What Ever Happened to Free Parking?

Over the years I’ve gotten into disposable income arguments with a number of people, most of whom have told me that conspicuous consumption is disgusting no matter how small the amounts involved are relative to your income, and people who spend $800,000 on a car or $200,000 on a bottle of whiskey should just get a Honda Accord and a bottle of some premium brand and donate the other $970,000 or so to charity. I’d like to think that I’m more tolerant than that, although in fairness I should probably just admit that I don’t particularly care how people want to squander their money. I follow the Heinlein school of ethics, which holds that anything you enjoy that does not unnecessarily harm another person is not wrong in an ethical sense – although it may stupid. The case of the million dollar parking space, as reported in the New York Times this week, probably falls into that last category…

Even if you’ve never been to New York City, the concept that parking would be hard to find and very expensive there shouldn’t be too hard to grasp. Space within the city is extremely limited, and as a result all real estate is expensive. Most of the residents don’t even own cars, and a surprising percentage of them will be happy to tell you, at the drop of anything resembling a cue, how wonderful it is to be able to go anywhere you want to go on public transportation, how much money they save every year by not having to make car payments (or pay for car insurance), and why this is further evidence of the complete superiority of their city to anywhere else in the world you could possibly live. I’m not convinced that the existence of a parking space that will cost you as much as $6,600 per square foot supports that contention, however…

According to the story in the New York Times website, the parking spaces are part of a new condo development in a building that will offer three-bedroom units in the $8.7 million to $10.45 million range – or around $3,150 per square foot; less than half of what the parking spots cost based on footage. Or, to look at it another way, each of these parking sports will require financial resources that would be sufficient to purchase a really nice house (complete with multi-car garage) in many other large cities, or four quite large houses in a good part of East Lansing, Michigan, outright. This would seem extravagant almost anywhere, but in a city that prides itself on its public transportation – and which is widely associated with both horrible driving conditions and unbearable automotive expenses – it seems like a complete logical disconnect…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that according to the same story it isn’t that unusual to see parking spaces with a six-figure price listing in New York; the author also points out that the available number of off-street parking spaces has dropped by around 26% over the past 30 years, whereas the population of the city certainly has not. We might also want to concede that someone who is paying in excess of $10 million for a new residence (especially a condominium) might consider an extra 10% in order to park in the same building no more than a minor expense – or possibly an interesting investment, since it will both enhance the value of the condo and also offer a property than can be sold separately from the residence. But it should probably also be noted than anyone who can afford to spend that kind of money on real estate can most likely also afford cab fare…

In the long run a parking space that costs four times more than the national average for a house may seem like a particularly disgusting example of conspicuous consumption, but if the people who buy them end up selling the properties at a good profit in five or ten years it’s hard to imagine what was wrong with this choice from a business standpoint; if the spaces appreciate the way some real estate did in the early 2000s the owners might end up having the last laugh on all of us. The truth is, if I could realize a profit of millions of dollars – or even $200,000 for a nice 20% profit – on buying and selling a piece of property, I don’t believe that I’d care whether it was a 200-unit apartment complex or a 200 square foot parking space…

And I can’t imagine why anyone else should care, let alone give me a whole lecture on conspicuous consumption…

Please Tell Me It’s A Hoax

There are times when you run across a story so absurd that you have to wonder if you’re being pranked, either by the news media or by the people in the story itself. The unfortunate fact is that much of what you can read about online, even more so than traditional news outlets, is completely untrue and was created for the sole purpose of getting you to repeat it and get upset about it. So when the story about an ultra-Conservative group attempting to run a donut shop founded and run by a high school student out of business because they don’t like the name of the place first hit my desktop, I made a determined effort to find some indication that the story was a hoax. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case…

You can go to the local ABC affiliate station’s website and read it for yourself if you like, but even the station is saying that they can’t take responsibility for all of the details being correct. The story goes that conservative groups in the small town of Front Royal, Virginia, have converted the community into something right out of a Hollywood movie script, waging war on anything they consider to be insufficiently religious, including all references to magic, the supernatural, popular culture, music, pre-marital contact (of any kind) between people of different genders, or – apparently – donuts being sold in a store with a 1950s pin-up theme. It’s not exactly a new concept – every few years another small town somewhere in America will drop into a Footloose scenario and outlaw parties, mixed-gender social events, dancing, or whatever else has its elders in an uproar. This is the first time on record, at least as far as I can tell, that theocratic groups of this type have gone after someone for the name and theme of an otherwise harmless business, however…

I’m not going to present this as an ethics issue because I don’t believe there is another side to the story – a group of people are using their alleged religious convictions to cover their bigotry and hatred for anybody and anything different from themselves. I should acknowledge, I suppose, that I have no evidence that these so-called “Christian Conservatives” would react any differently if the donut shop was being run by a male entrepreneur, or someone whose surname is more Anglo than “Ramos,” but I know which way I would bet if I had to…

What makes this a business issue – and brings it into my purview in this blog – is that what they are actually attacking is a successful business run by a young woman who has managed to start up and run her operation while attending school full time. Even if we are willing to stipulate that running a donut shop with a slightly racy theme does somehow interfere with someone’s ability to practice a level of humorless, joyless religious fanaticism that even our Puritan ancestors would find embarrassing –and I am not willing to so stipulate, in fact – that does not change the fact that these wingnuts are infringing on someone’s right to operate a business and earn a living. And if they can do that to Ms. Ramos and her donut shop, and get away with it, what is to stop them from targeting any other woman-owned, minority-owned, or otherwise inconvenient business? For that matter, how long is it going to be before people with no religious convictions whatsoever start making up whatever stories they need to in order to drive a competitor out of business?

Assuming that this hasn’t already happened, of course…

Now, I must once again point out that I don’t have any independent confirmation of the story. I hope, more intensely than I can possibly tell you, that the whole thing turns out to be a hoax; that there really is a Tiana Ramos and that her Naughty Girl Donuts is thriving and prospering, surrounded by supportive townspeople who can’t even imagine why anyone would make them out to be a bunch of hateful fanatics. Because if this story is true it should sent a chill down the back of every entrepreneur and business owner in this country – and I will fear for the future of our Republic…

Your Tax Dollars At Work!

The other day I was reading a story online about some of the agencies that have been receiving surplus equipment from the US military through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Excess Property Program. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s the same program through which the police force in Ferguson got all of the armored vehicles, assault rifles, tactical body armor, black uniforms and helmets, and other gear that made them look less like law enforcement officers and more like motorized infantry. In theory, this will allow local governments to obtain the equipment they would need in order to deal with major threats to the community, like terrorist attacks or natural disasters, without draining more money from their budget than they could possibly afford. In practice, however, there seem to be a few problems with this idea…

To begin with, any law enforcement agency that routinely makes use of this gear during non-disaster, non-catastrophe conditions is going to have an image problem. The sight of a wave of officers dressed in black tactical gear and body armor with military-grade rifles, grenade launchers, and armored vehicles is enough to convince anyone seeing it that the people running that agency have gone power-mad and are reacting with excessive force just so they can play with their exciting new toys. The sight of that kind of firepower being aimed at unarmed civilians staging a protest against unjustified use of deadly force is going to make an already tense situation worse, and the fact that such equipment (and the people using it) frequently are being used in inappropriate situations does not help…

Every time a police department deploys a SWAT team, complete with assault rifles and armored vehicles, in order to search for suspects who have never actually lived at the address being invaded, everyone in this country is a little less free than they had been, and all of the traditional animosity and distrust between underserved and disenfranchised communities and their local authorities become that much worse. But some of these scenes are enough to convince even social conservatives that things have gone too far. For example, last week the San Diego Unified School District acquired its own armored vehicle under this program, a mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle or MRAP, of the kind used for army patrols in Afghanistan…

You can catch the story from the local public radio station’s home page if you’d like; there are some really great pictures included (even if one of them has been digitally altered) that give you an idea of the size of the vehicle involved. The school district is insisting that they will only use the MRAP as a rescue vehicle, to knock down walls or transport children to safety in the event of an “active shooter” situation or a fire or earthquake. No one has explained, as yet, what is going to happen if they accidentally knock down a wall on top of some unsuspecting class, or how they appear to have managed to get through the last century-plus of operations without owning a vehicle whose armor can stop small-arms fire and IDE explosions, if this need is so critical. But nearly as bad, at least in my opinion, is the inherent squandering of government funds involved here – because that’s our money they’re throwing away…

Since the despicable attacks of 13 years ago today there have been exactly zero armed incursions on American soil, and exactly that many occasions when local law enforcement would have had occasion to use military-grade weapons to repel one. The world is a more dangerous place than it was decades ago, but nearly all of the threats to our nation and our way of life are made up of covert attacks and shadow warfare carried out at levels that local police forces will never encounter. The only possible benefit of this military surplus give-away is to require the armed forces to buy new gear, which funnels more public funds into the companies that make it. The whole thing is a mass of the worst possible kind of pork-barrel spending, covered with a two-faced mock-patriotic flag-waving justification stinking to high heaven of both social and financial inequity…

And I object to it, in the strongest possible terms, because the funds we are giving away consist entirely of money we are borrowing from other nations – some of which aren’t all that friendly…

Call Me Paranoid…

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the ride service that calls itself Uber; if they don’t have anyone working the area in which you live it may not have come up yet. The company is based around the smart phone app of the same name, which allows the user to summon a driver to pick them up from just about anywhere and transport them, much the way a taxi service does. The difference is that Uber drivers are not professional drivers and they don’t have a cab driver’s license; they don’t even work directly for the company. For the most part, the Uber drivers are just private citizens with cars whom you can pay to take you somewhere, assuming that they happen to be out driving around the area you’re in. Working from a modest start in 2009, the company is now reportedly operating in 34 countries and providing both work (for the drivers) and relatively cheap and safe transportation to the users – or, at least, that’s the idea…

My original reaction to the concept, when I encountered it in New York last year, was that this was something in which I would only participate if that were one of the demands made by terrorists holding my wife. To me, it sounded like the service was made for carjackers (have a car and a smart phone brought right to your door, whenever you want!) and armed robbers, not to mention the risk to Uber passengers, such as being kidnapped or assaulted by some random driver. And while it is true that the company would have some record of what happened to you – and where the police could find the driver after you went missing – I still couldn’t help thinking that this would be cold comfort to you if you ended up being the victim. I’ve known at least two people who were killed while hitchhiking, and while this is somewhat safer that just sticking your thumb out, it doesn’t seem that much safer…

It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact, apparently some of these things are actually happening, according to an article on the Daily Beast site earlier this year. It turns out that there have been complaints against Uber drivers, including at least one who was accused of raping a passenger, and several who appear to have gotten access to their riders’ personal information and stalked them over the Internet (and possibly in person). I haven’t seen any cases of Uber drivers being carjacked – I’m not sure how you would tell such a crime from a “regular” carjacking unless the company went out of their way to acknowledge it as such – but it seems unlikely that a large number of people can expect to place themselves in harm’s way on a regular basis without some ill effects. This is especially true when you consider the statistics on cab drivers being assaulted and robbed while on duty…

Now, I understand that the vast majority of Uber drivers are fine, upstanding citizens trying to scratch out a living as contractors for an Internet company, just as the vast majority of Uber customers are just ordinary people who are just looking for a safer, faster, and less expensive way of getting around the city. The problem is, most of the people who live in your town are probably good, honest folks, too, but that probably doesn’t keep you from locking your doors at night…

The author of the linked article describes being stalked by an Uber driver, who then tracked down her work email and her employer’s work email to protest the negative review she gave the driver as the result of the stalking incidents. He may not actually have meant any harm by this – it could in fact be a case of wanting to explain himself and apologize for his actions. But if the drivers can actually get access to passenger information (and the company has contradicted itself a number of times about how much of this is possible) then I don’t think it’s a very far stretch to conclude that eventually somebody is going to use that same information to do harm to one of their riders, either in person or in terms of identity theft…

All things considered, it just seems like a lot of risk to accept in the name of cheaper and potentially more convenient transportation – or for a low-paying part-time job. Or, to look at it another way, the entire business model looks a lot like another great idea ruined by people…