Staying where I am

Gig economy

There is a new blog post entitled, “Ridesharing traffic woes illustrate a defect of (not just) high tech thinking.”

Eliot Brown, “The Ride-Hail Utopia That Got Stuck in Traffic,” Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ride-hail-utopia-that-got-stuck-in-traffic-11581742802


Housekeeping

As my regular readers know, I’ve been anguished by evidence of racism, white supremacism, and even possible militia activity in the Pittsburgh area.[1] I’ve been photographing the gratuitous displays of guns, tanks, and other munitions that really seem like ludicrous overkill, that often seem really to form a white supremacist message for Blacks.[2] I have witnessed and been profoundly distressed by police behavior I’ve witnessed.[3]

None of this is okay with me and some of you know I’ve been considering moving, possibly to a less gun-nutty state, possibly to within Pittsburgh city limits.

In the meantime, I’ve been managing to make my apartment nicer and nicer. And the prospect of another move is, well, less than enticing. As I’ve been looking around, it seems increasingly clear that I need a real job, for which I still have no prospect, to significantly improve my situation and increasingly likely that I would otherwise be, at best, exchanging one set of problems for another.

Today, my car registration renewal notice came in the mail. It had an option to renew for one or two years. It wasn’t that expensive to do so, so I renewed it for two years. I’m staying where I am, or at least in Pennsylvania, at least for the foreseeable future.


  1. [1]David Benfell, “Militia territory,” Not Housebroken, November 22, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/11/22/militia-territory/; David Benfell, “The place where I live,” Not Housebroken, December 26, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/12/26/the-place-where-i-live/; David Benfell, “How am I to respond?” Not Housebroken, December 31, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/12/30/how-am-i-to-respond/
  2. [2]David Benfell, “The banners and the guns: Flagrant racism in Pittsburgh,” Not Housebroken, October 12, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/09/20/the-banners-and-the-guns-flagrant-racism-in-pittsburgh/
  3. [3]David Benfell, “Hey cops! Do you know what year it is?” Not Housebroken, August 27, 2019, https://disunitedstates.org/2019/08/27/hey-cops-do-you-know-what-year-it-is/