i can't wait for that day lewen!

as for deborah's arguments, my counter arguments are:

paragraph 1) if you're city/area isn't mass transit friendly, it's because demand hasn't been there in past and generally enough interest isn't there from the people. and it won't be any time soon, _unless_ gas prices are/stay high. i see it as unrealistic to think good transit systems would get in place untill people really really want them - bad traffic isn't enough to make most people want it bad enough, since cars are pretty confortable to sit in and people have demonstrated they are willing to commute in cars for hours. basically, those underserved area's are underserved because of low gas prices and the only way to change that is to make temporary sacrafices that will eventually lead to a better system in general. yes, it will take time, the entire structure and layout of cities/where people choose to live/etc is influenced by the price of gas, so it can't happen overnight, so I would agree if gas prices shot to say $7 a gallon, I think the impact could be sudden and hard enough that we might not be able to adapt fast enough and people would get hit hard. but even $5 a gallon would only help to evoke change more rapidly and could be sustained, especially if a portion of that money was a tax being funnelled back into helping with the transitions.

for your personal situation: in addition to the above reasons (hopefully your situation will improve), it's not as though some people driving is devastating - even at $20/gallon we would likely see a number of people driving around. but everyone would highly consider the fuel efficiency of their cars before purchasing, and would search for and support mass transit solutions... but ultimately, yes, some sacrafices will be necessary to improve the overall situation, and while that sucks for some more than others, lets take pride in making these sacrafices rather than complaining.

for small businesses, every time the price of a utility/expense goes up do we need to protect them? and if so, how, when and where do we draw the line? added bureaucracy to somehow protect small business would likely backfire. plus, what about the fact that small businesses can adapt faster? how about the fact that tons of people, instead of driving 30 miles to wal-mart, will instead go to that local small business near by? arguable, cheap gas is the #1 reason small business _don't_ compete as well against there large counterparts! i say, let supply and demand settle this, and lets enforce the legislation we already do have that needs to be enforced against big businesses (i.e. wal-mart employees should be allowed to unionize.) also, there is no reason supply and demand should not settle how much delivery drivers are paid/reimbursed, and this applies to big business as well.

this next idea of pricing differential sounds very flawed. great in principle, but too many loopholes and too complex/expensive to implement. ultimately, if we need to help the more unfortunate because they are suffering without less money, let's help them with education grants, and tax credits/discounts or something. or how about making mass transit free, paid for by gas taxes?

as for those who will still will drive their monsters, that is why gas taxes are essential to cover the negative externalities of fuel consumption, since these are not reflected in the price part. but fuel efficiency standards seem to work as well, though I would still rather see the marketplace encourage these standards by taxing gasoline more (e.g. i think virtually no fuel efficiency standards, but a heavy gas tax such that car buyers wouldn't want to buy a car without good fuel efficiency might work better, though i'm not sure about the full implications of this...). With the proper taxes in place, the Escalade driver pays a heck of a lot more in tax for driving, and this money can be used to improve mass transit systems. I prefer the market place (through a tax) rather than legislation because legislation gets out of date, has loopholes, gets changed for the worse, and often targets the wrong people (who knows, maybe there is somebody with a good reason to drive an Escalade. ... ok, maybe not).

Anyway, we'll see you at the BBQ for sure!
jet

lol. both the linux kernel swear count and your erics are hilarious. stupid grader...

yeah, the grouping of the neighborhood was basically just copied from some other happy hour guide, I didn't think about it much. As for being possible to add neighborhood, the MediaWiki software version I'm using (1.4) doesn't allow easy editing of the neighborhoods and the links that show up on the left hand side navigator (the newer version 1.5 is already out, which I'll upgrade to sometime shortly once it gets into the Ubuntu repositories does support this). But you can easily create new pages - so if you want to add a neighborhood just create a link to the page from the main page. When you go there, it will automatically just ask you to edit the page to create it... I can manually add it to the navigator after it's added to the main page list and such.

Hopefully this will catch on and we'll have a complete and update list!

hey dick, i saw you went to make a change on the belltown page for the local oyster happy hour, what isn't that the one that is in there already for the flying fish? EDIT: Nevermind, I see what happen, you added the entry for flying fish - just forgot to delete some junk at the end of it. I cleaned it up.

holy shit, it's so cool seeing the edits dick's made, the diff function works really well. like he fixed the location of the Flying Fish because it was wrong -haha, thanks dick!

whoops! I copied the Fremont/Wallingford stuff on top of the Queen anne stuff I guess, thanks for the heads up, I'll fix it tomorrow.
And yes, I'll password protect it to at least a basic zoji/zoji password tomorrow, just to prevent any wiki spam.

Sounds like a good idea Dick, I'm thinking about what the best way of doing this is, and I think that what we can do it this- turn the name of the bar into a link to a separate page, with reviews, comments, reactions or anything else random that people want to add about specifics on the bar and their experiences. The problem is that if we try to include this stuff on the tables, the logistics are difficult, and the page might just get to cluttered. I'll start it by change the bar name of Chez Gaudy (in Belltown) to a link and adding my experience on it - see what you think, then do the same for your reviews.

Remember, all you have to do to create a new page is make a link to it - then when you go to that link it just says, 'there's nothing on this page yet, why don't you add to it' and you can do it then.