Jesus fucking christ. Still a cesspool.

For members of Zimbabwe's socialist elite like Charles and his family it was invariably on German cars, French wines and British educations for their sons.

It makes sense, given that most of the new-new wealth is being accumulated by people who, like their patronus Bezos, don't have long or deep roots in this community, having immigrated here relatively recently from elsewhere. It's also a reflection of the current Globalist worldview, where everything is liquid and stateless, and there's no obligation, or even a need, to show loyalty either to a place or to the people who occupied it prior to your arrival.

Sure, the locals will bitch-and-moan about rising rents, or the destruction of long-established institutions or businesses, but at best it's brushed off as mere sentimentalism, and at-worst as an active impediment to progress. They don't care about your history - they're too busy disrupting the present in order to create their vision of a bright, shiny, plastic future, and their mantra is: "if you can't keep up, then step aside and STFU already, because we own you now."

it's like Charles is building evidence for the the Strauss–Howe generational theory.

Charles dear, here's an admittedly flawed and certainly incomplete list of Seattle's booms:

The arrival of the Great Northern Railroad
The Alaska Gold Rush
The Great Seattle Fire
The Alaska Yukon Exposition
World War I
World War II
The Cold War regional build-up
The Century 21 Exposition
The Prop 13 California Migration
The Microsoft Boom
The .com boom
The Amazon Boom

I would place Harbor Steps squarely between the Microsoft Boom and the .com Boom, which would be in the 10-11 region. You would have loved the oddball used bookstore that used to be where Harbor Steps North is. (Hell, you would have loved all of First Avenue in those days. It was deliciously dissipated, with nothing but pawn shops, thrift shops, porn theaters, and cheap saloons the entire length.)

If you want to write about the rich in the PNW, it would be interesting to see you explore the effect of the kidnapping of the Weyerhauser child on the psyche of the wealthy, and their retreat into private clubs and gated communities. Or the role prostitution played in making Seattle the principal municipality of the region.

Andrew Carnegie was a Real American, not like these anti-tax, anti-civilization chumps.

I've made a similar point in the past as have others. Agree that because Bill Gates is from the Seattle elite, those humanist/patrician values are more a part of the MS corporate culture than they are at Amazon. The same seems like it was historically true of Boeing.

Charles, how come Bullit embodies "public spirit" when he acquires distressed property and turns it into luxury housing, but when Paul Allen does pretty much the exact same thing with Promenade 23 a few decades later*, you vilify him?

*Both projects have public outdoor space. This should not come as a surprise: it's a code requirement.

@10

Space is cold, dark, and dead. In the future Space will be home only to machinery, never to humanity.

Humanity has at most 600 million more years left, before the oceans evaporate and the only planet Humans will ever inhabit becomes lifeless once again.

We might as well make ourselves some nice places to sit around in, and get to know each other a little while we wait.

@10:

And in the meantime, the citizens of Seattle, particularly those who were here prior to Bezos' arrival and who aren't already on his payroll, can just go fuck themselves.

Also, nice you have to go back nearly a half century for a cinematically-massaged example of the "grisly old Seattle" you clearly find repugnant, not realizing of course that was already long gone decades before you got here.

@15

The Elite know it is in their best interest to build Public Works precisely when the public is angriest at The Elite.

It's no accident that so many of Americas best libraries, museums, plazas, schools, and parks were built during the Robber Baron era.

@16

Just wait?

Yes, that is exactly it, isn't it. Just wait and wait and wait and wait.

For exploration, machines are more feasible than humans by many orders of magnitude. Exploration will be done locally by Earth-based instruments, and remotely only by machines, almost all of them near-earth (e.g. the unmanned James Webb Telescope).

Colonization of other planets is beyond Humanity's resources today, and we are currently at the peak of our resource extraction and utilization. Our future, whether we like it or not, is sustainable-- with much lower resource use, and likely a lower population.

We will not have anything even approaching the resource budget for a Generation Ship, ever. There will be no colony ship, no space-ark to carry you away from all those irritating earth-people and their earth-problems.

@19

Oh, I don't know. I mean sure, they went a little too heavy on the friezes and colonnades and marble statues, but that was the style at the time, you know? And a lot of them are still pretty nice despite it all.

Shorter Charles Mudede: “These darned rich kids today have no values, no civic spirit, no generosity! Why, back in the day ... oh, wait, the liquor store just opened...”

@4, @13

Yeah, fuck immigrants, right?

All people lack a connectedness in our society; the elites have abandoned us, this is true. But whose elites? A nation is only coherent if it is, well... a nation. The elite gave up on the notion of a real nation for a sterile, and mercantile, internationalism decades ago.

So of course civic life is all but gone. The only thing which can revive this is(sorry, communists) nationalism-- the positive affirmative of a real community, socially constructed, but based in biogical and historical reality.

A struggle for authenticity is the key to resolving our current malaise, it is the struggle to accept oneself, to embrace oneself for what one was born as and was born to be. This will bring to an end the age of the atomized individual and the return of the interconnected (real)community.

Wait....holy fucking shit @COMTE(#4). I'm actually agreeing with you 100% for once? How did this happen? Fucking based my dude!

“...but the destruction of the Amazon Tax. I'm just putting that out there.”

Yes, yes, yes, we know. Pretty much every writer at The Stranger has been “putting that out there” since our City Council committed the unspeakable atrocity of actually listening to real voters. (“That” being the set of tired talking points which, though endlessly repeated, could do nothing to prevent the humiliating defeat of “the Amazon Tax”.)

The idea that Amazon has to be coerced into helping the homeless was, of course, one of the many big lies which undergirded the abject fraud, known here as “the Amazon Tax”.

“SEATTLE – May 10, 2017 – Mary’s Place announced today that Amazon will donate more than 47,000 sq. ft. of space within Amazon’s newest headquarters building as a permanent home for a Mary’s Place Family Shelter. This first-of-its-kind partnership will include 65 rooms, which will shelter more than 200 homeless women, children, and families each night.”

http://www.marysplaceseattle.org/blog/amazon-marys-place-announcement/

Questioning and conversing with specific "rich elite" individuals might make your case more compelling, Charles, and then quote them in your article to illustrate your point. I know dozens--many dozens--of prosperous people in the Seattle area who give very generously of their time and money to enrich our region's arts, assist the poor, fund non-profits, and provide jobs to deserving young people, regardless of ethnic background, gender, or orientation. Our region is deeply rich in philanthropic, professionally successful people. They rarely get or seek credit for their generosity--but they deserve better than this sort of vague, abstract criticism. Look at the long lists of donors in arts events programs, and look at the dozens of charitable and fund-raising events each week--or each DAY--in and around Seattle. How about highlighting some of these efforts, and interviewing the people responsible for them, Charles, instead of relying on comfortable anti-capitalist stereotypes one more time?

While I don’t personally have deep roots because a great great great or whatever grandfather founded the town next to PA that eventually burnt down...

Georgie, you remind me of the kid I called out as “smooth” as he wandered about Berlin. His sheepish, embarrassed grin spread beneath his shaved head and he nodded.

I’ve seen enough of America to know with absolute certainty that he is American.

To paraphrase. Georgie.

Be sure you don’t call that a national, eh.

@21

Grab a chair, sit down, and wait for the fundamental principles of thermodynamics to change?

This isn't an innovation problem. I'm sure someone will put plenty of very clever thought into how to keep all your descendants alive for 1000 years with nothing to drink but your own pee.

It's a resource budget problem. Part of which is an energy budget problem. We simply don't have enough stuff and power and gas today to build and fly even one maximally efficient space-ark, and we're going to have noticeably less of everything in the future, when the hydrocarbons are long gone.

If we can’t master spooky action at a distance in 600 million, then, maybe you’ve never learned of spooky action at a distance?

Let alone being able to reach deposits of water, hydrogen, and oxygen by then, before even beginning to consider construction of these elements from, well, off of the cuff, electrical charges.

github.com/zb/Relativity

gl hf.

Hopefully your body won’t end up involuntary flexed too hard for too much of the day.

@30

Gosh, I don't know, all I've heard is that you can't use quantum entanglement to transmit information faster than light. But I'm sure they covered the EPR paradox and violations of local realism in tests of Bell's Theorem and all that in your Einstein Was Stupid class.

Quantum field theory hasn't rewritten the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, either-- quantum statistical thermodynamics is just a pedestrian application of Boltzman to Bose-Einstein, not an unexplored wonderland of free energy.

@31

Ah yes, if we can't find fresh springs in the interstellar vacuum, we can just build whatever matter we need by converting energy! Why didn't i think of that!

And never mind how much energy the science-people-equations suggest that would take, I'm sure we can innovate.

What class was that?

The one where I didn’t talk for years?

But hey, you’ve never heard of constructing elements from charges since right now, have you?

What made you decide we won’t be able to reach either water or oxygen and hydrogen in that much time?

@34

Smaller hits, ATBB. Smaller hits. And maybe try switching to an Indica hybrid.

Wrong again.

@36

Yeah, I usually flub the strain. They tell me it doesn't matter as much these days, though.

Vandenberg.

Act right, child.

Have a good night.

Public spirit and a sense of giving back to the community (that is, noblesse oblige) died when being called a Liberal became a pejorative.

It's Libertarianism now, Dude. Libertarian = I got mine, now fuck you and get the hell outta my way unless I can exploit you. You know, Seattle is very lucky to have one of its gods in our midst.

C’mon, Charles, stop living in the past. Community spirit is so very last century. You’re dating yourself.

@16:

Easy to say you've been here your entire life, difficult to prove, though, is it not?

As for me being "stuck in the present", well, name someone who isn't? We all exist in the here-and-now, and while that doesn't prevent us from imagining the future, I guess it sort of depends on what sort of future you imagine. As for myself, I would prefer to envision one where Bezos and his minions don't own the entire City and decide to collectively remake it according to their extremely limited, homogenized, quasi-Libertarian, white cis-het male incel coder-brah image.

@29: It’s always fun to see someone who may have reached all the way up to a C-minus in the thermo’ section of General Physics 201 lecture the rest of us on what we “can’t” do.

Would long-range space travel require harnessing energy on a scale as-yet not done by man, possibly involving physical principles we’ve yet to discover? Yep. That also would happen to be an excellent way for a learned European of a thousand years ago to describe our current buildings, conveyances, and methods of communication.

You are right about one thing, though: you and anyone who shares your attitude will never be part of any such future accomplishments.

(Oh, and as for traveling through space, surviving on water your ancestors once urinated? That’s what you’re doing right now, pal.)

@41
Way to miss the thrust, pun intended, of the argument.

It occurs to me that the greatest gift our current crop of local billionaires could bestow on us is preservation of as much remaining wild habitat as possible from development and logging.
Ample opportunities exist all along the Cascade front for land purchases, timber sale purchases.
Vast acreage of easily accessible prime recreation areas remain behind the gates of DNR, timber companies, local utilities, etc.
Connecting people to the natural world, this incredible local biome we have colonized but never really felt at home in before it all gets trashed. Giving our magnificent local forests a chance to regenerate by taking the long view.
Taking that long view and making some necessary investments of a philanthropic nature are what distinguished that sense of noblesse oblige that gave some dignity to the oligarchs of old.

This one really hit a nerve, didn't it? This was EXACTLY the conversation I had recently with someone at the Japanese Garden. These billionaire tech bros have zero sense of legacy in a physical reality. NYC has the Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Hall. Seattle has Bezos' glass balls. And unless you've grown up in a major metro with the kind of history that ties back to the previous Gilded Age, you won't know what you're missing.

Carnegie, JP Morgan, et al. may have been ultra-rich a-holes but at least they were ultra rich a-holes you left MANY (not just one or two) lasting monuments and foundations that directly fuels American culture. Billionaire tech bros have left nothing. Which takes hubris considering what they made their fortune on is, in physical terms, nothing. Just pull some plugs somewhere and their contribution would disappear. Good Lord, even old robber barons who were child labor have given back more than these tools.

“those who were here prior to Bezos' arrival and who aren't already on his payroll, can just go fuck themselves.”

Hey, that describes me and yet, I love having Amazon in Seattle. Maybe what separates us is you blame others for your failures, I accept personal responsibility?

Sounds like you need to clean up your own room first bucko.

I remember very well the day after the owner(s) of Belltown Court announced it was going condo in 1996, many of the lovely and friendly people who rented/lived there moved - almost right away - to the Harbor Steps. I was naive then about what happens when a downtown building goes condo. A friendly, little village gets broken up by investors and speculators and tech wonks with few manners and money to burn. You can, of course, opt to buy your place, but the apartments around you will probably become vacation and short-stay rentals, and the people who come thereafter don't have neighborliness on their agendas.

When I found out that people in the know, and people whose association I'd enjoyed, were getting the hell out of Dodge, I, too, thought about Harbor Steps, but it was just a little too expensive-to-way too expensive - even back then. Belltown Court had been almost budget-busting for me, but I needed a nice place downtown and after dealing with Metro going to and from West Seattle, I wanted to be able to walk to work.

It's a good thing I didn't buy my place. Belltown got too loud for my taste, and Belltown Court turned into a hotel as predicted. It's also a good thing I didn't move to Harbor Steps. It became one of Seattle's premiere locations, and rents there started doubling frequently. I'd have been in trouble. And that could be why it didn't become a gathering spot like the Spanish Steps. It was just too ritzy. And by the way, if you have $5000 a month to spend on rent, wouldn't there be a tax attorney or accountant in you life? And wouldn't he/she be screaming at you to buy a house instead of "disposing" $5000 a month on rent? It seems the only people who could spend like that are the same people who could spend $18,000 for a first-class ticket on Emirates. Five-thousand dollars is pocket change. And, no, they aren't very chatty with the public.

The data shows the opposite, but why let facts get in the way :). I throw a charity event for a tech company and last year 60 folks generated $16k in giving for one golf round. This type of article discourages that level of generosity.

" don't have neighborliness on their agendas."

Yeah, that probably explains why in rich neighborhoods they're all breaking into each others homes, stealing their neighbors cars and mugging grandma when she visits. Whereas poor neighborhoods are filled with homey old timers saying "hello" to everyone who passes by the front porch, neighbors pass around free candy and the only time you hear gunshots are when the kids gather around the TV to watch an episode of "Gunsmoke".

Because I live in a world of stupid stereotypes.

@41

Y'know, if I were the boss of a rocketship company, I'm pretty sure I'd hire the guy who got a C in Physics 203 over the guy who read a lot of sci-fi and spent the interview talking about harvesting energy from undiscovered physical principles.

@49: “Y'know, if I were the boss of a rocketship company,”

The remainder of your comment tells us why you are not.

@50

No offense old friend, but I can't picture you making a buck building rocketships, either.

@51: Your failure of imagination has been the leitmotif of your comments in this thread, yes.

@52

Yeah I know, it's a real bummer isn't it?

Turns out you can't just impatiently wave aside stuff like engine efficiency and mass/energy budgets and instead build a rocketship out of imagination, wishes, and Boris Vallejo cover paintings.

@53: “...it's a real bummer isn't it?”

To you, perhaps; I find it entertainingly amusing.

Here’s a hint about imagination and energy budgets: if you’re stuck on a conceptual model which requires your vehicle to carry a tank of oxidizer just to get moving, then your pessimism seems apt.

@54

Even if we assume some magical propulsion system that lets us move the can for free, we still have the impossible problem of bringing along enough energy to keep the meat inside the can fresh for 1000 years.

You can recycle pee, but you can't recycle energy.

@55: The only (and very tenuous) connection this (admittedly amusing) conversation has to the topic of the headline post is the space travel ambitions of Jeff Bezos. The last time I checked, he was saying humans should “move out into the solar system.” Not only are the travel times considerably shorter than 1,000 years, but if your destination is in the plane of the earth’s equator, you don’t even need an on-board propulsion system at all. Simply build a space elevator, and let the rotation of the earth provide the momentum to go to whichever outer planet(s) you want. Such an elevator would require a material with about six times the tensile strength of anything we now have, but that is a materials science r&d issue, not an infinite-energy problem.

@56

"Simply build a space elevator" just by itself is an unfeasible project, too, when you do any realistic estimation of the resources and energy it would take.

The outer planets in our solar system are uninhabitable, of course, and will remain so. We don't have anything near the resources to colonize a planet that can't sustain life on its own, let alone terraform it-- those are even more resource-expensive tasks than building a space-ark for the thousand-year trip to the nearest inhabitable planet, once we figure out where that might be.

I think I've got you pretty well sussed out now. You're the kid who just got whatever he asked for, never had to deal with an allowance or a budget or a household where you not only need to figure out where the pony is going to sleep, but how you're going to feed it, too.

No wonder you're such a little bitch about taxes.

@28.

Is this some sort of riddle?

@13: "And in the meantime, the citizens of Seattle, particularly those who were here prior to Bezos' arrival and who aren't already on his payroll, can just go fuck themselves."

As with @45, I fit that description perfectly, and like @45, I'm very happy with the technical talent Amazon employs locally, both those who were born here and those who moved here to help create that wealth. I happen to think that modern Seattle, with gleaming residential towers sprouting all over Belltown and families returning to downtown, is far superior to the Seattle of seedy rooming houses, run-down residential hotels, and tottering walkups with more vermin than human residents. Over a quarter of a century ago, I moved to that Seattle, and saw the potential to be what it has become. Living in the future I envisioned back then is even better than I'd hoped it would be. It turns out that having a local company grow up here to employ large numbers of persons in high-paying jobs makes for a greater city --- even when that company is not necessarily named "Boeing".

@57: ""Simply build a space elevator" just by itself is an unfeasible project, too, when you do any realistic estimation of the resources and energy it would take.

You wave your hands, utter a few vague words, et voila, you're completely right -- all by that same magical unexplained mechanism by which you're always completely right (just ask you).

Of course, you saying you understand materials science and engineering, construction techniques, management of large projects, &c. doesn't actually make it so, any more than waving the magic phrase, "laws of thermodynamics," makes you an expert on the physics of energy transport. (For that thousand-year journey which is outside the scope of this post and thread, there's a very compact way to take plenty of warming, radiant energy along. Consider the implications of E=mc^2 in any universe where c is a really, really frickin' huuuuuuge number.)

"I think I've got you pretty well sussed out now."

You understand me at least a hundred billion times better than you do thermodynamics, of that there can be little doubt. (Is there some way, a la "Total Recall," that I can substitute your fantasy version of my childhood for my actual memories? A free pony would have been far better than begging my family for winter boots.)

"No wonder you're such a little bitch about taxes."

While the erudition and class you bring to SLOG is truly appreciated, no amount of calling me names will stop the re-allocation of funds away from underperforming private social-service providers, of the type which seems to supply your paycheck. If I'm a convenient entity to blame, then I guess you'll blame me. (Not that it matters, of course.)

Cool story, bro!

Not too long ago, Paul Allen / Vulcan proposed donating a large parcel of land for The Commons, a large, new urban Central Park.

The Stranger spearheaded the protest of the Commons, contributing to its ironic defeat.

ALL Seattle residents could be enjoying one of the nation's newest and largest urban parks, extending from S Lake Union to downtown. Instead, you forced Vulcan to develop the land. Now Amazon is the largest tenant.

You and your ilk directly contributed to this mess by suppressing elite philanthropy. Next time, consider contributing and building for the common good, rather than behaving like a selfish brat. Strong work, loser.

https://crosscut.com/2015/12/south-lake-union-could-have-been-seattles-central-park

Cool story, bro!

Not long ago, city elites like Paul Allen and the McCaws donated tens of millions and a large parcel of land for The Commons, a concept for a large, urban Central Park to be enjoyed by all Seattle residents.

The Stranger spearheaded the protest to kill the Commons, contributing to its defeat.

ALL Seattle residents would be enjoying one of the nation's newest and largest urban parks, extending from S Lake Union to downtown, had more intelligent voices prevailed. Instead, you poisoned civic discussion, sowed fear over losing a warehouse district, and Vulcan changed it's mind, choosing to develop the land originally acquired for public green space into office towers. Now you whine about Amazon after you killed the park.

I realize this is only the Stranger, not real journalism, but at least try to include a fact or two in addition to your well-developed opinion. You sound a lot like the Trump of Seattle, spewing horse shit and lacking intellect.

You and your ilk directly contributed to this mess by suppressing elite philanthropy. Next time, consider partnering, contributing, and building for the common good, rather than behaving like selfish twits, villainizing an entire class of people. Strong work, moron.

https://crosscut.com/2015/12/south-lake-union-could-have-been-seattles-central-park

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/12/08/24737207/guest-editorial-dear-dan-savage-its-not-paul-allens-fault-the-seattle-commons-failed

I bomb u fag.

At this point it’s really like no I bomb u fag.

https://goo.gl/L2s53j

I woke up late and then worked and then spent time with my friends that I love and then I had to study because if I take my friends out on a fifty foot boat if my friends die I am the worst person.

Also I love her.

I bomb u fag.