From Streetcars To Spaceships

Make districts simple.

I write a lot, and think even more, about issues of organizational, and specifically government malfunction. There are many things one can say about this, and rest assured, I intend to keep going on at enervating length about dozens of aspects of this for as long as I have the time and access.

But there is one measure that applies to governments at all levels from town to sovereign, that is simple, very difficult to subvert, and should be capable of short and long term fundamental improvement in how governments work and how well.

Set geometric limits on the circumference to area ratios of voting districts.

It's as simple as simple gets. Simply provide a maximum numerical ratio, where the length of the line one would draw to go all the way around a voting district can only be but so complex. This simple thing would, right there, cut way down on gerrymandering, one of the most pernicious kinds of political gamesmanship. Ideally, such a law would also limit the degree of change a district could be subjected to in a given period of time. There are dozens of possible nuances that I leave as an exercise for the reader. You're smart folks, afaict; you'll see them just fine. And, as always, you're welcome to comment below.

Think about it.

I don't want to live in a society run by a bunch of Generals

Anybody who's paying attention is bound to see that every year our world is controlled by a smaller group of companies and their friends. The current crisis is just accelerating that. Twenty banks become five. Ten insurance companies become three. And it's nothing new. Since Enron we supposedly understand the importance of objective and external accounting measures. So it confuses me that nobody much seems to be upset that the once Big Eight accounting firms are now the Big Three. Big Two? Big ONE?

Well, let's step back a bit and remember that in much of America, not only is this round two or three of this kind of corporate domination (anybody remember Standard Oil? U.S. Steel?) but that many of our largest corporations were founded, not by inventors or marketers or people who cared about some particular kind of product at all. They were founded by financiers who set out from the get go to win not, fundamentally, by making better products but by owning as much of the market as they could and through techniques that are mostly illegal or should be. By beating up and marginalizing those who tried to succeed through the "naive" approach of making things that people wanted and selling them under good terms at a good price. They intended to win through sheer power and monopoly and to large extent they've succeeded.

I sound kinda vague, don't I?

Well, many of these companies have a tell. You see, they were quite open about their intent at the time, so you will find that these companies aren't named after founders or their products, or the places where they were. Nor after mythical figures or their products or any of the other types of names that show some kind of love  by those in charge for what they have wrought. Instead the names are as arrogant and dismissive of particulars as their strategies.

They're all Generals.

General Motors.

Founded in 1908 by as a holding company by William Durant, who owned two car companies by the time he had been in business a year and owned two more by a year after that.

General Dynamics.

Rebuilt by financier Isaac Rice, who, starting as the Electric Boat Company, making submarines for the Japanese, Russian, British, and Dutch militaries in the early 1900s, and then renamed and reorganized the company under the current name in 1952 when their takeovers of Canadair and Convair, paid for with the company's large post-war cash reserves, caused then to reorg and become a "modern" conglomerate.

General Foods.

Renamed General Foods in 1929 when Postum, personally being run E.F. Hutton (the guy, not the company), used money from stock sales to buy up, in quick succession, the makers of Jello, Minute Tapioca (owners of the process later used to make Minute Rice), Log Cabin Syrup, Maxwell House Company, and others.

General Electric.

Created in a merger by J.P. Morgan of the pre-existing Edison Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company (itself a result of several mergers), in effect creating a monopoly on many patents and processes for all electric devices.

If a company has a name that starts with General, they are bad people. And do I even need to get into Union? Union Carbide, perhaps?

One day soon I'll get back to this in more detail but for now remember two things:

1.) Any company named General anything can be assumed to be scum.

2.) They were founded to be scum and those scum behaviors were woven into the DNA of the firm by the day the name was first announced.

Happy Holidays.

Rustin

Consequences in Fiction, Part Two

So I see that yesterday's post has already drawn traffic searching on the phrase "burn notice". Good. Especially since the last straw for me had been having Sam, one of the lead characters, getting beaten and interrogated for three days (unless I'm misunderstanding the timeline in the episode) and, as soon as he's untied, standing up (after three days tied to a chair?!), running into combat, and, as soon as it's over, being casually dropped off at his place looking no more than a bit tired, with just a manly "thank you, brother".

Okay, now I've never been tortured, but I've gotta say that I think that almost three weeks tied to a bed in a burn ward gives me a little to say about this, especially since I kept flashing back to those weeks while I watched the torture scenes. And I can tell you now that after three days tied to a chair, frequently with his mouth duct-taped shut (which, by the way, in a hot, enclosed space like that would have almost certainly killed him right there), being beaten, interrogated, screamed at, and spending most of the rest of the time alone in that dark metal room, he wouldn't even be able to lift his arms or walk, let alone jump into manly action. And when they go out? I'm sorry, but just about anybody would have fucking well fallen over sobbing. Would he, maybe, in theory, wait for his buddy to drive away? Possibly. But one way or another he would be very, very fucked up indeed and a couple of smart guys like those, old pros as they're supposed to be, would have acknowledged that in no uncertain way.

So, just to let y'all know, that was the thing that inspired my previous post.

And, as it happens, my timing was good. Looks like Slashdot has a thread going right now about torture in fiction based on an expansion pack for WoW, and the article they link to turns out to be about just the same point as my previous post, about the stories that fiction tells about actions having consequences. Or not.

And you know what? I think that the article says these things damned well. So I'm done. Go read it. You'll be glad that you did.

Episodic TV Is Fundamentally Evil. Really.

At the recommendations of first my friend Matt and then my mother, I just watched the first season of Burn Notice on Hulu. In the past few years I've been trying to experience more in the way of mainstream American culture since I feel that anybody who wants to have useful conclusions about social policy better have some idea of how the people in that society actually live.

So in some ways I've found it fun, charming, certainly pretty. But by the end of the first season my disgust with it had finally reached the boiling point.

Now I could tell you what plot points and what production issues and what tricks of lighting and casting and editing nailed it down for me but let me jump to the chase.

Conventional episodic television is built around "normal" people (ones carefully engineered to fundamentally feel sympathetic to the audience) constantly doing extraordinary things. Over and over. And simultaneously doing them in an amped up way that is ten or twenty or a hundred times more eventful than real life.

And then being there for the next episode to do it all again.

What does this mean?

That conventional episodic television is, by definition, built around a world of actions without consequences. People get shot at and two days later are shaking it off in ways that make PTSD seem like some silly myth. They get married and divorced and married again but are still making the same jokes. They are pernicious fantasies and they have real impacts on people's personal behaviors, on how they teach their children, how they deal with each other, and vote.

Enormous numbers of events happen on any episodic television show of the sort that would utterly reshape people's lives but they can't change much or too fast because if they did the show wouldn't ever be able to sell in syndication.

One of the basic guiding realities of television is that a hell of a lot of the possible profits on a show come not from when it first airs but from when it airs again and again and again. And when the DVDs sell. And from sales of just the sort of licenced merchandise that depends on characters staying very much the same. So it is a rock solid rule of television production that you're always going for a bare minimum of three seasons worth of episodes. Episodes that need to have pretty much the same people doing pretty the same thing in pretty much the same kind of place. All while living through at least fifty to one hundred events of the sort that would, in the real world, guarantee that such consistency would never, ever happen.

Now you can spout all you want about Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos and House all that mahooah. But let's get real here, the Galactica's pilots would never, ever be able to have the kind of mortality counts they supposedly have and still have Starbuck and Apollo and all the "important" pilots both predictably take on insane risks and reliably get away with it. "Oh, you say, but Apollo had a really scary time that once and had to wait for rescue for hours!" Yeah, whatever. If you believe that this refutes my statement, then somewhere deep in your mind you know that you're rationalizing.

"But that's just television" you say. What does that mean, exactly? Explain to me how being able to describe why this is done (a thing that I understand full well) makes it somehow exempt from being destructive. A destructive thing is destructive UNLESS IT DOESN"T DAMAGE THINGS. "But they have a reason" is fundamentally a non-sequitur if what we're discussing is whether or not it causes a given result. Charles Manson had reasons. Executives at General Motor and McDonalds and Enron have had plenty of reasons. Having reasons does not change the basic fact that those actions have had consequences. "But that's just the way things are" has been the best protection of segregationists, slave traders, war profiteers, and oppressors and underminers of decent lives of a thousand different stripes for all the history of the known world. When something makes an impact on our world we need to look past "but that's just how things are". And whether people want to face it or not, these shows are created to make an impression.

And they do. Every time you watch an episode of a television show you are being exposed to a brilliantly seductive world, one that tries harder and with greater skill every year to give the superficial appearance of credibility, in which people are constantly rewarded for and and evade the changes that would come from their actions and circumstances. Actions and circumstances that relate to ones we engage in or at the least are expected to make decisions about all through our lives. Every hour you watch this stuff you're being seduced. You're being brainwashed. And the "realistic" shows like the Sopranos, with their high production values and skillful writing, are the one that will brainwash you the most and the fastest.

Count on it.

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.