RL302 - The Battle Of Turns Out

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The problem: And then what happens?, referring to things that appear very easy to fix, but if you would it, then what happens?

The show title refers to the problem that there is always a turns out or even a double, triple or quadruple turns out that you don’t know about when you only look at something on the surface.

John thinks that Merlin sounds different, he sounds compact, warm, but punchy. Maybe he finally broke in his microphone after 3-4 weeks? Like a baseball glove that you put a ball in and sleep on, Merlin has been waxing his mic.

It is kind of early. Merlin sounds so stupid in his ad-read. He has been up since 6:30am but he is still not awake.

Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.

John started off the day with a little bit of a tummy cramp. Merlin reminds John that he can leave whenever he needs to and what is in the show is in the show.

Merlin's Street Car replaced by buses for 2 months (RL302)

Merlin's street car is back. During June until last Saturday they were doing tunnel work on the West Portal Tunnel and Merlin had bus service for 2 months. Merlin is always with the MUNI and the reason why he never wants to move is because he lives very close to a MUNI line and he works near a MUNI line, but he hasn’t stepped foot on a bus and his daughter refuses to get on a bus altogether.

Environment and recycling (RL302)

When John ran for office, one of his platforms was public transit and novel transit. He wanted to re-establish street cars where there had formerly been street cars, not anything crazy, but just put them back where they had been. Within the hyper transit-focused and city-services-focused Seattle liberal community there was tremendous derision from some quarters about street cars, because it was stipulated over and over that buses could do the same job better and cheaper.

In researching it, you will discover that the wear and tear on street cars is much less than the wear and tear both on buses and what buses do to roads. You can put 5 buses worth of people in a street car driven by one person! This seems like one of these deep Turns Out, like ”We should get rid of straws”, and we will remember it as a turning point in the discussion about what individual consumers can do to help the environment. There is a viral video of a sad turtle with a straw in its nose.

A lot of things about recycling are a bit of a jam-up. Sometimes it uses more energy than it saves. It is a whole Penn & Teller type situation. When the markets for it are really good, there are businesses who are happy to take your recycling, but there are other times when the good progressives will put things in the blue bastic [sic] and it just goes to a different dump with more car rides. We haven’t interrogated that because it is one of those things where it feels that we are helping. In San Francisco they have a very large recycling bin and a comically small trash bin. Merlin’s neighbors hardly recycle at all, God bless them, and Merlin fills both 64 gallons of recycling bins every week and that is not even including the boxes. Merlin recycles a lot because he assumes it is better than trash.

The dogs in John's neighborhood (RL302)

See Neighborhood!

Restorative Practices, testing new ideas in schools (RL302)

At Merlin’s daughter’s school there is a thing called Restorative Practices. If kids get into a fight or if kids are screaming at each other at school, you take them aside and talk about what happened. It mostly makes a giant amount of sense and it is a great way to get the heat out of the situation and talk about what happened, who is aggrieved, and what we are going to do about it. Ultimately it is supposed to minimize the arbitrary discipline and frontier justice that has to happen. It works okay a lot of the time, especially with younger kids who do have a more innate sense of justice than many of us realize. They normally do feel bad about it and apologize.

A friend of Merlin’s kid got punched at school and they go into restorative practices, which is probably good, but what if that kid is just a fucking bully? The poor kids who get punched by this asshole has to sit down in a little plastic chair and look into each others eyes and talk about their feelings. That kid is probably a bully because he is getting bullied. There is some part of Merlin who does want the frontier justice in those cases. The same thing is true for governments: They need you to try and work this out, because they do not have a team of paratroopers that are going to come in and solve it for you. They do not have a dedicated dog force.

What do you want the government to do? Restorative Practice is a glimpse inside the liberal world view, which is that we are trying to make the world a better place. It is not just designed around the simple aspect of teaching kids resolve problems, but it is much bigger! Schools have that idea of creating a society and trying to create better kids that can make a better world. The vision of a better world is then the second and third question.

They are trying to promote a world without discrimination and with equal opportunity for everyone, but at a certain point you get into a world where you are asking ”And then what happens?” We very quickly get into a place where in order to make the world better we have to prohibit some behavior and the list of prohibited behavior in order to create a world where everyone is free starts to get longer and longer. At a certain point we have to start prohibiting families of behavior or schools of thought, because schools of thought lead to certain families of behavior.

At that point we are monitoring how the frames of minds of whole families and communities interact and it becomes very theoretical. Looking at problems that adults are having in the world, theorizing the cause and the source of those problems, and then theorizing what you could do to children in order to change the behavior of some imaginary future generation that you don’t want to have have these problems, there is a whole intestinal system of theories that you are progressing through.

Each time you have a theory, you move on to the next step and the theory you had is gradually calcifying into what you imagine is a fact. You say that this is because they didn’t have enough Vitamin C and you need to get more Vitamin C into schools, but as you focus on that, you forget that your original theory is just a theory and you don’t know if it is true. It was just an idea you had one day and it might have been Vitamin D instead! You had that theory and then you pivot to how to get Vitamin C into our schools to solve this problem and all of a sudden your theory has turned into a fact.

Then you start to talk to companies to put Vitamin C into their tooth paste. Now your last supposition also is a fact and pretty soon you are all the way up to some public meeting where you are screaming in someone’s face that they are trying to keep Vitamin C out of our kids and that is going to create world war! Maybe the other person is still all the way back of ”What does Vitamin C have to do with it?” Restorative practice sounds amazing, but if you scratch the surface of its intent, it isn’t just to get Bobby and Billy to solve the problem on their own who’s ball it is. It is about a whole universe and about how to get people to vote for a president who doesn’t actively want war.

The picture of the turtle with the straw got an emotional hook into us and that is now our framing for this problem. We tut-tut our neighbors if they put the green bottles in with the clear bottles, but what about Bitcoin mining and all this other stuff that is so much more consequential? The garbage trucks go into those big facilities through 4 separate doors that are different colors and on the other side it is just like the apartment of Help by The Beatles! They all just dump their garbage into the same sunken living room.

Schools in particular are an incubating petri dish of this kind of thing and they can’t get away and give you this brush-off! Early in the year John talked to the principal about standardized testing. He was missing one of his front teeth which is a thing that happens sometimes around the first of the year. He might also have been wearing a fedora with a giant peacock feather in it, but he is not a 100% sure. She gave him the real principal-reply which is that she gazed off into the distance to make sure some kids weren’t hitting each other with hockey sticks and she said ”Standardized testing is not really a thing that we put that much stock in, but we have to do it because we are doing it" They don’t really do anything with the results, but it is how schools are funded and judged and so they do end up tailoring everything to it.

John found out later in the year that the principal was a massive Long Winters fan, but she didn’t recognize him. At the end of the year he ended up signing her syllabus, but at the beginning of the year he wanted to talk to her about standardized testing and you could see that she had that conversation with 800 parents before and there are some that have more confidence rolling up on her, but she has even more confidence in redirecting their energy. Somebody told her during the year that John was the guy from The Long Winters and all of a sudden John could have said that we should eliminate standardized testing around here and put in helicopter lessons, because that will bring order to our community. She is a professional educator and her job is to be in between the parents and the people who are ordering her to test students. In the meantime she also has to deal with teachers and kids all day.

Marlo came home a couple of times and was in tears because she was terrible at tests. When John asked the school about it they told him that it was a computerized thing and as long as they keep answering questions correctly, the questions will get harder until they reach the point where they can’t answer them anymore. That is how they are testing the limits of their knowledge, but what they were doing is inculcating horror in children about tests, because the test will not end until they failed. People want to do well on tests, but John was just supposed to tell his daughter not to worry because the test will just keep getting harder until she can’t answer the questions. That is the way and somebody designed this!

Both John and his daughter were very confused about it, because what if you already can’t answer the first question on the test or what if you don’t know the answer to 5 questions, do you just lean back and think you have found the limits of this computer? They didn’t explain this concept to the kids at all! The parents have never experienced anything like that and why is every kid sad now? John loved taking tests because they were measurable. You could just answer the question and at the end you would get a grade. It was simple. It wasn’t an essay. Nobody could give you a C although your writing was good, but your topic was a little weird. Imagine if you would do your SAT and the questions just kept getting harder! Who came up with this? What theory is this? Even if you score off the charts, you will still walk away feeling like the biggest loser.

Merlin’s daughter is the highest everything, but she still stresses over all this stuff so badly. She told Merlin something that might have been what John just said, but she did it in a dumb kid way.

It feels like computers are hammers that make every problem look like a nail, and if you have the ability to randomize questions and make it harder every time, why would you not use it? Would you just have the computer duplicate an old-fashioned paper test? It is a Jurassic Park type situation. You can train the computer to do things all kind of tricky ways.

Merlin’s favorite number (RL302)

Merlin usually picks 37, which is the random number most people pick 1 and 100, because it feels the most random.

MUNI streetcars (RL302)

Merlin sent John a MUNI Metro link. The current streetcar fleet consists of three different types of streetcars. When Merlin first moved to San Francisco, they had the Boeing Vertols with the orange side which transitioned into the very heavy Breda, the Italian streetcars that you can hear clamoring by very loudly. During the last year they introduced a new car from Siemens that is very updated and modern. The older models had 2000 miles and 5500 miles between failures, while the Siemens is supposed to have 59.000 miles between failures, which is a mind-blowing figure compared to the previous two. Forget about comparing this to the latest buses, because buses have so many more moving parts, even if you are running on an electric line. The buses going up and down Van Ness avenue are going to be trashed.

There is a lot of emotion in public transit and the people who are looking at it from outside don’t understand how emotional the issue is. Especially Merlin who is living half a block from a MUNI station is very emotional about it. Some people don’t want to ride a buss, but they will ride a trolley, while a lot of people wonder what is the fucking difference? A trolley is elegant and neat. You need to make transit neat-o so that it is better than something that feels dirty and lame. People scoff and roll their eyes, but: There are people who are buying the cheapest, greyest car because it is the most efficient. Those people probably work in government, but everybody else is trying to buy a neat-o car. That stuff matters to people!

To car owners public transport seems abstract because they don’t need it. It is a nuisance like giving money to people in Africa. A big argument is made about which of these systems is less in the way of cars and many people say that buses just use the streets and are not in the way of cars the same way as if you sequester a train over to the side and give it a dedicated path. That will take a lane away, but in a city where the streets are full of buses your lane will not be somehow super-liberated. Also, a streetcar doesn’t cut you off. John loves streetcars and he will argue for them all day and night. In Portland you can get on a streetcar at the airport and get wherever you want to go. Everything they do in Portland that makes Portland better and shows the world how to go makes John so mad! It is so infuriating! Merlin likes the idea of Portland.

Merlin finds that people act differently on a streetcar. They comport themselves better, they are not shucking and jiving as much, and they are not fucking with people as much. He doesn’t know exactly why. Somebody should write a thesis on this! Merlin has ridden a lot of streetcars, buses and BART, and pound for pound, mile for mile, there is less bullshit on a train and people act better on a train. John finds this absolutely true! Even riding the streetcar every day for decades is fun and part of the reason is that it goes ding-ding. When you talk about it at public meetings that way, like why we need gondolas in Seattle, it is because they are fucking fun!

It takes 45 minutes to take the train and people imagine that it will only take 10 minutes by car because they have done that drive one time when it took them 10 minutes, and now that is what they think it takes, even though it takes an hour and 45 minutes. At meetings where people are trying to apportion money to different programs we cannot talk about building public projects or making things that are fun. People will get out of their cars and take gondolas or trains if you build them because they feel like their lives are fun. It sounds crazy, but when we are building cities we are thinking of a collective of workers who are all dressed in blue uniforms, mostly one person in a car driving somewhere.

People have all these examples of public housing projects that people didn’t care about and started throwing trash down the stairwells until it was uninhabitable and we had to tear it down. It is very hard to ask if we built those things in a way that would make anyone proud in living there. Did you give the windows a view? Did you make the spaces cheery and amenable? Instead they built a white-collar prison, they put up the minimalist, cheapest things they had, put up a bunch of bright lights that are on all night and they say that all the poor people live there and cause problems. They find that if they would make the ceilings 8 foot (240 cm) tall, it would cost an extra $0.30 per mile, and if you make them 7 foot (210 cm) tall, you can save $0.10 on everything. It will make the project be ahead of time and under budget, but they don’t realize that every little decision like that robs the world of whimsy and creates problems that you later have to solve. It ends up being more expensive in the long run and it is impossible to do a single study that demonstrates this.

When you ask for a budget for a sunny lobby that serves no purpose other than to give people a place to congregate, or for putting a little bit of trim over the doors that makes it feels less like army housing and more like a home, we know it is going to cost a little bit of money and you don't need to do 50 university studies on it, but you can just imagine yourself living there and imagine what little it would take to make you feel like this is your home and not just some place where you have been shunted.

This is the little train I ride to work and not just the easiest thing to put on the road tomorrow: A bus! Merlin and John are not against buses, because they are a component of the system. In 2011 there were 380.000 cars registered in San Francisco and 320.000 street parking spaces including meters. If you account for the vehicles that come into San Francisco to work during the day time, there are 505.000 vehicles in the city and 320.000 street parking spaces.

The Friendly Fire Reddit (RL302)

John was on a reddit the other day because his other podcast about war movies called Friendly Fire apparently has an active reddit community. The other two hosts have a show about Star Trek and the theme of that show and of that community is very ”Yes, and…” If you say ”Star Trek is ridiculous”, everybody is ”Hahaha” Everybody is supportive and agrees with each other 99% of the time and the 1% they disagree is very friendly disagreement. These two hosts brought a lot of their Star Trek audience over to Friendly Fire where John says ”I do not agree with you” and he also does not agree to disagree, but he just flat out disagrees with not only your take on this war movie, but also your entire premise about how the world works and let me explain to you about Vietnam and also about Napoleon and also about the 30 Years' War.

John’s cohosts are his friends and doing the show is super-fun, but people who have come from that other show get their feelings hurt just because John is a mean-y-pants. They just did Star Wars because it has the word Wars in the title and one of the guys said it was a war movie while John insisted it was definitely not, but if you have cohosts you have to collaborate and do what they say sometimes. Somebody said that they haven’t listened to that episode because they don’t want to hear what old grouchy Roderick has to say about their favorite movie.

John is on this reddit because somebody on the program told him that everybody is loving it over there, and so John read this comment and wrote a reply to them which they were probably not expecting. ”What can I say or do on this program to make you stop listening sooner?” and they deleted their comment and then commented on John’s comment with ”I apologize!” and now John knows what he needed to do: Not go on reddit! This is for you! He does not belong there!

page revision: 3, last edited: 08 Apr 2022 12:58
Edit Tags History Files Print Site tools + Options
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License