(Source: raw data, gathered from the Census Bureau)

In fairness: if you look at the population of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, the Boston metro area is 10th rather than in the 20s. The metro area stretches west to Worcester, north to southern New Hampshire, and south to Rhode Island, last I checked.

Boston should be proud that it’s growing at a healthy clip (healthier than the Commonwealth’s growth rate as a whole). Personally, I’ll be a lot happier when the suburbs shrink and the city grows.

1. The Yglesias Method still works. The ratio of people who use the stupid, default method — the one I used from the first time I ever rode Amtrak out of Penn Station until approximately Thanksgiving of 2013 — to those who use the Yglesias Method must be on the order of 100 to 1.
2. With the lead time that you have over the unwashed masses, you can get yourself to the quiet car. Amtrak happily tells you where to find the quiet car. On the Northeast Regional, it’s “adjacent to the business class car”. The only difficulty is knowing where, exactly, the business-class car is. Today the business-class car was the frontmost car; I assume that that’s normally the case when taking the train from Penn to South Station. Though you can always ask a conductor.
3. No trip to New York is complete, for me, without grabbing a dozen bagels at Absolute Bagels on the Upper West Side. Perhaps one day soon Bagelsaurus will deliver unto Cambridge the bagels which were foretold in scripture.
4. It’s really incredibly awesome that I can travel from the Upper West Side to Cambridge via walk-subway-train-subway-walk. I never want to live in a place where I need to own a car to make a similar journey. And I never want to take for granted that, despite its problems, the MBTA is better than what 90% of the United States has available.
5. Momomfuku’s vegetarian ramen didn’t live up to the billing. The veggie ramen at Chuko is the original and still champion.
6. To all my New York friends whom I neglected to see this time around: I’m sorry! I’ll see you soon.

Boston loves to call itself that, but I would like to observe a few reasons why that’s kind of nonsense:

1. New York is obviously America’s real walking city. Sorry.
2. If we’re being picky about it, Cambridge holds a better claim on being America’s walking city than Boston does. (Yes, that may be kind of cheating, given the student population here.)
3. Follow Google’s directions from Central Square in Cambridge to Deep Ellum in Allston, and you will regret the day you ever thought of walking in Boston. (The presence of a rail yard along your route might begin to suggest the difficulty.)
4. The intersection at Charles/MGH was just not meant for walkers. And there’s a series of ugly footbridge hacks around there to get you onto and off of the Esplanade. “A series of ugly hacks” defines a large part of Boston. (Sorry, I love this city, and I would like to raise a family here, but let’s be honest about this place.)
5. The snow. It’s only been falling around here for 400 years or so. Give it another 400 and the city may figure out how to make sidewalks walkable in its presence.

Boston cab drivers spent May 22nd protesting, rather than making their service better. I’ve taken a lot of cabs here in my time, and the story is the same every time: Rude drivers. Crazy drivers. Unsafe drivers. Drivers with gross, unclean cars. Drivers whose credit-card machines mysteriously stop working right when you need them to work. Drivers who won’t take you from Boston to Cambridge, or vice versa, out of the legitimate fear that they’ll have to deadhead (i.e., that when they take someone from Boston to Cambridge, they can’t then pick someone up in Cambridge and return them to Boston, because Boston cab laws are stupid).

I’m no expert, but this system doesn’t seem to benefit the cabbies. Medallions, 20% of which are in the hands of a single company (Boston Cab) cost $625,000. It’s a giant scam benefiting only a few people.

Uber, on the other hand, has been almost unfailingly great. I’ve taken both the black cars and the cheaper UberX; under the latter scheme, Joe Schmoe can pick you up in his ordinary car, provided it passes certain tests: it has to be reasonably new, and apparently Uber gets on the drivers about keeping their cars in shape or getting new ones. And apparently the company has very low tolerance for poor drivers. Tonight I had my first unsatisfactory experience with an UberX or black-car driver; within a few minutes of submitting the review, I’d received a personal, apologetic email from Uber, assuring me that they’d contact the driver and tell him to clean up his act. Otherwise the batting average has been 1.000.

Markets don’t always work. But in this case we have every reason to believe that they will: there’s a nimble entrant up against an underperforming monopolist. Let Uber continue to be Uber, and maybe cab companies will get it together. Or maybe they won’t, in which case the Boston cab industry should go away.

“And this time next year, on the third Monday in April, the world will return to this great American city to run harder than ever, and to cheer even louder, for the 118th Boston Marathon. Bet on it.”

Attention conservation notice: 1800 words on how-to instructions for Nest products, leading into some thoughts on being afraid of things you don’t know how to do, leading into some thoughts on needing a mentor, leading into an idea for a bartered mentoring scheme.

Me, I’m not so good at the handyman stuff. Which is something of a shame, because I’m sort of the landlord-in-residence at the apartment that I rent from my friends. But the smoke detectors needed to be upgraded: the existing ones start screaming when the wind blows the wrong way, and the Nests promise that you can silence them easily when all you’re doing is burning some toast (they call this the “Nest Wave”; they’ve recently remotely disabled it).

Marco Arment doesn’t think the Nest Protect solves any real problem, because “If your smoke detector has too many false alarms, moving it is going to be a far more effective upgrade. And if you cant move it, you probably also cant replace it.” It’s a fair cop. It’s even fairer to note that the existing crappy Kidde smoke detectors already had a “hush mode”, which was supposed to do what the Nest Wave does. My only hope here is that a higher-end product, from a company that seems to want to establish a relationship with its customers, is more likely to deliver on the promise.

Add to this the fact that everyone who owns a Nest thermostat loves it, and that (I assume) there are increasing returns to owning more Nest devices: if nothing else, the Nest smoke detectors can communicate with each other wirelessly. Altogether, it seemed like there were good reasons to go all-in on Nest products: I bought seven of the smoke detectors and one thermostat.

Before I go into the handyman aspect of this, which is the whole point of the post, let me just note that the thermostat is beautiful. It’s packaged with the same loving care that Apple puts into their products; the product is elegantly simple (again, like an Apple product); and it has a remarkably pleasing weight.

Installing the thermostat was really quite easy. The basic gist of the installation routine is just

1. Pay attention to which color wires go into which marked terminals (Y1, G, Rh, etc.). Take a photo with your phone.
2. Turn off the power to your house, so that you don’t die. (I think I could have just killed the power to the furnace, but I didn’t know for sure.)
3. Remove the old thermostat.
4. Put the new thermostat base on, and level it with the handily included bubble level.
5. Plug the wires into the appropriate terminals.
6. Put the new thermostat on the base.
7. Turn the power back on.
8. Go through a little dance to configure it.

It was basically painless. The only pain, really, was that I had to strip some wires. The wiring diagram from Nest (included at right) suggests that your segments of wire will be perfectly straight, will be cut to exactly the lengths you need, and will have the appropriate lengths of exposed copper. Mine did not meet these criteria. The first couple times I tried wiring it up and turning the power back on, I got the dreaded error 24, which seemed to mean that I hadn’t wired things up properly. This has to do with the Rh wire, apparently. I gather that the ‘h’ stands for ‘heating’. Unsure what the ‘R’ stands for. Now that I’ve played with this stuff, I would like to understand more about what I just did. If anyone has any books you’d recommend here, do let me know.

In any case, I had to shorten some wires so that they’d make nice straight segments. Then I had to strip the shielding off the ends, so that they’d conduct when put in contact with the terminals. With that done, everything went smoothly.

The Nest UI is really cool. One of the screens showed me which wires were connected to which terminals, thereby revealing to me that my Nest wasn’t ready to control the apartment’s air conditioning. (Maybe it was the Y1 wire? I forget.) So I took off the thermostat, killed the power — probably excessive, but still — stripped a bit more shielding, put the wire back in, put the thermostat back on, and voilà: the device showed me that it now saw a wire where it expected to find one, and told me on another screen that it could now control the A/C. Brilliant.

Putting in a smoke detector was even easier, though it was exhausting to bend my head back to look up at the ceiling and screw a bunch of stuff in above my head; I now know exactly how Michelangelo felt.

Here the only steps were

1. Kill the power.
2. Take the old backplate to the old smoke detector off the ceiling.
3. Screw in the new backplate.
4. Remove the old wire nuts that connect the existing black, white, and red wires.
5. Pair the new Nest black wire with the existing black wire and the new white wire with the existing white wire, and put the new wire nuts on over the existing wires. Then put a wire nut over the existing red interconnect wire: the Nest thermostat doesn’t need it; Nest uses 802.15.4 to connect devices wirelessly. I seem to recall reading that it uses your home WiFi to connect until all the thermostats are Nest, but that doesn’t 100% make sense to me: what happens if your WiFi router is down? In any case, Nest doesn’t use the red wire.
6. Install the Nest smartphone app and tell it that you want to add a smoke detector. It’ll ask you to take a photo of the QR code on the back of the device. After you’ve done that, it’ll tell you the ESSID of the device’s ad-hoc wireless network; connect to that ESSID through your phone’s WiFi control. (You may need to press the button on the smoke detector; the blue ring will light up, and within a few seconds the ad-hoc network will show up on your phone.)
7. Connect the power cable (which is hanging off the black and white wires) to the Nest.
8. Tuck all the cables away in the ceiling, and twist the Nest onto the ceiling.

And you’re done! There’s a little smartphone-app / website dancing to do here, but that’s all obvious.

I’ll admit to you that I was a little scared of installing this. What if I do something wrong? What if I disable our smoke detectors? It helped me a little that our existing smoke detectors were all but disabled, because they went off too often to do anyone any good.

As a general matter I think I’m too scared in my life of doing things wrong. This fear leads often to procrastination, which of course only makes the problem worse: you’re still scared of doing things wrong, but now you’re just going to have to worry about it for longer. And if it’s like most things in your life, the obligation won’t go away; that thing at work that you’re concerned you might fail on is now something that you might fail on after having avoided it for too long. So now you have other people thinking you can’t do it, which makes you look stupid or incapable in front of other people, which is (to my mind) worse than merely fearing your own incapacity.

You see how badly this turns out. In many cases I think I need a mentor to help me get over the hurdle: someone who will show me the ropes and convince me that in fact I know what I’m doing. Mentors are incredibly valuable; had I gone off on my own to learn Linux, without Adam watching over my shoulder, the whole bizarre Unix universe would have probably seemed too daunting to get started on, and I might have ditched it. And I wouldn’t have built the reasonably successful career I’ve been on ever since.

So it is with home-repair stuff. It’d be fun to put together a list of things I want to do around this apartment, then invite someone over to be by my side while I do them. They’d tell me things I should do differently, the corners I could cut, the shortcuts I could take, the extra little bit of hardware that, if I bought it (or borrowed it from a municipal library), would radically speed up my work. That would lower the difficulty of tasks in the future, which would lower my fear, which would mean I could do more on my own. Increasing returns! Indeed, this home-improvement coach would hopefully be someone who could tell me all the things that could be improved in my apartment that I just don’t see because I’ve not been trained. Hiring someone to train you on these things — without going to a vo-tech school, say — would be hugely great. I believe there are bicycle shops in Cambridge that do that: you can pay them $n to repair your bike, or pay them $m (where 0 <= m < n) to teach you how to repair your own.

Jeez. Writing this out puts me in a mind to construct some kind of community mentoring scheme. I could mentor people in what I know well (computer stuff, say); they could mentor me in what they know well and that I need help on, like carpentry or interior decorating or electrical work or plumbing. The first retort that comes to mind on this is "How do you know you're getting the right training from these people?" In principle you should ask the same question of Harvard or MIT professors, but those institutions are assumed to have vetted their staff properly. As for the Adams of the world, teaching people Linux … well, I knew Adam, so that solved that. In any case, the proper solution here would be Yelp for education, essentially. I teach you about Linux, and you rate how well you liked my teaching. Or maybe we find some more objective way to evaluate whether you learned what I ostensibly taught. E.g., you should be able to answer the question "how do you list the contents of a directory at the Unix shell?" after I'm done teaching you. And so forth. Combine a community mentoring scheme with a community library of tools (borrow a drill for an hour from the library, say), and you've got something really cool.

Yes, in some sense this is recapitulating the idea of "school", but in important ways I think it's different. It's a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours kind of system. And as described, it sounds a lot like like barter.

(Is 'skill-share' a generic term for this? A moment's Googling suggests it may be.)

I dunno. I think this is worth doing. It's all in the pursuit of reducing fear.

Brief note: when the city you live in requires you to shovel the sidewalk around your home, and leaves open the possibility of fining you for not shoveling, that’s an individual mandate for shoveling. When the city does it for you in exchange for your tax money, that’s single-payer shoveling.

Both have failure modes similar to the health-insurance case. In the individual-mandate case, the city might set the fine too low, such that people have an incentive to shirk their duty. But there’s a social aspect to the shoveling mandate that might be missing in the insurance case: everyone can see that you haven’t shoveled. As for single-payer shoveling: maybe the city would do a poor job of it.

In Cambridge, anyway, the results of the mandate are quite poor. “America’s Walking City” is a really poor place to walk during the winter. Me, I’d love some single-payer shoveling here.

Then, of course, there’s my longstanding gripe about how we choose to account for expenses like these. Charge all Americans taxes to fund the Department of Defense: that’s on the Federal budget, hence contributes to the deficit. Instead require all Americans to purchase a “self-defense package” from a private Defense Provider of their choice, while requiring that the self-defense package provide certain minimum safeguards, such as fighter jets: that’s not on the budget (you’re buying it on the private market, after all), so it doesn’t contribute to the deficit. You can see our way out of all debt concerns: don’t charge Americans taxes; just require them to buy things.

Likewise, Cambridge isn’t charging us taxes, with which it will hire men to shovel our sidewalks. Instead it’s shifting that burden onto us. So when you wake up at 5am to shovel your sidewalk, because you need to get it done before you take your kids to school, that doesn’t show up on the books, even though it deducts from your time, and even though your time is worth some money.

Finally: if the city did this for me, it could benefit from economies of scale. Rather than 45,000 or so households each buying a shovel, the city could buy a much smaller number of industrial-strength snowblowers.

Here’s a compromise: the city continues to require us to do it ourselves, but it sets up libraries for capital goods. The library that’s a few hundred feet from my apartment would open its doors early in the morning on the day of a snowstorm and allow one person from each building to rent a snowblower for a few hours. Seems silly to take this approach: it requires the city to spend money on more capital goods for its citizens than if the city just took care of the job itself. But there’s clearly something motivating the city, at present, to require that we all remove our own snow, and this plan allows them to continue that.