Down on The Farm? We got a minor entanglement with the treasurer’s office that caused us to consider residency stuff there and here. And over there. Residency and jurisdiction are just some of the issues in the air and this one was on the windshield this week.

Virginia permits assessments of personal property to be conducted and then taxed at an agreed amount each year. One of the company vehicles had been loaned to a recently deceased shipmate and while the car found its way back some of the papers didn’t, and why we weren’t liable for the unexpected bill due to incorrect address in another county, we had probably saved money since it wasn’t taxed as much as it would be in this more generous jurisdiction.

Anyway, poking the embers of that sparked the story from ace correspondent Alison down there. She had a note about the controversial rezoning that turned a horse farm into a $500 million data center on 243 acres along Route 3 over by where we turn from The Farm to get into town.

You can do the messaging streams from there, the ones about good growth, new jobs and a green future or the ones about the energy sink on an industrial property fifty times bigger than the spacious one in which we worked.

So, passions flying in all vectors and some in the same people. The effective message streams are emotional. For example, we were operating our little enterprise in a placid agricultural area with gentle rolling hills and lush green. We were there because of that. On the other hand, in the Creative section there are at least five assorted family members connected to the web of the Amazon enterprise.

We took a poll and discovered we would like to have them continue to draw paychecks. And Amazon is hiring down there, looking for servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment to ensure our customers have continual access to the innovation.

So there is that sort of stuff in the background, the steady state of noise. Like the Shredder truck. Management was concerned about the trash problems. The sensitivity about recycling and personal information had bags of things piled up in cubicles needing special handling of one sort or another and having a truck come by periodically to offer bulk shredding was an approach we will try until it becomes unsustainable.

The process is sort of neat, since the process does involve a dump of into a trash can, it is loaded under your eyes into a truck containing a massive grinding machine with video coverage of the process to a screen outside.

Several of the offices were able to catch up on other stuff as their last quarter of personal information was turned into pulp.

Which is when the civic duty thing came up. We are all Arlington enough to know the norm. We are all civic minded, since most of us either made our careers in or on it. Or both. So, we try to stick to process issues rather than the ones about the partisan aspects of why we are doing it. This one was about voting, not the integrity of the national system, which we think has suffered since Motor Voter, but rather the mechanics of it after the semi-truckload of ballots was reported in the 2020 edition and one of the networks offering a balance approach called a key race. Before the polls closed.

Anyway, that was why we vote “absentee in person,” a peculiarity of Virginia law that permits voting a few weeks before the official day at the Registrar’s office over in Clarendon. Timed properly, there is no crowd, identification is required, confusion is minimal and business is quickly done.

That might be an alternative to the mass mail in thing, and in-person at secure locations may be one way to ensure we know who wants vote, and if eligible, do so only once. We routinely produce ID without complaint for all sorts of stuff by force of law for relatively routine stuff. Not requiring it is an act characterized with the usual cry for virtue: rectifying past injustice against those departed by the commission of new ones against those here now.

We got some mail-ins in the section for the same issues that caused the old County to want future money on a past car. They look like marketing junk mail. So, when the Uber van took us over to do the speedy fifteen minute voting process we asked about it. They looked at the records and said some of us were on the list for mail in ballots. We were all eligible to vote so we did and promised to handle the blank ballots the same way the ballots ask you to swear you are who you say you are to the envelope.

DeMille was stern to the group at the Sunday meeting. He said no one should be holding any mail aside for potential future action. He reminded us about the Massachusetts couple who were voting in neighboring New Hampshire because it actually meant something to them. Six felonies worth of meaning. There was another report just in from Michigan that reflected more of something from a couple who cared in two election cycles and three races.

Our Pal in the square state wrote this morning to analyze some of the massive change in party affiliation underway. Some working class people seem to be of the opinion that the party they used to support now is supporting those who don’t have to work at the moment.

There wasn’t a lot of shock about that string. Relatively crude forms of election manipulation have been common in big cities our entire national life. We learned about George Washington Plunkett in school. He was an old school grifter in New York and he explained how things were run in Tammany Hall to ensure New York served the party and guys like him.

Some of the laws being violated now were imposed to stop what he was doing then, so the idea that there is anything different in human nature except a little time and circumstance is naïve. We ought to talk about the nature of this accelerated swing and ways to mitigate some of the likely excesses.

That struggle isn’t new. It is one of the reasons the Framers established the Electoral college, an effort to distribute power in a means that urban majorities would not have exclusive policy control.

But the tech collision has made it exciting not in a conceptual way. It is not a matter of “change.” That is part of the human experience and an eternal challenge. What this has got going is all the old successful themes are able to be harnessed to unique information channels that would have been incompatible in old forms of communication.

Now we can swim in bubbles of data that are pleasant, comfortable and compelling. And mutually exclusive. So, that isn’t some alarmist notion. If will directly affect things work and a demonstration of how things are going to be. Discussion in this cycle has already included abolishing the First Amendment by senior people and a White House discussion about peaceful transfers of power.

So, that is happening in the midst of a data immersion so pervasive that the old notions of privacy have been through the same shredder as our financial records on the truck in the lot out back. The Surprise was not issued last night, or we haven’t heard about it yet.

Or maybe we are just a little worked up with all the noise. The sun is bright and they say the chill will dissipate gently through the morning. We prefer it that way and the surprise can wait until the new week gets started tomorrow.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com