A few weeks ago, someone asked what DOGE was doing to the reputation of USDS and 18F among folks who work in tech. I replied, and then posted this:

One small way 18F and USDS are no longer a place of aspiration. It’s no longer an exciting place to improve basic government functioning that’s earned independence through success.

Ethan Marcotte’s now widely read post about resigning from 18F is just heartbreaking. I especially appreciated this succinct description of what government actually does:

In government, that infrastructure is built by laws, policies, and regulations. But regulations alone do not infrastructure make. Regulations require workers to become infrastructure: those workers who labor to understand new policies, how best to enact them, and then work to make them legible and understandable to the American public — and, yes, to enforce them. Without those federal workers, and their labor, these systems fall apart. And the architects of this assault on the federal workforce are keenly aware of that fact.

The administration is not working on efficiency or effectiveness of government. They are working on crushing it.

I booked my annual checkup 6 months in advance. I asked to be on the waitlist, because generally that gets me in a couple of months early.

Yesterday I get offered a slot for tomorrow, 6 weeks early. So I grab it. Today they call and say that’s a mistake, but someone already took my original appointment.

The earliest they can book me now?

June.

I’m not in dire need of care, but I do have some expiring prescriptions that I’d like to talk to a doctor about and blood work that really should be done annually. This sucks.

When we were acquired by PowerSchool a bit over a year ago, I had to put up a wall between all personal and work data to a much greater degree than before. This included them determining my (relatively new) laptop had to be recycled in favor of a PowerSchool issued one. Gone was a beloved 14" MacBook Pro in favor of a very beefy 16". I did not love the 16", but appreciated that they did not cheap out at all on specs. It is a great machine, but it is a work only machine. It does not have my AppleID, and to a large extent, it does not have my data.

At the time, I already had a personal Mac mini at my desk, but I only had an older iPad Pro as my personal “to go” device. That’s how things were until today. It was mostly fine. On weekends, especially, I missed being able to easily use my Mac away from my desk for personal tasks, but it also felt like it made me less likely to stay on the computer all the time. I have traveled a lot less for work in the last year, so that was also less of an issue. My life was just less on the go.

The band forced the issue a bit. The laptop we were using to record sometimes and run our interface has “issues”. So, given that I don’t have my own laptop and I want to be able to record at our space on the Focusrite interface I bought, and I’ve missed having a personal laptop anyway, and there was a good deal on Amazon on a refurbished M3 MacBook Air where I already had a few hundred dollars in credit cart points saved up, I ended up with a new computer.

MacBook Air’s are just remarkably thin and light. Wow. This is a lot of computer in an absurdly tiny package. I can tell the difference in screen quality with the Pros, but I don’t think it’ll bother me that much. Because this thing is so small. Have I told you how small it is? It’s freaking small.

Setting up a new computer without Migration Assistant is still a process, even with scripts I’ve written and not maintained. But I do like a fresh start, and this is not meant to be my main squeeze. Some things that are terribly annoying:

• Fastmail’s profile-based log in system it really wants you to do almost always creates problems when I have a new device. It’s just about the only thing that annoys me about Fastmail.
• Setapp was having issues just today in the period I was installing stuff. All resolved now.
• The Mac App Store just wouldn’t install the 1Password Safari Extension for like two hours. Of course, none of that nonsense is even needed for Firefox. This experience is still subpar and that’s mostly on Apple.
• iCloud stuff, especially Messages, just has a terrible time without being left to do its thing in the background for hours.
• MarsEdit still can’t autodetect my settings for my blog. I have no idea why or what I’m missing.
• I can’t believe I can’t sync various settings via iCloud. Things like “My Caps Lock is an escape key” feels like I should be able to sync between machines without doing a full Migration Assistant situation. Same with “don’t play fucking interface sounds ever”. The all-or-nothing world we live in annoys me a bit– even though MA has been basically flawless for quite some time, I am often not tying to recreate the same machine.
• For the love of God, please end the annoyance that is the long xcode-select --install process. All of that stuff should just be on the machine.
• There’s no solution for this, but having many credit cards in my Apple Wallet continues to be the worst part of any setup process across any Apple device.

I’m sure a thousand things like this will come up over the next month as I make this pristine machine a cozy little shithole that I love.

Version 1 of the new blog design is out. From now on, the front page will have all the posts from the most recent day I made any posts. They will be in chronological order for that day, mixing short and long posts. The front page is essentially focused on today.

I will also show any long posts (i.e. they have a title, so it’s not really length) that were made in the current month at the bottom of the page. Below that, a list of my slash pages, ¹ which will appear on every page.

My archives will continue to show only posts with titles. Therefore, all short/micro/titleless posts essentially “fall away” from the navigation. I am not actually deleting them, but I’m not making it easy to find them either.

This is the best reflection of how I treat blogging– I am writing thoughts throughout the day, and the best way to understand them is often within the context that they are written. Anything without a title is quasi-ephemeral; they’re not long considered koans imparting wisdom meant to stand the test of time. They’re meant to be said and read within the flow of conversation and slowly forgotten like most things that are said in conversation. If I sat down to write something longer that has a title, I probably put at least a little more thought into it and have a bit more of a desire to be able to reference and find it again easily. Those posts are at least somewhat meant to stand the test of time.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few spots in my theme and haven’t thought of some edge cases– let me know if you ever see something funky! But for now, this feels like a natural evolution of what I had before: reverse chronological by day, chronological within day, with an archive focused on long posts. Now there’s just no easy way to page through to the past.

I have figured out the direction of my next redesign of my blog. It came to me immediately reading about a new Micro.blog theme by Matt Langford:

In my opinion, longform content should have higher visibility than microposts. Unfortunately, that content is often lost in the constant stream of thoughts we push out. As a remedy, I’m soon to release a Micro.blog theme that prioritizes longform content without losing your microposts. Hello, Bayou.

I thought I had achieved this– I only include long form posts in my /archive. I organize my posts in a very specific way on the home page: reverse chronological by day, then chronological within a day. This is so that you see the most recent day’s posts first, then are presented them in order. Within a day, the short posts often lead to long post ideas and the long posts often lead to short posts. So reading the day in order feels contextually correct. You can still see all posts right now by going through the pagination on the main page, but that’s way harder and causes old short posts to “disappear” whereas old long posts are easier to find in the Archives.

Except, does this really sufficiently create higher visibility? It does not. The archive is stuffed away and not surfaced and probably not worth visiting for most. Plus, I don’t really want you to go backwards very far on the front page. What I really originally was to paginate on day breaks but thats not really possible with Hugo.

So here’s the new plan. The front page will have just the most recent day’s posts (on the rare day I don’t post, it’ll be yesterday’s posts). Underneath that, I plan to highlight the current month’s macro posts, in a format similar to the month view on the Archive page, along with a link to the archive.

I think I’m also going to move the navigation menu to the bottom of the page, likely below this “month” callout.

I will include the “month” callout on my single pages as well– this way I am pointing toward this month’s writing anywhere you might land on my site.

This has an effect similar to having “featured” or “highlighted” posts, but instead of having a curated list, I’m just emphasizing a recency bias. That’s largely what I want– though not actually ephemeral, my blog is a personal running set of thoughts. The further back you go, the further you get from my current thoughts and current self.

I’m excited about this idea, even if it may take me a few weeks to have the time to implement it. All of this came to me in a flash in seconds after reading Matt’s post. Inspiration can be great.⚡️

Exercising religious freedom should not mean freedom to eliminate secular life, freedom to act in place of our government, and freedom from taxes.

These things are especially terrifying given how easy it is to claim “religion” in the US.

The Evangelical version of religious freedom makes people like me, who identify as Jewish, deeply unsafe.

As ever, oppressors find a way to use the machinery of liberation to oppress us.

Anyway, when the Supreme Court inevitable rules that we can just publicly fund religious schools we’re all fucked. The courts have already decided that anti-discrimination laws do not protect staff or students as soon as we hint religion. We know exactly what those Creationist Museum people are going to teach the next generation. Hell, we already know what many public schools teach about slavery and the Civil War today.

I am terrified.

When Vincent Ritter posted some nasty things a little over six months ago, I was disturbed. His response to directly being called out was, as I said at the time, “breathtaking”. Although much of the original content has been deleted ¹, my replies were not. I feel pretty good about what I said then.

In fact, I went on to write a post about the rehashing of Vincent’s harm and role and my blog post from about a week later that still says most of what I think. It was one of my most read of 2024. ²

My ruminations were about both accountability and forgiveness. Despite that, I did not actually forgive Vincent. Shortly after I wrote that post, after continuing to read his blog for a bit to see where things went, I decided to cancel my Tinylytics subscription and unfollow his posts from the few places I paid attention.

I am not sure that his blog post today, Silence addresses the situation sufficiently enough to earn my forgiveness or support. But it is enough to earn my compassion, which I tried to exercise even back during the original events.

What does appropriate accountability look like? That’s up to each individual to decide. I felt like direct support was too much. I felt a loss of desire to interact. I, personally, did not feel that anyone who kept any kind of relationship with him must become stained with his actions. Adam sure feels that Vincent has crossed over to irredeemable. So much so that his contract employment should be at risk as a result and is seen as an endorsement of those past views. Maybe it should be. In my work place, I wouldn’t have even advocated for firing Vincent– I would have just done it on the spot. I have team members who rightfully would have felt unsafe with Vincent on their team. I don’t fuck with safety.

Vincent is a stranger to most of us, but that doesn’t mean he was a stranger to everyone. I can hold people privately to a different standard than I would or could publicly. I can hold space for people I have a richer relationship with in a different way than a stranger. Meaningful, personal relationships allow us to directly challenge one another. They also allow us to have compassion for one another.

I hope he has people to keep talking to him, to keep holding him accountable, and to keep being able to support him as a human deserving of compassion. These things can be true all at once.

It’s easy to be right in public. It’s easy to be wrong in public with conviction. It’s terribly difficult to be wrong in public and feel it and know it.

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.

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.