HorsesAss.Org

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.

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.

This Sunday’s New York times had a story about worker owned cooperatives. The main example that they use is in San Francisco, but

If you happen to be looking for your morning coffee near Golden Gate Park and the bright red storefront of the Arizmendi Bakery attracts your attention, congratulations. You have found what the readers of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt-weekly, deem the city’s best bakery. But it has another, less obvious, distinction. Of the $3.50 you hand over for a latte (plus $2.75 for the signature sourdough croissant), not one penny ends up in the hands of a faraway investor. Nothing goes to anyone who might be tempted to sell out to a larger bakery chain or shutter the business if its quarterly sales lag.

Instead, your money will go more or less directly to its 20-odd bakers, who each make $24 an hour — more than double the national median wage for bakers. On top of that, they get health insurance, paid vacation and a share of the profits. “It’s not luxury, but I can sort of afford living in San Francisco,” says Edhi Rotandi, a baker at Arizmendi. He works four days a week and spends the other days with his 2-year-old son.

Arizmendi and its five sister bakeries in the Bay Area are worker-owned cooperatives, an age-old business model that has lately attracted renewed interest as a possible antidote to some of our most persistent economic ills. Most co-ops in the U.S. are smaller than Arizmendi, with around a dozen employees, but the largest, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, has about 2,000. That’s hardly the organizational structure’s upper limit. In fact, Arizmendi was named for a Spanish priest and labor organizer in Basque country, José María Arizmendiarrieta. He founded what eventually became the Mondragon Corporation, now one of the region’s biggest employers, with more than 60,000 members and 14 billion euro in revenue. And it’s still a co-op.

Does anyone know about cooperatives in the Seattle area if people want to support them with their dollars? I was trying to think of any, and I couldn’t. I mean the advantages of capitalism without, you know, creating more capitalists (except their financiers, and I guess customers). If they make a decent coffee with good enough pastries, that’s really all I want out of a coffee shop.

If people know of local worker cooperatives, especially ones that provide good goods and services, please leave a comment.

It’s as if the editors at the Seattle Times live in a world entirely free of context:

The proposal now before the Seattle City Council is to double the existing property-tax levy devoted to parks, to $54 million a year, raising the annual cost for the owner of a $400,000 home from $76 to $168. It is not a backbreaking addition, but it would tighten the squeeze on middle-class families already struggling with Seattle’s cost of living.

And it furthers a trend of jumbo specialty property levies. The annual amount of dedicated “lid-lift levies” jumped over the past decade from $65 million to $146 million. The Families and Education Levy doubled in 2011 and the low-income housing levy jumped 50 percent in 2009.

Yeah, true. But you know what else has jumped over the past decade? The hundreds of millions of regular property tax levy dollars (those that don’t require a public vote) lost to Tim Eyman’s I-747, an initiative soundly defeated within Seattle. I-747 limits regular levy growth to an absurd 1 percent a year. So while voter-approved dedicated lid-lift levies may indeed be $81 million higher than they were a decade ago (if you can trust the Seattle Times editorial board’s numbers), I-747 will cost city coffers as much as $186 million in 2015 alone, the first year the proposed parks levy would take effect!

Is it great policy to move all this funding out of the general fund and into dedicated levies? No. It’s stupid. But thanks to I-747, the only other alternative would be to grow the $267 million parks maintenance backlog the editors already lament.

That is the context in which all these lid-lift levies have gone to the ballot. And unless we debate the parks district proposal within that context, it’s not really an honest debate at all.

– It’s the last day to get signed up for health care for the year, so if you haven’t yet, here’s the website for Washington.

– GOP Condemn A Black Woman Over A Tweet: A Timeline

– Not even really sure what a Chinese backed company would mean in that case.

– Congrats to Robert Cruickshank for being the new President of NPI.

– The only one of these proposed Constitutional amendments I’d support is number 5.

– If fantasy baseball was more like this, I could probably get more into it.

Just two Sunday’s ago I sowed my first planting of radishes. Today they’re ready to be thinned, the spicy seedlings making a delicious addition to tonight’s salad. Fourteen days from planting to harvest; can’t ask for a faster growing season than that.

It’s one of the reasons I love growing radishes and arugula, both of which are fast, vigorous and reliable.  Arugula especially is a crazy thing to buy in the store, where supermarkets charge yuppy prices for a plant that is essentially a weed. The row of arugula in the foreground of the photo above was planted only last week. Next week I’ll enjoy my first thinning, and as long as I keep planting fresh sowings every couple weeks, I’ll be flush with arugula until the summer heat gets too intense. Then I’ll start sowing again in September, and enjoy frequent harvests until the first hard freeze.

Tomatoes take commitment, and they are of course the pride of my backyard garden. But radishes and arugula provide a sense of immediate gratification that makes the wait for the summer bounty more bearable.

Last week’s contest was won by Brian. It was the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on Earth, good luck!

Matthew 10:34-37
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Discuss.