#my uploading might slow down more due to school work and motivation issues

[twistedroseytoesy]

What if Yuu and some students sang Carpe Diem from Phineas and Ferb as a closing act for VDC?

Super fun idea! Yet another AU for the VDC, hope y’all like it!

The day of the VDC was a week away. Many of the groups were rehearsing and finalizing their acts. Yet mc felt left out as they watched their group get ready for the big day. They’re err just a manager, therefore they weren’t allowed to participate. That was stupid. So the decided to do something about it. Going to the school library and printing about 20 flyers, they taped them up around the school.

Needed! 20 students or more to help with a closing act for the VDC! If interested please meet in the gymnasium at 4 pm on xxxx day.

With that set out they prepared a few things and waited until the next day. There they judged a recruited a variety of students. Some of the more familiar ones, such as lilia, cater, jade surprisingly, and silver. Also g with many students from various forms happy to have a chance to perform.

Now with their group set up, they got to rehearsing. By the day of the VDC they were ready, along with magical fireworks and other fun magical visual effects.

after all the groups had gone out the mc walked out onto the stage. “Ladies and gentleman, wizards and witches, please put your hands together for the final act of the day! Brought to you by a group of NRC students who are glad you’ve all come this far, and proud of the groups performances today! And onto the song carpe diem!”

music started up as a large group of 30 students along with mc came into the stage, moving around and dancing to the music as they sang together.

“Well we hope you all enjoyed the show Hope it was not anticlimactic Now there's something we want you to know And we don't want to sound didactic!”

different groups did tumbling over summoned blocks and pads. Other groups did mini duels of brilliant light magic creating and sending out rainbows over the crowd.

“But if there's one thing we can say I know it sounds a bit cliché There's no such thing As just an ordinary day”

mc and grim appear above the groups riding a ghostly roller coaster along with their ghost friends and hopping down into the arms of the group. The coaster flying over and out of the arena with the ghosts laughing loudly.

“And you don't have to build a roller coaster Just find your own way to make the most of Upcoming days of summer And dance to the beat of a different drummer Just grab those opportunities when you see 'em 'Cause every day's a brand new day, you gotta Carpe Diem!”

the groups continued to sing and dance, using a mix of magic and talent to awe the crowd as the song came to an end with all the students miraculously in a pyramid with mc and grim at the top.

“'Cause every day's a brand new day, you gotta Carpe Diem!”

the Cory’s went wild, clapping and cheering as the students undid their pyramid, mc sliding down a magical slide created for them. they grabbed the mike one more time.

“thank you all for coming to the VDC! And now onto the winners ceremony!”

The students moved off the stage as the competitors came into the stage. Ace and deuce stood just off stage to free the prefect.

ace punched their arm before saying, “you traitor! You made up a fun dance thing behind our backs! You didn’t even invite us!” Deuce frowned a bit but remained silent.

“sorry fellas, I wanted to dance. So I did just that. Now you go win that event!” They said pushing ace toward the stage, giving a good slap to his ass. They nodded to deuce and he nodded back looking very serious as he followed ace onto tue stage.

it was unfortunate that the NRC tribe got second place and that the final act wasn’t allowed to be voted for due to it not being officially a part of the show. But mc couldn’t say that they were up set, they fought an overblot, saved their friends lives, and Vil’s, and gave one banger of a performance. Despite all their setbacks, they were successful. And they were ready to carpe diem.

[ashesarrows]

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente- FULL REVIEW

This review is the complete version of its counterpart on GoodReads.

This book really disappointed me. The roughest thing is that it’s right in the middle of the series, so you have to read it if you want to continue. There are bright spots (Ell! Saturday!), and I can sense the incredible book Valente was trying to write, but overall, this was a flop. Would’ve been a DNF if I hadn’t promised myself I’d finish the series. 

So, firstly: I’m a longtime fan of Fairyland, and I commonly list the first book and Valente herself as my favorite book and author. I had no negative preconceptions about the book going in. In fact, I know I have an irrational fear of series, and at first I thought my struggles with this book could be chalked up to that. 

But I loved the second book. It was entertaining, a good follow-up, and a unique new story to explore. When I picked up the third book and only got a chapter in before forgetting about it, I had a lot of excuses—I was burned out. I didn’t like the Blue Wind, and I didn’t want to read about her. I was busy with school.

As it turns out, having picked the book up three years later and finished it this time, none of that was true. This time, I was yearning for more of Fairyland, I quite liked the Blue Wind, and I had ample time to read in. 

It just wasn’t a good book.

I talk about planning/pantsing a lot, and that’s once again relevant. I’ll excerpt from my review of another book:

There are two types of NaNoWriMo writers: the planners, & the pantsers. Planners have an outline ready before they write, and pantsers go "by the seat of their pants"—very few, or even no, plans. Both have pros/cons; here I'll focus on a common pitfall for pantsers.

Almost every Western narrative… follows something akin to the 3-act structure. There is a main conflict which builds to a climax and is then resolved (think Star Wars’s Death Star.) For any good narrative, you need MOTIVATION-GOAL-CONFLICT—and occasionally stakes[.]

This book does not have a conflict.

So where do you find 300+ pages of writing? Just have something happen & see what comes next as a response!

The problem is that this makes an unworkable first draft. Things Happening =/= Satisfying Plot Arc. In editing, you have to take everything you've written and organize it into a plot shape, often cutting things that don't fit. (Planning is the opposite; tons of work upfront/you usually end up UNDERwriting.)

...The most common method of writing on Wattpad is pantsing. 99% of the time, writers write & then post chapters on a set schedule. Can't edit plot structure when you upload one chapter a week.

Now, I knew that Valente was a pantser before I read this book, and that she originally uploaded Fairyland one chapter a week. I was very impressed when I first found out; I don’t recall sensing any of these pitfalls in the two previous books. It is hard to write a book with no editing—it is damn well near impossible. Whether I liked this book or not, the first two are a triumph just for that. Valente has been writing this entire series with both hands tied behind her back and her eyes taped shut, and I have to commend her. Even my feelings of frustration are almost overshadowed by how impressed I am that it took three books for her to fail.

Valente herself acknowledged editing concerns in multiple / interviews. From the latter link:

I remember being at a convention right after it really hit, and somebody in the audience asked, “Well, you realize you can’t go back and change anything, because you’ve already posted it online.” And I said, “Oh, shit.” It had never occurred to me that that was gonna be a problem. I kept a couple weeks ahead of the posting schedule, but again, much like writing The Labyrinth in ten days instead of thirty, I just ran ahead with something without knowing that I couldn’t do it and it worked out incredibly well.

Did it? I feel differently, and this review aims to explain why.

This book lacks plot. Valente is attempting a 3-act structure, which relies heavily on a central conflict. There has to be some big mission; some big goal. First book example: September has to beat the Marquess (goal and conflict) OR ELSE everyone in Fairyland suffers (stakes/motivation). Every moment of the book ties back to this larger goal.

The central conflict of this book appears about halfway through. You know the moon, and the yeti, and splitting things? This comes up over a hundred pages in. September, and the audience, has no idea about any of that for a hundred or so pages, and so for that amount of time, the book is unconscionably boring. 

The beginning of the book sees September afraid she’s too old to go back to Fairyland, which is a great central conflict idea for the one chapter in which it exists. Aha! A book about growing up and the associated trials and tribulations. That’s a fantastic theme, and yet I forgot about it entirely until the end, where it briefly awakens again, after an entire book of Not That At All. More on this later.

For now, the book takes September back to Fairyland, which should be wonderful, but Fairyland seems to have become all exposition and no action. A whole chapter of The Blue Wind lecturing September, for example. This is a character we don’t know, have no reason to be attached to, and are being actively hindered by as she relentlessly slows the plot down. And then September gets talked at by an alligator or something, and then another something something… I don’t remember any of this, because it was not relevant.

This isn’t like Fairyland #1, where September might need to befriend someone to gain access to magic which would help her on her quest. In fact, for this first half of the book, September doesn’t even have agency! Someone hands her a MacGuffin (I refuse to recall its name) in the form of a box, and she Must carry it to some city or other on the moon. Why? Who knows. She just must. And she does. And you’re thinking to yourself, why isn’t September making her own ship and leading revels? We know, as an audience, that she’s more than capable. What on Earth has got her seeming so meek? She even sasses characters, but somehow always ends up doing as they ask.

The book also takes all this time to reach any characters we know and love. The readers want Ell and Saturday! We do not care about a horde of lecturing adults with no connection to a central plot or September! Looking back, I can see how Valente may have been hoping to pull off something similar to Alice in Wonderland, but in Alice nobody speaks for a full page. This is just one example:

direct link

I’m hard pressed to even call this exposition, because it tells us nothing about the world we’re in. It’s just a sermon Valente wants us to hear. And worse, because I’ve read the last two books, I know she can pull this off. It doesn’t have to be this way. Many people said many things in Fairyland #1, and it worked because there was a plot that the speeches were part of. 

(If you just look at the quotes page for this book, you can see how many there are—and how repetitive they get. X is a Y, okay, alright…)

But this sort of thing reached its peak when it almost ruined Saturday. Don’t worry, he’s generally well-written, but when September meets him and he starts lecturing? It’s just awful to read. Suddenly it’s not Saturday talking but Valente speaking through his mouth, giving those sermons again, and it just makes you want to scream.

This made me recall an old writing rule—“never remind me of the author’s existence.” I want to feel as though real people are really saying these things, and when all of them speak identically, it’s really difficult to believe that. I won’t deny Saturday his right to say poignant things, obviously, but in this case due to the volume of lectures, and the proximity of his to the others, and the obvious preachiness of all of them, it really got in the way of my even enjoying the scenes with Saturday. And come on; that is unforgivable.

But there is a plot. There is an, ahem… other MacGuffin. A paw? A yeti’s paw. Something about time. Look, at this point I just wanted to finish the book. The original MacGuffin had become a new one, which would lead them to the third, and all this because at 100 pages in someone said “hey there’s this yeti we really hate around here,” and September went “sounds awful I’ll go hunt him right now.” And of course she can, because she has been DOING NOTHING FOR THE LAST HUNDRED PAGES. What is she going to do, something else? There IS nothing else to do in Fairyland apparently. Again, what this book does to the world & inhabitants of Fairyland is near criminal.

So the plot starts here, and it’s not great—September takes it up because there’s nothing else to do, and of course her friends come along, but (at least to me) it seems obvious that Valente invented the moon’s political situation and the Yeti just to come up with SOMETHING for this book. It never felt convincing that this had really been happening behind the scenes in the other books. On top of that, since we get very little context (despite the lectures!), it feels less like a vital quest and more like September (again) doing something because someone else told her to. We really don’t get any other perspective on the issue until the very end.

But talking about the end will require a spoiler tag, so I’ll avoid it for now. Let’s take a break to talk about how confusing the book was overall. I often didn’t know where the characters were heading or why, or what role a new character played, or even if they were there or not.

After seeing a GR query about this particular issue, I went back and researched it. The character Candlestick allegedly leaves the party on page 189:

Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them.

But then shows up in not one but two lines in the next chapter anyway:

The Tyguerrotype, the thirteen bouncing Glasshobs, the quivering houses—and September and Saturday, A-Through-L and Candlestick—had a little thickness, but no more than a thick sheet of paper. (201)

“Did we see what?” called Candlestick. (204)

I understand why Valente wouldn’t want to make major plot edits to the books after posting them, but why didn’t an editor read through this even once? It would have been easy to fix—delete one line, or even just a word. It seems clear through surrounding context, looking back, that Valente intended to leave Candlestick out of these chapters, so why didn’t anyone confirm that for readers?

It’s just not fair to your audience to leave things like this in. It’s not professional. It makes me look down on the publisher, to be quite honest, because they apparently couldn’t take the few months necessary to re-read the draft and offer Valente edits on these bare minimum issues.

So you can understand why I wasn’t sure what was going on most of the time. Especially in the beginning, when multiple characters existed just to lecture, it was hard to get attached to any one addition to the party because I could expect them to be gone without incident or importance within two chapters. 

For example, the Periwig (whose name I refuse to look up) who works with Ell in the library says she has cursed him to stop him from flaming around the books. Yes, Ell is having uncontrollable flaming issues now. As a reader pummeled by random lectures, watching September ferry around MacGuffins, this just felt like an “oh shit we have to come up with a NEW conflict for these characters” ploy, without much thought or logic. And I had no idea what the curse was for over fifty pages, until on page 173 there’s a specific reference to Ell getting smaller after he shoots flame. I’m sure there were more earlier on, but I missed them, and who can blame me after a hundred pages of content that was not relevant to the story.

This plot point is never satisfyingly wrapped up, either. Why did the Periwig think this was a good idea? Could she have undone it? Why did nobody address her about it? And why was it solved the way it was? Nothing made sense.

What’s really frustrating is what could have been. Near the end of the book, I turned to the back cover just to avoid continuing to read, and I looked once again in total bafflement at the two starred reviews of the book pictured there. Booklist’s back cover quote reads as follows:

As usual, Valente enlightens readers with pearly gleams of wisdom about honesty, identity, free will, and growing up. September often worries who she should be and what path she should follow, but the lovely truth, tenderly told, is that it's all up to her.

And, despite having read roughly two hundred pages of this book, it was only once I saw this quote that I understood what Valente was trying to do.

This is a great idea. And there are ELEMENTS of it here, and even elements I quite like. Occasionally, the lectures September hears do in fact correspond to some aspect of this theme (“you become what you are called” is one example of a line I could tell meant something, but needed to be expanded to accomplish anything.) It’s hard, as a reader, to differentiate between lectures addressing a vital theme in the story and lectures that are just talking.

Returning to Ell’s curse, it turns out that [SPOILER] Ell was just flaming for what is essentially dragon puberty, which is a GREAT opportunity to build on this theme! Somehow, though, we don’t get that.. I would have loved to see Ell have to deal with, essentially, a sexual awakening, and that did not happen, and it feels like the cure scene is random and therefore wasted. [END SPOILER]

It doesn’t help that Valente also wastes a scene with FANTASTIC potential where September literally destroys her fate by giving it no prior context, no weight in the plot, no relevance to the conflict, and fifteen tons worth of expositional lecturing to drown in. I want to love these scenes; some of these scenes utilize my favorite tropes! I just can’t get around all the ways Valente is leaving her story out to dry.

Then there’s the clothing September wears, her new designation, Aroostook the car, the attempted blossoming romance between September and Saturday: so many elements which could have made that theme great. It’s like a broken puzzle.

This brings us to the Yeti. I’m just going to go full spoiler, because I’m mad.

[SPOILER]

The Yeti is a reverse twist villain?? Can we stop with this? It’s not interesting & not an engaging surprise & also feels like going “ha ha I fooled you.”

From the moment September set off to beat him, I was wondering—are we really doing this? Based on one random person’s complaint? September has made it very clear that she doesn’t understand the politics of the world she’s inhabiting, and yet: this. Unlike in the first book, where the Marquess’s evil is confirmed by every person she comes across and September ends up fighting her out of personal connection, this just seems like meddling. September has no skin in the game; it’s almost a white savior trope—especially when the history of the Moon parallels colonization!

And then The Gang sees future-Saturday helping the yeti, and instead of thinking “maybe we got this wrong based on one person’s lecture” they think “ah FUCK maybe Saturday is going to be evil” and manufacture totally unnecessary conflict.

But it’s not even that they misunderstood, or that their source was biased; the end result is that the Yeti was seen as evil because he DIDN’T CARE THAT HE WAS. He gives this “none of their business” answer that is fundamentally unsatisfying (and makes no sense—had he explained, THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BOTHERED HIM) because at the end of the day, it means none of September’s actions in Fairyland were necessary. She just showed up and left. Nobody, not even the story, needed her. I guess September and Saturday have now kissed (twice!) which is great for them but not something that makes the whole book worthwhile.

[END SPOILER]

And on top of this, there are typos. I already covered the issue with Candlestick, so here are the others quickly:

 “All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.” (170)

“If you’re not to tired after your cannonades.” (179)

The full moon rose passed the high barn windows, spilling in like milk. (248)

(First sentence ought to have put the end quotation mark after the word “shadows,” but accidentally places it after September’s dialogue tag. The second sentence should use “too” instead of “to”. The final sentence needs to either say that the moon “rose past the high barn windows” or “passed the high barn windows”, likely the former.)

What gets me is that this last sentence is on the last page. Even if Valente and her editors never flipped through most of the book, surely someone would’ve noticed this? It just drives home how little anyone cared. About Fairyland, of all things!

And then Valente, who DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK, has the audacity to include lines like these.

September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?  “You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”  Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.

(page 184).

Like... all of that, and then she didn’t edit September’s story? I’m appalled.

At this point, you might well say I’m being far too harsh. I understand that. These next five paragraphs are for you.

For the first few months of (re)reading this book, I genuinely felt like I must be a bad reader, or my attention span was gone, or I just didn’t like Valente or her work enough. Looking at all the incredible reviews here, I felt jealous—and frustrated. Why couldn’t I just enjoy this book the way everyone else did? 

Obviously, I never want to dislike a book, but this was one that I almost feel betrayed me. I know there’s a significant amount of entitlement there; Valente doesn’t owe me any stories, let alone good ones. 

At the same time, I made every effort. I owned all the books, was working hard to read a series despite my long-time struggles with them, and, well, I LOVE Valente! I constantly talk about her work! And even someone like me—someone who’s usually a pretty fast reader, loves the series/author in question, and was determined to finish this book—struggled throughout. 

So I’m frustrated that the book made me feel like an idiot. I’m frustrated that, for the apparent crime of being devoted to Valente’s work, I was put through this. This book would be one star if not for the world of Fairyland and the returning cast—if this had not been a Fairyland book, I would not have finished reading it. For that first half, I was bribing myself (with better books) to read one or two pages at a time. Really.

Like I said, it didn’t have to be this way. I know damn well that Valente can do better than this. If Valente had been given the opportunity to edit this draft into a polished book, she could have done it. It’s only because of these restraints that she chose—and she is a grown woman who may choose what she likes—that the book came out this way. It’s genuinely hard to review, because I understand why she wrote the book this way, and I understand why she did not later edit the majority of the text, and I also have the perspective of a disappointed reader. It’s hard to balance all of that.

So two stars it is. I’m a little sad it took so long to review this book, because I was REALLY pumped to review it when I first finished, but I hope that on the contrary letting it sit has allowed me to be more objective and less emotionally upset by it. 

I hope to pick up the fourth book soon, but with the combination of it being unrelated to the main cast and the letdown that this book was, it’ll be a while before I feel up to it. Don’t worry, though, because I will come back to update you as to whether the series overall is worth continuing. I have every hope that it will be.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

January 17, 2021

This is my weekly roundup of things I am up to and looking at. Topics include human rights, decentralized social media, the I5 bridge replacement, Kuznets curves, and the Trump administration rundown.

Human Rights

I added a bit more to the Social Well-Being section of the Urban Cruise Ship site, which is mostly on human rights topics.

Having followed the work of, e.g. Steven Pinker and Has Rosling, I had expected to present a view that the world human rights situation was getting inexorably better. The reality is that the picture is more mixed. Democratization peaked some time around 2007 and has been in decline since then, though the world is still much more democratic than in the 1970s. Education, defined as the number of children not in school, made great progress in the 2000s, but now progress seems to be stalling.

It is my read of the data that inequality is generally increasing in wealthy countries, and decreasing (though it’s a mixed bag) in poorer countries. More important than inequality within countries is inequality between countries, and that metric appears to be going down as the world undergoes the Great Convergence, or the tendency of incomes of countries to converge as poorer countries experience fast growth and richer countries experience slow growth. This follows the Great Divergence that occurred from around 1800 to 1975.

Economic freedom is generally improving across the world. It has been the case historically, and it remains true today, that there is a correlation between economic freedom and political freedom. But with the rise of state capitalist or illiberal capitalist societies, that correlation seems to be getting weaker.

Freedom House’s review of freedom of the press unfortunately had its last year in 2016, and it showed an improvement, following by a stalling, of freedom of the press worldwide. It does not appear to me that the situation has generally improved in the last four years.

I have to move on, but I would like to look at these figures much more carefully. Taken as a whole, the picture for human rights in the 2010s looks like a mixed bag, with some areas of progress and some areas of regression, without an obvious trend one way or the other. This joins other observations about the present state of the world, which is also seeing declining productivity growth, seeming technological stagnation, the spread of sub-replacement birth rates, and the proliferation of dangerous debt levels. Although it is premature to panic, it should be clear that at least something is not working as we might hope, and we could ask whether a person’s effort is best focused on returning to the roots of principles of liberal democracy, or on bringing about a post-liberal order.

Decentralized Social Media

The noise has quieted down a little bit now, but there has been much consternation lately about whether the tech industry exercises too much power. Major events that have prompted these concerns include Donald Trump’s Twitter account being disabled and the social network Parler having its AWS service canceled.

I’ve generally taken a hard-line market position, arguing that whatever the merits of actions by Amazon, Twitter, and other companies, they are private companies and should be able to set their own policies without government interference. This is a minority view, though, and it looks increasingly likely that there will be some kind of regulation. Balaji Srinivasan pointed out on Twitter that the major tech companies came out of an era (recent, yet feels long ago) when the dominance of both the United States and American technology companies was beyond reasonable question. Now there are more alternatives to both, as well as growing concerns about nationalism, privacy, cybersecurity, and other factors that may motivate regulation.

I think the only lasting defense against the impulse to regulate is to build decentralized alternatives to major tech services that are inherently impossible to regulate, both by governments and by major corporations. This sounds nice, but in practice the industry is moving toward greater centralization for a reason. It is one thing to built a decentralized Twitter; I could probably do that myself. It is quite another to build a decentralized Twitter with the security, scalability, and reliability that one expects from main service. Parler evidently failed in these tasks; not only could they not survive the cancellation of their AWS contract, they did not secure vital data of their users. It is even more difficult to replicate the community that comes with scale. Building a decentralized version of AWS is even harder, as this means replicating a large and growing volume of computing resources. These companies have thousands of software engineers each.

So, “if you don’t like [Facebook/Twitter/Uber/Amazon/AirBnB/whatever] you should build your own alternative” is not yet a credible response. Such alternatives don’t exist for lack of effort. We don’t even have a widespread decentralized app for identity. I would start there. If that problem can be solved, then maybe there is some hope for more complex issues.

Metro and the I5 Bridge Replacement

Oregon Metro is getting off to a new term. In a work session this week, we heard from Metro’s lobbyist. He lamented the fact that there will probably be some security added in Salem, taking away the historic openness that the state capital has had. Aside from being closed due to Covid, there was a security incident last month which now implicates one of the legislators.

The main event of the work session, though, was the I5 Bridge Replacement, a project formerly known as the Columbia River Crossing. This project has been on the agenda for Oregon and Washington for most of my adult lifetime, and the states are now aiming for construction to be complete in 2025. I’ll be happy if it’s done this decade.

The main topic this week was the restorative justice program, which basically boils down to paying people with homes or businesses in the Albina neighborhood, which will be the site of much of the construction. The money didn’t seem to be sufficient for some council members. In addition, others are concerned about the fact that there is any highway project at all, wanting more money for local streets and/or non-automotive transportation.

While I am not without sympathy for the opposition to the bridge, I find the CRC and successor project to be prime examples of the syndromes that prevent the construction of any kind of infrastructure. Portland is one of the worst cities in the country for traffic congestion (though it has recently improved slightly), and the cost of living is significantly higher than the national average. If you don’t like highway projects, then fine, but propose credible alternatives that work for the region as a whole. There are some, but I don’t see Metro pursuing them. Simply obstructing projects, or adding ancillary priorities that raise costs, make problems worse for the region.

Kuznets Curves

Back to Urban Cruise Ship stuff, I whipped up a plot on Kuznets curves this week. An (environmental) Kuznets curve is a hypothetical model under which an environmental impacts shows a U-shaped curve with income. In other words, as income grows, the impact gets worse to a point, but it tends to get better after a certain level of income. Generally speaking, water pollutants and localized air pollutants show clear signs of Kuznets curves, while for other impacts such as municipal solid waste and CO2 emissions, the evidence is inconclusive.

To be honest, I have my skepticism about the whole business. I find Kuznets curves exhibit the “reading history sideways” fallacy, where the development of countries is assumed to be a predictable, linear process such that poor countries today look like rich countries yesterday, and rich countries today look like poor countries tomorrow. Some, though not many, scholars seem to have noticed this problem specifically in the context of Kuznets curves.

Misgivings aside, I hope to have several more results to present. Perhaps at some point I will attempt my own analysis. I tried something similar a few years ago when I was at The Breakthrough Institute, though those efforts were not successful.

As for other work, I also spent some time on the section on Economic System, though that is still not uploaded. I had hoped to have it down by now, but the section is turning out to be both longer than harder than I thought.

Some thoughts on the Trump Administration

This will be my last blog post while Donald Trump is still president, so I thought I would review some of what I see to be the highlights and lowlights of the last four years. The administration published their own list of accomplishments. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but rather a list that I find to be of particular interest.

The Good

There has been some significant reductions in regulation, which has helped power the economic good times of the administration’s first three years. These regulations have, in particular, helped the production of natural gas, which has done more than anything else to replace coal power (though, in fairness, the development of fracking and tight oil has been a bipartisan effort that goes back to the Ford administration).

Trump has had three appointments to the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Each of these justices have earned strong credibility through the Federalist Society, and I think they have generally done a good job.

(Fun fact: Jimmy Carter is the only president who served a full term and did not get a Supreme Court nomination.)

The Mixed

In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act bill was signed. This was a major tax reform bill which did far too many things to comment on, but a main thrust was bringing corporate tax rates in line with international standards. I give this legislation significant credit for the strong economic conditions that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. The cap on the SALT deduction was good too.

Unfortunately, tax cuts were not balanced with spending cuts, raising the deficit to around $1 trillion per year prior to the pandemic. These are dangerous levels that the United States should not be running during good times. Now we have deficits exceeding $3 trillion per year, a debt/GDP ratio in excess of a dangerous 100%, and an excuse for Democrats to embark on their own reckless spending plans.

(Another fun fact: U.S. federal budgets were last balanced under Bill Clinton. Before that, budgets were balanced briefly under Nixon.)

The Bad

Immigration and refugee rates have fallen significantly, in large part because of administration policy, and international trade has increased, despite administration policy.

The list of accomplishments above has a long section about the Covid-19 response (or the “China virus”), but there is no way to spin the fact that the American response has been atrocious. The best defense for the administration is that most governors and mayors have also responded poorly.

Much criticism has been directed at Trump’s personality and use of conspiracy theory, much of which is fair and much exaggerated. I think the least that can be said is that the Trump administration, like other recent administrations, provides a strong case for Congress to reclaim the authority that it has ceded to the executive branch.

Missed Opportunities

At HUD, Ben Carson started writing a rule to replace the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing regulation that would have been the strongest federal action so far on liberalizing zoning. Those efforts were scuttled by the rest of the administration.

In 2020, the Trump administration embarked on an effort to cut the time of environmental assessments and environmental impact statements under NEPA. However, the effort has not been completed and I don’t think is likely to continue under the Biden administration.