A Relationship Post-Mortem

Well, this is something of a departure from my normal stuff, but I feel the need to talk this out to myself.

Well, the relationship started about a month ago, we had talked a couple of times prior and she had come across as nice, and her being cute didn't hurt either. So, I attempted to ask her out. I was bad at it, bumbling and all that jazz. That was more understandable because I hadn't asked anyone out in something like seven years. I wasn't in a relationship during that time either, I just wasn't actively looking and nothing just popped up. But, we had a nice talk while we waited for her mother to come pick her up.

Then we had some scheduling issues, given that she was moving but about a week later we managed to go have dinner at a local sushi place. We had a nice talk, and I enjoyed myself. On the way over we passed a Hobby Lobby, so we stopped on the way back to help her find stuff to decorate her room. I like being helpful, so I didn't mind stopping but Hobby Lobby doesn't really have much that appeals to me. And, I'm not saying that I was the only guy in the store, but if that store was representative of the US population then there would be a professional quilting team named the Kansas City Bros. Needless to say, I was less comfortable there than I had been earlier. About an hour into the thing I exhorted her to make a decision between two thing, and she quipped that I didn't want to be there. Yeah, I wasn't getting as much out of the shopping and I was not all that excited about being there, but that wasn't what I was saying. All in all, I was fine with how things had went.

The next time we hung out was me helping her with an Excel Spreadsheet project. It wasn't really hard, but it was big and really detail oriented. Again, I don't mind helping out some time, but this was literally the most we ever hung out. And we did it all at her place or in a club area that she had membership in, but I didn't. So, there was a lot of stuff going on in her space, and I was not comfortable in that space. But I still had a lot of hope, over the weekend we finally had another date scheduled, as most of my suggestions thus far had been unacceptable for some reason or other.

A friend of mine was having two pieces of art shown in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta as part of their college night. Over the course of the week, I got myself worked up about it. Finally, it's be my thing in a space that I'm comfortable with and I'd really be able to gauge how things are going. So, I ordered the tickets early, and arranged everything beforehand. But, the day of she called and cancelled because she was coming down with something. She was, but that didn't change the fact that after a week of hyping myself up the whole event felt... anticlimactic. I went, talked with my friend, and saw a gallery of Frida Kahlo and had a reasonably good time. But the other events for college night: Samba dance classes, crafts, and the like would have been perfect. So, I was a little disappointed.

When we talked two days later, I didn't really hide the fact that I was a little disappointed, but I didn't express why all that well. So, she said that she didn't think that dating was a good idea. I didn't fight the break up, because I still had the feeling (right or wrong) that the relationship thus far had been unfairly one-sided. I don't doubt that I handled a lot of it wrong, and that I have some confidence issues, but I don't think that it would have panned out from my current perspective. That doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt, however.

Well, now I guess I'm back where I started more or less. Still, I'm thinking that it has taught me that I need to practice and put myself in situations where I ask women out more often. A long hiatus and timidity has served me poorly.

Some things I need to do better.

The biggest thing I need to do better is get a project actually accomplished. I've been trying to do a number of things, and stuff has largely fallen through. Partially because I don't have the right contacts to really make things soar, and partially because I'm a little bit timid and haven't really been getting after it. The only way to learn this stuff is to do it, and I've been ducking doing some of this stuff. The only person really being hurt is me, but still I need to buckle down get something built so that I can turn around and help other folks do it.

I need to write more. Not the stuff I write here either. Writing about generalities and abstracts is fine, but I need to figure out more specifics. I think writing fiction. Just a little bit, to help me round out stories. I tend to be rather critical of my own fiction, and effective criticism is a great way to polish ideas and polish myself. I used to debate things online, but the place I did so changed in composition and the quality of discussion dropped off. Rather than just find another place to talk things through online, I would like to talk things through while also generating something that is worth the time of a non-involved party. I know the secret to being a writer, whether as a hobbyist or as a profession, is just writing, but I'm bad at hold myself accountable and I don't have anyone to be accountable to when it comes to writing.

I need to be a more helpful, since right now I only encourage folks to pick up a hobby. I know very talented people, who have hobbies and skills that, quite frankly, boggle my mind. Those same people have problems related to money. It shouldn't be that hard to find buyers for art. I always think to myself, there's an answer here. I need to figure out a way to bring those skills to market. I just haven't the slightest idea how. That shouldn't be an excuse. I just need a better idea and clearer understanding of the tools I actually have at my disposal.

I need to learn to better include others. I have this unrealistic expectation I that I should be able to handle everything myself. Maybe it's pride. Maybe it's that I'm still not entirely sure of myself and don't want to expose anyone else to failure. I know that I lack the complete skill set and boundless energy required to do everything by myself, but I need to really understand this fact. Or at the very least find people with complementary skill sets that I can trust. I have good ideas. People remark upon this some times. I'm frustrated by my inability to create them in anything more concrete than words.

I would ask for help using this outlet, but I'm never sure if anyone actually reads it.

The thing I learned from High Stalinism

There is no one right answer. There is no one future. There is no one utopia.

No matter how I divide things or reduce things, no matter how simple or complex I make the world we will never agree. It won't be because I am right, or that I am wrong. It will be our goals are not the same, nor will be our methods. We should rejoice when we find that we are going the same way, not wonder what is wrong with one another when find that we are not.

Though it's hard, and I will never stop judging completely, I need to realize that people aren't using my measuring stick and what I think is obviously wrong isn't to them. I can only hope that others have the same courtesy towards me, and try not to force me into a future that they feel is best for everyone.

We need the dialog. We need the debate. We need the exchange of ideas, hopes, and dreams. The diversity and healthy debate keeps us strong and growing. Forcing an end to the debate either by declaring victory, choosing not to hear, or trying to avoid conflict and hurt feelings by censoring ourselves is a defeat for us all.

Our strength comes from the very bottom, from the discussions we have in our families and among our friends as well as the decisions of every day people to do something about something. These things, not anything done in the Washington, or the Vatican, or the United Nations, are the things that help the most. Billions of dollars in massive programs can't do as much as friends pulling together to help one another. We don't need big initiatives, even if they do help, we have always needed one another.

New Year's Rant

I've been reading a lot about Communism in Eastern Europe over the holidays. And I have to say that it's gotten me to thinking. Then I came across some articles online discussing hipsters and the value of college education. While I don't agree with anywhere near all of it, this commentary was rather thought provoking.

So, what ties communism, hipsters, and college educations together? Industry, more accurately, the kinds of jobs that industry provides. Mostly in that the kind of jobs that Eastern European Communists were desperate to create in order to create an ideologically correct ascendant working class don't exist. Hipsters don't have jobs, and likely never will because the jobs the things they have trained to do don't exist, either because they cannot exist or have not been created. And college educations are plummeting in value relative to what they have been in the past, partially because all the knowledge and skills those degrees supply are available through other means and partially because so many more people are getting degrees than before. Yeah, yeah, but what's the point? Well, I'm afraid that all this political campaigning about jobs, the lower tax receipts, the hostility towards immigration, and the very question of a welfare state are all signs of a fundamental change in our economy, one that most of us aren't even thinking about. The fact of the matter is that there are fewer things that can be jobs.

As modern farming techniques replaced peasants with machines they went to the city and became the proletariat. Marx saw this clearly and projected this out all the way in his theories. Factory work has been a conveyor belt to wealth from a persistent unemployed/underemployed group to higher and higher levels of education and levels of income. But since the 1960's we've seen much the same thing happen to factories that occurred in farm fields, sons cannot follow in their father's footsteps because those jobs no longer exist. What did people do? Well without really discussing it we simply decided that the children of all those factory workers would go to college. The problem is that no one really defined why.

In Eastern Europe we see what happens when we push a simple, elegant idea without accounting for reality. Not the totalitarian dictatorship, but the unhealthy economy that failed to effectively recover from the devastation of depression and war for almost half a century. Is going to college a bad idea? Well, that depends. Why are you going to college? The Last Psychiatrist's point that those unemployed hipsters are unemployed because their degrees don't help and likely never will is valid. Jobs aren't rationed. A degree isn't a ticket to a job. There are thousands of other people getting precisely the same degree, you aren't made unique by that piece of paper. Those who benefit from college, those who earn double or more, are those who have a reason to be in college.

I'm just afraid that hipsters are here to stay. Not the style or attitude, but the highly educated people who are not employed. I'm afraid that they will remain systemically unemployed. I end up paying in taxes for them to live, and so do you. They're a currently unaccounted for problem that feeds opposition to immigration, that strains our social safety net, and otherwise don't contribute. So, why aren't they accounted for, why are they assumed to be capable of getting jobs with medieval poetry degree whereas a high school drop out is not capable? They have precisely the same useful skills. It's just that the degree in medieval poetry was a big expenditure not just for the person, but that person's family and the community at large. The decision wasn't a good one, much like East European insistence on steel foundries at the expense of clothing and glass which would have been better industries to develop. Overfilling the five year plan was a problem, even though no one in a position of authority seemed to realize this. Too many people getting less useful college degrees is precisely the same problem, are there generalized benefits (positive externalities) to higher education? Possibly, but not at these prices.

So, we need that next step. That next thing that we can pour people into doing that generates not just wealth, but new KINDS of wealth. Healthcare isn't it, because it's about preserving and improving life, which will never grow faster that population. You don't need teams of programmers to craft each and every app sold in a store, and those who make them are closer to architects than bricklayers. Even retail is facing increasing automation.

What we need isn't to encourage existing business. No existing industry promises the growth we need right now. What we need is new business. We need to encourage those hipsters to make a job for themselves, rather than waiting for me to make a job for them. I haven't the slightest idea how a degree in medieval poetry can be helpful, but maybe someone who better understands poetry can. If anyone can make a job for a hipster it is a hipster.

What we need is a pool of money that supports art, not managed exclusively by a government or a corporation, but one that is controlled by local communities, individuals, and community organizations. We need the ability to support people who have inventions and business plans with however much we feel it's worth. We need crowdsourcing for new concepts, to allow pitches to made to people at large and manage risk by keeping the amounts being risked by any one source small. We need to find the reasons why people who have great ideas don't follow up on them and make them real. We need to find why people with great drive when it comes to crafts and hobbies don't turn around and make that into something they can support themselves off of. We need to figure out why people who are driven to help wind up wasting their time and energy on empty "awareness campaigns". Those barriers need to be reduced or eliminated. Rather than telling people to go to college do something and then work for someone else for forty years before they can do what they really want to do, we need to figure out how to get people to do what they really want in the beginning and profit from it.

Our theories are old, out dated. They don't work any more because they are simplified or are built on the assumption of factory work rather than that of the internet and robot. We need new ones, ones that were born in the realities of the 1840's and 1960's.

I need new ones. I need to help. I need to make those jobs. I need to make that pool of money. I need to get artists to make art, and craftsmen to make crafts and introduce them to people who want arts and crafts. I need to do this, but I don't know how. I need to do this, and I'm beginning to worry that college isn't going to teach me how. If not college, then where? If not me, then who?

Planned Obsolescence

Car manufacturers had a problem in the 1950's. A car can last for twenty years or more, how can they get people to buy a car more often? Well, Brook Stevens came up with a solution and called it planned obsolescence. To this day, this is a rather maligned concept to those who don't actively employ it.

Now, this isn't the idea that things simply fall apart after a given of time. Rather, you plan to make things look and feel old. It's a design issue. Each year you make a thing incrementally smaller, bigger, or different in evolution. The idea isn't to force people to give up their things, but to make it instantly recognisable when the thing came out. That way, the same features are both a selling point when it's new and a reason to get a new thing when it's old.

In the 1950's, it was the car fins. Today, it's most obvious in Apple Products where new versions come out every year or so with an incremental change in features and size. The original concept held that the incremental change is the primary driver in new purchases, but the fact that the model and year is immediately visible positively incentivize the decision to upgrade and penalizes the decision to use out of date models just because of the way we interact with one another.

The thing everyone thinks of, the redesign of things to wear out faster, is a poor substitute pursued by industries that cannot effectively vary the look of their product. Originally seen in things like light bulbs, this methodology cannibalizes their own sales if anyone breaks ranks and maintain quality in spite of their competition.

Car Communication

Road Rage is a thing. Walking Rage isn't. Why? People can communicate non-verbally when walking much better than they can through cars. Today, for example, I wound up cutting off a bus since the bus just let someone off at a sometimes bus stop and then had to immediately make a left at a light. This involved getting over two lanes. I was just trying to make a left, and assumed that the bus was only going to pull out into either of the straight lanes.

I felt like a dumb ass. I wish there was a "sorry" or an "I'm a dumb ass" button I could press that would communicate my actual feelings. But, I didn't so I'm pretty sure that I came off like a raging dick who didn't care that I had essentially lept into the bus' path and thereby forcing it to wait through a red light.

I find that comes up pretty often. Someone does something stupid or aggressive when driving and I kind of assume that they're just being a dick about it. I think that a few of them weren't trying to be dicks about it, much like I didn't intend to cut off a bus. The problem is that jerks exist. I want to react appropriately, but when I can't tell the difference because they can't tell me.

When walking and someone blunders, they look like they are embarrassed or sorry about it. Or they don't, and then I know they are a dick. I wish there was something, anything, that could mimic that interaction when strapped into the multi-ton frame that is a car.

A talk about housing

I believe that we are paying far too much attention to concepts of class in housing needs. There are many discussions about affordable housing, sustainable housing, and transit oriented housing. But one thing I read a while ago that really stuck with me. It was talking about the fact that the vast majority of Americans who are wealthy enough to consider moving end up with a very weak sense of place. How is this not a bigger issue?

Don't get me wrong, the discussions we are having about housing are important. Many people who move to those areas of the United States where they can take home more pay for the same job find housing costs so high in those areas that they wind up little better than they were before, so new ideas to help establish affordable housing without heavy handed government action like price controls would be most welcome. Many people who do not live in cities quickly find that their choices in how to get around is cars and also cars, suburbs were created partially to provide a choice that is different from either farm or major city but suburbs themselves also require more choice for those who are young, poor, or suffering from mechanical problem. Sustainability can be rather important, but I am sure that there are better folks than I to belabor that point. My point is that there is something that we aren't talking about, and that is that place sort of thing.

Many people when they reach the age where they want to move out of their parent's house find that there is nothing they can possibly afford in the neighborhood they grew up. This tends to be because the houses are too big, too expensive, or too far from work or school. This is simply because the needs and resources of a single person change significantly over time. A young man or woman moving out on their own needs little more space than a dorm room with an attached bathroom and kitchenette. They don't need a free standing house. A young man or woman moving out on their own for the first time also tends to be working in entry level positions, living off student loans, or working a couple of part time jobs. This doesn't lend itself to large housing bills. A couple of building that offer housing like this in a low rise higher density format close to the center of commercial activity and education in the area. These buildings lend themselves to mass transit options and mixed use with some commercial space in the same building, and with some early planning it should be easier to design it with sustainability in mind than single family housing units for a similar number of people.

As that person ages their wants and resources changes. In ten years or so that person is entering the main element of his or her earning potential and has been accumulating stuff. That first apartment would tend to be too small and possibly too close to the noise and bustle nightlife and commercial activity. The pattern doesn't need to be all that different or a lower density option like town homes, just a bigger space that doesn't share space with louder uses a little ways farther from the commercial heart of the community. Transit is less important because it is far more likely that the individual in question would be capable of supporting a car, but again an integration with mass transit is an easy win for the design of the community allowing people the choice of car rather than assuming it. If the individual remains a working professional this may be the last kind of housing that they need.

Many people like the single family home, and once they start having children they strongly value the privacy, land ownership, quiet, and control that the single family homes offer relative to other housing options. Schools, also, are essential to this decision. While that first house is concerned with post-secondary education, it really isn't all that important to have a strong local school system, the second house has a stronger emphasis on the local school system but primarily in so far as it relates to how it inflates or depresses the price. This stage is where schools become important, maybe even the factor. This is the largest, most expensive, and least predicated on mass transit options that the housing option is going get. The existing suburban model suits this set of wants rather effectively.

 Yet, all those things the large floor space, the yard, the high quality schools, and the distance that creates the quiet and control become liabilities as this person ages. You never stop paying for the size of the house even after you pay off the loan, property taxes rarely drop especially in areas with a well funded school system. In order be sure of silence you need a large block of low density use and that normally is same use, so while noise and strangers are kept at arms length so are things like medical care and low density makes it hard or impossible for mass transit to substitute for a car if a person suffers a mechanical failure or a health problem that makes the car unfeasible. As children leave it can make a great deal of sense to move into a smaller, more dense setting especially if the area is designed for the elderly. Housing dedicated to the elderly also has the ability to eliminate that school tax on a property, that's a huge proportion of local taxes and it's reasonably safe for a community to do this because it's incredibly unlikely that the elderly will put a burden on the school system.

All that being said, building this progression everywhere simply won't work. It is predicated on a number of assumption. First, is that there is a dense commercial core a main street or a regional mall, after all mass transit cannot be an option if it cannot put someone in easy walking distance of both employment and shopping so very low density suburbs and rural areas are unlikely to support the first home apartments. The second assumption is that the local character of the community wouldn't be altered by high density development, after all nothing breaks up small town charm quite like a small sky scraper sandwiched between historic buildings on a historic square. The third assumption is that the density is low enough to allow for single family homes at all, New York and San Francisco have progressions all their own. Anyone looking at their community needs to be very careful about development, because each one has something special and unique that needs to be nurtured and protected. After all, the health and future of a community depends upon those things that make it unique.

That being said, I think that it is a way to layer the market to better address questions about transit options and affordability. Too often, discussions about affordable housing feels like it breaks down into "where do we hide the poor people". That, I feel, is the wrong way to go about it. After all, everyone is poor, relatively speaking, when they are very young or very old. So, in providing housing for the young and old you are reducing competition for low cost housing and providing a geographic areas where lower income housing is considered acceptable. If this is infill development it creates a market for and a small area where transit can thrive. Connect that transit alternative to other, existing networks and you have a core of transit that can be expanded upon later should density increase in the future.

So, how do you include low-income high density housing with parking access in a way that preserves local flavor? I believe that the answer is to have a relatively small footprint on the overall property and the inclusion of public space. By replacing a large parking lot with a parking deck built around a transit spot with a green belt, a wooded area or parkland, is a very effective way to preserve a larger area by segregating a smaller interior area. This also counteracts the property value hit that higher density develop can deal to existing low density property. Including space earmarked for something that highlights or celebrates the unique part of the community such as a museum, local gallery, or community center is a good choice for an apartment for young professionals. A theater, outdoor concert space, a movie screen, or other artistic or entertainment venue is a good addition to the general commercial space because they can readily generate walking traffic between parking, the art/entertainment, and the green space. While segregating incompatible uses and diverse densities is necessary, it is also important to ensure that people have reason to interact and exist in the same public space. The goal isn't to create a new community, but provide for choice and diversity in an existing one. Maximizing exposure for unique local assets like artists, historical artifacts and structures, and community organizations doesn't hurt either.

This probably should be expanded into a well researched book or maybe a thesis, but I would rather focus on the quality of a community and building up the chance for people to stay at home when they move away than trying to reduce everyone to a stereotype based on income levels. There are something like 10,000 localities in the United States, each one is unique and few of them provide the opportunity to find housing choices well tailored to their needs at each stage of life. While people are muddling for solution to affordable housing or transit options as though they are separate issues, I would argue that both are symptomatic of a weak theory for what people need out of homes.