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

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.

Nothing like the friction of having to swap two cables from my personal machine to my work machine on a Monday morning.

What’s a bad decision that actually turned out good in your life?

— From @Annie

Adopting our dog, Gracie, is the easy winner here. I’m not sure I really made that choice— I went to meet her and discussed it with Elsa, but Elsa made it clear she was bringing Gracie to her home. I wasn’t quite ready, We hadn’t moved in together yet and we were picking Gracie up the very weekend I moved into a new condo I had just bought. I thought maybe a few months down the road, after we moved in and things were less hectic that it would be a better time. But I didn’t fight hard, and I admitted Gracie had captured my heart, at least a little, when I met her, so we drove 90 minutes each way to get her from a foster home.

We enjoyed the next 13 years with her.

As a reminder, I will be doing a month long Ask Me Anything this November. Email me your questions at ama@jbecker.co. I will only include your name and a link to your website if you want.

If Harris loses, I don’t think the appropriate response will be “where did the democrats get tactics wrong?” I think if she wins the popular vote, but loses the electoral college, it will be about how our system doesn’t work when we have partisan, geographic sorting.

If she loses outright, it will be about how we failed to convey the danger of Trump. It will be about how we have lost a shared notion of truth. It will be about how we’ve lost a common information architecture and with it, our common reality.

I’d like to hear some of your thoughts about urban development and transit policy, but I know so little about these topics I’m not quite sure what to ask. Maybe you could explain a few principles to an absolute beginner in this topic? (I know that’s not exactly a question, sorry.)

– from Annie

I’m going to try and describe a few ideas that influence how I think about urban development and transit policy. None of these are original, some of them likely have formal names and people associated with them. I’m not citing my sources, and I’ve never really studied these areas in an academic sense. Instead, consider these statements to be a crib sheet of things that have stuck with me because they either struck me as a true or came along with a boat load of evidence that convinced me they are true. Think of this is my crib sheet of “basic principles” I’ve come to largely believe.

The housing market is a lot like other markets– it responds to supply and demand.

The housing market is unalike many other markets, certainly the ones we study, because it’s expensive to move and expensive to buy and sell homes. Additionally, moving involves uprooting your connection to community resources, possibly requires you to change your job, etc. The housing market is full of high transaction costs.

The housing market is unalike many other markets because it takes a lot of time and capital to build new supply. Whereas interest rates and prices in the market can change overnight, building new housing cannot.

The high costs of building housing come from complicated rules around zoning and permitting alongside the fact that building housing is very labor intensive and hasn’t gotten much more efficient.

In the United States, our zoning and permitting rules are restrictive. We often do things in the name of “safety” with zero evidence they provide any safety benefits. We are grossly incurious of different safety standards set internationally and stick to what we wrote down in manuals in the early to mid 20th century as proven.

Gentrification is one of the most complicated and fraught topics to discuss. It’s kind of like defining pornography, except if the folks defining it came from vastly different cultures and time periods. Most of what people describe as gentrification is very much not gentrification. We use the language of gentrification and displacement to describe any change to place and rarely dig in. Often, what’s described as pro-gentrification actually reduces displacement by ensuring desirable areas maintain supply, stay desirable, and continue to offer quality housing at a price many residents can afford. Absent that growth, many of those people would move to neighboring areas and cause even greater displacement.

The sprawling suburbs and exurbs of America were a huge mistake, and we should be living in denser, more walkable neighborhoods with sufficient public transit to cover many aspects of daily life.

There is nothing more pro-environment than denser housing, and any idea of a return to rural pastoralism is a symbolic, aesthetic choice. The proper way to heal the environment is to reduce the need for human transit and reduce our land use footprint. Most people who react negatively to this can only imagine “Manhattan-ifcation” and lack the experience of traveling to many cities and neighborhoods which are significantly more dense than their experience while being obviously pleasant and desirable. These same people often imagine a sense of community that does not actually exist in American suburbs and small towns but very much does where there is denser housing.

Streets are safer when there are reasons for people to be there as often as possible. Unsafe streets are unlit and empty. Safe streets have folks picking up a coffee or dropping of kids in the morning, having lunch and entering/leaving offices and professional services all day long, then have folks picking up kids, leaving work, going out to dinner in the evening, followed by after dinner drinks or late night entertainment events in the evening. A street like that has people moving on it all the time. We don’t see crime where there are always lots of people around with good reason to be there– it’s the ultimate place-based cultural deterrent (the true deterrent is tackling poverty).

Organization before Electronics before Concrete– I think this originated in Germany, and it’s one of the most powerful ideas in transit/train policy. Basically, first you need to actually get the operating of trains right. Get a solid time table, run trains frequently and on time, provide good service. Once you’re at the limits of what can be done through organization, then you electrify your rail service. Trains operating with electrified lines over diesel run faster– they break down less often and they have lower penalties for adding more stops because they can accelerate and decelerate faster. They can also be operated with centralized control systems rather than drivers, reducing staff costs for operating trains more frequently and on tighter time schedules. Lastly, you use concrete– actual construction like grade-separated crossings over roads, level boarding at stops to decrease dwell time, or establishing new rights of way/expansions. We don’t do this anywhere in the US with any kind of success because we’re not serious about transit.

Frequency and predictability beats speed– I need to know when my train will depart and I need my train to be available as often as possible. That’s what drive usage. It’s no good to me to have two trains in the morning and two in the evening that arrive in 65 minutes but leave at different times every day. I’d rather take a train that always leaves at 5 after the hour, every hour and take 80 minutes.

Increasing transit service frequency and reliability is more important than decreasing fare box prices, at least in the US, but possibly everywhere.

There should be very little politics as we see them today at the municipal level. Most of the political questions around how we organize our society will not and cannot be solved at the municipal level and shouldn’t be the focus there. Instead, municipal government should be about public service provision– how do we operate as effectively as possible? You should get elected and hire people based on how well they can run city services. Unfortunately, we often elect folks based on issues they can’t really effectively tackle and settle for poorly run cities and gross underfunding, especially of schools and bread-and-butter infrastructure like sewage and water pipes, electrical lines, street maintenance, transit operations, and more.

I’m not sure anything filmed has ever been more terrifying than Narkina 5, right to the reveal of what they’re building.

It’s been said a thousand times and it’ll be said a thousand times more, but I don’t think any episode of TV has ever delivered the way S1E10 of Andor did.

I think season 1 of Andor is a perfect season of TV. The only thing I could say is that first three episode arc takes a little trust to get through the first time. But I’ve rewatched the whole thing this weekend and holy shit.