Parking makes food worse.
Parking makes food worse. Pammy Studio/Shutterstock.com

Seattle Seeing An Increase of Apartment Buildings With No Parking: According to data examined by the Seattle Times, 30 percent of recent proposals for apartment developments do not include parking at all. And developments that had them were on average 60 percent smaller than projects in the past. And in the past it was not uncommon for apartments in this growing city to provide two parking spaces per renter. Yes, this is all moving in the right direction, but 30 percent is still too low. Developments that offer parking should be rare and for the rich, who should be so rare as to be on the verge of extinction. Also, commercial and shopping developments shouldn't have parking as well. As the professor of parking, Donald Shoup, has often pointed out, the cost of parking in buildings of this kind is passed on to the customer. This does two things. It means, one, that those who do not drive and shop in such places are subsidizing those who do because, two, the products and services in these commercial centers are more expensive and, frequently, inferior. Indeed, this weekend, I actually ate and tasted some expensive parking in the dim sum served in a restaurant, Joyale Seafood, in a shopping center, Pacific Rim Building, with tons of parking. The shrimp balls, spare ribs, lo mai gai, and shumai were not cheap but very weak in flavor and texture. They had none of the richness of say Harbor City, a dim sum joint whose food has very little parking in it.

Something for Young People and Artists to Know: The median rent for a studio in Tacoma is $550. Hillary Clinton won the City of Destiny by 37 percent.

Rising Costs of Housing Connected With Oakland Fire That Killed 36 People During a Dance Party: This Friday, a fire erupted in a warehouse in Oakland that was holding a music event. The fire quickly consumed the building and killed lots of partying and dancing people—the death toll so far is 36 and is expected to increase. Why did this happen? How could a building burn so easily and quickly? It appears that the warehouse provided a number of artists with an affordable place to live in a city that has become too expensive for artists. In a post on Wear Your Voice: “'One bedrooms [in Oakland] increased 19 percent in the past year to $2,190,' writes SFGate 'while two bedrooms increased 13.3 percent to reach $2,550.'” In San Francisco, the most expensive city in the US, one bedrooms are $3,800. The fear now is that there will be a crackdown on places that offer cheap rent on the down-low. But the real problem isn't these places but the high rent landlords/investors/developers are demanding in Oakland and elsewhere. The city is the only place for artists. Rural areas can't make art for shit. If a city becomes too expensive for an artist, and they can't move to the sticks, where things are cheap but nothing much happens, then they must stay and make ends meet. In the age of Trump, cities must become affordable for the poor, the young, and the artists.

There Can't Be Any Global Warming Because It's Snowing: Snow is swiftly falling in Seattle and other parts of Western Washington. After the snow, expect things to get very cold. I do hope the cold kills lots of rats, which have become numerous and brazen with all of this global-warm weather.

Jill Stein Is Going Back and Forth, Back and Forth: Going to do Pennsylvania; not going to do Pennsylvanian; now going to do Pennsylvania. All of this sounds simply messy and sad. Stein does not understand our pain at all.


Fake Facebook News Could Have Caused a Mass Shooting: A man walked to a pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, in the D.C. area, to self-investigate a Facebook-type story that claimed Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager were running a child sex ring in the pizzeria's backrooms. Apparently, Michael Flynn, the retired general Trump picked for advise on matters concerning national security, circulated this ridiculous but very popular fake news story. The self-investigator, who, according to the Washington Post, was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a Colt .38 caliber handgun, and a shotgun, did not find pedophiles in the pizzeria (which, however, does have tables for ping pong, a pastime that might be popular with pedophiles), did fire one of his weapons, did not kill anyone, did get arrested. But this man is not lost. He is consistent with his times. On Sunday, the VP-elect Pence actually said on ABC’s This Week that the president is entitled to spread fake news.

Celebration and Tears at Standing Rock as Obama Administration Halts Plans to Drill Under the Missouri River: Yesterday, the US Army Corps of Engineers decided to not provide Dakota Access Pipeline with a building permit. This means the protesters in that cold state have won this round. There will certainly be other rounds. Indeed, the DAP people are now saying that they're going to ignore Obama and not reroute. That sounds like another round. But this is a little good news in the last days of civilization as we know it. Sydney Brownstone has the story.

Sisters Are Doing it For the Whole World: Watch Alexis Myers' short doc on Saturday’s "Women March Against Hate." The event drew thousands of women (and men, who need to take a backseat in this new sequence of struggle against the powers that be) to Cal Anderson Park.

Brexit, Trump, and Now Italy Make it Clear that Neoliberalism is Really Dying: The Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, a young and handsome politician who saw himself as a kind of Clinton/Blair of Italy, lost a referendum for constitutional reforms (some of which wanted to make Italy more "competitive") and resigned yesterday. What is now uncertain is Italy's future in the EU, an association that's neoliberal to the core because it is above all a monetary union. In 2010, the euro hit the rocks hard. There was panic in the markets. Something needed to be done fast. Berlin, Europe's center, decided to bail out the banks and impose austerity on the public. This has suffocated the economies in the south. Italy's recession is severe, and it has an aging population. Neoliberalism was able to block all leftist solutions to this crisis to protect banks and their bad bets, and so we are now seeing a surge in other political options. Those options are almost all populist and xenophobic.