Author Archives: legallysociable

Searching for the perfect name for a slate of candidates in local elections

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Keeping in mind regulations, non-partisan traditions, and what might appeal to voters, candidates running for local elections in the Chicago area come up with some clever names for their slate:

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A court ruled in 2017 that candidates in Illinois don’t need to be part of a slate to run under the banner of a political party. So Dubiel decided to create a party of which he would be the only member — LZ Thrive…

When the calendar turns to the spring municipal elections, political passions are no longer contained to Republicans and Democrats. In suburb after suburb, you’ll find parties with monikers like People Before Politics, We’re in This Together, You Are the Village’s Heart, the Common Sense Again Party, the United Party for Progress or, most expansive of all, the Party of the Past, Present and Future…

One way to avoid such complications is to change the party’s name for every election, thereby making it a brand-new entity that can control its slate. That has been a routine practice in Bolingbrook, which for more than three decades was run by former Mayor Roger Claar under a variety of party names…

Those included Citizens for Bolingbrook First, the Bolingbrook First Party, Bolingbrook First and, in its most recent iteration following Claar’s 2020 retirement, the First Party for Bolingbrook.

I imagine there is an art to this. What exactly can capture a particular local spirit? Many of the names quoted above emphasize a bright future or emphasize a collective community spirit. There is a sense of optimism or forward momentum. (There could be the occasional anti-growth or preserve the community slate names in there as well – just not quoted above.)

If many of these are in the suburbs, other names might fit with the broad themes of suburbia: Making the Best Suburb for Your Children! Boosting Your Property Values! Keeping Certain Land Uses (and People) Out! Maintaining Our Lead Over Other Nearby Suburbs! And so on.

What if this was possible at the national level? What could Democrats and Republicans come up with every two and/or four years to really emphasize their particular focus in that election? Since each party does reconfigure their platform each election to fit current priorities, perhaps this would make some sense. It could also help eliminate the confusion over long-term shifts where one party used to support something but now it is the other party that pushes it.

Do Americans actually like to drive or do they say this because much of American life requires driving?

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Do Americans actually like driving? Or, do they just do it a lot?

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Many Americans must drive on a regular basis. They need vehicles in order to get to work, obtain groceries and other goods, take advantage of recreation opportunities, and get to school. Many communities are designed around roads and emphasize moving large numbers of cars through areas at fast speeds. Americans have a system that privileges driving.

Americans might cite numerous aspects of driving and cars that they like. Driving is its own unique challenge requiring skill and attention. The driver is responsible for maneuvering a several ton vehicle. There are rules to be followed and ways to make driving more interesting. The average person does not have many other means to match the feeling of speed that a car can offer. Vehicles themselves can spark interest, ranging from their styling to their upkeep to their different features.

Additionally, driving has cultural meanings attached to it. From the beginning of cars, Americans loved the mobility and freedom they offered. Cars are more individualistic than mass transit. Vehicles represent progress with people behind the wheel. Cars and driving skills say something about their owners.

With an infrastructure that emphasizes driving and features of driving that Americans like, perhaps these two are simply intertwined today. Cars and driving are just part of the American way of life. Perhaps American drivers do not need to even like driving; they just have to tacitly support the structure that keeps driving as the primary mode of transport. Liking driving could then a resignation to the status quo or finding joy in what they are going to do anyway. Or, it could genuine joy at sitting behind the wheel. Changing this love of even or even acceptance of driving would take significant time and/or effort given how Americans feel about driving.

Looking at creepy abandoned McMansions on TikTok

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Empty McMansions that were intended to be part of a resort in Missouri have caught the attention of TikTok users:

As @carriejernigan1 explains in her video, the Indian Ridge Resort was meant to be a $1.6 billion development, complete with a wild amount of luxurious amenities. According to Missouri’s KYTV-TV, developers wanted Indian Ridge Resort to feature a shopping mall, a marina, a golf course, a 390-room hotel, a museum and the world’s second-largest indoor water park.

Many of those projects never got off the ground, as @carriejernigan1’s video shows. TikTok users were naturally creeped out by her clip, which shows decaying McMansions amid a sea of overgrown plants. Some called the ghost town “scary” or “nightmare-inducing.”…

This is not the first time I have run across creepy McMansions in Missouri. I recall the presence of McMansions in Gone Girl. Perhaps McMansions make some sense here: it is a conservative state in the middle of the country where people might be more willing to purchase such homes.

At the same time, the connection to a resort near Branson is an interesting twist. This is not just a normal suburban neighborhood of McMansions occupied by crass suburbanites in the Midwest. These homes were part of a larger luxurious project. From the TikTok video, the homes themselves seem to be larger than a typical suburban McMansion. The McMansions themselves are not meant to on their own impress people visiting or driving by; the whole resort community would help do that.

This also offers intriguing possibilities for how these McMansions might be reused. It may not be worth it for another developer to come in and finish off these homes. Could the materials be repurposed? Could the homes be completed but subdivided to create smaller units? Could this be some sort of weird theme park involving these homes (think Halloween where abandoned McMansions become haunted houses)?

Declining Mexican immigrant population in Chicagoland

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The population stagnation or loss in the Chicago region extends across groups of residents, including the Mexican immigrant population.

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The Mexican immigrant population in the Chicago metropolitan area has decreased by 15% over the last decade, shows a new report published this week.

That’s a 104,000-person loss, roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood disappearing, according to a report by the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC). The tri-state Chicago metro area includes the city, suburban Cook County and eight surrounding counties in northeast Illinois, four in northwest Indiana and one in southeast Wisconsin…

Cooper said most of the narratives about the population loss have focused on middle-class and upper-middle-class white residents leaving Illinois because of high taxes and the state’s pension woes…

The net loss of Mexican immigrants since 2010 is the continuation of a larger trend that has seen immigrant growth slow to a near halt over the past 30 years. In the ‘90s, Illinois had a net gain of 576,786 immigrants, according to the MPC report. From 2000 to 2010, the state witnessed a net gain of 230,801 immigrants. But from 2010 to 2019, the state’s immigrant population slowed to a net growth rate of just 0.4% — a net addition of only 6,622 immigrants. That trend helps explain why Illinois is near the bottom in population growth since 2010. Immigrant population growth had largely buoyed the state’s population growth in previous decades.

See this earlier post about how immigration to Chicago helped hold off population loss and this earlier post about the exit of Black residents from Chicago.

The point of this research makes sense: many locations in the United States talk about what might happen if wealthier residents leave. Would the 1% move elsewhere if taxes were raised? Will white flight continue? This emphasizes the structural conditions and decisions affecting just part of the population even as immigration has been important for many areas of the United States in recent decades. And then the next question to ask is why immigrants are not staying in this location or coming to this location in the first place; where are they going instead? Growth is good in many American communities but highlighting only certain kinds of growth provides an incomplete picture.

Another question based on these numbers: is Chicago welcoming to immigrants in 2021? Chicago has long been a traditional gateway city but it this now not the case for certain groups or immigrants overall?

Materialism and religion in the clothes pastors wear

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An Instagram account highlights the expensive wear of ministers:

On his feed, Kirby has showcased Seattle pastor Judah Smith’s $3,600 Gucci jacket, Dallas pastor T.D. Jakes’s $1,250 Louboutin fanny pack and Miami pastor Guillermo Maldonado’s $2,541 Ricci crocodile belt. And he considers Paula White, former president Donald Trump’s most trusted pastoral adviser who is often photographed in designer items, a PreachersNSneakers “content goldmine,” posting a photo of her wearing $785 Stella McCartney sneakers.

As the Instagram account grew, Kirby started asking more serious questions about wealth, class and consumerism, including whether it’s appropriate to generate massive revenue from selling the gospel of Jesus.

“I began asking, how much is too much?” Kirby said. “Is it okay to get rich off of preaching about Jesus? Is it okay to be making twice as much as the median income of your congregation?”

This is a long-standing issue within Christianity, let alone in American Christianity where money and status have existed alongside religious fervor and practices for a long time. In a society that emphasizes consumption, even conspicuous consumption, plus celebrity, is it a surprise that ministers would want to wear expensive items?

Counterfactuals to these observations might help. Two come to mind:

  1. Are there mainstream religious groups or leaders who actively shun or downplay status? I can think of famous pastors who are not as well dressed. But, are they necessarily poorly dressed? How much does presentation of self matter compared to other noteworthy factors like particular religious doctrines or practices? I assume there is some limit where a pastoral presentation has to fit some parameter or the lack of style or flashiness will be a negative. Is the nature of American religion with its religious economy of competition inextricably tied to status and presentation?
  2. Some evangelicals have raised questions about materialism and consumption for decades. Historian David Swartz’s book Moral Minority highlights how evangelicals in the early 1970s questioned the consumption patterns of Americans. If you want to go back further, Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that a particular ascetic approach to spending wealth on oneself helped spur on capitalism. How far did this critique go? By the 1980s, evangelicals largely became associated with conservative economic policies and reside in suburbs where appearances and keeping up with the Joneses matter to some degree. At the same time, evangelicals often claim they do not want to be too flashy or that they are middle-class even if they have the resources to be above that.

Love and mass transit in 2021

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Combine online dating and a love for mass transit and what do you get?

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As a single person wandering through the world, it can be difficult to find someone who loves all the right things: parks, subways, bike lanes, human-scale buildings, high-density housing, debates over the ideal length of a city block. Even on a dating app, you can’t always tell from a profile who might be thinking, behind their smile, I hate cars.

But if this is exactly the sort of partner—or friend or fling—you’re looking for, there is a solution: Join the wildly popular Facebook meme group and leftist community NUMTOTs (“New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens,” which isn’t really just for teens) and request access to its private spin-off group, NUMTinder. With about 8,000 members living mostly in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, NUMTinder is a makeshift dating environment for those who consider liking public transportation to be a core part of their personality, or those for whom a lack of interest in urban planning is a deal breaker. Almost everyone in the group posts at least one selfie with a bike or a subway entrance, to demonstrate their commitment to the lifestyle, and when a new member introduces herself, it’s not uncommon for her to brag about the fact that she doesn’t have a driver’s license. (A second spin-off group, called NUMThots, is for sharing the spiciest seminudes that Facebook’s content moderation will allow. But transit-themed!)

The primary advantage to online dating is that it expands a person’s options beyond geography and their immediate social network to a much broader pool of people who can be filtered by particular traits. In this case, limit the pool to people who care about mass transit and those with that interest can search for partners.

While this may seem strange to the general public, is it really any different than numerous other likes people care about? Just as a comparison, plenty of people like cars or specific cars. At races, car events, clubs, and more, people with these interests could come together. Or, take people who regularly watch trains. Through different communities, these people could meet up and interact. The primary difference is that more Americans might like cars than mass transit.

A final thought: I imagine this group might be more useful in and around cities with a lot of mass transit. Of course, it could also be helpful in other places where few people even think about mass transit because it is not as present.

Private city for business opens in Honduras

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A Honduras city primed for business will soon open for remote operators:

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Próspera is the first project to gain approval from Honduras to start a privately governed charter city, under a national program started in 2013. It has its own constitution of sorts and a 3,500-page legal code with frameworks for political representation and the resolution of legal disputes, as well as minimum wage (higher than Honduras’s) and income taxes (lower in most cases). After nearly half a decade of development, the settlement will announce next week that it will begin considering applications from potential residents this summer.

The first colonists will be e-residents. Próspera doesn’t yet have housing ready to be occupied. But even after the site is built out, most constituents will never set foot on local soil, says Erick Brimen, its main proprietor. Instead, Brimen expects about two-thirds of Prósperans to sign up for residency in order to incorporate businesses there or take jobs with local employers while living elsewhere…

The idea behind charter cities, along with their predecessor seasteading, which sought to create independent nations floating in the ocean, is to compete for citizens through innovative, business-friendly governing systems. For some reason, the idea has long been linked to Honduras, an impoverished country whose governing system is classified as “partly free” by the human rights organization Freedom House. Paul Romer, an American economist who pioneered the idea of charter cities, tried to start one in the country a decade ago. It failed, but Honduras has spent much of the time since then writing a law to enable such cities, which are known in the country as Zedes, short for zonas de empleo y dessarollo económicos (employment and economic development zones).

But the prospect of creating pockets of prosperity that play by their own rules is controversial for obvious reasons. Próspera has drawn protests from local residents who see a lack of transparency and little to gain from its existence, and a group of local political leaders signed a letter of opposition in October. This month, an arm of the Technical University of Munich said it’s reevaluating its relationship with Próspera and that it generally withdraws from projects if there are indications of human rights violations. Representatives for TUM didn’t respond to requests to elaborate. A spokeswoman for Próspera says it has had a “great working relationship with TUM over the years.” 

Although this city has been in the works for years, it seems appropriate that is will open for remote businesses in the COVID-19 era. Even without a physical presence in the city, corporations will be able to incorporate there and enjoy the benefits.

Down the road, it is interesting to imagine what a thriving or beleagured charter city could be like. For some reason, I am thinking of some of the more colorful communities from Star Wars where all sorts of characters come together to conduct their activities. How many people would come to live and work versus how many will access the city’s benefits from afar? What kinds of alterations to the regulations might be necessary? How many free market cities might this inspire elsewhere?

Facebook continues to claim it is about “meaningful social interactions”

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Members of Congress questioned leaders of social media companies this week. In contrast to what legislators suggested, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has one particular goal:

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Focusing on the attention-driven business model seems to have been a coordinated strategy among the committee’s Democrats, but they were not alone. Bill Johnson, a Republican from Ohio, compared the addictiveness of social platforms to cigarettes. “You profit from hooking users on your platforms by capitalizing off their time,” he said, addressing Dorsey and Zuckerberg. “So yes or no: Do you agree that you make money off of creating an addiction to your platforms?”

Both executives said no. As they did over and over again, along with Pichai, when asked straightforwardly whether their platforms’ algorithms are optimized to show users material that will keep them engaged. Rather than defend their companies’ business model, they denied it.

Zuckerberg, in particular, suggested that maximizing the amount of time users spend on the platform is the furthest thing from his engineers’ minds. “It’s a common misconception that our teams even have goals of trying to increase the amount of time that people spend,” he said. The company’s true goal, he insisted, is to foster “meaningful social interactions.” Misinformation and inflammatory content actually thwarts that goal. If users are spending time on the platform, it simply proves that the experience is so meaningful to them. “Engagement,” he said, “is only a sign that if we deliver that value, then it will be natural that people use our services more.”

Zuckerberg has said this for years; see this earlier post. Facebook and other social media platforms have the opportunity to bring people together, whether that is through building upon existing relationships or interacting with new people based on common interests and causes.

Has Facebook delivered on this promise? Do social media users find “meaningful social interactions”? The research I have done with Peter Mundey suggests emerging adult users are aware of the downsides of social media interactions but many still participate because there is meaning or enough meaning.

I suppose it might come down to defining and measuring “meaningful social interaction.” Social interaction can take many forms, ranging from carrying on social media mediated relationships through simply viewing images and text over time to less personal interaction in commenting on or registering a reaction to something like hundreds of others to direct interaction to people through various means. Is a negative response meaningful? Does a positive direct interaction count more? Can the interaction be more episodic or is it sustained over a certain period of time?

One possible path: ask for the evidence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat users (among others) having meaningful interactions alongside evidence of how these platforms count and measure capturing attention. Another: ask whether these companies think they have succeeded in creating “meaningful social interactions” and what they would cite as markers of this.

When infrastructure needs exceed capacity, Suez Canal edition

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Images from this week of the Ever Given wedged in the Suez Canal are fascinating. Such a situation raises a lot of quick questions – such as “how did this happen?!?” – but there are bigger issues at work. For example, how and when does infrastructure adjust when the needs increase?

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Here is how one piece frames it:

The incident could raise new questions about the container shipping industry, which moves 90 percent of the world’s goods, and its increasingly gigantic ships. Demand for shipping goods by sea has surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, with spot prices for empty containers moving from China to northern Europe rising by more than 400 percent. In response, shipping lines have loaded gigantic vessels like the Ever Given with record numbers of containers. Ships have run into some trouble. The industry has lost more cargo into the sea in late 2020 and early 2021 than in prior years. “We’re going to get to a point where the ships are so large, it becomes a burden,” says Byers.

Goods traveling via containers – whether on ships, trucks, trains, or other means – are essential to modern economies. As markets grow and expand, there will be more shipping containers moving around the globe. That means infrastructure needs to expand. More trucks and roads. More trains. More intermodal facilities. Canals that need to be wider.

This happens primarily behind the scenes. Consumers see goods on shelves or they are delivered from vast warehouses and all is good. It is only when something goes wrong in these systems, such as a 1,300 foot ship getting stuck in a major international shipping route, that we note the tensions and the limits. Changes will be made on the Suez Canal to limit the possibility of this happening again and the shipping containers will continue to flow. Until the problem arises again or larger changes need to be made…

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the ultimate expression of American individualism?

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A while back, I encountered Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way” two different ways. In one instance, a radio host closed out an eight year run by playing the song and reflecting on the years of conversation. In the second instance, another person thought about their life thus far and used some of the words from the song to wonder what life might hold by the end.

Here is my sociological question: does this song represent American individualism in the twentieth century?

Americans are known for their individualism. For example, the sociological study Habits of the Heart examined how individualism plays out in the realm of religion and spirituality. President Donald Trump played “My Way” for the first dance at the Inauguration Ball and the song played when he left Joint Andrews Base in January 2021.

Take these two paragraphs from the song:

Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way

This is a man reflecting on a full life. He planned it, he executed it, and did it “my way.” Later in the song:

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill my share of losing
And now, as tears subside
I find it all so amusing

To think I did all that
And may I say – not in a shy way
Oh no, oh no, not me
I did it my way

Similarly, thinking about the emotional aspects of life, the singer notes that he was not shy and “I did it my way.”

It would be hard for any single cultural work to stand in for an entire people or country. Yet, at the same time, there are certain works that become popular, stand the test of time, and embody particular values and practices. Is “My Way” one of these songs or does it fit a particular subset of Americans better than others?

Update 12/20/22: The song was part of the funeral service for football coach Mike Leach:

As the service was about to begin, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played over the sound system. It was quickly apparent with every speaker who came on stage that Leach, who was born in California and raised in Wyoming, had carved his own path — from college rugby player to Power 5 head coach.

Many in attendance wore cowbell-shaped pins on their suit jackets. Inside the cowbell was a skull and crossbones, a nod to Leach’s nickname, Pirate.