Yesterday was an exciting day on the Quest for My (New) Local (Q4ML) when two things happened. First, I walked with Morgan to library for an activity. While she was crafting, I started talking with another dad who was wearing a “Coffee & Beer; Beer & Coffee” shirt and he excitedly had ideas about where I should go. He started by listing the best local microbreweries, one of which I visited back in Feb when we came to check out Manchester. There were several good recommendations before he asked if I was interested in “Traditional Pubs”. When I asked for the top 5 in the city, his eyes lit up. I assumed he would start with the one that seems to be at the top of all the lists, Britons Protection. (We also visited this pub in Feb, see the last photo in Morgan’s post. If it were closer, I would already have completed my Quest). To my surprise, he said that was Top 5, but not number 1. That honor goes to Marble Arch Inn… which happens to be two blocks from our flat and high on my list of next places to try. I can’t wait!
The next exciting event in my Quest yesterday was my second run with the Ancoats Run Club. After the run, about half of us grabbed a beer from Seven Bro7hers Brewing. Although not a Traditional Pub, it has good beer and is close enough to at least consider. Even if it doesn’t become My Local, I’m certain that I’ll be returning.
Details:
After one of my hottest runs in a while, all I really wanted was something cold. Although it looks like they do have cask ale (at least occasionally), I saw a Helles lager on the board as I walked up and my mind was instantly decided. When I ordered, I was asked if it was “for here or to go”? Not the sort of question I ever got in Seattle. There is a great square where people gathered after work or after the run so I took mine to go and went back outside.
Score:
Cask: Yes (I saw the beer engines, but couldn’t tell if anything was on cask currently) Fireplace: Not that I saw Recorded Music: No Seating: Good mix with at least a few comfy couches (This is a new category suggested after the Crown & Kettle review) Community Energy: Another new category. Hard to judge for just the brewery since most people were outside, but there was huge community energy in the square Granddad: 1, I wasn’t the oldest there and I think he would have been comfortable there, but focusing on microbrews (and many that were very hoppy) would probably make it not his top spot. Morgan: 1, She wasn’t with me, but the couches convinced her we should go back Overall:6 / 10 — Still hot from the run, I spent only a little time in the actual brewery itself. As a result, several of the categories might not be judged with absolute fidelity, but as I mentioned before, it’s not really in the running. It has good beer and outdoor seating which on a hot day, wins.
Overview: I’ve been trying to repair broken stuff since I was a kid. When I was about 7, my walkie-talkie stopped working. With my dad’s help, I took it apart, found a broken wire, soldered it back in place, and to my amazement, it worked again.
It’s never made sense to me why companies are so concerned about people fixing their devices. They add all kinds of warning stickers and are unwilling to share repair guides they have, even after they stop manufacturing devices. The Right to Repair has clearly been a cause I support for a while and reading more about the struggle convinced me we need to continue to push for this. (Among other reasons, it’s one topic that brings conservative farmers and liberal environmentalist into agreement and there are remarkably few such topics these days).
This book covers how we went from a country of fixers and tinkerers to one where we just throw away broken things. I also covers much of the work that’s been done to rebuild the repair culture.
As if to show the importance of being able to repair the things we own, when I got to the section about washing machines being one of the least likely appliances to be repaired, my 17 year old washing machine needed repairs (again). By this point, I was very comfortable moving the dryer, taking the top off it and poking around inside. It first broke about 7 or 8 years ago so by repairing it, I was able to double it’s lifespan for a fraction of what it would cost to replace.
I would certainly recommend this book. I would also recommend trying to fix stuff. Remember, if something’s broken and you’re thinking about replacing it, the absolute worst way you could mess it up by trying to repair it would cause you to… replace it. You might be able to fix it, saving money and learning how things work in the process.
Highlights:
Jibo illustrates the risks to repair posed by the Internet of Things. The robot’s physical components could be repaired. If its screen was on the fritz, it could be replaced. If a sensor wasn’t working properly, it could be recalibrated. Even the embedded software in the device could be updated and patched. But most of Jibo’s features were not housed in its plastic shell. Instead, they resided on a server that Jibo owners could not access, let alone repair. Jibo’s basic operation, as purchasers eventually learned, depended on hardware and software over which they had no control. The tether connecting devices to remote servers in unknown locations is a core, if not defining, feature of smart devices. On a fundamental level, the Internet of Things as currently constructed is incompatible with repair
three sets of concrete benefits that flow from repair. First, repair helps consumers save money by extending the lifespan of products and fostering secondary markets. Second, repair lessens the massive environmental burden of modern consumerism, from the extraction of natural resources to the eventual disposal of the devices we buy. Finally, repair helps us grow and flourish as people. Through repai / 7 — r, we become better informed about the world around us, develop analytical and problem-solving skills, exercise greater autonomy, and build stronger communities.
If we can slow the replacement cycle, we will spend less over the course of our lives on clothes, cars, and electronics. And those expenses add up. Collectively, we spend unthinkable sums on new devices–$500 billion a year on smartphones, and roughly the same on household appliances. Both of those figures, however, are dwarfed by the nearly $3 trillion we spend every year buying cars.
In perhaps the most extreme example, a customer took his Mac Book Pro to Apple because the display was completely dark. After months of attempted repairs totaling more than $10,000–including two replaced logic boards and eventually an entirely new laptop–an Apple technician uncovered the issue. The screen brightness was turned to zero, a problem solved with a single keystroke.
fill your water bottle, and strap on your helmet, only to discover a flat tire. If you have the parts, tools, and know-how to swap out a punctured innertube, the flat is an annoyance, a mere stumbling block. But without the ability to repair, your plans are undone. You are defeated by circumstance. Repair cultivates a sense of self-sufficiency and autonomy that is increasingly rare in a world shaped by networked technologies.
consider how the inability to repair motorized wheelchairs can leave their users immobile and isolated. When the battery in the motorized wheelchair Kenny Maestas used couldn’t hold a charge, the device maker told him it would be a month before a technician could look at it. Even if the company had the necessary parts in stock, its policy insisted on separate inspection and repair appointments. In the end, it took more than two months before Kenny’s wheelchair was running again.
repair helps develop valuable problem-solving skills. Repairs vary in their difficulty. Some failures are easy to diagnose and simple to fix. But often, repair is far from straight forward. There is no simple algorithm or checklist to follow. It requires a creative, even improvisatory approach. These more challenging repairs require you to start with an immediate problem–your car won’t start–and identify potential causes within a complex system. Maybe the battery is dead, or maybe it’s one of a dozen other possible problems: a failed timing belt, a clogged fuel filter, carbon-fouled sparkplugs, a cracked distributor cap, a bad fuel pump, or an oversensitive security system, among others. Determining the right diagnosis requires some combination of experience, intuition, educated guessing, and trial and error.
By deliberately directing attention to the cracks and their repair, kintsugi draws on the Japanese notions of mottainai a feeling of regret over waste–and wabi-sabi–an aesthetic tradition that embraces imperfection and impermanence. Not only does kintsugi extend the useful life of objects, but it respects the effort and artistry of the original creator and the repairer inequal measure.
Landlords sat idly by as their tenants endured deteriorating buildings. Device makers, on the other hand, play a far more active role in obstructing repair. Imagine you have a leaky pipe flooding your kitchen. There are worse things your landlord could do than ignore your pleas for a fix. They could buy up all the wrenches in town and refuses to sell you one. They could refuse to let your plumber in the building, insisting you hire their Preferred Plumbing Partner who happens to charge twice the market rate. They could conceal your pipes behind a locked door and refuse to give you a key. When it comes to our devices, that’s too often the sort of reaction we can expect from the most powerful and profitable companies on the planet.
Replacement bearings are generally not terribly expensive, only $40 or so. But the job is labor intensive, as it involves the removal of the drum and the reassembly of the machine. The price for a repair is often nearly as much as buying a replacement.
As Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
we ought to be incredibly skeptical of any technology deployed to undo the very idea of interchangeable parts.
a supply chain focused on making new products is more efficient if it devotes minimal resources to servicing old ones, even if they end up in landfills. In the same way, Uber is more profitable if it refuses to recognize drivers as employees, Facebook is more profitable if it opens its platform to disinformation, and fossil-fuel companies are more profitable if they can pollute at will. Companies profit by externalizing costs. That doesn’t mean we should let them.
Despite the dire warnings, there are no laws, rules, or regulations in the United States concerning used or expired car seats. And regulators in countries like Sweden, which has some of the most stringent child safety laws in the world, actually encourage the use of secondhand car seats. When pressed by Minter, leading car-seat manufacturers and retailers offered no evidence supporting their claims.
The iPhone was also the best predictor of educational attainment. Back in 1992, before computing technology became pervasive, the best predictor was Grey Poupon mustard.
Even with in the internal logic of intellectual property law, repair deserves greater emphasis. Rather than a purely countervailing consideration, repair is intertwined with questions of innovation and progress. Our approach to repair influences what sort of innovations we are likely to see, who can access Repair and Intellectual Property, and under what conditions. In that sense, our attitudes about repair reflect what sort of technological and social progress we value.
But annual product releases aren’t compatible with truly innovative breakthroughs, at least not on any regular basis. Even if Apple, Samsung, and other device makers could churn out major new features every year, why bother? People need phones, cars, and dishwashers. If they can’t fix their current devices, they’ll buy new ones even without new major technological advances. In contrast, an environment that encourages repair creates stronger incentives for genuine innovation. If you can reliably and cheaply keep your four-year-old phone or decade-old car working, you’re more likely to holdout for some significant new functionality before replacing it.
As a matter of legislative history, Bork’s assertions have been thoroughly debunked. Nonetheless,they found a receptive audience in the Supreme Court. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Court’s approach to antitrust began to shift, adopting the consumer welfare framing of the Chicago School. By the mid 2000s, Justice Scalia–writing for a unanimous Court–was praising monopolies: “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free market system. The opportunity to charge monopoly prices–at least for a short period–is what attracts ‘business acumen’ in the first place; it induces risk taking that produces innovation and economic growth.”
As Justice Louis Brandeis put it, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Firms are also obligated to maintain a stock of parts available to third-party repair providers. Makers of electronics and appliances with wholesale prices above $50 must make parts and information available for at least three years. For devices over $100 at wholesale, that requirement extends to seven years. Given California’s size, the Song-Beverly Act has shaped device maker policies nationwide.
Depending on the product, between 62 and 83 percent of European consumers elected to repair their products in the experiment. But when the level of effort was increased, the experimenters found a significant decline in repairs. When repair is less convenient, fewer people do it. Rather disconcertingly, the same was not true for replacement. When the effort needed to replace a product increased, there was no notable drop in replacement.
A number of Austrian states and cities offer “repair bonuses” that cover as much as 50 percent of the cost of repairs. And in 2020, France launched a program that offers individuals €50 to spend on professional bike repairs in an effort to reduce traffic.
And as the Commission pointed out, if repair presents safety risks, manufacturers are best positioned to mitigate them through design changes.
Having recently arrived in Manchester, I realized I needed to find a local pub that I could call my own. I wanted to find as close to the perfect pub that I could within easy walking distance of our flat… But that leads to the important question, what makes the perfect pub? In my mind, it’s a place with hygge. The kind of place you could enjoy while a British winter storm rages outside; where you could chat with old friend or make new ones and the regulars know you; somewhere that feels like a true Third Place… But how do you quantify those into something that can be measured or compared.
After overthinking it for far too long, I came up with five criteria. First, do that have cask ale? This is fairly common in the UK, but still worth noting, especially if they have only or mostly cask ale. Next, does it have a fireplace. It’s August as I start this quest and expected to be 30° C tomorrow so we have no use for this now, but when the hypothetical storm arrives in November, it will be wonderful. Third, is there recorded music playing? This is a “reverse point” because most of the better pubs I can think of don’t play recorded music and if they do, it’s fairly quiet. If the pub is blasting the latest Top 40 at 85+ dB, it’s going to loose a point. Live music, doesn’t could against them.
The final two criteria are more subjective and look at how other people would rate the pub and are measured on a 0-2 scale. First, what would granddad think? This is not necessarily what my granddad would think, but more about the platonic ideal of grandfatherliness. Would he feel comfortable ganging out there? A night club with strobe lights and loud music scores a 0, while a place where I’m one of the youngest there scores a 2. Finally, what does Morgan think? Since she will likely be joining me more often than not, her opinion of the place is important. When I asked her what she’s looking for, she said, “Um… I duh know… is it good?” Well, fair enough, that’s basically what I said when I started this. For her, a 0 means she doesn’t want to go back, a 1 she’d be fine returning to, and a 2 means we definitely need to go back there.
I’m sure I’m missing some very important criteria. What else would you look for in a pub? Let me know below and I’ll look at updating the scoring system.
Details:
With the rough rubric sorted, we started our quest at the Crown & Kettle just down the road. It was a warm day with people spilling out onto the picnic tables out front. Once inside, the highly decorated vaulted ceiling is what I would picture for a 1920’s bank, but no longer kept at the level of “bank shine”. Good selection of beers and about a dozen ciders which seems unusual to me. Maybe they’ve gotten more popular since I last lived here? All beers were listed on TV screens and the one in our corner was a bit small for all the beers (granddad would have had a hard time reading it… unless I was leaning on the bar, I had a hard time reading it). My phone started acting up so I didn’t get any photos, but hope to include those in future updates. I also saw that they have a brewery Tap Takeover at the end of the month, so that will be worth going back to check out.
Score:
Cask: Yes (+1) Fireplace: Didn’t see it (0) Recorded Music: Yes, loud outside, but not too bad inside (0) Granddad: I wasn’t the oldest and I certainly wasn’t the youngest (1) Morgan: She loved the cat clocks on the wall. None of the tails were swinging, but she still thought they were cool (2) Overall:4 / 7 — Not bad and about where I’d hope our first pub landed, with room to move in both directions. Overall, it’s close and we will definitely be going back but we’ll have to check out other first. Time to keep exploring Manchester.
Shortly after moving to Seattle, we put string lights over our patio to better enjoy the long summer evenings and got a simple remote control to turn them on and off. After a year, the remote stopped working. Rather than buy another one, I realized it’s just a wireless receiver and a relay… I could build that. So I did.
I gutted the weatherproof box that held the electronics and started building. The old system appeared to transmit over 433MHz. I thought it would be nicer to control the lights from my phone and I already had some experience building BLE devices. I put an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, 5v relay, and USB power plug in the box. A bit of coding and everything worked great.
Well, five years later, I’ve updated my phone and the code I wrote no longer runs on the latest version of Android. Going back and redoing a project is never as fun as building it the first time so I hacked a solution that worked on my phone only but isn’t user-friendly enough for anyone else. That’s where the project sat for five months… until I received my first Cheap Yellow Display (CYD). That is the semi-official name.
This thing is fun. It has a full touchscreen, ESP32 with Bluetooth and WiFi, several I/O ports, and all programmable within Arduino IDE. After looking at the demos and building a simple temperature gauge, I started working on a new control board for my outdoor lights. I kept it simple with just the On and Off buttons I had in the app I wrote years ago, but maybe I need additional functionality? Automatically switch on at sunset based on data it grabs over wifi?
Anyhow, these ~$20 devices are fun to play around with. I’ve got another one coming and now I’m trying to figure out other projects for them. Have you built with one? Any recommendations for project ideas to try or modifications for my porch lights?
For anyone interested, here’s the code I wrote (with a lot of help from other examples) for the CYD:
Overview: After reading The Lines that Make Us years ago, I was excited when I heard another collection of Nathan’s stories were coming out. The physical book was released first and while I was waiting for the ebook to be released, I ended up riding the 7 bus home one night and had Nathan driving. We talked about how excited I was to read his new book and how I’d liked his last set of stories about driving the 7. As I walked back to my seat, another passenger asked, “Did you say he’s written a book?” I let her know about both of them.
This is another telling of his experiences, mostly driving buses that I have ridden often while living in Seattle. The number 7 is a special line with people from all walks of life on it, but not everyone sees what makes this route so wonderful. Admittedly, my first ride on it left me questioning Seattle buses as well, but I started talking to people when I rode it and found the friendliest group of people. They might be on their way to work at Amazon or unhoused and looking for somewhere dry to sit for a while. You never know who will be riding with you but they are often smiling and happy to talk, especially when I rode with my young kid. These stories highlight so much of what makes this route (and much of Seattle) so uniquely great.
Highlights:
People littered on his bus all the time, and he was tired of it. He drove the E, and I the 7; two routes whose coach interiors you can instantly identify by the sheer amount of wanton filth (I prefer the term ‘neighborhood seasoning’) left by the passengers. He wanted to know how I maintain a positive outlook on people.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
My initial reply was a line you’ve likely heard: if you can’t control it, let it go.
He said, “Yeah, but . . .”
I tried all kinds of things. I told him how littering is a form of asserting control. It may be the only opportunity available to effect change on your environment. I told him how if you feel society has wronged you, you may not feel inclined to follow its rules. I talked about a lack of role models. I talked about how these guys who act entitled by littering and not paying aren’t exactly living luxurious or untroubled lives. Their entitlement comes from a place of frustration different than other forms of the same: they act entitled because they’re not.
as a bus driver, if you need the passengers to act as if they’re well-adjusted and highly functional, you’ll go insane. You can’t expect folks to be reasonable or do things that make sense.
“That’s amazing!” I declared, without irony. Much has been written about the extremization of language, in the sense that words formerly used to describe things like hurricanes and fear of God are now used to define items like toothpaste and cupcakes. The downside to this is that when something truly astonishing actually occurs, we’re left speechless, having no vocabulary remaining to describe it.
For me that’s not the case. I really do think certain toothpaste is awe-inspiring. I’m so grateful for whoever ingrained this perspective, whatever chemical imbalance, who knows, that exists in me which allows me to be so thankful—and therefore so easily excited—about life’s many offerings.
“I had an arrangement with this guy once when I was doing the 124,” Robert continued. “He asked if he could sleep on the bus and I said yes, and he would get on and go find somewhere to crash, not where everyone wanted to sit, and he would sleep the whole night through. And we did that for about nine months.”
“Oh okay. Long time.”
“And after ten months, he came back and said, ‘Thank you.’ And I said, ‘for what?’ And he said, ‘Well, because you let me sleep, I was able to hold down a job that whole time, and now I finally have an apartment.’”
“If you act tough, they will act tough. We got stuff to lose. But they have nothing to lose. They don’t care about going to jail, they have already been there many times. What could possibly go wrong for them? They don’t have anything.”
“Yeah, it will never work, acting tough. They can always outdo you.” I was repeating his words mainly that I might better remember them; he’d just coalesced a hodgepodge of good instruction into a single succinct sentence, and I wanted to fold it up in my pocket for later. “I like to just make friends, be nice, and forget about it!”
The late Roger Ebert once wrote that it wasn’t the tragic events in films which brought him to tears, but rather the moments of people being enormously good to each other. To see empathy, to see compassion; these are the actions that stop us in our tracks.
I once spent the better part of an hour chatting with three homeless teens. Among other things, I learned that as a homeless person it often behooves you to pretend your circumstances are more dire than they are. To lie.
Housing and other services get prioritized for those with more extreme hardships, and if you tell them you’re schizophrenic and bipolar, for example, rather than (or better yet: in addition to being) merely thrown out by abusive foster parents, you’re going to get a leg up. If you tell those unwitting tourists the bruises on your leg are from something truly tragic, rather than the stupid fall you just had, it might further convince them you’re in need. It’s a curious position to be in, and one brought on by too many people fighting for the same resources:
You’re lying in order to emphasize the truth
I was traveling alone, late-twenties restless, eager to feel for myself the bewilderment, the joy, the soul-filling melancholy of seeing a thousand things for the first and last time. No other experience more closely approximates early childhood
I enjoyed that wonderful sensation operators feel when they board a bus they’re not driving: this bus is moving, and I’m not responsible!
As another passenger once told me, “Kindness is not a right. It’s a privilege. A privilege to receive.”
We don’t do it for brownie points. We just do it, so other people can feel what it’s like to be loved.
Operators know that in our new landscape of all-door boarding, most problem passengers enter the bus by sneaking in through the rear doors. Psychologically this is unsurprising but try convincing policymakers that rear-door boarding exacerbates safety issues.
We fail so we can learn. Regret is good, because it’s proof we’ve grown. It is the purest evidence of personal progress. I say, own the sensation. Failure comes for all of us, a silent proposition, the universe waiting to see if we’ll bite at the chance to improve ourselves, the chance to exercise grace, mercy, empathy. When people say experience is the best teacher, they’re being euphemistic. They mean failure. We go through our trials so we know just what to say, do (or not do) next time.
yes, it would actually be cheaper to set him up in a one-bedroom apartment and pay market rates for his rent, instead of what we all chip in for his Three-Step method . . . but ethics are a privilege of those who are doing well. His mandate is to survive, and he prefers sleeping inside to sleeping outside. He prefers hot food to scraps, clean clothes to dirty ones, friendly nurses to angry strangers, being chauffeured to struggling . . . and don’t you?
Overview: A quick read that explores many different (often contradictory) philosophies of life. I read the first one or two and disagreed with them so much, I started to wonder if I had misunderstood the messages I’d heard from Derek before. I decided to read a few more and saw these more as thought experiments he wrote down to better understand his own thinking. Don’t read this expecting to agree with everything. Instead read this to have it push your thinking about how to live.
Highlights:
You think you want more choice and more options. But when you have unlimited choice, you feel worse. When you keep all options open, you’re conflicted and miserable.
If you need money, be an investor. It’s the only career where you profit the most by doing the least. It should take no more than an hour per month. The stock market takes money from the active traders and gives it to the patient.
The actions are obvious. Put money in an investment account and never withdraw. Eat mostly vegetables. Exercise always. Get preventative health checkups. Make time for your relationships.
We’re all cousins. Everybody on Earth, no matter how far apart, has a surprisingly recent common ancestor. Go meet your family in the Middle East, in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas, and in Europe. Understand that there is no “them”. It’s just “us”. Feel those connections.
In Icelandic, the word for “idiot” means “one who has never left home to journey abroad”. Only idiots think they’re always right.
Ignore all marketing and advertising. Nobody is pushing what really matters. Friendships, nature, family, learning, community. The best things in life aren’t things.
To communicate clearly, you have to think clearly. Writing is refined thinking. Public speaking tests your writing on a real audience. Great public speaking comes from great private thinking.
Rules must be absolutely unbreakable. If you try to decide, each time, whether it’s OK to break the rule or not, then you’ve missed the whole point of rules. Rules are to save you from deciding. That’s why hard rules are easier to keep.
we admire a quick wit. It shows you quickly looked at something from many angles, found the one that amused you the most, and considerately expressed it to someone else. Observation, creativity, and empathy, all in an instant. What could be a better sign of a healthy mind?
No matter what you need to do, there’s a playful, creative way to do it. Playing gives you personal autonomy and power.
Practice being uncomfortable, even in small ways. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Skip eating for a day, or sugar for a month. Go light-weight camping for a week. Befriend discomfort so that you’ll never fear it.
Never say, “Not my problem.” We’re all in this together. What’s good for your community is good for you. Whatever affects others affects you. The quality of your life is tied to the quality of your community, neighborhood, and country. You can’t be healthy in a sick society.
Don’t convince yourself your home is an asset. Your home is an expense, not an investment, because it doesn’t put money in your pocket each month.
Imitate your heroes. It’s not copying because it won’t be the same. Your imitation of anything will be unrecognizably warped by your own twisted perspective. Most creations are new combinations of existing ideas. Originality just means hiding your sources.
Learn by hands-on experience. The more mistakes you make, the faster you learn. Once you’ve made all the mistakes in a field, you’re considered an expert.
Overview: After finishing Gangsters of Capitalism about Smedley Butler, I decided to read through his anti-war book as well. It’s short and easy to read, clearly designed to spread his message rather than engage in philosophical thinking but he does a good job showing how so many companies make lot of money off war without the owners or major shareholders ever being negatively impacted by it. I assume this book helped shape our cultural understanding since these ideas don’t seem shocking now but appear to have been revolutionary when he wrote them. Either way, we’re 100 years later and companies are still making a killing off of war.
Highlights:
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter — twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent — the sky is the limit.
they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought — and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor. Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t. Napoleon once said, “All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them.” So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier.
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group: “There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars. If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won’t. So … “
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
It was a busy week. Along with all the normal weekly activity, I led a Bike Disco on Wednesday. This rolling party was a fundraiser for SESSFA’s Move-a-thon. Last year, the event came together very last minute but still got about 25-30 people out on bikes. This year, with a bit more planning, we had over 100. Below is a video from Seattle Public Schools from the event. My March Mustache features prominently.
Saturday was the opening of the Crosslake Light Rail which we’ve been waiting for since we moved here about a decade ago. We met my parents and 205,000 of our closest friends to ride it on opening day. It was a massive party with lines hundreds deep to get on the trains.
Sunday morning we were back on the light rail headed to SoDo for a trapeze class at Emerald City Trapeze. Over the course of an hour, we each got to swing several times. Below is a video of me turning over to hang from my knees before turning back over and doing a back flip into the net. The one hour class went by quickly so we signed up for two more classes… Before realizing how sore we would be the next day.
Overall, it was a fun few days and we’re looking forward to the next few adventures we have planned
Overview: A few years ago, my friend and favorite math buddy recommended this book to me. It took a while to get to it but was enjoyable. A few of the stories in here were familiar to me but he does a good job connecting them while dropping amusing enough asides in that even non-math-nerds would laugh at the jokes. Thanks, Betsy for the recommendation.
Highlights:
If you ask someone what number is halfway between one and nine, they will say five – but only because they have been taught to. Wake up, sheeple! Humans instinctively perceive numbers logarithmically, not linearly. A young child or someone who has not been indoctrinated by education will place three halfway between one and nine. Three is a different kind of middle. It’s the logarithmic middle, which means it’s a middle with respect to multiplication rather than addition. 1 × 3 = 3. 3 × 3 = 9. You can go from one to nine either by adding equal steps of four or multiplying by equal steps of three. So the ‘multiplication middle’ is three, and that is what humans do by default, until we are taught otherwise.
But astronomy does give Julius Caesar the last laugh. The unit of a light-year, that is, the distance travelled by light in a year (in a vacuum) is specified using the Julian year of 365.25 days. So we measure our current cosmos using a unit in part defined by an ancient Roman.
Resonance can affect buildings as well. In July 2011 a thirty-nine-storey shopping centre in South Korea had to be evacuated because resonance was vibrating the building. People at the top of the building felt it start to shake, as if someone had banged the bass and turned up the treble. Which was exactly the problem. After the official investigation had ruled out an earthquake, they found the culprit was an exercise class on the twelfth floor. On 5 July 2011 they had decided to work out to Snap’s ‘The Power’, and everyone jumped around harder than they usually did.
On the Millennium Bridge, people did start to walk in step, because the movement of the bridge affected the rhythm at which they were walking. This formed a feedback loop: people stepping in synch caused the bridge to move more, and the bridge moving caused more people to step in synch. Video footage from June 2000 seems to show over 20 per cent of pedestrians walking in step – more than enough to get the resonant frequency ringing and the middle of the bridge swaying about 7.5 centimetres in each direction. Fixing it was a costly two-year retrofit, during which the bridge was completely closed. Removing the wobble cost £5 million, on top of the original £18 million build. Part of the difficulty was breaking the pedestrian-bridge feedback loop without changing the aesthetics of the bridge. Hidden beneath the footpath and around the structure are thirty-seven ‘linear viscous dampers’ (tanks with a viscous liquid that a piston moves through) and around fifty ‘tuned mass vibration absorbers’ (pendulums in a box).
One of the first bridges to be destroyed by synchronized pedestrians was a suspension bridge just outside Manchester (in what is now the city of Salford). I believe that this Broughton Suspension Bridge was the earliest bridge destroyed when people walked over it at the resonant frequency.
This is a common theme in human progress. We make things beyond what we understand, and we always have done. Steam engines worked before we had a theory of thermodynamics; vaccines were developed before we knew how the immune system works; aircraft continue to fly to this day, despite the many gaps in our understanding of aerodynamics. When theory lags behind application, there will always be mathematical surprises lying in wait. The important thing is that we learn from these inevitable mistakes and don’t repeat them.
players noticed that Gandhi was a bit of a jerk. Once he developed atomic technology, he would start dropping nuclear bombs on other nations. This was because of a mistake in the computer code. The game designers had deliberately given Gandhi the lowest non-zero aggression rating possible: a score of 1. Classic Gandhi. But later in the game, when all the civilizations were becoming more, well, civilized, every leader had their aggression rating dropped by two. For Gandhi, starting from 1, this calculation played out as 1 − 2 = 255, suddenly setting him to maximum aggression. Even though this error has since been fixed, later versions of the game have kept Gandhi as the most nuke-happy leader as a tradition.
the only quote from me that has been made into a poster by teachers and put up in their classrooms is: ‘Mathematicians aren’t people who find maths easy; they’re people who enjoy how hard it is.’
Because of the Quebec Bridge disaster, starting in 1925 any student graduating from an engineering degree in Canada can attend a voluntary Ceremony of the Calling of an Engineer, where they are given a steel ring to remind them of the humility and fallibility of engineers. It can be a tragedy when a mathematician makes a mistake which causes a disaster, but that does not mean we can do without mathematics. We need engineers designing bridges, despite the pressure that comes with it.
A Runner's Ramblings 