2015-09-25T12:31:58+00:00

Python SIGPIPE

September 25, 2015/stevereads/1 Comment

I ran into the same Python problem as this fellow. Namely: he’s written a script that dumps lines to stdout, and then runs

my_script.py | head

and gets this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/slaniel/bin/my_script.py", line 25, in 
    main()
  File "/home/slaniel/bin/my_script.py", line 22, in main
    print "".join(["%s %s\n" % (value, key) for key, value in sorted_list])
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

I.e., Python still has data in the pipe, ready to go to stdout, but it can’t send it because head(1) exited. So my_script.py gets SIGPIPE, and Python traps that as an IOError exception. The solution is straightforward:

from signal import signal, SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL
signal(SIGPIPE,SIG_DFL)

This DFL thing is new to me:

signal.SIG_DFL
This is one of two standard signal handling options; it will simply perform the default function for the signal. For example, on most systems the default action for SIGQUIT is to dump core and exit, while the default action for SIGCHLD is to simply ignore it.

If I’m reading that right, Python replaces the default SIGPIPE behavior with a thrown exception. To make the signal yield the system default, you need to tell Python explicitly to do that.

Two questions:

Why would Python do this? Is the general logic that it’s trying to “internalize” systemwide behaviors? Maybe it wants a script to be “write once, run anywhere”, so it can’t just accept the systemwide behavior. Instead, it has to turn external system events (like SIGPIPE) into internal program behaviors (like exceptions). Is that the idea?
I don’t want to have to tell every one of my scripts to exit silently when it receives SIGPIPE. So I would prefer not to write
from signal import signal, SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL signal(SIGPIPE,SIG_DFL)
in every script that I ever produce. Do people have a general approach here? E.g., every script does an import Steve_lib (or your own equivalent) that sets up the expected signal-handling defaults?

Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking

September 24, 2015September 24, 2015/stevereads/1 Comment

A Monopoly board -- particularly the few squares around Free Parking, of course

The High Cost of Free Parking has changed a lot of minds in its few years on this earth. For a book about a seemingly dry subject, THCOFP‘s effect has been shockingly strong. The premise of the book can be laid out in a few bullets:

Cities’ parking minimums on real estate are dangerous. This much is obvious, in that producing too much parking is exactly the point: if developers would produce that much parking on their own, then minimums wouldn’t be necessary.
The usual argument for buildings to come with their own parking is that if they didn’t, the buildings’ users would spill over and use public parking. But the only reason to assume they’d use city parking is if public parking is free, as it is most everywhere. But what if cities charged the market rate for public parking? Then, presumably, people would be indifferent between off-street parking and public parking.
The impact of free parking is devastating at many levels. It scars cities. It orients cities toward drivers rather than toward bicyclists, pedestrians, or those who cannot afford cars. And free parking (emphasis on the free part) isn’t good for the drivers, either: they spend minutes, on average, cruising around looking for parking, with expected effects on the environment and the drivers’ own state of mind. And the environmental effects go further: a world oriented toward drivers and parking is a world where buildings are more spread out, which is thus harder for pedestrians, which encourages more people to own cars purely out of convenience, which thus creates a larger lobby for car-centric cities, which makes the cycle start all over again.
People expect to be able to park free everywhere, so the story is even worse than all of the bullets above would have it. Not only must there be one free parking space in the world for my car — there must be two or three. City planners seem to require enough free parking at every new restaurant, barber shop, ice-cream shop and café to accommodate peak demand; as Shoup quotes somewhere in The High Cost of Free Parking, “Do not build the church for Easter Sunday.” A typical standard for restaurants (in California, anyway, from which Shoup draws most of his examples) is four spaces per thousand square feet of dining area. At 200-300 square feet per parking space, parking area can easily swamp dining area.
So parking should be market-priced. How much should we charge? Answer: charge enough so that there are always one or two free spaces available on every block; Shoup’s threshold is 85% full. This will stop people from needing to cruise, so the drivers themselves should be happy.
But people are used to having free parking everywhere. How, to put it bluntly, do we buy them off, so that they’re willing to forego free parking? Answer: give them something for it. When a neighborhood charges for parking, some fraction of the parking proceeds should be returned to a Business Improvement District in that neighborhood — money that can be used to repair (or expand!) sidewalks, plant trees, and generally make the neighborhood look nice. People will see the benefits of paid parking returned to them. The people who will object to paid parking will be those who, for instance, drive into the neighborhood during the day to go to work and drive home to the suburbs at night — but those people don’t vote in that neighborhood, so their voice won’t have an effect.

Donald Shoup is in many ways like Jane Jacobs. One of the great joys of Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is that she turns what might be a huge topic — subject to pure moralizing arguments like “What do we want out of cities” — into a number of small, practical, answerable questions. She looks out her window and asks what value sidewalks have. You want sidewalks to be wide enough so that kids can play on them; wide enough that a restaurant can drop a couple tables on them; etc. How about buildings? How tall do you want them to be? Well, we want our neighbors to be engaged with what’s happening on the street; skyscraper apartments can’t do this. And so forth. After she’s wrapped her (and our) brain around low-level details, only then does she scale out and talk about cities generally. And by that point she has a much more concrete object in her head, which it’s much easier to reason about with a minimum of ideological pollution. So it is with Shoup: he hardly spends any time talking about grand issues like global warming; instead he keeps focused on an individual car searching for an individual parking space, asks us why the car is spending so much time cruising, and lands the blame on the fact that parking is free.

Of course this should be obvious. We see videos of Soviet-era breadlines, and we pin the blame on a price system that wasn’t allowed to work; we never turn the lens back on ourselves and ask what harm we’re doing by assuming that a scarce resource should be free. Others have probably pointed this out in the past; this sort of thing probably occurred to Lewis Mumford, but Mumford was a genius who was a few decades ahead of his time. It took Donald Shoup to really bring this issue into the public mind in a real way. Now I hope people will actually put his ideas into action.

A few thoughts on ad blockers

September 19, 2015September 19, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

Marco Arment, of Instapaper and Tumblr and coffee-geekery (his app company is called Full City) and much general lovableness fame, introduced a web-tracker-blocking app for iOS 9 the other day. It was called Peace. A day later he wrote a blog post agonizing over some of the trackers he was blocking. Today he straight-up removed the app from the store.

I can’t speak to his motivations, but it seems like he’s agonizing over the decision to treat all web trackers as identical and block all of them. I surmise that he got some push-back from various content networks that believe they’re the good guys. And I don’t doubt that not all trackers are created equal. But this withdrawal says something a lot more worrying to me: that people are having a hard time choosing the end-user over the advertiser.

I’ve never understood the ad-supported web. I don’t understand how anyone makes any money off of web ads, when virtually no one I know clicks on ads. Yet I’m told that one of the first things they teach you, upon your being hired at Google, is that you are not the user: there are lots of people who just spend all day clicking on ads. Somehow an entire economy is based on this.

Fundamentally that economy is for the advertisers; it’s not for you and me. As the aphorism goes, “If you get something for free, you are not the customer; you’re the product.” All those ads being served up to you are you being sold to someone else. And of course no one wants to see ads on their screens; this is obvious. Ads are a thing that we’re told we need to suffer through in order to enjoy the free web. (If I never click on an ad, am I stealing? What if I click on an ad but never buy the advertised product?)

No wonder, then, that people install ad blockers and tracking-blockers like Peace. Yet Marco seems to worry that he’s taking money out of the hands of innocents. I don’t see the moral concern here: he has a choice between doing the end-users’ bidding and doing the advertisers’ bidding. I thought he knew that he was choosing to do the end-users’ bidding.

What worries me more is that there will always be a temptation to take money with both hands. Search Google News for an article titled “Google, Microsoft and Amazon pay to get around ad blocking tool”, or check out my cached copy. Sure, you can earn money from users paying you, but you can earn even more money if you have the users pay you and you take some money from the advertisers. Sort of like the New York Times: I happily pay them $15 a month, almost as a charitable contribution, because I view them as a social good, yet they still serve me ads. I want the Times‘s loyalty to be entirely directed at me, just as I want Marco and the AdBlock people to be indivisibly on my side. Is that too much to ask?

Depending upon how you look at it, it’s either fortunate or disheartening that we have, broadly, two wildly opposed business models: the Apple model, which is “pay us money and we’ll make something you love”; and the Google model, which is, “pay us nothing and we’ll give you a beautiful product while spamming you and making our money from garbage peddlers.” (Merlin Mann put it better in less than 140 characters.) I understand how the Google model spreads to pay for the web, of course: a new startup wants to build its user base quickly, so it offers its product for free. Ideally, to my mind, a company that has established itself and gained that user base would then stop the ads and ask its users to pay. It hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen, and I can see why it wouldn’t happen, but still: a man can dream.

(How much would you be willing to pay for the full suite of Google services? How much is it worth to you, every month, to get Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Docs? That’s never a choice you’ll ever have to make, of course: if Google ever put its search engine behind a paywall, you’d make do and switch to Bing; you’d use the inferior-but-I’m-told-improving Apple Maps; you’d use Yahoo Mail, which I guess is a thing that still exists; you’d use whatever the Microsoft cloud office suite is called. But if I measured the actual value that instant search, instant travel-planning, high-quality email, and cloud documents add to my life, it couldn’t possibly be less than $200 a month.)

Sites are now blocking you from using them until you disable your content blockers. I noticed this the other day when I tried to watch the first episode of the new Stephen Colbert late show; I had to disable either AdBlock Plus or Ghostery for that specific site to make it work. This is all turning very silly.

Since I know how corrupting the ad-supported business model is, I try my damnedest to pay for things that are important to me. John Oliver’s show is worth at least $15 a month to me, so I happily pay for HBO Now. I pay for the New York Times, and I’d gladly pay for the Boston Globe if the site didn’t do everything in its power to prevent me from giving them money. I listen to a ton of podcasts, and my life would be appreciably worse without This American Life or Radiolab, so I donate $20 a month to the former and $15 a month to WNYC. It’s possible I’m overpaying. But it’s also likely that a lot of people don’t/can’t pay for these things, so I like to think that I’m paying for a few people who can’t afford it.

I wish there weren’t this natural tension between what readers want and how writers make money; I wish that charging people money for consuming goods and services weren’t considered a bold business idea. But for now there is such a tension, and people largely don’t pay. I’m going to continue using ad-blocking software, and I’m going to hope that more software developers realize where their allegiances should lie.

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

September 16, 2015September 17, 2015/stevereads/1 Comment

Just the text, with a photo of the author in his Thinky Pose at the top right

There ought to be a term for the sort of book that starts from a simple concept and completely shakes the cobwebs loose from your brain. The most recent two books by Francis Fukuyama are in that category for me — and shame on me for reviewing neither of them yet. [1]

Galbraith’s idea is simple, yet profound: economics arose in an era when humanity had just barely emerged from the problem of scarcity, and it bears the expected scars. From the beginning of time until about 1800, humanity’s main problem was ensuring sufficient supply — getting enough food in enough mouths. Now we’ve arrived at an era when exactly the reverse is the problem: we have insufficient demand. The whole problem of depressions is a problem of insufficient aggregate demand.

Depressions are one particularly bad manifestation of the problem of insufficient demand. There are more trivial ones: it was either in Chandler’s The Visible Hand or Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis that the author mentions the birth of breakfast cereals purely as a way to clear out inventories of unsold grain. Much of economic history since the mid-19th century has been the history of getting us to buy things that we don’t need.

Galbraith argues that economics still hasn’t caught up with this new world. Economics is obsessed with production, and with producing things more efficiently. Why the obsession with efficiency? Because when the main problem in life is scarcity, we’re very concerned that we produce everything with the minimum of wasted resources. What if, instead, we realize that much of what we produce is unnecessary? This is not in any way controversial; an economy has reached the apex of its sophistication when it develops an entire industry devoted to, literally, shoving more food down our throats than we need. (See Marion Nestle: food availability, measured as food produced within the United States, minus food exported, plus food imported, minus food waste, grew from 3200 calories per person in 1980 to 3900 in 2011. And we weren’t starving in 1980.)

Contrast this situation with the decline in public services:

The competition is especially unequal for new products and services. Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the nation’s most talented citizens to see if the desire for more merchantable product can be cultivated. No similar process operates on behalf of the nonmerchantable services of the state. Indeed, while we take the cultivation of new private wants for granted, we would be measurably shocked to see it applied to public services. The scientist or engineer or advertising man who devotes himself to developing a new carburetor, cleanser or depilatory for which the public recognize no need and will feel none until an advertising campaign arouses it, is one of the valued members of our society. A politician or a public servant who sees need for a new public service may be called a wastrel. Few public offenses are more reprehensible.

Then there are those products that derive some or all of their value, not from their intrinsic merit, but from the fact that others also own them. My fancy car derives some of its value from the fact that it’s larger than all my neighbors’ cars. A university education has some intrinsic value, but it seems clear that a college degree would lose much of its value if everyone had one. Or rather, at that point the fight would move to a higher level: now having an MIT degree, or a graduate degree, would set you apart from the pack. The supply of the product, in other words, creates its own demand. To use the term of art: many of the goods that we produce are “positional.”

Between positional goods, and products that we don’t need, much of what we produce is simply unnecessary. Deciding what to do with this observation is the central question in The Affluent Society.

Obviously we can argue over these central contentions. Not least, there’s the empirical question of how much of our economy is worthless. Is my iPhone worthless? Is the Internet worthless? We don’t have to believe that all of the supply side is worthless to agree that much of economics takes as its starting point the scarcity of supply in the face of unlimited demands. That’s simply not the problem that the industrial world faces anymore.

Galbraith notes also that economics is based on a blinkered view of human agency, according to which my own free will leads me to choose a larger car and 700 more calories rather than better subways and public schools. It seems obvious that that’s wrong: my “free will” here is dictated in no small part by advertising. Again, we don’t need to believe that advertising completely controls us to believe that economics as a profession has the wrong idea about how to judge what people want. It’s not as simple as a naïve “revealed preference” story would have it: if I choose to buy a larger car, and I also choose to vote for lower property taxes, and if in consequence the public schools in my town suffer, it’s not possible to read directly off this that I prefer cars to schools.

All Galbraith is after is a little balance between public and private goods. Even without any change in balance, the need for public goods is likely to increase in lockstep with demand for private goods: all those extra cars need parking spaces; all that extra wealth needs police officers to secure it; all that extra food needs reliable roads to carry it to market. Yet we as a society have not chosen to increase our spending on public goods, so we end up in what Galbraith famously called “an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor.” Indeed, we end up with public squalor because of our private affluence. The situation today remains sadly unchanged from when Galbraith first described it more than half a century ago.

We can follow where Galbraith is going here and ask simply: what is the point of all this economic production? Why bother producing more? Is it so that we can produce and consume more and larger televisions? Eat more breakfast cereal every morning? To John Maynard Keynes, one answer was that economic growth would free us to be more fully human: we’d have time to learn, and think, and create, and play outside in beautiful parks, and swim in clean water, and live long lives, and develop meaningful friendships. After taxes, Americans are six times as wealthy as we were when John F. Kennedy was president, yet can we say that economic growth has made us better people? We’ve chosen to convert those gains in economic production into a greater supply of possessions rather than a better society or more leisure. Galbraith would say that the root of this failure is deeply rooted in the way we’ve thought about economics since the time of Adam Smith.

It takes a mind like Galbraith’s to chase down this problem. Another mind, in some ways similar, whom I’ve likewise been derelict in reviewing, is Lewis Mumford; his The City In History reoriented the whole way that I think about why cities matter. If asked what the point of cities is, most of us would probably define them as centers of commerce and industry: San Francisco is the city of software; Boston is the city of universities; New York is the city of theatre and finance. We might go a step further and say that that concentration of people is the wellspring of greatness: put people near one another and watch as they create beautiful things together. Mumford goes well beyond that: the city, he says, is where humanity can fully flower; the city exists for the enlargement of mankind itself. He imparts an inspiring moral greatness to cities. I maybe take some of the piss from this if I tell you that Mumford thinks it’s all been downhill since Ancient Greece.

Like Mumford, Galbraith sees modern economies as distracted from the goal of ennobling man. Again because of the focus on increasing GDP and using resources most efficiently, Galbraith notes that finance is very good at directing material goods to where they can be optimally used, but not nearly so good at increasing human capital. An economic system geared at the betterment of humans would look a lot different than one aimed at the betterment of SUVs.

This goes quite deep, I think. First, what’s the point of improving “human capital” if the point isn’t to just produce more stuff in the next generation? We usually think of human capital as something that universities provide, and that poor neighborhoods lack. A liberal education can expand our minds, but we’re often in the trap of thinking that human capital is like real capital: it’s an investment on which we spend a lot up front, from which we then draw over many years. Do we want human capital that allows us to appreciate great literature? Or do we only care about the kind of human capital that slots us each nicely into the machine?

Our most fervent hope is that our kids will live a better life than we do. Do we only want them to be wealthier than we are? Or do we also want them to be smarter, more generous, more curious, happier, more creative, better companions? I’m sure we’d say that we want all these things. But there’s a danger that our preoccupation with production, which springs from some of our most unquestioned intellectual roots, will lead us to define our children’s success in only the most vulgar terms.

Of course, many of us are born with little and die with less. Our obsession with maximizing production has led us to believe that the only solution to widespread poverty is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Another answer is to produce less unnecessary crap and share some of the bounty with our neighbors. Rather than guarantee a larger car to everyone, we’d each take a smaller but perfectly lovely automobile and instead insure that our neighbors get decent health care. First we need to stop thinking about production and start thinking about distribution.

From both Mumford and Galbraith, there’s a real urgency coupled with great clarity about where the problems lie. You can see the outlines of a moral revolution in both of their visions.

[1] — Short version of Fukuyama: humans will always tend to favor their kin more than they favor others; the evolution of human government has been the evolution away from government that favors kin, which Fukuyama calls “patrimonialism”, to government by impartial rulers chosen on the basis of merit. The danger is always that government will revert to the less-impartial form, which Fukuyama refers to by the wholly infelicitous term “repatrimonialization.” (In keeping with “i18n” and “l10n”, perhaps we ought to refer to this as “r19n.”) Human self-government is essentially the unending struggle to break free of the bonds of kin favoritism and arrive at the kind of government that China had mastered a millennium or two before Christ.

Tech-support bleg: iOS Notes app not syncing to Mac OS X

September 13, 2015September 13, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

A bunch of Googling and StackOverflowing didn’t give any good answers to this, so I wonder if the following fact pattern speaks deeply to any of the sleuths on this blog.

Not all notes on my phone sync to my Mac. The last note that synced is from August 20. I’ve created plenty of notes since then.
Notes are correctly syncing from phone to iCloud. I confirm this through iCloud.com.
If I make a change to a note on iCloud.com, that change is reflected immediately on the phone but is not reflected on the Mac. Likewise if I create an altogether new note through iCloud.com. So both the phone→iCloud and iCloud→phone directions work fine.
If I create a new note on the Mac, it doesn’t show up on iOS.
If I edit the aforementioned August 20 note on the Mac, I would expect the August 20 note to move to the top of the list of notes on iOS and iCloud.com. It does not. In fact it looks like that note is only on the Mac, not on iOS or iCloud.com. If I instead pick a note from August 8 that is on the Mac, on iOS, and on iCloud (this is a note containing thoughts I jotted down as I read the book about Nixon, as it happens), and I edit that note on the Mac, those edits don’t show up on iCloud.com or on iOS.
What I conclude up to here is that Notes from the Mac is just not talking with the rest of the world at all.
iCloud drive from the Mac works fine: I create a note in TextEdit and save to iCloud Drive, and it appears in the iCloud Drive app on iOS. This would seem to suggest that the Mac is having no problem reaching iCloud.
I use lots of other iCloud services from the Mac, including Messages. iMessages sent from the Mac show up on iOS instantly.
Logging out of iCloud on the Mac, then logging back in, doesn’t change things: the latest note on the Mac is still from August 20.
Both iOS and Mac (and, indeed, iCloud.com) are configured to use the same user ID, so that’s not the problem.
I’m syncing notes with multiple accounts (iCloud, home, work), but the problem isn’t that the missing notes are on another account: even if I display ‘All Notes’ on the Mac, I don’t see the post-August 20 notes.
Phone is running iOS 9.1 beta 1. Mac is running OS X Yosemite 10.10.5.

I wish Mac stuff — particularly the networking layer — were easier to debug. Console.app doesn’t seem to have much to say on the Mac side, and I wouldn’t even know where to begin debugging the iOS side. And for all I know, this problem doesn’t exist on either the Mac or iOS; instead, maybe the problem is somewhere out in the æther in one of Apple’s server farms.

I’m curious if other people know what might be going on here.

Update (2015-09-13): I’m told that the iOS 9 beta asks me, the first time I run Notes there, whether I want to upgrade their format to some new version. I don’t remember this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I said yes to it without paying much attention. If I did say yes to it, then I’ll need to upgrade to El Capitan through the beta program. I’m in the middle of doing that. We’ll see if that fixes this problem.

Update 2 (2015-09-13): Yep; updating to El Cap solved it. So it was just a beta-software incompatibility … though would I have suffered the same problem had I waited until iOS 9 was no longer in beta, and updated then without updating my Mac to El Cap?

Starting Donald Shoup’s High Cost of Free Parking

September 7, 2015September 7, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

A photo of part of a Monopoly board, centering -- of course -- on the Free Parking square

Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking has been on my to-read list since I was knee-high to a grasshopper; I think I’ve delayed reading it out of a vague concern that it’s just going to tell me what I already believe. (Is anyone else with me that a lot of books are like this these days?) But I just started reading it, and the introduction has already blown my mind a little bit by giving a sense of the scope of the damage that free parking does.

Take this, for example: Shoup makes a really good point about the usual argument for cities’ requiring developers to provide parking spaces. The usual argument is that, if developers didn’t provide it, people would consume the common resource (on-street parking). But this starts from the assumption that the correct price of parking is $0.00, so that developers are required to supply the quantity of parking that would be demanded if parking were free. So the city is constantly forcing the price of parking down to $0.00.

He contrasts this with the fight over affordable housing. It takes a lot of fighting to get even a few units of affordable housing, yet “affordable parking” — in fact free parking — is just assumed.

The book is also rich in data. Citing the 1995 NPTS, Shoup notes that drivers spend an average of 73 minutes per day in the car; a quick approximation, then, says that the average car is idle for 95% of the day (i.e., 100 * (1440 – 73)/1440 percent of the day). That’s a shockingly high number. Makes my mind wander off in a couple directions:

Will driverless cars really solve this, as people hope they will? Yes, cars are idle 95% of the time, but everyone is using their car at exactly the same time of day. If the supply of driverless cars needs to be matched to peak demand, will we end up with the same number of cars?
Cars might resemble books, in that we own them and mostly don’t do anything with them; they mostly sit idle. Just as it’s probably more efficient to give up our personal libraries and use the public library, perhaps there’s an efficient public solution to the problem of mostly-idle automobiles. I’ve thought similar things before about snow blowers. But the problem with snow blowers feels the same as the problem with automobiles: everyone tends to want to snow-blow his driveway, or drive to work, at exactly the same time. Many library books don’t suffer from this problem: I likely want to read The High Cost of Free Parking at a different time than you do. On the other hand, maybe we all want to read the same bestseller at the same time.

There’s probably a body of economic theory that already explains the optimal allocation of these sorts of goods. I’d be interested in finding a good intro.

So anyway, Shoup looks quite promising. I hope to report interesting findings from it in this space.

What we did on our summer vacation

September 6, 2015December 15, 2016/stevereads/1 Comment

Attention conservation notice: 6756 words about our Budapest → Ljubljana → Piran → Venice → Lake Como → Chur → Geneva trip. More below, step by step, if you’re interested. I hope it provides some helpful information for future travelers who follow any or all of this route. I also hope it’s interesting to those who have no intention of visiting any of those places. Apologies to those with no interest in municipal buses around Lake Como, or how to get WiFi at the Geneva airport.

General notes:

In general the structure of this trip was city, country, city, country. It helped to cut the sometimes-hectic feel of a city with the relaxation of a lake. We would definitely use this structure again.
My passport was stamped only at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and at Keflavik airport in Reykjavik. Note that all I saw of France or Iceland on this trip were their airports. It’s possible that we were supposed to get our passports stamped when we got off the flight from Paris to Budapest, but we certainly weren’t corralled in a way that suggested this was mandatory.
We crossed some EU/non-EU borders during this trip; at none of them did anyone seem to care about our risk to the homeland. The border between Italy and Switzerland, in particular, is quite porous: at the border near Lugano, going in either direction, all that the border guards seemed to do was raise a half-skeptical/half-friendly eyebrow toward the bus and then nod slightly to indicate that it should pass. I guess the Swiss and the Italians aren’t too concerned about each other.

Ten-cent mental model: the only places in the world where borders are heavily guarded are borders between poor and not-poor countries. Though I guess the truth of this rests on what we mean by “heavily”: the border between Canada and the U.S. is shockingly militarized, it seems to me.
We played a little game that we like to call Find The Most Absurdly Mistranslated English-Language T-shirt. The two finalists were one reading, simply, DRUG DEALER, and another reading — and I swear to you, all of this is sic —

“Simple way girlish
Simple shirt is so lady to be spankle”

I’m really happy to discover that I’m not the only person to have seen this t-shirt (Google Cache; supporting image cached for posterity).
We took walking tours everywhere that such a thing was available. This squares with our general love of walking. Whichever city you go to, Google for [city name free walking tour]. That worked great for us in Budapest, Ljubljana, and Venice. It also allowed me to feel horribly envious of tour guides who speak far better English than I speak Hungarian, Slovenian, or Italian. I’m tempted to move to Geneva just to force myself to speak four languages fluently.
AirBNB for the win. We stay in AirBNBs everywhere we can; in practice, on this trip that meant everywhere other than Chur. We’ve now stayed in AirBNBs on three continents. I have nothing but positive things to say about it.
It’s a bit of a pain to get a SIM card that works in all European countries, if by ‘European’ we include countries like Switzerland that are outside the EU. We used my friend’s SIM cards from LeFrenchMobile, which says that “This pack includes a All-in-one SIM Card + €30 of credit valid in Europe*.” The asterisk then explains that Europe does not include Switzerland. Damn you, neutrality.

The ideal would be that you’d get one SIM card that would work all through the actual continent of Europe (rather than within the boundaries of a political multi-national arrangement). Barring that, we ended up needing to take advantage of free WiFi wherever it was available. This wasn’t so bad: free WiFi is basically available everywhere in Europe. But it does create some anxious moments. Plus, if you’re trying (as we were) to keep in touch with people back home or call local restaurants, having a working telephone is indispensable.

To get an AT&T phone to work in Europe, you need to unlock it. Be sure to put in the unlock request well before you leave; it can take AT&T a few days to process your request. Once they’ve deigned to unlock your phone, they send you instructions: back up the phone to iTunes, restore, and restart. I believe what happens is that, upon restarting, your phone sends some kind of signal to AT&T, which sends back a message indicating that it’s unlocked. So you have to do all of this before you leave for Europe; the AT&T signal (assuming my model is correct) won’t reach the phone once you’re off the AT&T network. My partner’s phone was unlocked before we left; mine was not. Hence hers had a working European SIM and mine did not.

Assuming everything is properly unlocked, when you get to Europe you follow the LeFrenchMobile iPhone instructions. This entails connecting to WiFi, then downloading and installing a profile that allows your phone to connect to LeFrenchMobile network partners in Europe. When you get back to the U.S., be sure to delete the LFM profile (Settings → General → Profiles & Device Management) from your iPhone, or you won’t be able to connect to the AT&T network.

All of the above synthesizes my, my partner’s, and my friend’s experiences with this particular SIM card. It would be nice if you could “unit test” your phone, in a sense, before you leave: you want to know, before you even get on the plane, that everything will work once you touch down in Europe. I don’t know of any way to do that; if you do, let me know. Barring that, the above is the state of my knowledge.
I wish U.S. trains were nearly as great as Swiss trains, or Italian trains, or Hungarian trains. And I wish our train stations were as pretty as, say, the Milanese train station: , rather than the garish Brazil-esque horror that South Station has become. (We didn’t even go to France on this trip. French train stations like Gare du Nord are at a whole other level. The French Musée d’Orsay is a spectacular space on its own, and is a converted train station. A converted South Station would still smell like grilled cheese.)
Rome2Rio confused me at first, but it’s a handy site to help travelers find mass-transit or automobile routes between any two cities. The Man In Seat Sixty-One is also super-useful to get a narrative take on navigating many nations’ train systems.
Just as Steve Martin and John Candy had planes, trains, and automobiles, so we had (in order) plane, train, van, ferry, vaporetto, train, bus, personal motorcar, bus, bus, train, train, train. Makes for a more ungainly movie title.
We’re both vegetarian, which can limit our dining options now and again. But our modus operandi, both in the U.S. and abroad, is not to seek out restaurants that explicitly label themselves “vegetarian”. In the U.S. that gets you places like Veggie Galaxy or, at the higher end, True Bistro. Much love for both those places, and much love for the really stellar vegetarian places like Dirt Candy in New York or Vedge in Philadelphia. But you really limit your options if you force the places where you dine to serve only vegetables. You exclude places like Coppa that are focused on meat but do a great job for non-carnivores; indeed, Coppa’s Jamie Bissonnette is himself a former vegan, and still makes life for vegans perfectly lovely at his restaurants. It would be a shame to limit your world to Veggie Galaxy (one love!) and never experience Coppa.

Our options on this trip would have been even more limited than they would be in the U.S., had we picked only self-described vegetarian places. “Vegetarian” in Hungary, for instance, seems to be associated with “clean eating” and so forth; eating at vegetarian-only restaurants in Hungary means you’re just eating salad.

Instead our usual approach, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is to look for places that have one or two really good vegetarian options on the menu. If we’re comfortable having a culinary back-and-forth with the waiter, as we would be in the U.S., we can ask for a dish “minus the meat” or “with some vegetarian substitute” (e.g., mushrooms for meat). In Europe, where we’re less comfortable having that conversation, we just looked for vegetarian items on the menu and left it at that.

There doesn’t seem to be an accepted Googlable term of art for “not an explicitly vegetarian restaurant, but rather a restaurant that has some good vegetarian options.” Just Googling for [city name vegetarian] usually turns up the Veggie Galaxies of the world (which, again: much love). There needs to be a more flexible keyword here. On this trip, we discussed putting together a search engine, or at least a curated list, of the sorts of places we’re talking about.
I would like to apply a blanket apology to everything I say below. I was just a tourist, not a resident. I know from living in Boston that if someone came to my town, walked the Freedom Trail, ate at a couple of nice restaurants, spent time in the Public Garden, then proclaimed the city a festival of bullshit and moved on to New York, I would be pissed. I once tried to start a conversation with a Turkish woman on OkCupid by conveying some of my observations of Istanbul from an earlier trip I had taken there, and got torn to shreds via a haranguing that (probably rightly) featured the noun “Orientalism“.

So please don’t take any of my observations below about any of these cities as anything other than the casual observations of a passing stranger. In all cases I want to learn more about these places. In all cases, as always, my axiom is that I shouldn’t sound like an ass in front of people who actually know what they’re talking about. If I do end up sounding like an ass, I apologize in advance.

Budapest:

Really pretty city. It’s got much the same vibe as Prague, in that there are beautiful old buildings alongside Communist-era monstrosities. It’s nicely walkable. Our AirBNB was on the flat Pest side right next to the Parliament, rather than on the opposite bank of the Danube on the hilly Buda side. Parliament is beautiful, especially at night, when it features a cloud of creepy bats circling overhead.

We were told that the baths were the thing to do in Budapest, and indeed the one we visited was quite lovely. I think of it less as a bath, in the way that the hamams I visited in Istanbul were dedicated solely to public washing, and more as a beach vacation for people who are nowhere near a beach. The bath we visited on the Buda side had some reasonably hot water (though nothing approaching the 103- or 105-degree-Fahrenheit water of an average hot tub), some saunas, some cold pools for after the sauna, and many, many beach chairs set on a huge patio. We should have these in Boston and New York; you shouldn’t have to go outside of the city to relax poolside.

Excellent dining experience: Costes. Again, not explicitly vegetarian, but — like any good restaurant nowadays — they get the job done for vegetarians if you ask.

Budapest to Ljubljana: There’s a long but pleasant train ride through beautiful Hungarian countryside; Seat61 has the low-down. At one point the train stops and seems to go into reverse, but I think it’s just switching onto another track. I was deeply confused, though, for a good long while. Still, it ended up in Ljubljana right when it said it would be there, and the train was clean and comfortable.

Ljubljana:

Such a beautiful city; you should absolutely go there. It’s small: something like 250,000 people, in a country of just 2 million. At least when we were there (which, granted, was probably at the height of the tourist season), outdoor cafés were full all evening long; this was probably the best people-watching experience that I’ve ever had. We sat outside for hours, just admiring the people and the languages flowing past us.

Within a couple-hour bus ride of Ljubljana are Lakes Bled and Bohijn. We first took a bus to Bohijn, rented a canoe, paddled around for a bit, then took another such bus back from Bohijn to Bled. There is some sort of heated argument over which is the more beautiful; I claim that they are both gorgeous, and I say the hell with it. You should see both.

A cute castle on top of a hill overlooks the town. There are nice views from up there; there’s also a nice restaurant. Actually seeing much of the castle involved paying silly fees, which we were unwilling to do; your mileage may vary. We walked up to the castle, looked out at metropolitan Ljubljana, ate a leisurely meal, and walked back down. Highly recommended.

Historical/power-political question about Slovenia: I’ll be honest that I didn’t really know anything — at all — about Slovenia before we went there. It was a part of the former Yugoslavia; I hadn’t known that either. As our walking-tour guide explained it, Slovenia was the first of the Yugoslav countries to break off; a ten-day war followed, at the end of which Slovenia was independent. It was the other countries — Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and the rest — that suffered years of bloody fighting. The coalition of Yugoslav countries, it seems, was always a bit artificial, perhaps held together by Tito‘s charisma. The idea of ‘Yugoslavia’, perhaps, was always a fiction.

It’s curious that some European countries, like France and Germany, project an idea that they have existed since time immemorial as unitary entities: we (at least in the U.S.) seem to believe that there is something called ‘a Frenchman’ or ‘a German’, whereas ‘a Yugoslav’ seems like an artificial creation of (perhaps) post-World War I diplomacy. But Germany as we know it didn’t exist until 1870, and much of Bismarck’s genius in constructing Germany was to bring Catholic Bavaria on board with the Protestant north. The same sort of religious division shows up in France: rebels in the Vendée violently resisted the Revolution’s anti-clerical tendencies in the late 1700s, and my understanding is that the “French language” was forcibly constructed out of the many earlier “French” languages like Occitan and Provençal. (LazyWeb request: any recommended books on the construction of standard French out of the earlier French languages?) And of course calling the Irish “British” doesn’t always go over well.

How do some European countries manage to hold together as a single entity, whereas others fall to bits? I don’t mean to pass normative judgment on any of these countries: it’s not “good” that Germany is a single country or “bad” that Yugoslavia broke into several. I also realize that there’s a many-part answer to this question. Part of it is going to center on language: if you can wipe out Gaelic or Provençal, that will help you wipe out Irish or Provençal culture. Though if part of the recipe for wiping out ethnic differences is to destroy the local language, that’s a little question-begging: how did Occitan stop being a going concern, whereas the Irish made Gaelic an official language? In other words, how does one manage get killed off and another not? (Note: I don’t really know anything about the true state of languages in lots of countries, so this may be even more factually challenged than the rest of my life. I welcome correction.)

Ljubljana to Piran: We used GoOpti, which also seems to run the Piran-to-Venice ferry. In this incarnation it’s just a car and a driver, though with a different city pair it might have been more like a shared van. They picked us up outside a fancy modern hotel near the train station, and dropped us off as close as possible to our AirBNB in Piran. The driver was great. It was only €63.06 altogether, plus tip, and the ride was something like 90 minutes. Totally worth it. This GoOpti page contains the right cities, but doesn’t go in the correct direction; still, it should get you somewhat closer to what you’re looking for.

Piran:

We had a wonderful time swimming in the Adriatic. Confession: before I had swum in it, I don’t think I could have really distinguished for you between the Adriatic and the Aegean. I saw the Aegean from Izmir, in Turkey, and have now swum in the Adriatic on the western end of Slovenia, just a short ferry ride across from Italy. So now the geography is clear for me.

There’s not much reason to go out of your way to visit Piran. For one thing, it doesn’t have any beaches. It has boulders that sit on the shore, but boulders sitting on the shore do not a beach make. We swam, then sat on the rocks until our butts hurt (experienced tourists there lay on the rocks with what seemed to be thick butt-protection pads), then sat in a café drinking Aperol spritzes for a few hours while we read our books. No one was in any rush to move us along. So it’s a lovely little spot on the water, and it’s certainly worth stopping there if you’re in Ljubljana (which you should be) and want to end up in Venice (which you should). But it’s not worth going there as a destination on its own.

However, if you do go, I recommended wholeheartedly the AirBNB where we stayed; it features a lovely host, the perfect location about 50 feet from the water, and the right price ($89, all told, for the night).

Piran to Venice: There’s a ferry, which I believe took two hours. At least when we were on it, the Adriatic was as calm as a lake. I have, in my time, vomited with so much vehemence on the ferry from Boston to Provincetown that I cleared an entire deck, so I am always extremely tentative about ferries and come equipped with Dramamine. But I had no problems at all on this ferry; I imagine the calm of the water and the high speed of the boat combine to make it smooth. It’s mostly intended for people who pack their entire visit to Venice into a single day, so it’s staffed by tour guides who spend most of the ride lecturing in English, German, Russian, Slovenian, and Italian about the day’s itinerary, but it’s also useful just as a utility ferry to get you from point A to point B.

Venice:

Okay, this city is completely fucking bananas; there’s no curse-free way to explain just how ludicrously out-of-control this fucking city is. I think I used the word “bananas” at least 400 times over our three days there. Here I am duty-bound to quote Mary McCarthy from Venice Observed: “Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before.” Still: completely fucking bonkers.

First, have you ever been to a city that still felt really medieval, in that there are lots of crazy narrow streets and bizarre turns? That was my experience of Istanbul, or at least the parts of Istanbul that didn’t feel explicitly Westernized. Now take that and add canals — so very many canals — and you start envisioning Venice. I truly had no idea what I was going to get in Venice until I went, even though I knew at an abstract level that Venice was defined by its canals. You’ll be walking down a street that’s barely wide enough to hold a slender human being, and you’ll dead-end at a canal.

Down the middle of the city runs the Grand Canal. They are not lying about the Grand Canal: it is both a canal … and grand. To get from San Marco (one of Venice’s islands) to most anywhere else in the city, you have to cross the Grand Canal; this requires that you either take a vaporetto (a municipal bus on the water, basically), cross the absolutely tourist-mobbed and garish Rialto Bridge, or take a traghetto.

Google Maps just has no idea what to do with Venice. Even when Google Maps identifies the correct Street X, it seems to have the wrong idea of how long it takes to get from one point to another … or maybe it’s fine, and we were the problem; after a few days, I think our walking times began to approximate what Google thought they should be … but then you get the tourist problem, namely that certain streets are always packed wall-to-wall with bovine tourists who slow everything to a crawl. Any Google Maps pedestrian timings that feature a path over the Rialto Bridge at the height of summer, for instance, should be considered incredibly suspect; you will be moving at the pace of a sardine-packed mob. One of the many reasons I have usually considered walking superior to driving is that the standard deviation of the walking time is nearly zero: I know pretty precisely how long it will take me to walk a fixed distance. This is not the case in Venice. This is the first time I’ve wanted Google Maps to factor in real-time traffic stats for walking.

Our walking-tour guide explained that part of Google’s problem with Venice comes from the city’s history: every street has a couple different names. I seem to recall his saying that there are 42 streets in Venice with one particular name (I wish I could remember the details). I mean, bear in mind that Venice is 1500 years old. 1500! Years! Even Boston, which is significantly younger, still has a 76 South Street that’s in the southern part of the city and a 76 South Street up north. Anyone who lives around here would, of course, be able to explain that Boston comprises multiple neighborhoods which came into Boston via annexation; I assume you can still send letters to “76 South Street, Boston MA” and something approximating the right thing will happen, but “76 South Street, Jamaica Plain MA” would be more correct. Same goes for Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Now take that annexation-related problem, which is maybe 100 years old, and scale it up by a factor of 15. While you’re at it, throw in several epic changes in governance: the city was formed initially by exiles retreating from mainland Europe when Attila the Hun was invading the continent; eventually it became its own city-state; then it was a republic; then Napoleon invaded and it wasn’t a republic, and was instead handed over to the Austro-Hungarians; then it was part of the new nation of Italy. And this is just off the top of my head; I am seriously deficient in my Venice history. Reading up on that history is high on my list: A History of Venice, The Stones of Venice, Venice Observed.

People say Boston’s layout is weird; they say that it’s incoherent because our streets were initially cow paths. That’s possibly true, but there’s also the fact that a lot of the city is infill: roads and houses were built, and over time the city was slowly reclaimed from the marshland that it sits on. So build the city, develop it at its current dimensions, expand, repeat. My mental model of the city’s shape is that some of its odd curvy streets essentially follow the boundary of the city as it was in the 1800s. Now, again, take that and scale up the weirdness: build the city, not on marshland, but rather right on a lagoon on the Adriatic. Now do this with the architectural technology available 1500 years ago. I’m told that much of Venice’s foundation is built on wooden stakes driven into the mud; the part of the wood that’s buried in the mud is free of oxygen, so the wood doesn’t rot, while the part that’s above the water does.

I’m trying to assemble for you, bit by bit, the extreme fucking weirdness of Venice. (Proposed slogan for the city: “Venice: We Are Extremely Fucking Weird”.) Assembling that weirdness bit by bit can’t approximate the feeling of being dropped in the city, taking a vaporetto past achingly beautiful palaces along the Grand Canal, and then winding your way through medieval warrens that are barely wider than you are … all while surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Boventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their ‘Sunday Mirrors’, complaining about the tea, ‘Oh they don’t make it properly here do they! Not like at home’ stopping at Majorcan bodegas, selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in cotton sun frocks squirting Timothy White’s suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they ‘overdid it on the first day’!

Naturally I am one of those tourists. And naturally they probably think of me the same way I think of them. And naturally there’s the same “everyone wants to be where everyone else is not” aspect to Venice that there is anywhere: we all want to go to the best restaurants in the city, but only if we’re not surrounded by too many tourists who turn the fine local food into something like an American children’s menu. That was relatively easy in Venice: just stay away from the Rialto Bridge, to the extent that crossing the Grand Canal doesn’t require it. Indeed, I might suggest that you stay on Cannaregio — again, so long as you avoid the single tourist-infested, tchotchke-laden main drag of San Leonardo.

If you want to see the Piazza San Marco, which you do, go see it at night after the ferry-boat passengers who’ve come for the day have returned to Slovenia; the church is beautiful. We didn’t get to go inside. I’m told that the way to do that is to use the side entrance for actual worshippers during a Sunday Mass, rather than the front entrance for tourists. And I’m told that the way to see Piazza San Marco is to wake up early and get there by 7am.

We didn’t get to see many churches or museums this time. Partly that’s because we didn’t have all that much time in Venice; partly it’s that churches often charge a good bit of money to let you in. There are a bunch on our list for the next time, including St. George’s Anglican Church across the Grand Canal; I’m told that it has a beautiful view of St. Mark’s. We also want to go to the Frari; it’s supposed to be filled with astonishingly beautiful artwork by Titian, who is interred there. Our tour guide recommended that we visit Torcello, the first of the Venetian islands to have any settlers. He says it’s mostly empty, covered in ruins, full of natural beauty, and largely free of tourists. (It seems comically complicated to get there, which is maybe the point.) Finally, he recommended visiting Burano. He gave us all these recommendations after we’d already been on the island a day or two, so we’d already concluded for ourselves that Murano, the Venetian island known for its glass-blowing, is largely an underwhelming tourist trap. Unfortunately we concluded this only after visiting Murano. Lesson learned.

(Less cultured, but something I want to do the next time I’m in Venice: explore amari.)

Going to Venice slightly off-season might be the way to do it. I’m not sure how it feels in December; it might be cold and wet and raw. So maybe October or so? This seems like a question worth investigating, since the (other) tourists made the city quite a lot less enjoyable than it otherwise might have been. The numbers I heard varied, but Venice’s population is in the tens of thousands, while it gets tens of millions of visitors annually.

That’s not at all to say that you should stay away from Venice. You should absolutely go. It is one of the couple most remarkable places I’ve been in my life. You do need, though, to plan how to keep away from the terrible crowds, which means planning your routes to avoid the Rialto Bridge.

From another perspective, you need to plan how not to be one of the tourists who’s turning the city into Disneyland. One tiny step in this direction: behave appropriately in houses of god. Wear long pants and long-sleeve shirts. Don’t take photographs. Don’t carry around a selfie stick, you monster. Speak in a whisper, if at all. In fact, don’t speak. Carve out spaces of quiet for yourself and for others. Generally be a decent human being. Feel an internal hush in a space that is literally awesome.

When you’re out of the church, do as Venetians do (as I understand it): around 6pm, wander over near the Ponte dell’Accademia. There you’ll find little clusters of people sitting along the canals, eating bar snacks and drinking apéritifs. In particular, everyone in our time in Italy seemed to be drinking Aperol spritzes. The going rate for an Aperol spritz is about €2.50. Contrast that with Coppa, where the same drink costs $10.00. It’s a lovely, lovely drink. We drank our weight in spritzes around Italy.

Now that you’re fortified with a lovely apéritif, walk along the canals. Get hopelessly lost and laugh about it. Bask in one of the most beautiful, most perplexing places on the planet.

Venice to Lake Como:

This was easy: vaporetto to Ferrovia train station (here my French education helped: ‘Ferrovia’ is something like ‘chemin de fer’, which is the French word for ‘railroad’: ‘chemin de fer’ is literally ‘iron road’), train to Milan, train from Milan to Como San Giovanni, bus (I believe it was the C10; see generally this bus-schedule page) from Como San Giovanni to Menaggio. You buy the bus ticket in San Giovanni at the snack bar, which is just across the way from the tourist information booth inside the station. The C10 bus let us off right around the Grand Hotel Menaggio.

We stayed in Menaggio, on the western side of the lake, because our next stop was the Bernina Express bus. The Bernina route is divided into two pieces: a bus from Lugano to Tirano, then a train from Tirano to Chur. You can take just the train piece, or train+bus; we opted for the latter. We had to get to Tirano in time for the Bernina bus’s departure; had we stayed on the eastern side of the lake, getting to the Bernina bus would have required us to take an early-morning ferry to the western side. Seemed easier to stay on the west and shorten that piece.

If we were to do it again, we’d skip the Bernina bus and just take the train; the bus was a rather boring ride through towns that, honestly, felt no more picturesque than mid-Cape towns in Massachusetts. If — when — we do it again, we’ll stay in Varenna on the eastern side of Lake Como, then cut out the Bernina-bus piece and head straight for Tirano. Lesson learned.

Lake Como:

Just beautiful. Where land meets water, my blood pressure drops noticeably. We stayed in probably the most beautiful AirBNB I’ve ever been in. It … uh … well … the view from the balcony looked like this:

Menaggio, panoramic from AirBNB

And the view from the town itself looked like this:

View of Menaggio from closer to town

On someone’s advice — I forget whose; might’ve been Trip Advisor’s, or it might have been our AirBNB host’s — we went on our first evening to a lovely little bar (on Via Calvi, maybe?) for apéritifs, where we were charmed by the bar’s owner; she served us a delicious glass of wine, whose name I didn’t write down, from a wall of taps. Then we headed around the corner for dinner proper. (I can’t tell whether it’s considered gauche in Italy to have your apéritifs at the same place whence you get your dinner.) There were a couple really nice places for dinner in Menaggio. And, again, sitting in a café watching the people pass, or sitting on the lake and watching the waves lap, never hurt anyone.

Menaggio to Lugano:

Again, were we to do it again, we’d cut out this piece altogether; we’d go straight from Varenna on the eastern side to Tirano. But given that we opted this time to stay in Menaggio and take the Bernina bus from Lugano to Tirano, it turned out to be rather easy to get from Menaggio to Lugano: hop on the C12 bus near the church in Menaggio, and take it 45 minutes to Lugano.

It got a bit confusing there: the C12 bus ends at Lugano Cassarate (the bus terminal), whereas the Bernina bus starts from the Lugano train station. The bus terminal is not the same as the train terminal. It’s a 20-minute walk between them, or you can take the #2 bus. You can buy #2-bus tickets where the C12 ends.

Note the mild annoyance here: to get from Menaggio to the Bernina train, you need to take the C12 to a bus station to the #2 bus to the train station, which gets you on a Bernina bus that you then take to the Bernina train. Now imagine doing this in the morning before you’ve had your coffee, while you’re schlepping bags.

In general I would advise getting all of these maps and itineraries printed out before you leave. Really nail down the details: which exact bus station does this exact bus go to? Better to figure that out ahead of time (to the extent possible) than be anxious about making it to your bus on time. We built in tons of buffer time, so it was never a close call, but forewarned is forearmed and so forth.

Lugano to Tirano:

But okay, so you’ve gotten on the C12 bus in the picturesque lakeside town of Menaggio, so that you can take it to Lugano, so that you can get on the Bernina bus. The Bernina bus then takes you from Lugano to Tirano, by way of … the picturesque lakeside town of Menaggio. Yep: you have just recapitulated, on the Bernina bus, the last 45 minutes that you spent on the C12 bus.

Past Menaggio, the Bernina bus winds through lots of towns that look a lot like Hyannis. I advise you to skip this.

Tirano to Chur

Okay, HERE is where the party gets started. I advise you to do whatever you can to take the train from Tirano to Chur. Dear lord. It’s a bus through the Alps, reaching an altitude of something like 6000 feet. It is beyond breathtaking, every step of the way. The train has windows that curve up onto the ceiling, so that you can see not only the jaw-dropping beauty in front of you but also the jaw-dropping beauty above you. (Whoever the ad wizards are who came up with this one, I would like to thank them; designing your trains with scenery-appropriate windows is an attention to passenger experience that I’m not used to from American trains.) It looks like this:

View of the inside of the Bernina

No photo could possibly capture the scale of the beauty visible just out your window on the Bernina; god knows I tried. You really just need to ride it.

Chur:

The less said about this place, the better. On the positive side, we stayed in a perfectly nice hostel rather than an AirBNB, because there were none of the latter (or at least none that were affordable; I forget). We got a private room, for which they charged us per-person rather than per-room. This is perfectly consistent with my experience of Switzerland: shockingly overpriced in every particular.

On the negative side, we took a cab from the train station to the hostel because it was pouring rain when we arrived; otherwise it would have been a 20-minute walk. I had the hostel’s address on my phone, and showed it to the cabbie; somehow that didn’t register. Without belaboring the story, the situation with the cabbie continued to escalate. He didn’t like us at all. We wish him ill.

We found a not-completely-insanely-priced restaurant in Chur, ate dinner there, went back to the hostel, read our books, went to sleep, and got out of the city as quickly as we could the next morning (this time walking to the train station).

Chur to Geneva:

The Swiss train system, in my experience of it, is exactly as efficient and clean as the rumors would have it. My only problem was that the conductors were unwilling to use their QR-code scanners against our laptop or iPhones, for reasons that are completely unclear to me. The left hand and the right hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing, however, because the station agents told us that we didn’t need to print our tickets; in fact I think the machines didn’t even give us a way to print them. The moral: if at all possible, have your tickets printed before you leave the U.S., or at least before you arrive at the station.

With all that out of the way: the trains were great. Chur to Zurich, then Zurich to Geneva, were perfectly lovely. It’s striking to me that Swiss trains have much less of a buffer between them and the surrounding country than U.S. trains do, even though the trains are moving much faster; I think Italian trains are the same way. It’s also striking how much prettier the land around Swiss and Italian trains is than the land around U.S. trains. In the U.S., train tracks almost universally abut disgusting, trash-strewn land. I saw none of that in Europe.

Oh, and on the topic of cleanliness: there was virtually no trash on the ground, nor graffiti on the walls, anywhere we went in Europe. U.S. filth is about social norms, and perhaps about insufficient public services (Galbraith’s “private opulence and public squalor”). I’d love to know why we ended up like that and Europe did not. I thought about that a lot while we were there.

Finally, it charms me to bits that the Swiss train system is labeled, always and everywhere, “SBB CFF FFS”, in keeping with three of the official Swiss languages. Those abbreviations stand, respectively, for “Schweizerische Bundesbahnen”, “Chemins de fer fédéraux suisses”, and “Ferrovie federali svizzere”. I like to imagine how much less imposing the U.S. bureaucracy would feel if it were required to placate three languages at a time. “Oh yeah, tough guy? Wanna mess with the United States? Well feel the wrath of our Central Intelligence Agency / Agence centrale du renseignement / Osrednja obveščevalna agencija. Not laughing now, are you?” Takes the piss right out of it.

Geneva:

Beautiful town on a beautiful lake:

Panoramic view of Geneva. Mountains, lakes, loveliness.

Super-overpriced: $25 for a pizza, $13 for a burrito. Though there’s surpassingly good falafel — maybe the best of my life, actually — at Parfums de Beyrouth near the train station for $7. (Hat tip to my colleague Matt, who used to work at CERN, for the pointer.) I wish I understood why Geneva is so expensive. Do salaries here mean that locals can afford it but tourists cannot?

Geneva to airport

One stop on the same train that brought you into town. Trivial.

Airport

Oddly complicated. I was flying out on Icelandair, and there were no kiosks from which to print Icelandair tickets. I expected I’d have the same difficulty with bar-coded boarding passes on my phone as we had had with the Swiss train (see supra), so I expected I’d have to stand in line for an hour just to print the boarding pass. A helpful fellow from the airport suggested that I could just cut in line and ask a ticket agent to print my boarding pass for me, but the ticket agent wasn’t playing along. Eventually I decided to risk going ahead with a barcode on my phone only; that worked fine. It would have been less fine had I not been able to access the barcode on my phone. The moral, again, is to print this stuff out as early as you can and avoid the last-minute anxieties.

To get WiFi access in the airport, you can use a little machine near the info desks. You scan your boarding pass’s bar code (I used it on my phone and it worked fine), and it prints a receipt containing a code that you enter on your device when authenticating. Of course, if you don’t have access to WiFi, it may be hard to access the boarding-pass barcode. Again: print ahead of time, or make sure that you get the SIM card before you reach Europe.

Don’t strengthen economic regulations on ride-sharing services; weaken them on cabs: an open letter to my representatives

August 20, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

From: Steve Laniel
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 18:17:47 -0400
To: Michael J Moran, Linda Dorcena Forry
Cc: William N Brownsberger, Sonia Chang-Diaz,
Anthony W Petruccelli, Aaron Michlewitz, Byron Rushing, Jay D Livingstone

Dear Representative Moran and Senator Forry,

I read in the Globe about your bill, H.3702, that would add more regulations to ride-sharing services in an attempt to level the playing field with taxis. The intention is probably sound, but it seems to me that it’s going in the wrong direction. Why not loosen regulations on cabs? Two types of regulations strike me as hugely detrimental to taxi drivers:

“Dead-heading”: if a cab picks up a passenger in Boston and drops her off in Brookline, that cab has to then drive back to Boston empty before picking anyone up in Boston. In that same situation, ride-sharing services can pick up passengers in Brookline. Each fare is thus more expensive for cabs than it is for the ride-sharing driver. Why not get rid of the dead-heading requirement? There’s no conceivable public-safety justification for such a requirement.
Medallions: cab owners have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after ride-sharing services have driven down their value. Ride-share drivers aren’t subject to this requirement — and they shouldn’t be. Naturally we can expect that current medallion owners would hate the idea of their medallions becoming valueless, so of course we expect opposition here. The public good, though, is not served by defending entrenched property owners’ monopoly rents. Medallions introduce artificial scarcity, to no public-safety end.

The net effect of dead-heading requirements and artificial scarcity is that, as of 2011, Boston had the most expensive cabs in the country. And Boston cabs offer notoriously poor service, which is an expected outcome of a market protected by medallions: cab owners fight to protect their monopoly, rather than fight to provide better service to their customers. No wonder ride-sharing services have found a welcome home in Boston. And no wonder that the cab owners, long accustomed to monopoly rents, are outraged.

By the way: I’d be interested to hear the perspective of the cab drivers rather than that of the cab owners. Are the drivers choosing to quit the cab companies and work for ride-sharing services instead? Whose interests are we protecting? I suspect we’re not protecting the interests of the drivers. We’re certainly not protecting the interests of passengers. It looks from the outside like we’re only protecting the interests of the owners.

If what we care about is public safety, then by all means let’s require ride-share drivers to satisfy safety requirements. If, however, the goal is to level the economic playing field, then the way to do that is to weaken obsolete economic rules on taxis rather than strengthen them on ride-sharing services.

Sincerely,
Steve Laniel

John Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

August 8, 2015August 8, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

Close up black-and-white photo of Nixon's face. He looks evil -- scheming and plotting

As Hunter S. Thompson put it, “for people with seriously diminished attention spans,” the death of J. Edgar Hoover

led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

The longer story — from the moment Nixon’s White House tapes started rolling until they were switched off — is contained in John Dean’s [book: The Nixon Defense], and it is almost intolerably gripping. Within days of the Watergate break-in, Nixon was actively planning the cover-up, even as he was warning all and sundry that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. On June 23, 1972, Nixon instructed his men (H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman) to tell the FBI that their investigation of the break-in was intruding on some secret CIA work, and that they had to stop. It didn’t work, and the FBI kept investigating. It seems like the real reason they wanted to keep the FBI away is that they would eventually stumble on the White House “plumbers”, who among other things broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find information damaging to Ellsberg. Oh, and Nixon himself ordered a break-in at the Brookings Institution.

The Nixon Administration was rotten to its very core, as anyone who’s read [book: The Final Days] well knows. Watergate wasn’t just the story of a “third-rate burglary”; Nixon’s obsessive desire to cover it up, and then cover up the cover-up, is almost prima facie evidence that there was more to it than that.

Nixon went all the way to the Supreme Court to resist turning over his Oval Office recordings. When the “smoking-gun tape” of that June 23rd conversation came out, everyone — the White House staff, Congressional Republicans, and Nixon’s own counsel — realized they’d been duped, and Nixon was out of the White House days later. I’m mostly inclined to say that Nixon’s refusal to turn over the tapes was, again, prima facie evidence of his guilt. The only thing that stops me from saying that wholeheartedly is that it’s the same sort of argument made about people who claim their Constitutionally granted Fifth Amendment rights, and it’s deeply wrong when it’s made in that context.

Nixon’s argument for refusing to turn over the tapes is that it would set a dangerous precedent: as he said in his address to the nation on August 15 of 1973,

The Presidency is not the only office that requires confidentiality. A Member of Congress must be able to talk in confidence with his assistants; judges must be able to confer in confidence with their law clerks and with each other. For very good reasons, no branch of Government has ever compelled disclosure of confidential conversations between officers of other branches of Government and their advisers about Government business.

When he wasn’t making that argument, he was trying to cover the White House recordings in the mantle of “national security”. Indeed, that was the basis of the cover-up from the beginning: the FBI was about to tread on national-security matters, and had to be stopped.

These are all fair arguments on their own terms; they’re obviously tarnished by Nixon’s having used them. Offhand, it seems like the 1996 agreement which ultimately led to the release of the tapes is a good model for how these sorts of releases should happen while presidents are in office:

[W]e also are sensitive to the concerns of the Nixon family about material that is legally personal and private, and we recognize the need to treat materials not related to ‘abuses of power’ as we would treat materials of any other President in our Presidential library system, consistent with the law that specifically governs the Nixon materials. We believe that this agreement protects both the Nixon privacy rights and the public interest as defined by law.

Had Nixon actually been concerned to strike an appropriate balance among the public’s right to know, the president’s need for confidential conversation, and the government’s need for discretion in national-security matters, he would have landed on a solution like the 1996 agreement while he was in office. The tapes that John Dean so scrupulously transcribed explain exactly why Nixon didn’t want to strike this balance: he was a crook and a liar.

What makes Dean’s book such a nail-biter is that it’s practically an account from inside of Nixon’s own head. You’re watching a man dismantle himself and his administration. You’re watching as his aides filter in and out, telling Nixon what he wants to hear and hiding the true depth of the crimes from him. By the end, you’re watching his aides all turn their knives on each other, and then eventually — with a really shocking degree of uniformity — turn them all on Dean as the fall guy.

As the years go by, more and more things fall into the memory hole. We’re not long out of the nightmare of the Bush years, yet it’s still easy to forget what a criminal undertaking that was; in a better world, our former president and vice president would be in shackles in The Hague, on trial for crimes against humanity. It’s easy to remember Watergate as some minor crime that unfairly impugns the memory of an otherwise good man. It’s harder to remember that Nixon scuttled the peace talks that might have ended Vietnam, and that LBJ said Nixon had “blood on his hands”. It’s hard to remember the paranoia that gripped Nixon, a man of many hatreds.

The memory hole has consequences: maybe we care a little less the next time the government tries to use “national security” as an excuse. The only defense I can think of against the memory hole is to read and remember. So on my shelf now, I have Jane Mayer’s [book: The Dark Side] and Barton Gellman’s [book: Angler], both about the Bush administration. Dean’s [book: Nixon Defense] deserves a permanent place on the shelf of anyone who wants to remember our country’s nightmares.

On Boston’s rejecting the Olympics

July 29, 2015July 29, 2015/stevereads/Leave a comment

Most of the griping seems to be less about the Olympics themselves, and more about how we won’t get things the city needs — such as better mass transit and a “master plan”. (That’s a new one to me. I didn’t know the city needed one of those.)

That’s always been the nature of the pro-Olympics case, and it’s always been an atrocious argument; no wonder the city, in it wisdom, ultimately rejected that argument. Yes, the city has broken infrastructure. But conditioning infrastructure improvement on our accepting the Olympics is tantamount to blackmail. If we want to improve the city’s infrastructure, let’s improve the city’s infrastructure.

I’d be willing to start the discussion right there. If you think the city is a parochial backwater that is unwilling to think big, then the place where that matters is in the lived experience of its residents and the public services that support them; it has nothing to do with whether the Olympics come here. The three biggest challenges in Boston / Cambridge / Somerville / Brookline, to my mind, are that

The public transit isn’t up to the level of a great city. It should break down less often; it should come more often; it should run all night; the vehicles and the stations ought to be so well-maintained that no one would ever hesitate to use them; we ought to have real Bus Rapid Transit; and the subway should reach at least as far out as Lexington: wherever you’re standing, you should be able to walk ten minutes and reach a subway stop. (And not the green line. No one likes the green line.) Even some low-tech solutions would do a world of good: separate bus lanes on Mass. Ave. would make our most popular form of mass transit speedier than the cars that surround it.
The schools are a problem. No Boston / Cambridge / Somerville parents should have any hesitation about sending their kids to the public schools. It’s not uncommon for parents to think of ways to get a toehold in Brookline so that they can send their kids to the famously good schools there; consequently, Brookline property values are astronomical. Let’s talk about how to sunder the link between “the good places to live” and “where the schools are good”, like then-Professor Elizabeth Warren suggested. Parents in Roxbury should be able to send their kids to schools in Brookline. Let’s consider merging the school districts. (And yes, I’m aware that much of this is the legacy of a horrific episode in the 70s.)
Property values are insane, to the point that I don’t understand how those earning the median household income of $53,000 can afford to own their homes. Let’s talk about building more densely. Let’s talk about making America’s Walking City truly the best city in the world for pedestrians.

These are the conversations we need to have. If we don’t address these things, that is what makes us parochial. If we can only have conversations about how to make Boston a great city when those conversations are based around a fantasy Olympics nine years in the future, that makes us juvenile. We should be able to improve Boston because we want to improve Boston, not because the International Olympic Committee told us to.

Steve Reads

Author: stevereads