A Murder of Cows

"If you get (permission), you go and march. If you don’t—you have no right to. Go without..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:50:52 -0700

““If you get (permission), you go and march. If you don’t—you have no right to. Go without permission, and you will be hit on the head with batons. That’s all there is to it.””

- Vladimir Putin, offering a simple rule of thumb for political dissent in Russia

"Having lived in LA and D.C., I’d have to say that differences are few and far between and..."

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:33:16 -0700

“Having lived in LA and D.C., I’d have to say that differences are few and far between and constantly exaggerated. The two cities have nothing in common, other than they are packed with conniving bastards who are convinced of their own genius and want to finance everything with other people’s money.”

- Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.tv, answering Lisa De Pasquale’s questions in Human Events; read the whole thing here

Strangers on a phone

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:58:21 -0700

So nearly one in five Americans thinks President Obama is a Muslim.

Predictably, hands began to wring. There are people who make their living wringing their hands about the State of the Nation, and sure enough, they showed up and played their part, showed their concern, and, uh, then the next thing on NPR came on. For others, it was a chance to squawk about the ignorance of the right, which led, just as predictably, to the pointing of fingers—sometimes expressed as the wringing of hands—at Fox News, talk radio, Glenn Beck, and Lex Luthor.

It didn’t surprise me that the one note of skepticism was sounded by a pollster.

I’ve worked in polling for most of my professional life. Here’s a secret: poll results tell you what people told a pollster—specifically, a call center worker reading a script—not necessarily what they believe.

Figuring out what people really believe is hard. That involves getting inside their heads and hearts, and man, if you think that’s a matter of making a phone call, you have an awfully narrow view of human nature.

To people who follow politics closely, this is all a Very Serious Business. Sure, you’re reading the political blogs, you’re reading FiveThirtyEight—a cry for help if ever there was one—and you can name the people running in the Republican primary in some state you’ve never even visited. You’re following Your Guys like normal people follow their favorite sports team. You’d be thrilled if some polling firm called you up, even in the middle of dinner or Glee, to ask your opinions about the health care bill, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Sarah Palin. You’d answer every question thoughtfully, carefully considering whether to answer 4) agree somewhat or 5) agree strongly.

So you can’t imagine that people would just say whatever, and might answer a question to express not an actual, factual belief, but a general attitude, or a broad contempt for The Other Side, whoever The Other Side is for them.

So 18% of people tell the nice call center worker that they think President Obama is a Muslim. Do they really believe that? Surely some of them do; someone is maintaining those web sites, right? But some of them are just snarling because they don’t like his attitude toward Israel, or his foreign policy generally. Some are angry at his economic policy. Or they don’t like the health care bill. Or they they don’t like the cut of his jib. Or they just don’t give a good God damn about whether the poll turns out to be a perfect little sampled mosaic and they say whatever comes to mind because screwing around with some dweeb’s pie chart is more fun than just hanging up.

To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the man with a call center and a stack of polling clients, everything looks like a poll waiting to be written. It’s time for everyone to take a deep breath and think about what polling can do and what it can’t. Pollsters have gotten pretty good at figuring out who people are planning to vote for, within certain parameters, like when we’re close enough to the election that non-junkies are paying attention to the race. (Seriously, most people don’t spend all day thinking about who ought to be the State Treasurer. They’ve got bills to pay, kids to pick up, a doctor who wants to run Further Tests on that thing that’s Probably Nothing, and a mom who thinks they should have married someone else, and a house that’s worth $100k less than the mortgage.)

We’re pretty decent at measuring specific voting intent, and we’re good at measuring attitudes—who and what voters like and dislike—but beliefs? That’s hard. Beliefs are probabilistic by nature, and people spend years with shrinks, counselors, life coaches (::shudder::) and friends working out what they believe. The tools that tell us with 98% certainty and a 3.5% margin of error who people in Oregon plan to vote for in the gubernatorial race may not be so useful at sussing out beliefs. When it comes to voting, we can test our assumptions, compare our polls to the election results, and refine our models accordingly. But how do we test our polls about what people believe? To what do we compare our results? We refine our model based on, uh, what again?

When a good pollster tells you Schmuckface is leading Picklefeather by nine points, that’s probably about right. Yeah, sure, there are “Dewey Defeats Truman” moments (I’m looking at you, Republicans of Alaska) but those are rarer and rarer. We have some specific tools that are good for some specific things. But just as you wouldn’t go to a gynecologist looking for advice about that weird noise your car makes intermittently when you hit the brakes, don’t look to pollsters for deeper insights into human nature than those we’ve proven we can unearth. We aren’t psychics. And I believe, with 99.99999% confidence, that there aren’t any psychics at all.

What liberal media?

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:46:00 -0700

What liberal media?:

“According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

“In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, ‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists.’”

Read the whole deplorable thing here.

Bill Murray is ready to see you now

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:25:52 -0700

Bill Murray is ready to see you now:

“The very thing that makes Bill Murray, well, Bill Murray is what makes sitting down with him such an unpredictable enterprise. Bill Murray crashes parties, ditches promotional appearances, clashes with his friends, his collaborators, and his enemies. If you—movie director, journalist, dentist—want to speak to him, you don’t go through any gatekeeper. You leave a message on an 800 number. If Bill Murray wants to speak with you, he’ll call you back. If his three and a half decades in the public sphere have taught us anything about the 59-year-old actor, it’s that he simply does not give a good goddamn.”

Read the whole thing here.

From the Life magazine Tumblr site: “October, 1934: The...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:24:00 -0700

From the Life magazine Tumblr site:

“October, 1934: The vast and intricate framework of zeppelin model LZ 129, under construction at Friedrichshafen, Germany. With a gas capacity of 7,070,000 cubic feet, and christened “Hindenburg,” she became the largest — and ultimately, for all the wrong reasons, the most famous — airship the world has ever seen.”

San Francisco considers banning all pet sales (except fish)

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:18:00 -0700

San Francisco considers banning all pet sales (except fish):

Is there no limit to the desire of San Francisco’s many-tentacled government to control every aspect of human behavior? None at all?

So let’s walk through the logic here: I shouldn’t be allowed to buy a rat because, hey, I might not know what I’m getting into and the rat might thereby suffer ill treatment. On the other hand, if mice infest my home, I’m (still) allowed to buy mousetraps, glue traps, or rat poison.

And we haven’t even mentioned people with pet reptiles who buy live rodents because their pet python just won’t sign on to the whole vegan scene.

Were San Francisco’s real problems all solved sometime last night? Am I behind the news cycle again?

Letter addressed to an entity unlikely to respond

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:38:00 -0800

Dear Switzerland,

It’s been quite some time since my last visit, but I enjoyed myself in your country. What’s not to love about beautiful mountains, freakishly reliable trains, and a wide variety of chocolate? But I regret to inform you that, well, you officially fail as a country.

In a 57%-43% vote, your people amended your constitution to ban the construction of minarets. Your four existing minarets won’t be torn down. For now.

Are you under the impression that banning a piece of architecture will somehow persuade Muslims to become, say, Catholics? Are you under the impression that a giant “fuck you” from nearly three-fifths of your people will make Muslims think “Gee, we really ought to more fully embrace Swiss culture.”

I am not sanguine about the threat posed by the subset of Muslims who seek to impose their religion on others by force; Islam is hardly alone among religions in that regard, and I might even concede that Islamism is uniquely threatening because of the sheer size and momentum of the movement, and its degree of repression and orthodoxy. So I write this not as someone who views the clash between Islam and liberal modernity through rose-colored glasses. But, guys, this is not the right answer.

Have you stopped to ask yourself why the United States excels at assimilating immigrants? Maybe it’s because, instead of treating them like second-class citizens, we offer them opportunity and freedom. That isn’t to say we’re blissfully free of racism or anti-immigrant bias. But we’re awfully damned good at assimilating immigrants, and if you disagree, please name the country that does so more successfully. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Freedom and the melting pot are a pretty good model for getting people to buy into our culture and values in a generation or two.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, Switzerland, because clearly you need all the clues you can get: freedom is the gateway drug for Americanism. Let me say that again slowly. Freedom is the gateway drug for Americanism.

Think about it.

Meanwhile, perhaps, if you find time to reply to this, you can explain to me exactly how this minaret ban is going to work. Minarets are not required for any part of Muslim religious observances, and are not necessary to make a building a mosque any more than a steeple or stained-glass windows are required for a church. The only purpose of this ban is for the majority to give the middle finger to a minority they don’t like. Do you think this is more likely or less likely to make your Muslim population more radical, insular, snd defensive?

For extra credit on the exam, you can explain exactly how this is different from the majority banning the construction of new synagogues. Not that a German-speaking country in Europe would ever do such a thing. Perish the thought.

Very Truly Yours,

A Concerned Acquaintance

Thanksgiving, a day late

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:17:00 -0800

On a Wednesday afternoon in 1924, President Coolidge’s two sons—John, 17, and Calvin, 16—played a game of tennis on the south lawn of the White House. Wearing shoes without socks was something of a fashion among teenage boys of the era, a fashion trend that has come and gone repeatedly in the decades since, probably because it dovetails neatly with the laziness and studied slovenliness of adolescent males.

Calvin played the game wearing sneakers without socks. Unsurprisingly, he developed a blister on his right foot. The blister got infected. Eight days later, he was dead from sepsis.

In 1924, no antibiotics were available, even to someone as privileged as the son of the President of the United States. No amount of power, no sum of money, could buy what you can get by prescription for a few dollars. Calvin’s blister was eight years too early for the first commercially produced antibiotics. Keeping the wound clean and hoping for the best was pretty much all you could do in 1924.

The good old days weren’t. Unless you are among the world’s very poorest—say, a sub-Saharan African who labors every waking hour for a dollar a day—you live better than a king or queen did just a few hundred years ago. You have indoor plumbing. You have a dentist. You’re on the freakin’ internet. Would President Coolidge have traded away the White House for a bottle of antibiotics from Walgreens? Despite his chilly public image, the biographies I’ve read suggest the answer is yes; he loved his children intensely, as most people do.

The legend of President Washington’s wooden teeth is well known. They weren’t wooden—that’s pretty well known too—but he had many pairs of dentures made because his mouth caused him constant pain. Washington didn’t lose his teeth through simple 18th century neglect of dental hygiene; he’d been treated twice with mercury oxide—once for malaria, once for smallpox—which caused his gums to recede, loosening his teeth and exposing bone and nerve to the open air. He started losing his teeth when he was 22; when he was inaugurated in 1789, at the age of 57, only one tooth remained. Everything he accomplished was done through a cloud of pain and the laudanum he took to ease the pain. I consider Washington the greatest of our presidents, and his greatness is all the more staggering considering his lifelong pain, and his almost certain addiction to opium and morphine.

I’m 42, and I’ve seen huge advances in medical science in my own lifetime. When I was five years old, I had my tonsils out, and nearly bled to death. Tonsil removal was almost routine for children in 1972; now it’s only done when truly necessary. All surgery, even routine surgery like a tonsillectomy, involves risk, and on some morning in 1972, I nearly became a statistic. When they wheeled me back into my room, my complexion was sheet-white, terrifying my mother, who rushed to my bedside to make sure I was actually alive. I’m very pale to begin with, being a Northern European mutt, but I’m told I looked more like a corpse than a kid.

To make matters worse, the surgery left me with some scar tissue that interferes with the proper function of one of my eustachian tubes, which is one of several reasons my hearing is poor. I don’t blame my parents or the doctors for the surgery; it represented the best scientific and medical understanding available in 1972. When we learned better, we started doing things differently. Medical science in 2009 is far better than it was in 1972. I imagine 2009’s medical science will look pretty primitive come 2046, which is good news for me because (if I’m lucky) I turn 79 in 2046, so I’ll probably need every bit of what they come up with between now and then.

So what am I grateful for this Thanksgiving? All the stuff most people are, like friends and family, sure. But most of all I am grateful for now. I am grateful to live in 2009, not 1909, not 1609, not 1409 (oh, sure as fuck not 1409), and not 2009 BCE. I am grateful to live in a time when change and growth is palpable, when more people live better lives than ever before, when a billion souls escaped starvation thanks to the Green Revolution, when a billion people escaped poverty in China, India, Russia, Brazil, and the other economic tigers of the modern day. I am grateful for now.

This isn’t to say everything is peachy everywhere. Being an illiterate peasant sucks, and sucks even more if you live under one of the world’s most deranged governments, like North Korea’s or Zimbabwe’s. But many of the world’s poorest places are growing at a rate where a better life awaits them. And yes, even for rich westerners in 2009, very bad things can happen: you can contract diseases that can’t be cured, you can get hit by a bus, you can find yourself in the crosshairs of war, a meteor might strike the earth, etc. Life has always been probability’s loyal and obedient subject, but we’ve changed the odds, and we’ve created ever more space for ever more people to live lives in which they can pursue more than mere survival. We’ve developed resilient communication systems and distributed our knowledge widely. If a library burns down, we won’t lose the knowledge necessary to build urban sewer systems or manufacture microprocessors.

The fact that very bad things could happen, but that we’re more resilient than ever, makes me even more grateful for now.

Obsolete

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:35:00 -0800

Earlier this year, a photo developing store in my neighborhood posted this notice in its window:

With equanimity uncharacteristic of San Francisco—a city obsessed with keeping everything exactly the same as it is now, while also fancying itself the most forward-looking “progressive” place on earth—the owner accepted that there’s not as much use for film developing anymore, and passport photos aren’t enough to keep food on the table. So the owner understood that Schumpeter’s creative destruction had come to claim his business, concluded he had a good run, and went on to other things.

And so it goes.

The owner did not demand the government subsidize film developers in order to save jobs, preserve a dying art, or protect people who own their dad’s Pentax. He didn’t demand the Board of Supervisors hold a hearing on the loss of film developers, or ask them for legislation banning the eviction of photo stores—good thing, too, because they totally would have done both.

A few days ago, I read that the US Postal Service is $10.2 billion in the hole to the federal government. In 2007 and 2008 they lost a total of $7.8 billion, and the volume of mail is down thirteen percent from the previous year. The agency is seeking permission to cut Saturday delivery, and to get out from under some of their federally-mandated pension obligations. The calls for outright subsidies will not be far behind, and will fall upon the ears of a Congress that has shown little willingness to say no to spending.

Let’s work backwards on this: if the Postal Service didn’t already exist today, would we invent it? Would we say that what America really needs is to forget all this internet malarky and start a nationwide network employing 659,000 people who carry stacks of envelopes from house to house, most of them unwanted? Would the Sierra Club not become apoplectic at the idea of cutting down so many trees, driving so many trucks, flying so many planes, and running so many giant sorting machines, just to move bits of paper around? If President Obama proposed such a scheme, might not Vice President Biden and the cabinet think about invoking Article 4 of the 25th Amendment?

I don’t know about you, but my mail consists mainly of:

Junk mail, which I don’t want, except for catalogs from a few businesses from which I actually buy things;
Bills, which I do want (not because I like parting with money, but because if they go unpaid, Bad Things happen);
Magazines, which are, at least, invited guests;
the very occasional Greeting Card, which is nice, I suppose;
more Junk Mail.

None of this is essential in the 21st century. The junk mail isn’t necessary in the first place, and the few places from which I order have web sites which offer everything their catalog does. Magazines, increasingly, can be read online, and there are devices present and planned which aim to make the magazine-reading experience better, electronic, and just about as portable. Online greeting cards lack the personal touch, I’ll admit, but is it really worth billions of tax dollars for a bit of anachronistic charm?

Paying bills online makes more sense all the time. There’s something absurd about the idea that, in order to effect an electronic transfer of money from my bank account to PG&E’s, that PG&E sends me an envelope with a bill, some more ads I don’t want, and a return envelope, after which I take out a check, which has to be custom-printed for me, write the date, PG&E’s name, the amount I’m sending them, my account number, and my signature, put it in the return envelope with a part of the bill I tear off, affix a stamp that costs me 44¢, and carry this envelope down to the blue box on the corner. It’s even more absurd if you’ve seen my crappy handwriting.

I can hear the arguments now: lots of people don’t have computers or internet service, or can’t afford them. Buying cheap-ass computers and cheap internet service for the very poorest would, I think, cost only a fraction of what the total tab on keeping the Postal Service lumbering along is likely to add up to. Buying 30 million netbooks would cost $9 billion, and 30 million is probably way, way over the number needed to cover the people who truly can’t afford such things. A lot of supposedly “poor” people are buying cable TV and even high-speed internet service today.

For parcels, there’s already competition from private businesses like UPS and FedEx. The Postal Service delivers to a few remote locations unserved by private carriers, but by definition, very few people live in places that remote. Perhaps they would need to pay more to get things shipped to them. Living anywhere comes with all kinds of costs which differ from living elsewhere. People in Alaska and Hawaii pay more for milk than people in, say, Wisconsin. People in San Francisco pay vastly more for rent, but vastly less for heating oil, than people in North Dakota. There’s nothing wrong with paying a little extra because someone has to drive out to your farmhouse in Enid, Montana. All choices about where to live come with a unique set of costs and benefits.

UPDATE: I chose Enid, Montana as an example by taking out the 2005 large-scale Rand McNally Road Atlas and looking for someplace ridiculously remote to which UPS and FedEx obviously wouldn’t deliver. I did a little research, and lo and behold, not only do both UPS and FedEx deliver to Enid, Montana, but they both offer overnight service (for a price, natch). So to be outside the delivery zone of UPS and FedEx, you have to live someplace really, really, fucking remote, so we’re talking about a tiny number of people who would lose parcel delivery if USPS went away tomorrow. If you choose to live as a hermit atop a remote mountain, considered by many to be a local myth, it’s not reasonable for you to expect the other 299,999,999 people in the US to pitch in on the cost of hauling the stuff you order from Amazon up some road even goats fear to climb.

While we have competition in parcel delivery—which has led to useful innovations like overnight delivery, which, I stress, did not exist when I was a child—competition in delivery of letters and whatnot (everything under the rubric “First Class Mail”) is illegal. We can’t even begin to know what kinds of services and innovations have been lost because of that lack of competition.

It’s time to pull the plug on the Postal Service’s ventilator and see if the patient can breathe on its own, and give it a dignified burial if it can’t. Open up its First Class Mail monopoly to competition, and let it set its own prices and services, just like UPS and FedEx do. Let them charge extra for Saturday delivery if the market values that service so highly. Or drop the service outright if they don’t. The infinite number of monkeys at Google tell me Canada hasn’t had Saturday delivery since 1969, and I haven’t heard anything about the Canadians rioting in the streets over it, or being driven to suicide by weekend boredom.

One doesn’t have to sleep with a first edition copy of Atlas Shrugged under one’s pillow to see that the Postal Service is long overdue for privatization (maybe we should have realized this when, eleven years ago, the USPS produced the most ironic object ever) At one time, the Postal Service unified America as the sole source of communication between the former colonies; that era is long gone. Like the photo joint, it’s time for USPS to move on to other things.

Can’t someone convince an odd-bedfellows coalition of environmentalists and economic libertarians to join forces to privatize the USPS? Or do both groups raise too much money through junk mail?

Shortly after the photo store closed, the business next door went under too. It was a VCR repair shop. They’ve since been replaced by a cell phone store and a dentist’s office, respectively. They’ve been remodeled, and the buildings are looking nice. When I need a new passport photo, in 2014, I’ll have to walk a little further to get it. Change can be okay; creative destruction offers more than just destruction.

Friday Night List #1

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:58:00 -0800

Pixar’s ten feature films, ranked in order of my enjoyment of them:

The Incredibles
Up
Ratatouille
Finding Nemo
Wall-E
A Bug’s Life
Toy Story 2
Toy Story
Monsters, Inc.
Cars

Henderson, Nevada

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:20:00 -0800

Both of my parents turned 80 this year. It’s hard to get my head around that.

My mother has taken good care of herself, hasn’t aged visibly since her fifties, and has no serious health problems, so it’s hard to think of her as 80. My father is more physically infirmed, but that traces back to severe injuries suffered in a car accident that occurred on my 16th birthday in 1983, when the rear axle of his car simply broke, causing it to go off the road and roll, all while he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He nearly died, and spent years rehabilitating. Most of his lifelong disabilities would have been avoided if he’d been wearing it, so remember that next time you get into a car. In recent years, age has caught up with him. He used to get out and play golf; a few years ago, he stopped, and he’s aged noticeably. He’s had a few scary falls, and some scary brushes with the Reaper, but he keeps on as best he can. Despite impairment of his fine motor skills, he does what he can with a computer, communicating with his extended family and some old friends. Mom, on the other hand, won’t use a computer at all.

Some years ago, my parents moved from the outskirts of the Bay Area to Henderson, Nevada. Like many Californians, they discovered they could own a nice new house in the Las Vegas area for the cost of a hovel in California, with the added bonus that Nevada has no state income tax. They share their house with my mom’s younger sister, which is good for Mom, since Dad hasn’t been much of a conversationalist since the accident.

Mom works part-time at an outlet shoe store near the Las Vegas Strip. She doesn’t need the money, but it gets her out of the house, and the store attracts shoppers from all over the world, so she gets to interact with a wide variety of people. She fibbed about her age to get the job—something she could do convincingly because she looks vastly younger than she is—but when word got out she was turning 80, all was forgotten or forgiven, and the company did a writeup on her in their newsletter, announcing proudly that she’s the company’s oldest employee, patting themselves on the back for employing the elderly.

I don’t visit my parents nearly enough to meet minimum filial obligations. As they’ve grown older, I’ve felt guilty about that, and lately I’ve tried to be better about that. My favorite domestic airline flies nonstop between San Francisco and Las Vegas, so I have no excuse for being a crappy son. I’ve visited my parents twice in 2009. Yep, I suck as a child, especially an only child, but I’m trying to be better.

Airports look pretty much alike, but when you step off the jetway in Vegas, you’re immediately reminded where you are:

Most of the ads in the airport are for attractions in Las Vegas, but this one caught my attention for both for its inspired placement (where better to find Canadian gamblers than the Vegas airport?) and its egregious use of egregious quotation marks:

My parents live in Henderson, a city just south of Las Vegas which is (or was, as of a year or two ago) the fastest-growing city in the US. Until the housing bust, new construction was going on everywhere. On my last visit to Henderson, I passed a number of schools congratulating their first-ever graduating classes. My cousin, a teacher in Southern California, moved to Henderson, both to be closer to her mother, and because teachers could easily choose where to teach; schools were competing for teachers, not vice versa. An ad in the airport reminds everyone of Henderson’s growth-mindedness:

Henderson itself is a city of stucco houses, most of them built in the recent past. The real estate bust is in full force; there are several “For Sale” signs on every block:

My parents’ house has declined in value by about 40% since they bought it. On one hand, this is a bad thing; on the other, they have no plans to leave Henderson, so if they wanted to move, other houses have come down in price by similar amounts, so it doesn’t change the size or quality of house they can afford.

Lawns are forbidden by law; water conservation laws mandate “desert landscaping,” but don’t prohibit, uh, swimming pools. There are parks and schools with grass fields, but even bits of grass in street medians are being pulled out and replaced with desert rock and plants. My parents’ backyard is typical of those in Henderson:

On the ridge behind my parents’ house is a gated community of McMansions, seven-figure houses that are now six-figure houses.

Having a nice house with lots of space appeals to me, on some level, but I need a sense of place. I need a neighborhood where you can walk down to the corner and get lunch or coffee, or pick up your dry cleaning, or buy a greeting card for the parents you don’t visit often enough. Much of America is like Henderson, but colder and wetter, but I can’t live in a place without character, distinctiveness, and life. There are smaller towns where I could imagine living, but stucco suburbs punctuated by malls and strip malls would drive me to an early grave.

Henderson meets all my parents’ desires and needs, and I don’t begrudge them that at all. Despite the best efforts of the my college’s Department of City and Regional Planning, I’m don’t think that all other people can be fulfilled only to the degree they adopt my aesthetic preferences. But I need a place, and Henderson isn’t one.

Where I do want to live is a tougher question, something my partner and I are thinking about very seriously these days; this will be the subject of a future entry, maybe even quite a few entries.

Careful, now

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:21:00 -0800

A friend who voted for Obama wrote, before the election:

Maybe this feeling is still true, and the zeitgeist is still against ‘us’. It’s possible that if Obama wins, it will have been a mix of tactics, luck, and exasperation with the Bush years: a vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats. But it’s also possible that the country isn’t so inimically hostile, and that we’re wrong to think of politics as “us versus the masses”. No matter how much we’ve been telling ourselves otherwise - in jokes about ignorant hicks and in laments about the Unstoppable Republican Propaganda Machine - maybe Republicans don’t have an ideological monopoly on what Middle America is or what it wants. People might actually be voting for Obama because they like what he has to say about the kind of country we should be making for ourselves. If that’s true, it will bring up hard questions for those of us whose political identities are based on being, if not exactly outsiders, then at least somehow out of the mainstream.
Or, Obama could lose after all, and we’ll go back to our defensive crouch, secure in the feeling that the country really is against us. Between those two possibilities - losing or having to face the thought that those people might not be so alien to us after all - I’m honestly not sure which would be harder for me and some of my self-styled ‘progressive’ friends to swallow.

Let’s look at this election in context. For the last 40 years before this election—and I’m choosing 1968 as an endpoint not because it bolsters my case. but because the Democratic and Republican Parties really were very different before the Johnson admnistration—Americans have elected Democrats to the White house only reluctantly. In 1976, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, in the midst of an economic disaster, when things couldn’t be worse for the Republicans, Democrats won by a tiny margin (a few thousand votes in Ohio and Hawaii) over an unelected president saddled with the pardon of Richard Nixon.

In 1992, facing an unpopular Republican incumbent, Bill Clinton managed a whopping 43%, while an erratic, weird, on-again/off-again billionaire candidate pulled almost 19 points of the anti-Bush vote. In 1996, in the middle of an economic boom and relative peace and prosperity, a majority of voters still couldn’t be convinced to vote for Clinton.

So that brings us to 2008. Let’s consider the factors working in the Democrats’ favor:

an incumbent Republican president whose approval ratings flirted with -273.15°C;
an unpopular war in Iraq, dragging along in its fifth year;
a Republican Party that had alienated much of its base by spending like the McGovern administration in some parallel universe;
a Republican presidential nominee who much of the party never really liked or trusted, who left lots of scorched earth in his political path;
a Republcan presidential nominee whose age was troubling for a huge percentage of the electorate (for all the talk of Obama’s race, polls showed that McCain’s age was a huge concern among swing voters, on a scale that may have cost him the election);
a Republican vice presidential nominee whose grossly mishandled introduction to the American people turned her into a lightning rod;
a Republican campaign with a treasure trove of dirt on the Democratic nominee which failed to weave their negative talking points into a coherent narrative, choosing instead to launch them randomly;
a Republican campaign spending down its treasury chasing a state (Pennsylvania) they couldn’t win and didn’t need to win;
a massive Democratic fundraising advantage over Republicans;
and, last but not least, a financial meltdown of historic proportions happening during the final weeks of the election, in which people see their retirement savings and home values evaporate by the day.

So what did the Democrats get for all that? A landslide of 20 or 30 points? Nope, a 6.9% margin of victory, in an election with relatively low Republican turnout. Arguably, the real margin of victory was 3.7%, as a swing toward McCain of more than 3.7% would have delivered him an Electoral College majority.

Americans don’t like to elect Democrats to the White House, and do so only reluctantly, and under only the most unfavorable of circumstances for Republicans. They elect Democrats because they know they’re supposed to elect someone else when Republicans screw up badly enough. To think for even a moment that Middle America might finally be on board with the Democratic view of the world is to risk the overreach nearly every pundit expects of the Democrats. Obama’s victory wasn’t the result of an epiphany that Democrats were right about anything; it was the result of circumstances which were so ridiculously unfavorable to the Republicans that, if the D’s and R’s were reversed, the Republicans would have turned it into a sweep of every electoral vote outside Vermont and the District of Columbia.

So resume that defensive crouch. Obama’s election was a product of syzygy. That he ran such a spectacularly effective campaign only underscores how difficult it is to persuade Americans to give a Democrat the keys to the executive mansion. It might even be fair to say that Americans regard electing Democrats to the presidency as a last resort. If not, it’s darn close to that.

Be careful out there, Democrats. The pretty girl asked you to the prom to get back at her boyfriend, with whom she’s fighting. If you think she’s going to let you into her dress at the end of the evening, you’re in for quite a chilly surprise.

Some thoughts on Proposition 8

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:23:00 -0800

The narrow (52.4% to 47.6%) passage of Proposition 8 is a real heartbreaker. I was cautiously optimistic about it, but seeing it pass, in a very liberal state, in a high-turnout election, where a lot of liberals felt particularly motivated to vote, is certainly a little demoralizing. A number of thoughts about this are running through my head, both relating to my line of work (political polling and demographics) and not.

First of all, the involvement of the Mormon Church was a major problem. Not many Californians are themselves Mormons, but the church commands an almost bottomless pit of money, and having decided this was their fight, they were able to move literally tens of millions of dollars around. This enabled the campaign to reach not just the conservative parts of the state, but to make themselves highly visible in the state’s most liberal (and expensive) media markets. In Los Angeles County, they held the No vote to 49.6%. This was possible because of huge sums of money to completely saturate TV and radio.
Religion is a huge factor. People who attend religious services every week voted yes on 8 by a whopping 82%-18%. People who never attend religious services voted no on 8 by 83%-17%. So be sure to hug an atheist today. Religion is deeply at the core of the marriage issue, and it’s clear people infuse the term “marriage” with a lot of very specific religious ideas.
The Yes on 8 campaign was extremely successful among black voters. According to CNN’s exit poll, 75% of black women in California voted yes on 8. 70% of black people overall voted against it. This was a significant factor in Prop 8’s victory, both because of high black turnout to vote for Obama, and because the standard model for winning liberal campaigns in California usually involves big margins in traditionally liberal counties, including those with large black populations. Alameda County (where Oakland and Berkeley are located) is usually the most liberal county in the state. Yet 38% of its voters voted yes on 8, compared to other liberal counties with low black populations, like Marin (25% voting yes) and San Francisco (24% voting yes).
Older voters voted for Prop 8 by a significant margin. 61% of voters over 65 voted yes on 8, while only 39% of voters under 30 did. This is a self-correcting problem over time as young people replace old people through demographic churn. At the same time, the Obama campaign may prove to be a unique event in driving up turnout of young people. Will they be equally motivated in 2010 or 2012? No one knows.
There’s an interesting relationship between income and voting for Prop 8. It follows a curve People who make less than $30k/year voted no on 8 by a slight margin; people who make more than $150k/year voted no on 8 by a slight margin. But the people between those two poles voted for it. I’m sure the under-$30k group includes a lot of young people, but the numbers among high-income voters were interesting. College graduates voted against Prop 8, which probably explains the difference. It also shows that California is indeed still the land of brie-eating limousine liberals, and the presidential results bear this out. In some states, high-income voters voted Republican in large numbers, but in California, Obama won about 3/4 of the vote of people who make under $30k/year, and won about 3/5 of the vote of everyone who makes between $30k and infinity.
There was a lot of talk in the presidential campaign about fears of a “Tom Bradley effect” where voters told pollsters they were voting for the black candidate but, in the privacy of the voting booth, voted for the white one. The Tom Bradley effect didn’t materialize in the presidential race last night. And, in fact, the Tom Bradley effect has always been something of a myth. It’s named after the loser of the 1982 race for governor of California. Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, led slightly in the polls over George Deukmejian, the white state attorney general, but lost narrowly on Election Day. This difference was attributed to voters being reluctant to admit they were voting for the white guy, but in fact, there are lots of reasons the polling understated support for Deukmejian. Republicans ran a highly effective absentee ballot campaign that year, and a gun control measure on the ballot caused conservative turnout to soar beyond the turnout assumptions of the poll. But the myth of the “Tom Bradley Effect” persists.
However, we may be seeing a real Tom Bradley effect on gay issues. Polls understated the support for Prop 8, and the possibility that some people are reluctant to admit to a pollster that they oppose same-sex marriage may be a factor in that. It’s also possible that polls simply underestimated conservative turnout in the state. But the Field Poll that showed Prop 8 losing also showed Obama beating McCain by 22 points; in the end, the real margin was 24 points, so it doesn’t seem to me that Field was all that wrong about liberal and conservative turnout, so either voters changed their mind at the very last minute, or they didn’t tell the truth when asked by the pollsters.
All the Yes on 8 ads about how gay marriage would be taught in school didn’t connect with voters, but the ad where they show San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom talking about how gay marriage is coming “whether you like it or not” was a very effective one in my opinion. And it points out some of the problems of winning rights through the courts as opposed to the ballot box. The Yes on 8 people ran that ad constantly, and I’m sure it’s because their research showed it was effective. People don’t like it when the courts bulldoze them, and resentment of that was surely a factor in Prop 8’s passage. I’m not saying we should never try to win equal rights through the courts, but I’m warning that doing so can create a nasty backlash, and that rights won through means considered more democratic are more likely to last.
The No on 8 ads often seemed to be talking around the issue of same-sex marriage, talking in vague terms about equality and fairness while only hinting at the issue of same-sex couples. Many references were made to examples of discrimination in the past, but the ads kept the references to same-sex marriage as vague as possible. “And that’s why we should protect marriage for everyone” seemed to be the theme of those ads. Voters may have felt like the No on 8 campaign was trying to pull a fast one. I don’t have any polling to support that point; it’s just a hunch.
The margin is close enough that a rematch at the ballot box is likely. California will hold elections in June and November of 2010, and a pro-same-sex marriage ballot measure could fare well in the 2010 election, both because the culture will continue to shift in our direction and because a certain number of old voters will die off or move to states with lower taxes on retirement investment income in the meantime. November 2010 is likely to be a high turnout election because the governor’s office will be open, and there will probably be a competitive race as Sen. Boxer seeks re-election.
Same-sex couples married between the Supreme Court decision and the election (or, more exactly, the certification of the election, which usually takes a couple of weeks) are in legal limbo now. California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, has said that it’s his opinion that such marriages will continue to be recognized. Whether the courts will agree remains to be seen. Even some of Prop 8’s backers have said they honestly don’t know where the legal status of couples married during the post-decision, pre-election period will end up.
A number of legal challenges are being launched against Prop 8, but few of them show any promise. One suit alleges that Prop 8, because marriage affects so many parts of California law, constitutes a revision of the state constitution, and not an amendment. Revisions require the approval of the legislature, but amendments don’t. This argument is sure to be a tough sell. Even former California Supreme Court justice Joseph Grodin—a judge so liberal that voters, many years ago, removed him from the bench—expressed skepticism about this line of argument.

The Spider

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:19:00 -0700

I overshot my desired bus stop, so I found myself walking along Geary Boulevard. Somehow my my mental map of San Francisco got corrupted and I placed OfficeMax about six blocks west of its actual location, which I was making up on foot. I noticed this sign on the front gate of a building on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Geary:

The Spider, Inc., sounds like the perfect front for a low-rent superhero, like the late, lamented The Tick. An upstairs office in the Inner Richmond seems like the perfect location for a superhero who can’t afford more upscale digs downtown, let alone Wayne Manor.

At OfficeMax, I found a new desk and hutch for my office. I’ve been in the process of rearranging my office and making it more functional. I bought an iMac with a screen large enough to preside over Times Square, and a lot about how my office was arranged wasn’t working for me, so we’ve torn it up and started over again. Looking at the mess, which exploded out into every adjacent room, my partner Ron said “I”m starting to wonder if we’ve destroyed the village in order to save it.” But once all the furniture is in place, order will be restored. Really.

Like all the furniture at office discount stores, the desk is made out of particle board, covered by a thin veneer of, in this case, black. And, of course, it comes completely unassembled, with error-ridden instructions written by someone for whom English was not their first (and maybe not even their second or third) language. Assembling it has been a nightmare, and has basically eaten the last three days.

We can afford better furniture than particle board crap from office stores, but we’ve always put off buying anything but cheap furniture until we actually buy a place. We’ve always regarded living in our current flat as a temporary situation, but it’s been a temporary situation for 14 years now. We’re the beneficiaries of San Francisco’s insane rent control laws; without them, we’d have bought a house years ago. We still want a house—this place is in lousy shape, and we’re tired of having upstairs neighbors—but for a variety of reasons, we’ve postponed that. So we live in some kind of limbo between adulthood and college-kid-ness, buying cheap furniture because it’s all theoretically temporary.

As particle board furniture goes, this isn’t a bad looking desk, but it’s been a nightmare to put together. Neither of us are the hardy, do-it-yourself types, but this one’s been harder than most of the stuff we’ve assembled. Last night, Ron was talking with a coworker who’s very handy at building things (he’s one of the few people in California licensed to build and own a flamethrower or something like that) and even he said stuff like this is difficult to assemble. It’s not encouraging to hear that from some guy who probably ought to be part of the MythBusters cast.

So right now, our flat is a complete mess. It looks like we’re in the process of moving in or moving out. Or that the place has just been ransacked by the FBI or mobsters. On our living room floor is a hutch in mid-assembly. Tonight we’ll finish it or die trying.

Maybe we should enlist the help of The Spider.

Siskel & Ebert & Roeper & Phillips

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:19:00 -0700

I spend much of my childhood living in a small, rural town. Because my parents didn’t even have the good sense to live in town, where you could get cable, we got exactly three TV stations: the local PBS, ABC, and CBS affiliates. And bringing in the CBS affiliate involved using a control knob in the living room to activate a servomotor on the roof which spun our antenna southward.

At a young age, I discovered the PBS show Sneak Previews, with Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. That was the original PBS show, running from 1977 to 1982 before the hosts made the leap to commercial television. As with much classic television, a lot of the Sneak Previews shows no longer exist on tape because somebody foolishly taped over them. Who’d ever want to see an out-of-date movie review show? So I’ve probably seen many hours of Siskel & Ebert that will never be seen again. When Siskel & Ebert left PBS, Sneak Previews limped along with Jeffrey Lyons and Neal Gabler, and later Lyons and Michael Medved, but no one cared.

Through that show, I became keenly interested in seeing grownup movies. On a visit to San Francisco, my dad wanted to see Apocalypse Now at the legendary Northpoint Theater. Mom wasn’t up for a film with lots of gunfire and no smooching, so the plan was that she’d look after me while Dad saw his manly war movie. But I begged to go along because I’d heard Siskel & Ebert talk about it, and I was a precocious kid who wanted something new and interesting from a movie. Mom was reluctant, but finally relented and allowed me to tag along with Dad.

It was great. The Northpoint was a huge theater with continental seating, a big screen, and a sound system so good that many films had their sound mixed there. I was blown away by the movie, and an interest in cinema off the beaten path was ignited.

Siskel & Ebert reviewed not only the week’s Hollywood fare, but foreign and independent film. I’m sure the first time I heard the name John Sayles, it was out of Siskel’s mouth or Ebert’s. There was nowhere near me to see that stuff, but the advent of home video made it possible to catch a few offbeat things; even our small town’s video store carried some unusual stuff. Early video stores were long tail businesses before anyone knew that that meant. Each week, as I watched Siskel & Ebert, the list of films I wanted to see someday grew in my mind. And occasionally I’d be in or near a big city where I could find a few. When I left home and moved to The Big City, I made up for lost time.

I honestly don’t remember if I agreed with Siskel or Ebert more. What was important was that each review provided just enough information about a film that I could figure out whether it was for me or not. I got to know their tastes well enough that I could calibrate them to mine. I knew their blind spots (Ebert’s weakness for films which reflected his own left-wing politics, etc.) After Gene Siskel died in 1999, it became fashionable to trash his replacement, Richard Roeper, and while Roeper wasn’t the refined cineaste Siskel was, the Ebert & Roeper review still told me everything I needed to know about a movie, and still served the function of bringing things to my attention which otherwise would have escaped it. Yeah, it wasn’t the same, but it was probably the highest-profile forum in which small independent and foreign films, including documentaries, were discussed.

Two years ago, Ebert’s failing health took him off the air, and his return seems to be far in the future at best. The show went through a series of guest co-hosts, much as it had after Siskel’s death, and the producers seemed to have settled on Michael Phillips, whose chemistry with Roeper was good: Phillips the Urban Sophisticate, Roeper the Regular Guy. I expected the inevitable announcement that Ebert would step aside and allow the show to become, logically enough, Roeper & Phillips.

But instead, Disney-ABC wanted to take it in a more Hollywood-focused direction, and Ebert and Roeper almost simultaneously announced their resignations. Roeper said a show in the spirit of the original Siskel & Ebert would be forthcoming soon, details to follow, presumably when his contract with Disney expires next month. The sooner, the better, as far as I’m concerned. And I hope even the folks who’ve never warmed to Roeper give the guy props for quitting and going elsewhere because he believed in the vision of the original show. Maybe he’ll get a little more respect now.

Amusingly, one of the hosts of the new, Hollywood-ized At the Movies with ~~Ebert~~ & ~~Roeper~~ is Ben Lyons, son of Jeffrey Lyons, one of the critics who replaced Siskel & Ebert on PBS’s Sneak Previews. The other is Ben Mankiewicz from TMZ, which tells you everything you need to know about where they’re going with the show.

Wherever Roeper & Phillips are going, I’ll be there. No, you can’t recapture the chemistry Siskel & Ebert had, but you can still do a very useful film review show that calls people’s attention to stuff off the beaten track while reviewing the latest action film with Roman numerals in the title.

Ebert wrote a fine eulogy to the show this week. While his voice is silenced for now, and maybe forever, his writing is as sharp as ever. He spoke of how he and Siskel both hated each other and loved each other, and no better insight could be gained on their relationship than by watching these two videos of Siskel & Ebert, circa 1987, joking with each other and being downright mean to each other as they shoot (or attempt to shoot) show promos. Be warned that the language they use is NSFW:

Three to Read #1

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:21:00 -0700

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens writes an unsparing, unsentimental remembrance of Jesse Helms, who died earlier this month at the age of 86:
It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.
And it gets better from there. Read the whole thing here.
My partner and I recently watched the seven-part HBO mini-series John Adams, which, aside from a few quibbles, like treating Adams a tad too gently for the Alien and Sedition Acts, and rushing through his legendary correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in the last seven years of his life, we liked. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney vanished into their characters, and David Morse’s scenes as George Washington pull off the almost impossible task of communicating what it must’ve been like to set eyes on the man. The effort at historic accuracy was impressive, right down to the rotting teeth as characters age (despite a nasty little continuity error in which, in an extremely important scene, Giamatti is without his dental makeup).

One episode deals with the breast cancer and eventual death of the Adams’ daughter, Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smith, which offers a cringe-inducing look at the state of medicine in 1811. The TV series, by necessity, takes an abbreviated view of her illness. Jim Olson, a history professor at Sam Houston State University, looks in more depth at the story of her illness and medical treatment. It’s interesting to see what they knew and didn’t know about breast cancer then:

In June 1811, with the lump visible to the naked eye, a desperate Nabby returned to Massachusetts, accompanied by her husband and daughter Caroline. As soon as she arrived in Quincy, she wrote to Benjamin Rush, describing her condition and seeking his advice. When Abigail Adams first looked at her daughter’s breast, she found the condition “allarming.” [sic] The large tumor distended the breast into a misshapen mass. John and Abigail took Nabby to see several physicians in Boston, and they were cautiously reassuring, telling her that the situation and her general health were “so good as not to threaten any present danger.” They prescribed hemlock pills to “poison the disease.”
Read the whole essay here, but be warned it’s not for the squeamish.
Finally, how much trouble can a really disgruntled IT guy cause the government of the City & County of San Francisco? Quite a lot, actually, as we see in the case of Terry Childs:

Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored. Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.
Authorities made good on their threat of arrest, and Childs is now a guest of the city jail, but he’s still not talking. Now that’s disgruntlement. Read the stories here and here.
How a guy with a robbery conviction got into a position of such techno-responsibility is one of many questions people will be avoiding in coming weeks.

Cool Wikipedia Article: David S. Terry

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:27:00 -0700

David S. Terry was a notoriously short-tempered California politician in the 19th century, best known for having killed US Senator David Broderick in an 1859 duel. Both were Democrats, but Terry was a member of the party’s pro-slavery faction, while Broderick was a Free Soil Democrat who didn’t want slavery extended into California.

There’s something so very quintessentially mid-19th century California about the story of Terry and his wife:

Terry became entangled in a mysterious divorce case in the 1880s. A young woman named Sarah Althea Hill claimed that she was the legal wife of silver millionaire William Sharon. Sharon denied that they had ever married, but Hill wanted a divorce and a share of Sharon’s treasure. She lost her case and eventually wound up marrying Terry. The Terrys appealed, and United States Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field, a former friend of Broderick’s, heard the case in 1888 as the senior justice of the Federal circuit court in California.

Field ruled against Mr. and Mrs. Terry in a final appeal, and jailed them both on contempt of court. The Terrys vowed vengeance.

Read the whole glorious soap opera here.

The Terry-Broderick duel took place just outside San Francisco city limits, near Lake Merced. It’s strange to think of the Westlake Shopping Center as the site of a notorious political duel. I think of it more as the site of a 24-hour Walgreens.

Marx Realty

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:50:00 -0700

In another online discussion, someone said they’d like a picture of Marx Realty. Since I live nearby, and was having a late lunch right near it, I snapped a picture:

I assume the plethora of American flags (three, counting the tiny, faded sticker below the big flag) is to disclaim any connection to that Marx. In most places, that wouldn’t be necessary—they’d think Groucho, not Karl—but in San Francisco, you wouldn’t be too sure about that. A bakery a few blocks away advertises itself as a “workers’ collective,” after all. Somehow, I have a feeling a “workers’ collective” is a more oppressive place to work than a Wal-Mart in Honduras.

While my political views used to be considerably more liberal than they are today, I never succumbed to a flirtation with real leftism. For this, I think I have two things to thank. First, I traveled a lot in my youth, and saw up close that leftist regimes produced pretty miserable results. Second, while at UC Berkeley, I took a class from a political science professor named A. James Gregor.

Gregor is a Strangelovian character, and while I didn’t necessarily agree with everything he had to say, he was relentless, in that political theory class, about drawing the line between certain political theories and their catastrophic outcomes. Many of my fellow students hadn’t even heard of the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge, or that the Cultural Revolution in China had produced anything more insidious than a lot of people marching around in gray tunics. I never quite bought into his defense of right-wing dictators, but his argument about bad statist theory causing human disaster on unimaginable scales persuaded me.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of everything on Gregor’s Wikipedia page. It notes accusations that he silenced alternate views, in the class, I can tell you from firsthand experience that this was not true. Some students made contrary points and he argued back. It was the sort of exchange of ideas universities are for. He often made a point of inviting students to his office hours to continue discussing or debating a point.

I supported the anti-Apartheid movement at Berkeley, and I think history has rendered a clear verdict on who was right about that. But I couldn’t exactly join up and march, since the whole thing was led by serious Fellow Travelers, who ranged from the earnest—a woman who wanted to emigrate to Cuba—to the ridiculous—a guy who got to the front of every anti-Apartheid march through Sproul Plaza and Dwinelle Plaza chanting:

Marx and Lenin!

Mao and Trotsky!

We’ve got the team that’s really hotsky!

I am not making this up. I’m sure it got old, even for the commies. I sure did for me, as I tried to study early 19th century European history from my hard-won shady spot on the grass near the Life Sciences Building. It got especially old after the first few hundred times I heard it.

You say you want a revolution. Well, you know.

Dot remnant

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 04:15:00 -0700

I lived pretty close to the epicenter of the Dot Com Boom™ (v. 1.0). My partner worked (as he still does) for a Major Technology Company and our neighborhood was popular among the dot-com nouveau-upper-middle-class. We saw the upscale restaurants displace the cheap dives. We ate in the cheap dives, like the splendid Pot & Pan, which offered tasty food (the Won Ton Soup was to die for) in fluorescent-lit surroundings with all the atmosphere of an airport restroom.

We ate in the upscale restaurants as our own stock market investments made possible a break from our college student-worthy diets of deli sandwiches, boxes of cheap Chinese food, and burritos. And then we saw the upscale joints close, to be replaced by cheaper fare, like the always-busy Naan ‘n’ Curry. Creative destruction in action.

My partner, for a brief time, worked in a building that had previously been occupied by Pets.com, one of the classic dot-bomb stories. It turns out that offering free shipping on 50 lb. bags of dog food is a pretty good way to send your investors’ money to the Great Beyond. “Walk toward the light! Walk toward the light!”

Perhaps the quintessential dot-bomb story was Excite.com. Few companies basked in the media attention and hype that surrounded Excite, which was a portal when it seemed obvious to everyone that portals were the future. Joe Kraus, the boyish, telegenic co-founder of the company was likely to show up in any late-90’s story about the boom. You know the story: dot com companies, wallowing in money from big IPOs, paid ridiculous prices for Super Bowl ads, billboards along US 101, blimps, and anything else they could manage. Profitability was scorned as an outdated concept, but as many young people learn, their parents were actually right about a few things, and one of those is that a company can’t lose money forever before burly dudes come to repo all your Aerons.

Excite became Excite@Home, but never quite took off, and passed through the hands of various companies which never figured out what to do with it. Their ubiquitous logo faded, and the once high-flying stock crashed to earth as the company overpaid for long-forgotten startups like iMail, Blue Mountain, and Webshots. They paid $430 million for Blue Mountain (one of those sites through which you can send greeting cards via e-mail) and soon sold it for $35 million to American Greetings. Other properties were also liquidated at a fraction of their cost to pay Excite’s crushing debts. Three weeks after 9/11 the company went bankrupt. The founders of Webshots, who sold the company to the Excite boys for $82.5 million, bought the company back for $2.4 million from the bankruptcy court.

Excite still exists, and still looks like a portal from 1997. Various owners have bought it with the intent of revitalizing the site, but no one ever quite gets around to it. Some of the links are broken; others seem to point to pages full of news stories from late June.

One of the ways dot-com companies advertised themselves in the boom of the late 90’s was to pay people to repaint their cars with the company colors and logo all over it. The owner of the car got a few hundred dollars a month, and the company got a moving billboard. Those days are mostly gone, so it was with a combination of smugness and nostalgia that I observed yesterday, on my street, a double-parked car with peeling paint, covered with Excite logos:

It reminded me of those heady days. The dot-bomb was as over-hyped as the dot-boom; plenty of companies made money and thrived, and plenty of people who rode their first company off a cliff learned from the experience and ended up making their next venture a success.

And Joe Kraus, Excite’s boy wonder? At the ripe old age of 35, he’s now a Director of Product Management at a little outfit called Google.