Steve Reads

Author: stevereads

I put together a cocktail map of Boston and its environs — May 23, 2014

I put together a cocktail map of Boston and its environs

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…but it’s a little sparse at the moment. Does anyone have any interesting additions?

Granted, my criteria are fairly arbitrary/idiosyncratic. I love the Sligo in Davis Square (I watched the Sox win the ALCS in 2004 from there), but it’s a dive bar, and I don’t think it really fits here. Cambridge Brewing Company is on there even though it’s all about the beer and not about the cocktails. People might like The Burren, but I don’t, so it’s not on there. Etc.

I guess what I’m probably after are just nice bars that take the quality of their drinks seriously, and are reasonably close to a T stop — though that’s also not strictly enforced: Sarma and La Brasa are fairly distant from the T.

Anyway, if you’re into my arbitrary standards, and you’d like to contribute to a Steve Laniel-Approved Map Of Boston Drinking, you should.

Work music recommendation of the week — May 15, 2014

Work music recommendation of the week

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Steve Reich, [album: Music for 18 Musicians], on the basis of The Edge of the American West’s recommendation. Actually, that’s not 100% true: I wouldn’t have bothered to look into the Reich piece had I not already been obsessed with another of Reich’s works (viz., [album: Tehillim / The Desert Music]). Both are trance-like and beautiful.

On the basis of that same EotAW review, I’d like to get an MP3 version of Philip Glass’s [album: Symphony No. 9], but there doesn’t seem to be such a thing.

The latest This American Life is bananas — May 14, 2014

The latest This American Life is bananas

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See here.

I’d like to call out a couple things:

1. What the guy says about the plane arriving to rescue them: “In my head … you wanna start singing the national anthem … corniness aside, this is *awesome*: we live in a country that can do *this*.” I couldn’t help it: I was patriotically moved. Looking at it in a more wonky way, you can think of a society as an insurance policy; the Coast Guard here is insurance against getting hurt at sea. (Lane Kenworthy goes into this in [book: Social Democratic America].) I like to think of my society insuring me in all kinds of ways. And I love living in a country that can do that.
2. The entire Alan Simpson thing. I won’t spoil it by explaining any of what goes on. You can listen to Act 2 if you’d like. It’s just bananas.

Metrics for affordable cities — May 13, 2014

Metrics for affordable cities

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This Atlantic Cities piece measures which metro areas are the easiest for middle-income folks to buy homes in. They define this by the fraction of homes that the median earner in the city could buy, assuming this earner stays within sensible limits for what he spends on a home. That is, the earner is expected to spend 31% or less of his income on a home. I never know whether the 31% number there refers to gross or net. Again, people often make the mistake of considering their homeownership decision outside the context of the rest of their finances. You want your whole financial picture, including retirement savings and so forth, to be healthy, not just your homeownership picture.

But setting that aside: by this measure, Boston is not very affordable. If you take even the looser standard of the fraction of homes that are affordable if the head of household (love that Victorian label) has a college degree, then Boston ranks 93rd out of 100.

Consistent with my impression, Pittsburgh is 45th, and Detroit is 17th. This gets at something: you really want to measure along two axes. Along the x-axis, measure affordability; on the y-axis, measure desirability. Detroit is affordable but not desirable. The Bay Area, let’s say, is desirable but not affordable. What one wants is the set of cities that are both affordable and desirable. Or maybe, within the set of desirable cities, one wants to maximize the amount of desirability from the marginal dollar. (You’d want to limit to desirable cities to avoid Detroit showing up on the list. If you’re willing to consider the possibility of living in Detroit, perhaps you can relax this in the thought experiment.)

I don’t know how one would measure desirability. Basically you’d measure it by how many people want to live there. But the only way you can measure that is by how many people *do* live there or *have* tried to move there. The price of housing is a decent measure of those things. But the price of housing measures the intersection of demand with supply, and supply is controlled by regulators. So I can’t think of how to measure desirability.

It’s odd, though, that Pittsburgh may well end up maximizing the combination of desirability and affordability.

What tequila “should” taste like — May 7, 2014

What tequila “should” taste like

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This article is kind of annoying. It’s a bunch of people explaining what tequila is supposed to taste like. Apparently aging tequila too long is bad, because you end up tasting the notes of the aging and not tasting the tequila itself.

I mean, maybe. But we went through this with coffee. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, French roast was the thing, so people loved Starbucks. Then at some point the George Howell thing took over: now we’re only supposed to drink lightly roasted coffee, because “all those oils [that you see on the outside of a French-roast bean] ought to be inside the bean.” (For the record, I think Howell’s coffees are great as espresso, because the high-pressure / high-temperature extraction process gets more of the good stuff into the cup. I’ve not yet found a way to make them work well for French-press coffee.) Now maybe we’re in the full-city-roast era.

Whatever. Drink whatever you want to drink. Then there will be people who will tell you that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you drink Cuervo, and maybe it’s shit. I don’t know; I’m not familiar with tequila. But maybe you’ll develop a real taste for tequila, and you’ll sip it neat, and eventually you’ll gravitate to other tequilas. Maybe some of those will be aged in oak for a long while; maybe others will be on the sweeter side, and will be less oaky.

Eventually you and I will both be dead, and it won’t matter at all whether we drank the “right” kind of tequila or coffee. Drink what you want to drink. Fuck those guys.

(I guess I’m feeling irritable today?)

Miscellaneous observation, 2014-05-04 — May 4, 2014
Why is it so expensive to get from Boston to Montreal? —

Why is it so expensive to get from Boston to Montreal?

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I just looked into flights to Montreal, out of idle curiosity. The cheapest flights available on Matrix are $270, but that involves flying through Toronto — at which point I think a lot of people would decide just to hang out in Toronto. (It’s $201 round-trip, nonstop, Boston to Toronto.)

If you want a direct flight from Boston to Montreal, it’s $429 and takes just over an hour. Then add 45 minutes to get to Logan by T from Cambridge, an hour to go through security and such in the international terminal at Logan, some time to get through customs in Montreal, and half an hour to get from YUL to the center of the city. Call it four hours, door to door.

You could take a bus, but that’s 7 or 8 hours in the best case, and costs $188. Then 30 minutes to South Station on this side, maybe some hassle at the border, and another half hour on that end. 9.5-10 hours door to door. Your time is worth some money.

You could rent a car and drive there in 5 hours, apparently, plus some time at the border; call it 6 hours in total. I would have expected it to be longer. As for how much this option costs: a moment’s searching on the Budget rent-a-car site yields a car that costs $122.76. That’s for something akin to a Hyundai Accent; it claims to get 38 miles per gallon on the highway, and it’s 300 miles or so to Montreal, and gas is (let’s say) $3.60 a gallon, so that’s another $56 or so. So, like the bus, we’re up to about $180 round-trip.

(Incidentally, the IRS lets you deduct 56 cents per mile for business mileage. Assuming the mileage rate is a decent approximation to the actual cost of driving a mile, driving your own car there and back would cost somewhere north of $300.)

Finally, as far as I can tell, there’s no train going from Boston to Montreal. (And while we’re at it griping about travel difficulties: if you want to take a train or a plane from Boston to Burlington, VT, you’re going to go through New York City first. That makes very little sense to me.)

Shouldn’t it be just as cheap and quick to get to Montreal from Boston as it is to get to Toronto from Boston? Puzzling.

Apropos of nothing — April 24, 2014
You should go read Robert Solow’s review of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century —
I have funny friends — April 23, 2014

I have funny friends

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Quote #1 from today, after an iMessage conversation and involving a ton of context that I wouldn’t print here if you paid me:

> Only through that kind of multi-generational emotional torsion can you twist someone around far enough to have them believe they really want to wear inside-out bear costume feet someone named “Uggs”.

Quote #2, in re “Coakley lawsuit wants colleges ex-chief to repay millions”. I write,

> ‘Northeastern University investigative reporting students’!
>
> I’ll grant you that I only skimmed the article, but I don’t entirely get the grounds on which the state is suing him.
>
> Also, I don’t entirely understand how you can just get your organization to pay for a bunch of stuff without their knowing about it.

whereupon (here’s where the funny comes in) my friend replies:

> Right. Like: he founded a college, then spent millions on vacation homes and Mercedes, and then Northeastern students noticed when they made an Excel spreadsheet of public data and sorted by the “salary” column. Why didn’t I think of that?!?