My last DEXA scan was almost exactly three years ago. I was near a low weight for my adult life, but I was still pretty concerned. Most especially with my “visceral fat”— this is the dangerous stuff in your liver, pancreas, etc. This is the stuff you really don’t want, especially with a family history of major heart attacks and death in your 60s.

The benchmark is sub 1lbs, and I was around 5 lbs.

Today, after gaining a bunch of weight and losing it again (this time with some help), I did a new scan. Did I lose weight healthier this time? Do the drugs people are chastising do something less healthy than rigorous calorie counting?

My visceral fat came in at 1.46lbs. I’m still not healthy. My body fat remains too high and that visceral fat is not where it should be. But I’ll take every bit of help, along with the hard work at the gym, I can get. At least the long arc is bending toward avoiding an early death the best I can.

I can’t believe how far some of my friends came to watch our first show, which was meant to be a low stakes thing away from home. It was a blast to be on stage again after almost 20 years. I should have asked to have vocals and keys in the monitor up front, but oh well. Also, my old Dunlop pedal tuner is a piece of shit that was tracking terrible so I was not able to correct some tuning issues probably only I noticed.

Very successful first run out.

I realized this morning that our new home EV charger had a little WiFi symbol on it. It doesn’t feel crazy to add that as a new device, even though my car app can tell me about charging state it’s kind of slow.

So I registered and added my charger, and now I’m getting 3x faster charging at home.

Turns out, you need to configure the amperage of the circuit for the charger to take advantage of it. Because I did things properly and spent far too much money to have an electrician install the charger on a dedicated circuit to spec, this made a huge difference.

I was moderately happy with the previous charging speed– I could go from 20% to 90% in about 12 hours. I’m ecstatic with the new rate, which will let me more properly take advantage of cheap electric rate timings to keep costs low.

Overall, I have to charge so infrequently it’s not that big a deal.

The most ridiculous things about banning books in school based on “development appropriateness”:

1. There is no universal “development appropriateness”.
2. When kids find and are interested in something, it is almost definitionally “developmentally appropriate”.

“Developmentally inappropriate” is largely a term used to mean, “A topic that a child brings to an adult that they feel uncomfortable talking about with a child of that age.”

Most exposures to content that somehow becomes traumatic is only much more so when the world signals to a child that they should never talk to an adult about what they saw and how it made them feel because they were wrong to have come across it in the first place.

I was “exposed” to so many ideas my parents probably didn’t want me to talk about as a voracious young reader. It was fine– largely because I only was “exposed” because I was ready. The ability to read complex books, and interest in them, coincides with the ability to handle complex ideas. If I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared to take on those ideas, I would never have been able to or desire reading those books. And my “exposure” path to new books was through every channel you’d expect– what other people who liked books I had already read recommended. I was following well-trodden paths through recommendations that make sense for people like me. My age was immaterial– I was moving through a standard progression, just younger than many other people.

Books aren’t banned because of any (unproven) negative impact they’ve ever had on children. Books are banned because of scared adults.

I am rewatching Rogue One. For a moment, I was doubting whether I liked it quite as much as I remembered. I think this is only my third watch— once in theaters, once at home when it was first available.

There’s a moment an hour and twenty minutes in when Bail Organa tells Mon Mothma that he will send for his friend the jedi, turns off, and in the background says, “Captain Antilles, I have a mission for you.”

And for whatever reason in this moment, I felt that feeling in my throat. I felt a small set of tears begin to form. Because at this moment, the die is cast. Jyn and Cassian are on their way to Scarif, and this one moment begins what I know is the march toward tragedy, and hope. And after all of this time, it still wallops me.

So yeah, I think Rogue One is a pretty good movie.

For a UI enthusiast and long-time Mac user such as myself, watching Mac OS gradually become a shell of its former self — more locked down, more simplified and iOS-ified — is a painful spectacle. Have I had any problem with my M2 Pro Mac mini running Ventura since I purchased it in June 2023? No. Not an issue, and not a crippling bug either. That’s great, don’t get me wrong. But also: am I happy every time I interact with this Mac OS? No. Not as happy as when I switch to another of my Macs running older Mac OS versions like High Sierra, Mojave, El Capitan, Snow Leopard, Tiger. I use this Mac mainly for work. But it feels just like when I used a Windows PC for work. I tolerate it, I can work with it; but the fun is elsewhere.

There’s an entire world of macOS users having an experience I cannot relate to one iota. Riccardo Mori (link to the post with the above quote), who is an excellent writer, is increasingly one of those people. His downward spiral on Apple and tech in general over the last few years has been kind of weird for me to watch. I know his anguish has discouraged his blogging, especially because he has gotten a lot of push back from folks (and I think he thinks they’ve got the wool over their eyes).

I think a lot of this has to do with aging. As we get older, some ideas become things we cannot let go of, whereas other ideas become less and less important. That’s not to say this is good or bad– I’m not saying someone like Riccardo isn’t keeping up with the times or any such nonsense. I’m saying that each of us, uniquely, has a set of ideas, principles, routines, and desires that become hardened while others wither away. Depending on the mix of things you care about, you can end up deeply satisfied or unsatisfied as the world continues on its own path.

I’m glad that so far, the things that have hardened for me have not run counter to the broader directions of tech– I’ve never felt more capable while spending less and needing less. I’d be pretty bummed out if it felt like the things I need to be able to do (and have fun doing) got worse.

It’s good to read things you can’t relate to directly. It’s good to read about critiques that ring completely false and counter to your experience. I get to try on ideas and consider their value and impact and decide for myself. I am shaped by the opinions I allow in, so I don’t mind reading the endless onslaught of things that sound ridiculous to me– like how Riccardo hates the notch on iPhones and MacBook Pros and still thinks every phone is too big and super hard to use. I can reconsider my experience. Is there something that I’ve been brushing off that I shouldn’t? Are there ways of doing things I have failed to consider that would make me happier or more productive?

Should I offer any of my energy to this?

As I get older, it’s that question that comes up most often– how much of my energy am I willing to expend on this area of my life? I am, at my heart, a satisficer, not a maximizer. I do my research, I think about what my goals are, I make my decisions, and provided they work well, I move on. I want the right home theater equipment, but once installed and working great, I’m content to leave it there for a long time (I don’t think I’ve made any upgrades since getting a 4K capable receiver 6 or 7 years ago, and my speakers haven’t changed in a decade). Once things are great, I let go, no longer offering them any more of my energy.

Great is great, and best is a waste of time.

And so often, I read long critiques about details and moving form great to best and think, “Not one of these things will materially impact me.”

I use Transmit from Panic as my main app for interacting with Amazon S3 buckets and SFTP servers. I use the command line for both of those services plenty as well, but sometimes it’s nice to just drag and drop and look at things visually.

Using S3 and SFTP is not a thing that everyone needs to do.

Transmit has another trick up its sleeve that I use all the time– Dropbox and Google Drive support.

The Dropbox app is terrible, and frankly, so are most cloud storage applications. What used to be “just” a folder on my Mac that I could trust to get synchronized to the cloud and all of my other devices became a resource hog and a UX nightmare. Frankly, I just don’t use “cloud storage as my file system” the way I think these things are intended. Instead, Dropbox and Google Drive are largely places where other people share files with me and vice versa. As it turns out, 99/100 times when I’m working in this setup, I don’t need constant two-way syncing. Instead, I just want to download something someone shared with me or upload something to share with someone else. So I added my Dropbox and Google Drive accounts to Transmit, dumped their apps, and happily upload and download files.

For example, my band records all of its rehearsals. I recently bought us a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 3rd Gen – they’re being blown out now that the 4th gen has been released– and one of the other band members hooks that up to a laptop he brings. We record to Ableton directly, and after practice he cuts up the tracks and uploads them to folder in Google Drive shared with all of us.

Anyone who has used Google Drive knows what a mess it is to find anything and how bad the interface is for large files that it doesn’t know how to preview– like the wav files we record. It’s exceptionally easy to just open up the folder in Transmit, drag and drop, and have all the files locally.

At least it used to be exceptionally easy to do this. But Google have decided to put insane requirements on any developer who wants to support using its APIs, especially around Google Drive. This is messing with both Transmit and iAWriter.

Sigh. Google Drive continues to be one of the worst experiences on the web, and I guess that’s simply never going to change. Unfortunately, it seems my escape hatch has been closed.

I don’t understand why the CBO estimates changes to social security with two complicated paths— the first, raising the 250K cap to about 305 and then taxing only 90% of earnings, and the second, continuing to exempt income between 176K and 250K but then taxing incoming over 250K while keeping a benefit cab.

However, both of these methods dramatically reduce the deficit and increase the solvency of Social Security well into the future. And both methods only impact exceptionally high earners.

The most interesting reform would be something like no cap on the tax, and increase the benefit up to say, $1M in earnings. Maybe even include capital gains as subject to the employee side of Social Security taxes.

With these changes, we’d kick any problems with Social Security down the road at least another generation, maybe further.

The main issue I’ve run into was the following:

.Site.Author was deprecated in Hugo v0.124.0 and will be removed in Hugo 0.141.0. Implement taxonomy 'author' or use .Site.Params.Author instead.

This is a relatively easy fix– include your .Site.author data in config.json under Params like so:

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{
  "params": {
      "author": {
      "name": "Jason Becker",
      "avatar": "https://micro.blog/jsonbecker/avatar.jpg",
      "username": "jsonbecker",
      "activitypub": {
        "username": "[ACTIVITYPUB_USERNAME]",
        "url": "[ACTIVITYPUB_ACTOR]"
      }
    }
  }
}

Unfortunately, lots of places across Micro.blog templates reference .Site.Author, most especially RSS and JSON feeds.

So in addition to changing references to .Site.author in your own theme (most likely in head.html partials), you’ll have to bring in custom versions of RSS, JSON, and podcast feeds to have a successful site build.

Micro.blog isn’t ready for Hugo 0.140.0 quite yet, but it’s possible to get up and running if you have a custom theme and know how to maintain it. Unfortunately, Hugo doesn’t use semver or anything like it. They also don’t offer stepwise upgrade guides so that you can say, select your current version and the version you want to upgrade to and easily get the steps necessary to keep things working.

There are some nice features that have been added since the last upgrade of Hugo on Micro.blog, but I have to say, the surface of breaking changes that Hugo makes and its impact on themes and plug-ins really feels like a liability. If Hugo followed semver, it’d be a lot easier to maintain versions of themes and plug-ins verified to work at certain markers and maintain older versions as well. As it stands, the upgrade path is kind of rough, and places a lot of burden on a small number of folks.

I’m thinking about if there’s a way that we can incorporate something like the exampleSite process for Hugo as well as some key steps in the Micro.blog process (namely the coalescing of templates and configuration) into a GitHub Actions build step. What I’m imagining is that each theme can have a GitHub Action that builds the exampleSite by coalescing the theme-blank templates and configuration, using reasonable environment variables for some default values that are set on Micro.blog, and then builds against multiple versions of Hugo, generating a check artifact for compatibility. It’s possible even to maintain a release branch for each version of Hugo that is supported by Micro.blog that tests against that version and ensures compatibility.

This way, themes can be updated one version of Hugo at a time, even when Micro.blog doesn’t necessarily support it. Community members can easily generate pull requests that update a theme to a working build on a new version, and maybe the burden can be spread a bit.

With a system like that setup, for example, I suspect it would take me under an hour to get most themes working. Occasionally there’d be a problem that needs a Manton-level fix, but that’d be easy to find. I suspect almost all problems could be solved without Micro.blog official participation provided that theme-blank is used for the coalesce and has a working release that matches the Hugo version. In other words, fixing theme-blank for a version and using that release branch should cover all or nearly all of the Micro.blog-system-level support necessary to fix the downstream themes.

For example, all of the RSS and JSON feed fixes are not needed if theme-blank is updated to use .Site.params.author – except doing so now would break every theme on older versions of Hugo.

I would like an apology from every family member and friend who told me I was being extreme when I would get mad about specious health claims around what water you drink, apricot seeds and cancer, various diet fads, and all manner of “naturopathy”.

They all said some variation on “It can’t hurt, and if you need hope you try everything.”

And “Of course it doesn’t hurt to be healthier” where “healthier” meant… I’m not sure paying attention to all of this.

I have been, at times, a killjoy and hurt folks for not thinking it was fun or funny to engage in conspiratorial thinking about things, even if half said in jest.

I am not some ghoul, but watching these things has always felt like creating a certain set of conditions. For every ten people not taking things too seriously, one was. For every ten people not taking things too seriously, many had their sense of truth and trust erode just a tiny bit.

The White House has nominated someone to lead healthcare in this country who wants to end the most successful public health intervention… ever? They talk about “following the evidence”, but we no longer can trust that– we now have to ask “what evidence?” because we’ve eliminated any sense that we can build collective knowledge about an accepted truth. Everything can be cast in doubt. Congress just released a report on COVID-19 that used NY Times op-ed pieces as evidence for a lab leak theory, then discredited any study on mask effectiveness that wasn’t a randomized controlled experiment that precisely evaluated the same distance as CDC guidance.

So maybe I’m the worst, but just letting this kind of bullshit fester as acceptable has generated massive harm. And I’m sorry that I allowed myself to become less strident at pushing back.

Our healthcare system is broken, but that’s not because our healthcare knowledge and treatments are broken. How we provision care is what’s broken— other nations provision care differently and see significantly better outcomes at lower total cost.

We have a political and economic problem, but because the only known ways to address that problem involves building effective public administration, there is an entire ecosystem dedicated to telling Americans we have a science and knowledge problem.

I haven’t felt like writing much lately. Maybe it’s post-election blues or maybe it’s the end of year rush.

My band moved into a new rehearsal space last week. I’m excited to have more room. One practice in and I know I can hear things better. I’m hoping to use the space a bit more for my own practice and writing as well. Our first show is in just over a month.

Of course, Black Friday combined with my renewed interest in music led to some new purchases. I added a “blemished” Walrus Slö, which I’m sure I’ll dig after how much I love the Walrus Fundamental Ambient Reverb. I also bought into that Chase Bliss mystery box. And I grabbed a new Focusrite interface to put in a rack at the rehearsal space to help us record more.

I bought a Tele. It sounds great. I’ve got to get some work done to it. The pickup height catches the high E string sometimes. I think it could just use a setup overall. And even though the stock pickups sound great, I’m Fralin curious since I love their single coil pickups (this is a Thinline with the wide range humbuckers).

A couple of weeks ago I got the Hyundai Ioniq 5 I’ve wanted for 2.5 years. Our lease on the Honda HRV, which is our third leased HRV, is up in a few months and I panicked that EVs will be in some trouble during the Trump administration. I’m really happy with my choice, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it. Thanksgiving travel was a bit of a pain, mostly because there were very few fast chargers on Long Island near my parents. I had no trouble charging along the ride (Delaware on the way up, New Jersey on the way down). We are going to get the 240V charger installed at home, although I was taken aback by the cost of the electric work considering we have a garage and the fuse box is so close.

I weigh less than I have any time in the last 20 years and it’s wild. I’m going to transition more to maintenance mode soon and I’m definitely a bit worried. I generally do well for about a year when I hit a new low weight, gaining back just a little bit and holding before eventually yo-yoing right back up.

I missed one concert because I messed up reading the calendar and we were actually out of town. Another one got cancelled a few days before hand due to the band getting sick. Tonight is attempt three for the fall, it’s a couple of bands from my hometown area, one of which I last saw 20+ years ago. I was shocked to see either of them still exists in some form, and when I saw they were playing about a mile from my house, I had to give it a shot.

Shrinking is great. Silo is great. Sunny? Why is no one talking about that great show? Jury is still out on Dune: Prophecy.

Lately, I’ve become “3D printer curious”.

I’m not sure there have been four simultaneous issues where the right thing to do is so clear and our incoming government is wrong on all four at once.

• We must support Ukraine agains Russian invasion
• Israel is murdering Palestinians with impunity and support.
• Climate change is a serious, immediate threat
• Trans rights are human rights. Just fucking respect people.

I don’t think there’s any gray area left for any of these issues. Israel as a broader matter comes the closest, but the fact that Israel is obliterating Palestine with the intent to permanently foreclose on a two state solution is not in question.

Whether we’ve entered the end of America’s leadership on the international stage as a matter of projected force, I do not know. But whether we’ve absolutely failed the moral leadership test? There’s no question.

I think the Democrats are seeing that they were punished for stimulus that supported government and industry– we made sure people kept their jobs and kept getting service (or expanded service) from the government. That probably resulted in a small amount of inflation– most of it was almost certainly supply chain issues– but also is a part of why economic growth continued strong and employment stayed solid. It’s part of how our recovery from the pandemic was mostly “things are normal or better for now”.

So many people who benefited from these policies, short and long term, didn’t perceive their benefit. In almost every way, the country would have been worse off if we used all that money to give individual checks, possibly including inflation. And yet, something tells me that it would have resulted in a landslide Democratic victory and a sense that they had fought effectively for the working class.

Inspired by The impact of ARP on inflation by Kevin Drum.

I’ve never taken to most of the various tracking apps. I’ve never really taken to posting most forms of this sort of data to my blog either. I think it’s quite fun to track things and have data about patterns. And of course, data about things like the media I watch can be quite helpful for discovering new things.

But I don’t find the process of tracking to be fun– in fact, I find it tedious. For tracking to work in my life, it has to be both incidental and pervasive. Anything short of this is too hard to maintain and too incomplete to be useful.

My Apple Watch tracks a lot of health data in a way that is both incidental and pervasive. Last.fm used to be that way for music, kind of, except that so much my listening happened on physical media, and then, transitioned to various streaming services and phones and lots of places where scrobbling wasn’t quite so easy or reliable. Yesterday, I wrote about some spending patterns supported by Copilot (affiliate link, my code is DW49GR to get 2 months free). This only works because I almost exclusively use cash for haircuts and the occasional lotto ticket, so all of my spending is available digitally.

There’s some tracking I will make a little bit of effort for. I track my reading (and even do so on my blog). Almost all of my reading is on a Kindle, in part because of bad eyesight. It has a strong Goodreads integration, and even though I hate the Goodreads service, I can’t quite my preferred Literal or Storygraph to stick because there’s just too much manual intervention. If I’m going to put in that work, I’ll do it on my blog. ¹ When I read a physical book ² and complete it, it’s fairly easy to fill in somewhere.

Tracking movies and TV has just never worked. The watching ecosystem is far too fractured, there’s no interest in sharing data or my getting ownership of my own data, too much of the important stuff has been watched before tools were available, and too much of what I watch I watch casually. The idea of this becoming either incidental or pervasive isn’t even a hope– it seems impossible to get there from here.

The one thing I keep struggling to track is where I eat. One of the best things I did consistently for our few months in Mexico was take a picture at every restaurant. I then added those photos to Day One, which added date, time, and location to every photo. When I remembered, I’d even name the post after the restaurant. I have an incredible map of everywhere we ate those few months and I can see the meals we had. I still do this occasionally when we travel, but never with the same consistency or zeal. I can give restaurant recommendations in most of the US, almost entirely on the back of the map view in Apple Photos. I really love having these reminders of restaurant meals and places I’ve spent time. But even just remembering take a picture, which I can add to Day One at any time, is just not incidental enough to make this a consistent practice. It’s the one form of logging I wish I’d could hold on to that never fully sticks.

There are unnecessary or unexpected purchases every year. I would have thought this year was a bit high– I’ve bought an amp, a guitar, and donated quite a bit more than normal. Plus everyone keeps screaming about inflation. Heck, my property taxes are going up at least $100-200 a month annually.

But because I use Copilot (affiliate link, my code is DW49GR to get 2 months free), I can view things like total spending in a year and average monthly spending.

Using 2022 as my base spending, I wondered, am I feeling inflation? Well, in 2023 I spent -14.39% per month what I spent in 2022. And in 2024, I spent -13.90% what I did in 2023. So my spending is up a little this year, on average. But my spending remains lower than it was in 2022.

Perhaps this shows that in my income bracket I am more protected from inflation. Maybe I’ve gotten cheaper (note, my income has increased, though our family income is a bit down this year because Elsa has decided to do consulting versus a full time gig and is intentionally doing less than 35-40 billable hours a week). I think it probably shows that inflation slowed, and that when inflation hits certain categories, we’re generally capable of substituting for other goods.

If I completely remove the inflation story from this, it’s also helpful to know that I have smoothed my consumption to a comfortable level. I don’t track a budget very closely at all– in fact, while there is extensive budgeting in Copilot, I use it for cash flow and investment tracking. And I like to see a pacing guide on monthly spend that I get by budgeting just to get a sense of “am I overall going a bit too nuts this month” before making a big purchase. But mostly, I just live my life a way that I’ve gotten accustom to and that seems to be properly sized to our income.

Why was I looking at all this anyway today?

We’re getting much closer to leasing an electric vehicle, and I wanted to know how much the additional $200-250 car payment would hurt us. As it turns out, we are spending more on the car these days. Our lease payments have been relatively consistent since 2022 (with a $25 a month reduction starting in May of 2022) and our overall car costs (maintenance like oil changes, gas, and lease payments) averaged $351.01, $334.50, and now a whopping $419.64 a month. I think we’re driving more this year, to be honest. Regardless, going from $276.88 a month to a $525 a month payment, subtracting this year’s average gas costs is only about $100 a month increase. We get some free charging while out and about and I’m sure charging at home won’t cost nothing, but I think I can safely say we can afford the increase in car payment given how consistent our lifestyle has been.

The Democrats tried to figure out the complex process of how to use (or not use) the power of the government to make people’s lives better while trying to address a waning pandemic and the economic catastrophe it caused.

The Republicans said if things are not how you want them to be, it’s someone else’s fault, and here’s how we’re going to hurt them.

Americans didn’t understand the Democrats, and the Republicans made them feel good.

I said “This is who America is” not “This is who we are” because I am no part of a “we” that says this is who “we” are. I am not this. I didn’t fight for this. The people I spend time with are not this. None of the three spaces I’ve lived are like this. But America is like this.

If this is America, I need to reconstruct my politics. If this is who we elect, and this will be our judiciary, and these are our values, we need a different politics. We could have cared about each other, we could have worked to build an effective, efficient, operable government that ensures safety and equality of opportunity, and a minimum life of dignity.

We could do these things, if we had a public that supported them. Some states will still be able to do these things. But I think I have to abandon hope that we have the fortitude and desire to tackle the hard problems. Instead, I have to accept that we are going to fail those tests entirely, we have failed those tests, and I need to act to mitigate and protect against harms to my family and my community the best that I can.

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 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.

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.

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.

I use a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse. It’s fine. It has a ton of buttons, and I use them all. I prefer the experience of using the Apple Magic Mouse in every way– that touch surface is incredible, and works great on Macs. The problem is that the Magic Mouse’s low profile and click feel rapidly gives me RSI pains. Just a couple of hours with that mouse and my right index finger and hand hurts.

I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with the charging port being on the bottom. The meme is funny, I guess, but tired. Plugging in for like 5 minutes gives you hours of use. It just doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the Magic Mouse is, and has been, quite uncomfortable for a long time. They’re there AirPods without silicone of Mac peripherals– they might work ok for a majority, or even large majority of customers, but there’s a sizable portion of the population who will just never be able to use it.

Bad design is not a charging port on the bottom that’s used for tens of minutes every 4 months. There are far greater sins committed by the Magic Mouse, which is a shame, because it’s otherwise quite brilliant and unparalleled.

Nick Heer on Siri:

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

…to text a contact by using only their first name.

…for directions to locations using the place name.

…to play music by artist, album, or song.

…to start and stop timers.

…to convert from one set of units to another.

…to translate from one language to another.

…about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.

…all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably.

I don’t think Siri is very good, and I would have said I barely use it until I read this list. Because actually, I use Siri to do all of these things (well, except Apple Product features… but my “all kinds of stuff” include lots of home controls and starting specific workouts on my Watch). The only one that I find unreliable is playing Music, which I am quite sympathetic to because my tastes are not mainstream and the names of things are super weird. I wish that would get better.

But by my score, 6/7 of the use cases that exists pre-18.1 that Nick says cannot be done “reliably or predictably” work 100% of the time. The remaining use case, playing music, is a bit of a crap shoot. It’s also the least useful of all of these features (unless you’re still trying to make HomePods happen).

So maybe I do use Siri and maybe it’s fine?