"I'm from Silicon Valley and I'm here to help."

It's well-known that Ronald Reagan said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." It's less remembered that he said so in the context of announcing a drought assistance plan for farmers. But the idea that government plans can do more harm than good isn't an extremist one.

But beyond a certain point that applies to plans in general. There's a technocratic impulse in both the government and the private sector. It's the idea that as we get more and better data we can make better decisions, and if that "we" means only a small elite, it's incumbent on all the other schmoes to get with the program.

This article on the pitfalls of "smart cities" shows where that kind of haughtiness can lead. The great cities of the Northwest―Seattle and Portland―have turned unfriendly to their residents exactly by means of the scientific measures that were supposed to help them. 

Portland didn’t fail because it lacked intelligence. So far, it’s failed because it forgot to ask what the intelligence was for. The dream of a “New Atlantis” — a city run by science and data — turns dystopian not because of its technology, but because of its values. If citizens are assumed to be liabilities rather than moral agents, then urban design becomes an exercise in containment, not liberation.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the COVID reaction was the final boss of treating citizens as liabilities. For weeks turning to months turning to a couple of years, all unprotected and unmediated social interactions were held to be irresponsible. All because of experts who had convinced themselves they had the best information. 

This also means that it's past time smart people admitted that data isn't everything.

🗡sharp

Sometimes one might sit up late at night and ponder the big questions like: Knife throwing, is that for real? How does it work? What kind of nut would agree to be the throwee?

This first-person article pretty much confirms that it's a genuine thing. Bates apparently teaches it, or at least did back in 2015. He wisely doesn't give away too many trade secrets in the interview. The statement "I’ll also light the knives on fire and throw them while wearing a blindfold." must have been good for luring 'em in.

Windy City cats

I was just looking up stuff about Chicago, I guess out of curiosity over what puts it head and shoulders above other American cities in terms of creating Popes. And I came across this article on Chicago-specific slang. 

What struck me right away was the picture they had illustrating the word "gangway." It's very striking and the cats are beautiful, of course. But I doubt that there were just this many purely black cats hanging out together. I think there was a wrangler involved. Not a superstitious one, obbiously'

The ground under our feet

There's a certain class of Wikipedia edit I used to make. I don't anymore. I still remember how to log in, and I still make some edits, but smaller ones.

What I used to do was find an article that had been flagged for not having any sources. Then I'd find some official sources and include them in the article's bibliography. It's not really doable anymore.

Until fairly recently you could freely surf the websites of most magazines and newspapers. They might try to coax you to subscribe by offering some kind of premium content. Or they might have a limited number of articles you could read in a month, and once you had used them up you had to wait for a new month to begin. But increasingly we're in the "no freebies means no freebies" era. Everything is paywalled. 

You could say that this kind of crackdown was always inevitable. That publishers have to make money. You'd have a point. But some things rankle. For one thing this comes after years of online readers tolerating oftentimes intrusive ads. Also, are the revenues being used to pay writers and bring in more and better journalism? Doesn't seem like it. 

For better or worse the infrastructure of the internet was based on certain things being promised. Now they are quickly being unpromised. 

Odd shapes

As noted here, amoeba-like shapes had a huge upturn in the forties and fifties. It probably had something to do with their very abstractness. Amoebae themselves can only be seen under microscopes, and the similarity is just suggestive. So this shape belonged entirely to design, abstract art, kooky animation, etc. 

If you're about my age you've almost certainly seen amoeba patterns on Formica, and maybe porcelain as well. The actual practice of making them is long gone, but the artifacts themselves lasted a substantial amount of time after they were in vogue. Kind of like, if you look at the link, that little starburst shape behind the "k" in "Skylark."

Blondes have more fun

If you want to change the world, you have to have the courage to be an outsider. In other words, you have to take certain risks and do things a little bit differently; otherwise, if that were the case, everybody would be successful. Doesn't work that way. Progress never comes from those satisfied with the failures of a broken system; it comes from those who want to fix the broken system.

Remember those words from Donald Trump, delivered at the University of Alabama commencement. Years from now, when there have been more than fifty Presidents and he's just one or two of them, grade school level Presidential fact books will be published and that will be included as one of his grander, more presidential statements. 

More than that, though, it's a key to his appeal. For good reason, Americans have lost all trust in insiders. Trump presented the clearest available way to put someone besides them in charge. Different people have different opinions on him as a man and as a leader. I'd say that much and perhaps most of what he's done while in power has been not good. But it's important to understand how he got where he is.

You can't keep a good pie down

Good news from the neighborhood. While I don't want to jinx it, it appears that the pizza place near where I live may be coming back. That's according to a guy I talked to today who was working on renovating the insides.

Some background: A while ago they were told by their landlord that their rent would triple, or else they'd have to leave. The landlords apparently thought that they should be getting more rent because of the location. There was a change.org petition to allow them to stay. I signed it, even though those tend to be of limited use. As it happened, they got a few months' worth extension, but a few weeks ago they did close their doors.

The thing is, this is not really a posh location. It's nice enough, but the street at least on this side of the hill is a few modest homeowners and a lot of renters, plus a couple of small housing projects. People assume that all of the East Side is ritzy, but it's a little more heterogeneous than that. So any new business that came in paying the rent that it seems like they were asking for would have found out soon that the overhead was too high. Maybe the property owners realized that. I hope so, and I hope there are realizations like that everywhere.