I don't know if it is constitutional, but it doesn't seem like a horrible idea per se. Except in the sense that it lets the wealthy suburban areas continue to use political boundaries to avoid any regional responsibility.
How long do they have to live there before they can move somewhere else? Or are their visas contingent on them remaining there in perpetuity? Are they allowed to travel? Can they live there and commute to another location for work? What if there is no work for them? Are they eligible for unemployment/welfare?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I have a place for them in Detroit!
It's happened in both St Louis (huge Bosnian population) and actually I think Detroit, which has lots of Iraqis.
Here's a superficial USA today article about Vietnames farmers setting in the SE US:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-02-09-asianfarmers09_ST_N.htm
Talking about this should take into account regional variations, and probably also the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882. When did Koreatown in LA become mostly Korean?
Do any of these places count as previosly depressed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_significant_Chinese-American_populations#California_-_Greater_Los_Angeles
Detroit keeps coming up as the "hey everybody what if we all picked up and moved there?!" fantasy of New Yorkers who can't deal with the cost of living and it makes me sad because Detroit seems like such a fucking arctic hellscape.
The upper Midwest is a bit on the cold side for part of the year.
Tell the New Yorkers that virtually every other city also has a low cost of living.
it makes me sad because Detroit seems like such a fucking arctic hellscape.
I feel like I'm missing a step. Is it:
...and it just seems depressing to think that anyone would think it was a good idea to move there?
...and you'd hate to have to visit your friends there?
...and you think it should stay that way as an art object?
...other?
4. Not to sound confrontational, but have you ever been there? The Detroiters I talk to have said a) same problems for decades, only the attention is new and b) lots of nice places-- it's just not as populous as it used to be, and is only sometimes managing the new size competently. Toronto will also probaly survive being mismanaged.
There are swaths of St Louis that seem pretty bad, but much of the city is fantastic.
Detroit is full of friends you haven't met yet, Smearcase.
4: The narcissism of relatively small climatic differences.
If you click the "average low" button, the differences get bigger.
10: The differences in average low and average precipitation seem more compelling.
Cleveland weather is definitely a good step shittier on my personal standard of living index than New York weather, because you get snow on top of snow on top of ice, instead of snow that melts before the next snow comes. Also because of how spring doesn't necessarily start until May.
12.2 is to say: also look at a crucial difference in average high regarding when each one is above freezing or not.
Anyway, if you have to drive south to get to Canada, it's probably going to be really cold for part of the year.
The romance of Detroit and Detroit-in-potentia eludes me; I grew up in a smaller city that hadn't (and hasn't) weathered its post-industrial decline much better and it fucking sucked.
11, 12: Yes, by our pathetic, small-minded humid continental temperate climate standards they are somewhat different, with NYC slightly more hellishly hot and humid in summer and Detroit colder/windier in winter (it is not as snowy as Cleveland but a bit more than Detroit), but in the context of the world of widely variable climates they are pretty much the same.
but a bit more than Detroit New York
What Mobes said in one is something that also bothers me, though. It seems like Detroit was so eviscerated by the white flight, but maybe that's a convenient narrative.
As in, maybe the white flight only compounded the problems, and isn't entirely to blame.
Michigan is also super gray all winter long. Low gray clouds. Like the color was sucked out of the world. Other freezing cold places manage not to be so soul-crushing.
I love Detroit so much. If you think your city is badass and you are not from Detroit, you are wrong. There's a fucking huge black fist as emblematic urban art! Also, while this slightly undercuts the point I just made, the suburbs are really extremely pleasant. I sometimes have fantasies of moving there but of course it's not possible for a zillion reasons.
20: The western side of MI has fewer sunny days than Seattle.
21: It doesn't undercut your point unless you assume you are badass.
20,22: Point taken on the grayness, but I will note that Detroit is pretty much the "sunniness" place in Michigan as it is situated upwind of the closest lakes.
I realize this is a controversial position, but I'm not generally a fan of sunny days.
I'm not really that invested in any of these points--and people are always entitled to their subjective experiences of their surroundings--but I did feel the need to push back on "fucking arctic hellscape."
Other freezing cold places manage not to be so soul-crushing.
Someone hasn't spent much time in northern Europe. Try Germany - not quite as cold, but just as grey and a lot less daylight. Detroit is about the same latitude as central Italy while Cologne is about as far north of Quebec City as QC is of Boston. Having only eight hours of daylight plus freezing cold plus greyness sucks.
25, 26: For instance, right now in Pittsburgh is about the right amount of sunniness. In part, on really sunny days people seem to expect you to go out and do stuff.
"fucking arctic hellscape."
During those long, cold winters there's not much else to do.
To the OP: Why not just institute a system of internal passports? If it was good enough for the Warsaw Pact countries, it's good enough for us!
What would be really neat is some scheme to encourage wealthy non-European people to move en masse to Detroit/St Louis/KC/Flint/West Philly/etc. Like have an Angolan colony in Detroit, or a bunch of Uruguayans in St Louis. Just dropping people in a family at a time isn't going to do much to revitalize places that are already so badly off, but if you brought a whole community, you might actually have something that works.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with Detroit that a few clever initiatives couldn't solve. The city/county/state/feds should just nationalize that one asshole's holdings, you know, the guy who has all the lake/river front property and owns the toll bridges. One fell swoop and you'd have solved some big problems right there. You could also legalize micro-houses, encourage urban farming (already happening), put some big federal project* there, etc.
*I still think my Civilian Phone Corps idea should be tried out: Just hire anyone with a pulse to be a phone-answerer for Federal or State agencies -- you wouldn't even have to give them offices, just an app on their smartphone or whatever. So anytime you called the government you could immediately talk to a real person. I think people would love that, even if it didn't cut their total phone time by much, just avoiding being on hold for 45 minutes would be brilliant.
I realize this is a controversial position, but I'm not generally a fan of sunny days.
In the winter or the summer? I feel these are two vastly different things. A sunny day in the winter is beautiful, a cloudy day in the summer is relaxing.
Resisting the temptation to delete 33.
I actually love the experience of an occasional gray day for the exoticism but also have mild SAD, one of the many reasons I'll never follow through on my Detroit fantasy.
20. Allow me to introduce my friends Seattle and Paris. Flips, where are you from?
I can see safety and limited economic opportunity as reasons to stay away from places in recovery. But for people whocan find or make a good gig, native or immigrant, there's something there.
Me too, on the SAD. If I happened to move back to Michigan I'd need a lightbox and would take it really seriously. Whereas I think I could handle somewhere like Madison a little more easily.
If you treat your lightbox with derision, it doesn't work?
Summers down here have become a little soul-crushing in their own way. They were fine for the first 5-6 years, and then they slowly became more oppressive seeming to me. Undoubtedly it's because I'm carrying an extra 20 pounds of insulation, but still I want to kill everyone in September.
32: I don't mind the sun so much in the winter, but I'd still rather not have to squint if I need to look up at a stoplight or something.
If you treat your lightbox with derision, it doesn't work?
When we were camping, there was an extended conversation of the French Goodbye, where you slip away from a party without announcing your departure. One friend, C., was particularly accused of doing this.
So as we sat around the campfire, I quipped, "If a C. leaves a party in the middle of a forest, does she make a sound?" And no one heard me! Or one person did, but no one who would have appreciated it. So it, itself, was a joke in the middle of the forest that made a sound but no one cared. I'm mostly recounting it here because I felt so thwarted.
Allow me to introduce my friends Seattle and Paris.
When I lived in Seattle, I kept running into people from London. I guess it seemed normal to them there.
because I felt so thwarted
Oh, they have a creme for that now.
After years of living in perpetually overcast Pittsburgh, my reaction to a sunny day is to treat it as a day off of work and responsibilities. Get outside! Enjoy life! And then I moved to a place with 280 days of sunshine a year.
Detroit is sad in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. It's been badly mismanaged and neglected, but there are busy spaces like Eastern Market and bits of downtown. All the ruin porn is totally disgusting, but the buildings referenced in 31.3 are just so sad - beautiful windows with half broken out. Last I heard, the city was, in fact, threatening to fine the owner and confiscate his property if he failed to do basic upkeep. It's a step in the right direction. I'm not sure how you'd get the racist suburbanites to spend their money in the city, though, and I worry that without them, revitalization will continue to stall. Even the immigrants don't much like the native Detroiters, AFAICT.
I'd encourage people with Detroit fantasias to read Sweet Juniper, the blog I linked in 9. Dude is a stay-at-home dad living in Detroit who does a urban decay photo blog; it will make you think that living in Detroit is both incredibly awesome and incredibly soul-crushing (to wit: the zoo photos).
All zoos are pretty soul crushing.
45: I have mixed feelings about the ruin porn. On one hand, I wouldn't want people thinking of my neighborhood, which has its share of dilapidated, derelict and destroyed houses, in that way. On the other hand, what's happened in Detroit is fairly unique, both for its scale and its depth, in the urban experience in the US and even the world. It's hard to grasp the enormity of suffering that the destruction of the union auto industry has caused. Looking at beautiful spaces in ruin is, I think, part of the national coping mechanism. I think there's a bit of an analogy to the way Oprah got so angry about calling displaced New Orleans residents "refugees" from Katrina. Obviously, by any reasonable definition, they were (internal) refugees. But at the same time, she was right to call attention to the way that epithet dehumanizes the people to which it refers.
47 and 48 are crazy talk. The San Diego zoo, for example, is awesome.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with Detroit that a few clever initiatives couldn't solve.
Such a crumbling beauty … Ahhh, there's nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won't fix.
One thing I think should be/have been studied more is the socio-cultural impact of the internal migration of African-American people out of the Rust Belt over the last 30+ years. Here in Mpls. there is a sub rosa discourse, much of it racist in tone, about that migration. I think the local media, both print and television, was very adept at using the twin shocks of the crack epidemic and the in-migration from Chicago, Gary and Detroit to demonize the African-American community here in the 1980s. I think much of that was less than completely conscious, but it was hideously effective.
46: I love that blog so much. The author used to be an attorney and I completely identify with him. I fantasize about replicating his life where he quits everything to be a stay at home dad who makes awesome costumes for his kids. And then I realize I can only take kids for short periods of time and I'm not crafty. Back to billing!
IMO, what's really different about Detroit is (a) the size of the city that's abandoned or ruined (it's a huge square footage, and Detroit grew as an automobile city, so it's very spread out) and (b) just how rich Detroit was in relatively recent times before* collapsing so hard. There are just absolutely stunning art deco skyscrapers that were some of the biggest monuments to capital in the world only, say, 60 years ago, that now sit empty.
Before I went there, I thought, well, this will be just like parts of Baltimore or Bridgeport, CT or parts of downtown/South LA or all the other abandoned parts of American cities we're all familiar with. But it's really not, at least from the visitor's perspective, just because the scale of abandonment is so much larger and what was abandoned is so much more beautiful.
*(always remember, it's the city itself -- the suburbs are still pretty rich!)
49: My problem is that to find the beauty in Detroit's urban decay, you need to have a once-major city that nobody gave two fucks about that was left to wither. It's a crying goddamn shame that there are plants and foxes in what used to be a school because the city couldn't even sell the property or even the desks when they had to consolidate neighborhood school districts. I just can't look past how it got to be like that. Not a natural disaster, just a lot of human failure. Maybe with more distance I'd be more appreciative of the art.
Detroit just copied New Bedford, America's Original Rich City Gone To Ruin.
The worst zoo/wildlife thing I ever went to was Marineland. There was some place you could walk around with the gazelles or whatever miniature deer they had, and one had hooked some lady's purse on its antlers and was thrashing around trying to get it off and bleeding from the base of the antler.
56: And Sag Harbor never got beyond quaint because it lost out to NE whaling towns and NYC before it ever even got into gear.
A few years ago I was having lunch with a friend-of-a-friend who's an urban planner, and he emphasized (I forget how the subject of Detroit came up) that what happened to Detroit was very much the intended result of deliberate decisions made by state and local leaders in the wake of the 60s riots.
I don't know enough about the relevant history to judge how correct that is.
I don't think Marineland had miniature deer? Also, I will cut you if you badmouth it again.
And then I said something mean and then I didn't exactly fall back asleep but forgot to look back at the comment thread for a while.
7: makes me sad because I had for years thought "oh hey why don't we all find somewhere less impossible" and so dreamed of being part of the great migration, and then everyone picked Detroit which seems terrible to me but is anyway immaterial because 1) it's not actually going to happen and 2) I don't live in New York no more nohow.
60: I'll bet it's actually Marineland that's responsible for Detroit's decline.
Several other people who rightly thought I was being a dick: I have been there but only in summer, so I don't really know whereof I blather. I spent four years in Chicago and imagine the weather to be similar and also just have a chip on my shoulder about the Midwest, mostly. I did think Detroit was rather blah looking.
And then I came back and the thread was abandoned, like huge swaths of Detroit.
The Nebraska zoo (like Detroit) is impressive and super depressing, but unlike Detroit in the particulars. Giant leopards and lions with closet sized pens so they stay close to the glass, that sort of thing. But the zoo itself is huge.
63: I don't think you're a dick, just inaccurate, JP dickishly remonstrated.
Nebraska has more than one zoo. Kind of.
Some Saturdays in Lincoln, for instance, JP made explicit.
JPS I actually had the conversation about Chicago winters vs. New York winters a lot when I lived in Chicago. People would always say "oh yeah, New York is going to be SO much better, sneer sneer sneer" and I would say "actually, it just is not as bad there" and subjectively, I would still say Chicago winters are much, much more unpleasant than New York ones. I just assumed Detroit was probably similar.
Is 65 in reference to Henry Doorly Zoo?
I've been on this hobbyhorse before, but the last fifteen years or so of NY winters have been notably mild by the standards of my childhood. Boston I noticed as colder than NY (not much, a little), but I was right by the Charles, so in the cold wind. Chicago was pleasanter than Boston, maybe dead level with NY. But 21st century NY is much milder than 20th C.
20th C NY was exactly like redfox describes Cleveland: Cleveland weather is definitely a good step shittier on my personal standard of living index than New York weather, because you get snow on top of snow on top of ice, instead of snow that melts before the next snow comes. But 21st C NY isn't. And I don't think my hands have hurt from the cold since I was in my teens.
I got to volunteer at the soup kitchen and still get paid for it. I made meatballs from something like 40 pounds of meat. My hands hurt so badly from the cold.
I love the notion of regional visas. Those that get them would have free movement across the USA. They'd just have to live in a particular place the same way work-visa people are supposed to work in a particular place. If they wanted to transfer their visa from Detroit to Butte or something (if both are places have have visas) I think that'd be fine as well.
At least one big thing is that it could really spur entrepreneurship. A bunch of Poles or Indians could come over together and start a new business. It'd be good for the local economy, the broader economy, and just about everybody.
Boston weathers are wussy anymore.
73: Having seen the general fuckery that goes with the employer-tied H-whatever visas, I would probably be an improvement on that.
I would probably be an improvement on that.
Self regard much?
This thread would not be complete without a link to the video of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.'s cover of We Almost Lost Detroit.
Nor would it be complete without a link to one of my favorite Standpipe comments of all time (despite the fact that the é no longer displays correctly.)
Holy shit are you people from Jupiter or something? There are actual ethnic neighborhoods in previously neglected places in US cities, right now. The people that live there usuallly stay close to home, venturiung out can be kind of unpredictable. Please refer to earlier discussions of authentic Banh Mi or collards or something.
Just one more way that late capitalism instantiates many of the power fantasies of the early communists, this one being done without paperwork or administration.
I would think NYC folks dreaming of Detroit might be better off choosing Buffalo, but we've had that thread before too.
79: No one's disputing this. But that doesn't address the very specific problem of Detroit, which lost over a million people in the last 60 years. The whole, "ethnic neighborhoods in previously neglected places" could happen, but isn't under the current conditions.
The San Diego zoo, for example, is awesome.
Now name another.
The ratio of quality to price of admission at the National Zoo is infinite.
The MN Zoo is probably selling its monorail, if anyone is interested.
http://www.startribune.com/local/south/227612061.html
Biggest NYC snowstorm since records started in 1869: Feb 2006
4th biggest Feb 2010
5th biggest Jan 1996
6th biggest Dec. 2010
Snowiest winter in NYC 1995-6
3rd snowiest winter 2010-11
Things are warmer but we're getting plenty of snow. And if you've never found the cold painful then you're tougher than me. When the temps drop into the single digits I'm a very unhappy person, and even in the warming age they sometimes do though google tells me that the last of the sixty nine recorded subzero temps was back in 1994.
I'd agree there's more snow, but it doesn't stick as long -- childhood winters had heaps of months-old snow left by plows, that didn't melt completely from the first snow until late February. That never happens anymore. Big snow, but less than a week later, guaranteed, temperatures are well over freezing for long enough to clean the streets completely.
And if you've never found the cold painful then you're tougher than me.
I wasn't going to say nothing...
sixty nine recorded subzero temps
Wimps.
Minnesota usually has only one recorded subzero temp, it just lasts two months.
||
This is interesting. Which industry owns your state?
|>
I think part of my reaction to Detroit is the hunch that the people who talk about it as some kind of Brooklyn in exile would never consider somewhere in the south. Like, hey, Louisville is cheap.
90: Not just Lville. Are we allowed to talk about the price to buy your apartment versus our house? Moneywise, I'm do glad I live in a boring place.
89: I wouldn't have guessed that the gambling industry was the biggest total contributor in Maryland.
That might be a one time thing, since there were some big "legalize gambling/casinos" bills last year.
Detroit has a better climate than the South. With high humidity anything above the mid eighties sucks and once you get above the low nineties it is impossible to wander the streets.
*I was made wimpy when living in Geneva - DC winters and Maine summers are pretty good. The only time things get really cold are in the mountains and very warm clothing, intense exercise, and a dose of adrenaline help a lot.
Thorn, don't be mad but I like Louisville better than your nearby city. Of course this is based on having been in each a few times, briefly, years and years ago.
I've never been to Louisville, but I've been to Lexington and though it was nice. They must be about the same.
In the US, the National Zoo and Bronx Zoo are also pretty awesome, as is the zoo in New Orleans, among places I've been. I think the Columbus Zoo is supposed to be pretty good as well.
The San Francisco zoo is pretty terrible, except for that tiger who was totally eating people.
I've been to the Columbus Zoo, but I can't remember anything about it except Jack Hanna. And I'm pretty sure I remember him from Letterman and not the zoo.
92: Wait, what? I think it's Finance for Maryland. Colored in green. Gambling is that dinky state over to the right of Connecticut. I was surprised that Manufacturing took Mass., though it's not a big surprise in Ohio.
Oh, I don't have any particular local pride, just meant that the two cities are in many ways interchangeable for the hypothetical relocating hipster types, as probably would be Knoxville and plenty of others.
Also, who knew that Finance was big in Maine?
And I wonder why Defense isn't a category.
Like, hey, Louisville is cheap.
I have to admit I occasionally fantasize about moving back and buying a nice house in one of the walkable parts of town.
98: The elephants there still remember you.
If the veterinarian's testimony from the sentencing report is even half right, I suppose they should.
99: I was going by the top 20 contributors list here:
http://www.followthemoney.org/database/state_overview.phtml?y=2012&s=MD
I think part of my reaction to Detroit is the hunch that the people who talk about it as some kind of Brooklyn in exile would never consider somewhere in the south.
Um, guilty? I'd be afraid my kids would be despised outcasts in the south? (We actually had a conversation kind of about this last week, fantasizing about cheap places to move to that would make it easier for the kids to get into college. And then I pictured Sally in a rural southern school, and while I don't know what I'm talking about, it wasn't a reassuring prospect. She's fast-talking and aggressive by NYC standards, and has very firm opinions about what kind of anti-racist/non-homophobic/non-sexist discourse she expects from those she interacts with. I envision her life in a possible non-NYC highschool environment as filled with conflict.)
104: As the mosquito said to the elephant.
Dude. The suggestion was sending her to live with urple, not sending her to live in rural anywhere.
Louisville is not rural is the thing. This is kind of what I'm talking about.
I read 103 to 102 and it made me laugh.
C'mon. LB is born and raised NY. Everywhere but NY, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong are rural to her.
But my understanding is that via Buck they've actually been somewhat doing a reverse Green Acres all these years.
106: very firm opinions about what kind of anti-racist/non-homophobic/non-sexist discourse she expects from those she interacts with
So, you're sending her to Macalester, then?
89: More granularity would be helpful there. Even so, I think retail, finance, energy and agribusiness have at least as much if not more influence on state-level politics as "tech" does in Minnesota (even assuming that "tech" includes medical devices etc.).
106: Salt Lake City is a nice compromise. It's no NYC, but it had a lot of culture (symphony, ballet, plays), they're building a performing arts center big enough to house Broadway shows, sports (Jazz, minor-league baseball team), an excellent selection of natural history museums (Utah is great for preserving fossils), and tons of outdoor activities. The food is excellent. Housing is ridiculously cheap. The only thing it's missing is art. The best art is at the University of Utah, and, um, that's not saying much. It's also a Delta hub, so you can fly anywhere to get what SLC lacks.
That being said, I totally want to move to Alexandria, Virginia.
The image in 89 was too small on my monitor to read some states well so I thought Maine said, "France." The Canadians have already won!
Detroit has tons of Jews and a big art and music scene, which may be relevant to this hypothetical conversation about moving out of Brooklyn to someplace non-South and its presumed interlocutors.
Salt Lake City is great now that they've liberalized the booze laws, and is sometimes a fantasy-life destination of mine, but you do have to deal with being governed by a theocracy, at least at the State level.
89 et seq: It's as if comments in dead threads don't even exist on this blog.
110, 113: When I google Louisville neighborhoods, which I figure should get me the city rather than surrounding suburbs or small towns, I get a real estate site that shows me pictures of houses with horse barns. I'm not afraid of livestock, particularly, but it is the sort of thing that confuses me about where the urban/rural divide is drawn.
(All right, I'm hopelessly parochial, and hate and fear vegetation not properly kept under control by surrounding cobblestones.)
Louisville is not rural is the thing. This is kind of what I'm talking about.
Meaning living without using a car on a day to day basis is normal and easy? Plus, why would one live in a red state unless one either has a lot of personal connections or a really great career opportunity?
I have to admit I occasionally fantasize about moving back and buying a nice house in one of the walkable parts of town.
Me too. I like my current place fine but it's a shadow of the gorgeous house I had there, in an equally walkable (and much nicer) part of town, for I don't care to think about how much less. I really miss it and whenever I visit I go by and radiate ill will at the current residents for putting ugly furniture on what is rightfully my front porch.
I get a real estate site that shows me pictures of houses with horse barns. I'm not afraid of livestock, particularly, but it is the sort of thing that confuses me about where the urban/rural divide is drawn.
In Louisville, they still use horse drawn carriages to get around.
123 Because blue states are expensive and/or cold.
Geographic diversity for college admissions/financial aid purposes? We weren't serious, but we did toss some state names around.
and hate and fear vegetation not properly kept under control by surrounding cobblestones
Vegetation is fine on ones plate in limited occasional doses. It's also good for a vacation. But living in it? You might as well live surrounded by sand or year round snow.
Come to SLC LB! I'm sure Sally would rock the public schools here and be valedictorian.
This is interesting. Which industry owns your state?
That link lead me to this interesting article about Dr. Bronner's.
Limiting executive pay and spending virtually nothing on advertising left a lot of extra cash for improving the products and funding social campaigns--which have often gone hand-in-hand. For years, the soap had included an undisclosed ingredient, caramel coloring. As the new CEO, [David] Bronner wanted to remove it for the sake of purity, but feared that die-hard customers would assume the new guy was watering down the product. So he decided to incorporate hemp oil, which added a caramel color while also achieving a smoother lather. But there was a hitch: A few months after he'd acquired a huge stockpile of Canadian hemp oil, the Bush administration outlawed most hemp products. "Technically, we were sitting on tens of thousands of pounds of Schedule I narcotics," Bronner recalls.
Rather than destroy the inventory, he sued the Drug Enforcement Agency to change its stance on hemp, which comes from a nonpsychoactive strain of cannabis. Adam Eidinger, who now heads the company's activism efforts in Washington, DC, served DEA agents at agency HQ bagels covered with poppy seeds (which, in theory, could be used to make heroin) and orange juice (which naturally contains trace amounts of alcohol). In 2004, a federal court handed Bronner a victory, striking down the ban and allowing him to keep his stores of hemp oil.
The success of the hemp campaign convinced Bronner to push his company ever closer to the bleeding edge of the progressive movement. In 2003, Dr. Bronner's became the world's first soap company to win organic certification. Then it sued rival companies such as Kiss My Face and Estée Lauder that were using the "organic" label as window dressing. When Bronner couldn't find certified organic and fair trade sources of palm, coconut, and olive oil, he created his own in Ghana and Sri Lanka, and scaled up small existing projects in Israel and Palestine. (His coconut oil business now accounts for 12 percent of company sales, almost as much as bar soap.)
128: I like it when it's orderly. The tulips in the median of Park Avenue in the spring? Verdant, yet appropriately controlled.
129: The skiing does make that attractive. It's so crowded and inconvenient and icy around here -- that one ski trip we took out West was the most fun I've ever had on skis.
St. Louis has a really good zoo. I'd put it above DC as the best free zoo in the country.
SF Zoo is pretty bad, but the Oakland Zoo is surprisingly decent.
122: That's a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. (In fact, I think it's not even part of the city, technically.)
123 Meaning living without using a car on a day to day basis is normal and easy?
"Living without a car is not easy" and "is rural" are not at all the same thing.
Meaning living without using a car on a day to day basis is normal and easy?
Wait, this is the definition of urban? This means there are two urban areas in the US, you realize.
At least three - both DC and Chicago are ok for that. But yes, it's sort of sad that the US doesn't have actual proper cities.
It's certainly not normal, but there are now plenty of parts of LA where you can easily live with no car. You have to manage your work schedule and expectations of your friends, though.
But in any case that's a super stupid metric for determining a proper city.
123 Meaning living without using a car on a day to day basis is normal and easy?
Wait, this is the definition of urban? This means there are two urban areas in the US, you realize.
My town is relatively walk/bike-able, it just lacks the other amenities that one would associate with urban living (like museums, nice restaurants, or high-paying jobs).
You can live in practically any decent college town without a car.
Also, there are lots of houses in the center of MPLS that have carriage houses, which are essentially just small, fancied-up horse barns.
From LB's horse barn link, "There are even a few small businesses located in the center of town that cater to some specific high-class tastes." Essear, that means whatever horrible things I assume it means, right?
No car in Sacramento is not normal but it is certainly easy.
140: Whip-maker, botox clinic, absinthe distributor, French maid uniform outlet
123, 135: not at all normal, and only easy depending on where you work. I had a car there and I used it more frequently than I use my girlfriend's car here in DC, but I certainly didn't use it on a daily basis--plenty of walkable food/drink/shopping/entertainment in several neighborhoods, and for me work was bike- and bus-accessible. Anyway, as everyone else has said, this is irrelevant to the "not rural" issue.
It would be an enormous pain in the ass to live in Chicago or DC without a car unless you lived and worked in one of a few small areas. I would say it's not the norm in either town without a car. I was vaguely counting SF or Boston as the other, so ok, still maybe three.
I could, and for about a year did, easily live without a car for daily life (including trips to the grocery or hardware store or other routine errands). But I'd need something for nonroutine errands on the weekends*--frequently enough that renting would be uneconomic, and the city don't have zipcar or anything similar to bridge that gap.
*I'm sure if needed I could adjust to do less of this, but that would be a noticeable inconvenience.
140: Probably? It's a very wealthy neighborhood. I never really spent any time around there. I do remember once going to a high school classmate's house there to work on a group project, and feeling like I had stepped into a palace or something.
Also, people always complained that almost anyone who didn't live there and drove through would get pulled over by the police and either ticketed or just harassed about what they were doing there.
SF does actually require a car (or extremely careful lifestyle planning), but fails to provide parking or sufficient space to keep your car. The worst of all worlds.
Based on what I've seen of Chi, including staying with friends with no car on several occasions, it seems like having a car would be more of hassle. Where do you park the damn thing, first of all? And the traffic is insane. You could easily live in any of the relatively close in neighborhoods, or even out in one of the rail suburbs with no car with only minor problems encountered a few times a year.
and the city don't have zipcar
Urple is adopting the local dialect.
I know walkscore.com is a very highly imperfect measure, but for reference my current address scores an 89. Checking now, my last addess in Boston scores an 82.
146: No car is very easy in DC. I have no idea how many people own them in the city proper, but it seems like the car owners are mostly folks who moved out to the suburbs. I'm not sure what you're thinking of not being able to do easily.
150: You haven't heard of dibs?
If you lived in one of the rail suburbs you might sometimes want to go grocery shopping. As far as living in town, I know people who do it but it makes life a lot harder. If you live in Boystown and want to meet someone in Logan Square, you'd have to budget an extra hour to get into the loop and back out, unless you wanted to gamble on the bus, which is not a good gamble. And this presupposes your apartment and destination are near the El.
Pittsburgh's easy enough to live in without regularly using a car. The commuter buses are packed so I'm certainly not alone in this, and more so along the Busway. This sort of lifestyle isn't available to everyone in the city but certainly to a large chunk of those living east and south of Downtown (perhaps less so north and west, but Pittsburghers, like vampires, are reluctant to cross water so I can't speak of commuting patterns there).
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How does someone whose job is administrative assistant schedule a meeting for two weeks in the past? This kind of thing has been happening so much I'm picturing a Muppet spasmodically flailing their hands around the keyboard. (Not a cow-orker, fortunately.)
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Pittsburgh's easy enough to live in without regularly using a car.
Yeah, my mom hasn't had a car for ages and basically can't drive. I like here quite a lot, really, but I'd like it better if it were Pittsburgh.
146: I would say it's not the norm in either town without a car.
Re: DC, 153.1 is right. I've lived here 13 years (god help me) without a car of my own, in various neighborhoods outside what I imagine are the "few small areas" you have in mind. And know plenty of others who have done the same. It can be annoying (mitigated for me by cohabiting with car-owners for much of my time here) but it's not nearly as annoying as having a car, and is perfectly common.
I spent a couple days in D.C. last month and it was heaven! I walked 7.5 miles in one day and never wished for a car. Also, MUSEUMS!!! This is why I want to live in Alexandria.
I first read 157 as saying you still liked your mom even if she doesn't drive. (here/her)
Philadelphia and some of its suburbs are easy to live in without a car. Parts of Seattle are easy to live in without a car.
When I lived in DC a fair number of people lived without owning a car and most people I knew who had one and lived in the city itself didn't use them except for trips out of the city or a once or twice a month big shop in the burbs. Everywhere in NW that I was familiar with had supermarkets within a fifteen minute walk and the public transport system was decent. My impression was that quite a few neighourhoods in Chicago were like that but I could be wrong, the only part I've spent any real time in is Hyde Park. SF on the other hand struck me as surprisingly unsuited for a carless life. Boston - yes, quite doable in certain parts, ditto for Cambridge.
NYC is the only place in the US where it's the norm for middle-class people over 30 to not have a car. In plenty of other places it's possible and easy, even places with no subway or trains like Pittsburgh. (yes, the T, whatever)
I went carless in Ithaca, but couldn't manage it in Princeton. A lot of this depends on a lot of external circumstances. If I wasn't frequently going to the Insti/tute, I could have had a slightly smaller apartment near the university in Princeton and gotten by with no car.
159: My college roommate just visited from a Chicago suburb. We did normal DC stuff, and when she asked me how far we'd walked (for some fitness app?), I told her six miles or so. She looked shocked and entered it as four, which still doubled her "personal best."
163 is probably the best summary, and gets it exactly right. In DC, for example, while it is certainly very possible to live happily without a car, it's not, or at least wasn't at all, the norm for middle class or above people over 30 to not have a car.
Many of my neighbors walk to work downtown across the river, and others take the bus, but I don't know anyone in the neighborhood who doesn't own a car at all. None of the parents of the kids we've cared for have had cars, though, and certainly many people do live that way. I'd think the majority of kids at the girls' school are walked there by parents, which my mom claims is an Appalachian cultural value, the first time I've ever heard her use that kind of godless liberal language. Walkscore gives us a 79.
I wouldn't even say it's 'the norm' in NYC. It's not terribly weird, but I think more middle-class, over 30 people than not have cars. If I were going to guess, I'd even say it was 3 to 1, car to no car. Very few families are going to have two cars, and carlessness isn't weird, but it's not the norm, just common enough to be unfreakish.
On topic, I could live like a motherfucking 19th century rail baron in this house in Detroit for the cost of a studio apartment in Manhattan.
She looked shocked and entered it as four, which still doubled her "personal best."
Blink. There are people above the age of two with a 'personal best' for walking of two miles in a day?! That's about forty-five minutes of leisurely strolling.
168 My impression was that that's true if one defines 'middle class' as six figure income households with children. Otherwise quite a bit more non-car owning households.
Oh, if you don't live someplace with walking destinations, and you're not a hiker, it's not that weird. I mean, I agree with you, but she probably wasn't thinking 'personal best' lifetime, just since she started using whatever app.
171: I probably was thinking 'six figure' incomes (and I was thinking families with kids when I came up with 3-1), but that's a married couple that each makes $50K. That's pretty middle class to me.
It is pretty normal among childless people here. Less so among people with kids, probably.
170: Get in car, drop Child 1 at school. Drive home, retrieve Child 2 and deliver to preschool. Drive to gym, walk on treadmill. Drive home. Do chores/whatever, pick up children in reverse, maybe drive them to soccer, then go home. Like LB said, personal best since she started tracking in the app - she regularly walked much farther during college.
158's It can be annoying ... but it's not nearly as annoying as having a car fits me perfectly. I'm successfully living carlessly in Troy, NY - the smallest core city in a small metroplex - and that's because I in no way wanted to sign up for the stress of maintaining, insuring, worrying about, and potentially paying for a car.
(That is a core personal trait, perhaps to a worrisome degree: I say the same things about houses and ... something else, I forget what. Pets?)
There's a confounding factor that 'middle class' people at the bottom end of whatever income band that defines are likelier to be living in some part of the city with worse public transportation, making having a car more attractive. So, if I imagine a janitor married to an MTA employee, they probably wouldn't own a car if they lived in Manhattan, but they probably actually live in Flushing, where car ownership is easier and more useful. If you see what I mean.
That said, just as one occasionally observes that employer-linked healthcare makes moving jobs tougher than otherwise, I can imagine circumstances where I'd be more reluctant than I'd want to be about leaving this office that's a ten-minute walk from home.
I mean, we have a car, but it is probably silly of us, and we mostly use it to go away for the weekend. Renting a car when we need one would likely be more economical.
I think the whole living-without-a-car thing hinges, at least to some extent, on one's mobility -- says limpy to a big group of ableist antisemites -- and also on one's child-having status.
I do indeed do 180.last. (Not that I've ever actually priced it out; it seems like such an obvious money-saver given my needs that I haven't taken that step.)
179: I can't hear you, I'm stroking my gigantic stone staircase while thinking about having a drink in the billiard room.
181 is indubitable.
Also indubitable: I am in the one half-hour of work in which I'm more likely to comment than not. This recurs every two weeks or so.
The Unfoggetariat should collectively buy that house. It would be great for meetups, and there could be some kind of time-share arrangement the rest of the time.
I like here quite a lot, really, but I'd like it better if it were Pittsburgh.
I've never stopped saying, ever.
169: the kitchen's not updated.
Urple requires stainless steel appliances in which he can melt plastic and store bean things.
But maybe the older models are better at converting cream cheese to blue cheese!
Since everyone's talking about Louisville, what are good things to do in Louisville? They have a good beer bar, so I'm likely to be there for a beer event at some point.
Also, is the Zoo any good?
I am pretty sure that if you had that house, you would never leave it.
UPetgi(9), what sort of things do you like to do?
And now I'm wondering what beer bar you're talking about.
The zoo is good enough for a local zoo--above average--but not exactly a national attraction.
Especially with the fucking arctic hellscape and all.
193: you'd have to, to get something to eat. You're not cooking anything serious in that kitchen.
194 was me. Also, season you are coming hugely impacts suggestions about good things to do.
That's a bizarre kitchen for a house that size. Maybe it's a servant's apartment kitchen?
Who are you? What have you done with urple?
In the long history of bad/boring/stupid meetings, this is the worstest/boringest/stupidest. More and more, I fantasize about raising my hand in a meeting like this, in which lots and lots of relatively well-intentioned idiots are bragging about how their division of the university is poised to become a profit center, and politely quitting my job. "Sarah's point about 'the importance of improved metrics for learning outcomes,' Dave's discussion of 'text-light outreach endeavors to corporate partners,' and Carolyn's remarks about 'building robust and durable relationships between students and prospective donors' all remind me that you people are ruining what once drew me to higher education. I quit. Thanks so much." Then I'd limp out of the room, head home to pack, and move to Detroit.
With a $20,000 kitchen remodel, that house would have a list price of $4,000,000, easy.
Also the pool shown sure as hell is not "Olympic size."
And actually the bathrooms are pretty fucked up too- the only one obviously renovated is a hall of mirrors. Also no central air. Maybe $500k is overpriced.
Maybe it's the servant's apartment pool.
200: Then I'd limp out of the room, head home to pack, and move to Detroit
And get shot by the Nazi fetishist next door while lifting weights in the carriage house.
Holy Grale. It's one of less than two dozen US locations for Zwanze day, for example.
Most of the Louisville things that come to mind are pleasant things to do if you're around but not really big draws for people from out of town. There are a lot of nice parks; walking or biking to the top of the hill in Iroquois Park is nice. The Waterfront Park along the river is attractive now, and sometimes they have music festivals there. Cherokee Park is also pleasant, and near the Highlands, which is one of the more interesting neighborhoods to walk around. Jefferson Memorial Forest is a good place to go for a hike (not very strenuous hiking-- this isn't like being the mountains-- but walking in the woods), especially in the fall.
I guess the obvious big tourist things are going to Churchill Downs or visiting the Louisville Slugger Museum.
All that wall-to-wall white carpet is awfully tacky. I'd insist on figuring removal and replacement into the offer.
The Muhammad Ali Center is hands-down the world's best museum devoted to the life of a professional boxer.
FYI, the questionable Zoomprospector says that Savannah is a lot like Louisville. (I've never been to either.)
"The state of the art in contemporary cubicle design." I'm not even fucking kidding.
You could see the world's (or maybe the USA's?) second largest collection of 19th century buildings with cast iron facades on Main St, but since you've presumably seen many more such buildings in New York, it's probably hard to get worked up about.
The Saint James art fair could be worthwhile, if you're there at the right time of year.
If you're here during the annual state fair, it's fun to watch the pigs race.
Also, I think the DC Metro and the nastiness of the Beltway have made me dislike driving... it just doesn't feel fun any more to hop in the car and go somewhere.
214: Trying to decide if 214 is a biscuit conditional or not.
216: Urple was watching the pigs race and thinking "if only Upetgi were here, I'd be enjoying this"?
It's one of less than two dozen US locations for Zwanze day, for example.
Let me be the first to point out that Lord Hobo is one of the others.
With $100k of renovation that house could be like the most boss place of all time. Your fellow rail baron buddies can walk right over from the golf course and come into the poker room for a tasty single malt.
I'm pretty sure I never went to the state fair.
I've been to state fairs in two states. All the people selling shittastic home cleaning products were Australians.
Also, I think one involved a sculpture of John Glenn made of butter.
You can drink your fancy beer while eating a bucket of what Esquire (rightfully) called the best fried chicken in the world.
I was 100% honestly only aware that Louisville was a semi-substantial city after I started reading this blog. Before that I would have guessed it had a population of maybe 50k.
My immediate reactions to that mansion were: (1) you will need a Roomba, and (2) ghosts would look great there.
I was just saying that I thought that Detroit should be an enterprise zone / homestead act area. Individuals and businesses who set up shop in the city would be exempt from Federal income taxes in the case of companies and all income taxes for individuals.
There are plenty of great reasons to live in Louisville, but honestly I can't think of any particularly good reason to visit*. There aren't a lot of serious tourist draws.
* Unless you're coming for a particular event, like a music festival, the derby, etc.
223: Huh. I don't think I've had that. I think that's about as close to my parents' place as some of the restaurants they like to eat at. I should get them to pick some up next time I'm around.
69: JPS I actually had the conversation about Chicago winters vs. New York winters a lot when I lived in Chicago.
No idea why I feel compelled to continue such a pointless conversation but I find that I am. Yes, I agree that you are directionally correct, it's the hyperbole that I was quibbling with.
Speaking of pointless, twitter is weird. A reporter is tweeting the mayor to get a reply she didn't get from the press secretary.
Seriously, Louisville has to be up there as the most under-the-radar biggish city in the US. Get a sports team!
She tweeted her phone number. If I knew how to do voices, I don't think I could stop myself from calling.
Get a sports team!
You see, in that region, the sport is college basketball, and the city already has a successful team.
Also they have one of the premiere annual sports events in the nation.
If you're not coming until late next year, you may be able to hit up what will supposedly be world-class destination gay hotel and entertainment complex. But, it's not ready yet.
I guess Lebowski Fest has also grown into a big local thing recently?
Yes, but one that evokes pastoral fields, hats, and mint juleps, not big city swagger. Also I had somehow thought that Churchill Downs was in Lexington for a long time, even though I generally watch the Kentucky Derby.
Lexington has Keeneland, which requires gentlemen wear jackets.
And of course it's one of the best -- possibly the best -- liquor tourism destinations in the country.
227: I was there for a New Year's Eve wedding and I loved it. Stayed at the Museum 21C, which has an truly impressive contemporary art collection, walked to two other states. Didn't even make it to the whiskey factory or the baseball bat factory.
(Not contesting your point at all. Just piping up about Lousiville.)
239 is only really true if you drink bourbon.
What other type of liquor tourism destinations are in this country? I guess there was a brandy thing in California.
All bridges lead to Indiana. Any other state would be a very long walk.
243: well, depends if you count wine as liquor, I guess. Or beer.
Maybe I should have said "booze tourism"?
There's always talk of trying to bring an NBA team to the city, which sometimes sounds more serious than at other times. I don't have the impression it's very likely to happen.
Neither wine nor beer is liquor. I don't think that's debatable.
The reason they don't have an NBA team is that the Chicago Bulls owner wanted to take their best player so forced them out of the NBA/ABA merger.
218: Sadly, I do not live within 2 hours of Lord Hobo.
http://qdy.stparchive.com/Archive/QDY/QDY04271984p35.php
"[V]inous, spiritous, malt liquor license"
Club License: Permits qualifying non-profit corporations to sell malt, vinous, or spirituous liquors to members and their guests for consumption on the premises.
http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite/Rev-Liquor/LIQ/1209635768989
251: I was kind of disappointed when I learned that the name "Kentucky Colonels" didn't originate from Colonel Sanders.
Ah, 382,000 hits if you spell "spirituous" correctly.
Well, might as well go home and deal with the busted sink drain. Sigh.
"Spiritual" and "spirited" are already perfectly good adjectives; I don't see why they needed to make another.
I'm starting to think I should make the case that things ARE in fact better here than in Louisville. You could walk to two other states, though one would be more difficult than the other. There's a 21C Museum hotel, large and good zoo/botanical garden, all the stuff except Mormons that Liz Spigot cites, plus numerous (probably bad) beer spots and soon the start of the bourbon trail even though I've still never done that.
259: plus, you're right there by the Creation Museum.
And for sink drains, Jol/ly Plumbing, slogan "A Fl/ush Beats a Full House." Most of the Jol/ly family lives out in the rudal part of the county, where a park bears their name. And speaking of park names, Big Bone Lick is hard to beat and also awesome in its own right. Take that, Louisville and your shirts about how to pronounce your name! (Except my brother's there and so are many people I care about and I've always enjoyed my visits. Also I forgot to say that we win for professinal sports and probably also college, depending on how you look at it. But still, people should go to Louisville. I mean why not?)
262: Of course not. While I love the idea of going in theory, because I'm sure it would be wonderfully surreal, I couldn't stomach actually paying them money, since that money is being used to help miseducate people, mostly kids.
Can you still ride the triceratops?
You should go to the Creation Museum, they're probably also on board with birds are not dinosaurs.
263 speaks for me too, and I'm pretty sure they've upped the number of dinosaurs you can climb on for photo ops, but I don't pay close attention.
Huh. Apparently, their theory is that not all dragons are dinosaurs, but all dinosaurs are dragons.
They are right that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs. Science!
Keeneland requires gentlemen to wear jackets? That must be new or else I'm being dense and you're joking. I remember it as quite informal. It's where we went for senior skip day though I looked about 14 and couldn't bet.
Maybe break in when they're closed and do some minor vandalism.
263: Do they have a free day once a month? A reduced price for atheists?
Yes, I agree that you are directionally correct, it's the hyperbole that I was quibbling with.
I started to make a "hi, have we met?" joke but I feel like maybe I am being irritating. I actually wrote then deleted a status update this morning about should I try to rein in some speech tics like usually going straight for "endlessly terrible" or "horrifically appalling" when "bad would do." I will say, though the difference between how miserable NYC winters made me and how miserable Chicago winters made me was significant. That feeling of having a cold, strong wind whip countless tiny sharp bits of ice into your face, no exaggeration, is something I associate with Chicago and really not with New York though I'm sure it happens. I think this weekend I described it as "the essence of human misery" but that gets us back to me maybe wanting to get a grip sometimes.
269: coat and tie have always been required in the clubhouse. In the grandstands, people are somewhat more casual.
misplaced quotation mark, damn you. when "bad" would do.
272: A couple of years ago, I met a guy from Anchorage. He described Chicago winter as the worst winter he'd ever experienced. I tell this story whenever someone questions my opinions about winter in Chicago.
"How was your day?"
"It was endlessly terrible, though not as bad as yesterday."
275: Anchorage is relatively mild, right? Now, if he was from Fairbanks, that'd be something.
Yes, but when I tell the story, I just say a guy from Alaska. Because Chicago winter is miserably cold.
I think Anchorage is pretty cold, actually. Juneau, though, is comparatively mild.
279 amended to add: it's likely I have no idea what I'm talking about. Still, I think Anchorage winters are probably quite a bit colder than Chicago winters, whereas Juneau winters are, I suspect, considerably warmer than both. I bet I could have looked this information up in the time it took me to write this idiotic comment!
273: I think I must have been in the clubhouse. Anyway, some guy had to borrow a jacket from the racetrack people.
It was much fancier than the other racetrack I'd been to, Fonner Park in Grand Island. They moved the Nebraska State Fair there, but I've not been to Fonner Park while the State Fair was there.
A friend of mine who grew up in Juneau says that the isolation can make the winter feel worse than it actually is. But also that the winter's still pretty tough.
This is giving me new impetus to want to actually do the Geoclone idea and then people could define their own "wintriness" measures [.76*"days with highs below 20"*.768 + .4*"avg. wind speed"**2 - .0046*"days between first and last frost"] and fight about that.
The Illinois legislature passed a marriage equality bill yesterday. Apparently in honor of the occasion, I had my first ever same-sex sex dream last night. I'm not gonna lie. It was kind of awesome. Been wanting to share that with someone all day.
262, 263: I went about a week after it opened. (IIRC as a promo they weren't charging admissions at that point, just asking for donations and contact info, both of which I declined to give, and which the blue-haired old lady behind the counter was very gracious about.) Surreal is right, but it was a certain kind of eye opening and I'm glad I went.
Ah, here's a pretty good climate compare site. I have some winter variables for Anchorage, Detroit, Chicago and NYC graphed. And it is helping Smearcase's case...
Ooh, this is neat. Automated snow-measurement technology: SNOTEL. With meteor-burst communications!
Smearcase, we hates it forever.
In the winter is New York really windier than Nebraska.
Even though he is a hyperbolist.
I think this one is also good for what Smearcase had in mind.
You know what's even more crazy-making? I bet the fucking cubicles they're procuring aren't even state of the art. I bet they're third-tier cubicles, because that's how we roll. Seriously, I'm certain there are some sweet-ass, state-of-the-art cubicles manufactured and used in Germany, Denmark, or maybe Japan. But around here, we don't even know those cubicles fucking exist. Because the cubicle procurers here all have their heads up the asses of their bosses, who are too busy generating text-light outreach endeavors to realize what the fuck is going on with the badass cubicles we'll never have. Just fuck it.
If you work for the government in Ohio, you get cubicles made in Ohio by dedicated Ohio workers who are in prison.
This is giving me new impetus to want to actually do the Geoclone idea
You should have been pitching this to me last week, when I was trying to pick a webapp to make as my final project. Although I'd have probably said, "Fuck no, dealing with a zillion different databases sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass."
(I ended up deciding to clone Strava.)
The webstore is lacking in specifics.
But I'm sure that if Ohio's prisons can make their own lethal injection drugs, the cubicles will be technologically advanced.
This web store is very clear. Buy local! Buy Pittsburgh! Buy something you never conceived anyone would bother making!
212/295 made me laugh hard enough for my throat to hurt, but that actually doesn't take much, since I've had a cold for weeks, and haven't been able to talk for two days.
Thorn and Halford should live-blog a field trip to the Rosicrucian Museum in San Jose.
The website in 287 is interesting. I guess Anchorage is colder compared to other cities than I usually think of it being. Adding Fairbanks to the charts provides useful perspective.
Also, Louisville's great. I drove through it on my big cross-country adventure and while I really just wandered around Downtown for a while and didn't do any touristy stuff, that was lots of fun. It's a great downtown, one of the best I saw on that trip.
Fairbanks has higher highs and lower lows than Anchorage.
Yup. It's the basic difference between a continental and a maritime climate, exaggerated by the extreme latitude.
290 -- I use snotel all winter. It's a great resource. They have a station in the Rattlesnake wilderness that is a very good proxy for our local ski hill.
And another that's pretty good for Chief Joseph Pass.
I don't think Marineland had miniature deer?
Halford's right. You're thinking of Deerland. Marineland has miniature Marines. Like tiny little gung-ho Oompa-Loompas, double-timing around little waist-high assault courses and chanting cadences in squeaky helium voices.
Speaking of cubicles, and this really belongs on the Homeland thread, but they have always struck me (possibly wrongly) as a very American thing. I've never worked in an office with cubicles myself (not saying my career is representative but it's an anecdatum), nor visited an office where they were prevalent, whereas pretty much every representation of an office in US pop culture features them - and they crop up in the few in-office Youtube shows I watch.
re: 310
My current office [university library] has cubicles, but they are big, and each cubicle has more than one person in them. Mine used to have just me [as we didn't have a lot of staff in the building at one time] but currently has 4 plus a hot desk for a 5th person.
310: People who would have cubicles in America have offices in the UK, or they sit in open bullpens? I can't figure out which way you're surprised.
I've certainly worked in more than a few offices where it was a large open place space with no cubicle divisions. Just lots of interlocked desks with low partitions [as in monitor height or less] at the back of the desks.
How do they comment on the internet at work?
re: 314
Sneakily?
My computer is overlooked by a couple of people in the adjoining cubicle-office [there's a window/lowered section in the partition] which somewhat pisses me off.
310: People who would have cubicles in America have offices in the UK, or they sit in open bullpens? I can't figure out which way you're surprised.
In my experience (again, I'm not claiming it's universal, but I don't see cubicles so much on UK TV either), just desks next to/opposite each other. Back of desk partitions are certainly an option, but my current office doesn't have them.
I'm a little bit sneaky about it. I've stopped asking the work-study for help with puns.
Hey, interesting comment on that huge house in Detroit - the owner was the guy who had the local cable TV monopoly, hence those amazing 1980s music broadcasts that come up on youtube and a significant contribution to global music. Apparently, he was given the monopoly specifically because the Detroit black political machine wanted one of theirs to have it.
(Pity he didn't grok teh interwebs back in the 90s and run fibre, but who did...)
Clearly, the property should become the centre of a whole Unfogged Quarter. The Minnesota Zoo monorail will be moved there to provide snowproof transport between prominent Unfoggeders' homes and businesses, such as the Halfordismo World Headquarters - Temple of Hench - Mass Rally Grounds complex.
OT: Slate's relentless drive to contraranism was never so appreciated by me as when they point out that it takes an hour to carmelize onions. Cookbooks have been lying to me about that my whole life. "30 minutes or until caramelized" isn't a recipe for anything but frustration.
Huffpo says, Bite me Halford:
"Wild Animals: In addition to featured shows with killer whales and dolphins, Marineland offers visitors the chance to get up close and personal with many animals, from feeding beluga whales to petting deer. Park officials plan on opening their newest attractions, the world's largest aquarium complex, soon."
Marineland offers visitors the chance to get up close and personal with many animals, from feeding beluga whales to petting deer
I'd have thought a beluga whale was more than a petting deer could eat.
They're scavengers, they'll hold on to the corpse for weeks.
It's like eating an elephant -- the deer does it one bite at a time.
How the fuck was I supposed to know that there's some bullshit imitation Canadian Marineland-equivalent in Ontario? The real one died years ago.
Orky and Corky por vida, bitches.
Hey, Wikipedia says that Corky is still alive, though the imperialist bastards at Sea World who stole her from Marineland make her perform under the slave name, "Shamu."
Relevant to the conversations above about rent control in NYC, Brad DeLong linked to this article as a "must read" this morning, and I honestly can't figure out why.
The article has a somewhat interesting argument to make, but it's so tone-deaf -- Harvard professor says that inequality is a good thing.
It argues that the fact that NYC has vast disparities between rich and poor ("The Bronx and Brooklyn are more unequal than 90% of America's more than 3,000 counties.") doesn't reflect a failure of social policy, but rather is a sign that NYC has unique advantages which inspire rich people and poor people to move to the city and that creates inequality.
Urban inequality is ancient; it may be the very nature of cities to house the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor in close proximity. Plato wrote that "any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich." The urban juxtaposition of wealth and poverty can be jarring, but it reflects the enduring appeal of city life to both haves and have-nots.
...
It is critical to recognize that cities rarely make people poor. Rather, cities attract poor people, with economic opportunity, a better social safety net, and the ability to get around, usually without owning cars.
My research with UCLA economist Matthew Kahn illustrates why less prosperous people sensibly choose cities. We examined neighborhoods near the new transit stations built in various cities after 1973. Poverty rates rose near new train stations, not because the stations impoverished local residents, but because public transit was attracting the poor. We also found higher poverty rates a near bus stops in Los Angeles and subways stops in New York outside of Manhattan.
The poor make reasonable location decisions, and many of them choose New York, partially because of its abundant public transit.
The poor also choose New York because the city has been an opportunity machine for centuries.
Well, okay, but that still doesn't convince me that NYC has found the right balance and just the tone and language of the article doesn't convince me that he has any sense of what a good balance would look like -- it feels like just an apology for the status quo. Perhaps the status quo deserves an apology, but what makes it a "must read?"
My research with UCLA economist Matthew Kahn ...
That is not a promising start to a sentence.
I'm unclear as to what the results of that research are supposed to be. Public transport doesn't impoverish people? Whoever thought it does?
That should have been from Opinionated James T. Kirk.
From Delong's new equitablog, about the founding of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth:
To have credibility, the new group will need to follow the data wherever it leads.... Ms. Boushey noted that some of the apparent causes of rising inequality, such as the decline in marriage rates, were more frequent subjects of discussion on the political right than left....
I think the takeaway of the research is supposed to be: ceterus paribus, we should expect cities to have more inequality than noncities, because they have features that serve as attractors for both the rich and the poor. That seems obvious once stated, but I don't think that's conventional wisdom in economics.
As always, ceterus paribus is doing a lot of work. And the research doesn't address the follow-on question of "should an area with greater inequality have a higher level of redistribution, to help counteract the excessive inequality?"
That seems obvious once stated, but I don't think that's conventional wisdom in economics.
It does indeed seem obvious. I mean, cities are just more heterogeneous than non-cities. About the only place you wouldn't expect this to be true is in genuinely feudal societies.
328: The last few paragraphs read like a warning that de Blasio shouldn't expand aid to the poor, lest New York attract more poor people, becoming like East St. Louis.
cities are just more heterogeneous than non-cities
Note that "more heterogeneous" is not the same thing as "have more inequality".
ceteris paribus
noble comparator
asked to complete
a whole lot of work
lost itself journeying
transmetropolitan
caught out by econs
slap-happy with Burke
Opinionated James T. Kirk with Dyslexia?
Can we ... fix it?
Yes! ...We! KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
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God preserve me from lawyers as clients, particularly ones who think they understand the issues well enough to protect their own interests but don't. And unexpected phone calls from a federal judge sitting on the bench during trial (of a case to which your client is not a party but in which they have an interest) asking for one's position on a legal issue that the client should have been aware of but wasn't, will do an awful lot to test one's cardiac health. As will sprinting up and down stairs to get the input of four layers of management into that position. I can't imagine why I stopped keeping a bottle of whiskey in my desk.
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Everything is, I should say, fine. It was just a startling half-hour, and I had to do some high-speed bullying to get my great-great-grand-boss in line.
319 Most cookbooks seem to say ten to twenty minutes for caramelizing onions IME. I take forty-five to an hour. Slate lady takes three hours. I'm not sure I like onion soup enough to spend three hours stirring some onions slowly simmering away in butter. (She says you can leave it alone for up to five minutes, but anything that I can't ignore for at least fifteen minute intervals counts as constant attention). In related news people who write the cookbook time estimates for risotto need to be stabbed with a wooden spoon wielded by someone who has spent years cooking risotto every week.
In further fallout from the above half hour, I have realized that my own spontaneous version of "Bless his heart" is "He's a lovely person interpersonally, but" followed by an explanation of what stunningly demented behavior the referenced person has engaged in.
Orky and Corky por vida, bitches.
Instead of stories before bed my dad the biologist's kids often wanted him to tell us about animals. A common request was "Orky and Corky and snakes".
I can't imagine why I stopped keeping a bottle of whiskey in my desk.
I've been thinking this week that I should start drinking (not at work, just in general). Tuesday was the final day of about four weeks of very intent focused work and I feel like I still haven't unclenched yet. I don't have much that I need to be worrying about at this moment, but my body doesn't quite believe that, and I'm still a little jumpy. I was wondering if alcohol would help that.
Hell yes alcohol would help. I've been sipping a lot of brandy lately and it rules. I need to get some proper snifters but for now coffee mugs have been working all right.
350: Fewer questions from coworkers and perps.
I'm glad you went there, Sifu, so I didn't have to.
Fewer questions from coworkers and perps.
I'm up in the auto theft unit now and we still do quite a bit of street work but on the days where I'm deskbound it would be pretty awesome to have a drink at my desk.
I'm glad you went there, Sifu, so I didn't have to.
Ah, now I get the joke (I'm a little slow). Yes, that would help with relaxation.
I'm up in the auto theft unit now
A decade ago, when I was taking 'economics of crime' with Prof. Freakonomics, I was told that a huge percentage of auto theft was done by pros enabled by chop shops, and that therefore, even though LoJack had no deterrent value, it had a shockingly large impact on theft rates, when enough people in a metro area were members, because it made it much easier for cops to shut those chop shops down.
Is there anything to that? Did it used to be true, but professional car thieves and the chop shops that enable them have all adapted?
I know a guy who stole a police car. The cop left it running. I think he got away with it. They guy who stole the lights from a police car got caught because having them on your wall in a place visible from the street though a window is a really good way to get caught.
Especially if you turn them on for parties, which how could you not?
I don't know if they got them hooked up or not, but they did jail time.
Surprisingly enough, I have never known anyone who stole a police car or part thereof. I did know one guy who had a riot helmet from somewhere in Europe, but I suspect it may have just been bought from a surplus shop.
Back to the op, the first step should be restoring the original pronunciation of Détroit,
Did it used to be true, but professional car thieves and the chop shops that enable them have all adapted?
Wouldn't surprise me at all in larger markets regarding more valuable cars. LoJack never had much of a presence here. Our stolen skew older model Japanese cars. Some get stripped, some are just for joyriding or for use in other crimes. The pickup trucks are commonly stolen for doing burglaries and metal thefts. 90's Honda's far and away dominate the stats, because the worn ignitions can be turned with a shaved key or damn near any flat piece of metal.
I damn near shot this guy a couple weeks ago. We'd been doing surveillance on a house and he was seen exiting one stolen Honda and came back out of the house a few minutes later and got into another stolen Honda also parked in front of the house. My buddy and I were in unmarked cars that are equipped with low profile red and blues for making stops and we came in from opposite ends of the street to box this guy in so he couldn't flee. I come in behind the car and get there a tad earlier then the other detective and as I throw on the lights and go jumping out of my car the suspect (with pretty quick reflexes to his credit) throws that Civic into gear and tries to do a fast U-turn to get away. He doesn't have near enough room and ends up slamming into a lady coming into her driveway (with her one year old in the back in a carseat), spins her car around, continues through a chainlink fence and down a the sidewalk a few feet before hitting another fencepost and getting kind of pinned in between that and the lady's vehicle. I was coming in on foot to the driver's side and my buddy on the passenger side. Car thief was smart enough to keep his hands up off the wheel like I told him because with us on foot and a mom with her kid in the car just behind him I'd already made the decision that I was going to shoot him in the face if he dropped his hands to that shifter to ram his way out.
We interviewed him at jail couple days later after he'd gotten some sleep and the meth out of his system. Pretty lucid and talkative. Sticks to older Hondas because it's easy to take them casually and make it look natural. Either takes parts to sell off them or drives them to steal rims and stuff off of other Hondas he can move quick for cash. He knows to dump them quick after he's used them because they'll have been reported stolen and goes and takes another one that hasn't been reported yet. He estimated in the three months he'd been out of jail since his last stint he'd stolen around 100 Hondas. I believe him. That night he had three in front of that house.
Bonus small worldness in the above: The middle school that got locked down in the link when he fled from court? My wife was teaching there at the time.
He estimated in the three months he'd been out of jail since his last stint he'd stolen around 100 Hondas.
What does car insurance run out your way?
A friend of mine who lives a couple of blocks away has a '90s Honda. I think she's had it stolen, and recovered it later, at least 4 different times. Mostly people don't fuck with cars in our neighborhood too much, but I guess there's something irresistible about that one.
I live in a carriage house in a pretty walkable college town, and I own a Honda. This thread is relevant to my interests.
What?! no love for Toronto? For those who don't mind a more northerly climate, I'm told the current mayor of T.O. has been advertising some interesting new leisure opportunities.
Who doesn't love Toronto? I love Toronto. I've never been there (except to change planes at the airport), but this crackhead mayor thing is the most entertaining news story ever.
Speaking of police work, SFPD is hiring again...
I get so curious about presidential comments sometimes!
Ceteris Paribus
Well and "de gustibus"
(Child of the 80s,
I hate Classic Rock)
Oh this is just not my medium. The next verse was going to make awfully clever use of Peter Cetera sounding like Ceteris Paribus.
Smearcase, you should totally become a SF police officer.
I mean, look how much money they make! (Way more than Anchorage cops, although that's probably not a meaningful comparison for most people.)
I would make a pretty hilarious cop, it's true. I would probably need a new boyfriend, though, so I would be a sad hilarious cop.
Teo and I are now the overnight DJs of unfogged.
Before you moved it was just me, so this is definitely an improvement.
I would probably need a new boyfriend, though, so I would be a sad hilarious cop.
Well, you would probably be in as good a position as any to find one.
Once I get a job, I will be a less reliable late night unfogged DJ for six months, until I sink back into self-destructive habits.
Right, so that's Smearcase and trapnel into the police, gswift and alameida to co-host a radio advice show, Natilo to become a mercenary, teo to become a DJ... this is all shaping up rather nicely.
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First of two political pause-plays:
Breaking: In Virginia AG race R is officially up 777 votes, but late last night, potential significant error in counting votes in heavily D part of Fairfax county came to light (potentially several thousand votes in area that is 2-1 D). It seems to involve absentee ballot at an "in-person" location that may have been missed, so am a bit confused. Is there a mechanism in Va. where you can drop off absentee ballot at a location instead of mailing them in?
Anyway Fairfac Co. registrar: "Office was virtually empty when this was figured out tonight...It is likely to take 2-3 hours to go through things" in AM"
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If folks have not been following the implosion of the 60 Minutes hideously awful (even before it imploded) "Lingering Questions about BENGHAZI!!!" reporting from last week they should be now. Short version, report relied heavily on pseudonymous Brit (Welsh, I think) mercenary who told self-aggrandizing tale of his actions that night. But turns out he is publishing book under Matalin imprint (owned by a sub of CBS). Turns out his real time incident report said he was not there. He claims he lied in report to supervisor because ordered not to go. Says his testimony to FBI corroborates real story. CBS sticks to story to that point, claims story "year in the making", claims critics only politically-motivated (because, you know, progressive and defending Admin). But now NYTimes has report that FBI testimony is same as original and CBS has scrubbed video from site and admitted it "made a mistake."
Truly awful stuff even by the low standards of American national political media.
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Re: targeted car theft. I think I've told story here before of friend of wife's who came to our wedding in NYC. Expressed concern about her Toyota (Corolla I think) being parked on street overnight on Upper West Side. My wife pooh-poohed fears, family been parking all over NY for years, no problem. Sure enough car stolen and police tell that her year's Corolla is hottest thing going in car theft at the time.
Reportedly, a friend of my Dad's, a fellow ambulance driver I think, who was into cars had a souped up limited edition Sierra Cosworth [RS500, maybe?] in the late 80s at a time when those were particularly popular with thieves. Worried about theft, he had it locked in a garage with a particularly good security system. Which came to naught, as one night a couple of guys turned up at his door with a shotgun and asked for the keys ...
I would probably need a new boyfriend...
You could get a t-shirt that say, "Fuck the police... please."
Everyone loves a man in uniform. Or maybe that's a parade.
387: And BTW that is the report that spurred Lindsay Graham to hold up all appointees until "witnesses" interviewed by Congress. (Many of whom have been.)
911 Is a Joke, staring Brad Garrett, on CBS this fall.
New Orleans has a weird love of classic rock. If it's not the obvious jazz or zydeco, it's The Boys Are Back in Town or Canned Heat or something, on in the background.
Anyone know if Rob Ford has declared his desire to make love to the city of Toronto? Or is he saving that for his post jail stint comeback?
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So, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this whole "millions of people with existing plans getting terminated by their insurers" thing exactly what many people predicted would happen once ACA was instituted? And proponents of the law claimed that the critics were being hysterical, and that nothing bad would ever happen to existing insured people because of the law? And when critics said "but what about the insurance companies? You can't trust them any farther than you can throw them, and this law gives them vastly more resources with which to be sneaky and mean," those objections were also dismissed? Because it certainly seems to me that recent events have tended to support ACA critics' claims far more often than the reverse.
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396: I thought the cancellations were (1) a few anecdotes but overall very few people, definitely not millions, except for (2) people who have "mini-med" plans and other pieces of shit plans that should not exist at all, and that were only granted a reprieve to continue existing by virtue of a delay of some aspects of the implementation of the ACA, but which will eventually be phased out altogether, for good reason as was part of the design of the ACA, so many of those insurers are going ahead and cancelling the plans now because long-term they're not going to be able to offer them (and they possibly can't even offer them in many states in 2014, so they would only be offering them in certain states), etc.
I also think there has been quite a bit of news coverage that (deliberately?) conflates (1) and (2).
I had the impression that there were also lots of misleading communiques from insurers/HR departments describing transitions from one plan to another simply as "cancellations" of the existing plan.
The national media is reporting something like 3.5 million plans already having been cancelled, with a suggestion -- from the Administration -- that it could be quite a bit more. So it would seem that, in substance, either the press or the pro-ACA people are basically lying.
397 -- My guess would be that actually tons of policies are non-compliant, often in trivial ways,* and many many people in the individual market have made changes of one kind or another in the last 3.5 years,** and so the grandfather is inapplicable. I got a cancellation notice, for example, from BCBS, along with a proposed plan that seems fairly comparable.
* Of course they are, since the law imposes specific requirements that didn't exist in 2009, and so even a good policy has to be modified to comply.
** We change stuff around nearly every year. Back in the 90s, when I had a job that provided health insurance, my employer changed carriers every 2 or 3 years: I doubt this is particularly rare.
Right. Numbers on 'cancellation' don't mean anything negative. A negative outcome is one where someone had a plan (that provided meaningful health insurance at all) cancelled, and doesn't have a replacement option for about the same money or less.
If you are on a group plan you aren't affected. If you make less than the 400% of poverty level, i.e. roughly median income you're better off because of subsidies (does not apply to Medicaid gap people in the wrong states, but how many of them have even half way decent individual plans?). If you don't have insurance and think it would be nice to have some you're better off. If you are an individual policy holder and you are above the subsidy level but you're not in a low risk pool you are either better off or it's a draw. If you're an individual policy holder and make more than 400% of the poverty line and are in a low risk pool you're hosed. Among the 315 million Americans there probably are 'millions' in that last category, most of them middle class. But overall, it's pretty clear that the numbers of those who are hurt are massively outweighed by those who are helped.
It may be 'misleading' to call the notices a 'cancellation,' but it wouldn't shock me if state regulators required carriers to call any non-renewal -- including non-renewal because the company is no longer offering the exact product, 'cancellation.'
The direction I think useful is figuring out whether companies are deliberately ignoring the grandfather. It probably make business sense to cut off a program that is now non-compliant as to 40% of policy holder (60% being grandfathered) , and just move everyone to something compliant.
Oh, sure, 400 is true. I wouldn't take that to mean your "plan was being terminated", certainly not in any catastrophic ways like critics of the ACA predicted. I'm talking about people who aren't being offered replacement coverage by their insurers, or are only being offered coverage at significantly higher cost. (Those are the only real concerns, aren't they?) And again, I think those cases are extremely few, except for people who had phantom insurance in the first place.
If you're an individual policy holder and make more than 400% of the poverty line and are in a low risk pool you're hosed.
Can you elaborate?
401/404: Well, so what does "extremely few" constitute here? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? Surely there must be some way to verify that? Or do we just have to trust what the insurance company PR reps say?
Your insurance pool has suddenly gone from low risk to average risk. That means premiums have to go up, and you're not getting any subsidies to compensate for that.
I think the idea is that in states like CA, where it was really easy to deny insurance in the individual market, people who had individual insurance were unusually healthy, so insurance was cheap -- the pool of people who were allowed to buy it at all were low risk. If you were in that group of people who were allowed to buy cheap insurance before the ACA, you might see your premiums go up.
408: And you're also guaranteed to remain in the average risk pool even when, later in life, you become a higher risk. So not exactly hosed in the big picture.
407: Pretty much every Fox News poster child who has come forward crying about how their great plan has been cancelled has turned out, upon further examination, to be either better off or only slightly (and affordably) worse off under the options now available to them. So if they can't dredge up people who are genuinely fucked over I suspect "extremely few" is probably vanishingly small and in any case is surely dwarfed by the number of people who will be better off, whether through lower premiums or by gaining access to insurance in the first place.
410.1 seems like the appropriate counterpoint to 409.
4006: If you're an individual policy holder and make more than 400% of the poverty line and are in a low risk pool you're hosed.
I think "hosed" is something of an overstatement--but , yes, there ill be those (and bmaz is a loud example)--who will pay more next year. 409 is right, and the effect is further pronounced in ":high cost" areas like parts of CA where the 400% of poverty level does not look like a lot of money. Am looking for the links, but there are a pair of related stories (first was in ProPublica) about an Obama-supporting couple near SF who were going from $550 to >$1000. And the $500 plan was good. But they were in it because healthy--and I have no idea if they had any guarantee to re-up if they got sick. So it was a good policy for a year, not sure if beyond.
The whole deal is some middle and upper middle class people with good verbal skills are being "negatively" impacted to a relatively small degree. Like air control and the sequester. History's Greatest Monsters. And I'm one.
have no idea if they had any guarantee to re-up if they got sick
Of course not. Do any health insurance plans work that way?
411: Yes it is. Being in the healthy low-risk pool is great as long as you are in the healthy low-risk pool.
A special case of the maxim that "the unsustainable course of action is generally better than the sustainable one--other than being unsustainable." I use that one a lot in my work.
It seems like this would be most harmful to people who had, as JPS mentions, an income that was over 400% of poverty level, but not very much disposable income. Say, for instance, people who were over-extended on their mortgage. So there could be some ripple effects as that extra several hundred dollars a month eats into an already precarious budget.
413: Right. But I did not know that in fact, so was being cautious.
415: right, and I think the criticism of the ACA from the left that the subsidies should have been made more generous were and are spot on. Also, our taxes should be more progressive.
It seems like this would be most harmful to people who had, as JPS mentions, an income that was over 400% of poverty level, but not very much disposable income.
I honestly did not expect to see the day when Natilo would be fighting against the Obama administration on behalf of the oppressed masses making more than $94,200 a year.
OK, here is the ProPublica report. (Dickheadedly entitled "Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare") The article contains this illuminating bit of bullshit from a Kaiser spokesmanL
I called Kaiser Permanente and spoke to spokesman Chris Stenrud, who used to work for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He told me that this was indeed a good plan. Patients in the plan, known as 40/4000, were remarkably healthy, had low medical costs and had not seen their premiums increase in years. "Our actuaries still aren't entirely sure why that was," he said.Ha! You're actuaries knew exactly why--they had selected the pool that way. Confirmation in this followup via TPM:So, yeah, it was great insurance while they had it.
Oops lost the 2nd blockquote.
There was a bigger issue, too. The plan was medically underwritten, meaning that it carefully chose members based on their health status. The Affordable Care Act eliminates such screening and requires that insurers take all comers. "Because their current insurance pool is comprised of healthier people who use fewer medical services, the premium level needed to pay for those services is also less," Stenrud wrote.
For instance, David Frum, who relates his $200/month story in a link for this column of his in which he lays out the issue:
Talking Points Memo today offers a chart suggesting that the losers under Obamacare will number about 3 percent of the population. Why, that's only...9 million people. Nine million of the best educated, most affluent, and most vocal people in the country. How much trouble can they make? So really--it's no story."BTW--he gets the 3% wrong they are potential losers by the "how much do I pay *this* year for pretty good health insurance" standard. The actual David Frums are a portion of that.
Let me be the first to suggest Death Panels.
"Obamacare's real victims: a millionaire paying $600 a month for health care" -- Michael Cohen
In reference to:
Dylan Ratigan "I bought a catastrophic health policy for $170/mo when I left MSNBC," Ratigan confessed. "Obamacare cancelled the policy. New rate $600/mo. Thnx Mr. President!"
418: Yeah, for a 4 person family. There are parts of the country, like NYC and SF where that isn't huge money, of course. Shit, my working-class friends in Brooklyn (a Starbucks barista and a college janitor) gross something like $60K a year, which isn't horrible, but they hardly live in the lap of luxury either. If they were supporting two kids, they'd be just scraping by.
I was just playing around with MNSure to see where I would stand. Looks like a single person, my age and zip code, non-smoking, with a moderate ($2000) deductible, would be looking at somewhere in the $130-$260 range for a monthly premium. I'm not sure what my subsidy would be in that instance, is there a calculator for that?
A friend, an artist/arts administrator person with a new baby, just posted that he could find no plans at all. I dunno what his partner makes, but I don't think it is a lot.
But if they were supporting two kids, they'd be eligible for subsidies on their health care.
424: Kaiser Family Foundation has a calculator with relatively high estimates for basic premiums. But MNSure ought to be able to do it more accurately.
Here's a chart. Find where you are as a percentage of the poverty line, and it tells you what the maximum premium you should have to pay is, if you buy the 2d lowest cost silver plan available on the exchange. So figure out what line on the chart you're on, price the second-cheapest silver plan, and Bob's your uncle.
424: just posted that he could find no plans at all
Natilo, I don't understand what this means. He can't find a plan that's affordable? Realize that whatever premium rates are posted on the state exchange site are the sticker price, before subsidy.
The Kaiser Family Foundation subsidy calculator is here, but as Minivet says, MNSure should be able to give a more accurate assessment.
Come on trapnel, get on that SFPD application process. You've already fulfilled the misanthropy and self loathing parts of the job, might as well get a pension while you're at it. While I don't doubt their pension used to be better, 3 percent a year is still pretty good and they've got retiree health care. I've also heard they do a 4x10 type schedule same as my department, and I love it. Three days a week off, and they're likely just banking their holidays in addition to their vacation the way we do. Makes for having like five weeks a year of time off to use even your first few years and it'll only go up from there.
I'm actually considering it, but even aside from it being a pretty radical change in my sense of identity, I don't know if I could withstand the Employment, Character, and Background investigation:
Reasons for rejection include use of controlled substances, ... moral character (integrity), safe driving practices [do bikes count here?], confronting and overcoming problems, ... decision making and judgment, personal accountability and responsibility, work habits, truthfulness ...
If you can be rejected for safe driving, I think you'll be fine.
Apparently you can also be rejected for overcoming problems. How harsh is that?
I've seen CSI. If you've overcome your problems, you'll have nothing to talk about while you take pictures of the crime scene.
430: Do it do it do it do it. You need the job, and any police force needs people like you. Also, doubling the volume of police anecdotes in comments here is a mitzvah.
I keep hoping this thread will be about Detroit Metal City.
aside from it being a pretty radical change in my sense of identity, I don't know if I could withstand the Employment, Character, and Background investigation:
I know what you mean. But it's a running joke between quite a few of us that guys who always wanted to do this are weirdos and the best guys in the profession came to it via "life's just not working out, guess I'll go be a fucking cop".
Bikes aren't a worry, what they're looking for is a history of things like reckless driving tickets, DUI, excessive speeding, etc. that would indicate you'll be a liability. Recent drug use will be a problem, and hard drugs are usually a disqualifier. Smoking pot a few times years ago in college is given some leeway, smoking pot regulalry in the last year is not.
One more vote for TrapnelCop.
All these young people with their vacillating goals. Trapnel, become a police office in San Francisco. Teo, write a book. Everybody else go figure out if primates are less likely to experience food shortages than other animals.
428: I got clarification that it was just a glitch after all. So never mind.
427: Okay, so someone in basically my position would max out around $160. That's pretty decent. I mean, I would be REALLY broke if I were in that position, probably. Like, no money for copays, but I guess if you had to do it, you could.
441: Well, good! Hopefully he can find something that's affordable, where "affordable" means no more than 9.5% of income (if you're below 400% of the poverty line).
I'm a bit of an ACA hater, but I just can't get worked up about people having to change their insurance plans. If we had gone single payer, everyone would have had to change their plans.
