pavilion

Spent a weird weekend at Northern Regional War Camp.

We had both taken a vacation day for Friday to pack for the event. There was yet another smoke plume from Canadian wildfires, and the air quality was getting bad in NYC, and predicted to get bad in the Hudson Valley, so we weren't sure until 10 AM on Friday that we would go at all, but I pointed out that it was an opportunity to test the brand-new pavilion that arrived mail-order from India a few days ago. So we packed things up and left Friday afternoon. Traffic was bad getting out of NYC, but clear thereafter. We reached the site (one of the numerous ugly but flat county-fair grounds the groups in the Hudson Valley tend to use for events) before dark and started setting up the pavilion.

The pavilion appears to be very well-made: solid cotton canvas, with solid machine seams everywhere, hand-sewn reinforced eyelets, steel D-rings (or I guess Delta-rings) at the shoulders to attach guy ropes, which are provided and apparently made of hemp (!). As advertised, it was shipped without poles, but it did come with steel stakes (in two lengths, presumably the longer ones for guys and the shorter ones for walls). There's no hole at the peak, but rather a reinforced pad, which means you don't need (and can't have) a spike from the center pole or a finial on the outside. We might do some surgery to change that, since the finial on the outside provides not only decoration but an attachment point for external storm guys.

First surprise: we thought it had 16 roof segments, and it actually had 10. Which makes it more difficult to lay out initial stakes before raising the roof, but not impossible.

The pavilion was intended to be set up with vertical perimeter poles: each roof seam has an eyelet near the bottom, and each wall seam an eyelet near the top, and the spike in the top of the perimeter pole goes through both to hold them up and together. However, the pavilion was shipped without any poles at all (as advertised), and we didn't want to add vertical perimeter poles for a variety of reasons (more stuff to transport, and we've never seen any evidence of them in any picture of a tent before the 16th century), so we had come up with a mechanism involving eye-bolts, washers, and S-hooks to hang the walls from the roof edge. Which basically worked, except the washers I had bought turned out to be too small, so they occasionally popped through the eyelets and the wall fell down. So that was a second surprise.

On our way to the site, we had stopped at a craft store to buy wooden ball finials to screw onto the aforementioned eye-bolts to (a) hide their obvious modernity, and (b) protect the fabric from the screw tips, so (c) I could pack up the pavilion with them in place rather than re-attaching them every time. The eye-bolts are 3/16" diameter (i.e. #10 gauge), 24 threads per inch, and the holes in the finials are 3/16" as advertised, but slightly too large to screw on: I can put them on but they won't stay unless I also use glue or wood putty or something. Third surprise.

The center pole we re-used from our oval pavilion (two hardwood wheelbarrow-handles held together by a 2' length of plumbing pipe) was too short for this pavilion (not completely a surprise -- I thought it might be the case), so the walls puddled on the ground (even where they weren't falling off the walls). And it seemed to me that if the center were any higher, and we continued not using vertical perimeter poles (so the guy ropes need to be at the same angle as the roof), the ropes supplied with the pavilion wouldn't be long enough.

With all this, the pavilion clearly wasn't habitable for the night, particularly with two hounds who might panic and run away if anything fell down, so we stayed in a motel.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the nearest hardware store for bigger washers, longer pipe, more rope, etc. I found a very nice hardware store with helpful, knowledgeable staff and almost everything on my list... except the pipe. They had the right length of pipe, but too narrow to fit over the wheelbarrow handles, and they had the right diameter of pipe, but only in 5' lengths, and they didn't have the capability to cut that kind of pipe in-house. So I tried another hardware store, and then a Lowe's, and nobody had the pipe. But at least I had better washers, and spare nuts, and more rope, and good scissors for cutting the rope, and tape for binding the ends of the rope. So I replaced the washers, and the roof is no longer falling down. I replaced one rope, as a test of feasibility, and concluded that we could do it, but (a) the manila rope is really nasty, unlike the lovely apparently-hemp rope that came with the pavilion, and (b) even with longer ropes and a longer center pole, the pavilion will take up too much real estate to be usable at Pennsic.

Which leaves us with three choices for Pennsic: (a) use our old oval pavilion, which is over twenty years old and showing its age; (b) use this one with vertical perimeter poles, which we would have to make; or (c) finish the new oval pavilion.

I have today off from work, so I plan to spend a good deal of it on option (c).

Recent SCOTUS cases

On student loan forgiveness: the Department of Education has always had the power to forgive certain student loans, so the Court is on thin ice when it says forgiving this many loans is OK, but forgiving that larger number of loans needs to be authorized by Congress. But never mind: the State of Missouri had no standing to sue, so this should never have reached the court at all. Next!

The other two are more problematic.

On a private business owner refusing to build a Web site about a same-sex wedding: there really is a legitimate argument that people can choose what jobs to take, what business contracts to enter into. Particularly in a case like this in which the contract in question requires the business owner to do significant creative expression, aka "speech", in support of what the customer wants. If you run a private advertising company and are approached by the Baby-Seal-Clubbing Cooperative of Newfoundland for a campaign to improve their image and persuade the public that clubbing baby seals is good and laudable, don't you have the right to refuse that job because it violates your personal morals as an advertiser?

On the other hand, that's pretty much the argument somebody might have used a hundred years ago to defend excluding blacks, or Jews, or Irish, as customers from a particular business. If the Supreme Court says the right of a business to pick and choose its customers outweighs the right of a customer to patronize a business that's "open to the public", are racial exclusions next on the chopping block? Can a business refuse a mixed-race customer on the basis of the moral/religious belief that miscegenation is wrong? And if a business can exclude customers on moral grounds, it can presumably also exclude employees on moral grounds (since that's a much closer business arrangement); does that mean a lot of employee protections are out the window too?

On the third hand, the specifics of this case strongly favor the business owner. The race cases in the 1950's were about in-person, local businesses -- blacks might realistically not find any business owner in town willing to take their business -- while Web design is inherently a cyberspace activity, and a same-sex couple today that wants a professionally-designed Web site for their wedding will have no difficulty getting one -- in fact, they can find lots of Web designers who are themselves LGBTQ.

On the fourth hand, this isn't a real case, and nobody has standing. As discussed here, when the case started, the "Web site designer" had never actually built a Web site for a paying customer; she went to court to invalidate a state law affecting the hypothetical situation that she might be asked to build one for a same-sex wedding. When she eventually "received" such a request, part way through the case, it turned out to be in the name of a straight guy who was already married to a woman and hadn't requested any Web-site-design services (indeed, he was a Web site designer himself). Why did this case get anywhere near the Supreme Court?

And then there's Affirmative Action. It's been around for all my life, but it's always been vulnerable to reasonable criticisms. As Justice Roberts wrote in 2007, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Or in fewer words, "two wrongs don't make a right." AA, as it's existed for decades, has demanded a racial preference now that has concrete positive and negative effects on specific people, to rectify racial preferences (and much worse!) that happened decades or centuries ago by a broad category of people to another broad category of people, few of whom are alive to see justice done today. And it's always easier (for both the courts and ordinary people) to see, and rectify, specific harm done to specific people than broader harm to broad groups of people. It's a political loser, and has been since the 1970's.

Another legitimate criticism of AA was always "when will it ever end?" If we justify it as a temporary measure to bring people back to a level playing field, but in practice (as seems plausible) racial preferences in society follow more of an exponential-decay curve and never quite reach zero, then what criterion can justify declaring it "done"? The US still puts a lot of stumbling blocks in front of racial minorities, but far fewer than it did 50 years ago, which was far fewer than 100 years ago, which was far fewer than 200 years ago.

So all my life, I've been not alone in thinking "I agree with the goals of AA, but is there a better way to achieve those goals?" Yes, blacks have been disadvantaged in a lot of ways, but can we target AA at the mechanisms of that disadvantage rather than at its original motivation? For example, many elite colleges perpetuate old racial preferences without mentioning race by preferring the offspring of alumni, especially rich alumni; we could start by eliminating that. And one could certainly apply AA on the basis of family wealth and income rather than race: this would include poor white families (whose ancestors may have been underpaid and oppressed sharecroppers not much better off than their black neighbors), and it would automatically give more of a "hand up" to those (of any race) whose ancestors got screwed over the most than to those who were less harmed. Likewise, colleges could make a point of accepting a certain number of students from "bad neighborhoods" with poor, underfunded public schools; this would automatically benefit blacks in one inner city, Hispanics in another, and whites in Appalachia, all without mentioning race.

Interestingly, the same SCOTUS that just struck down racial preferences for college admission only a few weeks earlier accepted racial considerations in drawing voting-district lines in pursuit of something like proportional representation. I haven't read the two decisions, but the most obvious difference seems to be the "specific/general" distinction I made above: considering race in college admissions affects the careers and lives of specific individuals, while considering race in drawing districts affects the ability of a group of people to elect a representative of their choice without much changing any individual's rights.

Even that is philosophically dubious -- in an ideal world, government and law would be race-blind, so anything race-conscious they do to reach that ideal world is suspect -- so a better answer for the voting-district question is a voting system that automatically produces proportional representation, not only by race but by any criterion the voters find important. I discussed this at this post.