Mark-in-Seattle

Bio:
Great Grandfather did West Seattle survey work in the 1890's(?). My Grandmother was one of the early organizers of the Boeing Machinists Union. She was an experienced public speaker and as a woman it was thought her life and property would be less in peril. This quaint notion was upended when her car was overturned in the Boeing parking lot as a result of her union activity and my mother (8 years old at the time?) was almost run over by a car with two men that drove up onto the sidewalk veering away at the last moment. They had been following her and two friends home from school. "We are all leaders" - the Wobblys said moments before the sheriff of Everett and his posy opened fire on the unarmed union organizers. I am a proud native northwestern-er with a low REI coop number and do my very modest political organizing work (Dukakis, Monorail, Backbone Campaign, Washington Public Campaigns, various candidate campaigns) in (so far) more sedate times. To date my most frequent opponent has been - voter apathy. Read "The Logic of Collective Action - by Mancur Olson" if you are brave enough to hear a very good data driven case establishing why Democracy may be a "scale problem" - beyond 1000 participants in any given public structure; government, unions, trade associations - Democracy just does not function well at all, for a host of reasons. Norman Rockwell, New England townhall style democracy does indeed work, but in urban America, Thomas Jefferson's noble farmers experiment does not scale well. I believe this has become known in academic political science circles as the "rational voter problem". I have not found a solution to this dilemma. If you have, I would love to learn about it. In 1976, built my own little computer from a kit of parts (and a power supply I soldered together); a non-S100 bus Digital Group system with 4k of 2102 RAM memory. Started programming for various companies, however unlike my wife (employee #89) I didn't want to work for MSFT because I hated working with their buggy assemblers and various early programming tools....doh!

Website: http://www.batesearly.net/

Active since March 2008

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Mark-in-Seattle's comments

Is a 'green' idea discredited by a Seattle drainage project gone awry?

Posted Tue, Apr 26, 6:12 a.m.

My wife and I have been involved with this issue in Sunset Hill/Ballard for several months; www.ourseattle.org/rore . To quantify the as-built CSO retention capacity of this important Ballard pilot CSO project I personally measured each of the 93 bio-retention cells in the neighborhood and calculated they provided 35,000 gallons ...

The new Seattle Center: light on the vision thing

Posted Fri, Mar 14, 3:12 p.m.

What is the motivation for removing the Mercer Street Parking Garage?: With the US economy arguably already in recession, Boeing outsourcing jobs at every opportunity, King County and State government budget forecasters warning their elected bosses of looming deficits in the next budget cycle; is this really the best time ...