Blackcap Blog

Published at 20:15 on 9 February 2015

What’s happening with the ongoing gentrification of the inner cities is the end of the real great inversion: those decades following World War II when the cities were abandoned pretty much wholesale throughout the USA as desirable places to live.

The inner city basically hit rock bottom in the 1970s, after several decades of accelerating decline. That was the decade when large areas of the Bronx burned and New York City almost went bankrupt. By the end of the 1980s, historic preservation was starting to make people appreciate those older urban core areas and they began a gradual, ongoing process of revival.

Those postwar decades of urban decline are an anomaly in an overall historical record in which cities have traditionally been seen as the most prestigious places to live. That those same decades encompass most of the lifespan of the Baby Boomer generation does not make it any less an anomaly.

Published at 08:23 on 4 February 2015

The latest Republican effort to repeal it proves my point. It contains a provision to work on coming up with something to replace it. From that article:

Unlike previous GOP bills to repeal the health care law, this version did instruct key House committees to report back within six months with new legislation that would provide health care coverage without increased costs.

The debate on whether there should be some social responsibility for health care (as opposed to it merely being each to his own in a capitalist market) is therefore over. Both sides now agree that health care should be more than just an individual responsibility. The debate is now moving on to how exactly to define that social responsibility and its relationship to individual responsibility.

The latter, of course, will always be a big part of the equation, as it must in any free society. It would take an Orwellian world of total surveillance and total lack of personal privacy for it to be otherwise.

Even in the UK, which probably has the most socialized medical system in the First World, there’s still a lot of individual responsibility: choosing which risky behaviors to engage in (or avoid), adopting good hygiene habits, reporting symptoms to one’s doctor, choosing which doctor to have as one’s primary care practitioner, etc.

But I digress. Back to the emerging consensus as to the coming parameters of the debate: It is precisely why the Right fought any sort of health-care reform so tenaciously. They knew it would come to this; they knew it would be a Social Security moment, a time when a move to a more collective responsibility for something (then: retirement, now: health care) would become widely accepted by society.

That’s true despite any of the very real flaws in Obamacare (it’s basically a welfare program for the wasteful and inefficient private insurance industry), or no doubt in any of the GOP proposals that emerge to change or replace it. The basic parameters of the debate have now shifted.

Published at 21:04 on 3 February 2015

Basically, they are dead set on pissing as many people as possible off, and their ideology prevents them from being able to acknowledge this. So they’re doomed to gather increasing numbers of enemies, and increasingly provoke said enemies, until those same enemies feel compelled to crush the Islamic State. It’s precisely the same reason why Hitler was doomed to fail.

A look at their English-language magazine should be enough to convince one of that. It’s packed with rhetoric about how what they’re doing is God’s will. So any criticism of their aggressive expansionist doctrine amounts (in their eyes) to criticizing the Almighty, which is of course a capital offense according to their ideology.

And, unlike with Al Qaeda (a non-state actor), war will be possible to wage against the Islamic State. It’s an actual nation-state (albeit not an internationally recognized one). It has an identifiable territory which can be attacked, invaded, and conquered. The well-understood concept of war can be easily applied.

And what sort of state is it? A landlocked one, in control of a badly conflict-scarred infrastructure, surrounded by nations which hate it. And which it is fated to provoke even more.

It’s doomed.

Published at 16:02 on 3 February 2015

I’m not much of a sports fan, so when it became evident that the forecast storm on Sunday was instead breaking up as it hit the Olympics, I decided to load my fat-tired bike in my truck and ride the logging roads near Port Gamble. Part of the motivation was that it’s one of the last good chances to go off-island (for outdoorsy stuff) in the next month, as the Agate Pass Bridge is scheduled to have maintenance done on it, which means huge backups for anyone using it. That leaves the ferry, which does not head to a convenient destination if easy access to outdoor recreation is one’s goal.

So, anyhow, after lunch I hit the trails. Well, the roads. But many of them in the northeast part of the Port Gamble tree farm are more like trails, because they are so overgrown they might as well be mostly fictional (if you can even find them in the first place). That made for some unplanned adventures and detours.

Overall, though, it ended up being a day of hitting an aggressive stride and trying to go as fast as possible down those old roads. I had them pretty much to myself, because the masses were at home transfixed by their electronic screens. It was a wonderful afternoon of feeling great to be alive, and great to be an animal on a living planet.

I have yet to visit the southeast part of the tree farm. It was on the route plan for Sunday, but the unplanned detours due to the differences between the map and reality put me behind schedule as the afternoon light was starting to wane. If the map was correct, I’d have enough time to take a route through the southeast quadrant, but I had just learned that said map cannot be completely trusted as to its accuracy.

So I played it safe and took the way back I was already familiar with. The southeast quadrant will probably have to wait until March.

Published at 21:18 on 29 January 2015

The top-down sort of state socialism that the late Hugo Chávez implemented had its inefficiencies, but it survived for two reasons:

1. Venezuala is a petro-state and could afford to throw enough money around to (mostly) paper them over, and
2. The status quo Chávez upset had such gross inequalities that it didn’t matter for most Venezuelans that there were shortages of certain key consumer goods from time to time, since access to same had still improved for them (they had gone from often not being able to afford things to much less often occasionally running into shortages).

But with the collapse in oil prices, the strains are now starting to show.

Unlike Saudi Arabia which has a lot of oil and only a few people, the situation is reversed in Venezuela. Maduro isn’t sitting on piles of money that he can draw on in the lean times. Plus, despite some of first Chávez’ and now Maduro’s admittedly authoritarian policies, Venezuela is still much more free and open a society than Saudi Arabia.

As a result, Nicolás Maduro’s popularity is now plummeting. So it’s safe to make a prediction that his days are probably numbered. Absent an unexpectedly sudden turnaround in oil prices, I expect him to be out of power within two years.

Hopefully that can happen without a total sell-out to the forces of imperialism and class rule.

Published at 07:08 on 21 January 2015

Random stuff, because I’m still very much alive despite not posting much here recently:

Charlie Hebdo. Yes, their cartoons do have a well-established history of being crude and insensitive. That’s absolutely no justification for the violence (though it does help explain it; justification and explanation are two different things). There is no right to not be offended. What probably sucks more than the loss of life, however, is that France does not seem to be taking the same moral high road Norway took after their recent terrorist attack. There’s way too much talk of “war” happening in France. Neither Al Qaeda nor terrorism is a country with a defined land mass (the first is a non-state actor, the second is a tactic), therefore it is is pointless to wage war on either. I’ve discussed this latter point before, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Construction at home. It’s was a week of not really having my home to myself, because I’m having the carpet replaced with hardwood flooring. And it looks like this disruption is going to last longer than expected, because the adhesive used to attach the stair tread really stinks, so I’m now coping with that issue for at least a week after the work ends.

Durian. Speaking of strong smells, I did finally have time to treat myself to a durian smoothie in celebration of moving and defeating the bedbugs. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered, and now that the experience is fresher in my mind the addictive urge resurfaced. I actually tasted an almond aspect to it this time, which I believe is a first. One of the joys of durian is that it never tastes quite the same twice.

Sometimes, it’s best not to even try. That’s a statement that will make every motivational speaker cringe, but it’s true. One’s plans must be at least somewhat realistic. Consider the fate of the Kalakala. This historic vessel was “saved” from its fate of housing a fish-processing plant in Alaska by being towed back to its old home to await historic restoration. Alas, that latter part of the plan was very expensive, and funds to perform it never materialized. The vessel ended up bleeding its owners white in moorage fees year after year. Its current owner has decided to end the financial bloodbath and recoup at least some of his losses by scrapping it. If it had been left in Alaska, it would either still be a fish processing plant, or be sitting there abandoned (because in a rural area the moorage would be cheap or free and the cost to tow it south for scrapping would exceed the scrap value). It would, in other words, be waiting indefinitely for the right restorer to show up.

Sometimes, one has to try harder. Realism again. It’s a fact of life that some misfortunes, like bedbug infestation, are extremely difficult and expensive to manage. The “experts” will tend to lie to you about the effort and expense required in an attempt to manage the shock value. Absent being one of the lucky few who resolves the problem with minimum effort, the effect of the lies is to draw out the process, because instead of making the full effort needed, weeks and then months get wasted on half-efforts. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way battling scabies, and one I put to use again last year on bedbugs. I hit them harder than the experts recommended, and planned for the initial treatments to fail (which they did). I took stronger precautions than recommended to prevent infesting my new place. I might still be battling them if I hadn’t followed that strategy.

Published at 18:50 on 3 January 2015

Back when I first moved to Bainbridge Island, I made a post about my experiences with cooking on an induction stove. The alternative was the electric stove my new apartment came with. The latter was not only an electric stove, but the very worst sort of electric stove, a flat-top electric stove.

Take all the lack of responsiveness of a coil stove, then add to it a fragile glass top that’s easily fractured by dropped pots, won’t work properly with anything other than an absolutely flat-bottomed pot, shows every last speck of grime in great detail, and which is virtually impossible to keep grime-free, and you have the flat-top electric stove. The appliance industry’s answer to the question: how can we make electric stoves suck even more than they already did, yet charge more for them?

But I digress. There was an escape from the fate of having to cook on that thing, and it had the form of an induction cooktop which plugged into a normal wall outlet. Naturally, I ordered one. And I was glad I did.

But, unlike the majority who give induction a try, it still left me wishing I had a gas stove again.

First, there’s the obvious matter of only flat-bottomed magnetic pots working. I like to cook with a wok, and that’s basically a non-option on induction. Sure, there’s a few expensive induction stoves that have a recessed burner capable of accepting a wok, but they’re both few and expensive and the few reviews I’ve found of them generally indicate that woks work far better with gas.

Finding replacements for my non-magnetic pans was an exercise in frustration. I would go to the store and see something I liked, but it wasn’t magnetic. I’d see something magnetic, but it wasn’t to my liking. I’d see something to my liking that was magnetic, but it was the most expensive pot in its class and something I’d use only infrequently (so the cost would be hard to justify). Finally I’d find something that seemed suitable, only to discover it’s only available as part of a larger set (which needlessly duplicates things I already have) and not individually.

Instead of knobs, the induction cooktop had touch controls. Like all touch controls, they were finicky and often did not register a touch or erroneously registered one twice. It’s far simpler and quicker to use a knob instead of having to do minor battle with a poor human:machine interface each time I adjust a stove setting.

Its surface was shiny, so it showed every last spill and fingerprint, thus demanding frequent cleaning. It wasn’t nearly as bad as a flat-top electric stove which both has this drawback and bakes the grime on, thus making it impossible to remove, but it was still annoying. It begged for cleaning much more than any gas stove I’ve used.

When I performed those frequent cleanings, the touch controls would get triggered by my wiping and the stove would be beeping like crazy and flashing error messages because there were no pots on it. Harmless, I know, and easily remedied by turning it off afterwards, but needlessly annoying. A gas stove doesn’t needlessly beep at me when I clean it.

It had a mind of its own (and a very bossy one at that). That missing-pot detection ability I just mentioned means you can’t do things like lift a pan to distribute oil or melted margarine on it. At least, you can’t without the stove first scolding you for your transgression with beeps and flashing lights and then (a few seconds later) punishing you for it by shutting the burner off. Then I would have to fight with the finicky touch controls to get it back as it was.

I didn’t want a finicky techno-toy that tries to boss me around. I wanted something simple that works with any pot made and which does what I want. That’s gas, and that’s what I had installed in my new kitchen when I bought a home last fall.

Apparently that makes me the minority. From what I’ve been able to gather by looking around the Internet, most who are used to cooking with gas who try induction like it and never go back to gas.

I find that puzzling (given my experiences), but then again, I often find it puzzling about how so many people buy and use high-tech gadgets without going through a process of evaluating how said gadget will actually improve their lives. For many, the snob appeal of being able to show others how they can afford all the latest gadgets apparently has significant value in and of itself.

That’s not the whole story here, of course. For example, most people in the USA never use a wok, so the fact that induction works poorly at best with a wok is a non-issue for them. But I rather suspect it’s a big part of the story.

Published at 20:09 on 21 December 2014

How dare they!

That’s basically what comes to mind when gripes like this catch my attention.

And before anyone complains: No, I am not celebrating anyone’s death. I am merely pointing out that well-established historical patterns have expected consequences. It may be politically incorrect to say so in Establishment circles, but that doesn’t make it any less of a fact.

Published at 08:23 on 12 December 2014

That’s long been my estimate (even before I made that linked post) of how much the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement boondoggle is going to end up costing. And it’s an open question as to whether or not there will be a usable tunnel after pouring all that money down that rat hole.

The latest in the saga of foibles is that the access tunnel is that the access pit they are digging to repair the damaged tunnel boring machine is causing a whole neighborhood to start subsidng. That’s going to be a healthy chunk of change just to compensate all the affected property owners right there.

Remember, this is a unique and never-before-attempted project. Nobody has ever used a tunnel boring machine this large. Nobody has ever dug a tunnel this deeply through saturated soil. So nobody really knows how difficult it actually will be.

Anyone who said it would cost $1 billion, tops, was either a liar or a rank idiot. Or both.

Published at 10:21 on 10 December 2014

When that good price comes from a big, nationwide retailer like Sears or Home Depot, and it’s a gas appliance that you want to run on propane, that’s when.

You see, virtually no gas home appliance comes straight from the factory equipped to run on propane. A few do, but they’re very few. Most all are designed to run on natural gas, because that’s what the majority of customers use. But the difference between the two fuels is actually very minor, making it theoretically easy to convert from one to the other. And since it increases their market size, manufacturers inevitably make it easy to do said conversion. But, it’s still a conversion that has to be done. You can’t just hook the appliance up and have it operate properly.

I shopped at Sears for my stove. They had good prices, and Kenmore is actually a very highly-rated brand. Then I mentioned the p-word (propane) and the person on the phone giving me price quotes stammered and did a double-take. He said he’d have to get back to me. When he did, the cost was around $250. Goodbye to any price advantage for buying a stove from Sears as opposed to my local mom-and-pop store.

I tried Home Depot. The result was even worse. They simply didn’t do propane at all. Their “free installation” was for natural gas customers only. I’d have to pay a third-party service technician (probably from my local mom-and-pop appliance store) to convert and install it. Say goodbye to any Home Depot price advantage.

Meanwhile, the local mom-and-pop store is on an island with no natural gas service. So virtually every gas appliance they sell ends up being converted for propane use. It’s just part of their standard procedure. They tack on a fee for it, but it’s nominal by comparison.

Neither national retailer ended up being definitively more expensive, actually. It merely became a wash, price-wise. But why deal with someone out-of-town when I can deal with someone local? And why raise the spectre possible finger-pointing (“It wasn’t us! We sold you a good range! Your installer broke it!” “It wasn’t me! They sold you a defective range!”)?

It’s sort of a surprise, really. There’s lots of people in the same boat I am where I live. I’d not be surprised if a Seattle store had no idea of how to deal with a customer who used propane, but it’s a complete surprise to see such an attitude in Poulsbo.

Oh well, their loss.