Friday
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
10mo ago
Are we at the point, now, where Wawa hoagies can become an official Motte meme?
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10mo ago
The comment was intentionally phrased in an inflammatory manner for laughs (since this is the Friday Fun Thread). Seriously, though, as a reasonably-well-off person living in the US, I personally have little need of garages, closets, and pantries.
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I have no pantry. All my room-temperature food is in the kitchen cabinets.
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I have a closet, but I hardly use it. Rather, I keep all my regularly-used clothes in a large plastic basket or haphazardly around my bedroom. And a wardrobe can serve the purpose of a closet anyway.
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I have no garage. I can see how it might be useful for working on a car, but I personally just go to a mechanic.
gattsuru
10mo ago
The New York Times reports:
Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Tactically, this is the sorta thing that's obvious logical: Harris is trailing Trump in Georgia in recent polls, it's a major state for many of her success paths to the Presidency, and abortion is one of strongest spaces Harris has. There's basically zero chance of the ProPublica article leaving the "There may be alternative explanations for that delay other than legal concerns. But I trust that the reporter on this asked those questions, and so far no one has offered any" zone before the election is over, if it ever happens, and even if final report drops and embarrasses ProPublica, there's minimal chance anyone going to a Harris rally will ever hear about it.
But I remember when a federal candidate repeating rumors under the aegis that they weren't disproved yet was a bad thing. Scroll up in that twitter thread, and you'll find that a ProPublica writer brought it up as a counterexample in response to a conservative comparing fearmongering over ectopic pregnancies to the "eating cats" thing.
...
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the sorta people who were found it atrocious when Trump squirmed to mock a disabled man but couldn't care about Biden calling an innocent guy a white supremacist are going to find their gumption here. I'll post one if I can find it.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10mo ago
I agree with the other posters here suggesting shorter texts (even one sentence or less) are far better at maintaining a degree of mystery (and thus: interest). While laying all your cards face-up on the baize may seem straightforward, honest, reasonable, and even the Behavior That Was Asked For, that's only ever a strategy when teaching someone a new game--and usually what not to do.
Reworking the above:
Friday Evening
Me: … [local rock] concert. Let's do it.
Her: Ok!
or: .....
Either response is fine. As it is it took you several texts and a lot of hope to get to .....
Shorter sentences. Online dating isn't Motte effortposting. No emojis ever, for any reason. No exclamation marks. Suggest something fun. If she doesn't want to do that thing, be polite and move on. She will never refuse your advances directly, it's hard enough to do that in person--online she can just ghost you. Then if she gets bored or lonely she can reinitiate the interaction (Your self-respect should not allow that to occur.)
But again, always be courteous. Be courteous to a fault. Becoming the angry FuckYou guy just reinforces all popular modern stereotypes re: men. Not that you need to give a shit, but courtesy is a good thing.
People are saying church is lame. Why? It was her idea, though you brought it up. I agree church-as-date seems very unromantic and unexciting. It reminds me of that Life in Hell cartoon of biggest turnoffs before intimacy ("Dear father please forgive us for this vile sin we are about to commit.")
Anyway that's a You thing. We don't all run in the fast lane. I guess. The fact that she was responding with such relative vigor suggests she is either keen or mildly neurotic. Safe money on door #2 (see: I can't eat food around humans.)
Cut your loss, which is minimal. Next adventure begins any day now.
TowardsPanna
10mo ago
Wtf. Assumed this was a joke in the friday fun thread or something. It actually happened.
Can't believe they didn't check inside their other equipment after the pagers thing.
> Requests for advice
What's a reasonable "ghosting" protocol when it comes to online dating, assuming that I do want to rescue the conversation if-and-only-if the counterparty dropped the convo accidentally due to Universal Zoomer ADHD?
Trying out OLD recently, finally found what seemed to be a great match locally last weekend, but she went radio silence about 24h before a nearly-scheduled date. Not blocked, still "matched" on the site, and she shows up as "online" occasionally.
Current plan — asking in part for a sanity check on this — is to wait just under a week, maybe till Friday morning to allow for scheduling, then ask something upbeat and understanding like “hey, did you survive this week?” as the last outbound contact before writing it off as an intentional ghost.
Friday Evening
Me: … Well, let me know if the [local rock] concert next week sounds interesting or if you'd rather just grab coffee — or even lunch at a Chinese buffet? 😋
(I like rock music a bit, but not enough to bother going to a concert alone, so let me know either way!)Her: Coffee would be amazing too I love iced coffee and I’m sorry but I can’t eat in front of someone new for awhile I’m very self conscious about that😂
I like to try new places that aren’t popular there’s this [very interesting cafe about an hour's drive away] I wanna visit but I can’t this Saturday however I can Sunday! I work a 9-5 Monday-Friday so I have money while I’m getting my business off the groundMe: hmm, a drive up to [other state] this Sunday? 🤔Could be fun! I'm always down for obscure and interesting places.
What's the address, and have you got a specific timeslot in mind?
I was looking at checking out a church this Sunday (11am service), but could push that ahead a weekHer: Ooo which church I would love to go if that’s okay?
Me: Sure, I was looking at [nearby church] — it's a bit nontraditional (rather, they say they follow a non-mainstream tradition, Theosophy)
of course, as I said, I haven't actually been there yet so don't judge me if they turn out to be 100% crazy 🙈Saturday morning
Her: I’ll look into! It might be interesting
Me: OK, I guess I'll see you tomorrow at 11am at [nearby church] and then maybe visit the obscure [other state] restaurant after?
*or 10:45 more like, so we can say "hi" beforehandSunday Morning
Me: OK, I'm heading out now to check out the church.
I don't have [dating site] on my phone, so if you want to tag up today — [cell#]Me: (few hours later) Are you still interested in going to [that obscure cafe you mentioned] today?
It's an hour's drive there and an hour's drive back; if we leave around now, that would give us enough time for about a half-hour to eat and chat before I need to be back in [our town] by 4pm.
I need to fisk this article.
Recently I have been faced with repeated assertions by people in my social circles, both offline and online, that "at this point the only possible reason to not vote for Kamala Harris is that you're an irredeemably evil human being." Now, I'm no stranger to extreme political rhetoric! Demonizing "the other side" is nothing new. But in the past month or so I have been getting it from people who are not usually prone to that sort of thing, even in an election year. These are people who have tended to say things like "I wouldn't vote for Trump, but I understand why someone in $CIRCUMSTANCE might." They are people who have at other times bemoaned growing partisanship and the death of discourse, or praised charitable reading and balanced presentation. Somehow, after making it through 2016 and 2020 without ghosting me and blocking me on social media (like a fair few others in my life), somehow 2024 has finally managed to convince them that Trump is a political emergency against which no exigency is forbidden.
I say "somehow" but truly, for most of them I think the real explanation is Dobbs. Or rather--not Dobbs itself, but the absolutely panicked response the progressive news media is having over the existence of any corner of the country in which any baby in utero, and a not-insignificant number of babies ex utero, is protected from destruction against its mother's wishes or whims.
I am myself weakly pro-choice, in the libertarian "decriminalize but don't legalize" sense--at least in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I oppose any sort of government spending on abortions, but I tend to oppose government spending on damn near anything, so that shouldn't surprise anyone. However, I simply will not vote for anyone who advocates abortions in the third trimester, much less the euthanization of born-alive botches. I find that level of pro-abortion sentiment to be astonishingly ghoulish.
So: the article. When I saw the headline "2 women die in Georgia after they couldn't access legal abortions and timely care," my first thought was, "Damn, seriously? That's really surprising!"
My second thought was--"Wait a minute..."
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body.
Ohhhh. So the headline could literally have been, "woman in Georgia killed by abortion pills" with no noticeable loss of information?
She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
How do we know it wasn't too late, 20 hours earlier? Answer: we don't! Of course, I'm happy to point a finger at government bureaucracy as a contributing cause, as was the committee from which these two women's stories very conveniently leaked:
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school,
Lest ye be tempted to believe we're talking about a low-value citizen! She was gonna be a nurse someday, probably maybe!
should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.
Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.
There are almost certainly others.
Did you catch that? There are almost certainly others! That's the sound of a journalist telling you "I could find no evidence that my beliefs are true, so I'm going to make shit up instead."
Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.
Why would we report the news today, when we can drip-feed you artificially inflated horror stories once a week from now until the Fifth of November? Why would we tell you the facts we know, when we can wait for an unnamed "official committee" with unknown political biases to give us speculative inquiry into the hot topic du jour? Stay tuned for your daily dose of rage bait! (I say without a hint of irony, surely.)
Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
No fucking shit they declined to explain their thinking, even if HIPAA didn't exist they probably wouldn't have deigned to defend their medical judgment to a muckraker.
Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Good.
Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.
Shocking.
But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
Remember, it's not enough to be pro-choice; you have to be anti-racist. But let's not be unsympathetic, here: a woman is dead, and so is her baby. Or, it turns out, babies--
Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.
But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.
We're talking about a woman who was already raising one baby on her own, so there's no question that she understood the consequences of sexual activity. Imagine if someone had suggested to her that she could "preserve her newfound stability" by finding a stable partner before engaging in sexual activity. Here is another equally-accurate alternative headline: "woman dies in Georgia as a result of premarital sex!"
On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.
Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.
On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect.
Perhaps the headline should be "woman dies in Georgia after getting stuck in traffic?" Or maybe "woman dies in Georgia after being turned away from a legal abortion clinic?"
Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.
Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.
"I would kill my twin babies to preserve my newfound stability. But only if it's super convenient."
And of course: Thurman is given a legal option "well within the standard of care." It would appear that she accessed a "legal abortion" with no difficulty at all! Right, ProPublica?
Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.
Deaths due to complications from anti-abortion laws are extremely rare.
This was the point where I knew I had to react to this article in a public way. I recognize that ProPublica is an advocacy group and that RawStory is like, maybe on the level of the Daily Wire in terms of ideological bias and propagandizing. But the only reason I saw the article was that it was being shared by a couple of the aforementioned friends in my social feeds--people who I might even have described, in the relatively recent past, as political moderates. This is the new narrative, same as the old (pre-Roe) narrative: all restrictions on abortions are woman-killing laws!
Except, you know...
Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.
On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.
Look, I'm not a physician, but if you are bleeding through more than one pad per hour you go to the fucking hospital. This woman was bleeding like crazy and just didn't do anything about it for days.
But sure--anti-abortion laws are what prevented her from getting timely treatment, totally. And I've got a bridge you might want to invest in.
ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings.
Apparently not a HIPAA violation?
The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed.
Well that's alright then! But ProPublica somehow managed to identify her anyway. Interesting.
At least we finally got the name of the committee! Not that there's much information on the web about it. Who are its members? What are their politics? How often do they provide conveniently timed confidential medical information to partisan "investigative" reporters?
The world may never know. Also:
The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.
Here I will excise the precise timeline of the woman's hospital experience. If any of our physicians would care to comment on it, I'd be interested to know what a medical mind makes of the timeline as presented. It sounds harrowing, but mostly it sounds to me like the primary causes of this woman's death were, in descending order of contributory effect: poor life choices, abortion pills, poor self-care, medical bureaucracy, and then maybe legal bureaucracy. Georgia's particular abortion laws barely have any role to play at all in this tragedy.
Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:
“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”
There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.
Which she would apparently have received if she'd driven four hours to the followup she was duly informed might be necessary. When people die because the steps required to stay alive seem so inconvenient that a 28 year old woman with a son cannot even communicate the situation to her mother, it seems wildly irresponsible to suggest that the problem is with the law. Especially when you drop this nugget:
It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.
"The law totally did this! Well, in fact we have no evidence whether the law had anything to do with any of this. But you stopped reading eighteen paragraphs ago, so now we'll mention that fact for completeness. Wouldn't want a lawsuit to interfere with our 'reporting!'"
ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”
Sounds like Garrison Douglas knows what's up.
Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.
For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.
If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government. I'm sure they've got their hands full shadowing James O'Keefe.
The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.
They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.
On Monday, she would have turned 31.
Her twins, had they survived, would be nearly 2 years old.
cjet79
10mo ago
It looks extremely promising. I've already thoroughly enjoyed the space exploration mod that was created by the guy leading the design for the new expansion (the factorio company hired him). Their Friday blog series has managed to track down and kill some of the slightly unfun parts of the game, or just optimize it to perfection. There are game mechanics in factorio that felt fine because basically no other game really has them. Things like creating circuits that set programmable behavior (other game have circuits stuff, but rarely to this extent). They streamlined it all.
Quality modules are option as far as I know. But I also plan to heavily use them. Right now factorio kinda lacks an endgame resource sink to get awesome stuff (you can sort of get it with research, but it doesn't quite feel right). I can't wait to pour massive amounts of resources into a legendary suit filled with legendary modules shooting legendary guns.
I'm excited about creating another multi planet factory system.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
As a resident of the same state as @FiveHourMarathon, I'm going to have to semi-agree on gambling. As a resident of the western part of the state, though, I might be able to add some additional perspective. In 2001 West Virginia legalized traditional slot and video poker machines at racetracks. "Video lottery machines" had been legal at racetracks for some time, but they weren't particularly popular. Now that they had traditional slot machines, these tracks began constructing large casinos around them. 2 of the 4 racetracks in the state happen to be in the Northern Panhandle, practically an exurb of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania had been talking about legalizing gambling for a while, most notably through various riverboat gambling proposals in the '90s, but these never went anywhere. It soon became obvious that everyone was simply driving to West Virginia to play slots, and local news outlets regularly did stories where they'd go to Mountaineer or Wheeling Island and point to all the PA plates in the parking lot and interview the owners, who invariably said that they'd go to casinos in their home state if they were only legal. Whatever their objections were before, state lawmakers couldn't ignore the amount of money that PA residents were taking to West Virginia, and the push was renewed.
One thing lawmakers were initially cautious about, however, was that they didn't want to actually become West Virginia. Once slots were legalized, a number of sketchy "hot spots" started opening up around the state. These were usually bars, tobacco shops, and the like that had a room with 4 or 5 slot machines. Gambling wasn't merely legal there, but unavoidable, and Pennsylvania didn't want the state to have casinos popping up everywhere. So gaming licenses were initially limited to existing racetracks and four stand-alone casinos, one of which had to go in Pittsburgh and two of which had to go in Philadelphia. (It should be noted that at the time, Pittsburgh was effectively getting two casinos, as The Meadows racetrack is less than an hour south, and there was no comparable facility in the Philadelphia area at the time.) The gaming commission was also going through a comprehensive review process to ensure that only the best candidates were awarded licenses. They also announced that the casinos would have table games, at which point the same news stations went back to West Virginia and interviewed their resident casino patrons, who invariably said that they would drive to Pittsburgh (or The Meadows) to play them. West Virginia soon amended their law accordingly.
The system actually worked pretty well for about a decade. Then, the US Supreme Court ruled that sports betting could be legalized in any state. PA legislators rushed back to Harrisburg in the wake of the decision. But while they were there they did a couple of other things. They also legalized online gaming, removed restrictions on resort licenses (around a while but always a minor player), and created a new category of "mini-casinos". I was always in favor of legalized gambling, but this just seems like a bridge too far. I know that going to a casino is no real barrier for a true gambling addict, but there's something disconcerting about the idea that you can blow your life's savings while lying in bed. As another user noted, legalized sports betting has made sports media even more unbearable than it already was.
I play in a couple fantasy football leagues, but I've always found fantasy sports programming useless at best and agonizing at worst (I can only care so much about the fantasy performance of players who aren't on my team, and there's nothing more annoying than watching a game for one guy). Now we've added betting programming to that, and it's become almost completely impossible. Does anybody watch sports purely for pleasure anymore? Some people's lives are apparently so boring that they need to gamble on games they wouldn't otherwise care about to make watching them more interesting. I have a slightly different perspective. Last Friday, I found myself watching the Eagles Packers game with two guys who had parlayed the spread with a bunch of prop bets. Normally I wouldn't care who won, but after listening to the vocal commentary about every play, ref call, etc. that had any impact on their wager, I became very invested in these guys losing their shirts.
Anyway, the situation in PA got even worse after various courts ruled that certain games that I don't entirely understand are actually skill games and thus exempt from gaming laws. I doubt these games involve skill to the extent that one can get good enough at them to win consistently, but they've been popping up in seedy convenience stores all over the state. There are also these virtual horse racing and football game things that I've seen in family friendly bar/restaurant type places, but I don't really understand these either. In 20 years we've gone from the lottery, illegal slots in dive bars, and the small stakes stuff that's allowed in private clubs to gambling seemingly being everywhere. You can't get through a news broadcast now without them playing an annoying ad for Rivers online where a jingle that sounds suspiciously like the diarrhea song from elementary school literally boasts that their app allows you to gamble while lying in bed.
The other thing @FiveHourMarathon mentioned that I might as well address while I'm here is aging. I'm a few years older than him and, honestly, make hay while the sun shines is bad advice. Most women who age terribly tend to do so in their late 20s or maybe early 30s. If they make it any longer they're usually stable for the long haul. I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Cell phone video shows a man yelling at a group of pro-Israeli demonstrators, who were peacefully protesting across the street from him. That man, who's not part of the protest, is seen crossing the street and tackling one of the demonstrators.
Investigators said that's when that demonstrator, identified as 47-year-old Scott Hayes of Framingham, allegedly shot the man who tackled him.
Hayes was arrested and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. [emphasis added]
The video (cw: someone getting shot) is available, and while not the literal clearest cases of self defense that I've seen, is pretty high up there.
Hayes is set to be arraigned today. We'll see what the result of this philosophy causes.
I replied upthread but yes, I think alcohol is worst than cannabis, all things considered.
The thing is that cannabis was already banned and that was mostly fine. Sure there were some shady drug dealers, but there wasn't massive gang violence like there was during Prohibition. And, let's not forget that Prohibition wasn't a complete failure either. It really did reduce alcohol consumption by a lot with all the attendant benefits such as lower domestic violence and higher productivity. It's just that the benefits accrued mostly to the lower classes.
So yeah, if someone invented alcohol tomorrow, it should be banned absolutely. But once Pandora's Box is open, it's hard to shut. Which is another reason we should have never legalized weed. Now that it's legal, making it illegal again will be near-to-impossible.
Going forward, I think we need to squeeze a little harder.
Option 1) Increase taxes and regulation until the profit dries up. Consumption will go down and cannabis will be treated as a rare treat instead of a daily habit. We'll know its working if some street dealers start appearing again. Tolerate this to some extent as long as there is no violence.
Option 2) State run marijuana stores. Beige buildings run by bureacrats. Open 9-5 Monday-Friday. Inconveniently located and with no advertising whatsoever. Turn the pot industry into the DMV.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11mo ago
More on the PTSD subject here, for example. He observes that 1) combat experience was ubiquitous, and 2) it was viewed positively by the broader society. So returning veterans were told they did a great thing, that whatever they were experiencing was normal and also manly, and then were prescribed the socially accepted purification rituals to code-switch back into farming. Compare Scott’s discussion on neurasthenia: humans can probably adapt to the social context for all sorts of mental states.
I think I’ve also seen variants of @Ioper’s point, where increased range and especially industrial artillery made the difference. It seems likely that a constant drip of adrenaline would have dramatic effects on the psyche; the trenches plausibly maintained that stress much more than pre-modern warfare. But we still see PTSD from maneuver warfare, COIN, and other situations that should be as different from WWI as WWI was from the American Revolution. I’m not sure that physical response can explain the whole picture.
yofuckreddit
11mo ago
Holding everyone else back to accommodate the slowest is morally monstrous and more importantly, just wasting a ton of people's time for no good reason.
This may be different elsewhere, but the number of pants-on-head idiotic drivers who waste my time is... at least 1, but more probably 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of cyclists I encounter on a day-to-day basis.
We tolerate cars that are falling apart, weaving between lanes, stopping abruptly, and just fucking around far under the speed limit whenever they want.
As a driver first and foremost I'm sympathetic to your point that slowing others down is a moral problem. Do you contend that cyclists, as a group, are more responsible for this than drivers?
If so (and I'd love to know where in the world this could be the case), is the moral problem caused by cyclists worthy of the murder and maiming visited upon them by vehicles when they use the roads?
reconnaissent
11mo ago
It's not that those people have shorter attention spans. It's more that most people just don't take politics all that seriously. Because let's face it: electoral politics is not serious business. Voters do not think of themselves as board members trying to pick a new CEO, even though the two situations are structurally analogous. The huge difference of degree has resulted in a difference of kind. For most people, discussing politics is similar to watching sports: an amateur hour time when intellectual rigor is out of place, a time for letting one's hair down and cracking silly jokes (kind of like the Friday Fun threads. "This is for fun!")
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
https://www.themotte.org/post/237/friday-fun-thread-for-december-16/43418?context=8#context
Prior discussion. I basically stand by the advice in there. For a cheap, analog, mechanical men's watch I'd go for a Seiko5 dive watch or cocktail time; or a Timex Marlin; or a vintage Tissot Seastar, I recently added one to the collection and it's very nice, while not having much resale value.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11mo ago
So, anyone have a read on what a realistic ceasefire deal looks like? Does one exist? Is anyone serious mooting one around in the world of think tanks?
Ukraine's winning scenarios have run out at this point. The abortive and telegraphed offensive ate up too much time and material for them to win in any conventional sense. Prigozhin might have been the Black Swan they needed, but he pussied out. The Russian economy is showing no signs of collapse. Some point to a Wunderwaffen or to some chart that shows NATO production coming online at a faster pace from 2025 onward, but I doubt that will make a material difference. Ukraine is basically hoping for a Russian collapse as a result of some as-yet-unknown cause, which is not impossible, but not much of a strategy.
Russia's odds of winning much more than what they have so far seem longer still. They're hoping Ukraine just gives up, but that might be longer odds than a Russian collapse, as Ukrainian psychopathic nationalism seems more systemic rather than oriented around a single individual.
Neither side is going to win the kind of victory that will make good their losses. So how is a ceasefire outlined that will deliver a lasting peace?
I still haven't come up with a better idea than putting Harry and Meghhan on the throne in Kiev.
yofuckreddit
11mo ago
It looks like we need to fight more about whether or not God exists. It's hilarious that, if anything, most "conflict" seems to be in the Friday Fun threads.
zeke5123a
11mo ago
If we are talking vibes and just random anecdotes, then republicans are very excited about the RFK and (to a lesser extent) Tulsi endorsement. Both RFK and Tulsi are big in the Rogan orbit. Could help Trump and helps with enthusiasm. Listen to the roar of the crowd when RFK walked on stage Friday in Arizona. That’s vines.
Kinda late to this thread but I have watched and played some of Wukong last week so I will note down my own thoughts about the game itself, isolated from broader cultural context. (I actually managed to completely miss the DEI kerfuffle it reportedly had, gonna look that up)
The good: The presentation is, as the young'uns say, absolute cinema - easily on par with Western hits like God of War (in fact I think it's fair to call Wukong "God of War but Chinese", the parallels broadly hold in most aspects) and imho exceeding them at some points. Major fights in Wukong are exactly what an unsophisticated rube like me pictures in his head when he imagines xianxia - the prologue scene/fight solidly establishes that the sheer spectacle is the main draw of the game, and so far it does not disappoint while still having the difficulty to match, fuck White-clad Noble you are forced to git gud as soon as chapter 1. The game is gorgeous, the monster designs are consistently great, and I physically feel the cultural gap. After so many Western games that SUBVERT LE EXPECTATIONS, seeing a mythical power fantasy played entirely, shamelessly straight feels very refreshing.
The great: Special mention to the animated ending scenes for each chapter, with every one having a completely different art style, and an interactive in-game "tapestry" afterwards that serve as loosely-related loredumps to put things into context. Those are universally amazing, with incredible effort put into throwaway 5-minute segments that aren't even strictly speaking related to the game itself - I checked the credits out of curiosity and every cutscene has a separate fucking animation studio responsible for it! That is an insane level of dedication to your storytelling - foreign as the subject matter is to my uncultured ass, the sheer passion to share your culture and get your point across is still unmistakable. This right here should be the bar for every Chinese cultural export going forward.
The mid: I'm conflicted about combat. On one hand it feels a little floaty to my taste, especially the bread and butter light combos, and you do not get the stone form spell (the parry button of the game) until quite a bit into chapter 2 so the only reliable defensive option you have is dodge roll spamming. On the other heavy attacks are very satisfying to charge and land, and the frequent boss fights are almost universally great and engaging, with very diverse movesets for every one. There don't seem to be any bullshit boss immunities either, the Immobilize spell (which completely stops an enemy for a few seconds) works on pretty much every enemy and boss I've seen so far. Hitboxes and especially delayed enemy attacks can be frustrating at times though.
The bad: The exploration is worse than even Souls games; no map, sparse bonfires and very few notable landmarks scattered over the huge levels are not a recipe for convenient navigation. Maybe it's a skill issue on my part but it's been VERY easy to lose track of where you are (and especially where you were) and miss side content - of which there is a lot, adding to the frustration. To be fair, this is also why Souls games aren't my usual cup of tea.
Overall I think it is a very solid game, especially for the first game of the company, and I think that all the hand-wringing about Chinese bots or whatever is misplaced. It's not a masterpiece - it's just a good, solid game, and "organic" breakout hits of this scale are not unheard of, we had one just earlier this year.
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
It's been a while since my last update to the series, but this one was a monster that led me down several rabbit holes. I fear a few more of the upcoming ones will be like this. I'm trying to work outwards from Downtown and we're getting to some of the big ones that bring up a number of issues that deserve in-depth discussion. Anyway, enjoy your weekend.
Part 4: The South Side
Roughly speaking, the South Side Flats begin at the intersection of East Carson St. and Becks Run Rd. and end at the West End Bridge. Between these two points, the neighborhood lies on the flat strip of land between the Monongahela River and the railroad tracks. According to city planners, the area between the Liberty Bridge and the West End Bridge is technically called the South Shore, but literally no one calls it that with the possible exception of local TV news anchors (which irks my dad to no end). See map (This time with terrain!) There's also the Slopes, about which more later.
Unlike the Strip and the North Shore, the South Side was dominated by the massive J&L Steel mill at the eastern end of the neighborhood, which splayed across the river and continued on the opposite bank to an entirely different mill at Hazelwood. The neighborhood was originally the independent boroughs of South Pittsburgh, Birmingham and East Birmingham, which were incorporated into the city in 1872. For most of its history, the South Side was a typical Pittsburgh river neighborhood, dominated by industry and populated by a mix of immigrant groups, in this case mostly Eastern European. It was also one of the dirtiest parts of the city, and its population decline started well before World War II. There was never much of an upper middle class population, and the invention of the electric streetcar saw the working class heading for the hills to the south where the air was much cleaner. In the 1970s, there were plans to demolish the river side of the neighborhood to construct a four-lane highway, but this was around the time the Federal government was cutting funding for urban highway projects and it was luckily never completed, though the overengineering of the Birmingham Bridge (1977) is a vestigial remnant of mid-century transportation policy. By the time the J&L Pittsburgh Works closed in 1985, Carson St. was full of boarded up storefronts and dive bars, relics of the days when steelworkers would stop by after their shifts for a shot and a beer.
Incidentally, though, the mill closure would act as a sort of catalyst for redevelopment. I don’t know of any causal connection, but it was around this time that someone noticed that the business district was a nearly intact collection of Victorian-era buildings, and a robust historical preservation effort was begun. In the early ‘90s art galleries, music venues, and “alternative” spots like the Beehive coffee shop started opening, and the sheer density of bars quickly turned it into Pittsburgh’s favorite party spot, the Strip District’s brief club era notwithstanding. As the neighborhood improved, students from Duquesne University began renting in the western parts. The rest of the story practically writes itself.
4A: The South Side Works
The South Side is best described by tackling the ends first before diving into middle. On the eastern end, at the intersection of Beck’s Run Rd., the plain is too narrow to support much, and the only business of note is the renowned Page Dairy Mart. As you head further west, the valley begins to widen, and you begin to see scattered offices on the river side. These mark the beginning of the old J&L site, and they increase in density until Hot Metal St. (29th St.), the beginning of the South Side Works development. This is a typical New Urbanist development with a mix of residential, retail, and office space. While it’s reasonably well-done, it suffers from the same fate as all these large-scale developments in that its idea of retail revolves around big chains, and these chains don’t seem to stick around long. The retail aspect of these developments never reaches expectations, and some of the storefronts at South Side Works have been vacant for over a decade. Some of the restaurants do well, but I suspect that’s because there are offices here, including the headquarters of American Eagle, and I don’t think a midday lunch crowd is what the developers had in mind. I think that part of the problem is that New Urbanist designers are obsessed with the idea of a Town Square as the focal point of the community. However true that may be, they forgot that they weren’t building a town from scratch, but were adding on to an existing urban neighborhood. They built a town square a block away from the existing commercial artery, and it’s no surprise that it didn’t really pan out. The retail space that fronts Carson St. has been occupied pretty much continually, while the interior properties are suffering the vacancies. The square still gets a decent amount of foot traffic and the anchors are all occupied, so maybe the problem is just that the rent is too high, or that it had the misfortune of being built right before the retail market imploded. Either way, even the most “enlightened” theories of modern planning aren’t all runaway successes.
4B: Station Square
The same can be said for the opposite end of the South Side, the Station Square development. This is emblematic of the same ‘70s style development that struggling city governments are huge fans of — touristy, chain-dominated places inspired by a repurposing of some local historical feature. Baltimore’s inner harbor is the success story of this, but a proposed revitalization of the Buffalo waterfront centered around a Bass Pro Shops and Detroit’s countless false starts also come to mind. In Pittsburgh’s case, it was an old railroad station, and in Pittsburgh’s case, it was actually successful. The old P&LE terminal had a fancy restaurant and there was an indoor mall, plus a comedy club and chain restaurants like Hooters, the Hard Rock Café, Melting Pot, etc. at various times (had probably isn’t the best word because some of this stuff is still here). It was a product of the 1970s and I can’t speak to its initial success as I wasn’t born yet, but by the ‘90s it was the place to be. In the early 2000s it was home to Pittsburgh’s transitory club scene, usurping the Strip by providing a whole plaza full of cheap dance clubs. Circa 2006 you could pay 6 bucks to get into the Matrix on Friday nights, which was 3 establishments in one (technically 4 if you include the perpetually-deserted techno room, entered only if there was a line at the bar elsewhere) and sold well drinks for 50 cents.
But, as I alluded to earlier, the North Shore has since usurped Station Square’s position as the top downtown-adjacent tourist destination, and most of the club scene has migrated to the South Side proper, especially after the aforementioned plaza was torn down to build housing. This actually makes sense; until fairly recently, if you were visiting from another city to attend a sporting event, there wasn’t much development around the stadiums, and Downtown didn’t offer much in the way of nighttime activities that weren’t cultural or fancy restaurant-related and nothing in the way of typical pregame activities. So Station Square filled this gap, and offered a ferry service to the North Shore to boot. Now people from Cincinnati or Toronto can just stay on the North Side. It also didn’t help that UPMC initially planned on taking over the mall to build more offices. All the tenants were evicted and the building gutted. Then the pandemic happened and they changed their mind. So the building sits empty, with the exception of a few restaurants, and the entire development is now for sale. All that being said, I don’t see Station Square going away any time soon. It’s right across the river from Downtown and has the lower stations for both inclines, so it will always get tourist traffic. And the new residential development may induce some functional businesses to take up residence.
4C: The South Side Proper
There’s not much to be said for the far western part of the South Side, unless you’re interested in unglamorous semi-industrial businesses. So we’ll head back east. Moving eastward from Station Square there are about 10 blocks of transitional no-man’s land. It’s semi-residential, semi-industrial, and semi-commercial. There’s a bar called Brewski’s I think I was in once 15 years ago. Then, at 10th St., the real South Side begins. The heart of the neighborhood is between 12th St. and 18th St. Development is still thick up through South Side Works (which is around 26th and 27th Streets), but it’s quieter. There’s a lot of cool stuff down there, but the real draw is the bars. If you’re looking to get smashed on a Saturday night, this is the place to go.
This is the first of several rowhouse neighborhoods we’ll look at. Pittsburgh isn’t a true rowhouse city like Philadelphia or Baltimore, but it has its fair share of rowhouse neighborhoods, and I’d argue that the median rowhouse neighborhood in Pittsburgh is on par with the premiere rowhouse neighborhoods in either of those cities. Why? It’s tempting to say that since rowhouses don’t dominate like they do in Philly or Baltimore, and the rowhouse-heavy neighborhoods tend to be among the most desirable, that it's simply a question of money, since wealthier residents can afford to invest more in the upkeep of the exteriors, and rising property values give flippers an incentive to make the houses more attractive. There’s certainly some of that, but it’s a bit simplistic. Even if there were a massive campaign to restore every rowhouse in those other cities to its former glory, Pittsburgh would still come out ahead. The real answer is in the way they are constructed. In Philly and Baltimore developers built what was essentially one long building per block and divided it up with interior walls to create multiple units. This gives the street a certain rhythm and continuity of style, but makes it look boring. There were occasionally attempts to make the individual units look different, but there’s only so much you can do. In Pittsburgh, on the other hand, the houses were usually constructed individually to the point where the few block-long developments that do exist are interesting for their novelty.
If you thought I was going to post a picture of a nicely varied Victorian rowhouse street, though, you’d be wrong, because the South Side isn’t the neighborhood for that. Instead, I’m posting this picture from South 26th St. that is practically a field guide to mid-century remuddling. These houses are all at least 150 years old, as they appear on an 1872 map of the city. But note the massive dormer (complete with 90s fanlight) on the fourth house from the end. Note the front picture windows. Note the anachronistic brick façade on the end unit. Note that several houses have completely redone the front doors, removing the wood frames and transoms. I could go on but I don’t have all day. One thing I will point out, though, is the Kool-Vent awning on the house next to the one with the dormer, if only because architectural historian Franklin Toker once facetiously remarked that the South Side should be designated the Kool-Vent Awning Historic District. This may not be the kind of architecture that has outsiders paying big bucks, but I find it more interesting than what’s going on in Baltimore, and infinitely more interesting than anything in the Sun Belt, where even the old neighborhoods look like underdeveloped rural communities.
Anyway, the creeping problems with the South Side seem to be an unforeseen consequence of what happens when a formerly run-down neighborhood becomes trendy. A little too trendy. When most people complain about their neighborhoods, they look around and say “This place isn’t as nice as it used to be; the neighborhood has changed.” In the South Side, they say “I don’t like this neighborhood as much as I used to; it’s exactly the same as it was when I moved here”. To understand this seemingly odd state of affairs, you have to understand the dynamics that led to the South Side’s revitalization. The urban pioneers who took it from a declining working-class neighborhood to the Place to Be were young professionals in the ‘90s. They were also, incidentally, the people who made Carson St. the city’s premiere nightlife district. But there are more bars than any reasonable neighborhood to support on its own. Premiere nightlife district means outsiders. It also means noise. Now we’re in a situation where the people who initially invested in the neighborhood are in their ‘50s, and they’ve mostly aged out of the bar scene, and the music is starting to get loud.
This is partly a consequence of the South Side being the first Pittsburgh neighborhood to gentrify in the commonly-understood sense of the term. There were always areas that were nicer than others, but the South Side was the first neighborhood to become trendy, with hipster coffee houses and bars, an art scene, in-demand housing, and interest from outsiders just visiting for the day. There was always a bit of a hipster scene in Oakland (which will be discussed more thoroughly when we get to that neighborhood), but that was more of a consequence of proximity to Pitt and CMU; colleges always attract that element. As an inevitable consequence of this, combined with the increasing student interest from Duquesne, a lot of the bars catered more to the bro scene than the hipster scene, even in the early days. And since it spent so long as practically the only game in town for suburbanites and tourists looking for a good time, rather than morphing into a typical upper-middle class yuppie area, it solidified its reputation as an entertainment district. When other neighborhoods began gentrifying after 2000, this reputation became more and more ingrained, much to the chagrin of those who expected the neighborhood to mature along with them.
If you look at the Pittsburgh subreddit, every time someone moving to the city asks about living in the South Side, the consensus view is that it’s a nice area, but you’d better have a high tolerance for noise, and if you’re over the age of 30 the scene might not be for you. Someone else will inevitably point out that noise is only really an issue on Friday and Saturday nights within a block or two of Carson in the western part of the neighborhood, and that the businesses are diverse enough that there’s something for everybody. I’m inclined to agree with the latter view. I’ve never actually lived there, so take it with a grain of salt, but in my experience as a visitor on weeknights or during the day, and on most of the residential streets the weekend rowdiness is a low roar at best, easily drowned out by a TV or radio. Not the best place if you love peace and quiet, but not unbearable by any means. That being said, there are a number of places here where young people go to engage in what I call Loud Drinking. This is where you and your friends get dressed up to crowd into a bar that features overpriced drinks, no food, and a DJ blasting terrible music, wherein you struggle to get the bartender’s attention, fail to have a conversation over the noise, and ultimately guzzle your drinks as quickly as possible before moving on to the next equally crappy bar. They appeal to the kind of people who are either looking to relive prom every weekend or haven’t yet figured out that frat parties are boring, probably both.
4D: How Many Shootings in a Rash?
The other issue plaguing the South Side in recent years has been the perception that crime is on the increase. This was punctuated by a few high-profile shootings that occurred outside of nightclubs in the madness that was immediate post-COVID America. As usual, this was entirely overblown in the public consciousness, as the shootings were easily avoidable by staying away from Loud Drinking nightclubs in the western part of the neighborhood in the small hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings, but shootings are still shootings. The neighborhood usually has about 3 nonfatal shootings and 1 homicide per year. This ticked up slightly in 2020 but not enough to really gain anyone’s notice, especially since most people weren’t looking to go to bars. In 2021, however, there were 10 nonfatal shootings, and in 2022 there were 11. The numbers ticked back down to 6 in 2023, and so far in 2024 there has been only 1. Homicides were steady at 1 throughout the period, except in 2020 when there were none. The South Side has always been among the city’s worst neighborhoods in terms of total number of crimes, but this has always been downplayed in the public consciousness since it’s a generally wealthy area and it’s easy to blame it on the bars. Indeed, statistics bear out what I mentioned earlier, that the only really dangerous time is between 1 and 4 am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. It’s easy to wave of assaults as the result of bar fights, robberies as drunks being easy targets, etc. But when shootings are on the news seemingly every weekend (at least in the warmer months), perception begins to change. The idea that the South Side was dangerous became rooted in the public consciousness as it never had before.
Compounding the problem was that Bill Peduto had seemingly lost interest in being mayor. He had already been defeated in the May 2021 primary, but he probably would have won if he had bothered to campaign. He basically deferred to the chief of police, who responded by implementing traffic restrictions and increasing police presence. This didn’t do much to curb the violence, though the response times were excellent. The traffic restrictions proved so disruptive that they were jettisoned a few weeks after being implemented. Conservatives chastised Peduto and his successor, Ed Gainey, in the media, claiming that crime had increased in the wake of the George Floyd protests due to a kid gloves approach taken by Democrat mayors who didn’t have the balls to solve the problem. This attitude played well in certain circles but it’s unclear how true it was. Crime in the South Side didn’t start increasing in earnest until well after the “defund” insanity had subsided. And neither mayor showed any hesitation when it came to deploying extra officers in response to the violence; some argued that police presence was worthless if they weren’t allowed to do their jobs, but arrest totals were up as well, suggesting that they were doing plenty.
As 2022 was turning into a retread of 2021, Ed Gainey made a late night appearance in the neighborhood to assess the situation and meet with community leaders. The night proved uneventful from a crime standpoint, and Gainey insinuated that the problem was somewhat overblown based on his own observations, but critics countered that his appearance had been announced well in advance and he was escorted by police, media, and other local government officials, making it unlikely that anyone would do anything stupid in front of him. In July of 2023 he announced the formation of an “Entertainment Patrol” that would aggressively enforce quality of life violations in the South Side between 8 pm and 4 am Thursday through Sunday. There have been a number of articles in local media marking the one year anniversary and proclaiming the whole thing a smashing success that is set to be replicated in other neighborhoods, and soliciting comments from local business owners who want assurances that the patrol will be permanent. Aside from reporting the news, these articles seem well-placed to announce that the South Side has lost its stigma, and it’s all thanks to the smart leadership of local government.
Or is it? Yes, shootings on the South Side are no longer much of an issue, and haven’t been since 2022. But there was a dramatic citywide crime reduction between 2022 and 2023, which appears to be continuing in 2024 — is the drop in the South Side do to police tactics, or overall trends? These articles mention that the Entertainment Patrol consists of 10 officers and 2 sergeants. It doesn’t mention that at the height of the violence the city was regularly deploying 40 or 50 officers to the South Side on weekend evenings, with little effect. There’s also some question as to who, exactly, was perpetrating the violence. The Entertainment Patrol articles mention that, during the pandemic, a lot of people started drinking in the street or in parking lots, and police gave them a pass since the bars were closed. But the behavior continued after the pandemic ended, particularly among underage kids, and this fueled the shootings. I don’t particularly buy this, though, since ground zero for the shootings was in the crowds that congregated in front of bars around closing time. I’m not suggesting that the Entertainment Patrol is a bad thing, since the business owners seem to like it, it’s by and large made the area at least appear more desirable, and it sends the message that the city is committed to keeping the area nice, but I doubt its overall effectiveness at preventing violent crime.
Overall, I think the shootings are just one of those things that we’ll never have a good explanation for. I think that a big part of the problem is that most people, particularly those who study these sorts of things, are by and large rational and logical people, and accordingly assume that the perpetrators of violence are rational and logical people who simply lack the same moral compass that the rest of us do. But if you start from the premise that someone who would shoot someone else is inherently irrational, then there’s not much you can do in terms of traditional policing to stem the problem. The city threw officers at the problem, which sounds good in theory. But when an illogical person decides he is going to shoot someone, the presence of police doesn’t so much prevent the shooting as it does ensure swift apprehension of the suspect. Hell, one of the shootings took place directly in front of a parked patrol car with two officers inside.
4E: No Minimum
Among online urbanists and YIMBYs, there is no greater evil than the parking minimum. While they may grudgingly concede that some aspects of zoning codes are necessary — keeping housing away from industry, not putting a skyscraper in the middle of a historic district, etc. — the parking minimum gets nothing but scorn. This is understandable, to a degree. Parking lots are ugly, they take up a lot of space that could be used for better things, and they make businesses harder to walk to. But there’s a bit of a Chesterton’s Fence thing going on here, with the South Side being a textbook example.
Parking in South Side was never easy, considering that unlike many other rowhouse neighborhoods in the city, virtually no houses have a full-size lot which fronts on an alley, meaning there is little off-street parking. Given many people drive to the South Side to socialize, the popularity of the neighborhood made it difficult for residents to park near their homes. In relatively quick succession, essentially every residential street in South Side Flats went over to permit parking. The initial enforcement of it was limited at nighttime, meaning it didn't really cut down on bar traffic. It did, however, cut down on daytime shopping. Worse, employees of many South Side businesses had nowhere in the neighborhood to park all day, making it difficult to work there unless they lived in the neighborhood (which is hard for low-wage service workers) or took one of the few buses in. The city then compounded the issue in 2017 by prohibiting meter parking on Carson St. after 10 pm on weekends to keep a traffic lane open for safety vehicles.
Parking is a complex issue. The permit parking was good on paper but implemented horribly. The perception locally is that the permit parking has no clear winner and mostly losers, and as a consequence proposals to implement permit parking in other popular neighborhoods have died a quick death. Councilman Bruce Kraus has tried to make parking available across the river over by the jail offering a shuttle service; however, this has been a huge flop. Much of the feedback is people don't like waiting for a shuttle every 30 minutes to get to their car parked half a mile to a mile away. Trying to force changes in consumer behavior that don't adequately meet the demands of the consumer doesn't usually work well. Uber and Lyft were successful in derailing Yellow Cab because they provided a pathway to convenience, not because they forced people to jump through their hoops. It should be noted that residential permit parking is the preferred solution among online urbanists. Kraus, who retired a couple years ago, was an unapologetic NIMBY. He advocated vociferously for South Side residents but had no sense for the bigger picture. Proposed residential developments, which would have given the neighborhood more of a local base for the business district, were killed due to parking concerns. He was fully opposed to the construction of any garage, which would have helped immeasurably. There are a couple of inexpensive garages in the neighborhood, but they’re all at South Side Works, and, even if they could use the exercise, you can’t expect people to walk 15 blocks just to go out to eat.
4F: When Gentrification Ends
Over the past decade and a half, the South Side has been eclipsed by the gentrification of neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s East End. Virtually every vacant lot has been built out. Most of the existing housing has been rehabbed, and what hasn’t is selling for top dollar for something that needs six figures worth of work. And despite this, house prices are actually dropping. A lot of this is obscured by the across-the-board price increases since COVID, but while the city has seen an average home price increase of 37% since pre-COVID, the South Side has only seen about a 20% increase, and the houses take a while to sell (the South Side data is admittedly based on my own perusal of Zillow sales, so take this with a grain of salt). What’s more, this decline was occurring well before COVID. 1717 Jane St., a new construction town home, sold for $362,000 in 2011, but only $355,000 in 2017, and took over a year to sell. It sold again last fall for $418,000, which looks like a decent increase, until you realize that it’s only up 15% from 2017 prices. Growth in itself is its own economy. If an area stops growing or improving, the speculation and capital that creates investment is basically where you hit your diminishing returns. Investing in residential properties in the South Side is a bit riskier these days, as you aren’t seeing the kind of ROI that you can get in other neighborhoods. Retail leases are still astronomical while residential prices are falling. This isn’t sustainable. Gentrifying neighborhoods generally have low retail rates that allow hip, independent businesses to set up shop, while residential home values in the surrounding area skyrocket to do increased desirability. The South Side is seeing the opposite happen. It’s also getting to the point where a lot of the original rehabs are becoming dated and will need to be redone soon, but since the owners bought them when the market was hot they can’t get the kinds of returns that the original gut-jobs did. I don’t know if this ends with stabilization or decline, but the next decade or so will be interesting to watch. I read an article suggesting that the rough reputation it developed during 2021 and 2022 might lead to a second round of gentrification, but I don’t see that happening. Gentrification happens, in Pittsburgh at least, because the area is cheap enough that it’s worth investing in. As recently as the 2000s, houses in some “up and coming” areas were selling for like $40,000. They weren’t even gut jobs, though walking into them was like going back to the 60s in a time machine. I doubt the South Side would see that much new investment unless the area sees a significant price drop, and I don’t see that happening. My guess is that the neighborhood will be what it’s always been to outsiders, with Carson St. still being the rowdy part of town, but with relatively cheap rents compared to other places.
Neighborhood Grade: Upper Middle Class. Despite the problems I discussed, the typical markers of decline aren’t present, and though it’s not as desirable as a place to live as it used to be, no one is itching to get out and it’s nowhere near the point where Section 8 housing will start moving in. It’s also not accurate to say that it’s at an incomplete stage of gentrification because the traditional markers of gentrification aren’t there either; the original mill hunkies have all passed on, and the “quirky” businesses have either closed or been there long enough that they’re practically institutions. It’s not hip to hang out on the South Side, and it’s not hip to open a business there.
4G: The South Side Slopes
This is already a marathon post, but it doesn’t make sense to discuss the Flats without discussing the Slopes, since they’re really all just the South Side. The Slopes begin where you cross the railroad tracks around Josephine St. and end at the top of the hill. This area was never part of the aforementioned Birmingham or East Birmingham and was essentially undeveloped until around 1880, when the increasing need for housing near the J&L facility meant that any available land had to be developed. Being on a steep hill, this was always the least desirable part of the area, and it shows. The housing is mostly frame “mill houses”, that weren’t built well to begin with, and have often been remuddled or downright neglected. One interesting feature, though, is the so-called “low side house”. These look like tiny cottages from street level but descend another story or two in the back. While the Slopes never saw any significant levels of urban flight or abandonment, the benefits it’s seen as a result of the gentrification of the Flats have been limited. Some streets near the bottom of the hill have been rehabbed and sold for decent amounts, but the further up you go, the worse it gets. The benefits to the Slopes are that it’s relatively close to an active commercial district and the houses can have absolutely stunning views of the city. That’s about where it ends, though. The housing is cruddy and outdated. The areas near the top of the hill, while not dangerous themselves, are close to bad areas and are incredibly run down. The worst part, though, is that, in defiance of all logic, it’s neither walkable nor car-friendly. The Slopes have no business district of their own, so walking means a long trek down the hill to Carson St. and, more importantly, a long trip back up the hill from Carson St. The roads are circuitous, meaning that the only way to get their in a decent amount of time is to use a series of public staircases that don’t see snow or ice removal in the winter and can get overgrown in the summer. Driving means parallel parking on a narrow road with a 30% grade, which also happens to be at the bottom of the city’s snow removal priority list. It also means driving on similar roads to get in and out. A friend of mine lived here for a while and liked it, but he’s also an idiot.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. I don’t see this area ever becoming trendy, but I don’t see it declining much either. This is a prototypical Yinzer neighborhood that people won’t move out of because: 1. Their entire family lives on the same block, and 2. They can’t afford to. A few years back I was in one of the South Side’s dingier bars (at which I was a regular in my younger days), when a girl in the group I was with said that I girl in one of the booths said I was cute. I looked over and saw a reasonably attractive girl in her late 20s, so I took a seat across from her and introduced myself. I experienced a disappointment that is all to common here, as the first two words out of her mouth indicated that she was raised in a household that did nothing to discourage the development of an accent. I’d say it’s among the thickest I’ve ever heard, except that at a certain level it’s just like an on/off switch. Needless to say, she was also fucking insane, and when she asked me what I did for a living, I told her I rolled back odometers. Thinking I had made a successful escape, I was disappointed to learn that my friends would spend the rest of the evening winding her up about my obvious moral failings, which I later extended to include title washing, so that we could continue to hear her ramble about how degenerate we all were. She was from the Slopes. We dubbed her “Princess Sarah” and she’s become somewhat of a legend among the group.
FaibleEstimeDeSoi
11mo ago
Does anybody here knows how to find old reddit posts from a specific subreddit? There is no search for oldest, no option for specific dates and even scrolling down for top of all time will not work because of 1000 listed posts limit. Previously there were a couple of api based solutions but they got bricked recently. It would be very strange if there wasn't a way of doing this considering that all the posts are there and are accessible through links to this day.
Posting this in Friday fun because I need this to autisticly read discussions of the game/book/film from when it released, not for anything useful.
DoctorMonarch
♬We're so happy that we live in 1800's Alabama 'cause it's sunny and there is no crime!♬
11mo ago
As far as History of the Peloponnesian War, maybe make that the first half of your Friday class or similar? Also, Landmark Thucydides kicks ass as an edition.
Maybe try and force consistent translations for the epics? Fagles did a great job.
It's a bit unorthodox, but you could try to teach the kids to skim read properly, the funeral games in the Aeneid and also some of the same-y parts in Italy.
In the medieval course, I'd throw in Beowulf or Song of Roland. Going from Boethius to Dante is too much of a historical gap imo. Maybe also selections from Canterbury Tales or Decameron?
Open class discussion or even brief personal essay on "Why Bad Things Happen To Good People" before tackling Job might make the text more interesting, having articulated their personal beliefs.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
Next week my only option will probably be Friday, but the 5AM - midnight time span still holds.
Yeah, we used Discord the last time, but we ran into some technical difficulties, so if we continue having issues, we might try something else.
johnfabian
11mo ago
I previously sang the praises of Only Connect, my favourite game show. It is now back for series 20, with a brave youtube user evading the BBC censors for us. The first episodes of each new series are generally easier with it ramping up in difficulty towards the end.
Because it's Friday night... I think you should trust your closest relatives, not actually breed with them.
But yeah, in all seriousness, I think that living in a high trust society is fucking awesome and I lament its loss. I tend to err on the side of more trust, rather than less. But trusting strangers the same amount as relatives is pathological pro-outgroup bias.
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