Rov_Scam's profile

Rov_Scam 7d ago

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

For a while I've wanted to do a comprehensive survey of a city to examine it in terms of urbanism and the principles of what make a place a good place to live. In particular, I want to examine what makes certain places "trendy", and what causes some neighborhoods to gentrify while others stagnate or even decline. Most examinations of the urban environment are merely case-studies of a few neighborhoods that have seen change in the past several decades, for better or worse. But I think that those kinds of studies, while instructive, miss the big picture. Most cities are composed of dozens of neighborhoods, each with its own story and its own potential, and most are simply forgotten about. I've selected Pittsburgh for this exercise, for the simple reason that I live here and can talk about it as an insider rather than someone relying on news reports. You can talk statistics until the end of time, but the only way to properly evaluate a place is if you have a pulse on what the common perception of it is from those who are familiar with it. Before I get to the neighborhoods themselves, though, I want to give some preliminary information about the city so those who are unfamiliar (i.e. almost everyone here) can get the view from 10,000 feet. It also gives me the opportunity to present a few general themes that I've noticed during the months I spent researching this project. Note to mods: A lot of this survey will touch on a number of culture war items like crime, homelessness, housing, density, traffic patterns, etc. For that reason, I'm posting this in the culture war thread for now. That being said, there will be large sections where I look at nondescript parts of the city where I expect the discussion to be more anodyne, and I don't want to be hogging the bandwidth of this thread, especially in the unlikely event that I can crank out more than one of these per week. I can't really anticipate in advance what's most appropriate where, but I'd prefer to post these as stand-alone threads once I get past this initial post. If the mods have a preference for where I post these, I'll adhere to that.

I. The Setting Pittsburgh exists in a kind of no-man's land. It's technically in the Northeast, but people from New York, Philadelphia, and the like insist that it's actually more Midwestern. They may have a point; we're six hours from the nearest ocean, and the Appalachian Mountains are a significant barrier to transportation and development. No megalopolis will ever develop between Pittsburgh and Philly, and we're much closer to places like Cleveland and Columbus. We're also not assholes. That being said, nobody here thinks of themself as Midwestern. First, it's possibly the least flat major city in the US. Second, most Midwestern cities act as quasi-satellites of Chicago in the way that Pittsburgh simply doesn't. Additionally, being in the same state as Philadelphia makes us much closer politically and economically to that area than we are to places that may be closer geographically. Some people try to split the difference and say that Pittsburgh is an Appalachian city, but this isn't entirely correct, either; Pittsburgh is at the northern end of what can plausibly be called Appalachia, and is a world away from the culture of places like East Tennessee. There are close ties to West Virginia, but these are more due to proximity than anything else; for most of that state, Pittsburgh is the closest major city of any significance, which is reflected in things like sports team affiliation. And the Northern Panhandle (and associated part of Ohio) is practically an exurb of Pittsburgh, with a similar development pattern around heavy industry. But for the most part, West Virginia swings toward us rather than us swinging toward them.

The physical landscape can best be described as extremely hilly. For reference, I describe a "hill" as any eminence that rises less than about 700–1000 feet above the surrounding valley, with anything in that range or higher being a mountain. The area is built on a plateau that has been heavily dissected by erosion. Relief is low to moderate, ranging from about 200 feet in upland areas to 400 feet in the river valleys. The natural history results in an area where the hilltops are all roughly the same height, about 1200–1300 feet above sea level, while the valleys range from a low of 715 feet at the point to about 900–1000 feet at the headwaters of the streams. And there are streams everywhere. The most prominent ones are the three rivers (the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio), but there are innumerable creeks that spiderweb across the landscape. The upshot is that flat land is rare around here, and traditional patterns of urban development are difficult to impossible. Most people live on hillsides since the little flat land available is often in floodplains. Roads are windy and difficult to navigate; you may miss a turn and think that if you make the next turn you'll eventually wind up where you want to be. Instead, you find yourself winding down a long hill and end up in one of three places: In view of Downtown from an angle you've never seen before, at the junction with a state highway whose number you've never heard of, or in West Virginia.

What this means for the urban environment is that neighborhoods are more distinct than they are in other cities. While flat cities have neighborhoods that blend into one another seamlessly, Pittsburgh's are often clearly delineated, with obvious boundaries. The city is defined by its topography. One advantage of this is that a lot of the land is simply too steep to be buildable, even taking into consideration that half the houses are already built on land that one would presume is too steep to be buildable. The result is a lot of green space. Another advantage is that it means you get views like this from ground level. The actual green space itself is typical of a temperate deciduous forest, but with a couple of caveats — there's plenty of red maple, sugar maple, red oak, white oak, black cherry, black walnut, and other similar species, but not as much beech as you'd see in areas further north, and not as much hickory as you'd see in areas further south. There are conifers but most of them are planted landscaping trees. White pine and eastern hemlock are native to the area, but they're much more common in the mountains to the east. I should also note that the topography means that there are some weird corners of the city that have an almost backwoods hillbilly feel.

II. The Region

I'd describe the larger region as a series of concentric rings. First is the city proper, which is small for a city of its size. While that seems like a tautology, what I mean is that the actual city limits are, well, limited, giving the city itself a proportionately low population compared to the total metro area. This is because PA state law changes in the early 20th century made it difficult for the city to annex additional territory. The result is that the boundaries were fixed relatively early in the era when America was urbanizing rapidly, and only sporadic additions were made thereafter. The next ring would be what I call the urban core. This is the area where the density and age of the housing gives what are technically suburbs a more urban feel than traditional suburbs; in many cases, these suburbs feel more urban than the later-developed parts of the city proper. These would include typical inner-ring streetcar suburbs, though Pittsburgh has fewer of these than most cities of its size. Most of the areas thus described are towns that developed as the result of industrial concerns, or suburbs of such towns. These are most prominent to the city's immediate east, and also include the innumerable river towns in the river valleys. These towns extend along the rivers for a considerable distance, but there's an area close to the city where they form an unbroken geographic mass. If not for limitations on expansion, they would likely be part of the city itself.

Next, we obviously have the true suburbs, by which I mean areas that developed after World War II but still revolve around Pittsburgh more than a regional satellite. Then we have the exurbs, which I define as areas that are developed, but more sporadically, and are often revolve around a satellite county seat rather than Pittsburgh itself. This is the area where couples looking for an extended date will get a hotel in the city for the weekend (My family makes fun of my brother for doing this because he lives in one of these areas but always insists that he's close. Nevermind that it would be ridiculous for any of us to get a hotel room in Pittsburgh if we weren't planning on getting seriously wasted.) Finally, we have the much broader greater co-prosperity sphere, which is roughly everywhere that falls within Pittsburgh's general influence, be it rooting for sports teams to being the destination when you need to go to a hospital that isn't crappy.

III. History I'll try to make this as quick as possible, since there are obviously better, more comprehensive sources for people who want more than a cursory review. The city was ostensibly founded when the British drove out the French during the French and Indian War and established Fort Pitt. The war began largely as a contest between the British and the French for control over the Ohio Valley, a vital link between the interior northeast and the Mississippi River. The site of Pittsburgh was particularly strategic, as it was at the confluence of two navigable rivers. The surrounding hills were rich in coal; combine this with the favorable river network, and the location was perfect for the nation's burgeoning iron and steel industry. This new wave of prosperity attracted waves of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who later came to define the region. A number of satellite industries developed as well, including glass (PPG), aluminum (Alcoa), chemicals (Koppers, PPG), electrical products (Westinghouse), natural gas (EQT), etc. Pittsburgh's place as an industrial powerhouse continued until the triple whammy of the energy crisis, inflation, and the Reagan recession sparked a wave of deindustrialization that turned America's Rhineland into the Rust Belt. By the '90s the region was bleeding jobs, and much of the working-age population decamped for the Sun Belt. The outright population loss has stabilized in recent years, but the region is still slowly losing population.

The odd thing about this, though, is that in 1985, at what should have been the city's nadir, it started ranking high on the "liveability" lists that were becoming popular. The city had been making a concerted effort to reduce pollution since the '50s, and by the early 2000s it had become a bit of a trendy place to live. I don't want to speculate too much on why this is, but I think there are a few factors at play. First, the crime is low for a rust belt city; there aren't too many really bad areas, and the ones that exist are small and isolated. What this means is that there is a certain freedom of movement that you don't have in other Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Detroit with large swathes of ghetto. Even in the worst areas, the only time you might find yourself in trouble is if you visit one both at night and on foot. Even the worst areas are fine to walk around in the daytime and I wouldn't worry about driving through anywhere, which is more than I can say about friends of mine's experiences in Cleveland or Chicago. Second, the housing stock is more East Coast than Midwest. Many of the neighborhoods have architectural character, as opposed to other Rust Belt cities that are nothing but rows of nearly identical derelict frame houses (though we have plenty of those, too). Third, the housing is actually affordable. People have been bitching in recent years about significant price increases, but it's still nowhere near the level the major East Coast cities or the trendy western cities. Years ago I met a girl who moved here from New York because she wanted to live in a brick row house but it was simply unattainable where she was. She looked at Baltimore and Philadelphia, which are true row house cities, but the ones she could afford were all in the endless expanses of ghetto. In Pittsburgh, meanwhile, you could snatch a renovated nee in a good area up for well under $200k, and rehabs were being sold for under $50k. You aren't getting them for anywhere near that now, but $500k gets you a nice house in the city, and if you want to do the suburbs you pretty much have your pick of 4BR 2000 square foot homes in excellent school districts. Finally, the outdoor recreation is better than you're going to get in a city of comparable size or larger anywhere east of Denver, and the hotspots don't get the crowds that the western areas do. In the Northeast you have to drive a lot father to get anywhere, and the places are busier. In the Midwest the cities are surrounded by corn, and the areas worth visiting are few and far between. In Pittsburgh, the mountains are only about an hour away, and the general area is hilly enough and forested enough that a typical county park has better hiking than anything within driving distance of Chicago. The mountain biking and whitewater are nonpareil, and that's still a secret to most locals.

I've gone a bit off track here, but I want to make one general observation that I've noticed when studying the history of the city: Everything changes all the time, and there are no meta-narratives. The first statement may seem obvious, but when discussing urban dynamics, people often act like there was some golden era where everything was in stasis, and if we're still in that era then any change is bad and disruptive, and if we're not in that era then any change should be aiming to get back to that era. The meta-narrative is simpler: American cities developed in the 19th century, and grew rapidly during the industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was largely due to high immigration. Few had cars, so people needed to live close to where they worked, and public transit networks were robust. Blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, and this was a problem. After The War, people started moving to the suburbs, a process which was hasted by not wanting to live alongside black people, who were gradually getting better access to housing. This white-flight drained cities of their economic base, and the new suburban commuters demanded better car access to the city core. Once decent neighborhoods were turning into black ghettos. The response of municipal leaders was to engage in a number of ill-advised "urban renewal" projects that which were blatant attempts to lure white people back into the city by resegregating the blacks into housing projects so they could build white elephant projects and superhighways. Then in the 90s hipsters were invented and they looked longingly at the urban lifestyle. Hip artist types moved into ghettos because they liked the old architecture, could afford the rent, and were too cool racially to be concerned about black crime. Some of them opened small businesses and white people started visiting these businesses, and the neighborhood became a cool place to live. By 2010, though, that neighborhood was expensive and all the cool spots were replaced by tony bars and chain stores and all the bohemes had to find another neighborhood. Meanwhile, the poor blacks who lived here before the hipsters showed up started complaining about being displaced from their homes, and now the same hipsters who "gentrified" the neighborhood are concerned about the effects of reinvestment on long-time residents.

This narrative probably fits somewhere, but the reality is often more complicated. One common refrain I heard from older people in the '90s was "neighborhood x used to be a nice place to live and now it's a terrible slum". Usually, the old person in question was the child of an immigrant who grew up in the neighborhood but decamped to the suburbs in the '50s. She'd return regularly to visit her parents, and watch what she saw as the decline of the neighborhood firsthand. The problem with this is that most of the neighborhoods I heard people talk about like this growing up were always slums. The only thing that changed about them was that they got blacker and don't have the business districts that they once did. Second, in Pittsburgh at least, the changing demographics in some neighborhoods is more in relative terms than in absolute ones. While some places did see an increase in the black population in the second half of the 20th century, most places did not. Before World War 2, Pittsburgh only had one truly black neighborhood, and even that was more diverse than one would expect. Blacks normally lived in racially mixed neighborhoods alongside Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. of similar economic standing. The changing demographics were oftentimes caused more by whites leaving than blacks moving in. It's also worth noting that some areas went downhill long before any of the factors cited in the meta-narrative really kicked in. People tend to be ignorant of urban dynamics in the first half of the 20th Century, which is viewed as this juggernaut of urban growth. No one considers that a neighborhood might have peaked in 1910 and gone into decline thereafter, because the meta-narrative doesn't allow for it. But in Pittsburgh, I see these sorts of things time and time again.

IV. The Housing Stock I mentioned housing stock in the last section, but I want to go into a bit more detail here because it's important when evaluating a neighborhood's potential for future growth. When Pittsburgh was first settled, most of the housing was simple frame stock. Most of this is gone, but, contrary to what one might think, the little that's left isn't particularly desirable. These houses tend to be small and in bad condition, essentially old farmhouses from when most of the current city was rural. Later in the 19th century, brick row houses were built in the neighborhoods that were relatively flat lowlands. Almost every row house neighborhood in the city is desirable, as these neighborhoods have a dense, urban feel. It should be noted, though, that through most of the 20th century this was housing for poor people, as most middle-class and above felt these were outdated.

Also from around this time is the Pittsburgh mill house. These are similar to what you'd find in most Rust Belt cities, and are proof that not all old housing has "character". These were houses built on the cheap and have often been extensively remuddled to keep them habitable. Most of these in the city aren’t exactly true mill houses, as they weren’t built by steel companies as employee housing, but most 19th and early 20th century frame houses fit the same mold. These were mostly built on hillsides and hilltops where building row houses was impractical. Not a particularly desirable style.

Combining the two is the frame row. These were built during a period in the early 20th Century when the area was experiencing a brick shortage. They aren't as desirable as brick rows but still have more cachet than mill houses, although the purpose for which they were built is similar. Most of these were remuddled at some point (by this I mean things like plaster walls torn out in favor of wood paneling and drop ceilings, window frames modified to fit different sizes, wood siding replaced with aluminum siding or Inselbric, awnings, etc.). By the 1920s and 1930s, the classic streetcar suburban style took over. These include things like foursquares and bungalows, the kind of stuff you see in old Sears catalogs. The brick shortage had ended by this period and the houses were larger and better-appointed, making them popular for middle-class areas. The remuddling on these was limited, and they’re highly desirable. After the war, more suburban styles took over, though by this point the city limits were mostly built-out so they aren’t as common as other styles. Most of the suburban stuff was built during the first decade after the war in odd parts of the city that were too isolated to have been developed earlier, though a fair deal was built in neighborhoods that were rapidly declining into ghetto in an attempt at stabilization. There’s nothing wrong with these houses in and of themselves, but they aren’t particularly desirable, as this is exactly the kind of development urbanists hate most.

There are obviously other styles, but the rest of the housing is either multi-family or infill housing that may or may not have been built with consideration given to the vibe of the existing neighborhood. The city has gotten better in recent years about building new houses to match what’s already there, but there are plenty of hideous miscues out there.

V. Neighborhood Dynamics

Pittsburgh is roughly divided into four geographic quadrants, based on the points of the compass. The East End roughly includes anything between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, and is where most of the trendy neighborhoods are. The North Side is anything north of the Allegheny; the neighborhoods in the flat plain along the river are mostly desirable, if less obnoxiously trendy. The South Hills are roughly everything south of the Monongahela; most of it isn’t trendy at all. The West End is everything south of the Ohio, and is beyond not trendy; it’s basically terra incognita to most Pittsburghers, as the neighborhoods are boring and obscure.

Pittsburgh officially recognizes 90 distinct neighborhoods, but the official geography isn’t entirely accurate. First, the official boundaries are based on census tracts that don’t always line up neatly with a neighborhood’s generally-accepted boundaries. Second, there are a number of bogus or semi-bogus neighborhood designations. Large neighborhoods are often split up into smaller geographic divisions (e.g. North Haverbrook, South Haverbrook, etc.) that may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. Conversely, some neighborhoods include areas that everyone treats as distinct neighborhoods but are officially unrecognized. Some neighborhoods had their names changed because the residents didn’t want to be associated with a declining part of the neighborhood; in some cases these new names caught on but other times they didn’t. For this project, I will be discussing the neighborhoods based on what makes sense to me based on having lived here all my life and knowing how people actually treat the matter. When necessary, I will use historic designations that don’t necessarily match up with the official maps, but this is rare. I will always make reference to the official designations to avoid confusion for those following along at home.

As I was examining the neighborhoods in detail in preparation for this project, a few things jumped out at me with regard to gentrification, stability, and decline. First, a gentrifying neighborhood needs a relatively intact business district. This could be nothing more than boarded up storefronts, but the physical structures need to be there; there has to be some indication that the place has potential, and it’s much easier for businesses to move in when they don’t have to build. Some depressed areas lost practically their entire business districts to blight, while others never really had a business district to begin with. This second scenario decreases the chances of gentrification even further, as there is often no logical place to even put a business district. The presence of a business district is important for two reasons. First, walkability is a huge selling point for people who want to live in a city as opposed to suburbs, and an area that’s dense but unwalkable is the worst of both worlds. Second, neglected neighborhoods don’t get “on the map”, so to speak, unless there’s something to draw in outsiders. Related to the above, there are two general kinds of businesses that can occupy a business district. The first are what I call Functional Businesses — grocery stores, dry cleaners, corner bars, banks, professional offices, hardware stores, etc. The second are Destination Businesses — restaurants, breweries, boutiques, trendy bars, specialty stores, performance venues, and other miscellaneous stuff that will actually draw people in from outside the neighborhood. There's obviously a continuum here, as, for example, a coffee shop could be either depending on how much it distinguishes itself, but you get the idea. Both are essential for a neighborhood to fully take off. There are plenty of areas with perfectly functional business districts that don’t get a second look because there’s no reason for anyone who doesn’t already live there to go there. But if a neighborhood consists exclusively of destination businesses then it will feel more like a tourist area than a real neighborhood; it’s a hard sell for someone to move to a place where they can get artisanal vinegar but not a can of baked beans. Often, the presence of a robust functional business district will stymie a neighborhood’s potential for gentrification. One thing I’ve noticed is that destination businesses rarely replace functional businesses, usually moving into abandoned storefronts or replacing other destination businesses. Functional businesses just sort of exist and don’t move out until the neighborhood has declined past the point of no return.

As I mentioned in the previous section, housing stock is another major contributor to gentrification potential. Urban pioneers have to look at a neglected neighborhood and see the potential to return to a faded glory. Houses that are worth restoring, not dumps that should have been torn down ages ago. The one exception to this is the spillover factor; if a neighborhood with bad housing stock is close to other gentrified neighborhoods that have great amenities but have become too expensive, nearby neighborhoods will get a boost from this, especially if they have intact business districts.

On the other side of the equation, decline follows displacement. The story of declining neighborhoods in Pittsburgh follows a pattern. First, in the 1950s and 1960s, civic visionaries sought to clear slums by replacing them with ambitious public works projects. Forced out of their homes, the residents of these slums needed somewhere to go, and moved to working class neighborhoods that were already in a state of instability, if not minor decline. (It should be noted that slum clearance was much rarer in Pittsburgh than in other cities, though some wounds still run deep). More recently, the city has demolished public housing projects that had become crime-ridden hellholes, but their problems only spilled out into low-rent, working class neighborhoods. What results is a game of whack-a-mole, where revitalization of one area simply leads to the decline of another. That’s why I’ve been less critical of low-income set-asides than I was in the past. I used to be totally free market on the housing issue, but it seems like an inflexible standard only ensures that poverty will remain concentrated, which does little to improve the situation of the poor. Section 8 was supposed to address this problem by getting people out of public housing hellholes and into regular neighborhoods, but it’s only worth it for slumlords in declining areas to accept the vouchers, and the result is that entire neighborhoods go Section 8. I grant that it’s better than things were previously, but I think things could be better still if we agreed that every neighborhood was going to subsidize the housing of a certain number of poor people. That way we can at least make it so the honest, hard working people don’t suffer unnecessarily, and the kids grow up in a more positive social environment. Maybe I’m being too idealistic, but it seems better than any of the existing alternatives.

Finally, a brief note on stability. Stable middle-class or working-class areas tend to be boring areas that are too far away from bad areas for any spillover or displacement to affect them. There may be some long-term factors that may lead to their eventual demise, but there are no obvious causes for concern. The flip side is that as much as some of these places have been touted as the next big thing, the same factors that keep them from going down also keep them from going up. One factor playing into this is the number of owner-occupied houses and long-term rentals. New residents, whatever their economic condition, simply can’t move into a neighborhood if there are few rentals and little turnover in ownership.

VI. The Neighborhood Grading Rubric

The initial goal for this project was to discuss what the future holds for these neighborhoods, and to discuss special considerations that factor into the whole thing (actually, it will mostly be about special considerations, at least for the big neighborhoods). One thing that’s important to this exercise is to discuss where the neighborhoods are at now. I initially developed a complex classification system, then scrapped it because it was too complicated and still didn’t explain everything. But as I got to thinking about it, I decided that some sort of grading was necessary to put things in proper perspective rather than rely on qualitative description. So I developed a much simpler rubric that should catch everything. I would note that the below isn’t to be construed as a ranked desirability ranking, although it will be made apparent that some of the categories only describe undesirable areas.

Upper Middle Class: This includes upper class as well, but truly upper class areas are rare enough to make this a distinction without a difference. These are highly desirable but may have gone past the point of trendiness to the point of blandness (though not necessarily). These include places where gentrification reached the point where it’s all chain stores, but also places that never really gentrified because they were always nice.

Gentrifying: These are the hotspots that everyone knows about. What separates them from the upper middle class areas, even if they are more expensive, is a sense of dynamism and a raffish air. Students and bohemian types still live here. There may be older working class homeowners who never left, and poor renters who haven’t been forced out yet. There may still be a few rehabs for sale at somewhat decent prices. Most of the businesses are locally owned, and it probably still has a functional business district from the old days.

Early Gentrification: This is the point where a neighborhood starts making the transition from working-class or poor to middle-class or trendy, but isn’t quite there yet. Most of the businesses are functional, but there are a few cool places for those in the know. The hipsters are starting to move in. People are buying derelict houses at rock-bottom prices and fixing them up. But the normies don’t know about it yet; tell most suburbanites you’re going to a bar there and they either think you’re going to get your wallet stolen or wonder why you want to hang around old people. The neighborhood is still rough around the edges, and may still have a decent amount of crime and a high minority population. It probably still looks rather shabby. It’s perfectly safe for those with street smarts, but it’s still sketchy enough that you wouldn’t recommend it to tourists.

Stable: Not necessarily boring, but not going anywhere. There’s probably a good functional business district, but few destination businesses. Every once in a while one of the destination businesses might become popular enough that people think the whole neighborhood is going to go off, but it never seems to happen. And that’s if it’s lucky. The upside, though, is it’s very safe, and affordable to buy here. This also includes middle-class black areas that suburban whites assume are hood but are actually rather quiet.

Early Decline: These are the neighborhoods that just don’t seem like they used to. Crime is up, property values are down, and the houses are starting to get unkempt. Most of the long-term residents are elderly, and the newer residents are transients who are of a distinctly different class than the elderly ones. They may be blacks who were displaced from nearby ghettoes, or they may be white trash. There’s increasingly conspicuous drug activity, but no gangs yet. There still may be a functional business district, but there is rarely anything destination, maybe an old neighborhood institution that is still hanging on. These are perfectly fine to rent in if you don’t mind a little excitement in your life, since they’re still relatively safe for normal people, but they aren’t places you want to commit to.

Rapid Decline: This is the point where gang activity has become a problem, and gunshots are no longer a rare occurrence. If there was a white working class here they’re now dead and gone, and if there was a black middle class they’re very old. Residential sections are starting to see blight and abandoned houses. There’s still probably a reasonably intact business district, but it’s entirely functional at this point and mostly caters to stereotypical ghetto businesses. It is, however, still well populated.

Ghetto: A neighborhood that has bottomed out; it can’t get any worse than this unless it disappears entirely, which seems almost inevitable at this point. Few intact blocks remain. If there’s any business district left it’s scattered remnants (though there’s almost always some kind of newsstand). There’s probably gang activity, but there’s little territory worth defending. The atmosphere is desolate and bleak, as the remaining residents are only here because there’s nowhere else to go. Crime, while still a problem, is probably lower here than one would think, simply because there aren’t too many people here to be criminals, and equally few available victims.

The below ones are special cases that don’t fit into the above continuum particularly well.

Deceptively Safe: These are areas that look sketchy as hell but are actually decent places to live. They are usually poor neighborhoods where the properties are in somewhat shabby condition but are occupied. Unique to Pittsburgh (probably), this also includes places that look like part of West Virginia was transported into the middle of the city. These are mostly very small micro-neighborhoods that are poor but just don’t have the population or foot traffic to support any serious crime. Buy low, sell low.

Projects: Pittsburgh has a few “project neighborhoods” that only really exist because it built most of its public housing in odd places where nobody wanted to build before. Most of these projects don’t exist anymore, so saying these are invariably bad areas is a misnomer, especially since one of the few remaining projects is a senior citizen high rise. Most of these are an odd mix of different uses that merit individual treatment.

Student Areas: Transient population, unmaintained properties, exorbitant rent for what you get, multiple unrelated people living together common, noise, public drunkenness, vandalism — everything a real ghetto has except violent crime and gang activity. This doesn’t describe all student areas, but areas where the percentage of students reaches a certain threshold have a much different dynamic than regular neighborhoods. First, these areas are relatively safe considering how dysfunctional they are in every other respect, and second, while the properties are in poor condition, there is little blight or abandonment because the slumlords know they have a captive audience. Also, the presence of a university usually means that the area sees a lot of outside visitors so more destination businesses develop, and there are plenty of places catering to students. Altogether a unique dynamic, though no one not in college would even consider living here.

That’s it for the preliminaries, stay tuned for Part I, where I discuss Downtown and the other “tourist areas” in its vicinity.

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Rov_Scam 3d ago

People really need to quit with the whole "land acknowledgment" thing. According to a professor friend of mine, it's fairly common in the world of academia for things like panel discussions to open with them. Because they're not giving the land back, it's almost like they're rubbing their faces in it. It reminds me of the part in the Always Sunny in Philadelphia Christmas special where Mac learns that all his childhood Christmas gifts were stolen, so they take his robot toy to one of his old friends to apologize, but they don't give it back. And he says "so you brought something that you stole from me just to show it to me?"

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Rov_Scam 2d ago

I don't think China is going to stop selling to the US just because they might integrate the materials into weapons that will be sent to Ukraine. China is pro Russian, but not that pro Russian.

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Rov_Scam 11d ago

Mass shootings in the popular conscience mean shootings where random innocent people are targeted either for unknown reasons or because someone doesn't like a particular group. These were all shootings where specific people were targeted for specific reasons, probably drug-related. These stories usually get decent local coverage but some gang beef in Memphis isn't likely to concern people a thousand miles away like it would if the same guy shot the same people at a shopping mall for no reason.

Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.

Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public, and in a society where accused criminals have rights, we don't excuse police shootings just because the victim was probably a piece of shit. We expect the police to have better judgment and self-control than the criminals. When someone is killed while in police custody it raises questions about the proper role of police and use of police force that simply doesn't come into play when one random civilian murders another random civilian. Pointing out black-on-black crime in response to police violence is an exercise in futility because it ignores the dilemma that people in violent neighborhoods face — they don't want to deal with criminals on the streets, but it's hard for them to trust the police when they treat everyone like criminals.

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Rov_Scam 17d ago

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the reality on the ground. You can talk all you want about some theoretical shared history and kinship among whoever he considers white people, but it has little tangible effect on my everyday life. Compare me to an American black person — we speak the same language, share similar religions (i.e. we're both Christian), consume similar pop culture, eat the same food, etc.Why should I feel more of a sense of kinship with a Finn? He speaks a different language, has never been to my country, let alone my city, has no sense of shared civic responsibility, no sense of my country's history, and he's probably never even eaten peanut butter before. If a random black guy from Pittsburgh ends up in my living room, I guarantee I'll be able to relate to him better than a random guy from Finland with whom all I really share is skin color and the fact that our ancestors emigrated from central Asia some time in the distant past. At the very least, the black guy isn't going to complain when I offer him Miller High Life. This article is nothing more than the author trying to fabricate an intellectual justification for his own irrational prejudices.

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Rov_Scam 20d ago

Over a year ago, I started a project where I gave a ranked countdown of all the albums of the 4000+ I’ve spent the last decade scrupulously evaluating. 186–102 are complete, but at that point a took along break. Basically, what happened was that the market for oil and gas work was getting inconsistent and I was finding myself with a lot more free time on my hands than I would have preferred, so I quit being self-employed and joined a litigation firm that requires me to actually show up to an office and bill hours. The engagement on my weekly updates was getting progressively lower, which discouraged me from spending my much-reduced free time on the project. Now that I’ve settled in, it’s time to finish the damn thing. So here’s the next installment.

101. Steely Dan — Gaucho (1980) The final Steely Dan album from their initial run doesn’t get as much critical acclaim as the others. The recording sessions were plagued by misfortune: Walter Backer had developed a heroin addiction, and then was hospitalized in a car accident that left him bedridden in the hospital. Becker’s girlfriend tragically died. A recording assistant managed to erase the tapes of what would have been the best song on the album. The duo’s notorious perfectionism was getting out of hand; Babylon Sisters, for example went through over 200 mixes before they were satisfied. They spent $150,000 for their engineer, Roger Nichols, to develop a primitive drum machine that would let them move samples around on tape. Critics said the album sounded tired, defeated, soulless, sterile, perfectionist to the point where the life was drained out.

The critics have somewhat of a point, but I think the perfectionism was worth it. I’m not too keen on the quantized drums, but the album has a silky, seductive feel. Bernard Purdie’s shuffling drums on the aforementioned Babylon Sisters are only one reason why it’s the best song ever written about a past-his-prime loser having a three-way with a couple of whores. And from there cue the usual Steely Dan parade of losers, outcasts, and addicts. It’s a dark album for sure, but the title cut (about a gay catfight) provides a bit of levity, as does the bluesy film noir of My Rival.

100. The Decemberists — Castaways and Cutouts (2002) The rock music scene in 2002 was rather grim. It was the age of nu-metal. Garage Rock was making a comeback, but there were limitations to how far one could take the genre. The lighter side was dominated by John Mayer-style wuss rock. Even the indie scene was largely dominated by 90s holdovers who established the genre under the presumption that grunge wasn’t, well “grungey” enough. I exaggerate of course, but this album was a breath of fresh air at the time. The production evoked a warmth that hadn’t been heard since the 70s, with acoustic guitars, organs, Rhodes piano, and drums that weren’t compressed to hell and back. The structures were complex. The melodies actually went somewhere. And the lyrics were “literary” in the truest sense of the word, evoking past times and distant lands, with no shortage of whimsy. Future albums would explore these concepts further, with mixed results, but the band never really beat their debut.

99. Joe Walsh — Barnstorm (1972) Joe Walsh spent the early part of his career rocking out in the James Gang, and he would later go on to provide the Eagles with a modicum of rock credibility. But his best work was in his solo albums. He had matured since his days with the James Gang and lent into the Progressive Rock that was popular in Britain at the time without totally betraying his Hard Rock roots. The Eagles ultimately made him more money, but there he was a mere hired hand who would contribute a song here and there but would never have the clout to realize a total artistic vision. If you want that, then this album is the best example. The songs are distinct, yet they flow together in a suite-like manner that completes the effect. The whole is grater than the sum of the parts, but the parts are pretty damn good by themselves.

98. Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992) In the Classical era, the third movement of a symphony was in a dance form, usually a minuet. But while the form was there, the music itself was not intended for dancing, and it certainly wasn’t expected that the audience would get up from their seats and begin dancing in the middle of the performance. As time went along, the “dances” became so stylized that they were virtually undanceable, there for listening only. Electronica took a similar path. Born in the 1980s underground rave scene, it emerged primarily as music for dancing. With this album, however, IDM, or Intelligent Dance Music, almost emerges fully formed. Its roots are obvious, but it’s music clearly intended for listening, not dancing. The idea of electronic music that wasn’t intended for dancing wasn’t a new one, but older material in that vein was either clearly outside the scope of the club scene (Milton Babbitt, Brian Eno, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Wendy Carlos, etc.) or was Ambient music meant for chilling out. The title notwithstanding, this album wasn’t intended as mere background music or accompaniment to a drug experience, but as something worth listening to on its own. Over the course of a tranquil hour and fifteen minutes, MR. Richard D. James presents us with a series of subtly changing electronic pieces that retain the rhythms of what would be considered dance music but also contain a complexity that rewards close listening. This album took Electronica out of the dance club and into the living room, making it something for ravers and nerds alike.

97. Black Sabbath — Paranoid (1970) There’s some discussion among music junkies whether Metal is a subgenre of Rock or its own thing, the way Rock is distinct from Blues. While I’m inclined towards the former argument, the existence of Black Sabbath is the best evidence in support of the latter. When discussing the origins of metal, a number of bands — Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Jeff Beck Group, Iron Butterfly, etc. — come up in the discussion. But Black Sabbath stands out above the pack. The Hard Rock scene in the early 1970s was just that, Rock with more distortion. It was loud, for sure, but if there’s one differentiating factor between the Hard Rock of the 1970s and the metal of the 1980s and beyond, it’s the latter’s disposal with most of the traditional Rock and Roll elements, particularly the reliance on blues structures and any tendency to swing the rhythm. As much as Led Zeppelin was revered, they were always a Blues band at heart, and the others on the list even more so. I am of the opinion that one of the distinguishing factors between good Rock music and bad Rock music is that good rock music always retains at least some blues feel; it can move into the background but should never been absent entirely. While later generations of Metal musicians would strip as much of the Blues out of the music as they could without rendering it unrecognizable as metal, Black Sabbath understood this clearly, and while they were able to avoid the obvious Blues inflections of their Hard Rock contemporaries, they never succumbed to outright abolition. Instead, they gave the spotlight to the other structural elements that make Metal what it is and let the Blues simmer in the background. They first achieved this on their self-titled debut, but this is where the style would reach its apotheosis. Three of the cuts (“War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, and the title track) are radio classics, and the rest is on the same level, particularly the closing “Jack the Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots”. On future albums Black Sabbath would reach similar heights, but by wisely varying the formula rather than simply reiterating it. This was the height of the original style, and I don’t think Metal got any better after this.

96. Tangerine Dream — Phaedra (1974) This album is the inverse of the Aphex Twin album. While Aphex Twin took electronic club music and turned it into something that was worth listening closely to, Tangerine Dream made electronic music expressly for the purpose of close listening and almost inadvertently made it something worth dancing to. It’s IDM BC, provided you keep in mind that not only is it totally undanceable but also that it was never intended to have the effect that it did. Tangerine Dream were a trio who came out of the German Avant Garde scene who had been making experimental electronic music since 1969. While early synthesizer promotors such as Wendy Carlos were trying to adapt the instrument to existing forms, and plenty of Rock bands were treating the instruments like pianos and other keyboards, Tangerine Dream was more interested in exploring the full potential of the instrument. You can play Bach on a synthesizer, sure, but you can also play him on a harpsichord. What can you do with a synthesizer that can’t be done with anything else? A lot of groups would spend the next several decades trying to answer this question, but the development of the sequencer would change the game for Tangerine Dream. Put simply, a sequencer is a kind of synthesizer computer; it allows you to program a sequence of notes that will repeat. It’s the foundation of EDM today. Had Tangerine Dream simply made the first sequenced album, that would be a fine accomplishment but not necessarily make a five star album. They understood that a repeating sequence of notes was just that, and while it would later prove good enough for dancing, the intention was listening. So the sequences are integrated into a greater whole that stands on its own. They change — sometimes subtly, sometimes wholesale — in a way that moves the music forward as if one were going on a trip. It’s a dark, textured, and haunting album, and one that pairs well with psychedelics, or so I’m told. The ability of this album to repeat a consistent pattern and build on it would be influential in the development of Electronica, but his album is so much more than that.

95. The Who — Live at Leeds (1970) One of my pet peeves with the modern concert scene is that it usually involves people paying hundreds of dollars to see some well-known mega act and then evaluating the performances based on how close they sound to the record. Well, I can listen to the records at home, and for a lot less money. I want my live performances to offer something that I can’t get from a studio recording. Not all bands are able to consistently reinvent themselves like this, so most live albums end up being superfluous. The Who always had more of an edge than other British Invasion groups, but as the 70s dawned and Hard Rock took center stage heaviness became mandatory; what they had been playing only 5 years before now seemed a tad quaint. The performance of “Substitue” on here rocks harder than anyone could have predicted in 1965. “Magic Bus” had by this point become an extended performance piece. And “My Generation”, perhaps the definitive rock anthem, is extended to fifteen minutes, seemingly integrating every spare riff the band was playing with in that period. But that’s only part of the story. “Shakin’ All Over” and “Summertime Blues” are Hard Rock updates of Rock and Roll classics, bringing to the fore the raw aggression these songs always had buried somewhere in them. And then there’s the centerpiece, a cover of Mose Allison’s jazz tune “Young Man Blues”, which is the aural equivalent of being charged by a rhino with its incessant riffage. This album is a sonic assault in the best sense of the expression, being aggressive but not for its own sake. When I see a band — even a band that I love — has released a 3-CD boxed set of live performances, I often wonder if any 6 songs of the 52 or whatever they included can match the 6 presented here, and I shake my head knowing that the best 6 probably won’t come anywhere close.

94. Led Zeppelin — Led Zeppelin (1969) This is where the legend begins, kids. It’s not Led Zeppelin’s best album (spoiler alert!), but it does answer the question of how far one can push the Blues and still have it be the Blues. Pretty damn far. I don’t really have much to say about this one other than that it set the stage for pretty much the entire hard rock style. It isn’t as diverse as their later work, being mostly a Blues Rock album in the style of the Jeff Beck Group, but the 1-2 punch of “You’re Time Is Gonna Come / Black Mountain Side” preview their more sophisticated Rock songwriting and folk tendencies, respectively.

93. Bob Dylan — Blood on the Tracks (1975) Bob Dylan is at least partly responsible for three revolutions in Rock music. First was the expansion of lyrical themes from typical teenage concerns first to political and social commentary and then to oblique, symbolic poetry. Second was the expansion of song structures from verse-chorus arrangements to something more malleable and expansive. Third, he helped impart the idea that a serious musician writes his own material rather than relying on that of outside songwriters. By the 1970s, this revolution had spawned the Singer-Songwriter, an ostensible mini-Dylan who wrote and performed his own Folk-influenced songs about adult concerns. Dylan himself, however, never really fit into this mold, as the Singer-Songwriters sang mostly about personal matters while Dylan was anything but personal. That changed in 1975. Fresh off a divorce, Dylan finally embraced the style he helped developed and wore his heart on his sleeve for one album, letting out the anger, frustration, and other emotions out into the open.

92. The Allman Brothers Band — Brothers and Sisters (1973) Just as the Allman Brothers seemed to reach their height, everything came crashing down. Duane Allman, the band’s heart and soul, was killed in a motorcycle accident in October 1971. Only a year later, bassist Berry Oakley was himself killed in a motorcycle accident only three blocks from where Duane met his demise. Given the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the band simply packed it in. Instead, they replaced Oakley with Lamar Williams and added Chuck Leavell as a second keyboardist and went on to record the best album of their career. While the track lengths aren’t any shorter than their previous work, the songs as a whole seem tighter, with less of the jam tendencies of the early material. It seems almost unfathomable that three of the band’s best-known songs, “Wasted Words”, “Ramblin’ Man”, and “Jessica”, would come from an album without Duane. Much of the credit goes to guitarist Dickey Betts, who took over much of the songwriting duties and direction in a band that was ostensible democratic. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. The band’s next album was widely regarded as a disappointment and would lead to their breakup. They’d reunite several times over the years, and while they put on good live shows, they’d never add anything to their repertoire that was even close to being on par with this album.

91. Lynyrd Skynyrd — Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd (1973) The Allman Brothers may have invented Southern Rock, but it was Lynyrd Skynyrd who consolidated it into a distinct genre. While the Allmans were essentially a Blues band that owed more debt than usual to Soul, Country, and Rock music, Skynyrd was essentially a Hard Rock band that owed more debt than usual to the same “Southern” genres the Allmans were into. The result was a baseline that other bands could take as inspiration and vary from; if the Allman Brothers were the progenitors, Lynyrd Skynyrd were the definers. Take the Skynyrd base with more of an emphasis toward Country and you have The Marshall Tucker Band. Emphasize Soul and you have Wet Willie. Emphasize Hard Rock and you have Molly Hatchet. Emphasize pop and you have Atlanta Rhythm Section. Etc. If someone wants to know what Southern Rock sounds like and you only have 45 minutes, playing this album will give them as good of an idea as any playlist you could come up with.

90. Fleetwood Mac — Rumours (1977) Evaluating the mega albums is always problematic. On the one hand are normies who say it’s one of the best albums ever because, we suspect, that’s what they think they’re supposed to do (Thriller being the most egregious example of this, though I think A Night at the Opera may eventually overtake it). On the other hand, there are the contrarians saying that this album sucks because popularity does not equal quality, blah blah blah. One thing I’ve learned about evaluating art is that in order to give it a fair shake you have to forget about every prejudice you have about it and listen with fresh ears. I don’t want to get into a whole essay about how cultural expectations influence our perception of cultural artifacts themselves, but I don’t think its controversial to suggest that the rubric by which we evaluate art is defined by how we perceive ourselves. Something as simple as being young may bias us against music for “happy hour at the old folks home”, whereas the serious, sophisticated listener may be instinctively put off by music he perceives as being marketed towards teenage girls.

Much has been made about the personal tensions that were underway when this album was being recorded, but less has been said about the creative tension that was inherent to this edition of Fleetwood Mac. They started as a Blues band in the 1969s, led by Peter Green, but Green went nuts and they spent the first half of the 1970s rebranding as an average to above-average Pop/Rock band. Constantly adrift, they recruited Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks solely on the basis of the album the duo made together, and Buckingham agreed only on the condition that he be given an inordinate amount of creative influence for a new member. This actually turned out to be a good idea, as he was easily the most creative member of the new lineup. Creativity is, of course, a double-edged sword, as there’s also an inherent weirdness baked into most creative people. Luckily, these tendencies were balanced out by Nicks, who was much more conventional, if less daring, and Christine McVie. Buckingham was always in charge of the arrangements though, so nothing escaped Buckingham’s influence. The results speak for themselves. It wasn’t a massive hit because it appealed to the lowest common denominator, but because it knew how to appeal to the lowest common denominator while still being sophisticated enough to stand on its own two legs. Fleetwood Mac’s future albums would be beset by various problems to which there was no obvious solution (I also give Tusk 5 stars, but I admit that Buckingham kind of went off the rails here and he lost influence because of it), but this is the one place where it all clicked.

89. The Eagles — Hotel California (1976) Sticking with the mega albums, here’s another doozy. When Rock documentaries get to the punk years, this album is almost always cited as the reason Punk had to happen. It’s emblematic of the general decline the second generation of Rock artists foisted upon the genre. The initial youthful drive of Chuck Berry, the Stones, and the Who had been replaced with sanded schlock meant to appeal to California housewives, not pissed off teenagers. Rock stars weren’t outcasts from society, but multi-millionaires with comfortable lives, making music for young professionals with comfortable lives. The idealism of the 60s had been replaced with the materialism of the 70s; the hippies were well on their way to becoming yuppies (not that the Punks had any love for hippies or idealism, but I digress). I’m not going to argue that any of this isn’t true. I am going to argue that art isn’t subservient to ethos. This is especially true for music, which is, by its nature, and abstract form. Dylan went through the same thing in the 60s, when the Folk community cast him out as a Judas figure, first for refusing to commit himself to validating their politics, then for daring to go electric, thereby completing the betrayal by abandoning folk altogether for the siren song of the dreaded “Pop music”. While I can’t say that these days people have forgotten about that, as it’s an essential part of Rock mythology, I’m unaware of anyone today who seriously thinks the world would have been better off if Dylan had kept making solo acoustic albums about politics, Folk fans included.

The upshot is that the Eagles aren’t cool, a sentiment that’s best exemplified by the scene in the Big Lebowski where The Dude is kicked out of the cab for daring to say that he hates the fucking Eagles. The Dude, original author of the Port Huron Statement, member of the Seattle 7, consummate 60s radical and aging hippie don’t give a fuck extraordinaire — of course he hates the Eagles. I feel like the context of the joke is largely lost on the generation who embraced that film (that is to say, my generation), but the point is well taken. The question is whether there’s anything about the music itself that’s lacking, and there isn’t. Some things are popular for a reason.

88. Cream — Disraeli Gears (1967) It never really occurred to me until now how closely cream parallels The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Power trios that include guitar gods, fundamentally based in the blues but who added psychedelic touches and would set the stage for hard rock and jam bands. The most prominent difference is that Cream was more directly rooted in the British blues scene and would never embrace the all-out freakery that Hendrix would, though they did more closely presage jam bands. Other than that, I don’t have much to say. I’ve listened to this album so many times its become embedded in my DNA at this point, and asking for my opinion on it is like asking for my opinion on breathing. I’ll be happy to field any questions or address any criticisms on the off chance that someone else is as familiar with this as I am.

87. Grateful Dead — Workingman’s Dead (1970) Speaking of jam bands, the Dead is probably the jam band par excellence. But that has nothing to do with this record. Speaking of psychedelic music, the Dead is probably one of the most oft-cited examples of a San Francisco psychedelic band. But that has nothing to do with this album. The secret is, that, at their best, the Dead were a roots-rock band, and their best work was when they kept this in mind. I don’t want to say too much at this point because the Dead have a complicated legacy and can be difficult to talk about like one talks about other bands. That’s the minefield I’m entering that I didn’t much have to worry about earlier — when you’re discussing obscure bands no one has any preconceptions about them, and it’s not a hot take to list one at number 139. Hell, at a certain point I’ll probably have to start posting this in the Culture War thread. But the point is that, for all the bullshit that’s wrapped up with the Grateful Dead, there is nothing on this album that should turn off anyone who is already predisposed to like roots-rock in general. Most of the songs are acoustic-driven, if not entirely acoustic, and evoke a nice, laid-back atmosphere. Perfect for listening to on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

86. Deep Purple — Machine Head (1972) No, It’s not metal, but it’s hard rock at its finest. It’s got “Highway Star”. It’s got “Space Truckin’” It’s got a bunch of lesser-known songs that are just as good. And it’s also got that other song, the one I need not mention. The one that’s right up there with “Pinball Wizard” and “Stairway to Heaven” as one of the most recognizable songs of all time, the band’s business card, their definitive symbol, the riff that become synonymous with the entire concept of the electric guitar. Yup, that song.

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Rov_Scam 27d ago

Writing this from my law office — No, it's not defamation, and it isn't close. In addition to the disclaimer:

They changed his name
I didn't see the episode, but they probably changed a number of other details as well, and
It's a television show that no one is confusing for a news program.

Defamation requires statements of fact, and it's hard to argue that such a blatant fictionalization is making factual statements. I would also add that your proving my point by the fact that you confused Daniel Penny with Daniel Perry, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for actions motivated by white supremacy, and I'm apparently the only one who's noticed this so far. Accordingly, I don't know how much Mr. Penny could argue that the episode was about him if even a viewer as astute as yourself can't accurately identify the supposed victim.

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Rov_Scam 30d ago

I can't offer any empirical data either, but I think the fact that you're comparing Marvel movies to 90s action movies is the key here. The former existed back then, but they've since come to dominate the field and nearly replace the latter. Comic book movies were always targeted toward a broader audience than action movies, particularly an audience that included children and families. The idea that I wouldn't have been allowed to see a Batman movie when I was a kid because of sex and nudity would have been unthinkable in the 90s. Even big 90s blockbusters like Independence Day and Jurassic Park didn't have much, if any, sex or nudity, because they were aiming bigger than a typical Schwarzenegger action movie. Despite some efforts in Hollywood to change this (most notably Joker), movies based on comic books are always going to be viewed primarily as children's films, and there's accordingly a limit to how much sex they're going to include. You're comparing them to a totally different genre.

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Rov_Scam 11d ago

While that's true, they still had to be able to afford the original mortgage payment. The complaint of millennials is that they can't afford to buy a house now, not that they can technically afford to buy it now but that it's unsustainable to own it more than a few years unless they can reduce their payments. Wile some boomers certainly benefited from interest rates going down, it isn't an assumption you can make at the time of purchase. It should also be noted that this was also a time when lenders expected you to have 20–30% of the purchase price in cash at closing for a down payment. It seems like down payments now are basically a formality. I mean, you need them, but when I suggested paying the traditional 20% for my house the general opinion was "nobody pays 20% anymore".

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Rov_Scam 11d ago

Yes. Almost compulsively. I like being able to have my music organized the way I like it, and to be able to listen to it on my own terms. If I have financial hardship in the future I don't have to give up music entirely because I can't justify the cost of a subscription to a streaming service. While that isn't likely to happen, I generally don't trust the subscription model as a practical matter (though I admit this has nothing to do with why I don't use a streaming service). We kind of take it for granted that these services have a fairly representative collection of the entire musical corpus, in the way video streaming doesn't, but that's being held together by rights agreements that may or may not hold in the future. As we've seen with video streaming, the motivations of the streaming services and the content producers aren't necessarily symbiotic — Netflix and Amazon want to produce their own original content, while NBC and Disney want to run their own platforms. This hasn't happened in the music industry yet, but Spotify's exclusive contract with Rogan might portend the future. What happens when Taylor Swift signs an exclusive contract with Apple Music or whoever? What happens when Universal music decides to stop licensing their catalog and make it exclusively available on their own service? What happens when half of an artists discography is on one service and half of it on another, because different rights holders own different albums? Since you don't own the music, you only own the right to listen to whatever the platform has available during the month you've paid for in the subscription. If your favorite bands bolt, then you're out of luck for the future. This has the potential to be even more annoying than with video because even if you're willing to pay for multiple services, you won't be able to make playlists as easily. I'm not saying any of this will happen, but given how cheap hard drive space is I'd be wary of dumping my entire collection I already have just to have the privilege to pay for it, and be at the mercy of whoever is hosting it.

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Rov_Scam 18d ago · Edited 18d ago

To be fair, the statement about trans pride day was on March 29, while today he put out an Easter message in which he said the following:

Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.

From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Unfortunately, "work hard, at a quite possibly unpleasant job" isn't a great sales pitch. But I want to circle back to the point I made ending my discussion of the fifties- most people have to be worker bees.

That's easy to say when the assumption is that other people are the ones who are going to be the worker bees. Most of those industrial jobs that people bemoan the demise of suck. If you want one, US Steel is hiring in Pittsburgh right now because, even offering totally unskilled workers $25/hour plus bonuses, they're lucky if anyone stays a year. I've been in steel mills as part of site inspections for litigation and seen the work that goes on, so I know a bit more about this than the average bear who romanticizes the past. It's incredibly hot, and the dust is unreal. It's shift work, meaning you can forget about being consistently free on weekends (a friend who worked for Allegheny Ludlum got one weekend off a month), and the work itself is basically shoveling all of the dust that seems to come off everything in the place. And God help you if you're a laborer in the coke batteries and have to climb on top of the stand pipes and clean them out. You can eventually work your way up to one of the "fun jobs", like crane operator, where you're in the same environment, but you get to move slabs from one part of the building to another. Except during slowdowns, which happened regularly even in the steel industry's heyday, when you'd either get bumped back to the labor gang or laid off entirely for a few weeks. Or months.

Until very recently, the money for this kind of work wasn't good. People in my dad's generation who worked these kinds of jobs their whole lives were lucky if they made 40k/year by the time they retired in the early 2010s. I grew up in a blue collar family and it was made clear to me that I'd better study or I'd end up working in one of these places. My brothers and some of my friends did work in some of these places during summers in college and said that if they'd been slacking off nothing motivated them more than the prospect of having to work there full time. My one brother did work with my dad full time for a while after graduation and regularly cites that as the worst time of his life. I guy I had to cross-examine a few months ago put it best; he worked as a boilermaker after dropping out of college. I asked him what his major was, and he said "Business. Who knows, if I would have stayed with it maybe I'd be on the other side of the table sitting next to you."

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Rov_Scam 19d ago

Sorry for the delayed reply — it's a holiday weekend and I've been spending time with my family. To answer your question, the short answer is what @sarker said. The longer answer is, as with a lot of things, it depends. I personally try to use flac whenever possible, though a large part of my collection is mp3 I got before I decided to switch over everything circa 2014, and I just haven't updated it yet. But, and this is a big but, I also do most of my listening on one of two serious stereos I own or a pair of over-the-ear headphones which are top of the line for wireless ones. So keep that in mind.

So it depends on what your starting point is and what you expect to gain. High quality lossy formats are virtually indistinguishable from lossless formats. Subtractive testing has shown that very little audible material is lost in 320 kbps mp3 as compared to flac. That being said, different program material responds differently to compression; a solo acoustic guitar piece is going to be much easier to compress than a symphony. So I keep mine in flac not because there's an obvious audible difference, but because there might be and audible difference and I'm not going to A/B every single file to save a little bit of hard drive space. But I'm also listening on a relatively high-end system; any differences are going to be less audible on less transparent hardware. If you're system consists of a pair of airpods, a Bose lifestyle system, and a portable bluetooth speaker, and you don't have any expectation of ever upgrading, then the chances of there ever being an audible difference is going to be much lower.

Another consideration is the current makeup of your collection. I've spent a decade making the transition to flac, but my collection contains nearly 100,000 files and I'm very particular about tagging and artwork so making the changeover is going to be harder for me than for someone with 10,000 files who's satisfied with autotagging. Do you currently rely on a streaming service? If you're happy with streaming then it would probably make more sense to switch to a hi-res platform like Tidal than to start a collection from scratch. If you're looking to get off of streaming and starting from scratch or close to it, then flac makes sense if space isn't a concern. Is space a concern? Mp3s first came to prominence in an era when a 20 gb hard drive was considered large, and continued to make sense for large collections even as average sizes were in the hundreds of gb. But now that you can get a 5 tb hard drive for like 150 bucks, there's no reason to worry about space.

Unless, of course, you intend to keep your entire collection on your phone, in which case file size still is a concern, and you may want to consider a lossy format, though mp3 is outdated at this point and there are better options on the market, though since I switched to lossless I'm not hip to the exact details. I personally listen to music on my phone, especially when I'm at work/hiking/biking/in the car, but I listen to entire albums compulsively and work from lists I've made, so I just keep a rotating collection of 20-30 albums on my phone from what's next on the list. So to conclude, it depends. If you give me more detail on your setup, plans for the future, and listening habits, I may be able to give you a more definitive answer, but I hope that's enough to get you started.

Now, this isn't what you asked, but since you're obviously interested in sound quality, I'd be remiss if I didn't include it. Bitrate and compression are only part of the equation. Different masterings of an album will have much more of an impact on the sound of a recording than the file format. For instance, a record released in the 1971 may have several vinyl pressings from various territories. Then, with the advent of the CD in the 1980s, there are US, Japanese, UK, and European editions, all of which sound quite different from the others. Then there was a "Remastered Version" from 1995 with a few bonus tracks with the same mastering used for each territory, and then a 2 CD "Deluxe Edition" from 2012 with yet another mastering followed by a single CD edition from 2015 which doesn't have any bonus tracks but uses the 2012 mastering. And there's also an audiophile gold CD from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab or DCC from 2001, and an audiophile vinyl edition from 2009. Whether you're getting your music from legitimate sources or the high seas, the easiest one to find is usually going to be whatever mass-market edition is currently in print (and it will often be the only one that is legitimately available for download or streaming), and this will usually not be the edition with the best sound quality, given the casualties of the loudness wars and tendency towards noise reduction and questionable EQ choices.

So finding the best sounding version of a record isn't always a straightforward process (though relatively new music will only have one mastering). It often requires perusing online forums to find the internet consensus, and I may even download multiple versions of an album before settling on the best one. As I alluded to above, this is more of a problem for older material that's been reissued numerous times, and that was recorded in the analog days when recording wasn't always great and when original master tapes weren't always used for CD reissues. I can provide more information about this aspect if you're interested, up to and including my own personal recommendations, but for now I at least wanted to make you aware of it. Again, sorry for the delay but I wanted to give you a complete answer rather than a pithy yes or no.

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Rov_Scam 11d ago

I used to run a high-adventure program for the Boy Scouts, and whether or not some sourt of "Trial by fire" wilderness experience would be considered abuse would depend on the nature of the experience. There's a big difference between pushing a kid's limits and actively abusing them. If I take a kid mountain biking and he's apprehensive about riding a certain line, I'll encourage him to ride it if I think it's within his ability based on my observation of him. If I don't think he can ride it and that it's going to end in a crash I'll tell him to walk it. If he's clearly freaking out at the prospect of riding it, I'll tell him to walk it. If it's a difficult line I'll probably won't even pressure the kid into riding even if I think he can ride it; I'll just tell everyone they can walk it if they'd like. It gets more difficult when, say, you take the kid on a long bike trip with limited or no opportunity to bail. In that case it's more a question of getting them motivated enough to keep pedaling rather than putting them in a situation that could lead to injury, and making sure they have enough snacks, water, etc. so that an acute event isn't going to happen. I mean, I always have outs in case of emergency, but a kid being tired isn't an emergency unless they're obviously incapable of continuing. Usually I just slow down the pace and take more frequent breaks to keep them moving, even if it ultimately takes longer. When they complain, I just ask what they expect me to do about it, and that usually shuts them up, especially when I tell them that an evac means an ambulance ride and a trip to the hospital that will likely end their time in the program.

The key is that the adversity be time-limited, controlled, and intended to develop skills and build confidence. Telling kids who are old enough that they'll be cooking dinner one night a week so they can learn the skills necessary to be adults is a lot different than just not feeding the kids. Making sure your kids get early exposure to outdoor adventure in the hopes that it will maintain fitness and social relationships while building a lifetime hobby is different than putting the kid in situations he's clearly uncomfortable with (and that come with high risk of injury) and regularly subjecting them to death marches in the woods. Some kids are just whiners who want to stay inside and play video games all day and not do anything that's going to make them mildly short of breath, and I never had any problem trying to toughen those kids up over their complaints. But it's important that you know where the line is, and that you make sure you never get anywhere near it. If you're moving to the Alaskan wilderness because you like the outdoors and want your kids to learn self-sufficiency, I don't think that's too much of a problem, as long as you understand the limits I outlined above. I certainly wouldn't put it anywhere near the level of the kind of stuff that's on the ACE quiz.

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Rov_Scam 27d ago

I lived in a rural area for 3 years, not because I was trying to LARP a lifestyle but because I was working in the outdoor industry at the time and that's where I needed to be. I guess I was semi "off the grid" but not in any meaningful sense. I had electricity, but well water and a septic system. No TV or internet and really bad cell service (I left the property if I really needed to make a call, but if I sent a text it would send eventually). My house had an oil stove but it also had a wood burner and I decided to use that thinking it would save money. Well, maybe, a little. First, I had to get a log splitter, and even buying a used one split with two of my buddies was enough money to pay for half a winter's worth of oil. Add in the chainsaw and it became a whole winter. Then, every time someone cuts down a tree you have to be ready to go to their house that Saturday to cut it up and load it, and spend Sunday splitting and stacking it. I also didn't have much to start with so I had to buy a cord to get through the first winter, which was a brutal one. Then, when you go to use it, you have to load the stove up to capacity before bed lest you wake up in the morning freezing, making the house so hot you have to open the windows. You freeze in the morning anyway, and you have to get a fire going again from coals. Trust me, the last thing you want to have to do in the winter at 6 am is build a fire. Repeat the process when you get home from work. In the spring and fall you have to use aux heating anyway because any fire is entirely too hot when you're only trying to warm up from 50 degrees. The amount of time I spent dealing with the thing, had I spent it working, would have more than paid for me to run oil full time, and that's not including the cost of the splitter, chainsaw, blade sharpening, gas to haul all that wood, etc. That being said, nothing beats the feel of a stove going in the dead of winter, and it added a rustic charm, but I could have gotten that with a lot less work if I would have just bought wood and burned occasionally rather than committing to it as a heat source. And this is just one, relatively minor inconvenience that comes with living "off grid". But, I still have access to a log splitter I may decide to use again someday.

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Rov_Scam 19d ago

We knocked it down because it was starting to normalize perjury to the point where it risked the legitimacy of the entire justice system. When you need grounds but don't have them,. you're incentivized to invent them,.and it's easy to get away with it when both parties agree to the charade. Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.

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Rov_Scam 2mo ago

I don't think Twitter has much to do with it. The night before Thanksgiving, I attended a Taylor Swift trivia night that my cousin's boyfriend convinced me to attend because it was at a local brewery. The vast majority of the attendees weren't the typical brewery clientele, but suburban moms and their young daughters. Not too many men. And the place was absolutely packed; there were at least 20 teams. I guarantee you very few of these people have Twitter accounts, or care too much about Elon Musk. I attribute Swift's sudden blowup to the following factors:

She was already very famous. This may seem obvious but it seems like there's more staying power when an already famous person reaches this level of popularity compared with the meteoric rise of an unknown. She's 34 years old and has been in the public eye for nearly 20 years; there's no sense that she's the flavor of the month.
She has a history of making risky professional moves that have the potential to wreck her career but end up bolstering it. In 2014 there was some serious discussion as to whether she'd be able to appeal to the pop market in the same way she appealed to the country market. There have long been country stars with crossover appeal, but most of them never stop ostensibly being country musicians, no matter how pop they get. The only other musician I can think of who pulled this off was Linda Ronstadt, but she gets an asterisk because she was at the fringes of the country world; she came out of the more rock-oriented Laurel Canyon scene rather than being a product of Nashville. I think a big part of the reason Nashville artists are hesitant to break out like this is because country is a sort of security blanket. The country world wants something that's ostensibly country, and they will loyally buy it if it's marketed as such. Making a full transition out of Nashville means casting off the last vestiges of this to make it in the wider world. You run the risk of losing your old audience and failing to find a new one. But she correctly calculated that the country fans who were buying her music were probably already buying pop records anyway, and that her pop audience was where all the growth was. And when I say she I mean whoever does her marketing. So she managed to get two audiences for the price of one, so to speak.
Then — and people often forget about this — she pulled her music off of streaming services because she didn't like the business model. For three years. I'm not going to attempt to quantize the impact this had, but I doubt it did her career any favors in the short-term. However, it probably helped her career long-term, because it encouraged people to buy her albums rather than stream them. This probably fostered a sense of loyalty that she wouldn't have had if she'd been available at the touch of a button to anyone with a Spotify account. And then it was a big deal when she got back on the streaming services, which again increased her audience.
So at this point she's been steadily consolidating her power for over a decade. This is important in and of itself because most pop stars don't stay on top for that long, especially just by being pop stars. Contrast this with Lady Gaga, who is still famous but more because she did things like movies and albums with Tony Bennett. No one has cared about her pop records since 2011. The fact that Swift is in her mid-30s and has been able to sustain a career since her days as a teen idol without making any major changes is an accomplishment in and of itself and probably feeds into our current moment. She's been around long enough that women who listened to her in high school can take their kids to her concerts.
Despite her fame, and her numerous celebrity relationships, she's managed to avoid the kind of scandals and tabloid gossip that surrounds other pop stars, especially ones who become famous at sixteen and have to navigate the transition to adulthood while in the public eye.
She has an uncanny knack for making decisions that are totally about money and convincing people that they're not about money. The whole "Taylor's Version" thing is a prime example. She didn't like the fact that she didn't own the rights to her old recordings. The main advantage of owning the rights to her recordings is that she can collect all the money they generate. Otherwise, there's no real advantage. This is a big deal for most people, but for someone like Swift, who has more money than she's ever going to be able to spend, the schlubs at whatever private equity firm owns the rights to them probably need the money more than she does. But she casts it as a matter of principle, rerecords new versions she owns the rights to, and convinces her fans to shell out money for five different collectors' editions of the same albums they already own. The whole thing was about as transparent a cash grab as you could find, yet she pulled it off in such a way that even people who could care less about her career thought it was a slick move to stick it to those fatcats. It got her the kind of publicity you can't buy while minting her a pretty penny.
And, finally, in the same vein, we have the Eras Tour. At some point in every pop star's life, there comes a point where they are no longer a "frontline artist", by which I mean a contemporary artist who makes contemporary music for a contemporary audience. At some point, people don't go to your concerts to hear the new album but to hear the old favorites. It's usually the obvious sign that a band is over the hill — there's a new album out and the kind of people who paid 70 bucks to hear you play don't give a fuck. And if your biggest fans no longer care... Becoming an oldies act is depressing. Bob Dylan and Neil Young have defiantly refused to go down that path, regardless of the crap they take for it, and insist on being contemporary musicians who will tour the new album and maybe throw in a few old favorites. Mike Love's insistence on the Beach Boys playing touring their 60s hits in the wake of the compilation album Endless Summer's success in the mid-1970s drove a wedge between the band that they never really recovered from. (And most of the band was younger then than Swift is now.) The huge appeal of the Eras Tour was that, for the first time, Swift would be taking listeners on a musical journey through her entire career. She was becoming an oldies act, proudly and deliberately. At a time when she was still viable as a frontline artist. This is almost unheard of. Sure, contemporary bands usually play some older material at all their shows, but it's unusual for someone to actively embrace what is usually the sure sign of a has-been. Because the dirty secret of oldies acts is that they're very profitable. People like hearing old favorites, even when they're still willing to pay good money for the new shit. And the whole Taylor's Version thing was perfect cover. Combine this with the fact that she hadn't toured in half a decade and the stage was set for all hell to break loose.

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Rov_Scam 12d ago

Yep, and I agree that it's one of the best documentary series ever made. The only quibble I have is that it gives the Pacific war rather short shrift; in 26 episodes, one of which is dedicated entirely to the Dutch resistance, only 2 deal with the Pacific War exclusively (possibly 3, there may be one on Burma, I can't remember). This may be an artifact of it being a British series, but it prevents the series from being definitive.

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Rov_Scam 24d ago

As someone who grew up middle-class in an exurban area my thoughts were the same as yours... until PA announced it had provisionally implemented Voter ID and suddenly my grandmother was effectively disenfranchised. She hadn't driven in years and let her license expire. She could get a state ID, but that required a birth certificate, and she didn't have that. Getting a copy from Vital Records isn't difficult, but since she didn't have a driver's license we had to go to one of the "other" forms of ID, and then present the newly-acquired birth certificate to the DL center with an entirely different group of required documents that some people might not have (e.g. you need a Social Security card, and if you lost yours then you have to go to SSA to get a replacement which is a whole other process). So yeah, I can understand why this could be disenfranchising for elderly people who don't drive and don't work. There may not be many people like this in rural areas, but go to some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh where the average age is deceased and there are a ton of them who use the bus to get around since it's free if you're over 65. These people aren't at the fringes of society, they're just pensioners who live on Social Security and aren't going to maintain a license to drive a car they don't have and who have no reason to get a photo ID.

The big reason I think voter ID failed nationally was that its proponents made it sound like people without IDs were bums who, as you suggest, are a vanishingly small part of the population and who probably have no interest in voting anyway. If instead they had acknowledged the problem and worked towards rectifying it and maybe kicking in some money for outreach efforts or modernization of the ID system then they may have been more successful. But they instead stuck to the argument that we didn't need to worry about these people. For their part, the left didn't do a good job of defining who these people were in a way that would be understandable to Republicans — the more moderate ones just said such people existed in urban areas and left it at that while the more dedicated proggies trotted out their tried and true sob stories about a homeless woman of color with a glass eye and a wooden leg who was forced to make a living collecting cans behind Wal-Mart, which did little to disabuse conservatives of their preconceptions. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't have a point.

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Rov_Scam 12d ago

You're pretty much in the same situation as me, then, and no, I don't think cutting it out or switching to decaf will change much. I usually drink one cup around 10 am, unless I'm unusually tired, in which case I'll start earlier and possibly have a cup in the afternoon. I also have dinner at my parents' house every Sunday and my mum and I have coffee with dessert. I don't think it affects my sleep in any way. I don't drink coffee at home on the weekends and only order it at restaurants if it's a sit-down place. I used to drink quite a bit of tea when I worked from home (usually about 2 cups a day, almost always in the afternoon) and the effects on sleep were similar. Honestly, having to get up and go into an office as opposed to working from home where I wasn't going to sleep past the start time no matter what made a much bigger difference in my sleep schedule than whatever effect a little bit of caffeine is having on me.

I says this as someone who's pretty critical of coffee culture generally; it's the only addiction that's not only socially acceptable to have, but socially acceptable to almost brag about having. There was a commercial a few years back where a guy repeatedly warned everyone not to talk to him until he had his coffee. If you say you can't function in the morning without coffee people will act understanding, if not sympathetic. Say the same thing about booze and people will start giving you pamphlets. I get that there's a difference in the relative risk levels, but an addiction is an addiction, and caffeine addiction is probably the easiest to treat (it can be done over a long weekend). I think the dividing line is whether you're doing it for the taste or for the psychotropic effect. If you're doing it for the effect then you'd be sucking down Folgers at home every day and wouldn't have a moment at work without a cup in front of you.

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Rov_Scam 24d ago

I'd be in favor of changing the law, the question, though, is whether the pro gun people would actually go for it. Say you limited private sales to 3 per year or 5 in any two-year period and required that the seller fill out a Firearm Bill of Sale and keep that and a copy of the buyer's photo ID on file for 5 years so that in the event the weapon was used in a crime they'd be able to demonstrate that it was sold? Or maybe do what Pennsylvania does and require FFL transfers for handguns (but not long guns). Or also require them for long guns with removable magazines. I think part of the reason why the law remains vague is that gun control is such a toxic issue right now that any change of the law is difficult to accomplish. For the gun rights people any clarification short of a total repeal of the FFL requirement is going to be seen as an unreasonable imposition, and for the gun control people anything short of eliminating private sales entirely is going to be seen as a useless half-measure. So there's no political will to do this.

That being said, I don't think the law is as ambiguous as you're making it out to be. In Abramski, there was no question that the defendant purchased the gun for immediate resale, and the evidence in the case didn't even support a defense that Abramski purchased the gun for himself and later decided to sell it. I also don't think Abramski really applies here in any context because the defendant transferred the gun to Alvarez through an FFL; at no point was he invoking the private sale exception. While I don't like the ambiguity myself, I don't know that the Malinowski case is really the best argument for the idea that the ambiguity needs correcting. I don't know the exact evidence, but I'd find it hard to believe that Mr. Malinowski wasn't acquiring these guns specifically for the purpose of reselling them. I mean, it's possible that he happened to inherit a bunch of guns all at once and wanted to get rid of them, or that he was constantly buying guns to try them out and getting rid of ones he didn't like, but absent specific evidence of that, it's safe to assume that someone who sells 150 guns over the course of a couple years is doing so for pecuniary gain.

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Rov_Scam 18d ago

There are more of these holidays that get limited governmental recognition than you can shake a stick at. Some congressmen proposes that March 22 is National Inland Waterway Workers Safety Awareness Day and it passes unanimously by joint resolution and nobody pays attention to it except a few trade organizations that want do distribute safety leaflets.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

Affirmative Action/DEI has always had a bit of a mushy existence in the context of discrimination law. The origins of the concept are pretty easy to understand — in the 1960s, blacks typically made up a smaller percentage of the semi-skilled and skilled workforce than their total numbers would suggest. It was pretty obvious that even if companies weren't actively discriminating now, there was certainly a time when they were, and it was a given that as a black guy there was only so far you could go. A lot of people on here will point to HBD and blah blah blah but keep in mind that this was a time when the workforce was largely industrial. If you work in a steel mill, you don't get hired based on your skills and education for specific positions; everybody starts in the labor pool and bids on higher-paying jobs as they become available, and most of these jobs don't require much additional skill. There are skilled jobs, but union dynamics require in-house hirings — if you need an electrician, you don't put an ad in the paper and hope that someone from the IBEW applies from the job; you run your own apprentice program for USW guys already working labor and production jobs so that they can learn the necessary skills, and replace them with new hires. The problem was that, in an environment where these promotions are often based on social and interpersonal dynamics, black employees often found themselves relegated to the lower rungs of the ladder.

The idea behind affirmative action was that companies would take a long, hard, look at how they were making these decisions, and put policies in place to ensure that a diligent black employee would, for example, have a chance to get into that electrician apprenticeship rather than be destined to a career of cutting grass and cleaning up. But Title VII still existed, so blatant discrimination was still prohibited. This has been roundly affirmed by the Supreme Court on multiple occasions. And more aggressive forms of affirmative action in general have a lot of under the hood requirements to demonstrate that it's necessary, and these are all things a court may look at in an inevitable lawsuit. So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements. Make sure the black guys in the labor pool are aware of the opportunities and let them know that they have enough seniority to get the promotion if they apply for it. That sort of thing. It's also why DEI isn't just a euphemism; affirmative action is a legal concept that's complicated. DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.

The problem is that Novant Health crossed a line. It may have actually been permissible if it were part of an affirmative action plan, but Novant never made that argument and tried to claim that the firing was entirely unrelated to race. They had to do this, of course, because there was no affirmative action plan, and even if there were, it's doubtful whether such a blatant act would be permissible under those circumstances. So it's really no surprise. The actual law isn't any different than it was in 1987.

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Rov_Scam 23d ago

I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.

The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."

I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.

I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.

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Rov_Scam 30d ago

Ironically, the end result "power users" would be complaining about is likely to be something akin to Linux, where if you want software that isn't included in the approved repository you're condemning yourself to a complicated install process (that's totally easy provided you ignore every online tutorial telling you how complicated it is and instead follow these 23 simple steps [assuming you are using one of three distros]).

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