I think we mistook the power and dominance that they were displaying for wellness, but they weren’t ok.

Rachel Simmons, on the Slate Cultural Gabfest about middle school boys.

Voted today. I was always going to vote, but the Nazi rally made me really really want to take care of things ASAP.

There are years I would just say just vote. This is not that year. This year there is a right way to vote. Full stop.

Cancelled my WashPo. Sorry folks, I need the fourth estate to be strong and I need to make clear that this isn’t the way.

Every time I have to agree to pointless terms of service to access free public wifi I think “I should figure out how to pirate some filthy kink porn right now just to spite this pointless legalese.”

My lease is up in May. The Honda Prologue, by all accounts, is a pretty mediocre EV. I’ve been really eying the Ionic 5. But there’s a 24 month lease deal for $219 a month on the Prologue right now. That’s less than we pay for our HRV today.

My first car was a 2001 Honda Accord. My grandma leased it and put about 7000 miles on it over three years, just in time for me to get my license in 2004. I chipped in the money I had saved for a car and my parents chipped in the rest to buyout the lease. It was a great car. I used it, then my sister for a couple of years, and then I took it back in 2007. I drove it until about 2011/12, when it was totaled.

I didn’t have an accident, we just turned on the car one morning and it made a god awful sound. I drove about 8 miles to a dealership that day to have them check it out. Somehow, there was a large gash in my exhaust. It would cost about $4,000 to fix, and the car was worth about $1,200. I was early in my career and had just bought a condo. I did not have money set aside for a new car. I basically said to the dealership, while wearing my pajamas, “What’s the cheapest way for me to leave here today with a car?”

Elsa and I were together a couple of years and had just moved in together. We didn’t know how long we’d stay in Providence. We didn’t know yet if we wanted to start a family maybe someday. Electric cars were early, but seemed like they’d be coming along at some point. It just felt hard to make a huge decision like buying a car, which in my mind, meant choosing what we’d use for the next 10+ years. We also hadn’t done any research. So when we were offered a 3 year lease on a new Civic for $215 a month, that seemed pretty great. I think I had to put nothing down, just some taxes and fees, because of the tiny residual value on my Accord. So we left the dealership having leased a car, and that felt pretty good. No commitment before we knew what we needed and an affordable price– it felt like we managed to delay a major decision we weren’t really prepared to make.

What happened over the next year was pretty great. It turns out, a 2012 Civic is a lot more efficient than a 2001 Accord. We were spending easily $50-75 less a month on gas. Our insurance went down for some reason by about $400 a year. And then I looked back on what I spent on things like brake pads and calipers, a battery, tires, etc over the past few years. When all was said and done, I’m pretty sure that first year with the Civic we saved about $150 a month in costs we had with an aging, but good condition Accord. Our total cost to lease a new car was probably closer to $50-75 a month.

Over the next few years, we realized there are some nice things about leases, especially when you’re young and have good credit. The costs are consistent. There were no unexpected issues during an inspection or from a strange noise. Everything is in great shape, and within the first three years, virtually none of the regular wear and tear stuff happens. We know exactly how much we’re going to spend on a car.

Two years into our lease, we moved to Baltimore. We decided to move on a Monday. We sold the condo and moved to Baltimore that Saturday. That same night, Elsa’s mom arrived with her dog to live with us. The short version of the story is her mother had serious surgery and was diagnosed with cancer, and we needed her to move in with us from Mexico for her treatment. Suddenly, we had an extra dog and an extra adult. The idea that “we don’t know what our lives will be like over the next decade” turned out to be quite true– the car we needed in October of 2016 was nothing like the car we needed in 2014.

We traded up to the Honda HRV for our next lease. It would fit all three of us plus both dogs better. It would have been helpful in the move. I had only ever driven sedans, but Elsa liked SUVs, so the emerging crossover category was a good compromise. An HRV drove a lot like a Civic, so the choice was easy. Our costs barely budged. And we’ve essentially continued to lease HRVs since. I think we’re on our third… maybe fourth? We only drive about 6-7,000 miles a year. We can easily predict our costs– it’s the lease, oil changes, and gas. And each time we are up for a lease, I review what’s going on with the EV market because that’s what I have really wanted for some time.

In 2022, we almost got an Hyundai Ioniq 5. They were new and looked like exactly what I wanted. But a coworker of mine got one and had an immediate problem. It spooked me a little bit. This turned out to be a tiny blip– he loves that car and it’s been great to him, and he actually regrets that his small issue even happened because he knows it’s a part of what scared me off. But what really messed me up was how strong residuals on used cars were at that point in time. We were able to lease an HRV again, and our costs when down $50 a month. It was pretty hard to turn down lower monthly costs in favor of doubling my lease costs while working for a start up. I would have been fine, but I can be a bit conservative.

But now it’s time to look at cars again. It’s a lot easier to find the same EVs I was considering three years ago. And for various reasons, lease costs for EVs can be had quite affordably– if I’m paying $275 a month right now for an HRV and I can get an EV in that ballpark, it’s hard to keep leasing a gas car. And EV tech is still new, and many of the attractive models haven’t been around long enough to prove out their viability. A lease is much lower risk than buying a car that will massively decrease in value once it’s off the lot and may have troubles that don’t show up for 7 or 8 years.

A car is a consumption good for us. We don’t drive a lot. We have three adult drivers in our house and we all share the one car. This keeps our costs down but it also reflects our light needs. Consistent, predictable costs, without committing to the kinds of needs we may have or where technology is going seems to make a lot of sense to me. People always say don’t lease, but cars are all around terrible investments. I can pay these monthly costs indefinitely and afford it. It’s not really that important to not have any payment in 5-6 years. And I don’t really want to trade a higher car payment for 5-6 years followed by large unexpected costs in years 6-whenever versus a consistent, affordable monthly fee for now.

One day, I’d like to not need a car at all. But for now, leasing continues to make sense for us.

Imagine this Yankees team but Aaron Judge didn’t disappear in October.

Today has big “I just want to rot, but there’s work to be done!” energy.

Always find the bookstores

I feel like being able to fix McDonald’s ice cream machines is yet another small victory the Biden administration (or at least executive state under Biden) can claim. They keep tearing down these little nuisances, even if they’ll never get credit. This is the good government I want.

Sometimes it feels like being a product manager is mostly staring at a blank canvas trying to think of the best chart template to start with in order to explain an idea you’ve spent 6 months thinking about.

Do endorsements have influence? Probably not. Is it cowardly to fail to endorse? Yes, especially in a year where the candidates couldn’t be more unalike.

What’s really troubling is rich ownership injecting themselves into editorial decisions, demonstrating the erosion of norms extends well beyond our government and into the fourth estate.

Norms used to be powerful governing forces. Now they’ve been eradicated, and we don’t have any of the safeties in place to live in that world.

We live in terrifying times.

Anyone got great coffee and/or food recommendations in Charleston, SC?

The most troubling fact in American Politics is that Trump is still in this, with at least even odds.

I’ve started to fantasize about deleting LinkedIn, but I’ll need to get hired again some day.

Every time I love an Existential Comics I want to send it to Jess even though she hates them. This time, it’s about “who is the real nerd?”

New Tele day

Are we friends or do we just share trauma?

So tonight Elsa played three Sabrina Carpenter songs on YouTube. Of course, I had heard 15 seconds of each in countless short videos on Instagram.

I was struck by how uninteresting the entire rest of the songs were (but how gorgeous the videos are). I don’t ever remember pop music, admittedly not my thing, being barely songs. Those small clips I have heard a thousand times are absolute bangers, but everything else is boring, bland, and straightforward. Maybe Rick Beato isn’t just cranky.

I guess pop music really has changed because of TikTok.

I look at LinkedIn like once every 2 weeks and write nothing. I don’t blog or microblog anywhere about work or what I’m doing professionally. The great conscious uncoupling of my identity is well afoot.

Hopefully this just leads to better mental heath and no professional consequences of note.

Elsa: let’s go for a walk this morning!

The walk: 5 minutes to Chuck’s Trading Post for breakfast.

≈36 min set is complete, with another song pretty close. Time to book shows.

The current set list for Ancestral Worm is:

1. Global Worming
2. Italiano
3. Cake Day
4. Tekoi
5. 93 Decades

Optional: Everybody Blast Now

The one chore I absolutely have to do today is change the strings on my main electric. I hate doing it so much, but I’m playing enough now that I can’t really go longer than 4-6 weeks.

Back in 2011 I wrote about how I thought the social web should work. This isn’t what I’d describe as my ideal social web anymore, but I wish someone had taken a shot at this.