Jason Becker
I’m glad they quoted me on process, and not just how the recession will impact revenues. Process is in the control of districts, revenue less so.
Shared ownership of decisions is vital when money comes off the table. Not only do you need the input of those on the front lines, but people throughout the community need to know the circumstances and context surrounding the tough decisions that ultimately are made. This will increase buy-in and agency during times of uncertainty.
My grandparents were poor in tenements in NYC, attending Black and Jewish schools. My grandmother always used to boast about attending the same high school around the same time as Colin Powell.
By my generation we attended white, wealthy schools in suburban NYC, split between New Jersey and Long Island.
Anti-semitism continues to ferment in the background and is alive and well among white supremacist movements in America, but that doesn’t mean that my family and I have not benefited tremendously from the privilege of becoming white.
Great overview of how our racist history has led to an anti-Black police force.
The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of Northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they’re being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It’s just remarkable.
We have so throughly criminalized human activity that all cops have to do is focus on Black people to generate the data that back’s up the belief that Black criminality is the problem.
In the 1890s. And again in the 1920s. And again in the 1960s. And again in the 1990s. And again today. These aren’t waves or events strung together by history. They are a single, constant, concerted effort to maintain the slavery that built our nation.
Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him… — Mattis denounces Trump
Today might have gone differently.
Greet a few friends with a hug as we arrive. Meander to the bar for a drink while we wait to get seated. Order a round of oysters. Get to our table, refresh our drinks, order more of our favorites from the oysters we had at the bar. Maybe a couple of recommended starters. We’ll figure out the rest later. On drink three we decide it’s worth ordering at least one or two entrées for the table to share. Another round of drinks. Struggle to share a dessert. A digestif to end the evening. No fuss about it being my birthday, but still a time with a few friends and great food.
This year I sat at home. We ordered in pizza. The world watched America demonstrate it is a white supremacist state. The police murder instead of protect. They conspire to remain blameless for all their actions, no matter what our own eyes can see. The white supremacist leadership of this country calls for violence against people of color protesting state-enabled murder. The white supremacist leadership claim to support non-violent protest, even after they made a spectacle of rejected non-violent protest. The liars lied about whether they lied about directly undermining US foreign policy.
We are sheltering in place. We are shattering in place.
If you’ve ever heard of the “white noose” here in Baltimore, here’s another great demonstration.
Pooling local revenue with Baltimore City’s two nearest neighbors results in $3,717 more funding per student for BCPSS students.
If we pooled the whole state, that increase grows to $4,963.
Without including wealthy DC suburbs or the Eastern Shore of Maryland, roughly 75% of the gap in funding for Baltimore City is covered just by stepping across a border designed for segregation.
75% of the gap.
That’s the legacy of state sponsored segregation. That’s what you choose when you live over the border.
I have been waiting for about 2 years for a coffee shop to open around the corner.
They’ll “open” for pickup only for the first time Wednesday.
It’s heartbreaking to think about someone pouring their savings and time into opening up shop only for a global pandemic to hit.
I don’t think we’ve come close to grappling with the lives lost, and we certainly haven’t understood the economic devastation caused by the twin diseases of COVID-19 and an utterly failed government.
It’s Memorial Day in the US. We are supposed to honor and grapple with the sacrifice of soldiers lost at war today. In reality, we celebrate their deaths with cookouts and sales. I can’t help but feel the parallelism in our failures to understand the cost of war and our failures to take seriously this pandemic. The numbers are too large to understand. The costs incalculable. Scale overwhelms and whites out our ability to perceive.
So I think about this coffee shop. It was someone’s dream. It was their big risk that they hoped would define their life. “I have decide to be a coffee shop owner.” Now, through no fault of their own, their grand opening will involve masks, gloves, and paper cups passing quietly across a door frame. Instead of hearing, for the first time, that glorious din of pen to paper, fingers on keys, friends talking, glasses clinking, milk steaming, and the cheery greetings between staff and regulars, they’ll open quietly.
They may not survive long enough to be what they hoped. Neither might we.
I used to be a heavy Google Reader user. Besides the joy of going one place and reading my whole internet, I took a lot of pleasure in sharing great things from around the web with friends. Some of this happened within Reader, but mostly I was a prolific emailer in college of interesting things.
I miss the correspondence my friends and I had over email about interesting block posts or stories or funny things I found all about the internet. It was one of the joys of email, and the joys of leisure time.
I continue this practice somewhat today— if you’re unfortunate enough to be a close friend you probably get some combination of iMessage, Twitter DMs, Instagram messages, or Slack messages about the things I find. But it’s all scattered and sent through highly disruptive mechanism.
I don’t really like to link blog because half the fun is curating who I send things to. And I miss spontaneous groupings of my friends who might like the same things.
I think within all this is an inkling of an idea for a web app/service only useful to me that I’d like to write. If I could collect interesting things in a queue almost like Buffer, and then at a set interval, empty that queue. It would send off a custom email to each person collating the items I selected to share with them. The result is almost a newsletter, but actually a collection of “fun things Jason thought you’d like or would love to talk with you about”.
I think I could maintain a lot more of my friendships with this package. In many ways, sharing the fun stuff I find on the web or debating a news article or blog with you, probably because I thought you’d have interesting things to say or it would challenge your thinking in some way, is my love language.
I missed it by a couple of days.
After years of conflicting advise and being bounced from specialist to specialist for keratoconus, I finally seemed to have found a set of doctors I trusted and who gave me a solid course of action.
The news was not great– the scarring on my left eye was fairly severe, dead center. My right now, now also presenting with keratoconus could not receive corneal cross-linking, a promising laser-based treatment to temper the progression of keratoconus, because my left eye vision was so poor the risks outweighed the benefits.
The hope? Improve the left eye, hopefully before summer, so that I could get corneal cross-linking before the right eye got as bad as the left. How would we do this? After years of not having corrected/correctable vision in that eye and all blur, it was time to take seriously my need for a partial corneal transplant. My hope had always been to avoid this, because I’m young, there are risks, they don’t last forever, and artificial corneas seem just years away.
This latest doctor though gave me some hope– they would be willing to do the partial transplant, but first they insisted I try scleral lenses. I had been offered lenses in the past, but with caveats. I was told they were expensive, that my keratoconus was so severe they’d need to order whole new fitting kits, and that the likelihood was I’d get only modest vision improvement. My new doctor said that she thought we’d have much better luck focusing through (around?) the scarring. That if she could get me to 20/40 vision with the lenses, we would have some options to do a “scrape” to try and remove the scar tissue instead of a full transplant.
This whole course of action was a bit time bound– we wanted to see if we can’t get to the crosslinking before the right eye got worse and risked scarring.
And of course, my follow up was the first week of quarantine.
Today, I got to go to that follow up appointment. And to my delight and surprise (and even to my doctor’s surprise), we did better than 20/40 with the scleral lens. For the first time in 5 years, not only could I make out shapes with my left eye, I achieved a “blurry 20/20”.
I’m frustrated. I have had doctor’s telling me about scleral lenses for years, but making clear that I should only expect modest improved vision and that it was a pain in the butt and expensive. They are expensive. And I don’t know yet how much of a pain in the ass they’ll be. But at least for now, I won’t need a transplant and starting in a few weeks, I’ll be using both of my eyes to see again.
First, this inexpensive stud finder works pretty great.
Second, this self-leveling laser makes the job easy once you find a stud. Just line up the cross hairs and you’re ready to go.
Finally, I’ve always sworn by Ook picture hangers. Super easy to install, never fails, easy to remove.
I started counting calories again in mid-January with pretty good results. I had even been keeping up with it as the world shut down. But this week with Passover alone and the accumulated anxiety of the world I got off the wagon. I didn’t “blow it”, but the mental energy to keep track just hasn’t been there the past few days.
That’s ok. I’ll start up again tomorrow.
This is my reminder that I can be kind to myself.
From @atomicbooks
I played in a couple of bands back in high school, but haven’t really been singing or playing much lately. Haven’t had an audience in over a decade. And while I’m not proud of this take per se, step 1 is get on the horse and put something out there.
What I’m thinking about and working on right now. This page will be updated semi-regularly as seems appropriate. The post date reflects when this was updated, and all Now pages will be archived and linked to from this page.
Here we are in 2020 facing down COVID-19 and expecting to spend the next several weeks if not months primarily at home. Luckily, we have a room in our home I was able to turn into an office, and I can comfortably work from here. Still, it’s hard to stay productive and keep my fears and anxiety even as we face so much uncertainty. For now, I’m taking some solace in the fact that I can continue to work, I am safe, and my family is safe. But I am afraid that a lot of change is coming, and it won’t result in a safer and better world– that’s the kind of too-honest, invasive thinking that I’m hoping to ignore for at least a little longer.
I not-so-recently got engaged.
I had spend the last couple of years working out quite diligently, lifting weights three times a week about 80% of the time and twice a week the remainder. In the end, although I enjoyed it, my inability to control my eating saw my weight and health decline to where I wasn’t happy. I started counting calories again and I’m seeing results I feel good about. I’m going to try and reintroduce exercise now that things feel a bit more under control, and I’m hoping to have finally turned a corner on a lifelong battle with weight. I’ve done better than I’m doing now before, but this time feels easier and more sustainable than it’s ever been.
Some of that is helped by my obsession with the Bon Appétit cinematic universe, which has me enjoying cooking again, something I lost with the move from Providence to Baltimore. It’s kind of amazing, but the stress of the year we moved combined with spending a year in a kitchen that felt cramped really hurt my enjoyment of cooking. But slowly in the last two and a half years since we moved to our current house, I’ve felt more and more interested in being in the kitchen and eating food we make again. It’s a big difference.
And in truth, as difficult as this period of social distancing will be, the end of work travel for a prolonged period of time for the first time in six years means that routines are going to be easier to build and easier to keep than ever before. I miss the travel– a lot– but if I have to create some kind of silver lining, I think it has to be that routine feels possible again.
We hastily moved some things around at home in preparation for both of us needing to work from home full time for the foreseeable future. I still have a lot of work to do in this room, especially considering we started to move post-isolation protocol time, but thought I’d share a look at my current desk setup
Some notable gear:
There’s some stuff not pictured key to my home technology setup, including a Synology 1810+ disk station and Ubiquiti networking gear.
The wiring is a mess, but overall, this set up has worked quite well for the past few days. When I am at my office, I bring the Ergodox and the laptop and that’s it– I have an LG 5K there and MX Master 3 there as well so my setup is fairly “drop in”. I also use my Sony WH1000XM2 headphones there since the office is loud. Ideally, I would have a second Ergodox, a second boom and ATR2100, and a better pair of closed-backed headphones, but I can’t complain.
Oh, and here’s the guitars (pedalboard and Weber Mass 50 attenuator not pictured) that I have behind me in case I need to unwind for a bit.
I think it’s fun and funny to joke about delaying a task you dread only to have it take far less time than you expect. I just posted about that the other day.
But the truth is, problem solving is hard cognitive work and all that time in dread was my brain wrestling with the problem on some background cycles.
If I got started right away, the task would be tedious and hard, and I may not come to an answer I’m comfortable with. The right time to solve a problem is when it comes surprisingly easy and feels like the “right” way to do something.
In truth, I celebrate that I am getting better at identifying the right time and conditions to sit and work on a problem and seeing an elegant solution unfold quickly.
What I am struggling with is not feeling so bad during the waiting period when I haven’t quite figured out what to do yet.
A lot of white people in America who don’t support progressive taxes, and don’t support various ways government can redistribute wealth point to one thing: they have earned what is theirs. When we talk about reparations— they didn’t own slaves.
How many of them know the history of their wealth?
This story about two Baltimore neighborhoods is just one small example of how explicit government policy and action created and sustained a racial wealth divide just a generation or two ago.
Because I grew up in the New York City tri-state area, I frequently heard from people whose families, like mine, emigrated to the US with little, long after slavery. These immigrants and their descendants made clear that because they didn’t participate in slavery or the Jim Crow South and they came to the US with little, they had no reason to have to pay taxes that supported black people in America to correct for our original sin. It seemed preposterously unfair.
They were and are blind to the ways their own family wealth in America was created and supported through explicitly racist policy programs that lead to affordable home ownership for their families. They have benefited from white supremacy all the same.