Stapilus blog

a photo

2006-01-15T22:45:00.000-08:00

This is an attempt to see if a photo link will work.

This is a picture of Steve Allred, who was director of water resources and of environmental quality in Idaho for a number of years. It was included on the picture direction at ridenbaugh.com.

So we'll see.

downtown

2005-10-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Oregonian headline Sunday ran, "Downtown confronts its fears" - this referring of course to downtown Portland - but it raised some wonders. Is downtown that fearful?
The story didn't really seem to back up the idea of deep-seated fear. I've wandered around downtown Portland on a number of occasions, sometimes at night, and never felt particularly fearful, and it didn't seem as if many other people felt very differently. Last week, walking around the perimeter of downtown Seattle, the story was a little different; there were a few spots where I felt less than comfortable. But even there it was limited. Portland? Not so much. (And certainly not in smaller cities like Boise, where you also hear occasional fearful talk about walking around at night.)
That doesn't mean problems don't exist, and Mayor Tom Potter's community crackdown approach seems on a good track for fixing "broken windows" before things do get worse. There have been a few shootings, and some crime; but in the context of a big-city downtown, Portland seems relatively safe.
Downtowns generally seem to have developed a bad reputation for safety in recent years. Without dismissing the very real problems many of them have (and Portland's has some too), a great deal of this seems undeserved.

downtown, in view

2005-10-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

This place, I couldn't help but noticing, has gotten really gentrified.
Downtown Seattle a couple of decades ago seemed a place with at least its share of grunge and rough edges. Scattered buildings and blocks had an upscale look to them, but many - even many with overlooks of the Puget Sound - looked low rent, and probably were. How this circumstance managed to maintain for so long is unclear, but for a long time, it did.

Most of my visits over the last decade - and most often when I visited Seattle I would bypass downtown, if only because of the awful parking situation - I was most overcome with the scense with construction. Streets were torn up evertwhere. Buildings were either being built or rebuilt. The place seemed a mess to get around.
Right now, downtown Seattle has ongoing what may be the single largest construction project in its history, the rebuild of the underground bus tunnel. But that is mostly invisible. What you see at ground level is quite different.
I could pay more notice this time in part because I took public transit into downtown, eliminating car worries. The trip from the Tacoma Dome transit hub was painless (and parking at the hub was free). And once in downtown, I was surprised how much of it has been upscaled and gentrified - practically everything outside of Pioneer Square (where a few rough edges remain amid the trendy glitz) and Pike Street Marketplace *which still, blessedly, has that human look to it). Everything in sight looks spiffed and expensive. And, until you wander south of Jackson Street or so, and excepting an incursion around 2nd, no one is likely to feel unsafe.
The Nickels Administration has been promoting a new sense for Seattle's downtown for a while now. Looks like it has matched up with reality.

system/systems

2005-10-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

Note to Seattle public transport officials: Consider merging all your many agencies. You might pick up some travelers that way.
Yes, yes, you'll probably save money too, and not just a little. But the other part of it is that by splitting up management of the various bus/train/etc services, you make job of figuring out how to use the system vastly more complicated.
We here in Oregon have an advantage in this regard. If you want to use public transit in the Portland metro area, you check out Tri-Met, the reginal transportation entity, and especially its excellent light rail system MAX. It has one unified set of routes and carriers, and it's simple to figure out.
Headed to Seattle tomorrow, I want to use public transit to make my way around the area - from Tacoma to downtown Seattle. I plan to do that, and after a couple of hours research I think I figured out how to do it. But there was one agency after another to traipse through. Pierce County had one, Snohommish had another, King had - don't get me started on King. And the pieces fit together - how?
Well, apparently, they do fit together, and the system looks comprehensive and useful.
But they could have made it a lot more simple.

Canby convergence

2005-10-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Long-range planning in our house includes the question of how to set up electronics for the long haul. That would seem to involve convergence – meshing the telephone, television, computer, DVD, stereo and so forth into one mega-unit, or maybe a collection of mid-sized pieces linked together. It seems to be the way of the future, and a pretty good way at that.
Making the developments in Canby – pioneering in Oregon, though one of several around the country – worth watching here, and maybe in other houses too.
Telephone service in Canby is provided by the Canby Telephone Association, a long-time farmer coop. The CTA is joining an experiment in cabling television through telephone lines, an idea that seemed impossible just a few years ago but now has become doable, alongside such former impossibles as broadband Internet service.
From the Oregonian: “IPTV enters homes through a regular phone jack and then connects to a computer modem smaller than a shoe box. A small box on top of the TV decodes the signal. The service doesn't require a home computer and doesn't tie up the home phone line and Internet connection. When viewers change channels, a guide appears at the bottom of the screen to tell them what network they're watching and what program is on. If someone calls while the TV is on, the caller's number pops up on the TV screen.
“In a recent demonstration, Canby Telephone's picture generally looked clear and sharp, though fast-moving images occasionally broke up into pixels -- a defect caused by the video compression. Phone line capacity is also too limited to support high-definition TV, but the cooperative said it hopes a new generation of technology will make HDTV possible.”
What’re the odds?

Boise visit

2005-07-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

Meant to publish this a while back - the "rooster tail" from the anniversary of construction at Lucky Peak Dam. The controllers don't let the display run so often these days, so it was as well to get the picture while it could be gotten.

Let 'em go

2005-07-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

Word of a 30% cut in screeners at Portland airport PDX has thrown into a tizzy a lot of people who should know better. It may have the unfortunate effect, as the Oregonian notes, of slowing down traffic through the facility. But will it reduce security? Not significantly; and for that matter, you could scrap the whole passenger screening system as it is now, and not impair real security by much.

"Security" as it now exists is a hideous mishmash of idiocy. Grandmothers in their 80s are asked to remove their shoes to search for bombs. Screeners - not all certainly, but too many of them - are encouraged to act like little tin gods while getting little training on effective counter measures to smuggling. And the smugglers get more clever: You have a machine that searches for materials A and B - they'll switch to variety C. It becomes an elaborate game of hide and seek. And while time and money is wasted on passenger searches, little baggage gets seriously checked, even through x-rays.

There are better ways of doing things - many better ways. Four measures alone could provide security that would be more more than ample:

Secure the cockpit, and train personnel there in means of combatting an assault. (Some arms access might be a reasonable step, too.)

Put marshals on most or all commercial flights. A well-trained marshal could stop most or all incidents (including the non-terrorist kind, like air rage events) before they get out of hand.

Alter plane control systems so ground control can take them over in case of an emergency.

Make a serious effort to screen baggage by x-ray.

Those steps ought to be more than sufficient for reasonable security on plane flights. They are not intrusive and they would not turn our airports into the outlets of totalitarianism they have become.

Estates only

2005-04-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

Let's remove the labels for a moment and consider the following idea ...

In deciding where to look for additional tax revenue, one idea is to go after some of the largest inheritances - only the largest, $5 million and up, and farms explicitly excluded so as to protect family farms. (Presumably, in the interest of protecting some other kinds of family businesses, that sort of exclusion could be extended.) We are not talking about taxing many people - in the state of Washington, with about six million inhabitants, this tax would hit only about 250 people. It would not wipe out these inheritances, only take a sliver of it; but so great has the wealth disparity in our society grown that even though only 250 people would pay, and even then feel no more than a modest pinch, it would raise about $139 million, enough to contribute in a serious way to public education or safety. And bear in mind that this tax would reach people who have benefitted especially strongly from the advantage of living in the United States and, in many cases, specifically from living in their state - Washington, this case.

Put that way, you'd probably get four out of five, at a minimum, of Americans supporting this tax as one piece of the tax mix. If the issue were clearly understood by the general public, few legislators would dare vote against the tax.

That so many have is a marker of one of the more astouding pieces of political misinformation of recent years. The tax in question is properly called the "estate tax," and hits only the very wealthiest people in our society, and then not in a way that seriously affects them. The only argument for eliminating it amounts to sheer greed on their part. But because it is has been (brilliantly and dishonestly) renamed the "death tax" by so many political figures (notably members of Congress, and usually Republicans, all of whom should and most of whom probably do know better), it has been sold to a public which probably has been convinced in large part that this is a tax which we all pay. Pay when we die, presumably, or when our parents die. It is a stunning case of misdirection.

The Washington Legislature is on the verge of renewing the state's estate tax. And there seems to be little controversy about it: In this case, media and other reports have mostly been referring to the tax by its proper names.

A useful subject for polling: How many Americans have any idea how carefully limited the estate tax is? How many would support an "estate tax" but oppose a "death tax"?

Flooding, low level

2005-03-27T13:03:00.000-08:00

The heavy rain of the last few days has started to have its effect. Wennerberg Park is partially flooded, in part because water just hasn't drained, but in part because, on the lower, southern, end, the Yamhill River banks have overflowed.

Not that much of this is likely to help a great deal in what may be drought this summer; the effect on the snowpack is unlikely to be very great. But it does make us wonder what's happening elsewhere around the region, since the river here is usually about five or six feet below the park level.

Whose morality?

2005-03-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Terri Schiavo debacle brings up not only questions of procedure - which is where so many liberal commenters have had their say - but also very real questions of morality. And these are at least as scary as the procedural implications.

Today's David Brooks column in the New York Times sums up the view of those who have argued for intervening in the Schiavo case: "The core belief that social conservatives bring to cases like Terri Schiavo's is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult."

There are two deep problems here.

The first is a contradiction inside this form of "conservative" thought. An ideology that genuinely gives equal value toward all, depending not at all on what they "do, experience or achieve," sounds a whole lot more like socialism - even language right out of the Karl Marx playbook - than it does the laissez-faire rugged individualism of the social conservatives. How can this kind of approach possibly square with an ideology seeking to do away with anything resembling a social safety net? It doesn't fit, which suggests that Brooks' interpretation is nowhere near what it makes out to be - a central, core tenet of conservatism. It smacks more of dishonest spin.

There's a second, deeper problem, which lies in the notion of what constitutes worth and dignity. I for one would consider what has happened to Terri Schiavo to be among the most undignified ways imaginable to end a life, and if polling is any indication, most Americans seem to agree.

When is a life worth living? What is the nature of dignity? Most of us probably have always assumed that these are questions each of us must answer individually, and those individual answers will not all be the same. Some of them may happen to match with Brooks' prescription. But many others will not: I for one can easily imagine ways of living which would be far worse that submitting to death, and - again, if the polls are to be believes - most other Americans probably do, too.

The most serious problem with the Brooksian approach is not that it cannot be legitimate for some people but that it posits it as a requirement for all. We all must submit to this theology, because some people - those currently in power - happen to adhere to it.

Where is the morality here? According to Brooks, it can be found in doing away through hardball politics with freedom of conscience and even freedom of religion - for that is what this amounts to. According to most of the rest of us, it is a search for the best answer, with the recognition that absolutes are seldom as useful as they seem.

truck stop blogging

2004-11-24T16:00:00.000-08:00

Back in 1996 and 1997 when Linda and I were roaming the lower 48 states on our year=plus around the country, one of our bigger challenges was in staying on line. When we stayed in motel rooms, getting to the Internet usually was not a big issue: Motel phones usually would accommodate a connection by jack. But not always, and much of the time we were camping. In those days there was no wi-fi, there were no cybercafes (actually, the first of them appeared toward the end of our trip), and option for getting access to a phone line tended toward the difficult.

One of our best options turned out to be something we would never have guessed - truck stops. We'd stop in for a lunch or dinner, and at a significant number of truck stops phones were located at the dining tables. You can see the usefulness for truckers; they were just as useful for us, as we'd play around a bit with the machinery and usually get on line.

Not always, it should be noted, was this regarded favorably by the management: These places are oriented toward truckers. But options were few.

We had to gather the information on which truck stops had phones bit by but. We bought one annual guide to truck stops which provided quite a bit opf help. But would have loved something like Layover.com, which I just spotted on the web. It has a state by state rundown on "computer friendly truckstops," as in Oregon, Idaho, Washington, California, Nevada, Montana.

It not only tells you which stops are "computer friendly" but also how to get the connection - at the dining table, or in some cases just ask the waitress to plug you in (so to speak).

Not a resource to abuse, and probably less critical for most of us nowadays, but something to consider if you've just go to get on line and you have no other good options.

Misconceiving WalMart

2004-11-24T13:42:00.000-08:00

You can't make intelligent decisions if you don't stop to think.

This KBCI-TV story was jammed full of misconceptions about WalMart - faulty logic not the fault of the reporter, but in the minds of the people interviewed.

The story concerns a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Sam's Club to be placed in Nampa. Several people quoted were cheering it on.

"I think it's going to be cool because there's not many other places to go shop that are quick and easy to get to," says Nampa resident John Murphy.

Actually, there already are even by including WalMart in that definition - Fred Meyer, KMart and the stores at Karcher Mall are just a few of those in Nampa. But what makes a megastore "easier" to deal with than a smaller one?

A Nampa city spokesman remarked that "what it does is it helps to lower the tax burden for everybody who lives here it brings in a development and that development itself brings in jobs." That's jaw-dropping. There will be some plus, to be sure, in the property taxes on the store buildings, and in the wages paid the construction crews. But the rest constitute a loss. WalMart's low wages/benefits make a joke out of the "all the new jobs" line of jabber: The rest of the community winds up picking up the cost for people who aren't earning a living wage. And the idea that a WalMart coming to town represents an economic expansion is pure illusion. Just think for a moment: WalMart is in the business of selling a variety of goods to consumers. Unless you want to argue that people will be spending more money just because WalMart came to town - an absurd notion - you're stuck with the reality that WalMart's arrival represents a displacement of someone else. That means those low-wage jobs at WalMart are displacing other jobs - possibly higher-wage - somewhere else.

Some people get that point. The KBCI story does quote Debbie Hovde, owner Ma & Pa's Smoke Shop at Nampa, as saying, "if everybody can go to one store and get their shopping done, what's it going to do to us little people."

I think we know the answer, Debbie.

Sunset

2004-11-16T17:03:00.000-08:00

From the front yard, looking over Wennenberg Park toward the Coast Range.

Early in the day, but as pretty as summer, the onset of rainy season notwithstanding.

Back from Boise

2004-09-23T22:23:00.000-07:00

The latest trip to Boise yielded little in the way of change. Just about everything looked the same, save only a few storefronts and - around Meridian - a few new motels.

Just not a lot to report. Even the politics, six weeks out from election day, seems hardly of note.

A picture

2004-06-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

Introducing Bismark, in an old picture from Boise.

Why this blog

2004-06-02T20:29:00.000-07:00

So the issue is, I already have another well-established blog - ridenbaugh.com - so why this one?

Ridenbaugh is dedicated to a specific professional purpose - the publication of certain Northwest-related publications and reports (along with a few other items which have become attached to it over the years).

But there is more to say - about other professional activities, people, places, ideas and so on. Hence, Stapilus blog.

Publication may be a little more erratic here than on the other, but it may also be more widely varied.