City Gets Back 0.25 Percent on Investment

Posted on August 20, 2008 by The Apprentice

If you bought a car in 2004 for $30,000, wouldn't it seem appalling if four years later you sold that car for only $75? You'd conisder that a bit of a terrible investment, right?

 
Well, the City of Seattle knows what that feeling is like after it's $5 million craps of toilets sold for a combined $12,500 on eBay this past week.
 
Granted the car analogy only works if that car was known by all potential buyers to have been a haven for drug-dealing and five-minute long relationships between complete strangers.  But still, you get the point.
 
I have to admit, the city surprised me by breaking into the five-digit area, but it's still a laugh that these things that just a few years ago were million dollar prizes are now taking in the same amount as scalped Seahawks playoff tickets.  Even a few weeks ago the city was asking $89,000 for the toilets, but got no bids.
 
Apparently that first posting was just to "stir up publicity," and according to City spokesperson Pat Miller, that hunt for publicity worked.
 
But Miller said the first auction seemed to catch buyers' attention; there were between 25 and 40 bids on each toilet during the second listing, which didn't stipulate a price.
 
I would love it if things in my life could be considered a success when they only accomplished 0.25 percent of what they were supposed to.  Maybe I'll start telling people that I'm a millionaire if you use the City of Seattle success formula.
 
The city should spend the money it recouped on plaques commemorating the worst buy in city history.
 
South Sound Speedway swooped up one of the models, so if you want to check it out, feel free to breathe in a little piece of history we'd all rather forget.
 
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Chop Suey mob beating: when is vigilante justice an appropriate response?

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Seattle Crime Blogger
Mob justice:
Early Sunday morning, witnesses say, a crowd of about a dozen people beat a 25-year-old man outside the Chop Suey night club on Capitol Hill after the man was ejected from the club for allegedly harassing a woman.

Angelo—who witnessed the event and did not give his last name—and several of his friends were walking near Chop Suey around 1:30 Sunday morning, when he says a large crowd attacked the man. [...] Angelo claims he saw someone grab a folding chair from Chop Suey and use it to beat the man. Angelo also says no one did anything to help the man, who was left bloodied in the intersection of 14th and Pike.
It begs the question: is mob justice a fitting punishment for socially deplorable behavior? On the one hand, knowing that you're going to get your ass kicked for acting out has been a deterrent to men throughout the ages, and is indeed one of the driving forces that keeps civilized society functioning properly. On the other hand, too often situations are blown out of proportion, particularly when alcohol is involved - which, as this incident took place at Chop Suey late in the evening, I'd suspect was the case. But we're left wondering, did this ass-grabber deserve the ass kicking he received?

Packratt at Injustice in Seattle seems to have an answer, and makes a good point in a recent post:
I suppose that Seattle is so far northwest that it's still backwards and firmly in the old west, where mob rule was the law of the land and if you were strung up on a tree you must have deserved it somehow. The problem is that... sometimes, the angry mob is wrong and the drunken pursuit of justice is easily transformed into an injustice that was worse than the alleged crime.
It's a tricky issue, and one that I can't claim to know the answer to: while I think in theory mob rule can be a valuable system of social checks and balances, it can easily be blown out of proportion to the point where the beating being administered really isn't "justice" at all.
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