Treehugger has an insightful article from a former prefab homebuilder. These guys came on the scene a few years ago thinking that they would remake the world in a more sustainable image and a CGI image a day went up onto sites like Inhabitat of remote, unique-looking one-off homes perched over a frozen lake with nobody around.  The fact that the world can’t live away sustainably if everybody is in a Michigan state park on custom-built “prefab” housing a mile from the next human being didn’t seem to percolate into their ideological framework.   Their tiny, overpriced product only appealed to hipster environmentalist millionaires who wanted to live in the wilderness – a market which did not support the dozens of outfits that sprung up straight out of architecture school.  The only functional green prefab idea that came out of this movement was to use recycled shipping containers rather than 2×4’s in urban port cities, and even then half the buildings are currently made of purpose-built containers which don’t save any resources.
A commenter suggests that the *real money* is in the mobile home market, and the refreshing response goes:

The problem is the fundamental disconnect about costs in that market. When you build with well insulated walls, non-toxic materials and better build quality, the cost goes up. The people who understand the mobile home/trailer park system, where you rent the spot and own the manufactured home, balked at the price. No, they laughed at the price. They thought we were all kidding.  The people who understood how much it cost to build a proper, healthy green trailer didn’t get the model of tenure. There was nowhere for them to put the home because they had no intention of going into a park.

On Election Night, people noted spontaneous street parties when the election was called for Obama, and the phrase “It’s like we overthrew a dictator” struck me.
Well, Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales have been indicted by a south Texas grand jury for a 2006 conflict of interest which constituted a criminal conspiracy as well as responsibility for individual acts of assault, in quashing an investigation of a private prison system owned in part by the Vanguard Group which Cheney owns, in a 2006 disclosure, between $6M and $30M in.  I believe that the judge still has the option to throw out the verdict.

While people have posted things like “It was the IRS that finally took down Al Capone”…  I don’t think this will stick, and I don’t think it will even require pardon power.  A mutual fund like Vanguard is not an adequate connection – the money is managed at a great distance, they’re a giant company with many different traders and index funds and financial products.  I would attribute his interference in the investigation to anything else – basic ideology, bribes, friendships, campaign contributions, before I would attribute it to a financial interest made at such a distance.  He’s probably more likely to be doing a personal favor for someone at Vanguard than looking out for his own investments.  But who knows…

If it were valid, it still wouldn’t stick because of the institutional respect for the Vice President’s office and the controversy surrounding the outgoing prosecutor who moved the jury forward.   Even if we assume that there was an actual scandal that’s been uncovered here and the legal system were in favor of taking Cheney down, there’s still the black helicopter brigade to get past – and there are limitless coercive methods that they can use within Cheney’s constitution.

Cheney is a fascinating character responsible for a great deal of the sheer creepiness of the last eight years.  Working behind the scenes he’s been as much if not more influential than Karl Rove’s campaign to politicize everything, and he’s done it with utter disregard for his own reputation or common sense precedents.  Setting ‘neoconservative hawk’ as the persistent stance of his entire party, forming his own intelligence agency, helping to politicize the Justice Department, relentlessly pursuing the establishment of absolute, unquestionable power for the executive branch… This has been a man driven not by public opinion or personal ambition, but by committment to some dark path chosen long ago.  Noone has really satisfactorily explained his motivations, and while ‘Pure Evil’ is a mythically rare orientation, he seems satisfied to be branded that as long as it doesn’t interfere with The Important Work He’s Doing.
LithiumCola has a few words on the topic in an extremely intriguing diary on DailyKos, while covering David Bromwich’s New York Times review of several books about Cheney:

…we want to acknowledge that there is/was something unique at work in the Bush years.  Putting this unique thing, this singularity, into words, without fudging our acknowledgment of the past, is a worthwhile project.  It’s worthwhile because we want to understand just what happened in the first years of the 21st century and why it felt and feels so singularly dangerous — a feeling as of standing on a precipice and feeling the chill breeze of oblivion greet us from below.

…

Cheney does not seem to care about America.  Not in any sense – not in the right-wing “love it or leave it” America-Firster’s sense and not in the libertarian land-of-opportunity lover’s sense.  That Cheney was born into this country seems entirely incidental to his desire to rule it.  There is nothing even a little bit familial about his particular style of powermongering.  We might as well have been French, or Chilean, for all that Cheney cares.  The only thing the American system did was slow him down.

…

On this telling, Cheney used his years in Congress only to weaken Congress (see his minority report on Iran-Contra) and to gather up information that could be used against others later.  That’s it.  The suggestion of such premeditation and single-bloody-mindedness invites rejection.  No one is really like that.  But, then again . . .

Perhaps it is just this refusal to acknowledge the alien sensibility that allowed Cheney to get so far.  He is not out for personal glory – he shuns it.  He is not out for money – he has money.  He is not out to make America better place to live in any sense.  So what is it?  He seems to have only one, nonsensical goal: to make the Presidency into a dictatorship.  But to what end?

• Two subway lines cut entirely (Z & W).
• Two subway lines shutter half their active stations (G & M).
• One subway line cuts express service (J).
• 1500 employees fired, including 600 station agents.
• Longer off-peak headways.
• Dozens of low-ridership bus lines cut, or reduced hours.
• Increased maximum capacity in order to allow for more crowded trains & platforms, when ridership has already increased by 11% in the last fiscal year, breaking records and making rush-hour a struggle.

That’s what the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority has in the 2009 budget plan, whose operating deficit has blossomed from $900M to $1.2B.  Gothamist has a finger-pointing contest.  Continued severe cost inflation and unexpected decreased revenues from several special tax arrangements, including things like real estate transaction taxes and corporate tax surcharges that are expected to drop like a rock, have tanked a July budget plan to keep MTA solvent. The mid-year plan forecasted quite a few required cuts due to the real estate bubble, but the recession piled onto that effect. The budget report officially comes out on Thursday, and is expected to beg for a state bailout, threaten these cutbacks and possibly more, as well as threaten to raise fares 25-50%.

This is no way to run a transit infrastructure. Some types of tax revenue aren’t stable enough to run much of anything – they’re good for durable capital expenditures, not operating revenue. I don’t understand quite how you can base your municipality’s budget on something like capital gains without having a huge statutorily mandated cash reserve (impossible… to… resist… spending…). We’ve come to expect growth-based taxes tracking nonreal paper wealth to beat inflation year after year, and it appears that our realization that this is unrealistic is, when you get down to it, the root cause of most of our economy’s ills.

If this is the type of “dedicated funding source” that WMATA is looking for, I’m not sure I’m in favor. The end goal, whether it’s achieved with city/state/federal matching fund committments, more stable types of local tax districts, or simply higher fares & parking fees, should be to achieve more than breakeven operating costs, enough that the transit authority itself can contribute some small amount of capital costs from a multiyear warchest.

Any less than breakeven, and increased service requires increased subsidy – which is rarely guaranteed. If you manage to get a system that balances the budget with a slight surplus though, they can adapt that surplus to address shortcomings which increases ridership, establishing a virtuous cycle of expansion and fluid optimization rather than a vicious cycle of cutbacks and rigid bailout pleas. Getting the marginal profit per additional rider into the positive column provides incentives to increase service which are a whole lot healthier for the system than the subsidized alternatives.  When a budget gets to the point that the authority has to let already-paid-for tracks and rolling stock sit vacant for significantly more time than they did last year, its leadership is at a precipice – it can change the system to be productive or it can live on on handouts and the detritus of a more productive age.

In terms of operating revenue at least, the toolkit useful to fund transit-as-innercity-social-program or transit-as-vital-industry appears to me to be pretty dissimilar from the one that needs to be used for transit-as-viable-urban-transportation-system. Increasing transit capital subsidies to something in the same vein as highway capital subsidies is something that many of us concerned with sustainability are optimistic about in the next administration. Whether there will be a chance of realistically pricing the infrastructural externalities involved in suburban/exurban living, or of gasoline/fossil fuel dependency, is more a matter of hope. If the latter could be done effectively, it’s my contention that things like subways wouldn’t require an operating subsidy. Metrorail is already pretty high on the cost-recovery totem pole, even while it pleas for a continuation of enhanced capital expenditure as many systems reach their designed end-of-life.

Put on your policy hat – If the world is your oyster card, what’s the best long-term resiliant system to fund a transit agency?

We knew that Mark Begich would likely have an advantage over Ted Stevens in the remaining 90,000 votes to be counted. It was gonna be close – but we didn’t know how close. Today, after counting a 40,000 of those, the totals stand at:
Stevens (R) 125,016
Begich (D) 125,019

12,000 more are coming in tonight, and the rest will be counted in the coming days. Given the composition of the existing absentee/early/provisional ballots though, and the location of the uncounted lots, Begich’s lead is only expected to increase, by as much as another half a percentage point.

Update:

After counting the evening’s votes, Begich is up by 814.  The ballots not yet counted are apparently from heavily D-leaning areas, so it’s pretty safe to call this one for Begich.

That puts the Senate tally at 56-40-2 plus two races too close to call.

Brownsox over on DKos is doing a pretty good job of tracking races that havn’t yet been called… we watch with bated breath.

In the Senate, the tally is 55-40-2, with 3 seats undecided:
Alaska:
FiveThirtyEight has a simulation that suggests that there is still a decent chance of Mark Begich defeating convicted felon & Republican senator Ted Stevens, thereby preventing Sarah Palin from appointing herself temporary Senator (and then winning the special election) and making us listen to her verbal gymnastics for another six years.  If she wants to run for President this would be an ideal place to improve her image… but since the Senate has to actually vote on the record, strategically and tactically on many different issues, it’s traditionally been a very difficult place to springboard to the Presidency from.  Whether Sarah Palin’s appeal to her base is subject to tedious things like how she voted is up for discussion.  More on her (and the future of the Republican Party) in a later post.

Georgia:
While a few more votes have to be counted, Georgia’s Republican senator Saxby Chambliss is at 49.8% to Democratic challenger Jim Martin’s 46.8%. Under Georgia law, the winner coming in under 50% triggers a runoff that it would be entirely possible for Jim Martin, campaigning with President-elect Obama and enjoying much of the Democratic Party’s attention, could win.  3 points is considerable as a handicap, but I think this is entirely about how the economy does and how much effort the Democrats put into this race.

Minnesota:
Odds are close to even on who a month-long recount (to start in a week or two) will favor. Coleman has around 200 votes over Frankin, and lawsuits over things as small as a 32 ballot absentee batch that was slow in the coming in have been filed.

Update:
It looks like that lawsuit (which has been thrown out) may have attempted in the small print to stop the counting of most of the uncounted ballots:

Connecticut:
Lieberman was not up for reelection this year, but he may be impacted. Over the course of the last 8 years, he has gone:

• from the Vice-Presidential Nominee who torpedoed recount efforts & his chances of winning by being too conciliatory

• to an influential part of the DLC who “Votes with us on everything but the war”
• to an independant pro-war candidate who couldn’t muster enough Democratic votes to win a primary but could win an election by splitting both Republican and Democratic votes

• to a full-on neoconservative shill who campaigned with McCain and said he doesn’t know whether America would survive a government with the Democratic Party at its reins

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is pretty adamant that his committee chairmanship (Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs) be yanked, but even offered him a trade: a chair somewhere else where his pro-war positions won’t damage Democratic ability to govern effectively. Joe’s spokesman said simply that losing his chair was “unacceptable,” as Democrats stood in awe of his audacity and the blogosphere called for him to be thrown out of the caucus entirely. The sole position I’ve been warning about since the issue came up in 2006 where this could matter after 2008, the 60th censure vote that Democrats need to stop Republican obstructionism in the Senate, would be at stake if the above three races are decided in favor of Democrats. The question for the Senate might end up being – Is suffering Joe Lieberman as deciding vote worth having the deciding vote?

With the knowledge that this is a bit more optimistic than Intrade & 538’s polling projections, I’m going to predict that all the tossup states go Obama, and even several of the marginally McCain-leaning states join in.

The line will be drawn in the red Arizona sands, in John McCain’s back yard – a trophy that the Democrats won’t gain, but nevertheless an endpoint that represents the biggest margin a Democrat has been elected by since Johnson trounced Goldwater in 1964.  Say what you will about the Bradley or anti-Bradley effect, Obama has too many other things going for him.

• The cell-only correction in an age when young voters register Democratic over Republican bby a 2:1 ratio

• The unprecedented African-American voter turnout expected

• The ‘enthusiasm gap’ that McCain suffers (where he has to hold events at a school so that students are included and he can get more than 1000 people to attend, while Obama gets crowds of 100,000) will likely cause many of his voters that get polled to stay home.  This includes the GOTV efforts that Obama has set up – a ground campaign that McCain’s efforts were never able to touch.

• The deep hangover that the Republican party faithful tangentially connected to reality suffer from in the face of Sarah Palin, after the two-week-long euphoric highs of her cult of personality

And the clincher:

• The amazingly high numbers of people voting early, and the amazing margin by which they’re going for Obama. I understand that his canvassers urge early voting, but the numbers we’re seeing would need an election-day landslide for McCain to correct in some states where a significant portion of the electorate has already voted.

We’ll know in 24 hours how accurate I was.

Side bets:

• States without early voting, particularly ones with a diverse populations like Maryland, will positively swell with voters today, causing long enough lines to provoke outrage.  I’ll be out there at 7AM.

• When Obama makes his inauguration day address, the District of Colombia will swell with the biggest event it’s ever had.  If the same regurgitated speech in a campaign that lasted two grueling years can fill 100k seat stadiums multiple times a day, Inauguration Day will draw millions – and the low-attendence restricted-ticket events planned (where controversy has arisen over things like restricting crowds in front of bleachers) will be ill-equipped to handle it.  I’ll be out there at 7AM as well.

Update:

Arrived at poll at 7:30AM to a line that was just doubling back as it reached the end of the elementary school’s property.  I heard “Been here 90 minutes” from the people coming out.  There was a lot of chatter about Palin’s outrages and Obama’s merits as well as a few Democrats at their table – but not a vocal McCain supporter in earshot.  An hour and 15 minuts later, I was out, and the line appeared to be shorter by about 10%.

The jury handed down a guilty verdict on all counts yesterday to Ted Stevens, who had urged a speedy trial in order to beat the election cycle. What struck me in the case was this Taped phone conversation of Senator Ted Stevens from two years ago demonstrating the cockiness with which he viewed the whole situation, even while assuming he was under FBI wiretap & talking to the main codefendant & witness in any potential trial:

STEVENS: So, but it, you know, it doesn’t make any difference. Hell, I don’t care what they ..(inaudible) I’d say the same thing I said if they were sitting here right in front of us. I’m not going to let these guys get us in a position where they can charge us with something just because we didn’t do what they think we should do. They, they’ve got to go out make the case that we did something that, that is against the law. I don’t think we have violated the law.

ALLEN: I don’t think we have either, Ted. But, uh, you know, I, I – that lawyer has grilled me and grilled me on what they think they can do. He talks to them, I don’t.

STEVENS: That’s, that’s the way it should be. But as a practical matter, the question is, what can they convince the jury, uh grand jury, to charge us with. That’s the problem. But when I was a district attorney, I, I handled grand juries, lots of them. They’re funny people, but they also are people from within the community. And your reputation and everything else comes into into this play, as far as grand juries are concerned. But I think, really, when you look at it. We ought to just cool it. I told Ben the same thing: just cool it, you know, go about our business and smile and have a happy face. You ought to get out and meet people and do things. Do the things you used to do and just keep going. If it’s a violation of the elections law, that’s a corporate violation. This thing, it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t get to your mind, old buddy.

ALLEN: Well it has been, I’ll tell you.

STEVENS: Well but, you got to, you got to just stand back and say what’s going to happen when it’s all over. You got to get a mental attitude that these guys can’t really hurt us. You know, they’re not going shoot us. It’s not Iraq. What the hell? The worst that can be done, the worst that can happen to us is we round up a bunch of legal fees and, and might lose and we might have to pay a fine, might have to serve a little time in jail. I hope to Christ it never gets to that, but, and I don’t think it will. But I don’t, I’m developing the attitude that I don’t think I did anything wrong so I’m going to go right through my life and keep doing what I think is right.

ALLEN: Well, when this, when this grand jury is over, where are you going to be?

STEVENS: Grand juries meet about two or three days a month, Bill. They’ll finish and then they’ll go up and think about stuff and ask people to get more information on this or that and then they’ll come back in about a month to five weeks. So it’s not going to be over. They last about, their term is about 18 months.

ALLEN: Shit.

STEVENS: I’m going back to Washington on the 25th.

ALLEN: What is today?

STEVENS: The 19th.

ALLEN: 19th. .

STEVENS: I’m going to Seward, then I’m going to Valdez, then I’m going to Fairbanks, going to Barrow, and come back here and then leave the state.

ALLEN: OK.

STEVENS: But we ought to get together some time, when we can …

ALLEN: Yeah, we really should, Ted. And just between me and you – we’re not going, we’re not going to do anything, Justice, but I’ve got more information, maybe, maybe, than you got. You know, uh, and …

STEVENS: That’s probably true. But we’ll, we’ll get to the point where we have share information. Right now, let’s not, let’s not hasten, you know, this thing along and make it look like we’re trying to stop them at the pass. I’m not afraid of them at all.

ALLEN: I know you’re not. Uh, well, there is, there is things that I need to tell you. But, but uh, you know, I can’t do it over the phone.

STEVENS: If there’s some things you need to tell me, tell your lawyers to tell my lawyers. Bill Phillips in Washington’s my lawyer.

ALLEN: Is he? OK, well. How…I think I got all your cell phones and all that, so.

STEVENS: Well you, anything gets really serious, give me a call. Lets not try to share information that they don’t have.

ALLEN: OK.

STEVENS: That, that would be obstruction of justice…

If elected & not sentenced to jail time, odds are he’ll stay in that Senate seat for the rest of his life.

I’ve considered myself a resident of the internet community(with more social discourse online than off) for about a decade now. I’ve gone through a few dozen different obsessions in that time, from MMO & FPS games to Wikipedia to politics to technological niches. I’m a commenter on numerous discussion sites with a wide variety of topics under various screen names. I know this series of tubes like the back of my hand. I have lurked, and lurked moar.

So it’s about time I got around to a public life. This will be tempered by my understanding that in all likelihood, privacy as we have known it is doomed and the world + dog will forever have pictures of That Time You Got Drunk And Puked All Over Yourself in the public domain (or near enough that it doesn’t matter). My take on the world, however deluded it seems in another decade, might just survive me. I’m not sure what I hope to gain, but the inherent attraction of archived knowledge will at the very least be joined by my ability to write an article and link to it later, instead of constructing the same argument time and time again.

I’m an engineering student attending Montgomery College in Maryland.

-Squalish