Rants

Be a custodian of liberty in our community. Vote yes on 6c.

Jeromey Balderrama

As the son and husband of public educators, I can attest first-hand to the importance of schools, but lest we forget the critical development in the first years of a child’s life. These years are so important that many parents put their careers and livelihoods on hold to ensure their children have the best development opportunities. What other public institution, besides the public library, is as committed to resourcing parents and facilitating this crucial stage? After volunteering in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom, it becomes evident just how much of a head start reading gives our young children.

Libraries give people access to tools, materials, and resources that are not affordable or practical to individually own. When my parents were growing up, it was encyclopedias and reference materials. For me, it was PC’s and fast Internet. Today, it’s maker spaces with 3D printing, electronics tinkering, video and audio production. Do you remember when you unlocked a hidden talent that you never knew, discovering a passion changed the trajectory of your education, your career, your life? What resources were made available to you at the time?

We live in an age where we’ve never had more convenient access to the world’s information, or the ability to communicate across vast distances, yet somehow many feel more isolated. Like all of us, our youth are looking for ways to feel more connected, maintain community, with healthy in-person relationships. The library is also evolving to serve that need with designated gathering and collaboration spaces for groups of all ages to feel welcome.

Our community is blessed with a library that not only embraces this mission but excels at it. The Clearview staff demonstrates resourcefulness in offering rich, diverse, accessible programming for all ages – but they are at their limits. Originally built for a town of 10,000, the current facility struggles to keep up with a district that’s tripled in size.  Paramount programs like Girls Who Code and young children storytimes have to turn people away due to space constraints. Areas cannot be converted for these new needs without taking away meaningful space from another group or purpose. In its landlocked location, there’s no choice but to relocate to a larger space that is designed to serve our evolved needs.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.” We need to demonstrate wisdom, accept the growth, and be bold in supporting our next generations. As a fiscal conservative that relishes a limited federal government, I am also a fierce localist that realizes we each must do our part to shape our community. These principles don’t need to be at odds. There is much debate about “need” vs. “want”, but we really need to talk about what our community deserves.  I’d like to think we’re a virtuous citizenry that takes care of each other, providing adequate facilities to serve our growing community,safeguarding for the future. A localist can be pro-schools, pro-safety, pro-water and pro-library, all at the same time. Being proactive and investing now ensures we maximize our return, rather than wait years and only get 80% while spending the same amount.

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” -James Madison.

Be a custodian of liberty in our community. Vote yes on 6c.

Why Google Chat won’t fix messaging

Jeromey Balderrama

Exclusive: Chat is Google’s next big fix for Android’s messaging mess

The fact that they’re looking to fix Android’s messaging mess and not everyone’s messaging mess is why this will probably fail yet again.

Real-time messaging (be it SMS or real-time chat) is an absolute cluster, not for lack of innovation, for an inability to reconcile the needs of the users over each company’s own goals, resulting in some very draconian restrictions.

I’ve been using GChat/Hangouts for well over a decade, in daily conversations with my wife and family.  We have a basic set of needs:

  1. Enabled for real-time chat
  2. Ability to receive and respond to notifications across both desktop and mobile phone
  3. Group chat capability
  4. Ability to share pictures and other media
  5. Have a large user base and a lower barrier to entry for new users

Hangouts has been solid but also is neglected by Google.  Now their latest focus is to shift Hangouts for Enterprise use and deprecate it for consumers.  Supposedly they were steering everyone to using Allo, and I remember being very excited its pending release – and then it came and underwhelmed.  What made Allo fail out the gate was the fact that it was tied to your phone number and only one device, so you couldn’t use it from a tablet, let alone a desktop.  Over a year later Google came up with this jenky workaround to have your phone forward chat notifications to a desktop, but worked unreliably and required you to have the app open on your phone.  Given they hampered a key feature of Hangouts, it all but wrote it’s failed destiny and is why it hasn’t been adopted.

I don’t see much difference with Chat. From the article, it seems to be driven by whether carriers will pick up the protocol. That’s well and good to get Android the same features that iMessage enjoys on iPhones, but does little for anyone else on the desktop or using an iOS device. By limiting their goals, Google will once again doom themselves to failure.

I’ve looked a lot of other messaging tools, but each one has its own set of problems. iMessage is designed to promote the sale of Apple devices, which is why you won’t ever see a Windows or Android client (removing #2 and #5). Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp are all great apps with a lot of functionality but don’t have a big userbase and it’s hard to compel people to switch (with the caveat that WhatsApp is big for my international friends).  Facebook Messanger comes closest in terms of offering all the features, but feels really slimy and intrusive to use – and yes, I know that Google reaps the same benefits from inputting my personal information, but you’ve seen a lot more callous coming from Facebook lately.  Skype has been pivoting more into the messaging space, but they’ve had a bad spam problem and I’m not convinced people’s Skype contacts reflects all of their everyday chat contacts. The only time I go to Skype is to make a video call.

If Hangouts vanished overnight, I think I’d reluctantly migrate most of my activity to FB Messager.  It’s frustrating that Google is one few companies that has the clout and wherewithol to tackle this problem, but they’re hampered by their own blinders.  Until then we’re just confined to the ticking clock of neglected consumer Hangouts.

Why the Broncos preventing ticket printing is evil

Why the Broncos preventing ticket printing is evil

Jeromey Balderrama

Broncos embrace mobile ticketing for 2018 season

In which by “embrace mobile ticketing”, they mean they’re taking away the ability for season ticket holders to print tickets from home, requiring you to use their ticketing system to broker not only re-selling the tickets but any transfers as well.  I always love the PR spin that acts like they’re giving you something when they take something away.

One one hand, I can understand their justification for doing this, and the selling point that this will cut down on high-margin scalping and counterfeit tickets, which is all well and good, but when I heard about this policy change, I couldn’t stop thinking about two formative stories that shape my view of mobile ticketing.

  1. Back in the fall of 2017, I purchased tickets to Mumford and Sons, only available as a moble ticket. It turned out that I had to travel for work the week of the show, and tried to transfer 2 of the four tickets to my wife and the other two my friend. The ticketing system was so shoddy that it ended up taking days of attempts before I believed the transfers went through. Fast forward to the night of the concert, when I got a call from both of them stating that the tickets I transferred to my friends weren’t coming up.  So there everyone was, in line and stressed out about not being able to get in, while I was far away and essentially powerless to help them out.  The concert attendants weren’t particularly helpful, and who can blame them when they have a compounding line of people eager to get in.  We finally solved the whole problem by me re-claiming the transferred tickets, screen shooting them from my phone and texting the image over to my friend – which I should have just done, to begin with.
  2. This time the last year, the Broncos went on a massive audit of season ticket holders, establishing a newly-formed policy that they would revoke tickets to people who didn’t go to any games that year. They used the only data point that was convenient at the time – the NFL Ticket Exchange and tracking the electronic tickets. I detailed my concerns about this last year, but the bottom line was that for all practical purposes, my tickets should have been revoked and the only thing that saved me was the wherewithal of “selling” (and by selling, it was at-cost to friends and family) the tickets through the printed tickets.

Make no mistake, this is about making sure the Broncos and the NFL have the data points for all ticket transactions and can harvest the data for their own purposes, especially for retroactively enforcing policies that they just made up.  I wouldn’t be surprised after next season they’ll take tickets away from someone who wasn’t able to go, transferring the tickets to friends and family. And yes, I understand that there are fans that abuse their tickets by massively upselling them and not attending any games for years at a time. It would be fair to call their fandom into question. However, there are also many other fans that simply may have had a life event (like a birth, a sickness, a temporary job relocation) disrupt a single year of their attendance, and despite devoutly attending games for a decade before, they’re subject to the same revocation.  The Broncos have every right to do that, but it doesn’t make it a complete jerk move and fan-hostile.

Mobile ticketing ENABLES season ticket audits. I’m all for preventing scalping, but if you were serious about punishing scalpers you could send an intern out on game day, pretend to consider a scalper’s ticket and note the seat #, call the ticket holder the next day.  Sure it takes a little more work, but it punishes those who are egregiously violating your policies, rather than the low-hanging fruit of new parents that sold the tickets to their next-door neighbors.

If you go read the article and the FAQ, they’ll tout that 35% of their fans used mobile ticketing last year, conveniently forgetting that 2/3 of their other fans have never used this process.  I’d get it if 80-90% of the fanbase were using their phones to get into games, but don’t pretend they’re not trying to ram something down fans throats that they didn’t even ask for. Don’t piss on my leg and then tell me that you’re making me fire-retardant.

What about for friends who buy my tickets or if I can’t go? Now they’re all going to need TicketExchange accounts and I will basically need to handhold their app experience. Where’s the convenience in that? Now the Broncos are making their season ticket holders your front-line support for your app. I imagine that many more fans are going to have a similar experience to my Mumford and Sons story from above. Emailing tickets to my friends wasn’t a problem that needed solving.

I went back & forth on Twitter with one of their PR reps (and to their credit, they were at least responding – unlike last year), and he was quick to justify that other teams were doing this and that the NFL is moving over to this.  However, the Avalanche, Nuggets, and Rockies are still providing paper tickets with nice commemorative designs.  Even if many more teams were using this system, just because others (don’t) do it, doesn’t make it right. This is a race to the bottom for the fan experience. Commemorative tix aren’t the issue – introducing a barrier (preventing printing) to my “honest fan” experience, all to collect data to possibly punish me later on – is.

This isn’t about being a luddite or not embracing technology, this is about protecting yourself from data harvesting that is only going to be used to punish you, as the Broncos and NFL continue to squeeze blood out of turnips for their money-printing machines.

New Windsor Library Defeated

Romey

The New Windsor Library Initiative, which I adamantly supported, was unfortunately defeated.  After spending this month reflecting on the reasons for the loss, I ultimately attribute it to the following factors:

  1. Members of the community disagreed about the inherent value libraries offer to our community, especially to those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford access to the resources the library provides. Many ultimately decided that the elevated taxes would not result in a positive return on our community.
  2. Members of the community had a fundamental misunderstanding about the Library District, its boundaries, its relationship to other local municipal entities, and the way libraries are funded, both operationally and through facility expansion.
  3. Members of the community had confusion and misunderstanding about how the proposal came to be, how proposed funds would be allocated, and the previous attempts to solicit input and collaboration.
  4. Members of the community did not demonstrate an appreciation for present and anticipated growth, and its impact on current library capacity and their staffing – nor did they appreciate the future capacity planning with the proposed library, seeing it was something that was too large for the present time. I think we only need to look to our newly expanded recreation center to find out what happens when a community expands facilities with current demand in mind, where even mid-morning weekday classes are overfilled with attendees.

    …And finally

  5. Some opponents of the library measure were able to exploit the community’s lack of knowledge (especially for #2 and #3) and instead projected scandalous motives to explain issues that they did not understand. I found it most egregious that terms like “No Transparency” and “No Collaboration” were used when there were numerous public meetings and opportunities for input, as well as hundreds of pages of feasibility studies and proposals were available through the website. Rather than clarify their concerns, many simply used their lack of knowledge as justification for their distrust in our government institutions. While I do think it’s important for our society to be skeptical and scrutinous of our municipalities, many assigned nefarious motives for that which they did not understand, hiding behind their own ignorance.

Ultimately, I do think that our community needs to do a better job to improve issues #2-4, and hope that it can come through meaningful discussion, debate, and consensus towards what is best for our community. I do think there will always be those that fall into the #1 and #5 camps but hope that those can be diminished as we do attempt to improve #2-4. Perhaps it means more meetings and dedicated hearings. Having participated in two previous capital campaigns through my church, having an abundance of listening sessions and solicitation of input help quell concerns that many had. I would be very interested in doing my part to assist in any way I can, hoping that we can continue to provide a quality library that meets the needs of Windsor for generations to come.

More on the Windsor Library Mill Levy

Jeromey Balderrama

I wanted to share some more thoughts that I composed on the NextDoor discussion regarding the Clearview Library District Mill Levy proposal. People brought up some great points about whether we need to build the new library now and why the library can’t finance it out of the current taxes they receive.

I’ll be the first to say that I don’t understand how Libraries are funded, but let’s assume that a portion of their funding of their $2.6m operating budget comes from our taxes, and that revenue may have increased over the years due to additional growth. Even then, we’re still talking about operational budget.

I don’t know how your household works, but if you’re a homeowner, chances are that you didn’t purchase your house outright with 100% cash. If my family was expected to save for the complete value of our home using only my operational budget, it would take a lot longer than 30 years for me to buy my home – and by the time I could afford it, my kids would be grown and we’d be too old to manage a house the size that we needed back when our family was young.

Good thing we have mortgages, where the bank takes a chance on us and assumes I can make incremental payments out of our operational budget for the next 30 years, making a return on their investment through interest.  We’re able to benefit because we can buy the house that fits our needs now (although I’d recommend buying the house you need 5-10 years from now, if you can afford it – but that’s another post).

While the Mill Levy is not a mortgage loan, it enables the financing to construct needed facilities now, rather than 20 years from now, 10 years too late. Rather than getting interest payments, the community benefits by being able to use the new modern facilities now, rather than having to wait 20 years (imagine if the bank said they’d forgo interest in exchange for being able to regularly use your home).

People raise valid points when they examine current needs and weigh them against priorities, wondering if we should wait until the need becomes more evident. However, we’ve already seen how this played out in how we’ve deferred I-25 and I-70 improvements – and now look at how terrible traffic has become. I wish I could go back in time 10 years and convince younger me to fervently push for an Interstate train, or at least more northern lane expansion between Johnstown and Fort Collins. Now it almost seems like too-little, too late.

One last thing to consider: that proposed area of land, once on the outskirts of Windsor, is really the last opportunity for us to have a centrally-located library. The current location is land-locked, and the architecture doesn’t support vertical expansion, without starting anew. We have an opportunity now to choose what’s going on that proposed plot of land. It’s prime real estate, and something is going to be built on it – are you sure you’ll be happier with what’s built there over a library?