As I write this, my travel plans have just been dashed by Hurricane Dorian. I will spend the next few days re-working everything and hoping not to lose too much money in re-scheduling fees and so forth. As hurricane complaints go that's pretty minor, considering the photos coming back from Abacos and Grand Bahama. They look to be almost totally destroyed, which is to be expected when a Cat 5 squats over your island for over a day and the sea surges 20 feet over an island that is no more than 10 feet above sea level.
As another summer drifts away I find myself once again pleased that I didn't waste it. I got in plenty of activity and even got a small project or two completed. I am going to make a valiant effort to keep up on outside activities even through the cold this year. I will likely fail.
I also started work on the first revision of my book. I spent the bulk of the summer away from it intentionally, to re-approach it from a distance. It's got lots of holes in it, but I think it's going to work. I have been using this simple Pomodoro Timer app to good affect.
[Detroit] The Eternal Crisis
[TV, Rant] Mindhunting
[Rant] Isn't That Just Fine
[Good Links] Link Set
Thursday, September 05, 2019
[Detroit] The Eternal Crisis
There are probably legal-aged adults that have never known a world where I was not writing snarky blog posts about Detroit. But they're well-founded snarky blog posts. Detroit's peak of population was 1950. A healthy City of Detroit is quickly vanishing from living memory. A young adult who actually experienced a growing Detroit would be pushing 90. History is a heavy weight that grows with time. With each passing year it gets harder and harder to take the "Detroit Renaissance" narrative seriously. (For you it's harder. For me...I never bought it to begin with.)
David Perell's Thoughts on Detroit is a cut above most entries into this genre as it is more a list of observations than taking a position. Many of his observations line up with mine, although he concludes the glass is half full, whereas I think it's been smashed on the floor.
Although he is left with a positive impression, the only overwhelmingly optimistic sign he specifically mentions is that everyone has local pride. But confusingly, that seems to get conflated with Dan Gilbert. Dan Gilbert is the guy behind Quicken Loans, the largest employer in Detroit. That he will subsidize folks in five-figures if they relocate to Detroit (presumably to work for his entities) is named as a good source of civic pride. It doesn't seem like something to be proud of. Forty-five minutes away you have to subsidize Ann Arbor that much in property tax and you're grateful.
I don't doubt that everyone Perell met who lives there was enthusiastic about the city. And here's where my cynicism makes its grand entrance. I have observed before that the the big thing Detroit has to offer is authenticity. A statement that you are from Detroit will carry weight with a certain crowd -- progressive young-ish hipsters -- who want their place of residence to make a certain statement about them. The late hipster idol Anthony Bourdain once said he could think of nothing cooler than being able to say you were from Detroit. If you live in Detroit because it makes you sound cool, you'll sound cool praising Detroit.
Kudos to Perell also for noticing that all the recent vibrancy in Detroit is quite limited. "Except for Woodward Avenue, downtown Detroit is surprisingly empty. At times, it feels like a ghost town. Foot traffic stays on just a couple streets between Bricktown and Downtown Detroit." He also mentions all the abandoned buildings and boarded up windows.
More interesting to me is this statement: "City dwellers were overwhelmingly optimistic about Detroit. But people outside the city, especially those I met in Northern Michigan, were overwhelmingly pessimistic. The people I spoke to who live outside the city, most of whom were wealthier, rarely go into downtown Detroit. They spend most of their time in the Northern suburbs instead." This jibes with my experience.
As I mentioned, Perrel is optimistic about Detroit, although the reasons he gives besides how enthusiastic the residents are rather thin. He is impressed with the Arab ethnicity in Dearborn (immediately west of Detroit) and thinks there is opportunity for more Middle Eastern immigration -- but it's unclear to me how that benefits Detroit rather than Dearborn and what the specific benefit of that is. He sites the proximity of two large Universities (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State in East Lansing) and suggests there is opportunity to recruit skilled employment from these places, especially if there are tax benefits to doing so. His quote: "Many of the younger people I spoke with want to stay in-state. Chicago is too big for them and New York is too far." I can understand wanting to stay in-state. Michigan, especially in the north and the U.P. is remarkably lovely. But even if this is true for a broader mix of young people, "in-state" does not translate to Detroit. It doesn't even necessarily translate to the suburbs. There are plenty of mid-sized cities in central-lower Michigan that are tremendous places to live -- Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo -- and are actually growing. For 20 years, part of my day job has been recruiting tech talent; software developers often right out of those schools. In all that time I have encountered exactly one person who would have counted a Detroit location as a plus.
Quick aside: Praise to Perell for differentiating between Detroit, the suburbs, and greater Michigan. Although, he seems to count Dearborn as Detroit.
There are two battles going on here. One is over whether the "badness" of Detroit is real or simply reputation. The exchange is between those who say it is awful and have the stats to back it up, and those who say "it's not that bad" and point out that they themselves are OK with life in the Big D. There is an obvious winner in that battle.
The other is whether Detroit is improving or not. I will grant the there has been a slight improvement in the third-world hellhole level statistics of the past. I will also grant that there is about one square mile that has returned to some semblance of economic viability. And I have no doubt young professionals and artist-types who don't yet place a high value on personal and financial security might carve out a decent life (or at least a decent "lifestyle"). But that is little more than window dressing. For a city to thrive it needs a strong and stable middle-class. It needs to not just collect fashionable and high-profile businesses via financial incentives, it needs to support plumbers and convenience stores and various services and -- this is key --the families of those running those services. As far as I can tell, Detroit has made exactly zero progress on that point.
Lately I have had the opportunity to make some visits to Houston and it really highlights the vast difference between a city that dying and one that is living. Houston is about 4 times the size of Detroit. I don't think there is a single aspect of life in Detroit that measures up to Houston, other than it being less crowded. You can claim Houston has revenue that Detroit doesn't have, but why? Is that cause or symptom? Also, it wasn't always so. It wasn't until 1980-ish that Houston overtook Detroit as the fifth largest city in the U.S. Now Houston is fourth (behind NY, LA, CHI) and, next year, Detroit will slip out of the top 20. My point is that these trends are not just about public relations and tax incentives. They are deeply ingrained in the essence, character, and culture of these places.
I was born in Detroit, but at age 4 moved to the suburb of Southfield, just over the northern city border of 8 Mile Rd. I now live outside Ann Arbor. I know a handful of people who like to go into Detroit for a night out, but such trips are few and far between. I have not been to Detroit in decades, I don't even go into the northern suburbs unless I have to. We are far less culturally dependent on cities than we used to be. (Thanks, Internet.)
Lastly, note that all the good vibes about Detroit just aren't having the desired effect. The population decline that started in 1950 has not abated for a single year. I am 58 years old and Detroit has been dying for my entire life. I suspect it will continue to die for the remainder.
David Perell's Thoughts on Detroit is a cut above most entries into this genre as it is more a list of observations than taking a position. Many of his observations line up with mine, although he concludes the glass is half full, whereas I think it's been smashed on the floor.
Although he is left with a positive impression, the only overwhelmingly optimistic sign he specifically mentions is that everyone has local pride. But confusingly, that seems to get conflated with Dan Gilbert. Dan Gilbert is the guy behind Quicken Loans, the largest employer in Detroit. That he will subsidize folks in five-figures if they relocate to Detroit (presumably to work for his entities) is named as a good source of civic pride. It doesn't seem like something to be proud of. Forty-five minutes away you have to subsidize Ann Arbor that much in property tax and you're grateful.
I don't doubt that everyone Perell met who lives there was enthusiastic about the city. And here's where my cynicism makes its grand entrance. I have observed before that the the big thing Detroit has to offer is authenticity. A statement that you are from Detroit will carry weight with a certain crowd -- progressive young-ish hipsters -- who want their place of residence to make a certain statement about them. The late hipster idol Anthony Bourdain once said he could think of nothing cooler than being able to say you were from Detroit. If you live in Detroit because it makes you sound cool, you'll sound cool praising Detroit.
Kudos to Perell also for noticing that all the recent vibrancy in Detroit is quite limited. "Except for Woodward Avenue, downtown Detroit is surprisingly empty. At times, it feels like a ghost town. Foot traffic stays on just a couple streets between Bricktown and Downtown Detroit." He also mentions all the abandoned buildings and boarded up windows.
More interesting to me is this statement: "City dwellers were overwhelmingly optimistic about Detroit. But people outside the city, especially those I met in Northern Michigan, were overwhelmingly pessimistic. The people I spoke to who live outside the city, most of whom were wealthier, rarely go into downtown Detroit. They spend most of their time in the Northern suburbs instead." This jibes with my experience.
As I mentioned, Perrel is optimistic about Detroit, although the reasons he gives besides how enthusiastic the residents are rather thin. He is impressed with the Arab ethnicity in Dearborn (immediately west of Detroit) and thinks there is opportunity for more Middle Eastern immigration -- but it's unclear to me how that benefits Detroit rather than Dearborn and what the specific benefit of that is. He sites the proximity of two large Universities (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State in East Lansing) and suggests there is opportunity to recruit skilled employment from these places, especially if there are tax benefits to doing so. His quote: "Many of the younger people I spoke with want to stay in-state. Chicago is too big for them and New York is too far." I can understand wanting to stay in-state. Michigan, especially in the north and the U.P. is remarkably lovely. But even if this is true for a broader mix of young people, "in-state" does not translate to Detroit. It doesn't even necessarily translate to the suburbs. There are plenty of mid-sized cities in central-lower Michigan that are tremendous places to live -- Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo -- and are actually growing. For 20 years, part of my day job has been recruiting tech talent; software developers often right out of those schools. In all that time I have encountered exactly one person who would have counted a Detroit location as a plus.
Quick aside: Praise to Perell for differentiating between Detroit, the suburbs, and greater Michigan. Although, he seems to count Dearborn as Detroit.
There are two battles going on here. One is over whether the "badness" of Detroit is real or simply reputation. The exchange is between those who say it is awful and have the stats to back it up, and those who say "it's not that bad" and point out that they themselves are OK with life in the Big D. There is an obvious winner in that battle.
The other is whether Detroit is improving or not. I will grant the there has been a slight improvement in the third-world hellhole level statistics of the past. I will also grant that there is about one square mile that has returned to some semblance of economic viability. And I have no doubt young professionals and artist-types who don't yet place a high value on personal and financial security might carve out a decent life (or at least a decent "lifestyle"). But that is little more than window dressing. For a city to thrive it needs a strong and stable middle-class. It needs to not just collect fashionable and high-profile businesses via financial incentives, it needs to support plumbers and convenience stores and various services and -- this is key --the families of those running those services. As far as I can tell, Detroit has made exactly zero progress on that point.
Lately I have had the opportunity to make some visits to Houston and it really highlights the vast difference between a city that dying and one that is living. Houston is about 4 times the size of Detroit. I don't think there is a single aspect of life in Detroit that measures up to Houston, other than it being less crowded. You can claim Houston has revenue that Detroit doesn't have, but why? Is that cause or symptom? Also, it wasn't always so. It wasn't until 1980-ish that Houston overtook Detroit as the fifth largest city in the U.S. Now Houston is fourth (behind NY, LA, CHI) and, next year, Detroit will slip out of the top 20. My point is that these trends are not just about public relations and tax incentives. They are deeply ingrained in the essence, character, and culture of these places.
I was born in Detroit, but at age 4 moved to the suburb of Southfield, just over the northern city border of 8 Mile Rd. I now live outside Ann Arbor. I know a handful of people who like to go into Detroit for a night out, but such trips are few and far between. I have not been to Detroit in decades, I don't even go into the northern suburbs unless I have to. We are far less culturally dependent on cities than we used to be. (Thanks, Internet.)
Lastly, note that all the good vibes about Detroit just aren't having the desired effect. The population decline that started in 1950 has not abated for a single year. I am 58 years old and Detroit has been dying for my entire life. I suspect it will continue to die for the remainder.
[TV, Rant] Mindhunting
I binged the second season of Mindhunter on Netflix and it was a mixed bag. Mindhunter is an adaptation/fictionalization of the true crime book Mindhunter, Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit. The first season covered the initial efforts of the FBI to start doing psychological analysis, what would become known as profiling, of multiple murderers -- specifically serial killers. The second season covers its evolution into acceptance and its key role in the Atlanta Child Killer case. (Anyone born before 1970 will remember the case clearly.)
With regards to dramatic quality, Mindhunter is practically schizophrenic. The personal drama of the agents and their interactions are afforded little more that the basic dialogue of a network police procedural: overheated exposition and incoherent indignation substituting for actual character. They do a decent job of paralleling the personal drama with aspects of the psychos in the cases they investigate. They could delve deeper into that to benefit the series, but otherwise the workaday dialogue is the stuff of ear cringe. And the horrendous portrayal of righteous irrationality of black people in Atlanta at that time is worthy of a cable news network.
The shining lights are the portrayals of the killers themselves -- Edmund Kemper, Son of Sam, Manson, Wayne Williams, etc. Being asked to portray a serial killer, especially one for whom there is video documentation to research, has to be a gift beyond compare for a dedicated actor. And the actors they find just gobble the scenes, seemingly mesmerizing the regular cast as well as the audience. Here are side-by-sides of the the real killers with their portrayals: Kemper and Manson. You can just tell those actors are completely in the zone. It's a very cool payoff for the lukewarm bulk.
Quick aside: In real life Kemper has made a name for himself as a reader of audio books. We live in a truly bizarre timeline.
Unless you are squeamish, or just generally trying to insulate yourself from the Sick Sad World that's portrayed in the various media. Mindhunter is a decent watch. Now, me being me, I will digress.
Let's take a shot at recapping the phases of crime in America that have caught popular attention. I suppose early on, the 1920s-ish there were the bank robbers -- Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillenger, etc. Then, with prohibition and through the sixties with drugs, organized crime got all the attention -- Capone through Gotti. As crimes go these make a certain sense. They are about money. Directly taking it in the case of bank robbing, gaining it by fulfilling a forbidden need in the case of organized crime.
As the sixties faded into the seventies, things got weird and worse. Crimes that fascinated were no longer about money. Bombings and domestic terrorism were what the '70s was all about. According to Time: "In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day." Follow cable news and you would think the U.S. is swamped in violence when in fact there is less than ever. That Time article is an instructive read. As it points out, we all just took it in stride back then; it barely registered on my young psyche. Can you imagine what would happen if we had a stretch of five bombings a day now? The National Guard would be on every corner, children would be confined to their houses, Twitter servers would meltdown, the New York Times would blame the legacy of slavery, Fox News would look on the bright side. The past is a foreign country, my friends. In any event, these sorts of crimes that are labelled domestic terrorism are vanishingly rare, perhaps as a result of 9/11.
Late '70s and into the '80s it was all about serial killers. Mindhunter portrays the fascination of the public, noting how everyone wants to hear lurid stories of the grisly killers from the detectives. As you might assume the number of serial killers rose with attention. According to Slate: "There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the '70s, and 200 in the '80s. In the '90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers." That strikes me as a under-investigated phenomenon. What changed that caused bombings and serial killing to fall out of favor? Is it just fashion? Maybe momentum builds in the public mind so more and more people who are on the cusp of committing one of these crimes tips over and gives in to the urge. Then as fashion fades and the crime becomes less noteworthy they fall back to a normal level. That would be a fascinating research topic for a soft scientist.
These days the hot crime is mass shootings, although it is surprisingly hard to find consistent statistics on them. Some of it is a matter of definition. In this research article if you scan about halfway down, there is a table highlighting the different ways of counting mass shootings and stats for the year 2015. If you define a mass shooting as any single instance where 4 or more people were killed the numbers are astonishing -- in the mid 300s. To read that you'd think you should wear body armor at all times. The key here is the definition. If you take gang, drug, and organized crime out of the count -- which are things most folks aren't involved in -- the number drops to around 65. Still pretty sizable. But then, if you eliminate family and domestic shooting -- because most people aren't involved in murderously psychotic families -- you are down to 7. These are the ones who get all the attention. The guys who shoot bystanders indiscriminately over some perceived rejection or slight or conspiracy. Nut cases, in short. These are the crime of fascination in the current times. You would expect them to be on the increase. It certainly feels like they are from the news headlines, but what does the data say?
In that same article there is a graph at the bottom. The count of Mass Public Shootings (which is the kind we are interested in) seems to hover around 4 or 5 per year between 1999 and 2013. There may be a slight uptick toward the end, but it's negligible. This is not what we'd expect for the hot crime of the moment. What about the last few years?
According to this Mother Jones article:
One wonders where FBI profiling will go in the future since we are all in love with genetic causes for behavior these days. A future Mindhunter might be about the traditional profilers versus DNA readers as a Moneyball-style conflict.
And now I've digressed this topic to death. But yeah, Mindhunter is worth a look.
With regards to dramatic quality, Mindhunter is practically schizophrenic. The personal drama of the agents and their interactions are afforded little more that the basic dialogue of a network police procedural: overheated exposition and incoherent indignation substituting for actual character. They do a decent job of paralleling the personal drama with aspects of the psychos in the cases they investigate. They could delve deeper into that to benefit the series, but otherwise the workaday dialogue is the stuff of ear cringe. And the horrendous portrayal of righteous irrationality of black people in Atlanta at that time is worthy of a cable news network.
The shining lights are the portrayals of the killers themselves -- Edmund Kemper, Son of Sam, Manson, Wayne Williams, etc. Being asked to portray a serial killer, especially one for whom there is video documentation to research, has to be a gift beyond compare for a dedicated actor. And the actors they find just gobble the scenes, seemingly mesmerizing the regular cast as well as the audience. Here are side-by-sides of the the real killers with their portrayals: Kemper and Manson. You can just tell those actors are completely in the zone. It's a very cool payoff for the lukewarm bulk.
Quick aside: In real life Kemper has made a name for himself as a reader of audio books. We live in a truly bizarre timeline.
Unless you are squeamish, or just generally trying to insulate yourself from the Sick Sad World that's portrayed in the various media. Mindhunter is a decent watch. Now, me being me, I will digress.
Let's take a shot at recapping the phases of crime in America that have caught popular attention. I suppose early on, the 1920s-ish there were the bank robbers -- Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillenger, etc. Then, with prohibition and through the sixties with drugs, organized crime got all the attention -- Capone through Gotti. As crimes go these make a certain sense. They are about money. Directly taking it in the case of bank robbing, gaining it by fulfilling a forbidden need in the case of organized crime.
As the sixties faded into the seventies, things got weird and worse. Crimes that fascinated were no longer about money. Bombings and domestic terrorism were what the '70s was all about. According to Time: "In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day." Follow cable news and you would think the U.S. is swamped in violence when in fact there is less than ever. That Time article is an instructive read. As it points out, we all just took it in stride back then; it barely registered on my young psyche. Can you imagine what would happen if we had a stretch of five bombings a day now? The National Guard would be on every corner, children would be confined to their houses, Twitter servers would meltdown, the New York Times would blame the legacy of slavery, Fox News would look on the bright side. The past is a foreign country, my friends. In any event, these sorts of crimes that are labelled domestic terrorism are vanishingly rare, perhaps as a result of 9/11.
Late '70s and into the '80s it was all about serial killers. Mindhunter portrays the fascination of the public, noting how everyone wants to hear lurid stories of the grisly killers from the detectives. As you might assume the number of serial killers rose with attention. According to Slate: "There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the '70s, and 200 in the '80s. In the '90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers." That strikes me as a under-investigated phenomenon. What changed that caused bombings and serial killing to fall out of favor? Is it just fashion? Maybe momentum builds in the public mind so more and more people who are on the cusp of committing one of these crimes tips over and gives in to the urge. Then as fashion fades and the crime becomes less noteworthy they fall back to a normal level. That would be a fascinating research topic for a soft scientist.
These days the hot crime is mass shootings, although it is surprisingly hard to find consistent statistics on them. Some of it is a matter of definition. In this research article if you scan about halfway down, there is a table highlighting the different ways of counting mass shootings and stats for the year 2015. If you define a mass shooting as any single instance where 4 or more people were killed the numbers are astonishing -- in the mid 300s. To read that you'd think you should wear body armor at all times. The key here is the definition. If you take gang, drug, and organized crime out of the count -- which are things most folks aren't involved in -- the number drops to around 65. Still pretty sizable. But then, if you eliminate family and domestic shooting -- because most people aren't involved in murderously psychotic families -- you are down to 7. These are the ones who get all the attention. The guys who shoot bystanders indiscriminately over some perceived rejection or slight or conspiracy. Nut cases, in short. These are the crime of fascination in the current times. You would expect them to be on the increase. It certainly feels like they are from the news headlines, but what does the data say?
In that same article there is a graph at the bottom. The count of Mass Public Shootings (which is the kind we are interested in) seems to hover around 4 or 5 per year between 1999 and 2013. There may be a slight uptick toward the end, but it's negligible. This is not what we'd expect for the hot crime of the moment. What about the last few years?
According to this Mother Jones article:
- 2014 - 4
- 2015 - 7
- 2016 - 6
- 2017 - 11
- 2018 - 12
- 2019 - 7 (so far)
One wonders where FBI profiling will go in the future since we are all in love with genetic causes for behavior these days. A future Mindhunter might be about the traditional profilers versus DNA readers as a Moneyball-style conflict.
And now I've digressed this topic to death. But yeah, Mindhunter is worth a look.
[Rant] Isn't That Just Fine
I recently got pulled over in Pinckney, MI, a town just north of me. It was one of those situations where the speed limit dropped ten mph and I missed the sign and got caught doing about 12 over. The cop seemed decent and just gave me a warning for speeding in exchange for writing me up for having an out of date insurance -- which was an outright falsehood, since I had an up to date certificate. He explained that he could do that and I would get no points and have only a $25 dollar fine. Annoying, but I know how to pick my battles so I quietly acquiesced.
Later when I went online to pay, I come to find out it was not a $25 fine, but $125 (and no, I didn't just misunderstand). It was probably no cheaper than a low level speeding ticket. I suppose I still got out of points on my license, but why would the cop do that? Why falsify a charge and lie about the fine when he could have just hit me up for a minor speeding ticket? Putting 2 and 2 together I remembered the reason for traffic stops is not for the sake of law enforcement but for revenue. The lie gets me to feel grateful and not fuss on the scene. Discovering the lie is frustrating, but even that is probably not worth it to fight. But if you throw in points on my license, I may make a fuss. I may decide to be a prick and force a court date just on the hopes of getting out of it. So the strategy is to weasel in an effort to gain revenue while minimizing the possibility of administrative expenses. In other words, maximizing profit. And that, my friends, is a dangerous game.
Back when I used to read a lot of travel writing, I would often run into stories of folks driving through Mexico and getting pulled over, often on false pretenses. There would be dire warnings and threats from the Mexican cops but then it would be made known that a small cash outlay would get them out of trouble on the spot. The travellers in these stories seemed to find it all entertaining in a genuine-cultural-experience sort of way. But how condescending is that? Look at it this way, if there was some cop in Ann Arbor pulling people over and squeezing them for cash, Heads Would Roll. If it started in the morning, by Noon social media would be on fire. People would be out of jobs by the end of the day. It takes a special kind of smug superiority to sit back in your bubble and have a laugh over a similar situation because it's the silly Mexican primitives doing it far away.
The business of using traffic fines as a source of revenue is tip-toeing on a fraying line. There are places in Georgia and Louisiana where this has already gotten out of control. It's important to take very seriously how much corruption will feed upon its own image. If you think the authorities are cynical and dishonest, you assume you have to engage with them on their own terms and corruption grows. If you want to see where that ends up, read my above comments about Detroit. So much of the order needed to maintain progressive civilization is a matter of broad based trust. If you doubt that, google "low trust societies". Cheap ploys like I had played on me are a plain and obvious broken window.
I don't mean to imply there is third-world level corruption in Pinckney, MI. Like I said, it's a mere annoyance to me and not anywhere near a major problem in the area. I just want to point out the dangers. A healthy community will not resort to speed traps for revenue, if it wants to stay healthy. If you find your community is increasingly financed by fines and speed traps, it might be time to find a new community. The writing is on the wall.
Later when I went online to pay, I come to find out it was not a $25 fine, but $125 (and no, I didn't just misunderstand). It was probably no cheaper than a low level speeding ticket. I suppose I still got out of points on my license, but why would the cop do that? Why falsify a charge and lie about the fine when he could have just hit me up for a minor speeding ticket? Putting 2 and 2 together I remembered the reason for traffic stops is not for the sake of law enforcement but for revenue. The lie gets me to feel grateful and not fuss on the scene. Discovering the lie is frustrating, but even that is probably not worth it to fight. But if you throw in points on my license, I may make a fuss. I may decide to be a prick and force a court date just on the hopes of getting out of it. So the strategy is to weasel in an effort to gain revenue while minimizing the possibility of administrative expenses. In other words, maximizing profit. And that, my friends, is a dangerous game.
Back when I used to read a lot of travel writing, I would often run into stories of folks driving through Mexico and getting pulled over, often on false pretenses. There would be dire warnings and threats from the Mexican cops but then it would be made known that a small cash outlay would get them out of trouble on the spot. The travellers in these stories seemed to find it all entertaining in a genuine-cultural-experience sort of way. But how condescending is that? Look at it this way, if there was some cop in Ann Arbor pulling people over and squeezing them for cash, Heads Would Roll. If it started in the morning, by Noon social media would be on fire. People would be out of jobs by the end of the day. It takes a special kind of smug superiority to sit back in your bubble and have a laugh over a similar situation because it's the silly Mexican primitives doing it far away.
The business of using traffic fines as a source of revenue is tip-toeing on a fraying line. There are places in Georgia and Louisiana where this has already gotten out of control. It's important to take very seriously how much corruption will feed upon its own image. If you think the authorities are cynical and dishonest, you assume you have to engage with them on their own terms and corruption grows. If you want to see where that ends up, read my above comments about Detroit. So much of the order needed to maintain progressive civilization is a matter of broad based trust. If you doubt that, google "low trust societies". Cheap ploys like I had played on me are a plain and obvious broken window.
I don't mean to imply there is third-world level corruption in Pinckney, MI. Like I said, it's a mere annoyance to me and not anywhere near a major problem in the area. I just want to point out the dangers. A healthy community will not resort to speed traps for revenue, if it wants to stay healthy. If you find your community is increasingly financed by fines and speed traps, it might be time to find a new community. The writing is on the wall.
[Good Links] Link Set
A trio of things that have caught me eye in my Web meanderings.
This is a good final summary of what happened to Malaysia flight 360, if you happen to remember the flight that just vanished into thin air years ago and dominated the news cycle. The flight simulator evidence seems particularly conclusive.
The founding of Dungeons and Dragons is a story rife with controversies and varying interpretations. This article brought me back to those painful years before being a nerd had any cache. It also contains what is perhaps the single most deadpan sentence ever written: "One day, he was flipping through a copy of a neighbor's Playboy magazine when he saw something that captivated his 13-year-old imagination: an advertisement for board games."
An examination of the religious beliefs of Peter Theil by David Perell, who has never met or communicated with him. Thiel is a PayPal founder and Facebook big wig, among other things. He is a very influential intellectual, heavily responsible for the elevation of the philosophies of Rene Girard in current big brain circles. I've found him more of a communicator of ideas rather than a discoverer but, in the words of Jacobim Mugatu, he's so hot right now.
This is a good final summary of what happened to Malaysia flight 360, if you happen to remember the flight that just vanished into thin air years ago and dominated the news cycle. The flight simulator evidence seems particularly conclusive.
The founding of Dungeons and Dragons is a story rife with controversies and varying interpretations. This article brought me back to those painful years before being a nerd had any cache. It also contains what is perhaps the single most deadpan sentence ever written: "One day, he was flipping through a copy of a neighbor's Playboy magazine when he saw something that captivated his 13-year-old imagination: an advertisement for board games."
An examination of the religious beliefs of Peter Theil by David Perell, who has never met or communicated with him. Thiel is a PayPal founder and Facebook big wig, among other things. He is a very influential intellectual, heavily responsible for the elevation of the philosophies of Rene Girard in current big brain circles. I've found him more of a communicator of ideas rather than a discoverer but, in the words of Jacobim Mugatu, he's so hot right now.
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