How to Lie with Statistics

Since 1980, the Main Street Movement has resulted in $115.27 billion reinvested locally, 181,647 net new businesses, 815,894 net gain in jobs, 345,801 buildings rehabbed, and 37.3 million volunteer hours.

37.3 million volunteer hours over 45 years for 1600 Main Street organizations is slightly less than ten hours per week per town. 

That figure is no doubt WRONG because they didn't have 1600 chapters from day one, but those impressive sounding figures are extremely misleading. It sounds big because they are trying to make it sound big by giving you aggregate figures for the life of the nationwide program.

But I'm not impressed. I did volunteer work for tagfam.org and we had a lot more than ten hours of volunteer work per week. Valorie King was asking ten hours per week per volunteer and had dozens of volunteers enthusiastically doing more than ten hours apiece because they valued what this group of email lists was doing for them.

ONE enthusiastic volunteer can do TEN hours a week every week if they are retired and love your program. That's not an indication of community wide adoption with loads of locals showing up.

Actually, they don't even need to love your program. They can just kind of like it and be bored and have nothing better to do.

I also don't see where volunteer hours is a meaningful metric for an organization nominally doing economic development. It's unpaid labor and it doesn't actually measure anything.

People showed up and spent time there. Volunteer labor is labor not really tied to any meaningful metric beyond "people showed up." 

If you have a paid job, they track a lot more metrics than "You clocked in and warmed a seat." They have tasks you need to accomplish and they have tons of ways to check if you are accomplishing anything.

I've done a lot of volunteer work and in my experience if you are at all competent at anything, you can write your own ticket and do just about any damn thing that floats your boat. People are happy to get free stuff. If you are doing ANYTHING remotely constructive and giving it away for FREE, people almost always say "yes" to that deal.

Nonprofit organizations are infamously prone to program drift and that's part of why. Doing anything in this world is hard. Nonprofit organizations are typically trying to be do-gooders and believe the world is a bad place and they tend to NOT be hard asses wanting to tell people "no."

And they frequently get dragged around by the nose for anything that puts money in their pocket. If they can get a grant, they promptly forget their mission statement and jump through hoops to meet the grant requirements.

And grants always have requirements. People don't give money away and say "Do any damn thing you feel like."

Why am I saying all this?

Because in December 2017 I applied for my dream job and was taken far more seriously than I expected to be taken and it led to years of drama that I STILL cannot get free from.

To this day, I have to worry about what the nutcases in Aberdeen, Washington are up to though I don't even LIVE there anymore. I left after being illegally evicted and I ditched r/CoastalWA and have an openly hostile description on r/aberdeenwa and have posted NOTHING for something like a year or more and it's STILL steadily growing, which is evidence I'm not crazy and paranoid. These people who have stolen my ideas for years and denied me credit etc. are still stalking me.

Why? Why in the hell is that happening?

I actually made a few different searches trying to figure out if it is the norm or not for Main Street programs to get the "city" to pay their overhead costs out of "city" coffers and can't find an answer to that question. The above is something I found instead.

I put city in quotation marks because their three tiers of participation are:

1. Towns under 2500 people.

2. Towns with 2500-5000 people.

3. Towns above 5000 people.

In many places, these would be called a hamlet or a village or something like that, not a city. These are incorporated municipalities and so technically you can use the term city but most people would not think of these places as cities. "Small town" or some other term is what they would describe them as.

For places that small, paying the salary out of pocket for one person full-time or part-time and providing some kind of office space is a substantial burden. They do it in hopes that it fixes all the problems in town and if the program WORKED, I shouldn't still be having my life thrown under a bus by a bunch of nutcases in Aberdeen, Washington.

They should be content to watch Aberdeen bursting with life because Main Street, yay! And they aren't.

I've spent nearly eight years trying to figure out how the Main Street program operates generally in order to try to figure out if the people involved with the program in Aberdeen are just extremely crazy people who could and would fuck up anything they got involved with or if the Main Street program is simply broken and fundamentally doesn't work.

I cannot find answers to my questions to try to get hard data on HOW they operate so I can conclude firmly if it's Main Street or if it's a handful of crazies in Aberdeen. I know from published articles in the local paper, The Daily World, that the program in Aberdeen gets substantial funding from city coffers, enough funding that most likely the CITY is paying Wil Russoul's salary and providing him an office though he's NOT an employee of the city and has actively argued against being required to report anything to them on the grounds that he's already drowning in paperwork from the extremely bureaucratic requirements of the Main Street program.

They were surprisingly quickly "certified" or whatever it's called and I looked up the published metrics for Main Street and one of the things it says you SHOULD do fairly EARLY on is establish a style guide for downtown. They never did that and it didn't cost them their affiliation with the Main Street program. 

They not only didn't do that, they declined to implement MY style guide as a FREE solution, so no one there FEELS like "We need to do SOMETHING or they are going to boot us!"

So either the Main Street program is fundamentally broken and not accomplishing anything of real value in town and this is making people there desperate for a "savior" with MAGIC answers because the system doesn't work AT ALL or the Main Street program is so incompetent it has no means to go "Okay, you people in Aberdeen are wrong, broken, stupid and crazy and you are not the kind of people we want representing our program. Buh-bye! You are out!"

Either way, something is very very wrong with the Main Street program itself. 

I was molested as a kid and spent a lot of time in therapy and read a lot of books on how people work mentally and emotionally etc. to sort my baggage. I cannot get hard data on the national organization and how it operates, but:

IF getting the small town in question to cover the majority of the costs of the program is typical and thus the garbage I saw in Aberdeen is the norm, then NOTHING they (the national Main Street program) do is likely to be effective because everything they do will be intentionally designed to cover up the fact that their model is fundamentally broken so as to keep the money flowing in for the Main Street program.

If you think paying their bills without getting anything of value in return is "economic development," you're stupid. 

In the USA, there are 19,502 incorporated places registered, with 76% of these having a population of fewer than 5,000 people. This means that there are many cities and towns with populations under 5,000. 

That's 14,821.52 cities under 5000 people. Last I saw a blurb on how many participants they have, it was over 1600. That's in the neighborhood of ten percent because I don't know how many cities over 5000 there are etc.

1600 is 8.20428674% of 19,502, so it's a substantial portion of ALL US municipalities of ANY size. And I don't believe it actually works AT ALL.

I saw ZERO evidence that the Main Street program in Aberdeen was cleaning up the homeless problem, attracting new businesses, getting people jobs etc. I was a local person doing freelance work of various sorts and they not only didn't help me establish an adequate income on the ground, they actively sabotaged my efforts to do so.

They paid their buddy Rick Moyer to do website work for them. He had trouble repointing a URL. Repointing a URL isn't technically challenging. 

He's not a talented webmaster and you can readily hire a webmaster from elsewhere to do your website. It's not essential that your webmaster be a local on the ground in YOUR town.

He charges way too much money for what he does. He gets away with it because locals aren't technically savvy and don't know what's involved and because he's got an in with corrupt people who have no interest in doing economic development. They are only interested in making sure they and their cronies make good money though they aren't really earning their keep.

They didn't back me in part because if they promoted me, he couldn't get any work most likely because I do better work for less money. They want to keep alive the idea that "You get what you pay for." and my low costs are evidence it's garbage and not worth having AT ALL, so you should pay him big bucks because his high prices are evidence his sites are good.

I met him in person when the people running Our Aberdeen gave me a ride to a meeting involving him because I was taking over the websites they had. I needed to first figure out how to access them. No one had login credentials, not even him. I was there hoping to get login credentials and ultimately had to recover the login credentials aka figure it out and look shit up online.

I told their webmaster Rick Moyer that I was the highest ranked woman on Hacker News, figuring he would know who I was because of my online activities. He had never heard of Hacker News.

That's like being introduced to a local actor and saying "I'm big in Hollywood." and being asked "What's Hollywood? I've never heard of that."

That's like meeting the local STAR of the local stage production getting a STAR salary and trying to POLITELY name-drop and be casual and mention "When I had coffee with Steven Spielberg last week." and getting asked if this Steve dude is your boyfriend and why is your dating life pertinent to our professional meeting?

He doesn't know how to repoint a URL because he doesn't go online and look shit up and then ASK around online when he can't figure it out which is what every programmer or webmaster does. Especially if they live and work in the middle of fuck nowhere and can't ask one of their ZILLION colleagues on the job at Google.

You can be a woman in China hiding your gender from clients on the ground because you're a programmer and know what Hacker News is. That's the story of Naomi Wu, aka sexycyborg, and rest assured not only has she heard of Hacker News, she damn sure knows who the hell I am.

So Rick Moyer charges something like $1500 to make websites for locals in Aberdeen, Washington because he's a grifter and they have no idea what a good website is and want to support local economic development and he's in good with Wil Russoul, Executive Director of the local Main Street program who is also a grifter with a pork barrel job where the local municipality pays his salary and has no meaningful oversight or control while he pretends to work, stalks me online and steals my ideas and denies me any credit while botching the execution and the local Main Street program pays Rick Moyer as their webmaster and that defacto vouches for him and promotes him and gets more local fools to pay him big bucks for shit work.

I don't know what the hell he does for $1500 but I can tell you it's not worth what you're paying him. The Our Aberdeen websites I took over weren't even tracking page views.

He didn't have the login credentials I needed for the websites I was taking over that he was nominally webmaster for. I haven't been paid a dime in years by the two local artists I set up blogspot sites for but I still have the login credentials. If either one of them PayPaled me $75 and emailed me and said "Please add the following information to my website." I could do that. Promptly.

He also had trouble repointing a URL and had never heard of Hacker News, the biggest water cooler on the planet for people in tech. I was bracing myself for drama when I said "I'm the highest ranked woman on Hacker News." figuring I'm going to have to deal with him knowing who I am and either acting like I'm a big deal or pissing all over me because rest assured being a well known woman on Hacker News hasn't done fuck all for me professionally.

And he says nice things about me being a big name on some random discussion board, making small talk like I'm mentioning pointless bullshit about my social life when I was really saying "Oh, you're a webmaster. You've probably heard of me, unlike everyone else in this podunk little village." and telling him enough to identify me and decide how he feels about finally meeting either The Great and Wonderful Doreen Traylor or Oh, God, that loudouthed brassy broad who should STFU already and get out of our discussion group in tech land.

He's NOT a tech person. He doesn't routinely TALK to anyone who is. I have no clue how in the hell anyone can get paid that kind of money for multiple years for making websites and have no idea what Hacker News is.

But somehow he has, so his entire skill set is probably talking bullshit and conning clueless locals out of hard earned money.

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics.

I homeschooled my gifted and learning disabled children. The oldest is math impaired and has baggage from public school.

I was participating on TAGMAX, a gifted homeschooling list, and knew from some of the world's foremost experts in gifted education that statistics is serious math, more rigorous than the typical algebra-geometry-trig high school advanced math track I followed. I offered my kids a choice and told them they didn't have to study algebra-geometry-trig. They could study statistics instead if they so desired and I didn't tell them "It's harder math."

They chose the statistics track and my oldest ended up eventually reading calculus books for fun. Calculus gives me a headache and I played that for all it's worth so he could take GLEE in being better at calculus than his mathy mom.

One of the books in our curriculum was called How to Lie with Statistics. The quote from the Main Street program at the start of this piece is a classic case of how to lie with statistics and it implies to me they know the Main Street program doesn't work.

Most urban planning degrees are Masters degrees. Most urban planners are older people who did something else for a living first, they have a Masters in planning and a Bachelor's in something else.

Urban planning is complicated and urban planners routinely complain that no one knows what they do for a living and THEY don't know how to effectively explain it in laymen's terms. The same is true for GIS professionals and I wrote my own explanation of GIS in laymen's terms because Wikipedia didn't say what I wanted it to say and ESRI didn't say what I wanted it to say and I wasn't finding anything satisfactory.

Community development work is complicated and trying to hold the hand of enthusiastic volunteers in a small town who can't afford to hire a full-time professional planner as part of the city staff and explain it to them in laymen's terms such that it actually gets results is an extremely tall order.

I don't believe Main Street America is actually pulling it off. I think they know that and don't want to publish hard data that anyone knowledgeable could use to say "Wait a minute. That makes no sense. Why would a small town pay someone to essentially do urban planning work who doesn't have the credentials to do so and isn't accountable to the city?"

I think it's a con job and they know it's a con job. And probably most people working for them are happy to con locals out of money and have a relatively well paid job for a small town and absolutely no accountability to anyone, because Main Street isn't going "You've been doing this x years and STILL don't have a style guide? That a BASIC requirement you should have done year one! You're gone!"

I didn't want to become the hatchet man for the Main Street America program. I still don't want that.

My mother's mother came from a low level noble family. My mother was extremely polite and diplomatic.

I called her to ask for money because I didn't have my check from my ex yet for some reason and said something ugly about him and this woman giving me money so I can feed myself said in a sharp tone "Be nice." 

I applied for a job because it looked like my dream job and it didn't say "Driver's license required." I didn't expect my application to be taken seriously AT ALL. I didn't expect so much as a polite fuck off, this listing closed FIVE DAYS ago you stupid woman, and it led to ridiculous amounts of drama for me that I cannot get free of though I no longer LIVE in that town.

I initially was reading Main Street America materials because I was going to meetings in town and just wanted to understand what they were doing and I initially was trying to compare my independent efforts to an existing "successful" model but the longer this has gone on, the more impossible it is to politely pretend "Their model must work, because look at how many affiliates they have." while trying to inoffensively do my own thing independently because I don't happen to fit in anywhere.

Because I'm handicapped and I don't drive and blah blah blah. 

If it works, why is r/aberdeenwa still growing though I've done NOTHING with it and it's openly hostile to locals who have been ridiculously abusive to me? Why are they still asking people by word of mouth to hang on my every word and be excited by my ideas and welcoming of my ideas should I ever post there again while trying to shaft me out of any credit?

I don't know if I can figure out how to help small towns up their game, much less turn it into money for me, AKA a successful business. But I have come to believe that Main Street America is not merely useless, it's WORSE than useless.

And if the only thing I accomplish in the field of urban planning is to help take them down, small town America would be better off with NOTHING to look to than with eating their shit and pretending to like it.