Mark: [amused] So I came through Sam Rittenberg about ten of five yesterday and hit a wall of water — I mean a WALL — wipers on full, everybody down to fifteen miles an hour with their flashers on...
Mark: [laughing] ...and then like four hundred feet later, full sun. Dry pavement. Nothing.
Lauren: [dry] That's just August.
Mark: Good morning, everybody, this is Ashley River Radio, it's Tuesday the twenty-fifth of August, I'm Mark, that's Lauren.
Mark: And the forecast today is ninety-one and a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Tomorrow — [beat] eighty-nine and a chance of showers and thunderstorms.
Lauren: [flat] It's the same forecast.
Mark: That's copy-paste, man. That's not a forecast, that's a screensaver.
Lauren: >> Unrelated, but — router rebooted itself again during that storm last night.
Mark: [curious] And?
Lauren: And I've decided not to look into it.
Mark: [snorts] No you haven't.
Lauren: I have. I know what I'll find. It'll be the... the little cheap surge strip behind the desk, or it'll be the firmware doing its scheduled thing, and either way I'll lose an evening.
Mark: [amused] That is the least Lauren thing I have ever heard you say.
Mark: Uh huh. How long'd you actually sit with it?
Lauren: [pause] ...I looked at the logs.
Mark: [delighted] Ha! There it is.
Lauren: I looked at the logs and I closed the tab. That's — that counts.
Mark: >> Okay, so what have we got today. Polls are open until seven o'clock tonight for the runoff —
Mark: — there's a hundred million dollar housing fund that nobody's actually said out loud whether they believe in —
Lauren: Oh, I have opinions about that one.
Mark: [laughs] Obviously. And there's a thing off the Charleston subreddit about license plate cameras that I think you and I are going to end up disagreeing about.
Lauren: Seven o'clock. So we start with the thing that expires today, right?
Lauren: >> So — polls close at seven tonight. Special Republican primary runoff. This is the SC Daily Gazette's rundown, and the piece of it people keep missing: if you voted in the June Democratic primaries, you cannot vote in this one. Don't drive over there and get turned around at the table.
Lauren: Bring a photo ID. Your polling place may not be your normal one, so check it before you go.
Lauren: And if you're in line at seven, you get to vote. They can't cut the line.
Mark: Wait — what about absentee, though?
Lauren: If you've got a ballot and you haven't mailed it, you can hand-deliver it to the county elections office. Before seven.
Mark: Okay. And this is Darline Graham against Ralph Norman.
Lauren: Right. Norman's been in elected office since 2004.
Lauren: Graham was appointed to the seat in July. Primary two weeks ago was ten candidates — she took thirty-three percent, he took twenty-five.
Mark: >> And the Trump part of this is, uh... it's something. He went to Myrtle Beach and told the crowd to pretend it was his own name on the ballot.
Mark: Then three days later he does a call-in rally and says — I want to get this right — "I asked her to do it. I got her into this whole thing."
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: [incredulous] That's a hell of a thing to say out loud about somebody you want the state to hire for six years, dude.
Lauren: [beat] I don't think it's a slip, though.
Mark: Okay but it reads like one.
Lauren: To you. To the people it's aimed at, that's the entire pitch. That's not a gaffe, that's the product description.
Lauren: "I picked her." That's what's being sold.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah, no, that's fair.
Lauren: And the tell is he didn't dual-endorse this time. In June he split it in the governor's primary, and Evette led on election night and then got absolutely flattened by Alan Wilson in the runoff.
Mark: Historic walloping — that's the phrase I keep seeing everywhere.
Lauren: So first in a ten-way field means nothing. It means you were the name people half-recognized in a crowded room.
Lauren: Different election tonight.
Mark: Tim Scott went on Meet the Press and said he was "very confident" she'd win. Welker pushed him on how sure, and he stuck with very confident.
Lauren: [dry] Which is what you say.
Mark: [laughs] Right? It's the only available answer.
Lauren: Look — neither of us has a dog in this. Republican runoff, we're not eligible, we're not pretending we are.
Lauren: But the structural thing bugs me. McMaster appoints her July thirteenth. She's sworn in. Six weeks later she's on the ballot for the full six-year term running as the incumbent senator.
Mark: That's legal though. That's — I mean, that's just how the statute works, right?
Lauren: Sure. Legal and normal. Neither of those is fair. Six weeks of "Senator" in front of your name beats any ad buy anybody could write a check for.
Mark: [pause] I don't know that I disagree, I just — there's no version of an appointment where that's not true.
Lauren: Then maybe the appointee shouldn't be on the next ballot.
Lauren: Somebody could just... write that down. It's an option.
Mark: [amused] Sure, and then McMaster appoints his cousin's dentist and we all live with it for six months.
Lauren: [flat] Better than six years.
Mark: >> Alright. Housing. This was in the City Paper morning headlines — Coastal Community Foundation launched the Tri-County Housing Futures Fund. A hundred million dollars, five-year goal, Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester.
Mark: And it's three prongs — new units to buy and rent, repairs on existing homes, and capital to finance housing.
Mark: [rushed] And the part I actually like, and I'm going to defend this, is who's running it. Geona Shaw Johnson. Twenty-nine years running the city's housing department. Retired end of May. That is the single most experienced housing person in the region and she went to where the money is.
Lauren: [thoughtful] No, she's genuinely good. I'll give you that one.
Mark: [rushed] And Post and Courier had the number — at least twenty-five hundred affordable homes in five years.
Lauren: [beat] Okay. So do that division with me.
Mark: [resigned] Here we go.
Lauren: Hundred million over twenty-five hundred units. That's forty thousand dollars a door.
Lauren: And her own project — 1555 Juniper, in West Ashley, subsidized townhomes — those started in the two hundreds. Low two hundreds.
Mark: Right, yeah, I know the ones.
Lauren: So this fund is not building twenty-five hundred homes. It can't. Forty grand doesn't get you a bathroom out here.
Lauren: What it's doing is buying down the last slice of somebody else's deal so the deal pencils. Which is fine! That's a real thing! But then say that. Say "we're gap financing twenty-five hundred units." Don't say you're building them.
Mark: [interrupting] Wait, wait — no, hang on. Gap financing IS how things get built. I've watched projects die over less than forty a door.
Mark: You've got a developer, the bank number comes back wrong, and the whole thing goes in a drawer. Patient money at the right moment is the difference between a building existing and not existing. That's not a rounding error, that's the project.
Lauren: I'm not saying the money's useless. I didn't say that.
Lauren: I'm saying the headline number and the unit number are doing PR work on each other.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah, no, the framing's soft. I'll take that.
Mark: But the other thing — and this is me from job sites, not from a spreadsheet — Juniper took years and two full rounds of proposals. That wasn't a money problem. That was process. That was permitting, that was review, that was somebody's comment period.
Lauren: [pause] Then a private fund can't fix it.
Mark: What?
Lauren: If the bottleneck is process, a checkbook doesn't move it.
Lauren: You can't blended-capital your way past a nine-month plan review.
Mark: [beat] Ohh. Okay, yeah. Fair.
Lauren: And now there are three of these things running at once. This fund. The city's Project 3500. The county's own affordable housing trust fund, which was due for a progress update to County Council right about the same week this launched.
Mark: More shots on goal.
Lauren: Or nobody's on the hook for a single number.
Lauren: Three dashboards, three annual reports, three ribbon cuttings, and in 2031 you ask "how many doors" and everybody points at the other two.
Mark: Okay but I'd rather have three funds than one fund.
Lauren: I'd rather have one number.
Mark: [laughs] We're not settling this.
Lauren: No. And here's the thing that actually pisses me off, though.
Lauren: Their own stat. Nearly forty percent of tri-county families are cost-burdened.
Mark: Forty percent? That's brutal, man.
Lauren: That's not a housing shortage statistic.
Lauren: That's a wage statistic wearing a hat. Forty percent of families here are paying too much of their check for a roof because the check is too small for the roof, and every solution we discuss is on the roof side of that sentence.
Mark: [flat] Mm.
Lauren: And the people who'd benefit from faster permitting have shifts to get to. The people slowing it down have attorneys on retainer and a Tuesday night free. That asymmetry is the whole story and it never shows up in the press release.
Mark: >> Speaking of things that got voted on in 2014 and are only now happening —
Mark: [rushed] The library — Post and Courier had this. Main branch on Calhoun closed July thirty-first, and they've hauled forty-seven thousand seven hundred ninety-seven items out of it.
Lauren: [surprised] Forty-seven thousand.
Mark: Books, AV, and the circulating stuff — Chromebooks, hotspots, Launchpads, museum passes. All of it.
Mark: Temp location's at 1142 Morrison Drive, the old longshoreman's union hall. That's about nine thousand square feet. Calhoun Street is a hundred and eight thousand.
Lauren: [flat] A ninth.
Mark: And the renovation is funded out of a hundred-and-eight-point-five-million-dollar referendum that voters passed in 2014.
Mark: Twelve years, dude. Twelve goddamn years and the last branch is only now going under the knife.
Lauren: [dry] Are you shitting me.
Mark: I'm not! Sixteen branches, this is the last one on the list.
Lauren: [beat] Okay, and — look, I'm not mad at the library. The library didn't do this to itself.
Lauren: But whatever fits in nine thousand feet comes down to what's been circulating. That's the only sane way to pick it, and I'd pick the same way, so —
Mark: Right, because what else are you gonna do, guess —
Lauren: — and it still means somebody's book sits in a storage room for a year.
Lauren: And it's never the popular thing. "Optimize for popular" is how collections quietly get smaller, one move at a time, and nobody ever makes a decision to shrink it.
Mark: They say core services stay, though. Computers, holds pickup, returns, collections for all ages.
Lauren: The public computers matter more than everything else on that list combined. That's — for a lot of people that's the whole library.
Mark: [warmly] Yeah. Opening date's still to be announced, which is its own little thing.
Lauren: >> Okay, so — the Flock post. This was on the Charleston subreddit and I want to read the department's line first, because the wording is the whole thing.
Lauren: Quote: Flock "cannot run license plates through the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles database or any other state's DMV database, according to the department."
Mark: And the guy's situation is — what.
Lauren: He's driving his dad's old truck. Dad hasn't driven it in years, missed the tax notice in the mail, neither of them knew the plates were expired. Got pulled on the IOP connector, and the officer came up from several cars behind him.
Mark: [beat] Yeah, that's the camera.
Lauren: That's a camera. Come on.
Lauren: And read it again — that's carefully worded, not reassuring. The camera never has to touch DMV. It hands a plate to something else that does.
Mark: Okay, so — and I'm being genuinely straight here — I run badge readers and cameras at work. I know exactly how far apart "what the system can do" and "what the policy says we do" can get.
Mark: But I'm not automatically against a plate reader that finds a stolen truck, man. That happens.
Lauren: [flat] Nobody bought these for stolen trucks.
Mark: [skeptical] You don't think that was even part of the pitch?
Lauren: That's the pitch, sure. Look at the outcome in this post. The enforcement result was expired tags on a truck that had been sitting in a driveway.
Lauren: That's not crime fighting, that's a goddamn vending machine.
Mark: Okay but the tool's neutral. It's the policy around it —
Lauren: [interrupting] A tool that generates a thousand stops a month isn't neutral. Volume is a policy. Somebody decided the acceptable number of stops per day goes up, and they made that decision by buying equipment instead of voting on it.
Mark: [pause] ...mm.
Lauren: And think about what changed for that guy. The cost of a missed tax notice used to be a letter. Maybe a late fee.
Lauren: Now it's a stop, a citation, maybe a tow, insurance asking questions, and a day off work you didn't budget for.
Mark: And it's titled to his dad, which — yeah, that makes every part of it worse.
Lauren: Which is exactly who it lands on. People driving a hand-me-down car titled to somebody else. That's not a crime, that's how you get to work when you're broke.
Lauren: The convenience here belongs to the department. The emergency belongs to the driver.
Mark: [exhales] Okay, here's where I actually end up.
Mark: I don't care that much about the DMV lookup question, because the answer's going to be technically-no-but-effectively-yes and we'll never nail it down.
Mark: What I want is who signed the contract, how long's the term, what's the auto-renew do, and did one single person on that council read the retention clause before they voted. One.
Lauren: [dry] I mean, I know the answer.
Mark: Everybody knows the answer! But somebody should make them say it out loud in a room.
Lauren: On that, yes. On the rest of it we're still apart.
Mark: Yep.
Lauren: >> Anyway. I'd rather talk about something where the only thing that gets ruined is a rabbit hutch.
Mark: [delighted] Oh, this one's great. This is off the functional print subreddit. Guy models, tweaks and prints a sliding lock for a rabbit hutch. Several hours.
Mark: And the title's basically him confessing — could have bought one at the DIY store.
Lauren: [dry] He could have printed one, too.
Lauren: He says it right there. There's an existing model on Printables and he modeled his own anyway.
Mark: [rushed] Because the cheap one that came with the cage didn't lock properly! That's the whole reason! That's a real problem and he fixed it and now the kids can do the thing with the bunny and the carrot —
Lauren: [amused] The four dollars was never the point.
Mark: [laughing] Okay, fine, it was never about the money.
Lauren: [flat] This is the hobby eating itself and you know it.
Mark: Says the woman with a rack in a closet.
Lauren: [beat] ...that's fair, actually.
Lauren: >> Okay, different subreddit, way prettier. Woodworking. Guy built a twenty-four-foot wall sculpture for an office. Seven point three meters.
Mark: Okay, what's it look like?
Lauren: So the shape's out of the company logo — there's something in there between a K and a boomerang. And instead of slapping the logo on a wall he made it look like it's flying across the wall, rotating as it goes.
Lauren: Modeled the whole thing in Rhino, sliced it into individual ribs, CNC cut. Three-quarter-inch Paulownia, which he picked mainly to keep the weight down.
Mark: Twenty-four feet of ribs hanging off somebody's drywall — yeah, no, I'd want it light too. I've seen what anchors do.
Lauren: And I'm annoyed at myself, because I love it, and it's... it's a corporate logo.
Lauren: I'm being moved by a brand asset. [beat] Great.
Mark: [laughs] Every gorgeous ceiling in Europe was somebody's client work. Every single one. Somebody with money said "put my family's thing on it" and paid a guy.
Lauren: Yeah, no, I know.
Mark: [laughs] So get over it.
Lauren: [dry] I'm working on it.
Mark: >> Okay, Hackaday had a piece — "Anatomy of an SLA Resin Printing Disaster."
Mark: And the guy's honest about it. He put a bunch of models on the plate in ChituBox and mashed auto arrange, auto orient, auto support.
Lauren: [amused] In that order.
Mark: Exactly. And it mostly worked, and then it backstabbed him — the slicer jammed supports INSIDE parts.
Mark: Inside Technic-compatible holes, dude.
Lauren: [deadpan] So the article is a man discovering that pressing "auto" three times is not a plan.
Mark: [defensive] Okay but that's how you learn where the defaults fail! You don't know a default's wrong until it's wrong. Everybody does this.
Lauren: Uh huh. And how many seconds into that were you going to bring up resin versus —
Mark: I didn't say ANYTHING about bed slingers!
Lauren: You were going to.
Mark: I was going to. [laughing] Peeling forces, man. That's the phrase in the article. Peeling forces.
Mark: Sounds like a horror movie.
Lauren: [dry] Every maker post is the same post, though. "I could have bought this. I did not buy this. Here's what I learned."
Mark: [warmly] Yeah. And that's the good version of a hobby.
Mark: I had one fail overnight last week, by the way.
Lauren: What happened?
Mark: [flat] Not discussing it.
Lauren: [laughs] Fine.
Lauren: >> Okay, fast ones, because you have to go vote or not vote, and I've got a change window at eight.
Mark: >> News 2 had this — DOJ said it may send observers to some Charleston County polling locations today. That's per the county Board of Voter Registration and Elections.
Mark: And the board's line is that observers are "a routine and well-established part of the election" — and that's about all the detail in it, honestly.
Lauren: [flat] "Routine" is doing a hell of a lot of work in that sentence.
Mark: I mean, it does happen, though.
Lauren: If it were genuinely routine nobody writes a statement about it. That's the tell.
Mark: [beat] ...okay, that's a point.
Lauren: >> Utility thing. SC Daily Gazette ran an op-ed from the Small Business Chamber guy — they've intervened in every electric rate case since 2002 — about NextEra and Dominion trying to push their merger through the Public Service Commission on a six-month clock.
Lauren: Five months left now, deadline's January twenty-ninth.
Mark: Wait — is six months short for that?
Lauren: For a routine rate case, no. For a multibillion-dollar merger — in 2018, when Dominion went to buy SCANA, that took eleven full months of review. And of the seven commissioners sitting now, only two of them were there for it. Whitfield and Chairman Williams.
Mark: So five of seven have never done one of these? [beat] Great.
Lauren: Right. And the clock mostly cuts out legislative input, which — [beat] nobody rushes a deal that gets better the longer you look at it.
Lauren: That's not a rule of thumb, that's just true.
Mark: >> One more, and this is from home. Stateline's got a series running on the ACA subsidies expiring.
Mark: Over two hundred thousand Mississippians lost coverage when Congress let the enhanced subsidies lapse end of last year. Two hundred thousand.
Mark: And they follow a guy in Edwards — Derrick Clark, fifty-one, Type 2 diabetic, lived there his whole life. He's an at-large alderman, makes something like five hundred a month for it.
Lauren: [flat] And Edwards is small.
Mark: Edwards is nothing. It's a freight train and a barbecue place. [pause] And here's what gets me — diabetes is the cheap thing to prevent and the expensive thing to treat. That is not a controversial statement, every doctor on earth agrees.
Mark: And Congress picked the expensive one. On purpose. With a vote. That's stupid as hell and somebody's going to lose a foot over it.
Lauren: [beat] Yeah.
Lauren: >> Okay, ten seconds and we're done. Palmetto Railways — Tarek Ravenel takes over as president and CEO on September eighth. Patrick McCrory's out after nearly fourteen years.
Mark: New guy from outside?
Lauren: No, that's the decent part. He already spent a decade there running major capital projects. Twenty-plus years in freight rail and infrastructure.
Lauren: So at least it's not some stranger learning the state's rail network on the job, which — that's where the bar is now, apparently.
Mark: [amused] Low bar, cleared.
Lauren: [dry] Barely a hurdle. [beat] That's the show.
Lauren: Polls are open until seven tonight — if you're eligible and you haven't gone, go, and take your ID. If you're in line at seven you're fine.
Mark: And check your polling place, because it might not be the usual one.
Lauren: Thanks for hanging out with us. We're back tomorrow.
Mark: Stay dry. Or don't, it won't matter either way.