Some things happening now:

• Weight loss has gone well since returning to the gym in April 2021. I am about as fit as I’ve ever been in my adult life. I’m not feeling a lot of strain with keeping up with my physical health, so I’m hoping to keep this rolling, permanently. For whatever reason, this time everything is working.
• That vacation to Tulum was both great and terrible – we got away, we rode bikes, we hung out on the beach, and we ate some great food. It was nice to be active somewhere else. But for days during that trip I had a sinking feeling. Anxiety? Stress? I’m not sure. But I found the idle time challenging, and I think overall my feeling was, “Uh oh, that’s a lot of emotional weight from the past year and a half and I think it’s all catching up right now.”
• So this summer has been mentally hard. I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve been meditating lately, and I think maybe that’s helping. But the whole pandemic has been hard and the delta variant snatching away what normalcy I was starting to feel has been devastating.
• We’re going on more vacations, and I’m quite excited, because I’ve learned the alternative is a greater risk to my health right now.
• I picked up the pace of reading this summer and it feels great.
• I’ve logged out and deleted the Twitter apps (and all tweets, which happens after 60 days anyway). I’ve reduced some of my RSS subscriptions. I turned off easily finding my archives on the blog. This is not meant to be permanent, just seeking some additional quiet. I need a reset. I am allowing too many things out of my control to impact my emotions.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to correspond and you don’t have my phone number.

Here are a couple of recent dog pictures.

Previous Now Page

The failure of federal rent relief is a great demonstration of what happens when the law and policy is written without consideration for bureaucratic capacity. If we want government to be effective, we need to ask government, “What are you most capable of doing today to solve this problem?” If we don’t like that answer, we need to simultaneously fund government do what they can and fund government to build future capacity more in line with what is needed.

Reform often comes after failure, but disconnected from the funding and immediate policy objective. Imagine if while we funded expanded unemployment, we also funded states to have better systems for direct deposit access, Postal Service banking to have universal access to consumer banking needs, and dramatically changed the complexity of qualifying for unemployment.

I’m not sure what the equivalent is for rent, but there are clearly systems, capacities, and relationships government simply does not have that makes rent assistance virtually impossible. If we don’t like that, we need to fix it for the next crisis.

The failure of so much leftist, activist politics is a complete disinterest in making government better at its job and caring about the details of governing. We’re so busy worrying about ideological purity that fights over actual policy become purely symbolic– even when you win, it turns out our government cannot do what you want well.

And so the cycle begins as the right points out ineptitude as though that’s an inevitable, permanent feature of any government action.

We need to make government work well while we can ask government to do more. It can’t be either/or.

Some sequels are strong because they’re a continuation of an unfinished story. Some pull forward C-plot characters to tell a new story.

Few sequels take place after a “complete” story and picks up with the same characters to deliver another great, complete story.

The Hidden Palace achieves this.

I have never been the member of a social bookclub. It’s kind of strange, because reading is one of the few activities I have always made time for. ¹

The thing is reading is fundamentally asocial for me. I enjoy reading or listening to criticism on books I’ve read, but mostly, I enjoy reading and thinking about things myself. I don’t want to be an active participant in literary criticism. I read to learn and I read to feel. So much of my fiction reading, and really my consumption of all creative works, is about having a meaningful emotional experience without vocalization or analysis. So much of my non-fiction reading is about trying out ideas and hearing the steel man argument from someone I have no personal or emotional relationship with.

I don’t really want to be in a bookclub. I don’t want to have to find words to express why Piranesi was beautiful, or the meaning I found in The Hidden Palace , or how The Midnight Bargain’s simple surface feminism still had me pumping my fist in the air. I don’t want to have a pot luck about these things once a month, turning my joyful reading into homework.

But, I do want friends who know The Starless Sea was breathtaking, who can find themselves fantasizing of the bonds of found families in Becky Chamber’s books , and consider the power of stories from Alexandra Rowland’s books , and delight in being lost in Naomi Novak’s fairy tale worlds . We don’t need to have a bookclub, but I know we’d be fast friends if you connect with the same art that I do.

While I rebel against Rob’s recognizable and childish, “… what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” I understand how powerful that line is. What you like so often reveals what you are like, in inexpressible ways.

Most of my friends don’t read the books I read. I wouldn’t even recommend that they do. But there are a few people who share my tastes and I can’t help but to feel this keeps us connected in a different, powerful, and intimate way through the years. ²

While I’m mad at how the US has performed during COVID, and especially our government health authorities, I still have bristled at completely undermining their authority. This is at least equal parts fear of the lack of better alternatives and a recognition that, “the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance,” while real, also strike me as “a function of the limits of human knowledge,” as Martin Gurri wrote.

This crisis of authority is real, but their failures to be perfect are not. And in some ways, my frustrations are feeding a narrative that requires, at times, magical or impossible standards. That’s why specific criticism is so important— the early communication on masks was wrong, but possibly not bad ¹ decisions. Whereas the slow process to full approval for the mRNA vaccines and hesitance to introduce vaccine mandates of any kind feel more like both bad and wrong decisions.

Our government’s handling of COVID-19 is littered with wrong decisions and bad decisions. We would do well to focus criticism on the latter, lest we succumb to a hopeless nihilism that will only leave us less prepared to face the next crisis.

I was being driven crazy by the sound of my guitar. What’s wrong? The tuner says I’m fine. Am I going out of tune because I’m pressing too hard on the strings? Why do octaves all sound good? Is that a rattle/hum/buzz?

After 15 minutes, I realized what it was the interaction between the note I was playing and the sound of my ceiling fan being just slightly different such that I could hear the subtle beats of notes in unison out of tune. Turn off the fan, wait for it to stop. Play. Everything sounds fine.

Fuck.

But there isn’t just one spectrum; at the very least, there’s a quadrant grid, with policy goals on one axis and temperament on the other. The x-axis ranges from a fully planned economy to anarcho-capitalism; the y-axis ranges from solicitous Socratic dialogue to misanthropic bullying. They vary independently.

The Post-Dirtbag Left

This was a great article, but the quote above really stood out. I think we’ve fallen into this trap when it comes to vulgarity, call out culture, or tone-policing where it’s become difficult to talk about the impact of temperament. But the idea that we can think about temperament as a dimension within our political leanings, expression, and affiliation is powerful. It is on this access that we can understand the schisms between Warren and Sanders while also recognizing there are far more radical figures than either on other dimensions of policy.

I fall pretty far from the misanthropic bullying side of the temperament axis, while recognizing that I may have a quite a bit in common with those folks from a policy perspective. The whole Dirtbag Left phenomenon may be of my generation and gender, but it left me, and the people I associate with, far behind.

Should have cleaned up before pictures. Missing: my amp, which is in the shop for as much as five weeks. Needed: more books, a light for the bookshelf, and probably another plant on the bookshelf. Overall, pretty happy with where things are about 16 months after I took over this room.

Yesterday my friend came to me for advice. Afterwards, they told me that I was, “…a wonderful friend… I’m very grateful for you.”

My response was, “It’s a mitzvah to exercise being a friend.”

Here’s what I meant. Strictly, a mitzvah is a commandment–something we’re told we must do (or must not do). But a mitzvah is also a blessing. Each time we perform a mitzvah, it is an opportunity to act with meaning and to achieve something important. Performing a mitzvah is a holy act, whereby holy I mean that it is separated from normal. It is a chance to act with distinction from the mundane.

I am not always the best version of myself. None of us are. I don’t always take the opportunity to seize a moment to act with intentionality and purpose. So when a friend comes to me for support and I’m able to provide it, wholly, honestly, and without flubbing it up because I misread the cues or just am not who they need, it’s deeply fulfilling.

What is better than offering some part of yourself to strengthen others? What higher purpose can there be?

I am glad to hear that I was a good friend, but I am happier to have had the opportunity to be that friend. I wish I had more; it’s something I’d like to get really good at.

Taken from my DayOne journal, but I decided to share it publicly after some consideration.

Do real names reduce the need for moderation and introduce civility in online conversation? I used to think so. In fact, I changed all my online names to my real name back in college in part for this reason. I don’t hold on to any of those original “handles/monikers/nicks” I used to have.

But as the user-generated internet has grown, I’ve changed my mind. Facebook is filled with people who have their “real” identity, tied to their “real” family, and their “real” friends but act horribly to one another. They spread misinformation, fight about politics, are nasty, and reveal horrible truths about their personalities constantly. Services like Nextdoor or Citizen are filled with aggressive racism.

Real identities don’t increase shame or perceived risk of acting horribly to one another. Instead, the power of the internet to create connections and grow communities radicalizes us. If our behavior or views are deplorable or deplorable-adjacent, we find a pocket of the world that amplifies and rewards our behavior and disconnect from the world that rejects our behaviors.

Civility comes from having no choice but to find ourselves intertwined with others. Civility is a long game that the internet let’s us opt out of, and it’s destroying us.

Reflecting on “Abolishing Online Anonymity Will Not Tackle Abuse”

I have not had great confidence in the FDA and WHO when it comes to getting the science of COVID right in the short term. They both frequently advise too much caution in the face of low amounts of data, and too frequently the early available signals turn out to be correct. When weighing the risks and costs, acting on some data has almost always been the better choice than waiting on a more complete story. So when it comes to boosters, I’m inclined to believe Pfizer’s early evidence that they provide a significant increase in protection, especially for the elderly. And I’m inclined to believe that this protection is necessary for vaccinated individuals to have less restrictive lives given the rampant spread of COVID-19 and development of new, more contagious variants. The FDA, WHO, and other health officials playing “skeptical bad cop” will most likely have an outcome of dissuading complacent Americans from getting a third booster shot, even if better evidence shows we need them.

On the other hand, I do fully understand the moral imperative to get the whole world vaccinated. Not with standing the deaths, pain, and suffering COVID is causing as it continues to spread in lower income countries that were not able to secure vaccines due to international failure, the rise of new variants is dependent on the continuation of global pandemic conditions. Wealthy countries cannot defeat COVID only acting within their borders.

But the truth is, I don’t see anything to suggest that Americans who are willing to be vaccinated getting a third booster shot will meaningfully change the utter failure of the global community to distribute vaccines. And with large portions of the US population refusing to get vaccinated (and their governments supporting and enabling this choice), my family and I will see our risk of contracting continue to increase.

If offered, I am going to take my third shot, even if I hope the global health community gets its shit together and figures out how to vaccinate the world. We really need to see these vaccines get full approval instead of emergency-use authorization as well, since this has becoming the rallying cry of the vaccine hesitant, especially those who seem persuadable within the US.

In reply to: Health officials rail against Pfizer’s push for COVID boosters—for many reasons

We were staying around the corner from Kokoro here in Tulum without even knowing it— there’s a sign up against jungle foliage with a path and no further explanation. But at night, the path is lit up with string lights, inviting and mysterious. We wandered down the path and found the first pool I’ve seen that actually feels lagoon-like, and a Japanese restaurant with a grill on the first floor and sushi on the mezzanine.

If a sushi place looks pretty good, I’m almost always going to go for the omakase. So we decided to make reservations and return the following night to check it out.

What followed was a wonderful meal, most of which is pictured here ¹. The toro sashimi and toro nigiri with black truffle were particularly special, as was the quail egg and nori “taco”. It’s a privilege to be able to take vacations, and it’s even more of a privilege to be able to find a restaurant like this and let the chef do whatever they want. These are the experiences I treasure.

The best kind of progress for me is not measured on the scale. Instead, it’s measured by my accomplishment today.

I was able to keep up with a group of fit people in a tour “very few people choose to go on” mountain biking through the jungle, into caves, and then hiking through the caves until we stopped for lunch. We had virtually no breakfast, and lunch was a small sandwich— bread the size of my palm, one slice of salami, a slide of tomato, and maybe a slice of cheese, I can’t recall— and a banana. We had water and Gatorade, but I just went for the water.

Even just 2 months ago, I would have been struggling to keep up at all. I would have been starving and cranky about lunch, feeling totally unsatisfied and uncomfortable with hunger, especially after that hard work.

But today, I pulled on a wet suit and mostly swam through the caves for two hours. By the end, I was tired, but I just had some more water, pulled off the wet suit and returned it to my backpack, and then hiked to then bike back out the caves and jungles again.

At the end, we had a small meal of Mayan food waiting for us, a very reasonable plate, but nothing that would have approached a meal for me until recently. Drenched in so much sweat I could wring it out of my shirt, I enjoyed a light beer with my afternoon meal and we were on our way.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings, but right now I’m not sore or in any kind of pain. A few months ago, I’d be laying out on the floor. Now I took a shower, and feel refreshed, and while I’m not looking to do a long walk or bike ride tonight, I’m confident I’ll be ready to go in the morning.

And I’ve already been riding a bike about 10 miles each day the last two days.

When I decided to get back to the gym, back to weightlifting and training, and start watching my food closely again this is why— I was tired, I was not able to do things physically I wanted to do in order to enjoy my life. Sure I wanted to be able to more easily by clothes and was embarrassed by how I look, but I’ve been embarrassed by how I look my whole life. ¹ Mostly what I wanted was to be able to physically do it all, and never be worried if I could keep up with the group or have to sit back because something didn’t feel possible.

I’m not ready to climb a mountain, but I can be a full participant again. I can feel the good kind of effort, with more adrenaline and endorphins than pain.

This is what I’ve been in the work to achieve. This is the progress I wanted.

A rare picture of myself. Introducing, Vacay Jay. (It’s pouring here in Tulum, I’ve got to entertain myself somehow).

So tonight I was introduced to a “caprese salad” which was actually burrata and pesto stuffed into an heirloom tomato and I was very happy.

No pictures once it was sliced open, it was gone too fast.

In case you need this, if you install Java via homebrew, e.g. brew install openjdk, you’ll need to add this to your ~/.zshrc

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export JAVA_HOME="/opt/homebrew/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk/Contents/Home"

and then run the typical sudo R CMD javareconf to get hooked back up.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. I always feel pretty good after a night with an unusually high amount of “deep sleep”.
2. I fairly often feel great even when I don’t get very much deep sleep.
3. Sometimes less sleep is totally fine.
4. It takes getting significantly less than my normal sleep to feel bad after just one night of poor sleep. Normally, it will take 3-4 nights of low sleep to start having ill effects.
5. Interrupted sleep has the most negative effect on how I feel in the morning, but is also nearly fully resolved by just staying it bed and getting an additional 2-3 hrs of deep sleep throughout the morning.
6. Caffeine in the evening can cause me to stay awake later, but doesn’t have any discernable other impact on my sleep.
7. Exercise helps me sleep well, but less than I thought.
8. Anything over 6 hours and 45 minutes for me is absolutely fine. Anything over 7 hours and 15 minutes feels like “a lot”. I can sleep as little as 6 hours and 15 minutes with virtually no impact unless that goes on for days at a time.

I think the most important of these is (5)— if I find myself up at 2 AM, and again at 4 AM, I will do my best to send a few emails to say I’m having a rough night and make sure I can sleep from 7 to 10 or 10:30 AM whenever possible. This almost always ensures I won’t stack several days of bad sleep. If it’s not possible, I try and get a nap in around 4 or 5 PM that day.

Focusing on closing the resource gap in education is important as a mechanism to close the outcomes gap. Possibly the greatest flaw of the outcomes focused accountability regime of the last 20+ years was trying to eliminate the idea that changing inputs changes outcomes.

Of course outcomes matter! Of course the goal of equitable resources in education is to build systems that result in equitable outcomes! But the feedback loop has not been, “Our system provides inequitable resources, then provides inequitable services, and the result is inequitable outcomes.”

Instead, the feedback loop has been “Our system produces inequitable outcomes, you should change how you provide inequitable or ineffective or inefficient services.”

I am the first person to tell you schools and districts have room to operate better– it’s what I spend my professional career on! But there are severe limits when many districts are starved of the necessary supports.

We know how poverty makes it significantly harder for individuals to always make the “best” decisions that will lead to the greatest chance of escaping poverty. We talk far too little about how impoverished institutions and organizations face those same challenges. And that kind of institutional capacity rot is stacked on top of simply having too little to succeed.

A great piece by Alon again over at Pedestrian Observations, this time outlining how America’s hollowed out staffing transit authorities lead to high cost processes run by consultants. Transit is not the only part of government that operates this way.

The parallels are there in government software procurement. Few agencies have sufficient, well-paid, expert staff to build and maintain their own software systems. How many times do the same consultants need to fail before we recognize our process is broken? When it comes to big government software projects, if you don’t have the staff to build and maintain it yourself, you probably don’t have the staff to properly manage contractors building custom systems.

I think you have two options if you want to have successful projects: you either build it yourself, or you buy commercial-off-the-shelf products. That goes for software, but it also goes for infrastructure. How often are we finding American cities and regional transit authorities overpaying for lower quality rolling stock due to unnecessary customizations over off the shelf European train sets? The culture of pointless customizations at the margins is so strong, transit officials for Metro North in Connecticut didn’t know that federal regulations had change, permitting the purchase of unmodified rolling stock used in Europe.

Because of variations in state and local law, there are times you have to build things yourself. The team government has to do so should be as competent as private sector employees. They often are as individuals, but understaffed and underempowered to perform as well as a team. But so often, government spends orders of magnitude more on projects that fail in the interest of customizations performed by outside contractors that largely fail to deliver any meaningful improvement over unmodified, available systems.

Build the best yourself or buy the best from someone else. This in between crap just doesn’t work.

For all the ways that professional email and marketing email has cursed our inboxes, personal email is still beautiful. Don’t believe me? Choose someone you know and write a 5 sentence email to them. Choose someone you’d like to know who publishes their email address a 5 sentence email.

I’ll bet you one great email from me that the results will be delightful.

I’m going to add my contact information somewhere on this site in the future, but if you’re reading this, go ahead and send me an email.

Tonight I was revisiting an R script for cleaning up data that I wrote a couple of years ago. This script still runs nightly to process some data dropped on an SFTP server for some work we do at Allovue.

As I was reading through the file, I noticed that a lot of my code was repetitive. With some new powers I didn’t have back then, namely dplyr::across and many other tidyselect features, I wrote the following:

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clean <- map(raw,
             ~mutate(.x,
                     across(any_of(supplements), as.character),
                     across(where(is.character), na_if, ""),
                     across(where(is.character), na_if, "NULL"),
                     across(any_of('po_number'), na_if, "0"),
                     across(where(is.character), remove_non_ascii),
                     across(where(is.character), 
                            str_trim, side = "both"),
                     across(where(is.character),
                            str_replace,
                            pattern = "\\r\\n",
                            replacement = "\\n"),
                     across(where(is.character) & any_of('date'),
                            as.Date, format =  "%m/%d/%Y")))

My data is already stored in a list (raw) because I read the data using map with a custom function (extract_data), which knows how to process a yaml file and load data from various sources, like databases or flat files of various types. This allows me to automate executing the same script with different configuration files to collect data from many different sources. I mostly leave the data in a list so that I can use walk to export all the data once clean as text files with consistent formatting with a single call.

Until now, I never took advantage of having a list of data.frames for the T part of ETL. Without being able to use across with predicates based on data type or with tidyselect functions like any_of, it was harder to safely do mutations that were not attached to the underlying data structure. The code above can execute on any list of data.frames as long as a character vector named supplements exists. By using any_of, if those columns don’t exist in my data, they are ignored. And by using where on type definitions (largely characters in this case), I don’t have to worry about names of columns in the data I want to remove Windows-style line endings from– just take care of it on any character columns.

So while it’s not fancy, I’m tickled by removing four lines that mutated dates in 4 of 7 data.frames where that was relevant, and how many different places I added na_if before. Or how about the number of times I had to cast a specific value (like check_number) to character from some other format (usually integer because they’re quasi-numeric or logical because they are entirely missing from one data set) so that I can do a join or bind_rows. This is a classic case of time, experience, and an ever-improving tidyverse API reducing code complexity while making my code more generic and reusable.