Whitcomb: Fuel for the Housing Crunch; Stuck on Screens; Chasing Chance
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Fuel for the Housing Crunch; Stuck on Screens; Chasing Chance
“A record store on Wabash was where
I bought my first album. I was a freshman
in college and played the record in my room
over and over. I was caught by how he took
the musical phrase and seemed to find a new
way out, the next note was never the note….’’
-- From “Thelonious Monk,’’ by Stephen Dobyns (born 1941), American poet and essayist.
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“In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly.’’
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet, critic and philosopher
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’’
-- From Ann of Green Gables (set on Prince Edward Island), by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)
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As humans speed up in the fall, Nature slows down.
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How nice to see more people replacing their sterile lawns, with their pesticides and man-made fertilizers, which drain into the water table, with little meadows in which you can watch the wildflowers change through the seasons and the birds and butterflies attracted to these little refuges.
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Most people were pleased to hear about the Fed’s half-point interest cut, and the prospect of more coming soon. The news especially pleased those in the market for a home because the Fed’s move means lower mortgage rates.
But the at least short-term result may well be higher housing costs because the lower rates will boost demand even as much of the country – including southern New England -- continues with a severe undersupply of dwellings, largely because of local zoning ordinances aimed at blocking more density -- in effect, encouraging sprawl.
In the end, state government can overrule local government, but all too often politicians have not summoned the political courage to set aside local rules for the greater good.
This is mystifying. Cox Communications is suing the State of Rhode Island for allegedly using “flawed data” to decide where to spend millions of federal funds to improve Internet speeds in a state that already has among the best broadband access in America.
Cox alleges that the state is singling out for favorable attention in generally rich places such as Newport’s Bellevue Avenue neighborhood, Jamestown, and Westerly’s Watch Hill section for the physical infrastructure purportedly needed for improved broadband there. But it’s hard to see how such already well-served places need the added investment. The company complains that the program would “build taxpayer-subsidized and duplicative high-speed broadband internet’’ in these places.
Is all this just Cox trying to keep out more competition in infrastructure building or is the state somehow trying to please people in areas with a lot of affluent campaign contributors? Or just bureaucratic confusion?
I suppose the truth will come out.
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I wonder if many Americans are increasingly irritated by how just a half dozen “battleground states’’ monopolize the attention of presidential candidates. The oft-anti-majoritarian Electoral College ensures this distortion of the democratic process.
Meanwhile, if you want to know rather intimately how Trump operates, read the alarming reports of the many who worked for him and now are urgently doing everything they can to keep him out of office.
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Wouldn’t it be charming if there were a big sign at the new but already legendary roundabout in East Providence at the end of the Henderson Bridge, where Washington Bridge refugees go, that clearly tells people how to get to where many want to go—Route 195 EAST?
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John Deaton, the rich personal injury lawyer, investor, and crypto promoter running as the Republican nominee against Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, says he won’t vote for Trump. On the other hand, his dubious tax-avoidance contortions within the swamp of the federal tax code and disinclination to give to charity are part of the Trump personal finance playbook.
No wonder they’re anxious! The New York Times reports that a Harris Poll of 1,006 members of Generation Z (born 1997-2012) found that more than 60 percent of respondents said they spend at least at least four hours a day on social media! What in God’s name do they do all that time? It reminds me of the title of Malcolm Muggeridge's two-book autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time. (Of course, most Americans spend too much time with screens, including yours truly.)
For many of these young adults, spending more time outdoors, with the sun, the breeze and the smell of growing things; reading on paper (you understand and remember more that way), or even sleeping would be a better use of their time than staring at these designed-to-be-addictive media, which are rife with nasty misinformation, disinformation and personal attacks, along with syrupy greetings from friends and folks showing off photos of their children and grandchildren and fancy vacations. Criminally cute!
The poll says that many respondents wish that some social media had never been invented, including these percentages: Instagram (34 percent), Facebook (37 percent), Snapchat (43 percent), and the most regretted platforms of all: (Chinese-owned) TikTok (47 percent) and Elon Musk-owned X/Twitter (50 percent).
The genie is out of the bottle. But perhaps over time more ways will be developed to substantially reduce the use of social media, which can have very anti-social effects and is a reason that so much of American politics and culture in general has become so toxic since Tim Berners-Lee invented what he named the World Wide Web in 1989.
California is suing ExxonMobil for its alleged role in “a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics-pollution crisis’’ by exaggerating how much plastic waste is or can be recycled. The fossil-fuel- energy behemoth is the largest producer of the petrochemical polymers used to make the plastic products, much of them single use and that have led to massive water and land pollution.
Note that PFAS- “forever chemicals’’ hazardous to the health of humans and other animals- are used in many plastic products.
Some estimates suggest that only about 9 percent of worldwide and 5-6 percent of plastic products in America are recycled.
We’ll see what happens as the California case proceeds. Sounds like a tough case for the state to win. But in any case, it should draw attention to the need to move much faster to research and develop “bioplastics’’ made from such biodegradable plant material as vegetable oils, corn, potatoes, mushrooms and so on.
There’s a long way to go. Today, bioplastics account for less than 2 percent of all plastics, while some estimate that they could replace up to 90 percent of fossil-fuel-based plastics for such things as packaging and bottles.
Until that happy day, if it comes, let’s all try to reuse as much plastic as we can before throwing it out, and, when possible, use glass or metal containers instead of plastic ones as the landfills rise toward Himalayan heights.
What really is recyclable?
Coming Back
Hope from history? Observers, including me, remember how moribund now downtown Boston sometimes seemed half a century ago. Then big department stores were closing amidst suburban flight and the sleazy “Combat Zone’’ lurked nearby, scaring away people who wanted to be considered respectable.
The downtown is gradually coming back from the pandemic disaster, with new restaurants and other attractions opening. The COVID-accelerated move to remote work has affected the demographics of downtown consumers and changed the days and hours of peak business, but all in all “The Hub’s’’ center is looking pretty healthy. But it would look healthier if a lot more of the high-rise office space made empty by the remote-work revolution can be turned into housing, a very expensive and complicated architectural and engineering challenge.
I assume that there will be a flow of lessons for Providence, whose leaders, I hope, get ideas from time to time from our big neighbor to the north on how to energize a charming old downtown with narrow streets.
Look at:
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It seems incredible that Newport would allow the demolition of a building as old as the beautiful if battered Borden House, built in 1704, when the city was one of the leading Colonial era ports, but a story in Newport This Week suggests that could well happen soon.
And Willing to Pay for It
An elderly friend of mine fell down and hit his head while walking in Paris the other week. He’s a worldly businessman and journalist who has spent a lot of time in Europe.
But even he was surprised by the level of care he received, first in the EMT van, with its four medical personnel, and then in the hospital, all for no charge to him. Unlike in America, much of whose populace seems to fatalistically tolerate its crummy health indices and world-leading costs in a fragmented, heavily profit-based medical “system,” the French expect a generally high level of care and are willing to pay the taxes (income, VAT, etc.) to provide it. Most Europeans consider the American health care grossly unfair, which it is.
Of course our system is so lousy compared to those of most Developed Nations’ in part because many American voters are so ignorant about how other countries’ health systems work that they don’t push hard for reform.
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The best college for you is the one that best fits you.
Here’s a good discussion of such lists:
While very well paid, being a college/university president is increasingly unpleasant because there are too many constituencies to please (like a little country) and the general decline of civility and general knowledge in American society.
The latest university president to bail out in frustration and fatigue is Rutgers’s Jonathan Holloway.
400 years of Risk Takers
Eileen Warburton’s new book, Chasing Chance: Stories of the Peirce-Prince Families in America, is riveting American history structured through the interwoven narratives of two families who arrived in New England from England in “The Great Migration’’ of Puritans to New England, 1620-1640.
“Chance” in this context means accepting risk.
This is not some dry genealogical tome. Rather, this brilliantly researched, written and illustrated work narrates the sagas of memorable characters, many heroic, some not, in ways that can suggest life lessons for everyone. What to do, what not to do.
The cast of characters include austere and deeply religious Puritans, alleged witches, sea captains, Confederate officers, business moguls, scholars, artists, statesmen, war heroes and founders of towns, states, and companies. They’re never shown as stock figures but as idiosyncratic people in the round, with anger, occasional ruthlessness and other problematic elements mixed in with such admirable qualities as courage in the face of high, even lethal risks, ingenuity, generosity, civic leadership and plenty of romance.