Magic: The Gathering

This new guy at the place I work at is a bit of an odd-ball and yesterday I happened to look over at his screen and he was checking out some site about Magic: The Gathering. I couldn't believe it. To paint a picture for you, this kid is 23 and is a tech guy. He looks like he's about 35 and lives with his parents and commutes 180 miles total each day (he drives a hybrid). The other day, he ate some cookies for breakfast then ate enough Chinese food to feed a small family, and finished the rest for lunch today. So many jobs.

Olympic Rant Part Deux

Agreed Phil. That coverage blew. The men's downhill, in my meaningless opinion, is THE BEST Olympic event and NBC blew that. It is a weekday but it is also a holiday where a bunch of people are sitting around on the couch - it should have been shown live. If not straight NBC, why not CNBC or MSNBC, or some shit, instead of women's prelim hockey and speed skating? Also, I avoided ESPN and most other sports media sources this afternoon so I could leave a little suspense for my 8pm, tape-delayed, half hour of men's downhill. You'd think that if you check nbcsports.com for some scheduling info they wouldn't plaster the results of their tape-delayed material right on the front page, but they did. Way to totally ruin it, NBC. No wonder you're losing money on the Olympics. Oh, and here is the Chris Collinsworth Wooderson video if you haven't seen it. That Rod Stewart song at the beginning is sweet.

The Suburbs Will Be The Slums of the Future Rant

The latest entry in the "End is Nigh for the Suburbs" series. Briefly, the unifying idea here is that suburban sprawl and McMansions will one day be the place where the poorest amongst us live, when all the rich people have moved back to the cities, or the inner-ring of suburbs that are walkable and require less driving. The most-distant suburbs are too far from jobs, and someday gas prices will be too high to rely on cars for long daily commutes.

Sounds great doesn't it? Whereas the 50's - 60's American Dream focused on leaving behind the slums of the inner-city for a pastoral and tranquil suburban dream, now the American Dream is supposedly just the reverse: Leaving behind the suburbs, where instead of a Green utopia, we've ended up with a traffic-clogged, chain-store dominated, culture-less dystopia.

All of us smart, young, well-educated, wealthy and, let's be honest, mostly white, folks are smart enough to abandon the suburbs. The creative class will all live in cities. And since the Creative Class is apparently the future of America, the future of America is an Urban one.

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. And I'm as much of an urban dweller as there is. I love to walk or bike or mass-transit, hate the 'burbs, and can't imagine ever living there. I'd love to believe that the future of America is one of high-speed rail, connecting lively cities, full of dense, diverse neighborhoods.

But the American Dream is and always has been a DETACHED house with a yard. In The Last Harvest, a fascinating book by architecture professor and critic Witold Rybczynski, he asserts that it's not just in the post-WWII period that Americans have longed for a life outside of cities. It was indeed the founding principle of our country. The quest for open space that brought Europeans to America, the myth-making related to Manifest Destiny and the open expanses of the West, the utopic-visions surrounding many early suburbs, all of it was simply capturing the mood of Americans, their need for space.

The simple truth is that the majority of Americans want to live in a single-family house, not attached to any other dwelling (think town-houses), with at least a small yard, and a spot off the street to park their car. Many cities are made up of just such neighborhoods, especially the newer cities of the Sunbelt.

But think about that for a second. How can you possibly have the density required for mass-transit, ground floor retail and carless neighborhoods if everyone is living in a detached, single-family home? I'll answer my own rhetorical question to say that "You can't."

And what that means is that the future of America will not see an abandonment of the suburbs.

There are so many other reasons to be skeptical of an urban future for America: restrictive land-use policies, rampant NIMBYISM, over-funding of roads and airports, under-funding of mass-transit and rail, among others. All of these prevent denser development.

But all you need to know is:

1. Most Americans want a little space of their own.

2. Our country is still mostly empty space, and can quite comfortably provide the space that every American is seeking.

So to all of you predicting suburban slums and booming cities for America, I say you're making a prediction based on what you WANT to happen, rather than on what WILL happen.

Airline Rant

My full first name is "Samuel". Samuel is on the list of pretentious names. Sure, it's exponentially less pretentious than Augustus or Maximilian, or Alexander, but my point is that I go by "Sam" instead.

Sadly, I have a government issued ID that gives my full first name. And somehow the TSA thinks that terrorists would be dumb enough to go by "Sam" on their boarding pass, and "Samuel" on their ID. What the hell would that accomplish?

Well the TSA, in conjunction with the airlines, have accomplished wasting absurd amounts of my time.

To update my frequent flier profile with Delta, at least changing my name, I have to fax them a signed authorization. No joke. What happens to all the poor women in Delta's Frequent flier program who get married and decide to change their name? Every time they're expected to send a fax. Get the f*ck out of here Delta!

US air wouldn't change my name over the phone, or online. I have to do it at the airport. Thanks, because what I need is more stuff to do at what is surely the most depressing public space in any city.

It's simple: The US airlines, Jet Blue, Virgin America and Southwest aside don't deserve to be in business. (Please suggest others that don't deserve to die in the comments)

American

United

Continental

Delta

US Air

There is no good reason that any of them should be operating as independent companies anymore.

There is just one bad reason. Foreign companies can't own more than 25% of voting shares in US airlines. In practice, this protects US airlines from competition. They can provide shitty service and get away with it.

I'll point out that they are also further protected from competition by the US's lack of anything approaching high-speed rail. Think about how stupid it is that there are something like 40 188 flights between Boston and NYC (94!?! each way are you kidding me? And 122 each way between NYC and DC. Insanity). I never fly between these two cities, taking the train every time, - occasionally the bus if I'm skint. But the train is slow as shit. The train would be fast enough to travel 200 miles in less than two hours if it ran in the following countries:

France

Germany

Spain

Italy

Holland

Austria

Japan

South Korea

China

If Amtrak was fast enough to make the Boston - NYC trip in less than 2 hours, then I will guarantee that there would be no more than 10 flights a day between Boston and NYC, similar math for NYC - DC. Beautiful, open skies, ready to accept flights to other cities.

Oh and the NYC airports are the most congested in the country and commonly lock up half of the country's air traffic system.

You can go even further and say that we give additional lift to short-haul routes because we haven't adopted autobahn speed limits. If I could drive the 140 miles from Ft. Myers to Miami in 1.5 hours instead of 3, I surely wouldn't have suffered the propeller plane that flies that route.

America is a big country, and we should fly to many parts of it. But all that necessary flying would be much more pleasant if we killed the crappy airlines, and cut out the unnecessary flying.

And we only need to do two things to bring flying nirvana to the US of A, one free and simple, the other expensive and hard but worth it:

1. End the ban on foreign airlines owning US carriers.

2. Build a real high-speed rail system, starting with Boston - D.C. and San Diego to Sacramento, followed by a Texas line, a Florida line, a Chicago circuit, and several other obvious corridors.