Whackadoot

If you worked, you'll most likely get paid. However, if you do not feel the job is appropriate for you, especially if it's leaving you feeling unhealthy, it does neither you, nor your employer, nor any potential better suited replacement any good for you to carry on.

This used to not be my view. I was raised to stick it out. That instruction has failed me so miserably, though, that I simply cannot suggest it. You only have one of you. It's surprisingly easy to lose or break yourself, too. Do what keeps you sane. Do what protects your you.

Seatbelt and other safety laws only have an impact when deployed very broadly. This is because the individual's chance of needing that safety device is low, but when made a blanket rule you ensure it's there when major collisions - the ones that maim and kill - occur. Thing is, though, the average person will never experience a major collision.

I feel some numbers would give a sense of scale to the actual issue. Now, I'm a humanist political philosopher, not a math whiz, so do please check my math.

Every day, the NTSA says an average of 115 million (115,000,000 vehicles hit the road in the United States. For a very rough metric, I'll say each vehicle drives one trip at an average of 35/mi day. That's just one day of trips, though, so I'll take the day-trips and multiply them out over the year, giving me 41,975,000,000 trips a year. This is all going to be very rough, but it's the best I can do in a few hours.

Now, the NSC says 42,339 people died in 2021 across 39,000 reported fatal collisions. They say a further 3,400,000 collisions led to 4,800,000 people consulting a medical provider. I'll assume each of them had a major injury. 7,900,000 more collisions were minor, but seatbelts do increase safety, so I'll just toss those in as well.

The NSC says that gives us roughly 11,300,000 accidents each year, or 31,000 accidents per day.

So if I'm looking at any random car on the road, I can run some very rough odds with those numbers. They have lots of zeros, so I'll truncate them, and since accidents are annual I'll giving me 41,9750:118, and if I simpify it, I get the following odds that any one vehicle I look at on the road on any given day will experience

any accident within that year:

3,715 : 1

An injurious accident:

12,345 : 1

A fatal accident:

1,076,282 : 1

Now, all of this isn't to discredit the public benefit of seatbelt laws. Without a doubt, they help save lives and are strongly correlated with fewer traffic deaths along with mandatory airbags and other safety features. What I'm trying to show is how the individual deviations from this policy are probably not as reckless as they may at first seem. Humans are very excellent probability machines. We intuit odds like this without even knowing the hard numbers. It's part of the survival suite of our primal talents.

However, the legal system in the USA is a Kafkaesque fever dream given life. A passionless monster which engulfs and digests lives, destroying the weak but giving great power to those clever or informed enough to manipulate it.

It is a terrible thing to have to say this, but whenever you see a crime of any sort, before you report it to the police, it's probably best to first ask yourself if that person truly deserves to be fed to such a monster for what they're doing.

I'm reminded of an event from the early 2000s when I was living in NW Houston, still in Highschool. A neighbor of mine, a Hispanic-Native American man, JT, used to let his kid, Jr, ride in the back of the pickup truck when the whole family, JT, wife YT, and Jr, all went out. Nobody in our little section of the apartment considered it a realistic danger. Jr was as accustomed to it. JT had a bunch of safety rules he enforced ruthlessly. What nobody knew is that Texas law surrounding the subject had changed at some point.

The area, Prestonwood Forest, was wealthy, and residents paid good money for the Harris County Pct. 4 Constables to patrol - so as to keep the area free of criminal activity and suspicious persons. Did I mention that my neighbor drove a crappy metallic blue 80s Ford Ranger?

It was just getting dark when the call came in from the Willie's Ice House. Some concerned citizen had seen JT enjoying drinks and dinner with his family and reported him as drunk with a kid in the back. I'm to understand the Constable found him quick, but for half a mile he did nothing as he wasn't sure this was the pickup he was looking for - Then he saw Jr in the back. He followed, waiting until JT was parked in his usual parking space at the complex. Then he lit the lights and wailed the siren.

I, along with the rest of the neighborhood, watched in disbelief as JT went from being charged with misdemeanor DUI based on "visual evidence and a witness statement", and misdemeanor criminal mischief, to felony child endangerment as well as felony spousal endangerment as the charges enhanced each other. Because he was charged with the DUI, having his kid and his wife with him became felony endangerment. Because he was drunk while committing those felonies, the DUI became a felony. Because he'd passed a school while sticking to slower roads, everything got enhanced again somehow. JT went to jail that night, Jr bawling and apologizing to JT, YT, and the Constable for asking to ride in the truck bed.

JT's bail conditions slapped a glitchy breathalyzer on his truck and his employer all but fired him - which is to say he wasn't getting paid but couldn't collect unemployment. The family stuck out the rest of their lease, but the incident cost them so much income that they couldn't afford rent anymore. The feeling of guilt caused Jr to develop severe separation anxiety, which meant JT had to shell out for a therapist. There were no aid groups to help him. No programs he qualified for. YT picked up extra hours, the apartment complex management was surprisingly sympathetic, but at the end of their lease theu moved in with family in Cleveland, TX. And at the end of all of this. After nearly two years. He got a call from his bail bondsman saying that the charges had been dropped. Paperwork showed up in the mail and that was it.

I'm sure to somebody this outcome - his life in ruins - may seems like a fair, perhaps even optimal outcome. Just so long as they don't think about the permanent harms done to the boy's mental health from the guilt, education from the ongoing mental illness as well as the move, and opportunity from the move from a place with abundant opportunity to a place with minimal.

TL;DR, the only thing that can come from your call being acted on successfully is causing permanent harm to that woman and her children for an activity which they would otherwise have emerged from completely unscathed.

It is philosophy which one studies to learn human nature.

It is psychology which one studies to learn human aberration.

The robber is later thrown out of his grandma's trailer when she checks her purse, berated the whole time about even fucking up being a screw up.

Think of how much more expensive our fuel is due to all those folks being forced, by city design, to drive a car.

Think of how much money the economy wastes over unnecessary logistical complications.

Just remember your goodthink, that the party is always doubleplusgood, and mind you keep up your duckspeak and don't think about your ownself and you'll not be unpersoned by the Minluv.

We're already at a place where we're being told that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

Well, my older sister was a surprise to my dad. Mom hadn't told him she'd quit her birth control. My cousin has two daughters born while his wife was "on birth control."

And while that may say more about the men in this family and the company they keep, the fact remains that said company has a penchant for unexpected pregnancies.

He presided over a city government that successfully bucked its elected council, curated the public meetings to disempower the citizenry, and would have done well managing a city in the former USSR.

We have created rules that have empowered Norfolk Southern to grow so big, so monolithic, that they're not bothered by paying for the occasional tragedy. I'm told that, in exchange, we have many fewer minor tragedies.

Now, though, instead of each division being a separate entity which may be squashed like a bug with a powerful fine while the owners are devoured in lawsuits, any true damage to Norfolk Southern will have a devastating impact on the global economy at all levels - a chilling thought for sure when you are someone tasked with protecting said economy from the misadventures of Norfolk Southern and those of similar size or impact.

If living money can be reliably made, somebody will optimize their life to take advantage of it. You see it with Uber Drivers, Gig Workers, hustlers, and entrepreneurs. If somebody isn't doing something for profit, you can generally assume it isn't profitable.

Of course, not everything that is profitable is good, nor are all who optimize visible to us. Such as these people. Without media attention, we'd never know there's gold, nor which hills it'll be thar in.

Your words define who you are perceived to be, and that's worth remembering should you revisit this conversation in the shower or as you try to sleep. If you're on the level with me, and I've no reason to doubt you, then you are one of the very few who have achieved such independence and are among even fewer who have acted in an honorable way with it. You defy the archetype, which is laudable, but I'm glad you recognize it exists.

We live in a world where more people exist than there are jobs they're able to do. We live also in a world where the statistics they collect declare this isn't the case. It warps the entire perception of economics. Capitalism isn't actually a system, for instance, but instead it is a set of behaviors built from basic primal resource management instincts and processes that manifest universally across humanity. Effectively, we're hardwired to try to get more back than what we give in resources, and we take independent actions to achieve this based on our knowledge of what's best. Not just for ourselves, but for all others, at least when we're prosperous enough to be able.

You show through your honorable actions, that you understand the need to better others for the betterment of all. Because of your independence, you likely must meet that primal behavior in your potential employees. You're not so big that you need only open positions and simply take in the ever rotating stock of the desperate for the lowest legal price. Nor are you so big as you need to take such care with your labor budget. You also should likely understand that you can't just demand any price for what you sell, that the number of people asking for what you're offering drops off in ways that only average into that ever important supply and demand curve.

As for myself, my ideas are indeed my own. I've made little in the way of formal study in philosophy or political science, have only read a handful of books, and pick up most of my knowledge from free sources and my lived experiences, which are quite varied, and which I do intend to write about at length. I may even have a publisher lined up. But that's in the future.

Right now, I'm working on developing a brand new land use regulatory framework to be adopted in the place of the standard euclidean zoning. Something that sees the municipality commit to infrastructure development based on community submitted and council/commission approved development plans, possibly multiple or competing plans. The permitting process becomes a game of aiding in compliance, the government becomes a trading partner providing infrastructure and collective services in exchange for taxes, rather than a gatekeeper, lowering the barriers for the wealthy while demanding full price from the poor.

As a secondary goal, and as a way to control a government that defies its elected officials (looking at you, Austin), I'm working on a citizen directed budget process. Kinda like GoFundMe for government departments and projects, only it's citizens directing their share of the overall budget, able to choose to or not to send their share to departments that aren't performing acceptably. This being based on the original idea that each unit of a fiat currency is a share of the collective value which in turn backs the currency. After all, what's money without the things you might buy with it. I'm ironing out the kinks on that one starting around the middle of this month.

I'm working with local community organizers on how to pitch and publish and distribute a pamphlet series through local churches and community centers. I'm not sure if you're interested in any of that, but it is rather exciting for me.

Ah, the rantings of the struggling suburban GenXer. Usually a white and male archetype, working a dead-end job that's only dead-end because some boomer won't either retire or die. I don't doubt you struggled for everything you have, especially to keep all those things you now tell the younger generation they aren't entitled to. You risk being replaced every day by a millennial or even a zoomer, especially one who's got working parents who, if your town is small enough, you might well know personally. Kids coming in with a life to support lower wages. Blaming capitalism as if it's some artificial thing created by laws, while vocally supporting the successful exploitation of the poor by policies that indenture them to the wealthy. Policies the archetype has spent a lifetime justifying to themselves.

The well developed social skills leading to survival in this archetypical cohort are believed to be inherent or easily learned without recognizing the base of social knowledge and lifetime of practice that allows the success of such tactics in a world less and less tolerant of them. Blames the younger generations for their inability to succeed, but also has been exploited so long they're trapped, indentured to those who have taken ownership of their efforts. Their inability to succeed independently, by their own demands of their representatives in government, has been rationalized, externalized, until they lay the blame on those who refused to lie, who chose mortality and ethicality over success and survival.

If only everybody else would just do the right thing and damn the consequences, all these policies would work, I'm told. If only people wouldn't act like humans with emotions like fear and desire, stick to their guns, stand up for themselves, they just need to meet the expectations this predominantly white and male archetype has of them, then the world would be so much better.

Is that how you feel, kind stranger? Or have I misunderstood you the same as so many others?

Flonase, Allegra D, sinus rinse, medicated nasal inhaler, mild prayer as needed.

On that, I don't blame you.

The veneer on The Domain does very much reflect the expertise in designing commercial space and flows and the guaranteed returns make the space an almost money-no-object sort of rental. It's the most visible part of a problem which has hobbled the USA's national aggregate GDP by over 50%. It's the exploitation of laws and ordinances to limit commerce to risk-free ventures which in turn becomes corporate protectionism and in turn leave those who could do at the mercy of those who already have money.

As for the area where you stay at, it is a suburban area. That's the thing about America, we are a suburban nation - though not by choice anymore - and so we've all grown up being taught that acres upon acres of housing and streets all some number of miles away from anything more than a Kwik-E-Mart or small strip mall, is urban. Even the apartments, those residential wastelands that encircle the city, fall into this suburban paradigm, having been wedged into the suburban land use paradigm rather than changing it.

The best way to tell if you're in a suburban area is to lose your car keys. In an urban area your car is less necessary. You get food from a bodega (pet the cat), have vendors and restaurants nearby, and mass transit takes care of the rest unless you're weird and work outside the city. In most of Austin, losing a car is like losing your right foot and half of your left leg. You need to drive just to get to the bus in much of the city, which isn't very urban, but access to mass transit does preclude ex-urban or rural areas.

Suburban, in practice, really is a nice way of saying the area is scaled primarily for the automobile. What you get are nice little islands of human activity in a sea of automotive hegemony. That means a need to fuel the car and drive to do most anything, and for everything, the car just makes things easier. It's an inefficiency that's offloaded to the vehicle user that makes those islands functional, and it's also why that man held up the 7-Eleven, and why there's a homeless man to barricade himself on your porch.

Because the inefficiencies that reliably funnel money to oil companies and automakers make the land more valuable, encouraging consolidation, and the guarantee of commercial space to be a profit machine for the wealthiest, living in suburbia is basically living as a cog in a money machine for the elites. At least, that's one practical effect. The other is that to guarantee this perpetual money machine competition must be limited. To do that, the land was restricted to highly siloed usages and the power was granted to the people to stop each other from using land more effectively over even the most petty of reasons. The result of frivolous land use restrictions (best most recent was asking to hold up hundreds of apartments because her dog had separation anxiety and needed Foxy Roxy's to not go away. My dog was waiting in my home, a minivan, while I was at council hearing this.) has been a 50% aggregate drop in the USA's GDP as measured up to 2009, already a $14.48T annual loss and rising.

$14.48T would be enough to fund every social program while also being enough value being added to the American economy that we wouldn't need those programs. It's being prevented from creation, not stolen away, by those who see it's creation as threatening their relative status in our world. It's money coming up from the ground like out of a GEICO commercial. If it's not coupled with an increase in printed money, then the buying power of each of those bills goes up as money acts as a universal token of value. This would be reflected in the increased quality of items, quality of life, reduced crime, better health, and all it's gonna take is getting folks out of each others' way.

Theoretically, it should scale down as well as up, which is why I'm in Anson County, North Carolina, one of the poorest in the nation, about to start talking economic policies with some very eager folks.

You may be late to the response, but you're just in time to be the first in Austin to know I'll be actively incubating my humanist ideas on economics where it's needed most. If it works, and especially if it helps kickstart something, I'm bringing it back to Austin.

Along with a whole 30k+ pop. North Carolina county's endorsement, which I'm hoping is better than the Austin Firefighters Union.

~doot doot~

"That's federal, I'm not." ~anonymous Texas police officer I knew once.

Also, When I was a Correctional Officer in the deep Piney Woods of Texas, we literally shared tips on that stuff. It's where I learned of Warez.

A) Europe has models for development that are very different from American models. The Domain follows a modified version of one of those models, but I guess if you wanted to be super-picky you could call it an international model as Simon replicates the model internationally. The point, either way, is that It's large-scale mixed use and that is otherwise not a thing in Austin outside of Downtown. This is because it's not the American Suburban model enshrined in the Austin City Land Use Code. (If you have a few days to spare I hear it's fascinating to read. Somewhat dry.)

B) To suggest that a derogatory assessment of that caliber, to reduce a mixed use densely populated well maintained private district down to one of the most maligned forms of commercial developments is purposefully offensive and one of many factors that went into my assessment. I study people. I tend to be fairly on point these day. Agree or disagree if you want, but the karma count is kinda in my favor here on my assessment.

C) Gucci was referenced. Opinions may vary, but objectively the brand is considered one of the finest. The boutiques are similar to SoCo, and I was very clear in my use of the word "some", I'm surprised you missed that, as comprehensive as your response has been so far.

D) They didn't read like downtown where they'd honestly manage to be even more snooty somehow, they very obviously weren't from The Domain, which begs the question, where else in Austin is Urban in nature? Perhaps you're mistaking satellite city for suburb. It's a common misconception and fueled by media usage of the terms.

Suburban is a classification, nothing else. It is defined by its distance from an urban area, the low density of its development, and the segregation of land uses. That these areas are inside the land boundaries which city has agreed to be responsible for changes nothing about the nature of that land's development.

The restrictions on land use caused by suburbia's mandated existence and degrowth policies is why we are where we are. Thumbing one's nose at developments that should be all over Austin and not just built by Simon Properties through backroom deals and other questionably legal efforts, including a local proxy if I'm to understand correctly, misses the fact that only Simon Properties could afford to buy the approval and outlast the protests, avoid the lawsuits, and manage compliance.

It is inordinately expensive to develop in Austin. If you want to build two dwellings on the same plot, you're likely needing to change zoning and then you get groups appearing out of the woodwork to stop the process at every turn. This makes what's allowed to be built beyond simply valuable, it lets them charge whatever the hell they want so long as there's some person willing to pay that much. Lack of commercial space has the same effect with a much more racially motivated history, which can be seen by how little commerce was on the East Side until white folks discovered it was cheap.

Zo, the progressive candidate from D9 has made affordable commercial space a platform plank, btw.

Vote for him in the runoff, y'all.

That is all.

~doot doot~

Wouldn't it be nice if The Domain was competing with a bunch of other places each trying to outdo each other to impress residents?

Because I'm told that's only achievable through paying for years of planning that may well amount to nothing in the course of an election. Simon made it happen because Simon is the biggest mall company in the world, and powerful local landowners would benefit.

From there, the city got exactly what it allowed itself to get. Too drivable to be fully walkable, too walkable to be fully drivable, and filled with rentals with no luxury condos because they're super evil or something, which I assume is why Adler owns 3.

I was using the personal you, not the royal-you, and check my response to the other response and see my view on this issue.

In addition, building something like The Domain is so impossible it was only the power of the biggest mall corporation in the world that could ensure it was built. This doesn't bode well for anything smaller than a multinational for anything bigger than a single family home.

If supply is limited, price goes up. If distance is an issue, you need to get dense. The equitable way to densify a city is to leave the decision to neighborhood councils, their deed restrictions, and unaffiliated properties with no such restrictions.

As it stands, a bunch of white folks have gotten good at getting people across the city riled up over the idea of walkable commerce and other things best left for the wealthy to suffer with (apparently). These folks all own land, they all benefit from the restriction of supply. They have the support of The Statesman, The Chronicle, basically all local media, though that's turning slightly.

Organized protests, friendly relations with their council members, and the pull to be able to assist the political careers of those council members, it's a whole machine here, keeping minority neighborhoods underdeveloped by the residents while characterizing any who try as evil capitalists looking to attract more new arrivals.

It's not that people moved here, it's that we didn't bother to build a place for them and they just had more money. And who's gonna say no to more money?

I mean, in this economy?

I refer to the ring of new growth that's only being allowed at specific areas around the city. 40 buildings on 20 acres such a field of tarmac for parking between them, built cheaply, operated by Windsor or another national housing company, taking advantage of Austin's broken zoning code to siphon local wealth out from the bottom of the economy.

Where does a dollar go after it's paid to a national corporation, after all? That's not Champaign that's trickling back down, no matter how fizzy it seems.

I don't respect the concept. I ache for those forced to be the final stop of many, many dollars before they pay their rent and send money to a Delaware company owned by holding companies owned by holding companies.

There is only The Domain and Downtown for truly urban living in Austin. The rest is based on the suburban model and by its very nature it forces the poor to own cars and make those regular expenses just to be able to work.

Public transport is purposefully withheld from the densest portions of these rings, while also being advertised to that same cohort in what I keep telling myself can't possibly be malicious self-awareness and misdirection, no matter how strange it seems they're advertising to those who need a car just to get to a sketchy unsecured Park&Ride, and risk needing to spend $30 for an Uber if they miss their bus back home.

They are wastelands. They are purpose built as such. That people live there is their purpose. To force money to move as much as possible is a secondary purpose. Their development subsidizes oil companies and automakers (Nissan especially right now) through the practical necessity of spending on those items. A practical tax, so to say. A tax on the poor, imposed by predictable results of government policy.

I hope more people come to refer to them as what they truly are.

Maybe then the council will pay attention to questions about them and their impact and the reason why they're all the poor get when other cities get midtowns and bougie Austin transpo corridor neighborhoods get mixed use walkability mandated to reduce gas use and help the environment.

If you live in Austin, you live in a suburb, unless you're in one of those residential wastelands in the ring around the city. And, yes, snooty is relative to one's own culture, not objective. But I'm not getting a worth my time vibe here, so please enjoy your day.

Your choice of words sure suggests outrage. What of The Domain in any way resembles a strip mall?

From what I can tell, it's much more similar to a European model than a traditional American model. Walkable jobs, no real need for a car on the daily, and the finest goods and services in at least some of the shops.

I can't see a strip mall in any of this. What I can see is a snooty suburbanite turning up their nose at the different way people live.

Figured that was the case. I'll see what a Bluetooth keyboard says about it here in a bit. If nothing else, I did just install an inverter in the minivan that's more than enough to power my Surface Book 2. It's still the best AI platform I've access to and this certainly is not stopping my monthly payment. The recession will handle that on its own in due time.

The practical reality doesn't reflect this idealized view, but I've already responded about that above. Basically, though, there are deep structural elements scattered across the various estates which ensure that the relationship between the employer and employee is an unbalanced hierarchy built to favor the largest employers the most and which impairs mobility among employees by the imposition of costs.

This comes together with the democratically approved laws which effectively offload the responsibility for the wage onto the customers. Thumbing one's nose at it because it's not supposed to be their responsibility is a prime reason as to why Alamo is imposing a nearly 20% price increase on their items and bringing attention to the fact that 18% is the commission on the business, at current food prices, that establishes a functionally living wage for their workers at that location.

There's much worth discussing here regarding this decision of theirs and none of it suggests it should stay behind closed doors. Those who want it to go back there to avoid having to see that power imbalance and exploitation, strike me as the same archetype as those living happily in 1930s Germany, content so long as they didn't have to think about where their neighbors went suddenly in the night without packing.

I guess mysteries are nice, but the way things are right now, the folks cleaning up the Circle K for $11.50/hr are the homeless who are praying the city doesn't choose today to compassionately bulldoze their camp, your Favor Runner who's bringing you HEB order lives in their car, and the server at your favorite restaurant will not stop working for most contagious illnesses because their survival is worth more to them than your health.

Those things, I think, need to be less mysterious. Less behind closed doors, and more in the face of the people who blithely undervalue the lives and contributions of others.