The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #156
Readers: This week marks the completion of the third year of The Deleted Scenes—that’s three full years, every day except Sunday, of thoughtful, illustrated, locally rooted pieces on urbanism and more. I’m offering a 20 percent discount for new subscribers, good until the end of Sunday. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, this is a great time. Your support—whether reading, sharing, or subscribing—keeps this thing going. Thank you! To another year! E-Bikes Overtake Buggies For Some Amish, This E-Bike Life, Dave Hogan, October 9, 2021
I see a lot of urbanists and transit/pedestrian/cycling advocates excited about e-bikes. These are not stripped-down motorcycles or anything, they’re just bicycles with a motor and battery for electric pedal assistance. A lot of people see potential for these simple vehicles—which cost more than traditional bikes but far, far less than even a small used car—to revolutionize errand-running in urban areas for people who just don’t enjoy the effort of biking, but can’t or don’t drive, or want to drive less. (There are silly sport cyclists who think e-bikes are “cheating,” but cyclists who are actually trying to get somewhere overwhelmingly like them.) So it’s really neat to read that to some extent this is happening—but in the rural and suburban areas of Ohio’s Amish Country! Whether or not electric bicycles are permitted depends on which division within the diffuse Amish church you happen to belong to. But the article quotes an Old Order Amish man—the stricter set of Amish communities—who owns an e-bike store and has a lot of Amish customers. What’s so interesting and, I think, significant about this is that the Amish community is pretty much its own sphere. They’re not on Twitter arguing about the culture war. They don’t think bikes are for commies, etc. etc. So the Amish adoption of e-bikes is a validation of the technology, shorn of what anybody thinks about it. In other words, this is one way to determine that a lot of “urbanism,” broadly, is just…sensible stuff. And that perhaps a lot of people don’t even get to the point of judging these things on the merits. Read the whole thing. This is a great and detailed article on something you’ve probably never seen covered before. America’s Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant, The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, March 8, 2024 I’ve been writing about restaurants a bit lately, so this was of particular interest to me. There’s a glass-half-full and a glass-half-empty reading here, which Thompson acknowledges.
There are regional disparities along with restaurant-type disparities. But the short of it is that while restaurant sales as an overall category have rebounded, the pre-pandemic dining experience, in an actual restaurant, has not rebounded to the same extent:
I’ve gotten this almost eerie feeling, ever since I went to my first post-pandemic Chinese buffet, that I’ve been watching a once unremarked-upon thing going extinct, or at least becoming conspicuously uncommon. This article basically proves the supposition that “going out to eat” doesn’t quite mean the same thing that it did before 2020. That’s a shame. Fixing Macs Door to Door, Mathew Duggan, January 5, 2024 This is a really interesting piece—fun to read as a human interest story, but also touching on economics, business, sociology, and class. The first thing Duggan makes clear is how different a company Apple was even in 2008, when this takes place.
It’s hard to believe something like this program would exist under the auspices of a company as obsessed about image and control as Apple. It makes me wonder how many other things like this there are, that still exist because of inertia, but that would never be started again today and will only exist as long as they continue to exist. A little more no-background:
You can imagine how some of these jobs will go: odd people talking your ear off while you’re trying to work on a dusty computer in a messy home office, the super-rich who barely notice just another servant filing in and out of the mansion, the exposure to petty crime from navigating the city at odd hours, etc. Once you read this, you realize why a lot of service workers can seem resentful or rude: because they put up with stuff that’s completely invisible to any given individual customer who interacts with them for just a few minutes. There’s an asymmetry. Whole groups of people are usually not jerky and insufferable for no reason. If you think people are being that way, wonder why. This is also notable, and it confirms something I’ve read elsewhere. Apple is consistently one of the worst offenders when it comes to all things repair-related:
And that “turn on long enough for you to get off the property.” It underscores how sometimes these poorly paid, seemingly menial jobs can end up demanding more than is possible. What do you do if a job goes late and the last bus is on its way? “You do what you have to do” is the kind of thing people say who’ve never had to do it, isn’t it?
This idea is floated now and then: that basically every seemingly deep, almost metaphysical problem in the West really comes down to the housing crunch. In other words, a lot of cultural problems are downstream of a very simple economic problem with a simple technocratic fix. So the big question, once you reach a crisis point as we have with housing, is this: can a technocratic fix unwind the cultural problems that arise downstream of the simple problem? Or do they take on a life of their own? For example, you couldn’t have unwound Nazism in 1942 by fixing hyperinflation in Germany. Are all cultural problems like that? But about this piece. First of all, the housing shortage is real. You have to basically throw out all of economics in order to claim that these numbers are not proof of a supply shortfall which is a chief cause of housing price spikes:
But this is the real meat of the piece:
This is a point that some housing folks, like Nolan Gray and Luca Gattoni-Celli, have made: the housing crunch is a massive social and economic tax on American cities and on American families, because it forces people to waste money and time and dilutes the fundamental function cities play of bringing talent together and enhancing what a single person can do. But it affects everything:
The authors even mention fiddling with the pipes in your house, because plumbers are too expensive, because they have to either afford to live near population centers or drive all the way out from somewhere else. The extent to which the housing crunch distorts the entire texture of American life is unknown, but great. That’s why I think “shortage” or “crisis” don’t capture what this is: I call it a housing famine. And this is a fraction of what the article hypothesizes. (Economic inequality? Declining fertility rates? It’s housing!) I’m sure this could all be quibbled with; some of it may be wrong. If half of it is right, we’re in trouble. Related Reading: Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter, discounted just this week! You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 900 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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Easter Saturday
Saturday, March 30, 2024
(Two) holiday thoughts ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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