Will the Blue Angels be replaced by Amazon planes in the future?
Will the Blue Angels be replaced by Amazon planes in the future? Philipe Ancheta / Shutterstock.com

Seattle Enters A New Era When Amazon Plane Flies Over Seafair: And it will happen before the Blue Angels do their very predictable business of soaring and plunging and scaring the crows on my street. We will yawn at all of that. But to see the Amazon plane—this will be amazing. And not because we expect the pilot to dazzle us with acrobatic demonstrations or his mastery of the Boeing 767. But because it's simply there in our air. Simply flying over Lake Washington. Cooly turning this way and that, with its logos reminding us "who's running tings 'round here."

Will we see more of this kind of thing in the future? Will the Blue Angels go for good and be replaced by this and other planes in Amazon's growing fleet? And if this replacement were to happen, would we begin to miss the military jets because in a way they were more public, more about the people than about the dreams of a single billionaire? So much to think about at this year's Seafair. Seattle Times: "The Amazon plane will fly over Lake Washington on Friday through Sunday from 1:15 to 1:30 p.m., just before the Blue Angels display."

Home Sales Plunge in Vancouver After BC Government Imposes 15 Percent Tax on Foriegn Buyers: Shortly after the government announced that a pretty big tax would be imposed on foriegn buyers in Vancouver's hot real estate market, and that this tax would begin on August 2, activity on B.C.'s land registry website surged and crashed the system. The government introduced the tax not because it thinks it will be very effective, though real estate agents are now saying that it has already lowered the volume on the market's music (buyers are backing out, there is now uncertainty, and so on), but because it's election season. And the popular feeling in that city is that the government is doing nothing to deal with the crisis of affordability. To stay in power, politicians had two choices: really do something or do something that looks like something. They chose the latter: tax foreign buyers. But this tax has the appearance of something that, for the very rich, will eventually become a simple hump on the road to future home and condo purchases. As I explained in more detail on this week's Blabbermouth podcast: The real thing to do, and this is the same in Seattle, where prices are surging and condos are getting flipped liked nobody's business, is to provide housing outside of the market. And here we hit the ground of my position on all urban housing matters: the US needs to get over its problem with public housing. Public housing is not poor black people. Public housing does not make you a failure or a success. Public housing is only a solution to a problem that the market can't clearly solve. The market can't make roads or even provide a long-term mortgages on its own. Only the government can do these useful things. The same is true for housing. What the market can do very well is build for people who have lots of money.

Metro Needs Drivers: KIRO TV reports that King Count Metro has been forced to cancel trips on certain routes because of a lack of drivers. King County Metro estimates that it needs about 200 new drivers to fix the problem. Sounds easy enough. But the thing is good drivers are hard to find and Metro does not want to lower its standards.

Woman Drives Down A Steep Pedestrian Path Thinking It Is a Road: The SUV got stuck in that steep path around 1 a.m.. "The tires were spinning, the engine was running, and two women were inside," witnesses told KOMO. Apparently, this has happened many times before. Drivers see a road, refuse to not see anything but a road, the road is a road to them until it becomes steps heading down a hill in the real world. Some believe the solution to this problem is more and more signs for drivers. The thinking in traffic engineering is that American drivers must get all the help that the city can give them. They need us. If they refuse not to confuse steps with with a road, then we must go out of our way to make sure this confusion is cleared. We must not ask why drivers do not focus on their driving, but why we failed to let them know that sometimes steps are indeed steps for pedestrians.

Black Lives Matter Signs Appearing More and More in White Hoods: But not all the whites in these parts of Seattle, a city with a reputation for having lots of progressive whites, are at all happy about it. KOMO reports that some believe the same thing as Trump's supporters, that "the Black Lives Matter movement as violent and anti-police."

More Bad News for Trump: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning the 255,000 jobs were added to the economy in July. This might be the final nail on the coffin of Trump's much-troubled campaign. He really needed some good news from the economy. And this good news needed to come in the form of bad news for American workers. But that just did not happen.


Speaking of Jobs:


For Those Who Are Intested in South African Politics: The ANC, the party that was once progressive and led the country out of the wilderness of Apartheid, is now in trouble. It's losing ground like never before in the current election. The DA (which is essentially the white party, but is lead by a young black African), has won a major city outside of the Cape area (Port Elizabeth) and may even win the financial capital of the continent, Johannesburg. A part of why ANC is doing so badly because there is another party that's taking votes from it, the EFF, which is young, black, and Marxist. There is even speculation that if the ANC were to not hold the majority, a coalition between the white neoliberal party (DA) and the black Marxist one (EFF) would end its post-independence dominance of South African politics.

For Those Who Care About this Sort of Thing: The opening ceremony of the Olympics in Rio is tonight.

Let's End With This: