Inflation is really hitting Pokémon Go. Incubators are no longer available in bulk for less than 100 coins.
I have an article I've been meaning to send you for a while and will work on getting that to you, but there's plenty of other crazy shit right now to keep everyone busy.
Depressing article in the Globe today that even the most liberal cities around Boston have done nothing to trim police budgets.
My parents are far away from any real hurricane danger, so they're having a rainy day with high winds where you're supposed to cancel everything and stay home, and I'm so, so jealous. Where's my mild hurricane.
I mean, it wasn't a mild hurricane by any standard.
Evolution of placentas?
https://elifesciences.org/articles/74297
Recipes for preparing placentas? The only really vegan meat.
They are pretty interesting-- those and teeth are basically the only parts of mature mammalian bodies where new pieces get grown in a developmentally controlled way. Liver tissue regenerates after fairly extreme damage, but that's different from growing a new organ that wasn't there before on demand.
I wonder if the Greeks picked "liver" for Prometheus because they knew about its regenerative abilities or if it was just because they knew birds liked liver?
I did not know about Cape Coral until just now. An city filled with hundreds of artificial canals so that "every house is waterfront"? What a doomland.
There was a redevelopment plan for South Beach pre-revitalization that proposed something similar. An "American Venice." Luckily they didn't go through with it.
Miami beach itself was initially scammy landfill built by the same irresponsible loon who bouilt the Indianapolis speedway. No engineers consulted, improvised iterative improvements after the initial deaths.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/indy-brickyard-is-completed
6 SNL's placenta helper sketch (written but never aired)
Liver tissue regenerates after fairly extreme damage
And thank god for that
Why be frugal? Just have another baby.
Miami beach itself was initially scammy landfill built by the same irresponsible loon who bouilt the Indianapolis speedway.
Florida history is wild that way. Just one crazy real estate scam after another.
I'm sure at least some of the real estate scams were of higher quality.
Well, some of them did involve actual existing land.
3: It was wild watching the radar in Gainesville through the hours of ugly weather happening just south, then just southeast, with our own precipitation forecast getting cut from 10+ to 6-8 to 4-6 to now like 2 inches. The weather today is the nicest it's been since April!
Many speculative developments during the 1920s Florida boom were so badly planned and built that they were the main impetus for cities nationwide to adopt model subdivision codes.
The 1920s boom also coincided with a smallpox epidemic, which was a pretty unusual thing to happen in the US by that point.
Vaccine resistance isn't new either.
But Cape Coral dates to no earlier than 1957!
There's a similar concept place called Discovery Bay in the far-east Bay, 56 miles' drive east from Oakland. It went 54% for Trump, out of 9,004 total votes cast, versus 26% countywide.
Yeah, it's looking like boats are for assholes.
Vaccine resistance isn't new either.
It is not. It's actually kind of fascinating how antivaxx sentiment parallels the history of vaccination all the way back.
But Cape Coral dates to no earlier than 1957!
Well, it's not like Florida real estate speculators were going to let a little thing like spurring a national regulatory crackdown stop them from coming up with new terrible ideas.
24. Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, was the one who in her letters (1715 or so) back home from Constantinople the introduced the practice of variolation against smallpox to Europe. The collected letters are great reading.
26: While at approximately the same time Cotton Mather independently learned about the practice from his slave Onesimus and also reported it to the Royal Society! It's fascinating stuff.
Dear Sirs,
My slave is practicing witchcraft.
Your Servant
Rev. "Cotton" Mather
P.S. Isn't Protestantism great.
On Twitter some guy I don't follow was blaming zoning regs for Cape Coral, and boy is that a good example of a certain flavor of YIMBY/urbanist who's convinced himself that people really don't prefer the things they do. People who buy canalfront houses in SW Florida aren't doing so because Somerville, MA isn't dense enough.
It's absolutely the case that, if regulation were better, fewer people would choose lives that bien pensant urbanists disapprove of, but unless you literally ban suburbs and SUVs, a huge chunk of Americans will choose them.
28 is funny, but Mather was actually super into inoculation and advocated very aggressively for it. During the 1720 Boston smallpox epidemic, he got in a huge fight with the local medical establishment, such as it was, which strongly opposed the practice over a mix of reasonable and unreasonable concerns. It got so heated that at one point someone threw a grenade through Mather's window. Luckily for him it didn't go off.
Teo - do you have any recs for Cotton Mather books?
Also, Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to you too!
On Mather, no, I've only read articles on his role in the inoculation controversy and related issues, and I've been wanting to seek out more general books on him but haven't had the time. I did order his medical magnum opus The Angel of Bethesda, unpublished in his lifetime and finally published by the American Antiquarian Society in the 1970s, but I haven't read it yet. He's a fascinating, complicated figure that I'd really like to learn more about.
unless you literally ban suburbs and SUVs, a huge chunk of Americans will choose them
Large chunk, sure, but they wouldn't be filling up every square inch of the countryside the way Florida is contending with now (and Houston was in other years). A lot of people could, for example, live in dense_r_ streetcar suburbs. It's not a binary between Manhattan and Levittown.
I agree I don't see any reason the particular style of Cape Coral is zoning-determined.
SUVs can just be banned outright.
I've never heard of Cape Coral, either. That's insane.
Also, it's the future!
Not to be confused with Camp Coral https://spongebob.fandom.com/wiki/Camp_Coral
Make me an angel
That flies from Bethesda
Make me a pundit
On a cable news show
36: Lying for a living
Is such an easy way to go
> Almost immediately after becoming president of the College of New Jersey, Edwards, a strong supporter of smallpox inoculations, decided to get inoculated himself in order to encourage others to do the same. Never having been in robust health, he died as a result of the inoculation on March 22, 1758. Edwards left behind eleven children (three sons and eight daughters)
He must have been robust enough in crucial moments.
This is more amusing than I expected: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/28/were-all-pretty-goofy-guys-santa-clara-mens-cross-country-teams-mustachioed-headshots-go-viral/
I had halfway convinced myself that that was like four guys max.
Spike: y'know who had *robust* health? Edwards' wife, that's who! 11 children! Sheeeeesh.
In the same year, he married Sarah Pierpont. Then 17, Sarah was from a notable New England clerical family: her father was James Pierpont (1659-1714), a founder of Yale College; and her mother was the granddaughter of Thomas Hooker.[19] Sarah's spiritual devotion was without peer, and her relationship with God had long proved an inspiration to Edwards. He first remarked on her great piety when she was 13 years old.[20] She was of a bright and cheerful disposition, a practical housekeeper, a model wife, and the mother of his 11 children, who included Esther Edwards.[9] Edwards held to complementarian views of marriage and gender roles.[21][page needed]
Mather, on the other hand, had 15 children and was survived by two.
29: also I see that Cape Coral dates from...1957, which makes me wonder about the contemporary relevance. (Although the city also invested in a pre-standard WiMAX network, which goes to show why criminals buy and sell lists of suckers.)
Well, American zoning codes haven't changed much since then. (A little, yes.)
Though I agree that the specific problems with Cape Coral aren't really due to zoning per se.
28. Practicing witchcraft, eh? Well, be patient, they'll get it right eventually with enough practice.
If that worked it would be called science.
George III had 16 children- I think it would be more accurate to say that Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz did, that was some heavy lifting. They had them all variolated. Two of them died in consequence, but they had the rest done anyway. I think that in those days people expected many of their children to die of one thing or another, which is why they had so many. And if you believed (rightly) that variolation gave them a better chance of survival than risking actual smallpox, you might accept the associated risk and losses anyway. It's a brutal calculation, but if you started a family in the expectation that at least half your children wouldn't make it to adulthood you might have been more willing to make such calculations than we would. I don't know if Mather lost any children to smallpox, but many of his friends would have.
The fantasy that people in the early modern period were less distressed by their children dying than we would be is utterly wrong. They were very upset as you'd expect. But they accepted that life was pretty horrible, because it was.
It's kind of hard to believe the flooding with the hurricane only caused 16 deaths so far.
Let's talk about how the homeless encampment down the street from me is being evicted by something like 19 squad SUVs (the cops all have small SUVs and not sedans now, of course, they would).
They have blocked off the street for two blocks one way and eight blocks the other and of course they are taking and trashing people's tents, etc. There's a flow of literally internal refugees making their way down the streets clutching blankets or if they are lucky wheeling trollies. In the year 2022 in a rich city in a rich country I am watching internal refugees moving down the streets with nowhere to go.
There's various clothes and stuff on the sidewalk by my house that people dropped or discarded as they went.
Like, this was not in fact a camp that was in great shape over the past few weeks - some violence, lots of drugs. I heard from someone that people had been trying to leave on their own to find new places to stay. It's also crowded, so I'm sure that made a problem with trash, etc.
But it's not like there are a lot of other places for people to go - you move them on from one place and they're just going to another, probably nearby. It doesn't even "solve" the problem for the neighborhood because most people stick around - they want to keep connected to social services, friends, familiar places, etc. It makes much, much more sense to [house people you trash mayor] let people have small internally managed encampments with city services, because people are pretty capable of setting up smaller groups with friends that can stay pretty safe if they are supported.
Honestly why not just ask unhoused people how they could get housed and then try providing that? There are some smart people with analytical skills around these groups. I've talked to several people just recently who obviously have the intellectual chops to do policy stuff given the chance.
I am involved, to the extent that I have time, with a project called the Supply Depot. I can vouch for the fact that all the money that goes to them gets turned into tents, tarps, lights, heaters, etc and that there is good oversight of the stuff and its distribution. When I was out there this morning I ran into a guy from the Supply Depot who was talking to one of the organizers unhoused guys being evicted and he was just asking for more tents since of course all the tents are mashed up by the bulldozers and garbage trucks now (I saw the bulldozers and trucks myself). Anyway, if you want to throw a few bucks to the depot, the linktree link is here:
https://linktr.ee/sanctuarysupplydepot
Let's talk about how the homeless encampment down the street from me is being evicted by something like 19 squad SUVs (the cops all have small SUVs and not sedans now, of course, they would).
They have blocked off the street for two blocks one way and eight blocks the other and of course they are taking and trashing people's tents, etc. There's a flow of literally internal refugees making their way down the streets clutching blankets or if they are lucky wheeling trollies. In the year 2022 in a rich city in a rich country I am watching internal refugees moving down the streets with nowhere to go.
There's various clothes and stuff on the sidewalk by my house that people dropped or discarded as they went.
Like, this was not in fact a camp that was in great shape over the past few weeks - some violence, lots of drugs. I heard from someone that people had been trying to leave on their own to find new places to stay. It's also crowded, so I'm sure that made a problem with trash, etc.
But it's not like there are a lot of other places for people to go - you move them on from one place and they're just going to another, probably nearby. It doesn't even "solve" the problem for the neighborhood because most people stick around - they want to keep connected to social services, friends, familiar places, etc. It makes much, much more sense to [house people you trash mayor] let people have small internally managed encampments with city services, because people are pretty capable of setting up smaller groups with friends that can stay pretty safe if they are supported.
Honestly why not just ask unhoused people how they could get housed and then try providing that? There are some smart people with analytical skills around these groups. I've talked to several people just recently who obviously have the intellectual chops to do policy stuff given the chance.
I am involved, to the extent that I have time, with a project called the Supply Depot. I can vouch for the fact that all the money that goes to them gets turned into tents, tarps, lights, heaters, etc and that there is good oversight of the stuff and its distribution. When I was out there this morning I ran into a guy from the Supply Depot who was talking to one of the organizers unhoused guys being evicted and he was just asking for more tents since of course all the tents are mashed up by the bulldozers and garbage trucks now (I saw the bulldozers and trucks myself). Anyway, if you want to throw a few bucks to the depot, the linktree link is here:
https://linktr.ee/sanctuarysupplydepot
Double post, donate twice!
Ugh, this whole thing is so shitty. It's really giving eighties dystopian movie vibes.
This isn't relevant to the absolutely immediate need, but how do unhoused people survive in Minnesota in the winter? Living in a tent, I'd think people just wouldn't make it.
Jesus, that's awful. Thanks for the link.
The one guy I knew fairly well who wintered outside did in fact sleep in a tent, wrapped head to toe, on a layer of stuff.
A lot of people spend part of the winter in shelters or move around a lot, not sleeping well or much, sleeping on street heating grills, etc. The shelters are, of course, open more during the winter because we have decided that it's okay to provide the bare minimum. And these are the bad shelters, like where it's just a mat in a crowded room.
People use propane heaters - I've heard people talking about the Buddy brand (from "Mr. Heater") which are supposed to be safe. I know the Depot has been getting heater donations and heater funds recently.
It is so galling, because of course it is enormously more expensive and difficult to heat a tent than to heat a room, even leaving out the fact that the cops trash people's stuff.
Along with the human cost it is the stupidity that gets me. Everything in life is like Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts - we do it to ourselves, we have the resources and the know-how and yet the unscrupulous and selfish leaders promulgate an obviously stupid narrative so that we do the least useful, most wasteful, most deadly thing.
Like, it is objectively stupid to have people living in tents on the street dealing with trash and rats and bad sleep and temperature extremes. We have this incredible technology called buildings which solves all those problems but instead we have people living in tents on the parkway because we as a society would rather deal with random bags of trash, rats, people roaming around like zombies because they last got a good night's sleep in 2015, etc.
Now they are sweeping another nearby encampment too, I just heard.
So of course what happens is there aren't big encampments to photograph, there's just a bunch of wandering unhoused people dossing down wherever they can find a spot.
This is all posturing. The city isn't even concerned about the housed people - they keep the encampments to near south because near south is poor and can't make a fuss, and then they do all this mediagenic sweep garbage to play to the paranoid rich in other parts of town. Like, you don't come here anyway, at least leave our unhoused people alone.
That guy who hid in the woods in Maine for decades stole a ton of propane tanks.
Frowner, I can't get the Amazon list to work - it keeps trying to ship things to my address. (I mean, I can donate another way. Just giving you/them feedback.)
59 - I will mention that when we meet next. That's weird!
One more update in fairness - the second site isn't being evicted, city workers are doing something but not requiring people to leave.
A lot of people could, for example, live in dense_r_ streetcar suburbs. It's not a binary between Manhattan and Levittown.
I agree with this. But while people could live in denser streetcar suburbs rather than Levittowns, I'm really not sure that other than affordability issues, huge numbers of people would prefer to do so. Single family zoning wasn't imposed by conquerors from outerspace. It's a measure to protect a system that was the lived preference of a great number of people. Obviously not all, and there are even people who prefer Manhattan, even after they have kids.
Single family zoning isn't bad because it's imprisoning the people living in it against their will: it's bad because it's locking other people out of the opportunity to have any home at all. It can only be gotten rid of over the objections of a lot the people currently living with it, many of whom will resent the change for years and years to come.
In your politics in the Bay Area, and, seemingly right now in California at large, that's a political price worth paying. Lots of places are going to be different including, I'll speculate, Florida, where the suburbs are full of transplants who've come for a specific vision of how they're going to live.
Minneapolis too, but even there, as we see, the political will doesn't go nearly far enough.
It's worth pointing out that street car suburbs are mostly single family housing here. Lots of duplexes and row houses with some detached housing and apartment buildings. It's more expensive to buy a duplex in my neighborhood than in a detached house with a yard in all but the fanciest suburbs.
But while people could live in denser streetcar suburbs rather than Levittowns, I'm really not sure that other than affordability issues, huge numbers of people would prefer to do so.
Huge numbers of people do express preferences for denser walkable communities. Not a majority, but maybe two-fifths. And if prices better reflected social costs, infill alternatives would be a lot cheaper than US-standard single-family homes.
I know you're not exactly saying this, but I'm always vexed by SFZ defenders saying "This is most people's preference, therefore there's no point in changing the laws." Maybe those preferences can express themselves fine in the market and don't need the legal cosseting by removing all other options on 80% of our residential land? Maybe nonrestrictive zoning would end up with a bunch of detached multistory homes on 1,000-square-foot lots, but that would still be a positive step forward. Our status quo is amazingly restrictive, even looking at all the suburban ways there could be to live. (It's the most one-size-fits-all policy there is.)
It's a measure to protect a system that was the lived preference of a great number of people.
It was explicitly designed to keep neighborhoods white! (In addition to making every home inevitably expensive by having to be bundled with a ton of dirt, it's also a lot easier to intimidate Black people when they're coming one family at a time, instead of a little apartment building being thrown up by the odd owner whose greed outweighed his prejudice.) Then our suburban ideal emerged inextricably from the economic isolation and degradation of the urban cores, even as it expanded so that non-white people now believe in it too. On the one hand is the green lawns and quiet homes, on the other is the dirty, unsafe inner city. I don't know how we're going to get past that, I know I can't will people's preferences to be better, but we're going to have to, and allowing a wide range of housing options is the most materially meaningful way out of the current stagnation. Everywhere is quickly turning into California because everyone eventually runs out of sprawl-land.
Density in Pittsburgh im was helped by the land value tax, though it hurts old rich people and was repealed before I moved here. Property taxes were based on thy value of the land, but the building.
66: You mean value of land _not_ building? Yes, LVT is a policy worth reviving in more places.
Meanwhile, our notorious bear-infested campground is closing today, and the city's solution for where to put the people, announced quietly at the last minute, is... to send them back to the stadium they abruptly shuttered at the end of June, causing this mess in the first place! All that suffering for no reason at all. What a disaster.
How do they keep the bears out of the stadium?
Possibly relevant, Pittsburgh just opened a "low barrier" shelter. I have no idea if it is going to work.
How do they keep the bears out of the stadium?
Probably with more ease than keeping them out of the campground. Though, to be fair, there haven't been any bear incidents there in a while.
They run fast but can't really jump.
Shuffling homeless people around between a narrow list of locations is pretty standard city policy, if usually more sub rosa.
The most frustrating part is that the city owns a former hotel that the previous administration bought, and could easily house a lot of people there, but the new mayor strongly opposed the purchase, campaigned against it, and continues to refuse to use it. So back to the stadium it is.
65.1 Is key. Yes lots of people like suburban living, but the number of people who would prefer walkability is both a large minority and also much larger than the affordable housing in walkable areas. Moreover many people prefers suburbs not because of lifestyle but because of square footage. Affordable *large* housing in walkable areas is extremely expensive. And we're talking about the margins here, everyone knows lots of people like the suburbs, and (other than issues around burning down the world, which is going to happen either way) who cares, as long as people who want affordable spacious housing in walkable areas can get it then we're happy even if a majority of people are still living in unwalkable areas.
The number of people who prefer short commutes is very large and walkable neighborhoods are associated with that.
77: Yes, and yet I think of coworkers that chose to live hours away because that was where the house that they wanted was. This seems common - there's a certain type/size house that people dream of owning, and they are willing to suffer in order to live in it.
65.2: it's also a self-sustaining problem. If apartments/duplexes are considered unsafe, then SFH will continue to attract people who care about safety and can afford to buy it. I get the sense that this is changing a little, at least locally - lots of new construction is reasonably affordable condos zoned for shops & restaurants, but we'll see. But it's the *new* places that are commanding the real estate premium and getting the shops.
The new construction one bedroom apartments by the new shops rent for more than my mortgage.
I'm in the fancy new urban retail development surrounded expensive apartments because tacos are there too.
81. 82: it's the same here, except the reason I am around the fancy new apartments is because I work near them.
Yes, but not in a way we can understand.
I actually have "Able to understand Ohioans without pain or difficulty" on my cv.
It's okay, everybody lies a little on those.
84: you'd be surprised! I hear some of them even have indoor plumbing!
That's just the law. They can't make you use the toilet but they can make you have one.
Law? In Ohio? You have been away for a while.
I was at a rest stop on the Ohio Turnpike. There are still toilets.
Which I guess was your point, not mine.
We didn't have debate at my school.
I am long overdue for commmenting but I finally figured out how to use text to speech. I'm feeling a lot better partially because baby actually sleeps a chunk through the night and we've come up with a routine for bottle feeding that I can sleep through so I get about four and a half hours of unbroken sleep every night. I also am having a much better luck nursing directly and so that makes everything much easier. I managed to get an appointment with a psychiatrist and she actually referred me to an outside therapist which is like unheard of in Kaiser. I am kind of scared because my sister is going home tomorrow so we really will be in the regime of me by myself but I don't think I actually depended on her that much except to go to doctor's appointments. I think she's going to start a meal train for me next week after we figure out a little bit of the logistics of what would actually be helpful for us. The thing I'm really going to have to get some help with is maybe arranging for someone to come with me to doctor's appointments and working on the house. The house is still really overwhelming but we did make some small but significant pieces of progress with my sister and I think we have a plan for how we can move before it's done. But basically I'm trying not to think about it except in very compartmentalized amounts. Baby is being a little fussy sometimes and so I'm a little apprehensive that the dreaded colic and witching hour is coming and also how I'm going to deal with teething but I guess I shouldn't borrow trouble. Otherwise he's super sweet, he is looking at me and smiling a lot and the nursing that works best for me is sideline and it's really sweet. If you're friends with me I'm in the other place feel free to send me a message and I will send you a link to the album I just don't want to spam all my friends or post it directly on Facebook. Sorry I disappeared letting it all off my chest really did help and it was nice to know that you all were rooting for me. I'm definitely not out of the woods but things are looking positive at least. Oh and my mother-in-law's chemo is still going better than anyone could have hoped!
Ile! I'm really glad for that parts of this that are sounding hopeful, and will repeat, to the point of being annoying, that if any of us in the Bay Area can do anything to help out, then you know. The meal train thing is great, a friend just set one up to keep me and the family fed after my surgery in November and it's really going to ease things.
There's an interesting disconnect between 62: It's a measure to protect a system that was the lived preference of a great number of people. and 65: Maybe those preferences can express themselves fine in the market and don't need the legal cosseting by removing all other options on 80% of our residential land?
... and it's that the "preferences" in the first part aren't about how the homeowners live, it's about how the homeowners want other people to live. Other people not living in SFH is a threat, at some level so nobody can be allowed to do that.
This toxic need to control how all of your neighbors live is the heart of the problem.
Ile! Mossy!
I'm going to see Fetterman. Hope the rain isn't bad.
I wore a raincoat so I got a post where I stand in the rain.
I should have brought my rain skirt.
A pro-exclusionary-zoning poster from 1922 Seattle, with a photo of an 8-unit cottage court. Text: "Would you like this condition next to your home? - Eight cottages on one 60ft lot - Zoning would prevent it"
Cottage courts are perfectly cozy, suburban, and private - just lower-cost.
So glad to hear from you, Ile!
On hurricanes and building codes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/10/01/punta-gorda-hurricane-ian-damage/
That's just big government. The free market solution is to let people build whatever they want, vote against disaster relief for every other part of the country, and then demand disaster aid when the disaster happens to you.