"Bear Music on the Radio!"

Strange things happen when you put your entire music collection on shuffle. Sometimes, it's magical when one great song you forgot you loved is followed by another, then another, until it gets awkward. 

You know those moments? When it goes from a cool tune to something that's just for you, like that Peter Frampton song from High Fidelity, or anything from Swallowing Shit, or your super-secret anthem.

You want to go to the next song, but the skip button is too far away. It's impossible to casually make a move without drawing attention to secret song shyness. It's even worse when iTunes does that thing where it starts playing the next song before the previous song is finished. There's no time to make a diving leap for the Skip button.

It's shuffle roulette, and sometimes you got the bullet.

This was a common social situation for those of us in the 2000s, just leaving the age of CD shuffle and entering the wonderful world of digital music. A world of downloadable music where you could dangerously venture outside of your tastes, into other genres, and gleefully listen to guilty pleasures. 

We didn't understand playlists. We grew up with mixtapes, which took effort. So, most of us either learned to slap together a playlist without overthinking it or settled with Russian Shuffle Roulette and hoped it doesn't land on a bullet.

This was a problem in my household. My wife has good musical tastes. But, I'd be playing family-friendly Arcade Fire, and as the song would finish, Bane would come roaring on. The toddler gets a little freaked out, and I get a nod of disapproval.

Thankfully, I discovered a foolproof technology that prevents these awkward yet excusable social situations: the radio. In particular, the celebrity DJ on the radio. 

When Burton Cummings plays something that off-kilter while you're listening with your musically-judgemental friends, then their judge-y glares are directed towards the guy from the Guess Who.

If Henry Rollins spins some Devo after Bad Brains, we all forgive him.

Lately, we've been listening to James Newell Osterberg Jr., and he plays some great stuff... and some really weird stuff. It goes from some 70s punk band that makes you nod your head along to something as random and amazing as a Swedish pipe organist. But, I don't get any looks over the shifts from genre to genre. Why? It's difficult to argue with a radio DJ who fronts a band and is mainly known by his onstage name: Iggy Pop.

With the miracle of on-demand listening, we play Iggy on-toddler-demand. So, my almost-three-year-old son has taken a particular shine to Iggy Pop's DJ sensibilities. James Brown's Make it Funky has become "Bacon Pocket!" Listen to the song. You'll hear it. 

But it's Iggy's deep, growly voice that commands his attention. Every morning, he asks us to play "Bear Music."

Some old technologies never get old.

Berlin's New Plattenbauen

Filling in Berlin's blanks with new buildings.

While reading Farnam Street's newsletter, I came across this interesting long read, The Housing Theory of Everything.  

The TL;DR version is that overpriced housing leads to all sorts of problems — inequality, lower economic productivity, climate change, and lower birth rates. You get overpriced housing when demand exceeds supply. 

Like any theory for everything, some of its arguments are flimsy. But there are some takeaways that make sense, like building higher-density communities to increase housing supply in a smaller area.

Berlin is struggling with a housing shortage. Everyone has a story about how hard it was to find an apartment. Prices are also rising. And there's a fear that locals will be priced out of their own communities and the character that draws so many people to the city will be gentrified beyond recognition. 

Berlin has been fighting it in different ways. When we moved to Berlin last year, there was a rent cap in place. It was thrown out of the constitutional court. In the recent election, a referendum passed that allows the city to appropriate property from the large companies that domain Berlin's real estate market.

Measures like that, which run against free market orthodoxy attract a lot of love, hate, and headlines. But, there's something else grinding on, away from the headlines. 

Berlin is pocked with all sorts of bits of unused land. There are swaths of land running along the city's commuter railways. Strips of what was once the kill zone on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall. Empty lots that were levelled in the war, and left empty for decades.

These are all spaces where new modern, residential high-rises are rising, or Neubauen. Berlin is gradually adding high-density residential housing to meet the growing demand, filling in the blanks on the city map. There's just one hiccup.

Berlin's architecture was dominated by big, stone apartment blocks built in the late 1800s (and rebuilt in the 40s and 50s) seem like they were built to last centuries. The housing built after the war feel eternal, but feel like they have some durable staying power.

Some of the new builds are nice to look at. But, having looked a few of them while we were apartment hunting, many feel like they might fall apart soon after you've moved in. They're built quickly and cheaply to maximise profit for the developers. The density pushed by that long-read doesn't necessarily mean quality.

In some ways, they're no different than the Plattenbauen, those old prefabricated East Bloc residential buildings that make seems to make so many eyes sore. The purpose was the same: create supply to meet the demand for housing. The difference is that some one is walking away with a fat profit.

A Tale of Two Elections

 

"Look at those lovely trees. Let's put a sign up in front of them!"

Germany and Canada have elections this September and I came across some interesting stats. In Germany, 41 percent of voters are undecied. In Canada, it's 13 percent. 

What's up with that? Are Germans more indecisive voters? Do Canadians just have their minds made up vote by habit? Or is there something else?

Let's start with how they vote.

Germany's federal electoral system is a mixed-member proportional representation system. This means that you vote for your local candidate, and you vote for a party. They don't have to be the same. In 2017, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union won 185 of the 299 local seats, but only 15 of the 410 proportional party seats. But the far-right Alternative for Germany, the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Left (former DDR communists), and the liberal Free Democrats all got somwhere between got 95 and 60 votes respectively. 

Canada has a first-past-the-post electoral system, so it's one vote for your local candidate who is a member of a political party. The party with that wins in the most local candidate races wins. First-past-the-post is straight-forward, but most of it's Wikipedia page is about its disadvantages.

Often, first-pat-the-post systems allow political parties to form a government with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. This is something the mixed member proportional representation solved. By adding that second party vote, Germany's Bundestag adds a popular vote to the mix that nixes some of Canada's first-past-the-post issues. 

Every vote counts in Canada. But every votes counts more equally in Germany. 

Before he got elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau ran in 2015 on a platform of electoral reform. He was going to hold a referendum on whether to move on from the current system to another. 

But, J.T  wasn't interested in proportional representation. Even though a commision he formed recommended it, he inaccurately claimed it would allow crazy fringe parties into parliament. Germany and other countries set a 5 percent threshold of the party vote that parties most reach to earn seats in the Bundestag for that very reason. So, the Pirate Party, the Vegan Party, the Bavarian independence party, and the Nudist Party must convince 5 percent of the people they're not too crazy to be taken seriously.

Trudeau wanted a ranked ballot system, which his commission didn't recommend and that some experts pointed out would favour his own arrogantly nicknamed "natural governing party." When he wasn't going to get what he wanted, Trudeau gave up on electoral reform in Canada.

Now, how does that long digression come back to undecided voters?

My theory is that German voters are strategic voters. They might have their minds made up for their local candidate, but they're keeping their options open for their party vote. So, someone might vote for the mainstream right-wing CDU, but cast their party vote for the Greens or the AfD because they're worried about climate chnage or want a bit of crazy in the Bundestag.

This makes the elections unpredictable. So, chancellors are loathe to call an opportunistic snap election and stick to the four-year election schedule.

If you're living under the tyanny of the first-past-the-post system, then you only have one vote and you have to go all-in for the mainstream parties or for the crazy parties. There's no splitting your vote on the party level.

That's probably why most Canadians usually have their minds made up. Which means if a prime minister is arrogant enough, he might call an election during a pandemic that no one wants in the hopes of going from a minority government to a majority government.

First-past-the-post system might not keep all the crazies out of Parliament.