Seattle Surveillance Technologies Up for Public Review

Someone pointed out to me on Twitter that there's probably still more fingerprinting happening behind the scenes here, so worth noting as well.

Still happy to be corrected. :)

I can only address this for the Duvall area, but I can't agree with this statement. According to the latest city council meetings I was at, we're slated for >11% YoY growth in population (mandated at a higher level of govt, to my understanding, and without commensurate increases in funding), but have consumed our road repair funding for the next 5 years. This not including regular shutdown of the only two roads across the river, for which we have to beg Redmond to fund repairs for if issues happen, not even getting INTO the boondoggle that was the novelty hill switchback being built at half bandwidth due to legal/contractor malfeasance. (I'm also frankly, as you say, still bitter that the train buildout didn't start years ago, going back home to philly and being able to easily get into center city from >hour out via train is _such a relief_)

Enforcement was actually less my issue than how they've handled licencing. There was IIRC a lottery for licensing and they didn't take into account actual grower realized capacity, which alongside some very high tax levels, puts it non-competitive with the black market, has lowered quality and availability, and makes it very difficult to create new businesses.

I'd certainly agree with "Reasonably well managed" and would hope my complaints don't paint over the successes that I also mentioned. As you say with the city council grandstanding (and I'd mention some of the corruption in the ports prior) there are some pockets of issues, and that's why I try to "stay hungry" as it were for being on my local govts to improve themselves.

For comparison, my parents' road in South Carolina is less than 5 miles from a major downtown and has a pothole in it that disabled an ambulance a few years ago. The pothole has been there for at least a decade.

People who live here have no idea how good they have it.

But I'm be quite weary of criticisms against city's handling of their homeless populations, given the issue is a box of hand grenades, all with different timing mechanisms that must be diffused the moment it's opened.

The most vocal political actors around the issue are generally highly empathetic activists averse to almost any form of outcome oriented case management, metric collection or conditional aid policies; and those that vociferously oppose all forms of state-driven social aid.

Cities that pander to the first, compassion-oriented constituency tend to risk becoming a dumping ground for the region's less compassionate actors, and cities that pander to the other tend to dump their homeless populations on the more compassionate ones. This means that whoever tries to solve the issue first inevitably finds their public/private resources strained beyond reason.

Attempts to reconcile the two perspectives usually satisfy no one, and more often than not seem to produce counterproductive and Byzantine bureacratic mazes that ultimately produce little to no positive outcomes and lack the flexibility to adapt their social services on a case by case basis.