We have chosen a terrible fate for ourselves and the world with eyes wide open. Our institutions have been tested and failed. Our citizenry has been tested and failed. Now, some of us, resist a tide of hate and destruction that can too easily and permanently overpower us.

We’re up to The Debate in S7, which is perfect for before we watch the vote totals roll in.

One nice thing— we actually did pass the Santos plan, at least partially, and we have dramatically lowered the count of uninsured.

I failed to refill my Taharka Bros ice cream pints before tonight and I am bereft.

Holy shit, FL is going to fall short on abortion. That’s a terrible sign, and a terrible thing for women (and men) in Florida.

It’s quite clear America is fucked right now, and the only question is whether we’re about to nose dive into a place irreparable in my lifetime or whether we just barely hold back the tide.

Nothing like the friction of having to swap two cables from my personal machine to my work machine on a Monday morning.

What’s a bad decision that actually turned out good in your life?

— From @Annie

Adopting our dog, Gracie, is the easy winner here. I’m not sure I really made that choice— I went to meet her and discussed it with Elsa, but Elsa made it clear she was bringing Gracie to her home. I wasn’t quite ready, We hadn’t moved in together yet and we were picking Gracie up the very weekend I moved into a new condo I had just bought. I thought maybe a few months down the road, after we moved in and things were less hectic that it would be a better time. But I didn’t fight hard, and I admitted Gracie had captured my heart, at least a little, when I met her, so we drove 90 minutes each way to get her from a foster home.

We enjoyed the next 13 years with her.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

If Harris loses, I don’t think the appropriate response will be “where did the democrats get tactics wrong?” I think if she wins the popular vote, but loses the electoral college, it will be about how our system doesn’t work when we have partisan, geographic sorting.

If she loses outright, it will be about how we failed to convey the danger of Trump. It will be about how we have lost a shared notion of truth. It will be about how we’ve lost a common information architecture and with it, our common reality.

I’d like to hear some of your thoughts about urban development and transit policy, but I know so little about these topics I’m not quite sure what to ask. Maybe you could explain a few principles to an absolute beginner in this topic? (I know that’s not exactly a question, sorry.)

– from Annie

I’m going to try and describe a few ideas that influence how I think about urban development and transit policy. None of these are original, some of them likely have formal names and people associated with them. I’m not citing my sources, and I’ve never really studied these areas in an academic sense. Instead, consider these statements to be a crib sheet of things that have stuck with me because they either struck me as a true or came along with a boat load of evidence that convinced me they are true. Think of this is my crib sheet of “basic principles” I’ve come to largely believe.

The housing market is a lot like other markets– it responds to supply and demand.

The housing market is unalike many other markets, certainly the ones we study, because it’s expensive to move and expensive to buy and sell homes. Additionally, moving involves uprooting your connection to community resources, possibly requires you to change your job, etc. The housing market is full of high transaction costs.

The housing market is unalike many other markets because it takes a lot of time and capital to build new supply. Whereas interest rates and prices in the market can change overnight, building new housing cannot.

The high costs of building housing come from complicated rules around zoning and permitting alongside the fact that building housing is very labor intensive and hasn’t gotten much more efficient.

In the United States, our zoning and permitting rules are restrictive. We often do things in the name of “safety” with zero evidence they provide any safety benefits. We are grossly incurious of different safety standards set internationally and stick to what we wrote down in manuals in the early to mid 20th century as proven.

Gentrification is one of the most complicated and fraught topics to discuss. It’s kind of like defining pornography, except if the folks defining it came from vastly different cultures and time periods. Most of what people describe as gentrification is very much not gentrification. We use the language of gentrification and displacement to describe any change to place and rarely dig in. Often, what’s described as pro-gentrification actually reduces displacement by ensuring desirable areas maintain supply, stay desirable, and continue to offer quality housing at a price many residents can afford. Absent that growth, many of those people would move to neighboring areas and cause even greater displacement.

The sprawling suburbs and exurbs of America were a huge mistake, and we should be living in denser, more walkable neighborhoods with sufficient public transit to cover many aspects of daily life.

There is nothing more pro-environment than denser housing, and any idea of a return to rural pastoralism is a symbolic, aesthetic choice. The proper way to heal the environment is to reduce the need for human transit and reduce our land use footprint. Most people who react negatively to this can only imagine “Manhattan-ifcation” and lack the experience of traveling to many cities and neighborhoods which are significantly more dense than their experience while being obviously pleasant and desirable. These same people often imagine a sense of community that does not actually exist in American suburbs and small towns but very much does where there is denser housing.

Streets are safer when there are reasons for people to be there as often as possible. Unsafe streets are unlit and empty. Safe streets have folks picking up a coffee or dropping of kids in the morning, having lunch and entering/leaving offices and professional services all day long, then have folks picking up kids, leaving work, going out to dinner in the evening, followed by after dinner drinks or late night entertainment events in the evening. A street like that has people moving on it all the time. We don’t see crime where there are always lots of people around with good reason to be there– it’s the ultimate place-based cultural deterrent (the true deterrent is tackling poverty).

Organization before Electronics before Concrete– I think this originated in Germany, and it’s one of the most powerful ideas in transit/train policy. Basically, first you need to actually get the operating of trains right. Get a solid time table, run trains frequently and on time, provide good service. Once you’re at the limits of what can be done through organization, then you electrify your rail service. Trains operating with electrified lines over diesel run faster– they break down less often and they have lower penalties for adding more stops because they can accelerate and decelerate faster. They can also be operated with centralized control systems rather than drivers, reducing staff costs for operating trains more frequently and on tighter time schedules. Lastly, you use concrete– actual construction like grade-separated crossings over roads, level boarding at stops to decrease dwell time, or establishing new rights of way/expansions. We don’t do this anywhere in the US with any kind of success because we’re not serious about transit.

Frequency and predictability beats speed– I need to know when my train will depart and I need my train to be available as often as possible. That’s what drive usage. It’s no good to me to have two trains in the morning and two in the evening that arrive in 65 minutes but leave at different times every day. I’d rather take a train that always leaves at 5 after the hour, every hour and take 80 minutes.

Increasing transit service frequency and reliability is more important than decreasing fare box prices, at least in the US, but possibly everywhere.

There should be very little politics as we see them today at the municipal level. Most of the political questions around how we organize our society will not and cannot be solved at the municipal level and shouldn’t be the focus there. Instead, municipal government should be about public service provision– how do we operate as effectively as possible? You should get elected and hire people based on how well they can run city services. Unfortunately, we often elect folks based on issues they can’t really effectively tackle and settle for poorly run cities and gross underfunding, especially of schools and bread-and-butter infrastructure like sewage and water pipes, electrical lines, street maintenance, transit operations, and more.

I’m not sure anything filmed has ever been more terrifying than Narkina 5, right to the reveal of what they’re building.

It’s been said a thousand times and it’ll be said a thousand times more, but I don’t think any episode of TV has ever delivered the way S1E10 of Andor did.

I think season 1 of Andor is a perfect season of TV. The only thing I could say is that first three episode arc takes a little trust to get through the first time. But I’ve rewatched the whole thing this weekend and holy shit.

I’m curious to see how Fantastical does on Windows. Is there a market for premium apps? Did they succeed in something high quality and can they maintain parity? Will they run into major piracy issues

I want to know if the market for indie, high quality Windows applications has a chance of improving.

I like to do things alone (specifically I also enjoy traveling alone, wandering new places alone, going to bars and reading alone). Has there ever been a time in your life when doing things alone was scary? If so, how did you overcome it? Or, conversely, has there been a time in your life when you weren’t able to get adequate time alone, and how did you handle that?

– from Annie

I’m a white male born into the middle class who was 5'8" at 14 and hasn’t seem 200 lbs on the scale since he’s 16. Given all that, I am not sure I’ve ever really felt fear being alone. I vaguely remember having a little bit of fear the second time I traveled to Israel in 2009? I was joining a group, but I had to leave a day or two later than everyone else. I had been to Israel before and at that time had enough conversational Hebrew ¹ (and English is commonly spoken) that I wasn’t terrified, but the logistics of finding people I didn’t know without a working cell phone getting off a long flight at an odd time definitely generated some anxiety if not fear.

Of course, everything was completely fine, and I actually don’t remember the fear or anxiety all that clearly. What I do remember is the joy I felt after taking a long ride and meeting up with the group.

I now need to take a bit of a context digression…

This trip was run by a sect of Orthodox Judaism that does significant outreach, especially on college campuses, to non-religious Jews in an attempt to bring them to Orthodoxy. While I had no intention of becoming an Orthodox Jew, I had long enjoyed the intellectual and study elements of Judaism. I continued Hebrew school past my bar mitzvah through high school. I wanted to understand the religion, its philosophy and ethics. The textualism and legalism of Judaism appealed to me, and I enjoyed meeting with students once a week to learn more about how Orthodox Judaism differed from my own. Although I studied chemistry in college, I also mistakenly made it 2/3s of the way to a Judaic Studies major as well. I took a class called Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the archaeology department. I took a course on the history of Jewish diaspora into the Middle Ages– covering from roughly the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem through the 1400s in the history department. I took an anthropology course about the formation of Israeli culture and contemporary issues. I took these courses in departments that were not Jewish studies, but they were all cross listed. I didn’t even realize that my embarking on a walk of various humanities disciplines that I was doing so with a topical focus. In many ways, I saw participation in more religious learning as a rounding out to all these other interests.

A free trip to Israel was available to those who attended these learning sessions. My university had very little participation, but the University of Pennsylvania had an incredibly popular program. So I was joining “their” trip.

One more bit of context– I was taking this particular trip directly after finishing my bachelor’s degree. I was going to return three weeks later and immediately start a fifth year master’s program in a completely different subject area. My life was in major transition, and I wasn’t ending college at my happiest. I was an adult at a moment of, not crisis, but a deep unmooring.

Ok, back to the main story.

I think I knew this before I got there, but one of the folks who was on the UPenn side of the trip was a friend from high school. She was one of my first girlfriend’s younger cousins. We got to know each other when we shared a science research class that spanned grade levels. I hung out with her a few times in high school and always felt a connection with her. I don’t think we would have dated if not for her cousin, but I do think we might have gotten quite a bit closer without that awkwardness (we met mostly after that relationship fizzled with quite a bit of ongoing teenage angst and drama). I hadn’t seen her for at least 3 or 4 years at this point, probably since I had graduated high school– she would have been maybe 16.

When I arrived, she was the first person who saw me. She ran up and gave me a huge hug, dragged me to her friends, and we sat and had a couple of drinks.

The reason I know I was anxious or afraid to be alone on this trip is because I know how it felt to see a familiar face and how it felt to be embraced by an old friend. We spent a lot of time together that trip, and I remembered how we had always had an easy friendship. It was a comfort over all those weeks.

It is the feeling of belonging and presence that stands out in contrast with the feeling of being alone that stuck with me.

Nowadays, this story feels like it doesn’t fit. While I was always someone who needed time alone to process (I was very much the stereotypical teenager who closed the door to his room and stayed there alone for a long time when I needed to), I think I’ve settled into even greater independence as I’ve gotten older. I love traveling alone. I take great comfort and restoration in walking around a new place on my own. Some of my best adult memories are from the trips I took myself. And yet.

Loving alone time is not the same as being alone. And sometimes we don’t realize that we have allowed our need for alone time to shift into convincing ourselves we are alone. The special people in our lives, those we really connect with for whatever reason, can be a powerful pillar to steady ourselves against in those moments.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I saw my friend. She ended up becoming observant and marrying an Orthodox man just a couple of years later. That made the opportunities we would have to cross paths drop to nothing, and it would have made actively pursuing an ongoing friendship pretty disruptive for her. She is still someone I think about from time to time, wondering if she’s happy with her choices and doing well.

I don’t think I really answered the question, but I think I touched on the spirit of the ask. For some reason, this is the story I felt like telling today about being alone. It’s really a story about not being alone at all.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

Subsets of Sets by Jakob is one of the best albums of all time. I never tire of it.

The problems with e-Verify are the same as with voter identification requirements— the system today is designed to harm and discriminate, the GOP doesn’t want to fix that, so instead they say democrats don’t want to solve “solve the problem”.

Andor does a great job of demonstrating how terrifying just a few soldiers or a single TIE fighter can be under a fascist, military regime.

Andor is great for many reasons, but having all the women be absolute badasses might be the greatest.

Using a corporate controlled computer comes with a lot of small annoyances and indignities. I get it, I work somewhere that handles a lot of sensitive, confidential data. That has been true for me my entire career– I’ve never not had access to individual student level records or employee records. But Powerschool is much more serious about device management.

The two things that are most difficult for me are separating out my Apple ID and not having access to (fairly benign) applications. Without my Apple ID, I am looking at my phone much more during the day for iMessages. I also have to use my phone and headphones to play music, since I can’t access my Apple Music library. And without my iCloud Photo Library, it’s much harder to share pictures of my family or from my life in Slack, which is kind of demoralizing. I can’t use SetApp or several of the applications I like to use for work on my machine– no CleanShot X, Yoink, TablePlus (DBeaver is fine, but TablePlus is better). I am not allowed to use the Elgato Stream Deck software, so I lost access to a lot of handy Zoom controls and Slack shortcuts.

It’s not a completely locked down hellscape. I am able to use quite a few tools that are valuable to me like Transmit, Alfred, iTerm2, RStudio, neovim, VS Code, etc. And although they made me swap out my old machine that was perfectly fine, they bought me a 16" MBP with M3 Pro and 36GB of RAM and 500 GB SSD – it is no slouch.

I actually end up Screen Sharing onto my Mac mini at various points in the day, but they’ve blocked the port that allows for high quality screen sharing somewhat recently. So while I used to get fast, retina or near retina level resolution, the experience now is… subpar.

None of these things are the end of the world, but the paper cuts are real.

I finally just took off my strings, did a quick wipe down, and put new ones on. It took all of 20 minutes, and I’ve been putting it off for 2 weeks. Just like everything else I do in life.

I don’t know why Thor Love and Thunder got so much hate. It was definitely better than average Marvel for me.

Alone for the weekend, so should I find another movie or should I do my first Andor rewatch?

I forgot how much of a shit Timm is in Andor.

Three different browsers, three different alignments, I hate computers.

What topic areas should we ask you about? Are personal questions ok, too?

• Pratik

Whatever you want! It’s true AMA, personal questions are totally fine. I plan to only not answer a question if there’s a security or legal reason I cannot answer. I find it pretty hard to believe any question that is asked in good faith would be outside the bounds of what I’d be willing to answer.

Always happy for the first question to be a question about the questions I’ll answer.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.