New and Old #174
Friday roundup and commentary
Zoning ordinances which restrict the land uses available to landowners are takings just as much as eminent domain is. When used to separate truly noxious land uses from everyday life, these takings are exempted from the requirement for compensation by the police power. Most zoning laws go far beyond this, though, and attempt to separate ordinary and inoffensive land uses at an extraordinary degree of granularity. Retail shops and multi-family housing are not noxious to everyday life. Thus, this shallow motivation for zoning is not exempted by the police power.
This is the gist of the argument, but there’s a lot of interesting legal argumentation here positing exactly where and how the Court erred in the Euclid decision, which found that zoning, pretty much without limitation, was permitted under the Constitution and did not constitute a “taking” of private property.
This is one of the more thorough and relatable pieces I’ve read on the legal question of zoning and the more momentous question of whether it would be possible to revisit the issue at the level of constitutional interpretation, i.e. getting a modern Supreme Court to overturn itself. Which, of course, it has done before.
My understanding is that this would go beyond state preemption and make it illegal for localities to impose zoning at all, or within whatever framework a court decision would most likely finesse. I do definitely understand the idea of local control on this matter, but I also think it’s very tough to argue zoning as it is generally practiced is consistent with private property rights and free enterprise.
Who’s “weird”?, Noahpinion, Noah Smith, July 31, 2024
This inversion of ingroup and outgroup naturally dismays and rankles conservatives — especially educated ones who live in blue cities, but also those who are bombarded with liberal culture in TV, movies, and music all the time. Their everyday experience is as a counterculture and an outgroup, but they still have the cultural memory of when they were the “normal” majority. This manifests as a profound sense of loss and dispossession.
This is an interesting and plausible explanation for why this “weird” attack seems to be working against not so much far-right as very-online Republican pols. But there’s also a lot here about how the culture shifted and diverged in the 1990s and 2000s, and how social media amplifies boutique opinions and works along with economic, geographic, and political sorting.
One of Smith’s points is that our entire political culture has been “weird” for awhile now, and that if you step aside from all of the political particulars, this is one of those upheavals that happens once in awhile in history. (Not surprisingly, Smith compares the Trump era to the Nixon, and of course those men to each other.)
I can’t say if his wandering analysis is correct, but it’s always good to think more broadly about these things.
Who cooks for you, barred owl?, Adirondack Almanack, Steve Hall, April 5, 2021
Every once in awhile, I share a link in one of these roundups that has nothing to do with any of the topics I focus on professionally. I just enjoy an occasional break with work-related topics, and remembering how much is out there. In this case, I like feeling like a kid reading a Ranger Rick magazine. I like owls too, and every once in a great while I’ll spot one on an evening walk. Once, for a span of a couple of weeks, we heard one of these barred owls making its call somewhere right behind our old condo building.
(Fun fact: I used to think this owl was the “Bard owl,” and that it was somehow named after Shakespeare. I also thought “primadonna” was “pre-Madonna” and meant something like “Watch it, you’re becoming like Madonna there.” But this isn’t about me.)
About the barred owls:
The eyes are long, tubular and, and in terms of photoreceptors, have many more rods than cones, which means owls detect the slightest motion, and because their heads are round, wide and without the ear tufts found on Great Horneds, Screech owls and Long eared owls, which break up the head’s outline, and because they have 14 neck vertebrae, twice the number people have, they may swivel their heads without having to move their bodies, it would be very difficult for prey to notice them. While most owls have yellow eyes, the eyes of barred owls are so dark brown, they are nearly black.
It gets scarier.
I gather some people find owls kind of spooky, which I guess they kind of are. But also very cool.
If there are no eels, we can just eat eels, Daily Portal Z, Hiroshi Hirasaka, August 20, 2013
In the spirit of the owl link, here’s another out-of-left-field piece: a Japanese blog post about alternatives to the overfished freshwater eel, or unagi, one of my favorite pieces of sushi, maybe unfortunately. (Have your browser translate it for you if it has that feature.)
The blogger goes to a spot with some drainage ditches and catches these eel-like fish by hand, then prepares some of them in the grilled and sauced style that unagi is typically made in. Did it work?
The color of the fish is mostly white, with the occasional bright red fish like tuna. There are exceptions, such as salmon and trout, which are orange, but I've never seen a fish with such a ghastly color.
Not quite as badly as that bit makes it sound! A fun little read.
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If you're going to eat something far outside American culinary tradition, best do it with your eyes wide shut. That way at least some of the warning signals (weird weird weird) will be silenced.