HorsesAss.Org

First of all, if Christopher wants to interview people who are truly struggling to scrape by on their meager income, he might want to start by interviewing his own staff. Second, I’m not sure I get the whole point of featuring failing businesses as the poster children of the anti-$15/hour side of the debate? I  mean, what’s the argument? If we raise the minimum wage, the unprofitable bookstores and coffee shops Christopher loves will fail even sooner? That’s hardly a sound premise on which to base economic policy.

Don’t get me wrong, I have great empathy for small business owners. I come from a family of small retailers, and I owned and operated a small business myself. My then-wife and I founded Eccentric Software in 1993, initially to publish what I loving describe as “the world’s most widely pirated rhyming dictionary software,” capitalizing our business on credit cards and some small loans from family members. Over the next five years we sold tens of thousands of copies of four different titles in shrink-wrapped retail packaging through major outlets like Computer City, CompUSA, Egghead, and in all the major mail-order software catalogs. Our software (much of which I developed myself) garnered great reviews and developed a loyal following, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. To this day I’m proud to say that I am one of the few Americans who can boast a trade surplus with Japan.

The original retail packaging for A Zillion Kajillion Rhymes.

But while the business never lost money, it never really made much money either. It was an awful industry, one in which the people who create the most value reap the least rewards, and in which longtime vendors would sometimes just decide to refuse to pay you, simply because they could. We lived comfortably, but we eventually walked away with a six figure debt.

Still, nobody shed tears for us, because such are the risks of entrepreneurialism. We knew that going in. But we took that risk anyway, partly because of the prospect of reward, and partly because we just passionately believed in our product. I can point you to dozens of Broadway musicals and Disney movies and hit songs that I know were written using our software. That’s gratifying in itself. And the money thing worked itself out too, with my then wife’s entrepreneurial experience helping her land a dot.com job that ultimately paid off our remaining debt. (I also landed good-paying dot.com work, but my options never paid off.)

So yeah, I know what it’s like to run a struggling small business. I know what it’s like to pour all my passion and time and financial resources into a business, for little monetary return. Hell, even HA was an entrepreneurial endeavor into which I sunk immense human capital, often for non-monetary return. So I feel for small business owners, and do agree that the system, alas, is stacked against them.

That said, most businesses fail. They just do. I’m sorry that Rafael Sanchez might have to go back to an unsatisfying job at Microsoft or some other bland corporation now that his lovely little business didn’t work out (I’ve been to Cintli, and it truly was a lovely little place). I feel your pain, Rafael. Been there, done that.

But life isn’t fair. So while no doubt a $15 minimum wage might push some struggling small businesses over the edge, others will take their place. Broadway won’t become an empty landscape of boarded up storefronts, bereft of coffee shops, restaurants, and retailers. The business community will adapt to Seattle’s living wage economy. That’s the way capitalism works. And there’s no rule that says the forces of creative destruction may only be unleashed by the private sector.

Another election, another Pam Roach primary — and possibly general election — challenge.

State Sen. Pam Roach, a guardian of the Republican Party’s right flank in Olympia, is getting a challenge from a fellow Republican.

State Rep. Cathy Dahlquist, R-Enumclaw, announced this week that she will run against Roach. Under Washington’s “top two” primary system, the challenge creates the distinct possibility of a November battle between two Republicans in the 31st District of eastern King County and rural-exurban Pierce County.

And at the link, Dahlquist makes good noises about education, including mentioning teacher pay that the GOP often don’t when talking about education. Still, on many issues she’s a pretty standard Republican. She voted against the Reproductive Parity Act and marriage equality. And I couldn’t find any tax increases she supports, so wanting to pay for education is nice, but presumably it means by destroying the rest of the state’s social services. So sure, she’d almost certainly be better than Roach. But that’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Because the law is the law. (Though geographic diversity could be one of several reasonable tie-breakers.)

Also, contrary to the mischaracterization in today’s Seattle Times, Justice Jim Johnson is not “an unabashed populist.” He is a government-hating ideologically rigid Libertarian.

Just setting the record straight.

“Ride-share” drivers may want to check their insurance policies for updated exclusions like this.

One of the big debates in the battle over how to regulate Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Lyft, Sidecar, and uberX is over how to ensure adequate insurance. The Seattle City Council seemed pretty adamant about requiring insurance comparable to the commercial insurance required of taxi drivers, while the TNCs basically argued: “Don’t worry, we’re handling it, trust us.” Particularly offensive to the TNCs is a provision that requires that their blanket insurance cover drivers whenever they are logged into the system, not just when they are engaged with a passenger.

Good thing too, because insurance companies are busy updating their personal auto insurance policies to explicitly exclude coverage when the vehicle is used in connection with TNC services, for example, in the revision above that Amica has sent to customers:

We have excluded Medical Payments Coverage for bodily injury sustained by anyone other than you or any family member while occupying, or when struck by, your covered auto while it is enrolled in a personal vehicle sharing program under the terms of a written agreement and being used in connection with such program.

What exactly does this language mean? I’m not sure. But I wouldn’t count on my insurance company paying a claim on an incident that occurred while I was logged into a TNC. Or, perhaps, ever.

TNC boosters seem to think that because there’s an app, it changes everything! It doesn’t. Your personal auto insurance does not cover commercial for-hire use. So I’d make damn sure the TNC’s insurance does before assuming the liability that comes with being a for-hire driver.

– Fort Hood can’t catch a break. Video loads automatically.

– City Hall Starts to Give a Shit About Women’s Pay Equity Again

– I love that Sound Transit has pictures for specific stations, but some of them don’t make a lot of sense (to me). Answer some questions to help them design the pictures for new light rail stations. [h/t]

– Supply and demand is a thing in housing.

– STOPPPPPP YOU’RE HURTING MY FEEEEEELINGS is apparently the new clarion call of the conservative movement. I’m still a little shocked by it.

One of the questions with the Oso disaster that people are asking now is why did we let it happen? We knew that the hill was in danger, and yet people were allowed to live below it. Emmitt tries to tackle that with a bit of a historical perspective. And as is often times the case when he does a historical overview, the early settlers to the area from New England and from the Appalachian region play a large part.

But, the ability to do anything about it stopped where it became obvious that no one wanted to listen to them. The deep sense of individualism that came west with the Appalachians in Cascadia still rules the point of view, especially along the Stillaguamish River.

Sadly, one of the former political leaders on the Appalachian end of the spectrum likely died in the Oso mudslide.

Sure, it is possible to offer enough money to make anyone want to move. But, it isn’t like Snohomish County had magic public funds growing fairy dust. And, when it came to spending that limited public money on someone that really didn’t want to move in the first place. Well, you see where the attention of Snohomish civic leaders can be distracted.

Its easy to point to the available evidence and blame well intentioned people for not doing more. But, it is worth looking back at our origins here and seeing that it isn’t simple.

I don’t know how much we can to do to prevent these sorts of things as long as we’ve decided that the government is going to enforce property rights (something I’m generally for), and it has limited funds. Maybe there isn’t a way. I mean if the state took money out of education, or whatever, to pay to move some people who chose to live in dangerous places (and there must be thousands of dangerous places across the state), or if the county took money away from fire or police protection, people would rightly scream bloody murder.

None of this is to take anything away from the rescue efforts or to say that this was what they had coming, of course. As a liberal, I think we’re all in this together; as a human, I have nothing but sympathy. And as someone who lives in the city of Seattle where the next big one is overdue, I know it’s only a matter of time before I or my neighbors need the same sort of help. And nowhere is perfectly safe. Still, the tough decisions about how we minimize the damage from future events haven’t suddenly become as clear as we might like.

Refrigerator-sized utility cabinets like these may be coming to a planting strip near you if CenturyLink has its way.

As I wrote about a few months back on Slog, CenturyLink has long argued that its efforts to upgrade broadband speeds throughout the city have been hampered by regulations requiring neighboring homeowners to give their approval before installing refrigerator-sized utility boxes on city-owned sidewalks, planting strips, and alleys. These utility boxes—like the ones pictured above, just a couple blocks from my house—are unquestionably both an eyesore and a graffiti target. But CenturyLink says that 21,000 households would have access to faster broadband speeds today, had they the freedom to to liberally plop these down throughout the city.

And that’s a freedom that Mayor Ed Murray now says he’s ready to bestow. Um… hooray?

Look at the utility cabinets above. Now picture them installed on the planting strip in front of your house. Now honestly ask yourself whether you and your neighbors should have zero say in how and where they are installed?

Some residents of Beacon Hill and other underserved neighborhoods had been asking for a pilot program that would have suspended these regulations in certain neighborhoods, just to see how things worked. But the mayor’s proposal would apparently eliminate these regulations altogether. And CenturyLink says it will take that as an opportunity install 349 cabinets in the first year alone.

That could provide welcome broadband upgrades to thousands of Seattleites. Which is good. But it would also create hundreds of new eyesores. (Of course, CenturyLink could alternatively install these cabinets underground or on utility poles, or pay homeowners to install them on private property, but that would cost more money, so no go.)

Personally, I support the notion of a pilot program. But completely eliminating the current restrictions without getting any binding promises back from CenturyLink just strikes me as regulatory giveaway and recipe for some very disgruntled homeowners.

Great news for billionaires, as the US Supreme Court further unravelled campaign finance and disclosure regulations by striking down the overall limit that individuals may donate to candidates and political parties.

Under one of the last remaining useful provisions of the McCain-Feingold (a provision that dates back to the post-Watergate election reforms), individual donors had been limited to $48,600 in overall contributions every two years to all federal candidates, and $74,600 to political parties. (The $2,600 cap per candidate remains in place.) Now, really, really rich people like the Koch brothers can dump even more money into politics, assuring that their voice can finally be heard.

The conservative majority on this court won’t do squat to stop the GOP’s campaign of voter disenfranchisement, but they are absolutely outraged at the notion that wealthy people shouldn’t be allowed to spend as much money as they want influencing the few proles who are actually allowed to vote.

Hooray for democracy!

– Your April Fools joke isn’t as funny as you think it is.

– Vote Yes on Prop 1

– Fox News is awesome at graph making.

– And it’s not like we won’t know that people signed up.

– It’s sort of precious, isn’t it? Kind of like a 5th grade essay about a little girl’s puppy.

– Anyone doing 30 days of biking?

– Leave it to Darrell Issa to infuriate Democrats with his pointless obsession, while infuriating Republicans for being bad at it.

I was thinking of doing an April Fools post in which I announced that I had been hired by the Seattle Times as a political blogger and columnist. But every time I sat down to write it, it never came out funny.

The fact is, and as immodest as it may sound, there is no media outlet in Seattle that could profit more from my services than the Seattle Times. I would deliver the kind of edgy, funny, and provocative commentary younger audiences demand, while helping to combat the common perception of the Seattle Times as a paper hostile to our city’s urbanist and progressive values. I’d create a little havoc, sure—I mean, what kind of paper hires a columnist who is guaranteed to debunk their own editorials?—but those sort of intramurals make for a helluva good read. And given my tireless blogging and my decade of cultivating political sources, my blog would quickly become the most politically relevant feature in the paper since “Postman on Politics.”

And relevance is something the Seattle Times could use more of.

True story. The very last event I covered as an employee at The Stranger was a minimum wage forum held down the street at Seattle Central Community College. At one point, King County Council Member Larry Gossett quotes something from a Danny Westneat column, only to be met with blank stares from the couple hundred community college students in the room. “Danny Westneat… the Seattle Times?” Gossett prompts the crowd, raising his hand by example. “How many of you read Danny Westneat?”

Nobody raises their hand.

About ten minutes earlier, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant had cited something in The Stranger, and mentioned that “Goldy” was in the room. A lot of heads turned around looking to see which person was Goldy.

This isn’t meant as a knock against Danny. I like Danny. He’s a smart, coherent, and thoughtful writer (if a bit too conventional for my tastes). And had that forum been held in front of the Municipal League instead of a bunch of grungy kids, nearly every hand in the room would have been raised at the mention of Danny’s name. But most of them would’ve been familiar with my work too, if less sympathetic. Love me or hate me, that’s the sort of broad relevance I could bring to Seattle’s last remaining daily.

Look, I know I haven’t always been kind to publisher Frank Blethen. But this is business. And I’m convinced that bringing somebody like me on board as a brash counterweight to his paper’s staid status quoist zeitgeist would be good for business. Then again, if the Blethen family was motivated purely by business interests, they probably would’ve unloaded the paper more than a decade ago.

So here I am howling into the wind on my lonely blog, as Blethen watches his aging readership gradually die off. Not sure which one of us is the bigger April fool.

Don’t be a fool…join us tonight for an evening of political punditry over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks may show up even earlier for dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state DL over the next week. They’re everywhere! The Tri-Cities chapter also meets this and every Tuesday night. The Lakewood chapter meets this Wednesday. For Thursday, the Spokane and Tacoma chapters meet. On Friday, the Enumclaw chapter meets. And next Monday, the Yakima, South Bellevue and Olympia chapters meet.

With 215 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.