also apparently use video of her playing soccer to make the comparison. I checked my copy of the SEAK, Inc. Expert Witness Directory, and it doesn't have a heading for forensic gait analysts. It has a heading for gait, but most of those are the kind of person you hire if your gait has been affected by a car crash or medical malpractice. The few I could find all had backgrounds in podiatry, orthopedics, neurology, or some related medical field. I don't know what background the "veteran analyst" for The Blaze had because they don't tell us who he is. They don't produce an expert report. They don't even have him discuss the analysis other than mentioning that it's "closer to a 98 percent match". It's not clear who this bozo is or what he did.

And if you're still not convinced that all of this is complete bullshit, keep in mind that this story didn't disappear as soon as we turned over to a new Culture War Roundup. It turns out that Ms. Kerkhoff was already the object of far-right MAGA fringe ire, as she fired pepper balls into the crowd on January 6 and testified in related prosecutions, and has the distinction of being the first witness to testify in the first January 6 prosecution. Her name was not selected at random. In fact, someone had already submitted a tip to her employer and she was placed on administrative leave while the FBI investigated. The FBI had, in fact, cleared her, before the story even ran. She was quickly able to produce video of herself playing with her dogs the night the bombs were planted, and that was the end of it as far as the FBI was concerned. Beck himself, who hyped the story in advance as being among the biggest in his lifetime, was walking it back by Monday, refusing to name the woman on his podcast, reminding listeners that a match did not equal guilt, and saying that she was still a private citizen who was innocent until proven guilty. I think it's safe to say that this story is dead.

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Rov_Scam 1d ago

I hate to break this to you, but when judges order you to pay, they don't give a shit whether you actually have the money or not, and they aren't going to give you guidance on how to get it. You can be flat broke and ordered to pay a million dollars, and the court can do everything from seize bank accounts, foreclose on property, and garnish paychecks until hell freezes over. And government entities don't get some magical exemption from this. But that's all beside the point. He's arguing that he has the right to not spend money appropriated by congress, so maybe use that money? Or maybe just tell the Treasury Department to write a check; he's already got the Supreme Court decision saying he can't be charged with violating any laws that are part of his official duties. However he would have found it, the point is that he didn't spend the money because he didn't want to spend the money. A Democrat would have found a way to get the money. Do you seriously think a Democrat would have made the same excuse?

I suspect this kind of analysis would have predicted 10 of the last 5 Democratic victories.

At what point do I make any predictions? Last year I did and entire post on why I don't make predictions, and why I don't overthink the predictions I do make. That being said, you still have to heed certain warning signs, lest you find yourself whistling past the graveyard, and you still have to capitalize on advantages. I'm not predicting that the Democrats will win in the midterms. I'm saying that Republicans have x, y, and z weaknesses that they need to shore up if they want to have their best chance at winning, and Democrats need to push x,y, and z advantages if they want their best shot at winning. I you don't think that anything I've said is a problem, then fine. I'm some rando on the internet and it's your prerogative to ignore me. But I've made similar criticisms of the Democrats over the past 15 years and was assured by everyone in the bag for them that none of their woke bullshit would ever be a problem.

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Rov_Scam 2d ago

I just looked up Pennsylvania's laws regarding large roadkill and things are more complicated than most people realize. If the deer appears to be dead you're supposed to call PennDOT (if on a state road) or the Game Commission (if on a local road) to remove the animal. If it's alive and hasn't moved from the road or poses a safety risk you're supposed to call the local police, who may in turn have the game commission dispatch it. If it's dead you can take it, but you have to report it to the Game Commission within 24 to get a permit number for it. I'm guessing that this is so people who get reported for having a deer without tags won't get busted for poaching.

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Rov_Scam 2d ago

The most antiwar president imaginable has no control over whether other countries decide to start wars.

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Rov_Scam 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

A few quick hits about the current political situation:

The Republicans have now officially become the party of low-propensity voters. Trump was successful because he was able to tap into a certain demographic that was previously resistant to participating in elections, but to appeal to them he had to sacrifice a significant number of reliable participants. I'm not talking about the mythical never-Trump Republicans, but suburban moderates, swing voters, and independents. I've pointed this out before, but Mt. Lebanon, a wealthy Pittsburgh suburb, used to be reliably Republican area and, while it had been shifting leftward for several years prior, the emergence of Trump turned it into the kind of place with rainbow flags and "In this house we believe" signs. Directly south of there, Upper St. Clair is one of the preeminent "new money" suburbs and was even more reliably Republican until recently, but now is more like 50/50. South of there, Peters Township is wealthy and still reliably Republican, but by that point you're outside of Allegheny County and on the edge of what can plausibly be described as suburban. Exchanging wealthy, reliable voters for poor, unreliable ones may have been a winning strategy for Trump to eke out narrow victories in presidential elections, but the results have been disappointing without Trump on the ballot, and it's unclear how much of a hit the GOP will take in a presidential election without him.
The Democrats' much-maligned caving on the shutdown doesn't look as bad in retrospect. With real pain on the horizon, allowing it to continue indefinitely was a risky prospect, and getting a vote on ACA subsidies was a bigger win than most commentators gave it credit for. Throughout most of the shutdown, the subsidy issue was more of a theoretical problem, with open enrollment only beginning on November 1. When the issue comes to a vote, Open enrollment will have been in full swing for over a month, and cost will be a real issue for a lot of people. Trump has signaled he'd be willing to support some kind of extension, but Republicans in Congress can't really support it. They made their intransigence the central issue of the shutdown, and by voting for it they'd be admitting that they shut down the government for petty reasons. Furthermore, they were trying to scuttle Obamacare from Day One, and now they'e being asked to save it. It's a damned-if-you do situation.
Affordability is still the biggest issue. For any politician, it's a knotty problem, because there's not much that can be done to effectively combat high prices. For Trump it's worse, however, because he took active steps to make the problem worse. The tariffs are the most obvious example, but the ACA subsidies come into play here as well. This is a gift for Democrats, because it not only gives them an issue to run on, but a concrete policy plan; vowing to eliminate the tariffs is something they can actually do that will have some positive effect.
One of the biggest problems I see with Democratic politicians, at least locally, is the complete lack of any ground game. They tend to do well in elections that are actually competitive, but when it comes to reliable Republican seats, the candidates are often whoever is willing to run, and they aren't given much in the way of support from the party. They're basically sacrificial lambs. It's understandable that the party doesn't want to waste resources on races they're sure to lose, but complete abandonment makes it much more difficult to capitalize on potential shifts in opinion, as does allowing unserious candidates to run. I'm talking about people who file the paperwork but don't do anything to promote themselves. No knocking on doors, no appearances at community events, limited presence. They win the people who vote straight Democrat but can't make any inroads with anyone else. This is stuff that is more about commitment of time than of money, and while it's unlikely to be enough to win any given election, it may make enough of a dent to set the table for the future.
Behn's nomination is a textbook example of this. There were better candidates in the primary, but the district was seen as a lost cause and they didn't get any party support. The DSA progressive types seized on Behn being one of their own and poured money into her campaign, allowing her to win the nomination with 27% of the vote. The other candidates split with about 24% each. I'm not one to think that money decides elections, but when they're that close and when the difference in resources is that large, I'm inclined to believe that kicking in some support may have been enough to take one of the others over the top. This isn't to say that they would have won in the general, but with someone that far to the left closing that much of a gap, it isn't beyond the realm of possibility to think that it could have been a lot closer than it was.
Trump's habit of doubling down on unpopular policies following losses beyond his control comes across as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. After a court ruled that SNAP benefits could be withheld, he not only appealed the decision, but said he wanted the states who had paid benefits to return the money. I have no doubt that if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, he's reinstate them with some other justification. He could use these as offramps that avoid the embarrassment of having to retract them himself, and take the issues off the table for the next election. Instead he decides to keep them alive while providing even more ammunition for his opponents.
Incompetence is another angle of attack that the Democrats haven't been taking full advantage of. They want to focus on the vindictive nature of the revenge prosecutions, but Trump can easily counter that by pointing out how he was prosecuted himself for spurious reasons. While those prosecutions certainly had their share of incompetence, one resulted in an almost ruinous damage award and one resulted in a felony conviction. Trump doesn't have any clear wins on this front and a lot of embarrassing losses. I wrote about this last week, but again, he keeps doubling down on this. After the court ruled that Lindsey Halligan's appointment was illegal, the Justice Department told the Eastern District of Virginia that they were to continue signing her name on pleadings. The upshot is that there could be legitimate prosecutions that will now be jeopardized because Trump wanted to make a point.
I don't see Ukraine or Gaza playing much of a role in the election. These aren't wars with direct US involvement, and there are intra-party differences of opinion. For Trump to move the needle on Ukraine he would have to negotiate a deal that was extremely favorable to the Ukrainians, and I doubt that will be forthcoming. Ukraine isn't winning the war, though they may be able to hold out for quite a while. The most likely outcome, aside from a continued stalemate, is some kind of Russian victory, and that doesn't really help anyone. Gaza is technically a settled issue at this point even if the war is realistically continuing, and I don't see it being an issue next year absent major new developments.
Trump calling for Congressmen to be executed for sedition and the various other outrages we talk about a lot here aren't going to play a major role in the elections. These are the kinds of things people get fired up about for a couple weeks and then forget about.
Epstein is an interesting one. I don't see there being anything in the files that will hurt Trump that much, but his reluctance to release the files suggests that he may drag this out as an issue. I suspect that a significant amount of information is going to be withheld due to the ongoing investigation or national security exceptions, and this will keep things in the news. I'm on record as saying that this is one of the stupider scandals of our time, but it seems to have real traction and Trump seems committed to making sure it doesn't go away.
The MTG resignation announcement and hints of other GOP House members considering resigning points to a larger problem with the Republican party than is being talked about. The one thing about the Tweet that struck me was "They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies". Massie and other GOP members have gone on the record about how they are treated like garbage and expected to be nothing more than rubber stamps for Trump, but that quote seems to hint at a deeper problem, where they aren't only expected to do Trump's bidding but to give him credit for their own accomplishments. The current wave of retirements leading to open seats isn't good for them, but what may be worse is if this level of party control carries over into the campaigns themselves. Having to run in spite of an incumbent's unpopular policies isn't ideal but it's doable; just accentuate the positive and run on your own record on issues that are winners and are important to the district. But what if they're expected to run on the issues that Trump thinks is important? What if they have to talk about how great tariffs are, and how their purpose in congress is to push through the Trump agenda? It's been no secret that Trump doesn't give a shit about the party as a whole or what happens after he leaves office, only the glorification of his own massive ego. If Trump tries to direct House campaigns to fit with this mold, it could be a recipe for disaster.
If there's any kind of military action in Venezuela it's over for Trump. I don't think this will happen, but it's pretty clear that Rubio wants it to happen, and a couple targeted airstrikes won't be enough to remove Maduro from power. A sustained military operation would require additional appropriation from congress, and the last time a president was able to get that was in 2003, when 9/11 was still fresh in everyone's memory. Again, it's a damned-if-you do situation for Republicans, because support for such a war is tepid at best, even among Republicans, but Trump would expect his rubber stamp, especially if there are already troops on the ground. Ending the war would just be another no-brainer issue for democrats to run on.

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Rov_Scam 3d ago

By that logic, Biden should be the real anti-war president. He didn't bomb anyone we weren't already bombing, got us out of a war, and wasn't making threats against Greenland, Venezuela, and Canada.

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Rov_Scam 3d ago

Even as a joke, it wore thin pretty quickly. Irony isn't an excuse unless it's worthwhile.

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Rov_Scam 3d ago

In 2006 there were 140,000 US troops in Iraq. By contrast, when the Afghanistan drawdown began there were 5,000 troops stationed there, and there were never many more than 100,000 throughout the war. I picked 2006 because it was a typical mid-war year that wasn't part of a surge or a drawdown. That year we spent $70 billion on the war and suffered 821 killed and over 6400 wounded. You can also add on the 32 billion in Iraqi government spending that they paid for themselves out of oil revenue. Which revenue, by the way, wasn't anywhere near what they needed it to be, since the war was disrupting the supply. With that kind of production, the price of oil would have to be about $140/bbl just for them to pay for security and government funding i.e. it has to be that much just to get to what would be a price of $0 in any other context. Then add all the normal expenses on top of that and you're looking at prices that have never existed just to hit breakeven and not make any money.

And even if it were profitable, profitable for whom? Do you think the US government was going to operate these fields at taxpayer expense and give everyone free gas? No, it was going to give concessions to private companies and charge a royalty, the same as it does on public lands in the US. This was traditionally 12.5%, even as rates crept upward during the fracking boom, and have only gotten up to 16.67% with the Inflation Reduction Act. I spent a decade in the industry and the largest royalty I ever saw on a lease was 20% in the Utica. At any rate, the Iraqi government made about 90 billion in oil revenue last year, but there's no war going on, and the 2006 numbers suggest we can comfortably halve that. So about 45 billion in additional government revenue, against about 100 billion in expenditures. I don't see how this is better than what we got.

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Rov_Scam 3d ago

Except then you're basically committing to a permanent military presence wherever oil is produced, which is throughout the country. You may be okay with that, but selling the war as an effective permanent takeover was never going to be politically tenable. We would have had to commit to nation building as a side effect.

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Rov_Scam 4d ago

It's only a niche talent in the sense that top professionals are skiing on water injected courses that are more bulletproof than anything mother nature will give you outside of an ice storm, but what Westerners consider bulletproof is far from it. Skiing deep powder is the real niche skill, and it's a lot easier to go from ice to powder than vice versa. But breakable crust... Fuck that shit.

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Rov_Scam 4d ago

Like I said, he won't ski in the East, and I can't tolerate him long enough to go out West with him. And no, he's not joking.

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Rov_Scam 4d ago

If it wasn't clear I've never actually skied with the guy so I have no idea.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.

Which parts? It isn't that big, and the only parts of it that I would consider remotely bad are the parts of the island where it's all drug addicts. But he isn't likely to live on the island if he doesn't want to have a car. Parts of it are dumpy for sure, but most of it is completely safe, and it isn't really blighted. If he's looking for actual hellscapes that aren't inside big cities, parts of the Mon Valley are much worse.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

How about e) more about the fact that I find it pleasurable regardless of any of the other factors you mentioned? a is only relevant if you're doing it competitively, and most people aren't. I'm beter at skiing than any of my other hobbies, and I've never raced in my life beyond the extremely casual "race you to the bottom" on an easy run with your friends. b is completely irrelevant, because it only gives you social status with a select few people. The fact that I'm incredibly good at skiing means absolutely zero to people who don't ski because they'll never see me ski, and if they somehow did then the fact that I can go down a moderately difficult run would be as impressive to them as skiing Corbet's Couloir. The only social advantage to being good is that if you want to do it regularly, the kind of person who goes regularly is probably pretty good, and you'll have more fun if you can keep up, but this is still a pretty low bar that anyone can attain with enough practice. c is relevant to an extent, but there are some things I'm never going to be able to do and I'm cool with that. I mountain bike a lot and I can't jump to save my life, despite it being a fairly common skill, and an essential one for riding some lines, but I don't see a future where I'll be able to do it well and I have enough fun not doing it that I don't care if I can. Maybe I'll learn someday but maybe I won't. d can be fun, but I wouldn't consider it essential, and I greatly prefer a world where that's more of a possibility rather than something I have to rely on. I'd prefer easy, reliable access to every trip being a time-consuming slog that had good potential of being a total bust. There may be fewer first ascents or new routes, but for all the people who discovered them there was a lot of trial and error. Driving two hours, getting fully unloaded and set up, only to get a quarter of the way up and realize that the route isn't doable may be a fun adventure if you're doing it every once in a while, but I wouldn't want that to be the outcome of a significant number of trips I took.

If your goal is to actually be good at something relative to the current number of participants, there are plenty of unpopular activities that you can participate in where few enough people participate that you'll have a legitimate shot at being among the best with enough persistence. I'm not talking about obscure shit that nobody has heard of, either, but things that were popular enough at one time to have developed a mature ecosystem but that have faded from popularity. For instance, chess has been continuously popular for centuries, people teach it to kids at an early age, and people competing at the grandmaster level have skills that you never will. But bridge is significantly more difficult. Chess players don't believe me, but you can teach anyone to play chess poorly in under an hour; you need to take lessons and develop your game for months before you'll be able to play bridge with the same level of facility. Even computers can only play at a rudimentary level. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s it was America's most popular card game. A survey from the card manufacturers' trade association done in the 40s showed that 30% of men and nearly half of women played it. In the early 60s there was even a weekly half-hour television show where top players (often business leaders and distinguished politicians) would play each other with strategic analysis provided for the home player. Now, the number of people who know anything about it at all is much lower, and they're all dying off, but it has enough staying power that there are bridge clubs in most cities, international tournaments, daily newspaper columns, and the like. You'll probably never be able to defeat the top players in the game, but being the best bridge player in your town is a distinct possibility.

You may argue that since there's no longer any social status to being good at bridge that doesn't matter, but that's my point; there was no social status associated with being good at cycling, or rock climbing, or whatever, in the 1950s. These things come up periodically. In the 1970s backgammon was popular. In the 1980s there were racquetball places everywhere. Prior to the pandemic it was axe throwing and escape rooms. Since 2020 pickleball seems to be the current thing, though it doesn't require much skill so maybe it has more staying power. Disc golf is difficult enough that people will be mildly impressed if you're good at it but easy enough that you can actually be good at it with enough practice (unlike regular golf, which is impossible for most people). I'm sure there are still Parkour people out there.

But there's a friend of mine who is a much better mountain biker than I will ever be, and he's one of those people who can just pick up new skills easily despite the learning curve. We have another friend who is pretty good at a lot of things as well, but he's completely insufferable about it. He insists he's one of the top C1 canoeists on the East Coast. When we ride mountain bikes with some of his friends, he tells us that we'll be riding with some of the best in Pennsylvania. He refuses to ski at our local mountain because it isn't challenging enough, and unironically claims that whenever he skis in the East he's invariably the best person at the resort. I say "unironically" because this is a common joke on /r/skiing, i.e. people complaining about other skiers while insisting that they're the best person on the mountain. I found out about this on a ski trip with our friends that he couldn't attend, and I insisted that I was better than he was (which I genuinely believed) if only because I ski regularly and he hadn't in years. This led to my friends joking that I must be one of the top 3 skiers on the East Coast (which I am most assuredly not). As to my first friend, he told me once that if you're going to say that you're better than any other dedicated amateur (except maybe a total beginner), that you'd better be doing it for a living. And I'm inclined to agree with him.

The upshot of all of this is that the opportunities are much, much greater now than they were in 1959. I said in another post that if you were into the outdoors back then, hunting and fishing were pretty much it. Anything else was a niche activity that was expensive and difficult to learn. These things became more easily accessible beginning in the 1970s and have increased in popularity since then. Yes, it may have been easier to be among the best back when few people did the activity in question, but you wouldn't have had the conceptual knowledge to even think of doing it. There's probably something that exists now that will become popular in a decade that you can get on the bleeding edge of, but you won't, because unless you're in some niche group where you find out about it, or invent it yourself, you're not even going to think of doing it.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

That's basically the same argument that a certain type of degrowth leftist makes. If relative wealth is all that matters, then economic development in and of itself doesn't make sense because it just increases the treadmill. The only way to improve society as a whole is through fundamentals, which would include redistributing wealth to blunt the pain of being at the low end of the economic totem pole.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

It probably wouldn't have even been that, though. French food didn't become popular in the United States until Julia Child made it so, and even then a lot of her recipes are modified based on what was available to the typical American (good luck finding pancetta in 1962). If you want an idea of what fine dining looked like during the postwar era, here's a menu from The Brown Derby in Los Angeles from 1948. You can see that it's mostly basic meat and seafood dishes. Few Americans in 2025 would be willing to pay the equivalent of $30 for what amounts to a country-fried chicken breast with gravy and consider it fine dining.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

By that logic, being the chieftain of a hunter-gatherer tribe, or an ancient Assyrian king, would be preferable to living in the modern age; in other words, any era has technological improvements that seem impressive at the time. If people in 2125 have it better than we do now, then it's preferable to live in the future. But we don't know what things will be like then. We do know what things were like in the 1950s, and just because they seemed amazing at the time, they were objectively worse on almost every metric. In 1900 it would have been a big deal to have electricity, the telephone, and the phonograph record. In 1850 it would have been a big deal to have access to cheap textiles and mass-produced farming implements. But go back to then and you get a worse standard of living than people in the poorest parts of the world have today. If you think that the standard of living for a rich man is preferably, that can be achieved for a relatively modest sum of money in today's terms.

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Rov_Scam 5d ago

In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.

Camping gear, miuntain bikes, etc, might not be as light or as good as today, but many natural areas were potentially much better in the 50s.

Mountain biking didn't start until the 1970s, and that was people racing old beach cruisers they called "clunkers" down fire roads in Marin County. There weren't any purpose-built mountain bikes until the 1980s, and these were rigid. You wouldn't get any kind of suspension until the very end of the decade, and it wasn't common until the 1990s.

Natural areas were decidedly not better in the 1950s. Especially in the East, most of what is now forest had been clear-cut prior to 1930 and there was still a lot of farmland. There was more forested area in the 1950s, but a lot of this was still in early successional stages. There was also a lot of unremediated contamination from mining and other activities. There were 44 state parks in Pennsylvania in 1956, compared to 124 today. I collect old outdoor books, and the equipment available was of a decidedly rudimentary nature. Pretty much everything aside from hunting and fishing was a specialized activity that wouldn't gain much traction until the 1970s. Whitewater, for instance, didn't really exist outside the Grand Canyon until 1964. Most first descents of whitewater streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were done in the late 1960s (I know some of the participants personally, although they all insist that these weren't first descents but very early descents). Back then, they found where to paddle based on looking at USGS topo maps for steams with sufficient gradient and didn't know what to expect when they got there; som traveled long distances to find streams that were unrunnable. Now anyone can go on American Whitewater and find stream information, including runnable levels.

The point of all of this is that even if some of this stuff was theoretically possible, the conceptual knowledge that allows us to enjoy it now simply didn't exist back then.

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Rov_Scam 6d ago

To be clear, that wasn't an executive order. The administration announced that DOE would be pausing issuance of new permits while they reviewed the process, but there wasn't anything official that was signed by the president, unless you include an official announcement on the White House website. I have no idea whether this is something that DOE would have had to consult with the president about before doing, or how much involvement Biden had, or whether it's something his communications team decided the administration would take credit for.

I'd also mention that there's a fundamental disconnect between what oil companies want and what consumers want, and the GOP seems to regularly conflate these interests. I spent a decade in the oil and gas industry, and we are happier the higher prices are. This isn't any different from most industries. But there's political pressure to keep prices as low as possible. The policy would have the natural consequence of putting downward pressure on natural gas prices by limiting the industry's ability to export. This may have been bad for the industry but good for consumers. If increased feasibility of exports were to cause prices to quadruple, I don't think most Americans would be saying "Thank God that the oil and gas industry is doing well!"; no, they'd be bitching about high costs, as they should be. I don't even think most Americans would agree that gas prices should have some kind of floor to ensure that the industry maintains a minimum degree of profitability. I don't know whether the policy in question was any good on a fundamental level, but you can sell it either way.

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Rov_Scam 7d ago

Let me try to restate my argument, because I think we're talking past each other. What kind of test are you going to have and what is it going to entail? What I'm getting at is: What percentage of 11-year-olds crossing over is it going to exclude? 80%? 90% 50%? It honestly doesn't matter what number you pick, because unless you're only selecting for the top 1% you're using a test that any 14-year-old is going to be able to pass easily unless he's fat, special needs, etc. IF you're talking about a troop, where you do the full complement of scout activities and advance towards Eagle, you need a steady pipeline from Cubs, or the troop withers and dies. I've seen power struggles before where the Cubmaster loses faith in the local troop and sends the kids elsewhere, and it takes a long time for the troop to recover, if it can at all. So any troop that decides to exclude is at a disadvantage initially, even if their reputation enables them to draw from a wider geographic area.

But all you've really done is exclude for an 11-year-old with the fitness of a below average 14-year-old. And any 14-year-old who is that out of shape doesn't want to do the more difficult activities anyway. The goal of Venturing is to move away from advancement and focus on high-adventure group activities. Selecting for motivated 14-year-olds does a better job than selecting for fit 11-year-olds, and since advancement is an afterthought the group can focus on activities. I haven't seen any Venture crews who participated in my programs that included people who shouldn't have been there. I saw more 14-year-olds who could pass a fitness test but were some combination of lazy, unskilled, or petulant, while these kids never seemed to show up in Venturing. In any organization that relies on people acting locally (rather than the council-level program), some groups are going to be more active than others. I don't think creating a new kind of class is going to do anything, and in the years I spent heavily involved in Scouting and Venturing, nothing led me to believe that something like this would have any benefit.

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Rov_Scam 7d ago

What you're talking about already exists. They're just called Venture Crews, and they don't have any fitness tests and are variable in how active they are. Realistically, 11 is too young for them to make that kind of choice. Even if the kid can pass some kind of test, they aren't going to keep up. My program was geared toward Venture crews and older scouts and while there were a few 12 and 13 year olds who slipped through for various reasons and invariably did fine, there's generally a pretty clear skill progression with age, and when I worked with younger kids on the side there's no way I'd want them anywhere near my program as a matter of course. If you were to try to separate these kids out right after crossing over all but a few would go to normal troops and the pipeline would dry up pretty quickly because no one wants to join a troop without their friends. Aside from the fitness test, nothing is preventing anyone from starting a troop like this as it is, but saying you want to be more active runs up against the reality that it requires active adult leaders and kids who are also willing to put in the work as far as planning is concerned. Last year I had to tag along with my old troop because a few kids wanted to get the cycling merit badge and needed a second adult to go on the 50-miler. The first adult was a 22-year-old who hung around after aging out. I hadn't been involved with the troop in 20 years. None of the dads were willing to ride 50 miles, even if the scouts were. And by the end of the ride, the kids, who were all fit and reasonably active, looked like they never wanted to sit on a bike again. I think it's easy to sit here as adults and think of what we would have like d in retrospect, forgetting that we weren't always stronger than we are now and didn't have as much tolerance for pain as we do now.

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