I keep seeing the video of the New Zeland MP who starts a Haka on the floor. I feel like each time it’s more and more affecting. Even half a world away, and as distant physically and culturally that I am, the meaning and power of their protest hits like a 2x4.

This is really getting dark.

I know I’m mentally exhausted by the very idea of work because nothing feels like more of a hell hole than opening LinkedIn.

I am asking this without any sarcasm or ill intent— has Trump announced a single nomination that would have passed muster during any other president’s term at any point since say, Carter?

Sinclair media is such a cancer on Baltimore City and its schools– this is a remarkably good faith settlement from City Schools.

Kakistocracy has to be the Merriam-Webster word of the year.

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.

This should be a triumph we’re handing off to Harris, instead, Trump will take the credit for everything that has already been accomplished.

I cannot believe how huge my Tele and Dr. Z sound. Oh yeah, with the BSRI Magawa in between. Still, fucking heavy for a guitar and amp probably better known for country music…

If you needed to rot all week, that’s fine. If you need to rot all next week, that’s fine too. Take your time.

With the time I control, I kept doing the things that bring my life joy even if I didn’t feel like feeling joy. For me, this turned out to be a huge help.

Tone knobs were made for the Telecaster.

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.

Here’s something positive I can still say after this horrible week: I am still able to feel joy in the company of people I love.

I don’t really think of myself as masculine, or manly, or whatever the phrase. Yet, I find myself wondering how fragile someone has to be to feel that being male somehow poses a threat or implies a lack of respect.

You have to be very small to think culture is “dominating” the young male.

You’re allowed to eat as much ice cream 🍨 as you want.

We have chosen a terrible fate for ourselves and the world with eyes wide open. Our institutions have been tested and failed. Our citizenry has been tested and failed. Now, some of us, resist a tide of hate and destruction that can too easily and permanently overpower us.

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.

I keep coming back to Lauren Morrill.

I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.

We’re up to The Debate in S7, which is perfect for before we watch the vote totals roll in.

One nice thing— we actually did pass the Santos plan, at least partially, and we have dramatically lowered the count of uninsured.

I failed to refill my Taharka Bros ice cream pints before tonight and I am bereft.

Holy shit, FL is going to fall short on abortion. That’s a terrible sign, and a terrible thing for women (and men) in Florida.

It’s quite clear America is fucked right now, and the only question is whether we’re about to nose dive into a place irreparable in my lifetime or whether we just barely hold back the tide.

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.