Making the Transition

Cross-posted to the Seattle Transit Blog. Regarding my previous post, nickb asks:
My question is how did the transition happen. Was it more just a matter of you stopped using the car and started using just public transportation?
In a sense, yes, it was as simple as using transit instead of a car. However, it takes some actual effort to discover that it is possible to get where you want without that car you're used to. For me, it was a process of migration and discovery, each step intentional, encouraged by the reasons I described earlier, but also testing the waters to ensure that I wasn't choosing the path of martyrs. Happily, I can attest I was not. The important benchmarks in my transition, which may be helpful in making yours, were: 1) Using Transit as a Commuter As I wrote, busing it to work was a given, and it served the important role of introducing me to transit here. This was a significant step for someone whose transit use was previously non-existent as a child of the suburbs, and in Austin limited to my weekend use of the E-Bus (aka Drunk Bus) which runs between the University of Texas Campus and 6th Street (infamous for its numerous bars & venues). 2) The arrival of Google Transit Don't get me wrong, the King County Trip Planner is pretty good. But Google Transit (previously mentioned) does it much better, because it allows you to interact visually with your options on Google's draggable, zoomable maps. This is a matter of night and day for anyone as visually-driven or memory-challenged (where was that street again?) as I. Better still, it recognizes and accepts far more place names and address formats, so you need not hunt around for the address or answer questions about whether you really meant PL instead of Place. It's free and highly recommended. To use it, you can either use the link above, or from any Google Maps directions page, click the "Take Public Transit" link in the upper left, once you have your destination plotted. 3) Taking the One-Less-Car challenge The one-less-car challenge (also mentioned previously) offers incentives for those who commit to not using their vehicle for a set amount of time. The program isn't active yet for 2008 (we'll update you when it is), but you don't need the program to get its most powerful benefit, which is the commitment itself. Like others who have used this program, it was taking this challenge that pushed me to go out and try the other ways of getting around which I wasn't used to; to rent a Flexcar even though I had my own car out on the street, or to take a bus to a seemingly out-of-the-way place. Only to find that the experiences where painless. So look for the return of the challenge, or, if you're able and willing, simply challenge yourself to go without your own car for a while. You may find it easier and more liberating than expected. 4) Renting my first Flexcar (now ZipCar) For the foreseeable future, there will be parts of Seattle that aren't well-traveled by transit, where either there is no route when you need it, or there is no direct route. Sometimes, those place happen also to be your destination for the night. My first Flexcar rental was also my first trip out to the (AFAIK) sleepy and suburban Mercer Island. It was a pleasant trip, and easy to manage, in the time of computers (to find & reserve the car) and cell-phones (to extend the reservation if necessary). I've since taken out a ZipCar, and the experience was the same, but a bit friendlier. For example, I find their web experience more intuitive, and there's never a need to carry around the car's key, because your card always does the locking. 5) Taking a bus out into the Unknown Or in this case, Greenlake. All my time here, I'd traveled to and from my friends' place in Greenlake via auto. But finally the aforementioned commitment pushed me to check out the other options (found via Google Transit), and I found them quite pleasant. The point being, just because you've never taken a bus over that way, doesn't mean it's inconvenient to do so. I've since traveled as far as Everett without incident. A Step Not Yet Taken: Put the Internet in my pocket The next big enabler I see in my future, which I'll suggest to you all as an option, is the extra ease which will come once I have the internet in my pocket, via a web-enabled phone. Both for transit and ZipCar, a certain small amount of planning is necessary, to minimize waiting time and to know the route, or to find and reserve the car. Having the internet available from the street means that no matter where I am, or what I've been doing that day, if it comes up that I need to get somewhere unexpected, I can pull up these sites and find my way. Thus I'm a little more free, which of course is the goal. Conclusion So after all of these, I've made a successful transition. Everyone's needs are different of course, or as they say, your mileage may vary, but I've found these steps are a sensible way to try things out.

The Ex-motorist

Cross-posted to the Seattle Transit Blog. Thoreau said that freedom was not only a situation apart from ourselves, from which a person could be plucked or into which one could be thrust, but also could be a consequence of our choices, the things we volunteer ourselves into, for our own reasons or on behalf of society. In particular, he contrasts the lifestyles of the native peoples, whose simple habitations were easily constructed, with the farmers who would spend decades of work to pay off the mortgages on their homes. The farmers may have seemed better off, but at the same time they were bound to this heavy burden, which drove them to work the land rather than write, as Thoreau did, or simply live more simply. I don't mean to romanticize the state of the natives, but there's a legitimate question to be asked here: how free were the farmers, really? Had they unknowingly chosen to punish themselves because that was "the right thing to do" in the society they lived? This concept of the unacknowledged burden became quite real to me recently when I unloaded myself of a burden which had once been, and remains to many, a symbol of freedom: my car. I've been living in Capitol hill for the past year and a half. My drift away from the car started immediately; first it was obvious that the bus was an easier commute than my car, because on the bus I had my time to myself, and it spread from there. I've since read books, watched films, learned a fair amount of French and even done a bit of work on the bus. In fact, I largely wrote this post on the bus. Over time, I built up a pretty clear case for giving up the car, which I share here because some of the arguments can be subtle, and may have been missed. I'll try not to cover the obvious reasons, (i.e., the inconvenience of parking and the cost of gas and insurance), just 3 oft-ignored costs. The Inconvenience of Maintenance One cold night, a friend and I went to take my car out. It'd been a few weeks since I'd used it, but it had always been dependable, so imagine my surprised when the engine refused to turn over. No problem, it had just been out for a while and the battery had discharged. A jump from a helpful friend later, and I'm on the road. Perhaps I only need to drive a little while and the batter will be charged back up and good to go. Wrong. Only after a month and a hand-full of attempted jumps, including one from a re-neg-er who said "um, this is taking longer than I expected, I'm gonna go back to my house" (5 minutes in and half a block away from her house) did we make it back to be fixed. The battery had gone bad. All told, this event required hours of time, $200 in the cost of jumper cables and a battery, and the priceless aid of friends and passers-by, to be fixed. Time, money, inconvenience. But beyond that, upon checking the car for the battery problem, the mechanics came back with a laundry list of concerns, adding up to thousands of dollars in potential maintenance, of questionable necessity. Driving home the point that I didn't have time for maintenance, one of their suggestions was that I replace my wiper blades, which were in fact bad. Apparently, they had failed to notice that I had a fresh pair in the backseat, which had been there for months but I'd never had the time to put in place. The Cost of Depreciation Yes, depreciation: the difference between what you could sell your car for last month and this; the value that your car loses over time. In my case, I drove a distinguished but not flashy two-door coupe, bought it for $9000 and two years later could sell it for around $6000. $3000 dollars over 2 years, and this for a 10 year old car! This is not the cost you see flowing out of your wallet, but it's the true economic cost. It exists, it's substantial, and it's an amount you should account for when comparing alternatives. The Goal of Density I've an appreciation for density for one important reason: cultural diversity. A major part of what determines whether a certain obscure genre can be represented in an art gallery, music venue or bar is the quantity of patrons willing to make the trip out to support that establishment. Greater density means more people within a given radius and thus a greater likelihood that enough people will be willing and able to travel to and support this establishment, keeping it alive. This is one reason rural and suburban areas are so often cultural wastelands. Institutions can't muster the support they need when their potential patrons are so spread out. You can't have a gay bar and a metal bar and a indie bar and so on when you have a handful of each. And spread out why? For the sake of lawns and parking. If there's one thing which prevents a place from effectively becoming more dense, it is the roads and parking lots needed to support the car-only lifestyle. A one-car-per-person society has a hard limit on how dense it can become, and thus typically a practical limit on how culturally diverse it may be. But if we make the choice to minimize our own footprint, we open the door to greater density and all the attendant benefits. Conclusion So, when I finally relieve myself of my car, I not only save money (by relying on public transit and zipcar), lessen my impact on the environment, clear my mind & schedule by offloading the concerns of maintenance to those I rely on, and give myself time to read and to write, but I also help support a society in which it is possible for minority ideas & establishments to flourish in the support of their nearby constituents. This is the liberation I'm finding as an ex-motorist.

Can Money be Speech?

I was reading up online and I came across this statement in an argument about the public finance of campaigns (which I happen to think is a bad idea for many reasons, which I won't cover here):
Money is not free speech.
My response: This is a troubling statement. I'll try to explain why... Speech is not just speech. It is a million little steps which translate one person's thoughts into corresponding thoughts in another person's head. Money is one path through which a person's ideas and intentions travel. For example, if I want to communicate in another language, I must have a translator. If one isn't available for free (i.e., doesn't volunteer), then I must hire one in order to express my message in that language. If the government limits my ability to give a translator money in order to speak for me, then they have limited my right and ability to speak. The same is true of other forms of expression which require a purchase, such as advertising. So ultimately, when I give my money to a group which I support, they are acting for me, and by proxy expressing my speech. I support Ron Paul, and he, quite literally, speaks for me in the Republican debates, and in his ads. If you legislate my right to act through him, you limit my very ability to express myself. IMO, liberals are taking the wrong approach by going for public financing. Other people, such as Lawrence Lessig, are doing a much better job of approaching the problem without potentially destroying our speech rights. The problem here is quid-pro-quo (whether it be votes or access), and as he cites, interesting work is being done to break that (quid-pro-quo) link, without limiting the speech that occurs through dollar-voting on the part of citizens.

Electioneering

In a moment of zest, I took a few minutes aside to write my local legislators about an issue which concerns me, which is our voting method. Few people are aware of the effects that our voting method have on politics, or even that there are alternatives. But there's a growing grass-roots movement of people who recognize the benefits of better voting systems, such as Instant Runoff Voting and Condorcet Voting Methods (such as the Schulze Method). Why should you care about the voting method? Well, one of the many good reasons I didn't discuss in my letter is that our voting method makes us stuck with choices we don't like, and it picks a winner who is often not the best candidate in the eyes of the electorate. For example, look at the federal landscape today. Not one branch of government has an approval rating above 30%. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have only the good Democrats and only the good Republicans, or how about someone in the middle? But you can't do that, you're stuck with just 2 choices, and there's a reason. At the core of it, is the Spoiler effect. This is what comes into play when a third candidate 'spoils' the election toward the least-preferred candidate, as Nader and Perot in these past few elections. Basically, a rising star builds up their momentum up until the moment when they split the vote enough to spoil the election, and at that moment, their very constituency turns against them. I witnessed this first-hand in Austin, where the liberals vilified and actively opposed Nader's efforts in 2004, even though they agreed with him, because they believed he had spoiled the election to Bush the Younger. This whole process is known as Duverger's Law, and this is the reason people speak of our system as a "two party system." This is, as they say, a bug, not a feature, that is, it's a flaw in our system, not something we've taken on by choice. Another way of looking at this is through the academics' eyes, who call this the voting criterion of Clone Independence. Basically, 'clone independence' is the question of what happens if you taking an existing race, clone one of the candidates, and carry on the race with the clone included. Different systems react differently. In our system, plurality voting, the clones together are less likely to win than the original on their own. For example, 2 qualified liberals or 2 qualified conservative are actually less likely to win than a single qualified liberal or conservative. In others, they may be more likely to win. The proper answer though, is that they should collectively have the same chance of winning as the original did on their own, and their are several systems like that. Including both Instant Runoff Voting, and my personal favorite, the Schulze Method, for which I prefer the name 'Full-Runoff voting.' In any case, for those of you frustrated with what's going on, I recommend you pick a subject which has local significance, because your voice is 100x louder when you speak to your local legislators, who have far fewer constituents. Go to your legislators, show your interest, and speak to them on the specifics which actually affect their constituents, which they recognize could affect their chances of re-election. As a politician once said, whether they agree with you or not, "when I feel the heat, I see the light."
Dear [Mr./Mrs. Legislator], I hope you'll consider supporting Instant Runoff Voting, aka Ranked Choice voting, ala [HB 2202/ SB 6000], which I'll refer to as IRV. If you're unfamiliar with IRV, it's a form of voting which allows the voter to rank each of the candidates according to their preference. At the time of tabulating the votes, if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their votes are re-alloted to the second-choice candidates of those voters. Candidates are successively eliminated until one of the remaining candidates has a majority of votes. It may not be obvious from my telling, but IRV presents the opportunity to solve several of our problems in Washington at once. First of all it removes the need to limit choice through the restrictions of the pick-a-party primary. This is a problem which has been generating frustration on the local level across Washington, as evidenced by Pierce County's adoption of IRV to solve just this problem. Second, it ensures that all our elected officials must win the support of at least 50% + 1 of the electorate in order to be elected. Not the out-right support mind you, but enough to put them out ahead of their other major opponents. In many local races this makes a significant difference, for example at the Port of Seattle Commissioner election just a few days ago, Place 2 was won with just 33% of the vote! Only a third of voters supported that candidate (Gael Tarleton) and yet she won. Likewise, Redmond's mayor was elected with 39% of the vote, and had strong opponents with 36% and 24% of the vote. It's very possible that more of the electorate actually preferred the candidate who received 36%, but were unable to have there preference heard, because of our limited voting system. The principles of representative democracy suggest we can do a better job of forming a consensus for who to choose as representatives, and IRV can help us do that. I've spoken with a number of people about this, and just about everyone I've spoken to thinks its a great idea once they know about it. It's encouraging that Pierce county has voted to adopt this method, and it shows that there is a grass-roots movement growing up around the issue. I hope you'll be there to work with that movement. I'm looking forward to working with you on this issue, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. Regards, Ben Woosley P.S. Another alternative to IRV, rather than eliminating the least popular candidate each round, uses the voters' ballots to run a "virtual" runoff between each and every pair of candidates, simultaneously. The candidate who beats each of the other candidates in this "virtual" runoff is the winner. In the rare case there is not a single candidate who wins all run-offs, IRV-style elimination rounds are used. This is known as Condorcet's voting method, and is technically better than IRV. Both are much better than our current system.

A tale of music discovery in the Information Age

  1. Load up boingboing, one of the more interesting blogs on the internet, to see what they've scared up recently.
  2. Notice an article on the holographic projection of sea-life on a recent Diesel fashion show. Sounds interesting...
  3. Follow the link over to youtube, to get a look at the effects
  4. You're a sucker for distorted vocals and dirty beats (see Vitalic, Battles), so you immediately notice the first song on play in the video, and suddenly you must know the answer to the question: who are these people?
  5. Search for some of the lyrics. Nope not good enough. Try again. And again.
  6. Bingo
  7. You ask yourself, who the heck is this "Walter Meego" guy?
  8. Look up "his" wikipedia page.
  9. Oh it's actually a them (who thought up that band name?). And they're from Chicago. Independent until recently, only E.P.s so far. The person who wrote the "style" section is laughably amateur, not at all in wikipedia style. This means the page doesn't get much traffic. Not surprising considering the other facts.
  10. Hop over to their myspace page, looking for more music to sample. They say they are working on a full-length album, good for them. You're much more impressed with "Romantic," the song from the video, than their other stuff, but that's life. Hopefully the eventual album is more in that style. Not touring much at the moment, unfortunately. You've discovered them just a bit too late to reasonably tip-off your NY-habiting friend about their show there that very night.
  11. Check if youtube has any videos of theirs, to get more a feel for their style
  12. First up, a video which appears to have been made in a dorm room, and includes a synchronized dance scene ala the macarena. The whole thing is kind of flippant and uninteresting. Okay okay they're independent, you get it. You just have such high expectations after seeing such great stuff from other bands.
  13. Second up, for the song which tipped you off, is a video involving ninjas playing in a theme park, playground, rollerskating, and getting rejected by the girls they make advances on. This is, put simply, an abomination. It runs totally counter to the song, trivializing the depth and sorrow of it in again, a flippant way. A commenter captures this in more than one language:
    I don't like this video. I love the song. I'm just so frustrated I'm gonna say this in swedish because I'm way too frustrated to think right now. Videon gör inte låten någon som helst rättvisa! What were you thinking? You've made light of the song and yourself with this video! C'mon u guys got some serious potential! Silly video and so's the other one.
  14. Disappointing, yes, but not a deal-breaker, after all, it's just the music you're there for. Still, someone needs to give these guys a talking to. Competition in the music industry is fierce, and videos are one of the best ways to spread the word. If your talent doesn't translate into the visual realm, find someone whose does.
  15. Head over to Amazon to pick up an E.P. Think twice and go to the band's website. They probably keep more of the money that way.
  16. Hmm... Romantic was the song you liked, but the Romantic EP is stuck together with "Wanna be a star" which is a bit more straightforward in just about every way... beats, lyrics. Definitely a B-side. But the sample remix isn't terrible. Ah well. If you were playing the iTunes game you may wait and purchase by the track, but you're not, so platters it is.
  17. Reflect on how awesome it is that you just used a fashion show soundtrack together with a host of internet tools as a music recommendation system to find a promising, yet (deeply?) flawed, relatively unknown band.
  18. Write a blog post about it.

ideas travel through us

A quote, relating to this column by (none other than) Fidel Castro titled "Ideas can not be Killed". Some could claim that ideas can't be killed because they are spread quickly through society. Of course the truth, I suspect, is more beautiful:
One could go further and say that ideas are inherent to reality. That what we do is just pick up the pieces of a story folded all around us. So one can tell you not to think, blow out the brains of the one who does, but they can not destroy the reality which we fight to carry out, to honor, to realize.

Creationist Revisionism

Well, it has been a long while, but after weeks of travel and work and films and art and some business, I've been refocusing my attention on the need for creation, for creative action. In that spirit, I'm reclaiming this blog for what I'd always intended it to be, a place for me to record my thoughts, and perhaps contribute something meaningful to the conversation at work on the web these days. So be warned, the future is now; or very soon at least.

Urban Shenanigans

I've recently moved to Seattle, and while the trip itself is something I should take the time to write about, since then I've had a really excellent time of getting to know a new place, finding and settling in a house, and meeting new people. Aside from all that, I love the city, but have had trouble explaining why. Today I had an experience which I think conveys the beauty of Urban life.

I've rented a place in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill, an interesting area across the freeway from downtown proper. I've all my things, save any furniture, which didn't make it into the car for the roadtrip up here. Anyhow, no furniture means no bed. It didn't take long to learn that the tile floor would be inhospitable, so after a brief stint sleeping on a mat of some of my clothes, and a longer one on a cot borrowed from a co-worker, as of today, I returned home to find the bed I had ordered over the weekend. Seeing as how I'd never owned a bed larger than a twin, I didn't have the sheets for the new one, so I set off, at 8:20, to get some sheets downtown from a certain store, knowing full well they were closing at 9:00.

Simply enough, I walk to the bus stop, hoping my timing will be right, but when I check, the schedule says that a bus had just past 5 minutes ago and another wouldn't come by for 30 more, too late to make it. Undeterred, I walked down the street towards another stop, where I know I can catch other routes downtown. Two blocks later, at an intersection, my bus zooms by, late. The light changes before I have time to cross and, flustered, I cross the other way, thinking the bus would be gone before I made it over to the bus stop.

I'm wrong, so when the light changes again, I'm on the wrong side of the street from where the bus still sits. In a moment, I'm running down the street, hoping to cross and catch it at the next intersection. Then, tradgedy strikes; As I'm running, I suddenly realize my phone is no longer in my pocket! How could this be?!? I'm forced to turn around the find it, as it's quite dear to me. I use it to take my pictures.

It turns out that my shorts, which I'd had for a while but were fine, except for having holey pockets, had gone from bad to worse and my phone could now fall out! Luckily it was an inexpensive lesson, as I found my phone, relatively unharmed a few feet away.

Knowing I'm pressed for time, I run to the next bus stop, where I'm glad to see that I have just a few minutes before the next bus arrives. So I sit and wait, and pretty soon four soccer players walk past. Then, there's a guy posting flyers on utility poles and trying to chat up women. The first one doesn't respond and he lurks behind her angrily for a short while, saying "You could at least smile, I'm never gonna see you again," but a few minutes later he's talking to another girl about cell phones and how mothers are sometimes wrong.

Late again, the bus eventually arrives, but now I'm pressed as ever for time. Less than 10 minutes later, I'm at my intersection, so I exit the bus and run through a crowd of sedentry folks waiting for the bus, over to the store which is due to close in 5 minutes. I make it, and after spending a few minutes comparing the merits of egyptian cotton to regular cotton, and 200 thread count to 350, I pick a few things and head to the counter, where the checkers are surprised to see a customer (and not just any customer, mind you ;-)) is in the store. One of them unlocks the door, and after regaining my bearings, I'm off to catch the bus back to Capitol Hill, carrying a rather large bag of bedding.

Pretty soon I see my bus down the street and, once again, this time with loot in hand, run toward it. I'm too late to catch it, and once again something falls out of my pocket. Luckily I've learned my lesson so it's just 2 dimes. While I pause to collect them, I realize that the bus I've just missed has another stop a block away, where a whole crowd of people are waiting for it.

I line up behind one of the people and notice that I'm not the only one carrying a big bag. Most everyone there had a large bag or suitcase or something. So, with nothing better to do in line, I ask one someone with a bag, "What's with all the suitcases and stuff?," to which she replies, "We're homeless, and we're heading down to a Church." Huh. Homeless people in Seattle seem much more "normal" than homeless people in Austin, which mostly are kooky or lazy (Seriously, ask another Austinite). Anyway, I finally get in the bus thinking that I blend in pretty well with these normal-looking, bag-carrying homeless folks, and I'm wondering if anyone thinks I'm homeless. I have time to reflect on that because one of the homeless ladies, who has a cast on her foot, is using the lift to get in, while another homeless lady yells at her (hollers, really), saying "What're you doing?! You don't need that, why I oughta woop your ass! You're holding up the bus!".

After other sights and sounds on the way back, I finally make it back home, and am glad to have sat by some rather polite people, who may or may not have thought me homeless.

So there you have it. It may not sound glorious, but I promise, it was.

PS. I don't want it to be thought that I'm disrespecting the homeless folks. Personally I think it's rather sad that so many people cloak their disdain by "feeling sorry". I give them the respect of treating them just as I treat everyone else.

No Justice, No Peace

I've never taken a side in the Middle East conflict, except to say that I codemn the violence perpetrated by both sides. Today we enter a sad new stage of the crisis. Just months ago, with the transfer of the Gaza Strip and the signing of the prisoner's agreement, I had hopes that the Palestineans and Israelis were finally taking the steps necessary to work for peace. Sadly, as evidenced by the Israeli invasion of Gaza and Lebanon, it seems I was mistaken. As before, I don't defend the kidnappings and killings perpetrated by Hezbollah and Palestinean militants, but when the reponse to 5 deaths is the invasion of Lebanon & Palestine, as well as the deaths of more than 80 Palestineans, including women and children, the response clearly excedes the boudaries of justice. Israel will never have the peace it claims to desire until it learns to love justice more than the gun.

My message to the Israelis, Palestineans and Lebanese is the same as it's alway been. Let's not be eager for retribution, let's be eager for peace.