There\u2019s a notice of transfer of license in the window of the public house of my frequency. It\u2019s not a good sign. It\u2019s the only place I found reliably offering Irish music on a Sunday evening, and it\u2019s easy to get there and back, and if it stops being an Irish bar I don\u2019t know quite what I\u2019m going to do with myself. Yes, I can fill up the insulated growler for $14 and have all the beer I need of a Sunday evening at home reading in the recliner with the headphones on, but sometimes there\u2019s just no substitute for potato skins and Guinness and someone with actual stringed instruments plinking out \u201cWhiskey In The Jar.”<\/p>\n
This reminds me of the news a few weeks back that Wal-Mart was closing about a hundred stores in the United States. \u00a0You don\u2019t see much of Wally World in this part of the country – there\u2019s one in the less fashionable end of Mountain View but I literally couldn\u2019t name another location and there are at least three Target stores more readily accessible – but there are places I used to live where closing the Wal-Mart means a torpedo at the waterline of competitive commerce in at least a twenty-mile radius. In places where main-street commerce went down a couple decades ago at the hand of the Beast of Bentonville, losing your Wal-Mart is a nontrivial hit.<\/p>\n
And that in turn puts me in mind of Uber, slowly meat-grinding the taxi sector even as it struggles to avoid the twin perils of regulation and an IPO which might mark it to market as less valuable than General Motors. What happens when Uber becomes the entirety of \u201ctransit\u201d in an area and then either folds or decides it\u2019s unprofitable to continue service? To be honest, Uber coming to Birmingham alarms me simply because Birmingham needs improved transit infrastructure, and while the bones of a viable streetcar system are still present in the east-to-west layout, you\u2019re never going to get uptake from people with money if they\u2019re counting on just pushing a button on the app.<\/p>\n
The moral, I guess, is that if you have to put your eggs in one basket, that basket had better be triple-walled vibranium alloy sunk into bedrock with an Aegis-grade radar-guided antimissile defense. There aren\u2019t a lot of those baskets around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s a notice of transfer of license in the window of the public house of my frequency. It\u2019s not a good sign. It\u2019s the only place I found reliably offering Irish music on a Sunday evening, and it\u2019s easy to get there and back, and if it stops being an Irish bar I don\u2019t know … <\/p>\n