Tag: NIMBY

Friday’s Theme Music — Ignored

Ashland, southern Oregon. Friday, August 21, 2026.

It’s a cool 75 F under cloudy skies right now. Looks like it could rain but rain is not in our forecast. Today’s high is expected to be 90, ten degrees lower than what we saw yesterday.

Mom is really down right now. She feels trapped and ignored, and that’s very understandable.

Mom texted me that her PCP told her she looks tired and old. Mom’s claim; don’t know if that’s what the doctor said. Mom also texted me, “I don’t want to see another birthday,” “Why won’t God let me die,” and “I don’t want a memorial service when I die. I don’t want anything.”

Mom, to me, always depended upon the structure of routines and schedules. Now her aging, medical issues, and medications has fractured her norms. She used to use cleaning as an outlet to stay on track, along with writing copious notes on her calendar about what was going on: children’s schedules and visits, appointments, bills due and paid, house and car maintenance. Those mechanisms are gone, too. She’s being told one to sleep, eat, and socialize, and she doesn’t like it. Additionally, she and her daughters who live closest to her have a huge emotional schism relating to their lives together and Mom’s choices.

Mom reacts to the gap with anger; the sisters react to Mom’s anger with more distance.

It’s like a self-fulfilling doom loop.

The closing for the sale of Mom’s house is next Tuesday at 5 PM. I texted Mom to ensure she was aware.

She didn’t respond.

Without real surprise, I see that Trump is encouraging the construction of AI and data centers. Backlash against AI/data centers is growing across the United States, creating an ideological trap for Donald Trump.

Part of this is that these types of sites take up land, water, and electricity, but nothing tangible that can be held in your hand emerges from it.

The other part of the trap is that the corporations often demand huge tax breaks and subsidies for the privilege of building there, and the locals are not usually consulted. That pisses them off, because nobody is listening to them. That was exactly the angry and emotional fodder Trump used as fuel to win their votes; he was speaking for them, ‘telling them like it is’.

Now, as others have done, Trump is ignoring them.

And it’s happening on the cusp of the midterm elections.

Those of us who understand who Trump is aren’t surprised. He used MAGA to achieve political power. Then he used that political power to enrich himself. Now he’s using it to further enrich the ultra-wealthy. There are no surprises there, if you’ve been paying attention.

Trump is breeding discontented supporters. They won’t vote for Democrats — “Never Democrats” is probably one of their most repeated mantras — but they won’t come out and vote for Trump, either.

All this thinking has The Neurons playing “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M in my morning mental music stream. When people feel ignored, they hurt. Released in 1993, the song was written about and for teenagers and what they endure. I think it’s sensibilities are more universal than that.

Sample Lyrics

When your day is long
And the night, the night is yours alone
When you’re sure you’ve had enough
Of this life, well hang on

Don’t let yourself go
‘Cause everybody cries
Everybody hurts sometimes

Sometimes everything is wrong
Now it’s time to sing along

When your day is night alone (hold on, hold on)
If you feel like letting go (hold on)
If you think you’ve had too much
Of this life, well hang on

‘Cause everybody hurts
Take comfort in your friends
Everybody hurts

May you prosper today, enjoying peace, joy, and happiness. Hopefully, you won’t feel ignored or alone.

Cheers

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NIMB

NIMB (Floofintion) – Acronym that means Not In My Bed, employed by housepets to register their disdain for anyone/thing disrupting their slumber.

In use: “Raising her head, she issued a plaintive NIMB growl when another animal jumped onto the bed. The other immediately fled.”

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NIMS

NIMS (floofinition) – a rare floofinition that doesn’t include ‘floof’ as part of the word or phrase, NIMS is a shorthand reference that means ‘not in my space’, which is a housepet’s policy of not allowing another housepet in their personal area.

In use: “The small calico with the white neck and silky belly weighed under eight pounds but employed a strict NIMS philosophy, warning other pets with deep growls that were amazingly effective in prompting meek, hasty retreats.”

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Change, Resistance, and Complacency

Writing science fiction, one area I end up studying and contemplating is change. I was happy to come across this Harvard Business Review (Walter Frick) interview with Tyler Cowen. Cowen’s newest book, ‘The Complacent Class’, addresses how America has become complacent and averse to change in recent years.

I’ve watched this develop. NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – was the rallying chorus to battle many new construction suggestions. Property values and appearances take precedence over more pragmatic uses of land, usually in the name of property values, especially when one small set who don’t live in the area will benefit to the detriment of those living in the area and fighting the action.

Yet, we can see the concrete results in places like Oroville Dam. Oroville Dam was headline news during some of February as record rains struck parts of California. The dam’s spillway was opened but damage caused it to be closed. With water rising behind the dam, the emergency spillway was employed but the visibly fast erosion taking place concerned many. Fears that the dam was going to collapse caused mass evacuation. Many area residents were pissed because the water behind that dam in their back yard benefited others living hundreds of miles away.

Almost as an extension of NIMBY, Homeowners Associations (HOAs), have developed to protect individual neighborhoods and developments here in southern Oregon. A large part of that is the agreement to establish a new development is centered around having an open green space, or mini-park, as part of the development. That park, and the attendant common areas, need a management focus. Hence, the HOA is used. To protect property values, the HOA restricts changes and uses. Home owners are limited to what they can plant; fruit and vegetable gardens are generally off-limits, frustrating people who want to grow their own produce. Some common interest developments address this by creating a community garden.

So, from the economic and social ramification of residing in America in the early twenty-first century, to watching and thinking about politics, to imagining our future, Cowen’s book entices me.

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HBR: And all this is happening during a time when we see a lot of change in technology, particularly in IT and machine learning, and, potentially, artificial intelligence. How does that progress fit with your thesis?

Well, there is a lot of change, but it’s concentrated in some areas. Look at a classic 20th-century notion of progress: how quickly you can move through physical space. That hasn’t gotten faster for a long time. Planes are not faster. With cars, there’s more traffic. It’s actually harder to get around, and that makes the physical world less dynamic. It’s harder to build things in the United States.

The thing that’s much easier to do is sit at home and have all of life come to you. You speak to your Alexa or your Echo, and you have things be ordered. You use the internet. You watch on Netflix. It’s made us all much more homebodies, feeling we don’t need to change things, more comfortable in our consumption patterns. And obviously that has big private gains, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But there’s nonetheless a collective effect that I think is worrying when our physical and geographic spaces become less dynamic, less mobile, less intermixed. And that’s the America we’re seeing today.

Read the entire short, engaging interview at HBR.

 

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