NYC « Quotulatiousness

November 5, 2020

Fallen Flag — the New York, Ontario and Western Railway

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: FallenFlag, NewYork, NYC, Pennsylvania — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is the New York, Ontario and Western, which ran from Oswego on the south shore of Lake Ontario down into the New York City megalopolis. Sadly, the line is best remembered as the only Class 1 US railway to be completely abandoned. John R. Taibi outlines the history of the NYO&W from formation to abandonment in 1957:

Preserved NYO&W General Electric 44-ton switcher number 104 preserved at the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, GA.
Photo by Harvey Henkelmann via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York, Ontario & Western Railway struggled to find its place among the many transportation systems serving New York City, but in the end it was able only to secure a place in history as the first Class I railroad to be abandoned in entirety. Despite this unenviable status, “the O&W,” as it was known, did endear itself to the communities along its line. After all, it was the carrier that had brought boxcars full of prosperity to every community along the line during its 76-year life.

Begun on January 21, 1880, the O&W set a goal of improving the Oswego–New York corridor, as well as the branches to New Berlin, Delhi, and Ellenville, N.Y., it had inherited from the New York & Oswego Midland. The O&W developed a new entrance to Gotham from Middletown, N.Y., that ran to Cornwall on the Hudson River, thence to Weehawken, N.J., by rights on the New York, West Shore & Buffalo Railway (later New York Central).

[…]

As it improved its physical characteristics, the O&W also acquired modern motive power to haul its numerous coal, milk, passenger, and general freight trains. Where previously Camelback 4-4-0s, 2-6-0s, and 2-8-0s were as common as the road’s wooden coaches and country depots, a corps of end-cab locomotives helped usher in the new era. E-class Ten-Wheelers (1911), W-class Consolidations (1910-11), X-class 2-10-2 “Bull Mooses” (1915), and Y-class Mountains (1922 and ’29) provided the power for passenger trains to the Catskills, milk trains to Gotham, and coal trains to Oswego, Cornwall, and Weehawken. Still, many Camelbacks worked into the mid-1940s.

This familiar, widely circulated O&W map was created by cartographer Crawford C. Anderson.
Classic Trains.

[…]

Dieselization was hoped to be a savior, and under [O&W bankruptcy trustee, Frederick E.] Lyford’s direction a handful of GE 44-ton switchers arrived in 1941. Nine two-unit EMD FTs came in 1945 and were put into fast merchandise service between Scranton and Maybrook, and Scranton and Norwich. Lyford’s successors in 1948 acquired additional F3 and NW2 diesels, enough to banish steam locomotives from service by that summer.

By that time, though, O&W’s accumulated losses amounted to $38 million. It was beyond the ability of trustees, the reorganization court, and diesel locomotives to extricate the carrier from financial ruin. Nevertheless, passenger trains from Weehawken to Walton (then only to Roscoe) kept running until mail contracts gave out in 1950; the service was suspended in September 1953. Although milk and coal trains were a memory, gray-yellow-and-orange diesel locomotives soldiered on, leading a dwindling number of ever-shorter freight trains.

By the mid-1950s, the reorganization court — which had been searching for a buyer for the road now truly earning another of its nicknames, the “Old & Weary” — was advocating total abandonment. Additionally, the U.S. government was suing for taxes and retirement payments that were in arrears, and New York state began planning on how best to use the O&W right of way for highway improvements.

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October 9, 2020

Speaking in code and public health

Filed under: Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: Epidemic, Language, NYC, Police, PublicHealth, Radio, September11, WuhanCoronavirus — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Joshua Hind relates the tragedy that forced US emergency services to wean themselves off their many confusing (and sometimes conflicting) spoken codes and use plain language to help reduce tragic misunderstandings among different emergency response organizations:

“First responders on site of the Lac-Megantic train derailment” by TSBCanada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the beginning, it was standardized, and the best-known codes, like “10-4,” were consistent from town to town or state to state. But it didn’t take long for newer codes to emerge, which often meant different things depending on where you were. Efforts to reorganize the codes every 20 years or so only compounded the problem. On a local level, in any one town, it wasn’t a problem. But when cops or firefighters from different towns had to work together it could lead to disaster.

In 1970, a particularly severe wildfire season in California killed 16 people in a 13-day period and laid bare the cost of bad interagency communication. The rat’s nest of codes, abbreviations, and jargon prevented firefighters from different towns from communicating with the speed and clarity a major disaster demands. To address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service created FIRESCOPE, the first complete system for organizing and managing major incidents. One of the primary principles of this new system was to “develop standard terminology.”

Despite this effort, which later went national and then international (the province of Ontario has its own version, the “Incident Management System”) coded language continued to proliferate. Nearly 30 years after FIRESCOPE was launched, on September 11th, incompatible technology, lack of protocols, and a refusal to harmonize terminology likely contributed to the deaths of 121 firefighters who were caught in the collapse of the North Tower because they either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand the warnings that the building was about to fail.

Which brings us back to 2006, and FEMA’s notice to first responders. After decades of asking agencies to stop using coded language, the federal government made funding contingent on compliance. “The use of plain language in emergency response is a matter of public safety,” the memo’s introduction read. “There simply is little or no room for misunderstanding in an emergency situation.” From that point forward, all interdepartmental communication would have to be un-coded. A fire would be called “fire.” A shooting would be “a shooting.” And if you needed help, you’d say “HELP!”

Police, fire departments and paramedics slowly but surely got on board and started using some form of the incident management system which included plain language. As use of the system spread, other sectors, like large music festivals and other live events, began adopting the concepts to better synchronize public safety programs with the first responders who support them. Today it’s not unusual for producers, technicians and event security staff to attend training at the police college right next to fire captains and police officers.

Then COVID-19 happened, and we realized that no one had told Public Health.

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August 8, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “[T]he Kendi test: does the staff reflect the demographics of New York City as a whole?”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: Demographics, Newspapers, NYC, Racism, Statistics — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at an earnest diversity initiative of The Newspaper Guild of New York:

I’m naming this after Ibram X. Kendi because his core contribution to the current debate on race is the notion that “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups” is racist. Intent is irrelevant. I don’t think many sane people believe A.G. Sulzberger or Dean Baquet are closet bigots. But systemic racism, according to Kendi, exists in any institution if there is simply any outcome that isn’t directly reflective of the relevant racial demographics of the surrounding area.

The appeal of this argument is its simplicity. You can tell if a place is enabling systemic racism merely by counting the people of color in it; and you can tell if a place isn’t by the same rubric. The drawback, of course, is that the world isn’t nearly as simple. Take the actual demographics of New York City. On some measures, the NYT is already a mirror of NYC. Its staff is basically 50 – 50 on sex (with women a slight majority of all staff on the business side, and slight minority in editorial). And it’s 15 percent Asian on the business side, 10 percent in editorial, compared with 13.9 percent of NYC’s population.

But its black percentage of staff — 10 percent in business, 9 percent in editorial — needs more than doubling to reflect demographics. Its Hispanic/Latino staff amount to only 8 percent in business and 5 percent in editorial, compared with 29 percent of New York City’s demographics, the worst discrepancy for any group. NYT’s Newsroom Fellowship, bringing in the very next generation, is 80 percent female, 60 percent people of color (including Asians), and, so far as I can tell, one lone white man. And it’s why NYT‘s new hires are 43 percent people of color, a definition that includes Asian-Americans.

But notice how this new goal obviously doesn’t reflect New York City’s demographics in many other ways. It draws overwhelmingly from the college educated, who account for only 37 percent of New Yorkers, leaving more than 60 percent of the city completed unreflected in the staffing. It cannot include the nearly 19 percent of New Yorkers in poverty, because a NYT salary would end that. It would also have to restrict itself to the literate, and, according to Literacy New York, 25 percent of people in Manhattan “lack basic prose literary skills” along with 37 percent in Brooklyn and 41 percent in the Bronx. And obviously, it cannot reflect the 14 percent of New Yorkers who are of retirement age, or the 21 percent who have yet to reach 18. For that matter, I have no idea what the median age of a NYT employee is — but I bet it isn’t the same as all of New York City.

Around 10 percent of staffers would have to be Republicans (and if the paper of record nationally were to reflect the country as a whole, and not just NYC, around 40 percent would have to be). Some 6 percent of the newsroom would also have to be Haredi or Orthodox Jews — a community you rarely hear about in diversity debates, but one horribly hit by a hate crime surge. 48 percent of NYT employees would have to agree that religion is “very important” in their lives; and 33 percent would be Catholic. And the logic of these demographic quotas is that if a group begins to exceed its quota — say Jews, 13 percent — a Jewish journalist would have to retire for any new one to be hired. Taking this proposal seriously, then, really does require explicit use of race in hiring, which is illegal, which is why the News Guild tweet and memo might end up causing some trouble if the policy is enforced.

And all this leaves the category of “white” completely without nuance. We have no idea whether “white” people are Irish or Italian or Russian or Polish or Canadians in origin. Similarly, we do not know if “black” means African immigrants, or native black New Yorkers, or people from the Caribbean. 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign-born. How does the Guild propose to mirror that? Ditto where staffers live in NYC. How many are from Staten Island, for example, or the Bronx, two places of extremely different ethnic populations? These categories, in other words, are incredibly crude if the goal really is to reflect the actual demographics of New York City. But it isn’t, of course.

My point is that any attempt to make a specific institution entirely representative of the demographics of its location will founder on the sheer complexity of America’s demographic story and the nature of the institution itself. Journalism, for example, is not a profession sought by most people; it’s self-selecting for curious, trouble-making, querulous assholes who enjoy engaging with others and tracking down the truth (at least it used to be). There’s no reason this skillset or attitude will be spread evenly across populations. It seems, for example, that disproportionate numbers of Jews are drawn to it, from a culture of high literacy, intellectualism, and social activism. So why on earth shouldn’t they be over-represented?

And that’s true of other institutions too: are we to police Broadway to make sure that gays constitute only 4 percent of the employees? Or, say, nursing, to ensure that the sex balance is 50-50? Or a construction company for gender parity? Or a bike messenger company’s staff to be reflective of the age demographics of the city? Just take publishing — an industry not far off what the New York Times does. 74 percent of its employees are women. Should there be a hiring freeze until the men catch up?

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June 1, 2020

QotD: The right to keep and bear arms

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: Constitution, Guns, LNeilSmith, NYC, Police — Nicholas @ 01:00

The bureaucrat who commands an army of over forty-nine thousand armed men and women (the largest police force in the world, slightly more than three Army divisions) in its century-old struggle against the Bill of Rights, has loftily decreed on 60 Minutes, the famous CBS newsish show, that it is “insanity” to “allow” national concealed carry reciprocity for law-abiding citizens. This according to an article that appeared this week on the Breitbart website, written by their distinguished Second Amendment specialist, A.W.R. Hawkins.

The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.

Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.

“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.

Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.

* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987

L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.

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April 20, 2020

“New York City subways were ‘a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection'”

Filed under: Government, Health, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: Epidemic, NYC, PublicHealth, PublicTransit, Subsidies, WuhanCoronavirus — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole wonders why the lone sacred cow of mass transit is still running, despite its potential role in spreading disease:

MTA NYC Subway 1 trains at 125th St., 14 May, 2018.
Photo by Mtattrain via Wikimedia Commons.

Sit‐down restaurants and bars have been shut down. Public officials are discouraging or even forbidding people from doing “unnecessary travel,” even if it is to visit a second home where they might be able to socially distance themselves better than in their first, more urban home. All sorts of other rules are being passed, all supposedly for our own good.

So why are urban transit systems still running? A 2018 study found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.” A 2011 study found that people who use mass transit were nearly six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than those who don’t. Not surprisingly, a study published a few days ago found that New York City subways were “a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”

Transit agencies say they are helping “essential workers” go about their business. But if they are so essential, isn’t it important to find them a safe way of getting to work? If we truly cared about people’s safety, then transit services should have shut down at the same time we closed other non‐essential businesses and asked people to stay at home.

[…]

Unfortunately, the transit lobby has successfully turned government‐subsidized transit into a sacred cow. Transit is supposedly greener than driving when in fact it’s an energy hog. Transit is supposedly needed to help poor people get to work when in fact the people most likely to commute by transit are those earning more than $75,000 a year.

When the pandemic took away most of transit’s customers, instead of shutting down, which would have been the responsible thing to do, transit agencies demanded that Congress give them $25 billion, tripling federal support to transit this year. Thanks to transit’s sacred cow status, Congress agreed without any serious debate.

Effectively, Congress rewarded the agencies for spreading disease. It would have been better to use that money to help transit‐dependent essential workers buy a car so they could have a safe way of getting to work.

New York City subway system.
Image by Jake Berman (maps.complutense.org) based on information from the MTA, via Wikimedia Commons.

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February 6, 2020

Fallen flag – The Nickel Plate Road

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: Chicago, Cleveland, FallenFlag, NYC — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kevin J. Holland provides a brief look at the history of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis, better known as the “Nickel Plate Road”:

The New York, Chicago & St. Louis opened between Buffalo and Chicago on October 23, 1882, in many spots east of Cleveland just a stone’s throw from rival Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway. What would become the Nickel Plate became a Vanderbilt property in January 1883.

Although eclipsed by the Lake Shore’s plush limiteds, NYC&StL from 1893 fielded three unpretentious, reliable Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y., passenger trains, establishing a long-standing pattern of modest passenger service. In 1897, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western entered the picture, conveying NYC&StL cars from Buffalo to Hoboken, N.J.

“The great … Nickel-plated railroad”
When NYC&StL was being surveyed, Editor F. R. Loomis of Ohio’s Norwalk Chronicle waxed enthusiastically on the railroad coming to town referring to it as “the great New York and St. Louis double-track, nickel-plated railroad.” Use of “Nickel Plate Road” proliferated, in newspapers and by the road itself.

In 1914, LS&MS and Nickel Plate were wards of New York Central. Passage of the Clayton Act that same year was intended to bolster the earlier Sherman Antitrust Act, and left NYC with a dilemma. Enter brothers Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen, self-made Cleveland real-estate developers who purchased acreage from NYC Vice President Alfred H. Smith. “The Vans” as the brothers were known, approached Smith, by then NYC president, to discuss their plans involving land owned by the Nickel Plate. As the Clayton Act’s divestiture deadline loomed, Smith engineered a sale to the Vans of not only the land they sought, but of the entire Nickel Plate Road. Their Alleghany Corporation holding company eventually included control of the Nickel Plate, Chesapeake & Ohio, Pere Marquette, Erie, Wheeling & Lake Erie, Chicago & Eastern Illinois, and Missouri Pacific.

The gaunt NYC&StL was ripe for re-equipping under its new owners. Addressing the Vans’ lack of railroad experience, Smith orchestrated John J. Bernet’s move from an NYC vice-presidency to be Nickel Plate’s president. Neglected physical plant and obsolete motive power received needed attention under Bernet, who reincarnated the road into a lean and aggressive contender.

Nickel Plate Road GP9 number 526 switching a way freight at Gibson City, IL on November 24, 1962.
Roger Puta photo from the Mel Finzer Collection via Wikimedia Commons.

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January 3, 2020

Fallen flag – the Pennsylvania Railroad

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: FallenFlag, NYC, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh — Nicholas @ 05:00

The origins and an outline history of the “Standard Railroad of the World” for Classic Trains magazine by George Drury:

The original Pennsylvania Railroad ran from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Much of its subsequent expansion was accomplished by leasing or purchasing other railroads.

Construction began in 1847. Two years later the Pennsy made an operating contract with the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster, and by late 1852 rails ran from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh via a connection with the Portage Railroad between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown, Pa. The summit tunnel was opened in 1854, bypassing the inclined planes and creating a continuous railroad from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh.

In 1857 PRR bought the Main Line of Public Works and in 1861 leased the Harrisburg, Portsmouth, Mountjoy & Lancaster, putting the entire Philadelphia to Pittsburgh line under one management.

PRR also acquired interests in two major railroads, the Cumberland Valley and the Northern Central. The Cumberland Valley was opened in 1837 from Harrisburg to Chambersburg, and it was extended by another company in 1841 to Hagerstown, Maryland. The Baltimore & Susquehanna was incorporated in 1828 to build north from Baltimore. Progress was slowed because of the reluctance of Pennsylvania state officials to charter a railroad that would carry commerce to Baltimore. The line reached Harrisburg in 1851 and Sunbury in 1858. By then the railroad companies that formed the route had been consolidated as the Northern Central Railway. Pennsy acquired majority ownership of the Northern Central in 1900.

The Pennsy expanded into northwestern Pennsylvania by acquiring an interest in the Philadelphia & Erie Railroad in 1862 and assisting that road to complete its line from Sunbury to the city of Erie in 1864. The line to Erie was not particularly successful, but from Sunbury to Driftwood it could serve as part of a freight route with easy grades. The rest of that route was the Allegheny Valley Railroad, conceived as a feeder from Pittsburgh to the New York Central and Erie railroads. The Pennsylvania obtained control in 1868, and in 1874 opened a route with easy grades from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh via the valleys of the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers. PRR leased the Allegheny Valley Railroad in 1900.

Horse shoe curve near Altoona on the Pennsylvania Railroad, circa 1874.
Photo by W.P. Mange & Co. via the Library of Congress.

But even the mighty can fall, and the PRR fell into difficult times after WW2:

During World War II Pennsy’s freight traffic doubled and passenger traffic quadrupled, much of it on the eastern portion of the system. The electrification was of inestimable value in keeping the traffic moving. After the war Pennsy had the same experiences as many other railroads but seemed slower to react. PRR was slower to dieselize, and when it did so it bought units from every manufacturer.

As freight and passenger traffic moved to the highways, Pennsy found itself with far more fixed plant than the traffic warranted or could support, and it was slow to take up excess trackage or replace double track with Centralized Traffic Control.

PRR was saddled with a heavy passenger business. It had extensive commuter services centered on New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh and lesser ones at Chicago, Washington, Baltimore, and Camden, New Jersey. It had gone through the Depression without going bankrupt.

Pennsylvania and New York Central surprised the railroad industry by announcing merger plans in 1957. The two had long been rivals, and the merger would be one of parallel roads rather than end-to-end. The merger took place on February 1, 1968 — and Penn Central fell apart faster than it went together.

PRR E8A 5803 with Train 72, The Red Bird, passing the Hartsdale, Indiana tower and crossing the NYC and EJ&E on November 26, 1965.
Photo from the Roger Puta collection via Wikimedia Commons.

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December 25, 2019

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: Christmas, Ireland, Music, NYC — Nicholas @ 02:00

Time:

“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

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December 5, 2019

The New York Central in 1928-1929

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: NewYork, NYC, SteamPower — Nicholas @ 02:00

Speed Graphic Film and Video
Published 22 Dec 2017

More early sound film from the Fox Movietone News archives in the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Resource Collection.

It shows New York Central trains in the Hudson River valley in 1928 and 1929. Scenes include:
0:10 K3 Pacifics passing through Peekskill station.
1:10 View from the tender as a fast freight crosses the bridge at Castleton.
2:30 Looking up at the bridge as a train passes over.
2:42 Another ride over the bridge at Castleton, this time seen from the caboose. There is a brief glimpse of NYC 0-6-6-0 No. 1300, the only locomotive with that wheel arrangement on the railroad.
4:54 View from a bluff above the Weehawken yards. (Thanks to Vincent Zablocki for the ID.)
5:30 Street operations on the West Side Line in Manhattan when it still ran at street level. Locomotives seen include No. 595 and dummy No. 1904.
7:33 A look at the drivers as a K3 Pacific passes by the camera.
8:21 Passenger trains on the main line, seen at a distance. These are editing “trims,” so the shot ends just as the train gets near the camera. These were probably taken at Breakneck Mountain.
11:19 Departing passenger train at a grade crossing. Again, this is a “trim,” so the beginning of the shot is missing.

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June 19, 2019

Summer Stupidity: NEW YORK (City Review!)

Filed under: Food, Humour, USA — Tags: NYC, OverlySarcasticProductions, PublicTransit, Travel — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 18 Jun 2019

Welcome to summer break! We’re beta-testing a new kind of video to punctuate our REAL weekly Friday content on lazy summer Tuesdays. Let us know if this brand of fast-talking stupidity is something you’d potentially like to see more of! As always, regular content returns Friday.

PATREON: http://www.Patreon.com/OSP

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March 10, 2019

Irish Potato Famine – The American Wake – Extra History – #4

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Food, History, Religion, USA — Tags: Christianity, Farming, Immigration, Ireland, NYC, Poverty — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 9 Mar 2019

Not all of the 214,000 Irish immigrants in 1847 made it safely to their new homes — and of those who did, many faced classism and xenophobia and even bullying from the “Ulster Irish” or “Scots-Irish” folks who had previously established themselves. In New York City specifically, the Five Points neighborhood became an infamous center of conflict — while local Irish-American John Joseph Hughes became instrumental in restoring Irish Catholicism.

Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

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February 25, 2019

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [is] doing for America what Jeremy Corbyn has done for Britain”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: Amazon, CronyCapitalism, Democrat, Jobs, NYC, Socialism, Taxes — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alex Noble sings the praises of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she does the heavy lifting to bring awareness of socialism to the American people:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the Reardon Convention Center in Kansas City, on 20 July 2018.
Photo by Mark Dillman via Wikimedia Commons.

Good old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – she’s doing for America what Jeremy Corbyn has done for Britain. Much to the dismay of the secret socialists now entrenched in the Democrat Party, she is stripping away the protective layer of bullshit that socialism normally has to rely upon to keep people from understanding its inherent failings, and is thus laying it bare before the world.

Because she is too ignorant to understand them – she actually believes in socialism, and thinks that if only it is adequately explained to the rest of us, we will love it as she does.

She doesn’t know enough history to know that everyone over the age of forty has seen socialism tried a dozen times in their lifetimes. Her sales pitch is wasted on us – we’ve seen the results before.

So when she told Amazon that their particular brand of crony capitalism was not welcome in New York, she genuinely thought people would admire her.

Instead, even the crony capitalists on the Democrat side of the aisle (i.e those who understand how the game is really played) are very upset with her – she has driven away 25,000 jobs and all the ~~votes~~ economic benefits that would have flowed from them.

All because she thinks Amazon should pay more corporation tax.

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February 4, 2019

QotD: Brasilia and reconciling with Jane Jacobs

Filed under: Architecture, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: Brazil, Brutalism, CentralPlanning, Housing, LeCorbusier, Modernism, NYC — Nicholas @ 01:00

Brasilia is interesting only insofar as it was an entire High Modernist planned city. In most places, the Modernists rarely got their hands on entire cities at once. They did build a number of suburbs, neighborhoods, and apartment buildings. There was, however, a disconnect. Most people did not want to buy a High Modernist house or live in a High Modernist neighborhood. Most governments did want to fund High Modernist houses and neighborhoods, because the academics influencing them said it was the modern scientific rational thing to do. So in the end, one of High Modernists’ main contributions to the United States was the projects – ie government-funded public housing for poor people who didn’t get to choose where to live.

I never really “got” Jane Jacobs. I originally interpreted her as arguing that it was great for cities to be noisy and busy and full of crowds, and that we should build neighborhoods that are confusing and hard to get through to force people to interact with each other and prevent them from being able to have privacy, and no one should be allowed to live anywhere quiet or nice. As somebody who (thanks to the public school system, etc) has had my share of being forced to interact with people, and of being placed in situations where it is deliberately difficult to have any privacy or time to myself, I figured Jane Jacobs was just a jerk.

But Scott has kind of made me come around. He rehabilitates her as someone who was responding to the very real excesses of High Modernism. She was the first person who really said “Hey, maybe people like being in cute little neighborhoods”. Her complaint wasn’t really against privacy or order per se as it was against extreme High Modernist perversions of those concepts that people empirically hated. And her background makes this all too understandable – she started out as a journalist covering poor African-Americans who lived in the projects and had some of the same complaints as Brazilians.

Her critique of Le Corbusierism was mostly what you would expect, but Scott extracts some points useful for their contrast with the Modernist points earlier:

First, existing structures are evolved organisms built by people trying to satisfy their social goals. They contain far more wisdom about people’s needs and desires than anybody could formally enumerate. Any attempt at urban planning should try to build on this encoded knowledge, not detract from it.

Second, man does not live by bread alone. People don’t want the right amount of Standardized Food Product, they want social interaction, culture, art, coziness, and a host of other things nobody will ever be able to calculate. Existing structures have already been optimized for these things, and unlesss you’re really sure you understand all of them, you should be reluctant to disturb them.

Third, solutions are local. Americans want different things than Africans or Indians. One proof of this is that New York looks different from Lagos and from Delhi. Even if you are the world’s best American city planner, you should be very concerned that you have no idea what people in Africa need, and you should be very reluctant to design an African city without extensive consultation of people who understand the local environment.

Fourth, even a very smart and well-intentioned person who is on board with points 1-3 will never be able to produce a set of rules. Most of people’s knowledge is implicit, and most rule codes are quickly replaced by informal systems of things that work which are much more effective (the classic example of this is work-to-rule strikes).

Fifth, although well-educated technocrats may understand principles which give them some advantages in their domain, they are hopeless without the on-the-ground experience of the people they are trying to serve, whose years of living in their environment and dealing with it every day have given them a deep practical knowledge which is difficult to codify.

How did Jacobs herself choose where to live? As per her Wikipedia page:

[Jacobs] took an immediate liking to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, which did not conform to the city’s grid structure.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.

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January 5, 2019

Leave the Strand Alone! Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads With NYC: Don’t Landmark My Property

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: NYC, Regulation, Rights — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 4 Jan 2019

Leave the Strand Alone! Iconic Bookstore Owner Pleads With NYC: Don’t Landmark My Property

December 25, 2018

Repost – “Fairytale of New York”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: Christmas, Ireland, Music, NYC — Nicholas @ 02:00

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“Fairytale of New York,” The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl

This song came into being after Elvis Costello bet The Pogues’ lead singer Shane MacGowan that he couldn’t write a decent Christmas duet. The outcome: a call-and-response between a bickering couple that’s just as sweet as it is salty.

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