FREE WHITEWATER

Adventure, Good Ideas, Lifestyle

The Cinder Cone

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The Cinder Cone from Farm League on Vimeo.

In the Spring of 2014 a small group of close friends broke ground on a building project in Skamania County, Washington in the Columbia River Gorge. Their primary endeavor was a multi-platform tree house, but also included a skate bowl and a wood fired soaking tub as well. The crew came from all over the country and from a variety of backgrounds. Some were professional carpenters, others learned on the job, gaining experience along the way. The Cinder Cone is Foster Huntington’s short film that documents this year-long process of building his dream home with this community of tight knit friends.

City, Culture, Press, Social Media

On Trends in Whitewater’s Media

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If print’s in decline (and it is), then what’s next for Whitewater (or other small towns)?

I’ve contended that a new Whitewater is inevitable.  We’ve passed the beginning of that process, and are now in a middle time toward a new city.

There are years yet ahead, but most now living in Whitewater will one day see a significantly different political and social climate.   

A few easy observations:

1.  The move from print to digital is a move toward the possibility of faster interaction between publisher and readers, and less expensive entry costs for new publishers.  It’s less expensive, in fact, by more than one order of magnitude.   

2.  It’s worth highlighting yet again: these electronic trends empower individuals to become publishers.  It’s a return, in a way, to America’s early (vigorous, and influential) tradition of pamphleteering. 

3.  Nothing about the Web, social media, email, texting, etc., was invented in Whitewater.  These are global developments, of which America has had a significant, outsized role.  The businesses behind these developments are often worth billions singly, and amount to trillions in wealth collectively. 

4.  America’s tradition of liberty, with a free and productive economy, is a fertile ground for the growth of these electronic media.

5.  Like most places, Whitewater has had both public, institutional, and small-publisher websites for years.

6.  Whitewater’s political culture has been, until recently, stodgy, top-down, narrow, and driven by personality.  (One can guess that glad-handing has no appeal to me, especially when it has produced work so far beneath the standards that capable Americans can and do meet every day.  Most Americans are sharp and capable this way; many, but not all, town notables have often lagged the standards of our dynamic country.)

There’s no circumstance under which I would prefer print over electronic publishing, or an insider’s role over independent commentary.  See, along these lines, Measuring the Strength of a Position. 

7.  I predicted in 2012 that Whitewater would grow to have not a few but many electronic publications, of diverse types of media, and that resulting growth would be a positive development. (“I like it, and hope for more and still more.  Each and every thoughtful person in this city will benefit from an expanding marketplace of ideas.”) 

8.  I made this prediction three years ago, and it’s slowly proving correct.  Not only have thousands of residents been skilled in using social media for many years (long before 2012, of course), but their clubs and organizations are beginning to build new webpages or Facebook pages to advance their views without reliance on third parties. 

There are easily dozens of such organizational or business sites now,  and each one affords its publisher the chance to craft his or her own message by content and style. 

9.  There’s a role for something like a Banner in Whitewater as a convenience to others, and may always be, but it’s an obvious move for organizations to create their own pages, of their own composition and design, to advance their views and messages as they would like, without reliance on a third-party publisher.   

The number of talented people in Whitewater is vast; there’s no one in the city who is demonstrably best at online publishing.  Even in a city of about fifteen thousand, one could not count (let alone arrange in order) all the capable people of this kind. 

I would always prefer an environment where FREE WHITEWATER was one of many different sites, of all sorts of views.

10.  As groups craft their own pages (especially on Facebook, which is well-used and offers an easy-to-use publishing method), their views will begin to diverge from a common, unified, party-line message.

Some will start by echoing the same, standard message of others, but they’ll not end there.   (Several pages will begin with a common message, then with similar messages, then with different messages revealing the differences in ideology and outlook between publishers.)

One knows this because while Whitewater’s town fathers would prefer a single message, nature offers diverse messengers.  When dozens of groups have dozens of Facebook pages, those pages will begin to publish the unique viewpoints of (naturally) separate and distinct individuals. 

It’s false, and odd to the point of nuttiness, to think that a free and educated people would rely on a few print publishers, or a few online publishers, as against their own prodigious talents.   

Some pages will spring to life unexpectedly, in surprising times and places, as part of a broader, spontaneous order (thank you, among others, Prof. Hayek).

11.  The idea of ‘one city, one leadership, one message’ is fated to failure.  It’s not fated to failure because of anything that began inside the city, but because of the irresistible trends in media developing all across this continent, when applied to (naturally) different kinds of people. 

Those forces, and that human nature, will not be denied.  Whitewater will develop into a city of shifting pluralities, with no one (individual or group) assured of control over a majority.  That will be to the good. 

Whitewater’s coming to the end of a top-down way of doing things, although there are years to go before that prior and inferior method shrivels to its demise. 

I write this because I am confident that it’s true, but with considerable optimism for the outcome, too:  Whitewater will be a far better city when she at last sheds this absurd and wrong desire of a few to dominate so many more.

Diverse media are better media.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.17.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset 8:35, for 15h 20m 04s of daytime. It’s a near new moon, with only .9% of the moon’s visible disk illuminated.

Today in Whitewater, the Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On June 17, 1885, America receives something extraordinary:

On this day in 1885, the dismantled State of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of America, arrives in New York Harbor after being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in 350 individual pieces packed in more than 200 cases. The copper and iron statue, which was reassembled and dedicated the following year in a ceremony presided over by U.S. President Grover Cleveland, became known around the world as an enduring symbol of freedom and democracy.

Over two-hundred years earlier, on this same day, intrepid explorers see something extraordinary:

“Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.” It’s important to recall that Marquette and Joliet did not discover the Mississippi: Indians had been using it for 10,000 years, Spanish conquistador Hernan De Soto had crossed it in 1541, and fur traders Groseilliers and Radisson may have reached it in the 1650s. But Marquette and Joliet left the first detailed reports and proved that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, which opened the heart of the continent to French traders, missionaries, and soldiers. View a Map of Marquette & Joliet’s route.

Here’s Puzzability‘s midweek game in its Make Room for Dad series:

This Week’s Game — June 15-19
Make Room for Dad
We’re mixing it up with pop this Father’s Day. For each day this week, we started with a word or phrase, added the three letters in DAD, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Overweight; heroically turned the tide from bad to good
Answer:
Heavyset; saved the day
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Heavyset; saved the day” in the example), for your answer.
Wednesday, June 17
Practicing for a boxing match; city where Gerald and Betty Ford are buried

Business, Press

A Prediction of Print’s ‘Fast, Slow, Fast’ Decline

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Earlier this spring, the public editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, wrote a post on how the printed newspaper would continue to be important to the Times.   In reply, Professor Clay Shirky of NYU wrote with what he called a “darker narrative’ of print’s prospects. 

(See, at Sullivan’s blog, A ‘Darker Narrative’ of Print’s Future From Clay Shirky.)

When Shirky wrote to Sullivan, she published some of his remarks.  Longtime readers know that I’m an admirer of Shirky’s work, and his reply is, I think, not merely darker, but more realistic, than Sullivan’s views.

Here’s a portion of Shirky’s perspective on print’s future:

I’d like to offer a considerably darker narrative: I think the pattern of print revenue decay will be fast, slow, fast.

The original, fast decline was 2007-9, where two overlapping events — the Great Recession and the sudden shift to mobile consumption — created a vicious cycle, where your most adventurous readers and least committed advertisers both moved rapidly to digital-only, amid a period of general contraction in ad revenues. These were the years of double-digit decline in revenues.

By 2010, most of the early abandoners had left and the economy recovered, leaving you with only secular decline in readership (down 5-6 percent a year) and only proportional decreases in advertising revenue. This is the slow period of print decay.

The people you quote — Baquet, Caputo — seem to be betting that the current dynamics of slow decline form the predictable future for your paper. I doubt this, and the alternate story I’d like to suggest is that print declines will become fast again by the end of the decade, bringing about the end of print (by which I mean a New York Times that does not produce a print product seven days a week) sooner than Baquet’s 40-year horizon, and possibly sooner than Caputo’s 10-year one. (Public editor note: Mr. Baquet said “no one thinks there will be a lot of print around in 40 years.” Mr. Caputo predicted that a printed Times would be around in 10 years, but did not specify seven-day-a-week production.)

You observed that print is responsible for the majority of ad revenues at the paper, but the disproportionate importance of print is not a signal of the robustness of the medium, it is a signal that advertisers have not found a way to replace print ads with anything as effective in other media.

The problem with print is that the advantageous returns to scale from physical distribution of newspapers become disadvantageous when scale shrinks. The ad revenue from a print run of 500,000 would be 16 percent less than for 600,000 at best, but the costs wouldn’t fall by anything like 16%, eroding print margins. There is some threshold, well above 100,000 copies and probably closer to 250,000, where nightly print runs stop making economic sense. This risk is increased by The New York Times’s cross-subsidy of print, with its print+digital bundle. This bundle creates the risk of rapid future readjustment, when advertisers reconsider print CPM in light of reduced consumption and pass-around of print by all-access subscribers. (Public editor note: C.P.M. is the cost to the advertiser per thousand readers or viewers, a common measurement in advertising.)

Both your Sunday and weekday readerships are already near important psychological thresholds for advertisers — one million and 500,000. When no advertiser can reach a million readers in any print ad in the Times (2017, on present evidence) and weekday advertising reaches less than half a million (2018, using the 6 percent decline figure you quoted), there will be downward pressure on C.P.M.s. This makes no sense, of course, since pricing ads per thousand should make advertisers indifferent to overall circulation, but marketing departments have never been run terribly logically.

So it seems likely to me that after the early, rapid decline, we are now in a period of shallow, secular decay, which will give way to a late-stage period of rapid decline. You can see something like this has happened already in your delivery business, when you read the comments on your piece. Several commenters would like a print copy, but don’t live in an area where it’s cost-effective to deliver the paper. This happened to my mother, in western Virginia; she is now digital-only because after years of gradual decay, the Roanoke, Va., market simply crossed a threshold where it became unprofitable, and all the remaining print subscribers disappeared all at once.

Those dynamics, in miniature, characterize print as a whole — below some threshold, the decay stops being incremental and starts being systemic.

Shirky’s talking about a large paper in this discussion, but his observations have value for smaller ones, too.  Significantly, any slowdown in print’s decline is temporary, and advertisers’ alternatives and print’s own huge costs will erode print circulation significantly.   

For an expression of Shirky’s views on papers, see Last Call: The end of the printed newspaper. 

Tomorrow: On Trends in Whitewater’s Media.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.16.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset 8:35, for 15h 19m 48s of daytime. We’ve a new moon.

Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1832, during the Black Hawk War, troops under Henry Dodge win their first victory:

1832 – Battle of the Pecatonica
On this date the Battle of Pecatonica took place between a band of Kickapoo Indians and troops led by Henry Dodge. Dodge, along with two others were on their way to Fort Hamilton in Wiota, WI when they passed a white settler named Henry Appel. As the men reached the fort, rifle shots rang; the settler had been ambushed and killed by a group of Indians. Dodge and 29 men went in pursuit of the Kickapoo Indians who concealed themselves under the river bank of the Pecatonica. As Dodge and his men approached, the Indians opened fire, injuring four and killing three. Dodge ordered his men to attack. The Indians, unable to reload quickly enough, were fired at point-blank. Nine died immediately and two others were shot as they tried to escape. This battle was the military’s first victory in the Black Hawk War. [Source: The Black Hawk War by Frank E. Stevens and Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark]

Here’s Tuesday’s game in Puzzability‘s Make Room for Dad series:

This Week’s Game — June 15-19
Make Room for Dad
We’re mixing it up with pop this Father’s Day. For each day this week, we started with a word or phrase, added the three letters in DAD, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Overweight; heroically turned the tide from bad to good
Answer:
Heavyset; saved the day
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Heavyset; saved the day” in the example), for your answer.
Tuesday, June 16
Long-running Broadway musical and movie built around songs by a palindromic band; classic palindrome said to Eve

 

 

WGTB, WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN

Trane’s Second Presentation on an Energy-Savings Contract

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WGTB logo PNG 112x89 Post 12 in a series. When Green Turns Brown is an examination of a small town’s digester-energy project, in which Whitewater, Wisconsin would import other cities’ waste, claiming that the result would be both profitable and green.


Trane's Second Presentation on an Energy-Savings Contract from John Adams on Vimeo.

Recap: On 11.5.13, city officials in Whitewater met privately with three construction or engineering vendors (Trane, Black & Veatch, Donohue) and at least one major waste-hauler to discuss importing waste from other cities into Whitewater for a digester energy project. On 12.3.13, Whitewater’s Wastewater Superintendent Reel and City Manager Clapper presented a brief slideshow about the project. On 1.21.14, Trane and Black & Veatch presented to Whitewater’s Common Council on the project. On 2.4.14, the City of Whitewater, at the enthusiastic recommendation of Reel and Clapper, agreed to fund Trane’s ‘study’ on the feasibility of the project, in an amount up to $150,000. On 2.20.14, Trane presented on a separate proposal for an energy-savings contract for Whitewater (proposals to save money by reducing energy consumption at city buildings). On 3.4.14, Trane returned to discuss the energy-savings plan.

Trane’s role in the energy-savings proposal is material and relevant to its work on a digester plan requiring waste importation into Whitewater: it’s the same vendor, including some of the same vendor-representatives, advancing a seven-figure plan to the same city officials, as in the digester plan. (Later, we’ll see that Whitewater will switch to another vendor, Donohue, but in March 2014, Trane was the vendor for more than one city project.) The quality of the Trane’s work, and the quality of municipal diligence in evaluating Trane’s work, is on display here.

(Every question in this series has a unique number, assigned chronologically based on when it was asked.  All the questions from When Green Turns Brown can be found in the Question Bin.  Today’s questions begin with No. 119.)

119. In September 2013, six months before this meeting, the City of Whitewater proposed a letter of intent for an energy-savings agreement. Half a year later, there’s still uncertainty about the scope of the project. Why is that?

120. The Trane proposal discussed at this meeting includes approximately $750,000 in work apart from energy-savings efforts. City Manager Clapper (Clapper) says that the additional work was for a ‘broader scope’ than mere energy conservation. Wouldn’t a ‘broader scope’ be a justification for countless additional public expenditures?

121. In response to a question about that ‘broader scope,’ Clapper responds that “if there’s any concern about any the items [the additional $750,000] to exhaust those concerns or remove them from the list.” Why doesn’t Clapper think that it’s his role, as the publicly-paid city manager of Whitewater, to apply his own judgment to remove unnecessary items?

122. Does Clapper believe that his role as the publicly-paid city manager of Whitewater is merely to present in full what vendors want to sell to Whitewater?

123. Alternatively, does Clapper believe that each and every one of Trane’s proposals has equal merit (that is, is he unable or unwilling to distinguish priorities between a vendor’s various items for sale)?

124. Listening to Rachel’s sales presentation in this clip, with references to ‘holistic’ needs, etc., would anyone have confidence in the specifics of her work? Why can’t (or won’t) she supply a direct answer to Trane’s expertise even when pressed multiple times?

125. How is it possible that the vendor’s representatives know less about the dates for regulatory compliance times than a councilmember who, like all councilmembers, serves only part-time on Whitewater’s Common Council?

126. Did City Manager Clapper review Trane’s presentation prior to delivery at this 3.4.14 meeting? If he did, was he confident of Trane’s work? If he didn’t, then why didn’t he?

127. As a policy matter, why would a full-time manager (City Manager Clapper) ask fewer questions, or no questions, of a project than elected representatives with full-time duties elsewhere?

Council Discussion, 3.4.14 (Trane)
Agenda: http://www.whitewater-wi.gov/images/stories/agendas/common_council/2014/2013_3-4_Full_Packet.pdf
Minutes: http://www.whitewater-wi.gov/images/stories/minutes/common_council/2014/ccmin_2014-03-04.doc
Video: https://vimeo.com/88385707

WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN: Mondays @ 10 AM, here on FREE WHITEWATER.

Film

Seniors in the Park Film Foreign Film Series Begins Wednesday, June 17th @ 12:30 PM

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The Seniors in the Park Best Foreign Film Series will begin Wednesday, June 17th @ 12:30 PM in the Starin Park Community Building.

The films in the series will all be award-winning foreign features.  This Wednesday’s showing will be Ida, director Pawel Pawlikowski‘s 2015 Oscar-winning account of  “Anna, a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland, is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a dark family secret dating back to the years of the Nazi occupation.”  The film is in black & white, with English subtitles.

Embedded below is the trailer for the film.

Upcoming films in the Seniors in the Park series, in the weeks ahead, include Leviathan (Russia) and Mr. Turner (England).

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.15.15

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday will bring thunderstorms and a high of seventy-eight to Whitewater. Sunrise is 5:15 and sunset 8:35, for 15h 19m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1902, what was to become one of the most famous rail lines in the world began service:

The 20th Century Limited was an express passenger train on the New York Central Railroad from 1902 to 1967, advertised as “The Most Famous Train in the World”.[1] In the year of its last run, The New York Times said that it “…was known to railroad buffs for 65 years as the world’s greatest train”.[2] The train traveled between Grand Central Terminal (GCT) in New York City and LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, Illinois along the railroad’s “Water Level Route”.

The NYC inaugurated this train as competition to the Pennsylvania Railroad, aimed at upper class and business travelers. It made few station stops along the way and used track pans to take water at speed. Beginning on June 15, 1938, when it got streamlined equipment, it ran the 958 miles in 16 hours, departing New York City at 6:00 P.M. Eastern Time and arriving at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station the following morning at 9:00 A.M. Central Time, averaging 60 miles per hour (97 km/h)[3] For a few years after World War II the eastward schedule was shortened to 15½ hours.

Its style was described as “spectacularly understated … suggesting exclusivity and sophistication”.[4]:48-49 Passengers walked to the train on a crimson carpet which was rolled out in New York and Chicago and was designed for the 20th Century Limited. “Getting the red carpet treatment” passed into the language from this memorable practice.[5] “Transportation historians”, said the writers of The Art of the Streamliner, “consistently rate the 1938 edition of the Century to be the world’s ultimate passenger conveyance—at least on the ground”.[4]:46

On this day in 1832, Gen. Scott is appointed to command United States forces during the Black Hawk War:

On this date General Winfield Scott was ordered by President Andrew Jackson to take command at the frontier of the Black Hawk War. Scott was to succeed General Henry Atkinson, thought to be unable to end the war quickly. General Scott moved rapidly to recruit troops and obtain equipment for his army. However, while in New York, the troops were exposed to an Asiatic cholera. Just outside of Buffalo, the first cases on the ships were reported and death often followed infection. By the time the ships reached Chicago, the number of soldiers had dropped dramatically from 800 to 150, due to disease and desertion. Rather than going on to the front, Scott remained with his troops in Chicago, giving Atkinson a brief reprieve. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail, by William F. Stark, p. 90-91]

Puzzability begins a new weekly series today.  Here’s Monday’s game:

This Week’s Game — June 15-19
Make Room for Dad
We’re mixing it up with pop this Father’s Day. For each day this week, we started with a word or phrase, added the three letters in DAD, and rearranged all the letters to get a new phrase. Both pieces are described in each day’s clue, with the shorter one first.
Example:
Overweight; heroically turned the tide from bad to good
Answer:
Heavyset; saved the day
What to Submit:
Submit both pieces, with the shorter one first (as “Heavyset; saved the day” in the example), for your answer.
Monday, June 15
Longstanding competition, as between baseball teams; Curb Your Enthusiasm star