Some local happenings are going on, including a couple that will impact me for sure.
One that’s already impacting me literally is the Pioneer Square District project to improve pedestrian access to the waterfront from Pioneer Square. It has started right outside Real Change; the pounding impacts of construction make you feel like you have a migraine.
They say the end result will be wider sidewalks, which means the existing sidewalks will have to be torn up with the help of more jackhammers right outside our office. So far, all they’ve done is rebuild South Main Street between 1st and Alaskan Way.
Now, I’m all for improved pedestrian access to the waterfront from Pioneer Square, because I am a staunch pedestrian and I like to go to the waterfront a lot. My favorite places to go there are the ferry terminal, the water taxi, Ivar’s Fish Bar, the Great State Burger and the Frankfurter. I like Bainbridge Island, I like Alki Beach and I like food.
But I also like to relieve myself, and sometimes I don’t want to wait until I’ve established myself as a customer, so I expect to be impacted by the new toilet facility planned for the waterfront.
I like the idea of it: an old-fashioned, six-stall facility with human maintenance. Remember the space-age, self-cleaning toilets the city bought about 20 years ago? Remember how stupid that was? Because the self-cleaning toilets had to be maintained by space age-engineers, who cost vastly more than janitors? The city isn’t repeating that mistake.
I just wish there were going to be more such buildings. At least one more. It’s going to be a long walk to Myrtle Edwards Park.
My main complaint about the space-age toilets was the same one I have have about self-checkout machines and automated ordering kiosks. In the name of “progress,” they take jobs away from people. Why can’t cashiers be paid to take my order or check me out? And why do we need robots filling french fry orders?
Watching a robot fill french fry containers at an automated burger shop has a certain novel charm, but when you think how people are laid off just for you to see robots doing in a burger shop what they do at a GM plant on the assembly line — just to think, “look how advanced we’ve got” — it's just a sign of mislaid priorities.
Now we find out that the Boeing 737 door was missing four bolts? What did they do — shut the robot off early that shift at the jumbo jet factory? If something like that happened in the automated burger shop, four customers would just get empty bags of fries. They’d live. Their shirts wouldn’t be sucked off and land on someone’s roof. Ergo, french-fry-container-filling robots aren’t necessary. Pay people to fill the french fry containers.
Another happening going on won’t impact me personally, but it’s sort of good news. Bellevue is providing for homeless vehicle parking in a lot with space for 20 vehicles. I say sort of, because my own experience of living out of a vehicle almost 40 years ago was that the biggest problem was keeping the vehicle warm. I couldn’t just keep the engine on to run the heater.
For one thing, my ’69 Green Rambler didn’t have a working heater. But even if it did, I couldn’t have paid for that much gas, so I had to park the thing in the UW underground parking garage to avail myself of the heat coming from Kane Hall.
Questions for the advanced reader
What is the logic of the sentence above that begins “ergo”? What do french-fry-container-filling robots have to do with airplane assembly robots? He’s a mathematician. Doesn’t he know what “ergo” means?
Why is the author so concerned about people being paid for work? Doesn’t he know or care that the future belongs to robots and AI? Write your answer with a Chatbot, making it five words or less. Include an original deep fake picture of Taylor Swift.
You can’t eat either Alki Beach or Bainbridge Island. They are not food. Discuss this contradiction using either Hegelian dialectics and a dictionary or, for mucho extra credit, using Jainist Anekantavada dialectics. But in either case, stick to English, thank you. Remember: eyes on your own paper.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Feb. 14–20, 2024 issue.