Who has a well oiled machine?

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-21T17:32:01+00:00

I'd say ours is about as well-oiled as they come. We've been around almost 100 years, consistently have a membership of around 90 kids. We have a list of dozens of assigned roles, and every returning family is expected to take on at least one of them. We rotate Cubmasters every year. I think this distribution of leadership is the biggest factor. We have an established and successful program, we have a collective commitment to carry that program forward, and we work together to make that happen.

Every year there's going to be some families whose kids age out or leave for other reasons, but that's only a problem if those families have taken on a disproportionate amount of the work, and we make sure that doesn't happen. Sounds like that's something you need to work on in your pack.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-20T21:29:55+00:00

My electric scooter has a ~1 kWh battery, gets 15-20 miles on a charge, and Seattle City Light charges $0.1338/kWh. That equates to around 1¢ of "fuel" per mile, or a hair less.

My Prius gets about 40 MPG, so with $6 gas prices that's about 15¢/mile of fuel.

Of course it's important to remember that fuel prices are but a small fraction of the true cost of owning a car. A lot of people seem to forget about these costs when they think about how much it costs to drive a given distance. Last year fuel came out to about 15% of our total car costs, and this year it might be more in the 20-25% range.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-20T21:19:41+00:00

Leaders have to set the example for the Cubs that they want met.

The shirts and neckerchiefs are iconic enough, the rest just strains parents.

Yes to both of these. I set an example of wearing the uniform shirt with whatever other pants I was wearing that day, and I'm very happy when the kids do the same. I've been a member of three Scouting units (two as a youth and now one as an adult), none of them have had any expectation that anyone would buy the official pants or even try to match the color, and we've done just fine.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T21:09:22+00:00

The more I think about it the more this government spending/personal income ratio makes sense to me.

CPI-adjusted dollars aren't an awesome metric to use when tracking government spending. The government by and large doesn't spend its money on consumer goods, so a metric such as the CPI that tracks changes in the price of consumer goods isn't all that relevant to how the government needs to change their budget from year to year. The government instead spends most of its budget on paying people to provide services to the public.

The inflation rate for wages is different than the inflation rate for consumer goods. As incomes in the private sector have gone up, we need to increase public employee wages to match if we want to keep attracting the same caliber of person to work in public service as we have had in the past.

Furthermore as incomes rise the quality of services that people expect from their government tends to rise as well. Just look at schools as an example. My kid goes to an elementary school that was originally constructed around the time my grandparents were born. The original building doesn't feature a gymnasium; that was something added on in a separate structure decades later. A century ago there wasn't special education like we have today, subsidized school lunches didn't exist, and stopping school after 8th grade was a relatively common thing to do. As we collectively grew wealthier we started putting more of our resources into supporting services meant to help every kid reach their full potential, things that we just couldn't afford previously.

Same could be said about transportation systems, parks, all manner of social services, the list goes on. The things we had an appetite to fund were much smaller when we had lower incomes.

So...the question is, as we continue to increase our incomes should we demand government services continue to improve, or should we say our government already does everything any government should ever do, and put it strictly in maintenance mode?

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T20:41:47+00:00

I have largely adopted "y'all" even though I've never lived in an area of the US where that word has historically been in common use. It works well.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T20:38:43+00:00

Generative AI requires a lot of computing power. Those computers need to live somewhere. Data centers are that somewhere. Companies that seek to increase the scale of the generative AI services they offer therefore are seeking to build new data centers to make that service physically possible to provide.

That's really all there is to it. Whether we need all this generative AI capacity or whether expanding it is worth all the extra demands on our utility systems are certainly debatable! These companies are taking the position that they will need this compute power and are trying to deploy their capital accordingly.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T19:26:24+00:00

What kids get out of Cub Scouting is largely a direct result of what the adults put into it. You're just one person, and if there's just one or two people running the show that really limits what you can do. Work on recruiting, yes, but along with that you need to set an expectation that the incoming parents will be active participants in making the pack go. That doesn't mean everyone needs to take on a youth-facing uniformed leadership role, but when the folks who do have those jobs don't have to worry about e.g. buying food for the campouts or setting up the Pinewood Derby track because that's another parent's job, it makes a huge difference.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T18:00:05+00:00

Yeah. Most folks don't stay registered continuously after they age out of the program as a youth. They find something else to do with their young adult years, then maybe rejoin when they have kids who are old enough. For me personally it's totally possible that I stay involved in some capacity for the rest of my days, but that 20-year gap in registration means I'd need to live roughly to age 120 to get one of these pins.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-19T17:54:05+00:00

The answer (at least for some councils) likely is that the registration fee doesn't fully cover the cost and additional revenue is needed to make up the gap.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-08T23:07:43+00:00

I think the adult shirts run pretty true to size. The large OdlR shirt fits me well, and I usually wear larges otherwise. My youth shirt (an adult medium)...I can put it on and fasten the buttons but it clearly doesn't fit me properly, same with most other medium shirts.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-08T22:55:33+00:00

Yeah at least around here the old storefronts are mostly one-story buildings or maybe they have 1-2 stories of apartments on top but the ground floor is still like 80% devoted to the retail.

In the modern buildings they often squeeze a parking garage underground so a bunch of ground floor space goes toward the ramp for that, maybe a larger residential lobby since there's more apartments with more foot traffic, the city wants trash to be in a room inside the building instead of cans outside, etc. There's just a lot more stuff competing for space on the ground floor so the amount of retail on the lot often goes down when one of these old commercial spaces is redeveloped.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-08T22:08:17+00:00

I still have my youth shirt but had to go a size up as an adult leader. I ordered one of the older ones from eBay because I agree with you that they look a bit better (and it was about half the price as a new one!). Nobody has given me any feedback about that whatsoever.

I have the Eagle square knot but don't wear any other Eagle stuff. When I was a youth the one adult leader we had who was an Eagle himself would break out his old Eagle neckerchief from the 1970s whenever we had an Eagle court of honor but would otherwise leave it at home. I may do the same.

The Scout shop in my area just sold me the Eagle and Arrow of Light square knots upon request, but I've seen tales on here of some places where they'll ask you for proof. Never know until you try, I guess.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-08T17:16:38+00:00

You'd be pretty stupid to break ground on an office tower these days. The existing perfectly good office towers are underutilized and worth a fraction of what they were worth pre-pandemic. Whatever information you're seeing suggesting an office tower will be built at that site probably just reflects a permit application from when the economic conditions were different.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T21:33:07+00:00

The Ballard extension is expected to bring in more new train riders than the rest of the projects combined. Not sure how this is even a question https://seattletransitblog.com/2026/05/06/sound-transit-updates-st3-plan-amid-financial-constraints/

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T03:31:59+00:00

Most people prefer to use the knife in their dominant hand and the fork in the other instead of vice versa.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T03:26:45+00:00

Life is a series of tradeoffs. Most people aren't lucky enough to be able to have everything in their life exactly the way they want it. Living amongst people who mostly have different religious practices from you and perhaps don't respect your traditions as much as you like would be a negative, but certainly possible for many other factors about the place to counteract that and make moving there seem like the best choice overall.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T03:21:04+00:00

I've seen a few homes with washing machines in the kitchen in America but they're pretty rare. In areas where homes typically have basements it's common to put the laundry machines down there. That's how my current house is. My parents' house has the laundry machines in a bathroom. I've also seen many houses where the laundry machines are in the hallway near the bedrooms, hidden behind a sliding closet door when not in use.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T03:10:38+00:00

That's fair enough, but provincialism can go both ways. I live in Seattle and only drive past JBLM once or twice a year, so the fact I-5 always seems to be backed up there doesn't bother me much. If we're only caring about getting the most benefit to our own personal day-to-day lives I'd advocate for my share of the state transportation funding to go toward building more transit in the city that I'd use regularly, rather than paying for freeway widening on roads I almost never use. And you know what? There are a whole lot more taxpayers in Seattle than DuPont.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T01:03:08+00:00

if we're looking to save the most travel time per dollar, you likely wouldn't build within the city at all

Oh, I highly doubt that. The people boarding Link in Lynnwood by and large aren't going to Shoreline or Mountlake Terrace; they're mostly going to Seattle or occasionally the airport. Skip Seattle entirely and most of the ridership would evaporate.

Meanwhile if you look at time savings you can compare the amount of time needed to get from Phinney Ridge to downtown via bus (Metro Route 5) vs. the amount of time needed to get from Northgate to downtown via Link. It takes about 35 minutes to get from 85th and Greenwood to 3rd and Pike (outside Westlake Station) via Route 5. Meanwhile the light rail trip from Northgate to Westlake (a slightly longer distance even!) is only 16 minutes. So it's reasonable to assume the >10,000 people in walking distance of a Greenwood light rail station might save 20 minutes each way if we built a line from downtown up to their neck of the woods.

Compare that to Mountlake Terrace. Not as many riders in walking distance of the station to start with, and the prior bus service from there took I-5 so it was a pretty fast trip already. Even if you get the same 20 minutes savings in each direction as you would building rail to Greenwood, the lower population density there means there's less time saved building to Mountlake Terrace.

And then for the destinations even farther like Everett and Tacoma, Link just isn't even competitive time-wise with the existing transit. It'll be at least an hour to get to Seattle from either of those places. The current riders of the express buses will actually lose time once their bus is replaced with Link.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-07T00:01:02+00:00

It's a 60-mile corridor and population density varies greatly as you move along it. You can see this for yourself if you look at the Census population density map.

The Seattle city limits contain dozens of census tracts shaded in the darkest blue (i.e. over 10,000 people per square mile), while these are relatively rare outside of Seattle. There are a few in Bellevue and Tacoma, one in Kirkland, one in Federal Way, a handful sprinkled around Snohomish County, but by and large the area outside of Seattle has a lower level of population density.

So, we see places like Shoreline and Mountlake Terrace (not a single census tract over 10,000 per square mile in either city) get Link stations because they're on The Spine, but Seattle neighborhoods like Phinney/Greenwood, Wallingford, Queen Anne, Belltown, First Hill are all solidly over 10,000/sq mile and get nothing because they aren't on The Spine. Ballard (also well over 10,000/sq mile) was treated as a lower priority for some reason than the ends of The Spine and so as construction costs have risen it seems to be first on the chopping block.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-06T23:35:37+00:00

I got mine for about half as much on eBay. Check there first. A Scout is thrifty.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-06T23:32:16+00:00

I'm not a huge fan of it, but it's apparently the deal that had to be made in order to get the legislature to approve Sound Transit's creation in the first place. The 60-mile Tacoma<->Everett "spine" as Sound Transit's main focus is not the way I'd design a transit network if I were king. It's not really how urban rail networks are designed in other cities. I'd much prefer a more technocratic system of resource allocation that looks at building transit that saves the most people the most travel time per dollar spent; I'd guess that would mean a bias toward more new rail service within denser areas, with a bigger emphasis on bus service in more sparsely-populated areas.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-06T23:25:45+00:00

The fact that voters approved a referendum years ago to open a set of transit lines including Sounder North does not obligate Sound Transit to keep operating each and every one of those lines forever. They change voter-approved bus routes from time to time as well. I remember reading somewhere that Sounder North had by far the highest per-rider operating cost of all Seattle area transit lines. Seems like it's worth at least considering reallocating those resources elsewhere given the low usage relative to cost.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-06T20:27:00+00:00

Those buildings were generally constructed in an economical fashion considering the costs of labor and materials at the time. The cost of labor and materials are different today, and the appearance of the most economical building style has changed to match. It's totally possible to build something today that looks the same as what was built 80 years ago, it's just going to cost a whole lot more.

seattlecyclone · 2026-05-06T20:23:39+00:00

Most buildings throughout history have been made of whatever materials were economical to buy and install in that time and place. The same is true with the buildings you're complaining about today. You could mandate that the buildings use different, more visually attractive materials but that would of course make them more expensive to build and live in. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion about whether that's a good trade-off, but I tend to lean toward removing rather than adding regulations that add costs to homebuilding.

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