$4.25 a Gallon

This is how much a gallon of gasoline costs at the station down my street: $4.25 a gallon. That's roughly $1.13 a liter.

With gasoline so expensive by American standards, The Economist is speculating that diesel engines will come back as a popular solution, as an oily alternative to the hybrid cars and biofuels. Mercedes-Benz has developed a more fuel-efficient diesel sedan known as the E320 Bluetec, with a price of $53K. The petrol version of the same vehicle (at the same price) runs at 17 miles per gallon in the city and 24 on the highway, compared to the diesel engine's 23 (city) and 32 (highway).

But the price of diesel is expensive too. The diesel price in the US rose twice as fast as petrol this year. While both carry the same tax weight in the US, diesel now costs 60 to 70 cents more a gallon than regular gas. But while diesel is 20% more expensive than gasoline, it is also 35% more efficiently used.

Europe and the US differ in the way oil is refined too, giving way to different pricing schemes. The catalytic "crackers" used in American refineries are setup to produce as much petrol as possible, with the leftover being used for diesel, heating oil, asphalt and other products. In Europe the refineries' hydocrackers produce 25% petrol and 25% diesel. If Europe wants to produce more diesel, it implies producing the same amount of petrol as well, the exports of which are shipped to the US mainly. So producing more diesel in Europe implies lowering the world price of petrol as well.

At any rate, when I drive to and from cities that are somewhere between 30 and 40 miles away (Seattle and Olympia) it costs me approximately $5 per trip, which adds up even for my compact commuter car, the 1997 Geo Metro Sedan. It was once stolen and left somewhere in ditch. I bought it two years ago at an auction in Fife, WA for $1,800. For reasons other than my own self-interest, rising gasoline prices should be a positive influence, and should also be matched by changing consumer preferences and the development of petrol-using substitutes.

Why does postmodern music remix other music?

"Postmodern music" is a maddeningly imprecise idea as a musical concept. So much of what postmodernism has done is react against the project of modernism, and parts of postmodernism are not even doing this: they are not reacting but repudiating the authority of musical history. So, there are really two strains of the "postmodern" music attitude: anti-modernism and post-modernism. Postmodernism embraces, anti-modernism reacts.

Listen to Samuel Barber's second movement in the String Quartet No. 1 in 1936, Adagio for Strings, which is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the modern classical era. Click on the green link for the full version.

It has been called the "saddest" classical work written in the modern era. With the Nazis coming to power in 1936 and the American Empire on the brink of a new age, the piece was also used in 2001 to commemorate the thousands who were killed in the September 11 attacks.

I heard Adagio for Strings played at a party over the weekend. This was the largest party I've been to, called United States of Consciousness in Seattle. Thousands of diverse creatures in costumes that embraced references all kinds of different sub-cultures. What we all came to be a part of was this party - and beat our heads to Tiësto - because "in trance we trust".

Listen to the Adagio For Strings as 'embraced' by Tiësto...

This nostalgia for the modernist purity and totalizing demonstration of musical mastery is not present in Tiësto's remix of Adagio. It is opposed to strains of modernist drives toward mastery of musical composition. The nostalgia found in Tiësto is distinct from Barber's in that it completely distrusts elitist 'high' and 'low' concepts in art. It doesn't uphold the distinction between varying senses of melodrama and over-sentimentality in art. Tiësto is imitating the superficial appearances of art, through a formula of "remixing" that is supposed to demonstrate the lack of creativity or originality displayed in art.

For example, electronic dance music djs in the "Happy Hardcore" scene and others who remix popular theme songs from Tetris and Wizard of Oz, really do embrace that "superficial" aspect of postmodern music (again, probably not superficial to those who like it). But I don't agree with the claim that postmodernism is superficial so much, because I think that misunderstanding is mostly caused by a generational gap. Generation X thinks Generation Y's music is not creative.

Why does postmodern music remix so much? I don't think it's because of lack of creativity. It's more like a dialogue that cross-generational and cross-cultural. It's what the millenial generation knows how to do so well. YouTube is full of remixes. By remixing something you add another layer of commentary on to it, and someone watching or listening or reading has to figure out what it is that you added to it, and why that's different from what the original was. It's hard to tell what the original of anything is now. But postmodern music embraces the whole of commentary that came before it. Because everything seems so inter-connected, all content seems more like a discussion rather than a private session by yourself.

Bellevue: A Citiy of Tomorrow

Bellevue is a Seattle bedroom community, a republican bastion on the East side of Lake Washington, and one of the more anti-human and unhappy cities in the Northwest region. Beyond the consumerist core of the city center, Bellevue Square, I start to notice fewer and fewer places for humans to walk, fewer and fewer places for humans to talk to one another, until eventually, there are no sidewalks at all and I am competing for space with the sport utility vehicles and tinted town cars.

Some time perhaps during the 1970s, urban-planners in general began a movement that has signaled the city center's destruction, disrupted and rejected any bohemian style of living in favor of taller buildings and more road space. Urban and suburban centers, the new message announced far and wide, were engines of wealth creation and the parading spectacle of the new urban lifestyle.

The aim of the Keynesian city-planner is to lubricate the city for the purpose of extracting credit and increasing the velocity at which money travels from one hand to another. The strategy is to extract wealth from residents and use this flow to attract and subsidize developers to build the city's common areas. The goal is to create a stock of residential bourgeoisie. The city center was to be totally economically liquid. How 'cities' - that is, the planners and council members of general purpose areas - ever got to be in this position as the vanguard for any 'municipality' is the same story as with any nation-state vanguard. I view them much like I would view any armed mafia, except these ones have flags.

Bellevue is ironically rated by Money Magazine as one of the 25 safest cities in America. Crime level equivocates with "safety" all too easily. In these inclement climates, a new architecture, a new planning, and entire areas dedicated to the attitude of anti-human politics were erected at the expense of the human population and their happiness. The cities dispel the homeless, the black and Latino, forbid loiterers and close their doors to the non-consumers. The new centers of city life have but one ultimate purpose, to mechanize the general population and influence the flow of consumption.

Further reading:
Hall, Peter Geoffrey. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA: 2002.
Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age. Routledge. link.

The Chivalric Defense of Trusts

There is a phrase Americans use a lot when faced with political opposition and disagreement: "I don't agree with you, but I will defend your right to say it."

(Whether this is true or simply a rhetorical device is less certain. For whatever reason war-supporters say this all too often with regards to the war in Iraq, which demonstrates the same amount of equivocation as was present in the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda in 2003. As if the terrorists attacked the US in order to limit the speech of leftist American dissenters.)

Since my copy of Windows XP Pro has completely failed in the last few days without recourse to re-installation (during finals week no less!) should I have been thinking along similar lines: "I disagree with your products, but I will defend your right to sell them"?

Variable Spotting, graveyard shift

"Our hypothesis is that a greater incarcerated population as a proportion of the total population indicates a stronger or more effective system of catching and apprehending those engaged in crimes against property. It seems reasonable that states with a well-functioning criminal legal system with respect to property crimes would also exhibit a well-functioning civil legal system."

It's late. I'm caffeinated. And I found this irresistible quote in the Journal, Land Economics, in a paper titled "Property Rights by Squatting" which was published in 2001.

Silly land economists. It seems rather unreasonable, au contraire, to assume that states with a high proportion of incarcerated citizens would exhibit a well-functioning civil legal system to deal with other crimes. To use the highly unjust and discriminatory US prison system as a variable for a study that attempts to estimate the efficiency of adverse possession seems patently naive. Nonetheless, the overall argument of the paper is a reasonable one, that squatter's rights are efficient ways of transferring property titles from previous title-owners to newer owners like squatters who value the land more and hence use the land more efficiently.

However, the higher the prison population simply reflects, at minimum, the willingness of the state to prosecute. It does not reflect any sort of "developed" legal system. One historian at my school studied the increase in juvenile crimes in England after World War II, and concluded that the increase was directly attributable to increased state funds to prosecute, not, as many thought, due to an increase in juvenile delinquency and pot-smoking after the war.

Perhaps a more efficient legal system is one in which settlements take place out of court and not arbitrated by the state. Did the authors ever consider that? The less reliance on legal arbitration there is, assuming non-violent and non-coercive means, the more efficient the overall system of bargaining would be. Communities can have greater gains to efficiency through established customary laws without relying on legal arbitration methods. Their extraneous assumption about legal efficiency would have been better off if it was left out.

To Be Homeless in Pierce County

This was an article I wrote for a blog that some friends and I run, The Melon. Tacoma is the largest city in Pierce County, Washington, though there are sizable jurisdictions just outside the city limits. This article is about homeless issues on the borders of these jurisdictions. I juxtapose two opposing views - one is an activist's view and the other a professor's - though both are seeking to ameliorate homelessness.


Several months ago a Midland community activist, Stacy Emerson, posted a video on YouTube documenting a homeless encampment behind a K-mart just outside Tacoma’s city limits in an unincorporated area of Pierce County. Emerson said she posted the video after months of unproductive interaction with the Pierce County police force regarding the growing encampments. Since the video was posted, all three encampments were cleaned up, one by hand, two by bulldozers.

Emerson told The Melon that she never determined who the children’s clothes seen in the video belong to. The circumstances suggested to Emerson that pedophilic activity was taking place in the encampment. A meth lab in the K-mart encampment was reported to the Pierce County Health Department, and prescription drug containers were reported to Emerson’s Neighborhood Patrol Duty for possible HIPAA violations. She says the encampment’s inhabitants likely took the bottles from K-mart’s dumpster, not from the store itself, but believes K-mart could be liable nonetheless.

Ever since an encampment on Golden Given & 72nd was plowed over two years ago, “campers then migrated across the border into my community,” Emerson says. Her Neighborhood Patrol Duty in Midland has made more than twenty arrests over the last two or three months near the K-mart encampment. The Tacoma Police and other law enforcement agencies may have arrested more too, she says. But the camps were “never ‘explored’ by social services” and the thinly-spread Pierce County police force can only give inadequate attention to the problem.

Richard Anderson-Connolly, Professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, says the enforcement of ordinances like anti-panhandling laws is “a micro-level approach to a macro problem. All they can do is move the problem to another jurisdiction.” The burden of addressing underlying structural inequalities, unemployment and mental health are shifted onto other localities since this is “one of their few options.”

“The dominant political paradigm is not only micro but also ‘get tough,’” Anderson-Connolly says, “much like our approach to crime or foreign policy and education.” This tends to serve the interests of the economic elite, produces a lot of “lucrative contracts”, and does not require economic redistribution. Anderson-Connolly argues that the legitimating ideology here is one that blames the victim.

Homelessness in Pierce County has gotten worse according to Emerson, while at the same time in Tacoma homelessness is getting better. Although Emerson agrees with the statement that Tacoma’s ordinances “merely push people into areas away from the city centers”, she believes the adoption of Tacoma-style ordinances would better serve the communities around Tacoma and clean up the homeless encampments in the short run, which she argues is a good strategy until the different jurisdictions can determine better ways to spend taxpayer’s money.

The City of Tacoma’s “crackdown efforts” like anti-panhandling, Alcohol Impact Areas (AIA), Housing First, and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) have had a “tremendous impact on unincorporated communities,” especially Emerson’s, she says, since it borders the city. But she maintains now it’s time for the unincorporated communities themselves to pass legislation to crackdown on activities that homeless people resort to.

Anderson-Connolly characterizes this “get tough” approach as a prisoner’s dilemma between the non-cooperative jurisdictions. If one city pushes its homeless population out by enforcing these ordinances, other cities have the incentive to do the same in order to avoid the costs of helping people out of homelessness. While the optimal strategy may be for jurisdictions to cooperate effectively, “The high road is essentially blocked the low road equilibrium is the best one could hope for.”

Tacoma chose the “defection” strategy, Anderson-Connolly says, the one that in this case will lower each jurisdiction’s costs regardless of the other players’ strategies. This will most likely force other localities to do the same as Tacoma, “otherwise they get the worse possible outcome.”

While in support of Tacoma’s legal method, Emerson says what is more important is the inadequately-funded mental health program in Pierce County, paid for by the State of Washington. The homeless people she spoke to said they became homeless “as a result of making bad decisions,” and many become “mentally ill as a result of the hard life of homelessness.” The county “has now been without mental health services for almost two years,” having a significant causal impact on homelessness.

Anderson-Connolly is currently researching the Tacoma’s “encampment elimination project,” or what is often called by supporters the “Housing First Project”. When his research is available we’ll post it to The Melon. Emerson is a full-time community activist and says she will stay vigilant on issues regarding homelessness in Pierce County. Her website can be found at LifeInPierceCounty.com.

* picture from the Tacoma News Tribune.