voluntaryXchange

I Can Confirm

Three decades before Uber Eats and Door Dash, I delivered for a large Italian restaurant.

And on some long shifts I was part of the 28% of drivers who pilfered a snack out of someone’s order. Usually a single chicken wing out of a bucket of 50 (this was in Buffalo), and never more than 2 or 3 in an evening. Usually this was during the Friday and Saturday dinner rush when there were several hours where there would never be time to grab something back at the restaurant.

Two Car Graveyards

There was a minor story on the news about a car graveyard appearing in the middle of a rundown residential block in the UK.

It reminded me that there are two visible from I-15 in central Utah. Both appear to be graveyards, rather than actively working junkyards.

This one, at the end of the dirt road leading in from the right side, is around mile marker 212 is and over ten miles from the nearest town:

It is in an arroyo, and only visible if you are heading north. You can zoom in and out if you go to Google Maps. Here it is on Street View:

This  one near mile marker 165 is also only visible heading north:

It’s hard to tell, but this looks like the cars are abandoned in an old sand pit. You can zoom in on it here. It’s on the outskirts of Fillmore. I couldn’t find this one on Street View, which is odd because you can see down into it from a passenger car.

This is kind of a weird thing … I know. But these are mostly posted for personal interest … I’ve been driving by these about once a month for a few years, and they’re landmarks for me now. For some reason, they always make me think of Kermit and Fozzie Bear finding an old rusted Studebaker in The Muppet Movie.

BTW: It may be an acquired taste, but I always find both areas to be far more scenic to drive through than they appear on satellite images.

Cross-Country Driving Trivia

Surfing from this, I found a few details about the first woman to drive across the U.S. The trip was sponsored by an automaker that promoted driving by women.

In 1909, 4 women (only 1 of whom could drive) took 59 days to drive 3,800 miles from New York to San Francisco. It was paved less than 5% of the way. With few maps, they mostly followed telegraph poles; more wires led to bigger towns.

That sent me back to the first person to drive cross-country. In 1903 it took 63 days, and was done on a bet, without much corporate support.

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Navel Gazing

My mother drove Buffalo to Long Beach and back, twice, in 1936 and 1938. Even when she first told me about them in the 1970’s she remembered very little, and there are no pictures. Petrified wood in the Painted Desert is the big memory, so she did do Route 66 in the good ol’ days. She was 8 and 10, and in her defense I guess I don’t remember much of my first big road trip — Buffalo to Boston — when I was nine (although I remember a whole lot more about Boston than she ever did about Long Beach).

Anyway, I have never met anyone who did the trip before she did. But, her parents were rich and in a position to take a long time off of work, so it may have been a thing with the country club set back in the 30’s.

FWIW: I still haven’t done east to west completely, although I have done a 2,400 miler, a 2000 miler,  and a 1900 miler on 3 different parts of it. I have also done 1,300 north coast to south coast.

Thomas Friedman Gets What Scares Me

He’s worried that Trump will get re-elected, possibly easily. Me too.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

I tend to think of Friedman as a twit who can turn a phrase well enough to be worthwhile reading once in a while.†

But here I think he gets the broader point: just because Republicans have a candidate many people will vote against (me included), this does not mean the Democrats should also come up with a candidate that people will vote against.

I would add two things. First, incumbents rarely lose, which plays to Trump’s advantage. Second, Democrats love Obama, and yet he put up the third worst showing of an incumbent running for re-election since Hoover: he should not be viewed as an ideal.

† I still tell this story. I highlight books. A lot. Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century is a book I read cover to cover, enjoyed very much, and highlighted not one thing. It was intellectual cotton candy.

Buffalo Near the Bottom

I fled Buffalo 30 years ago next month: a job in another state called.

The U.S. Metropolitan Area Economic Freedom Index helps explain why.

Of the 52 metropolitan areas with populations over a million, Buffalo ranks 50th.

And things aren’t good in upstate: close neighbor Rochester (half an hour of country from outer suburb to outer suburb) is ranked 51st. Pity actually … Rochester had a lot going for it 30 years ago before its big hometown corporations tanked.

Now, this is published by Reason, so you can imagine the priorities embedded in their data (and recall the argument made here many times that all rankings like this are questionable).

Anyway, Buffalo is not at the very bottom for government spending. But, In 9 survey years going back to 1972, it was never higher than 49th in tax burden, and never higher than 50th in labor market freedom.

WalletHub (disclaimer: they occasionally quote me, but don’t pay me for squat) has an alternative ranking. Out of 150 cities, Buffalo ranks 114th.

WTF: Just noticed that it is no longer the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA, but rather the Buffalo-Cheektowaga-Niagara Falls MSA. Cheektowaga? Yes, it’s a big suburb, but one of several. My guess is that it gets included because the airport is in it. Anyway, Cheektowaga was always in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls MSA, so it is a change of name rather than region.

Via Newmark’s Door.

R.I.P. Johnny Savuka

In my circle, I’m the world music person. It’s a good thing the vXgirl is in Africa, or I’d be making her listen to Savuka all day. Frontman Johhny Clegg has died.

Lot’s of people will be showing this video of “Asimbonanga” with Nelson Mandela on stage. I believe that’s Mandisa Dlanga with the ridiculous voice leading him out.

For my part I would have liked to have found something from their performance on SNL to post, but I’ll have to settle for a song I’ve always thought was a good one for newbies:

I got turned on to this music by a woman from New Zealand who was working at a pub called the Bricklayer’s Arms in the West End in 1983. Of all things, she was moving on to South Africa, which at the time (as an American) I thought was kind of crazy. Can’t remember her name, but I wonder how her life’s journey turned out.

Anyway, that was his previous band, Juluka, which was mighty good too. I’m going by ancient memories, but I believe this seminal version was one of the songs she’s sneak on to the pub’s sound system when the office worker clientele had gone home:

When African music (for me) consisted of King Sunny, this stuff was a revelation.

FWIW: I think with this find, for once, I got out in front of Paul Hinz for musical curiosity.

Pets and Love

Interesting piece on whether pets love us, and if so what sort of love do they express? Discussed through the lens of the forms the Greeks thought about: storge, eros, and philia (the regular feeding part is in the last one).

We’ve only had 3 birds, and not for 25 years, so this was surprising:

Birds are far more likely to feel a warmth for their owners that you could term eros. A parrot that is tenderly stroked in the wrong places by its minder, for instance, will often misread friendship signals as foreplay and begin producing sex hormones. Should you wish not to sexually excite a parrot, try not to stroke down its back or on, or under, its wings.

I hope Big, Thibodaux, and Tucson didn’t get the wrong idea.

I also wonder about our current oldest: a sheltie mix who was 7-10 when we rescued him and is now 12-15, and the most independent dog I’ve ever known. Most days, he is too weak and arthritic to get up if he’s laid down a slippery surface. So he makes a special bark for help: plaintive, high-pitched, and in singletons. And I show up and lift him a little so he can get his legs perpendicular. I interpret his emotions afterwards as a combination of appreciation and annoyance, but I wonder if there’s some storge in the there too. I know that’s what it is for me: he’s part of my family and I do what needs to be done for them, no questions asked.

There’s nothing in there about agape and philautia though. I think I’ve made strong arguments with the vXyoungman that a lot of what dogs experience may be agape. Think about it. For dogs, many of us are essentially immortal and unchanging: a dog may go from puppy to old age without its humans visibly aging much at all. We leave and come back. We often bring food with us, in a way that seems effortless. And we do magical things sometimes. For starters, what on Earth does a dog think of when it sees the things a hand can do? And I still remember the delivery of our first PC just before Christmas in 1994. A bunch of large boxes arrived at the door all at once. Unable to get away with wrapping them, I told the vXwife to hide in the other room, while I covered them with blankets. When I told her to come out … the dogs were sitting/climbing on the magical new pieces of furniture we’d gotten.

Read the whole thing, by Jules Howard, and entitled “Do our pets ever really love us – or do they just stick around for the food?” in the July 16th issue of The Guardian.

I Thought NOLA Was a Target of Yellow Fever Not Yellow Journalism

National journalists are making it up as they go along with their coverage of Hurricane Barry.

… Unsolicited advice to the good people of New Orleans …

It’s a bad idea for people in New Orleans to listen to Al Roker instead of the actual experts on the ground …

… the only people who want us to panic seem to be those who think the main lesson of Hurricane Katrina was that the city should have evacuated more quickly.

New Orleans, of course, did not flood in 2005 because it was hit by a hurricane. It flooded because the federal government’s levee protection system failed. The catastrophic flooding began after Katrina left.

I would add that the levees failed in exactly the way everyone knew they would fail if they were going to. This was explained to me by my former colleague Tim Ryan prior to Hurricane Andrew’s passage in 1992.

Do note that the author uses Al Roker as a prime example, but isn’t picking on him only:

Al Roker is not a meteorologist.

Al Roker has never lived anywhere even close to the Gulf of Mexico. He is, however, second cousins with Lenny Kravitz, and Lenny Kravitz once owned a house in the French Quarter.

I’m singling out Roker because he calls himself a weatherman, but he isn’t the only national reporter who has completely misrepresented the on-the-ground reality.

This morning, MSNBC reported that New Orleans was “already underwater.” Not true.

The reporting is so bad that the City tweeted a response directly at the Washington Post:

That’s rough.

I’m a veteran of 9 years in NOLA (many hurricanes and one evacuation), but not an expert. Even so, I can attest that even before Katrina there seemed to be little understanding outside the Gulf region of how hurricanes work and how big the disaster area will be.

BTW: Andrew made landfall in Louisiana in just about the same place as Barry — about 40 miles southwest of New Orleans.

Read the whole piece by Lamar White Jr., entitled “National News Coverage of Tropical Storm Barry Is Its Own Disaster” at Bayoubrief.

Empty Nesting

For the first time in over 20 years there are no kids in our house (don’t worry, the vXgirl plans to be back in late August).

Rodent Humor

If you’ve ever had a rodent as a pet … sometimes … in the dark of night … the wheel just stops spinning. Here’s why:

Those days passed out of our house about 3 years ago over Thanksgiving. RIP Clarence.