Mark: [warmly] Morning, morning. This is Ashley River Radio. It's Wednesday, September ninth, I'm Mark, that's Lauren.
Lauren: [dry] Hi.
Mark: There is a tide tonight you're gonna want to know about before you park somewhere clever, and Lauren has opinions about protest permits.
Mark: But before any of that, I have to complain about a printer.
Lauren: [amused] Oh, good.
Mark: So — the plotter. The big one. The one nobody will let me retire.
Mark: Monday it put out a sheet at, uh... not full scale. Slightly reduced. Doesn't say so anywhere on the page. Looks perfect.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: And a superintendent took it out to a site and scaled dimensions straight off the paper.
Mark: With a ruler.
Lauren: [beat] Oh no.
Mark: Yeah. So that was my morning. On the phone. Explaining that the machine lied to him. It's a twenty-year-old piece of shit that everybody in that building treats like scripture.
Lauren: [flat] The machine didn't lie. The machine's been telling you it's done for about three years and you keep feeding it paper.
Mark: Okay but —
Lauren: [interrupting] No, I mean — the failure is that somebody put a ruler on a printed sheet with no scale bar on it and believed the number. That's a process thing.
Lauren: The plotter's just where everybody agreed to put the blame.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah, no. That's fair.
Mark: I still want it dead.
Lauren: Obviously.
Lauren: So did you check whether the driver had a—
Lauren: ...I'm not saying it.
Mark: [laughing] You were RIGHT there.
Lauren: I'm invoking it.
Mark: You're invoking the rule.
Lauren: I'm invoking the rule.
Mark: [amused] It was a scale setting. I found it at eleven-forty.
Lauren: [deadpan] Mm-hm.
Mark: >> Okay. The thing that actually matters today. Live 5's got it — onshore wind's had the water sitting high all week, and tonight's the one that tips over. Seven thirty-one at the harbor.
Mark: So. Where are you not parking tonight?
Lauren: >> [beat] So let me do the numbers, because they're the whole story. Two high tides at Charleston Harbor today. Seven-oh-six this morning, that's action stage. Seven thirty-one this evening, that's minor flood stage.
Lauren: Minor. Which sounds like nothing.
Lauren: And the thing I keep chewing on — it's day four. Four.
Mark: Day four, yeah. Monday, Tuesday — it's just been the week.
Lauren: Right, and the forecast frames it as easing after Wednesday, because the stationary front slid down and it's basically parked over Florida now, and the wind relaxes. Which is true! That's a true sentence.
Lauren: It's just — easing is doing an enormous amount of work in there. The same handful of low streets go under on the same tides every September and we call it minor because it's somebody else's street. That's bullshit.
Mark: [skeptical] Okay but everybody out here knows which streets. You just... you don't go that way, you go up Wappoo.
Mark: [amused] It's a Tuesday, man. Nobody out here's calling it a crisis.
Lauren: Sure. And routing around it privately is how a public problem stays unfunded for thirty years. Who's paying for it? Nobody, on paper.
Mark: [beat] Wait, how do you mean.
Lauren: I mean if everybody who can afford to solves it individually — move the car up the hill, leave twenty minutes early, take the long way — then the number of people complaining stays small enough to ignore. The person who can't move the car is renting on that street and doesn't have a driveway.
Mark: [exhales] Yeah. Okay.
Lauren: Also — if anybody's got beach plans on a rain day, rip current risk is high today. Not moderate. High.
Mark: Wait — even for good swimmers? That's what it said.
Lauren: Especially for good swimmers, because the good swimmers are the ones who go out.
Mark: >> Alright, so — different thing, and this one's also Live 5.
Mark: Did you see city council's reviewing the demonstration ordinance?
Lauren: I read it twice.
Mark: So right now, in the city, if you're organizing a gathering of more than twenty-five people you need a permit from the police chief, at least three days ahead. Passed in twenty twenty-one.
Mark: And there's a push now to either repeal it or change it. They quote a community organizer, Matt Colburn — he says, uh... "I don't feel safe or like my First Amendment rights are respected by the city of Charleston. I think it's the exact opposite."
Mark: And the city's line is it's content-neutral. Permit decisions can't turn on what the protest is about or who's running it.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: And look — I sit in permitting meetings all week, man. A process isn't automatically a muzzle.
Mark: Anything that touches a public street, somebody's got a form for it. That's just — that's the world.
Lauren: A street closure has a process, sure. This is a permit to stand on a sidewalk with twenty-six people, signed off by the police chief, at his discretion.
Lauren: Content-neutral is about the text. It says nothing about who's holding the pen.
Mark: [pause] Yeah, no, I hear that.
Lauren: >> And then the numbers, which nobody's really said out loud. Twenty twenty-five — twenty-seven applications. Twenty approved. Seven withdrawn or cancelled by the organizers.
Lauren: This year, so far, twelve applications. Five approved. Seven withdrawn or cancelled.
Mark: [surprised] Wait, wait — seven out of twelve? Jesus.
Lauren: More than half of them quit before anybody said yes or no. They're getting worn down until they stop.
Lauren: At that point the process IS the outcome.
Mark: Okay but people withdraw for boring reasons. The date moved, it rained, the two people organizing it had a falling out. I've watched that happen with a charity 5K.
Lauren: You don't get to guess, though. The city's got the only records and hasn't published one reason. If the answer's boring — publish the boring answer.
Mark: [conceding] ...yeah, okay. If it's boring, say so. That's fair.
Lauren: And twenty-five people isn't a parade. Twenty-five people is a sidewalk.
Mark: >> The bit I actually got stuck on is the forty-eight hour exemption. So if something breaks in the news, you get a spontaneous gathering window, no permit.
Mark: And one of the DSA folks in the piece asks the obvious thing — forty-eight hours from WHEN? From the first broadcast? And do patrol cars have a news ticker in them telling officers what's still new?
Lauren: [dry] They do not.
Mark: Right. So — my fix, and I'll die on this — make it ministerial. You file, there's a hard clock, city misses the clock, it's deemed approved.
Mark: No discretion, just a deadline.
Lauren: [pause] I like the clock. It doesn't fix it.
Mark: Why not?
Lauren: Because somebody still decides whether your thing counts as spontaneous. You moved the judgment call, you didn't get rid of it. Repeal the thing and enforce the rules you already have about blocking a street.
Mark: Okay but when four hundred people show up on Meeting with zero notice?
Lauren: Then you've got four hundred people on Meeting, which is a thing police departments have handled since before either of us was born.
Mark: [laughs] Okay, we're not landing this one.
Lauren: No.
Lauren: >> Alright, so — related in a sideways way. County council's looking at short-term rentals, and this one I found genuinely funny. This was going around, it's WCSC again.
Lauren: The proposal is that an STR permit application has to list every "designated sleeping area." Anything furnished or intended or used for sleeping, whether or not it legally counts as a bedroom.
Mark: The FROG.
Lauren: The FROG is named specifically, yes. Room over the garage.
Lauren: And the zoning official — Niki Grimball, she's the interim deputy director there — her own example is, quote, someone says I have a three-bedroom house, but I have enough room for ten occupants.
Mark: [incredulous] Three bedrooms, sleeps ten. Come on, man. That's a bunk barn.
Mark: Everybody's known that's horseshit for years.
Lauren: Right, and what I hear in that is the county admitting they've been permitting a fiction for years. Reading the listing and the application side by side and just... doing nothing.
Mark: So what's the teeth?
Lauren: Parking. One off-street space per designated sleeping area, on the property, on top of whatever parking the use already requires. Because unincorporated areas don't have the street parking that downtown leans on.
Mark: [excited] Okay, no, that's actually smart. That's the smartest thing in the whole ordinance.
Mark: You can't count occupants at midnight without knocking on the door. You can count cars from the road at ten in the morning. Parking's the only lever they've got that's, uh — that's countable.
Lauren: [dry] It's occupancy enforcement in a parking hat, and I'm fine with that.
Mark: Sure. I'll take it. Doesn't make anything worse.
Mark: >> Here's the catch though, and this is the part that'll matter on the ground. It mostly hits new applications. Existing permit holders only get looked at at annual renewal, and only if there's already a problem. And the application update itself takes six to eight weeks to even build.
Lauren: [flat] Of course it does.
Mark: And grandfathering is the only reason anything passes, man. You go after existing permit holders, you get a room full of angry people with beach houses and it dies at second reading.
Mark: That's just — I've watched it happen. That's how it goes.
Lauren: So the guy who built the sleeps-ten arbitrage in twenty nineteen keeps it, and the woman buying one house on Johns Island next spring has to pave four more spaces. Are you shitting me?
Mark: [beat] ...yeah. Yeah, and honestly, half those lots physically can't. You've got a septic field, you've got trees, you've got a driveway that's twelve feet wide. There's no four spaces to be had.
Lauren: Which means the rule sorts by who already got in.
Mark: >> Okay, palate cleanser. Business Journal had this — Jane Do, the fitness studio, New Jersey outfit, they do sculpt, step, trampoline, dance. They're taking fifteen hundred and four square feet at South Windermere. Seventy Folly Road.
Mark: Second Charleston location.
Lauren: When do they open?
Mark: Not announced.
Lauren: [dry] Mm.
Mark: [excited] No, I like it! Second location, that's somebody betting real money on West Ashley.
Lauren: It's a fifteen-hundred-foot suite on the second floor of a shopping center, Mark.
Lauren: That's a lease decision.
Mark: [laughing] You are such a joy.
Lauren: I'm just saying — second floor. Trampolines. Who's underneath?
Mark: [pause] Huh.
Lauren: That's somebody else's structural problem and I hope to God somebody's run the numbers.
Lauren: >> Which — speaking of things that refuse to behave the way they're supposed to.
Lauren: Hackaday pointed me at a piece by lcamtuf about negative resistance, and I've been annoyed about the name for two days.
Mark: [curious] Okay, go on.
Lauren: So — normally, right, you push more voltage through a thing, you get more current. That's the whole deal. That's what a resistor is.
Lauren: Negative differential resistance is when there's a range where pushing one makes the other go DOWN.
Mark: [drawn out] ...that's backwards.
Lauren: It's backwards. And the example in the piece is a neon lamp.
Lauren: Once it's lit, you push more current through it and the voltage across it drops.
Mark: [beat] Wait, so it gets easier the harder you push it.
Lauren: In that range, yes.
Mark: [rushed] Okay, no, see, that's — that's why fluorescent tubes have ballasts. That's the whole reason. You can't wire the tube straight to the wall, because it'll just keep taking more and more and it eats itself in about a second. Same deal with welding gear, that's what the machine's doing, it's holding the arc back.
Lauren: [delighted] Yes. Exactly that.
Mark: So this isn't news, is what I'm saying. Anybody who's ever changed a ballast in a shop light already knows this.
Lauren: You know the fix. That's not the same as knowing why the fix has to exist.
Mark: [skeptical] Isn't it, though? Practically?
Lauren: No, because knowing WHY is what makes the weird ones make sense later.
Lauren: You hit something misbehaving that's got nothing to do with lighting, and you go — oh. Same shape.
Mark: [grudgingly] Mm.
Lauren: >> And the bit I actually enjoyed. A true negative resistor — like, a literal minus one hundred ohm part you buy in a bag — can't exist.
Mark: Why not?
Lauren: Because it would be putting power INTO the circuit. A passive component can't do that.
Lauren: It's got nothing to give. There's no battery in a resistor.
Mark: [laughs] Right.
Lauren: But you can fake one. He's got a design using an op-amp, and it behaves like a constant negative resistance... as long as you plug it in and stay inside its operating range.
Lauren: And past the range, the article's words, you let out the magic smoke.
Mark: [delighted] That's the nicest possible way to say you set a chip on fire.
Lauren: It is.
Lauren: My whole complaint is one name doing three jobs. The curve that slopes wrong in a range, the imaginary passive part, and the powered thing pretending to be the imaginary part. And then people hear negative resistance and think it's — I don't know, mystical.
Mark: Bad naming is just the normal state of engineering, Lauren. Nobody's ever named a thing right.
Mark: And honestly? The mystique is most of the fun of it.
Lauren: [flat] Mystique is how things get sold.
Mark: >> Okay but is it USEFUL? Like — actually.
Mark: Because even the article says practical uses are pretty specialized and then kind of waves at tunnel diodes and stops.
Lauren: It's what you reach for when something oscillates for no visible reason. Or latches up. Or draws less than it should and you can't find where it went.
Mark: [laughs] Okay, it's a party fact.
Lauren: It's a diagnostic instinct.
Mark: It's a bar fact!
Mark: It's a thing you say to somebody at a bar and they go, huh. That's the whole use of it.
Lauren: [beat] Mm.
Mark: [amused] You just did a whole thing with your face.
Lauren: I didn't say anything.
Mark: [laughing] Anyway — anything that behaves worse the harder you push it is basically my kitchen in September.
Lauren: [dry] That's a terrible segue and you're going to own it.
Mark: I'm owning it.
Mark: >> Because — okay. I said I'd be at the seven AM biscuit window at Angel Biscuit Co., the day thing in the old Ruby Sunshine space on Savannah Highway. And I was there.
Lauren: You went.
Mark: Seven-ten. There was a line.
Mark: A real line. Out into the — well, not out the door, but like, eight deep.
Lauren: [flat] Six months.
Mark: [incredulous] There were people! Awake! Voluntarily!
Lauren: A line in the first weeks is a novelty line. Tells you people are curious. Doesn't tell you anybody's back in February when it's dark at seven and Emily's doing pizza burgers at night in the same building on the same rent.
Mark: Dude, you are being such an ass about a biscuit shop.
Lauren: [warmly] I want to be wrong!
Lauren: I've said that. I want to be wrong and I don't think I am.
Mark: Six months. It's on the record.
Lauren: Friday, actually. I've had it in writing since then.
Lauren: >> Which reminds me — you cook everything in that one pan.
Mark: [laughs] Every single thing, yes.
Lauren: The cheap one.
Mark: The pan is not the variable.
Mark: The pan has never been the variable. It's repetition, man. You cook the same eight things two hundred times and you know what they look like when they're done.
Lauren: I have a probe thermometer and target temps written on a card and I'm not remotely embarrassed.
Mark: [laughing] You're doing to dinner what you did to the closet.
Lauren: The thermometer cost twenty-two dollars. One ruined pork loin costs more than that.
Lauren: You're arguing feel because you don't want to be measured.
Mark: [pause] ...that's a little pointed.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: Okay but you have to admit this place does genuinely weird things to cooking.
Mark: Dough proofs about twice as fast as any recipe says, because you keep your house at — what is it, seventy-eight?
Lauren: We're not doing this.
Mark: Seventy-eight degrees. And my flour goes strange by August, sugar turns into a brick, and the cast iron I left in the garage found rust in like four days.
Lauren: Your garage is a swamp from June to November.
Mark: [exasperated] Six months of the year, easy! Do you know what it costs to hold a garage at forty percent humidity in September? You can't.
Mark: It's one shitty little box fan against the entire goddamn Lowcountry.
Lauren: Right, but the humidity's a constant. Eleven years you've had it. It's a condition you build for at this point.
Mark: It's the filament and it's the flour.
Lauren: [deadpan] It's never the machine.
Lauren: >> Honest question though. What do you actually cook on a Tuesday when you got home at seven because the bridge was a parking lot?
Mark: [beat] ...eggs.
Lauren: Thank you.
Mark: Eggs, or I go get something.
Mark: Which — okay, that's my whole point about the weekend, the weekend is when you get to —
Lauren: [interrupting] And the best cheap food out here is in strip malls, run by people who have already cooked all day and are cooking again for their own family in the back.
Mark: Yeah, no, that's true.
Lauren: That's the actual Tuesday answer for most people and it's got nothing to do with anybody's technique.
Lauren: >> Okay, few quick ones and we'll get out.
Lauren: SC Daily Gazette had a study from the state employment agency on where graduates end up. Over the past fifteen years or so, more than sixty percent of South Carolina college grads are working in state the year after they graduate.
Lauren: By year three, that's ten points lower. By year five, less than half.
Mark: Year three's when people move for money, though. That's — everybody does that, I did that.
Lauren: Sure. But nobody in Columbia's standing up and calling a ten-point drop by year three a retention success.
Lauren: They're going to quote the sixty percent and stop.
Mark: [laughs] Yeah, that's the number that goes on the slide.
Lauren: We keep them until they price out or somebody outbids us. That's the finding, that's the whole finding.
Mark: The bit I liked — they tracked whether people work in their actual field. Lawyers, architects, health care, they line up. And then English majors quietly turning into paralegals.
Lauren: [amused] Which is, honestly, a good outcome for everybody except the English department.
Mark: >> Alright, and one that isn't funny. Same paper. Redcliffe — the state historic site. There were two slave quarters buildings left out of four, and one of them was a hundred and sixty-nine years old.
Mark: September twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-four, Helene comes through as a tropical storm, seventy-five mile an hour winds, and a cherry bark oak over two hundred years old comes down on it. Flattened it.
Lauren: [flat] Mm.
Mark: And descendants of the people enslaved there, and of the sharecroppers, had been gathering in that room every year for more than a decade.
Mark: The state parks director, Joy Raintree, says at its height there were close to a hundred people coming — New York, Minnesota, California.
Lauren: To sit in that specific room.
Mark: Right, and eat, and read through documents about how their families lived. And now there's one building left and no square.
Mark: So — last month a legislative spending panel approved seven hundred fifty-five thousand in federal historic preservation grant funds to rebuild it.
Lauren: Good. Genuinely good.
Lauren: [flat] Two years and a panel vote to release money that exists for exactly this. That's bullshit and I'm not softening it.
Mark: [exhales] Yeah. Two years, man.
Lauren: Every one of those years is a gathering that didn't happen for people who are, you know — some of them are elderly.
Lauren: That's a real cost and it's not logged anywhere, because nobody has to log it.
Mark: >> Okay, let's go out on something light. Business Journal — four Clemson students won Coca-Cola's forty-eight hour packaging competition.
Lauren: Doing what?
Mark: Rethinking the fountain drink for delivery. Their thing's called "A Glassic Taste," it's paperboard, and it keeps the ice in a separate compartment so your Coke shows up cold and not watered down.
Lauren: [curious] Huh. That's a real problem, actually.
Mark: [excited] It's a great fix, though! First place AND the Sponsor's Choice.
Lauren: So Coca-Cola got its delivery problem prototyped overnight by four undergrads.
Mark: ...for a certificate.
Lauren: [dry] Mm. Suitable for framing.
Mark: [laughs] Okay, that's a little shitty when you put it that way.
Lauren: I'm not taking it off them, they did the work.
Lauren: I'd just like to know who owns the drawing.
Mark: [amused] Fair.
Lauren: >> Alright, that's us. Thanks for listening, we're back Friday the eleventh.
Lauren: And — seven thirty-one tonight, minor flood stage at the harbor. You know the spot where it comes up. Don't leave the car in it. Saltwater doesn't come back out of a car.
Mark: Rip currents too, if anybody's got beach plans.
Lauren: High risk, yeah. Stay out of the ocean and off the low streets.
Mark: [warmly] See y'all Friday.
Lauren: Bye.