Law on Rice

The good news is that I’m done with finals for the semester. The bad news is that the dean of my law school, Dean Testy, is leaving to head up the University of Washington. Good for her, bad for us I think.

We had dinner at Cafe Bengodi (great pasta selection) in Pioneer Square and then walked around for just a few minutes. I took a few pictures with the iPhone. The first is of the Smith Tower:

The second is our much maligned Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The next was from the pathway that leads from the ferry terminal at pier 50 to First Street.

I know they aren’t the greatest pictures, but I wanted to share anyway. I thought the sky had a nice color to it.

Nope, this isn’t a joke, it’s just that I don’t have much I can blog about. Notice I chose my words carefully! I said “can blog about.” I have a lot I’d love to talk about, but just can’t and never would.

Instead I’ll tell you about this great sandwich. It’s from Arbys which is new and old for me. It’s old because, when I lived in Phoenix and I worked for Big Companies, I’d often be forced to get fast food for lunch. In part it was time, in part it was a lack of choice. It’s new because, since I moved to Seattle, I can count how many times I’ve had fast food on one hand.

So there was this nostalgic rush that hit me as I walked in the door. That old familiar scent of floor cleaner and fried food after breathing Big Company stale air is something that I think bonds all people who work in corporate campuses everywhere!

So I’m toasting you with my Arbys sandwich!

My trip to Victoria was a surprising one! I had no idea it was so big. That is to say it is a lot larger than the marketing makes it look. I imagined this teeny little town with one quaint road and a few historic buildings. And tea. Lots of tea.

Instead, I found a fairly large, vibrant city with lots of great looking restaurants, pubs, and shopping.

In fact, as I left, it occurred to me that Victoria might be a better destination than Vancouver in a number of ways. Specifically? Not sitting in stop and go traffic for six hours waiting to get across the border!

Here’s the ferry:

Here’s the requisite picture of the famous hotel:

And here’s some weird looking uniform:

Here’s a guy with crabs:

No, I didn’t make it to the gardens.

Mayor Nickel’s $0.20 plastic bag tax will soon go into effect for Seattle grocery shoppers. To me, the tax has the right intentions, but gets it wrong for three reasons.

First, the 20 cent bag tax is plainly a tax on the poor. Carrying around those clunky totes is no problem for those among us with Volvo station wagons. However, when I was riding the very packed buses to work through Seattle’s International District, Central District, and parts of Mount Baker, I saw a lot of big poor families that were having enough trouble hanging on to their kids, let alone having to remember that they might be going shopping that night. If they forget there’s no food in the refrigerator, they’ll probably forget to bring the tote. This isn’t really a problem when you have no kids and you make $100,000 a year. It is a problem when you make $32,000 and have three kids.

Second, the 20 cent bag tax fails to put the cost of the behavioral change on the cheapest cost avoider. That is, the tax should not be placed on consumers. Attempting to get consumers to change behavior is expensive and inefficient compared to what we could do if we taxed the grocery stores for the use of the bags (or if the state charged a tax on their importation). If we did something like that, then the stores or producers would attempt to innovate something better. The best innovation consumers come up with is a dirty old tote.

Third, the 20 cent tax may actually undermine environmental efforts. I say this based on a conversation I just heard in Starbucks this morning. A woman was saying, “they want to charge us for air in our tires, water to drink, and now plastic bags.” The barista, for whatever reason, explained to her how bad the bags are for the environment. The woman was nonplussed. I think the general majority of people lump grocery stores and government into a larger “they,” and so most people won’t really get it. They’ll just see it as yet another burden from “they,” and that may turn the same people off of environmentalism. I think it’s an annoying and unfortunate mistake.

“McMullen’s large-scale and absurd kinetic machineries cite an era of American industrial boom, when ever-new, problem solving mechanisms became available to the average consumer.”

Grey Gallery
1512 11th Ave
Seattle, Washington 98122

I’m hanging out in Madison Park waiting for the Number 11 to take me to Pike and Pine. Near Bert’s Red Apple is a crosswalk across a very slow moving part of Madison. And at this crosswalk, I observed the following sign. I thought I would share.