All of 2025

12/31/25 (13:27)

  • A new year is around the corner.
  • I feel like I've aged a lot the last year or two. Hoping to turn around that trend a bit this next year.
  • I like to discuss ideas and principles because they are universal and more interesting than the mundane singular events and people that litter history and current events. Do we like what Trump is doing today or not? Should we take Ozempic or not? If you have good principles then the answers reveal themselves. If, instead, you treat each thing as it comes then you have to recreate the wheel anew each time. You must litigate and judge every question as it arises, and without guidance of principles.
  • As a general principle I believe a couple things - don't mess with tens thousands of years of evolution and nature (just in humans...much more outside of our species) and don't be an early adopter. These two principles lead me to think Ozempic shouldn't be adopted (unless you're dangerously overweight and have exhausted healthy alternatives like diet and exercise). Should you have been an early adopter of Betamax? How about Fen-phen? Olestra? Early boob jobs? You don't want to be early on any of these things. The risk/reward for early adoption is pretty bad in most cases I can think about. And when you're playing god and changing things that have evolved over thousands of years...it seems an even worse idea. Let other people be guinea pigs and sort out all the issues. This, by the way, is why, when forced by the government, I chose the J&J vaccine over the brand new mRNA vaccine. If talcum powder and baby powder are now possibly linked to ovarian cancer after humans using it for many years without worry...what are the chances that all this other stuff is perfectly harmless?
  • In California 28% of black kids are reading at grade level. In Mississippi it's 58%.
  • There's a principle in civil rights law that intentions don't matter - outcomes do. This is to prevent states from having rules in place that de facto discriminate against black people, but are ostensibly fair. So, if there's a disparate impact on a protected group then that makes it incumbent upon the state (or whomever) to justify the policy in question. So, outcomes matter more than intentions is what I have always gotten from this. By that metric, CA is more racist to black students than MS.
  • In 2015 there was a controversy on the Yale campus that went pretty viral if you were paying attention to such things. This and the Evergreen siege were early indicators of wokeness run amok that I think most people missed. If you're not aware of these things then you probably only thought wokeness went too far around 2024. If you were aware of these events, then you have probably been waiting for the wokeness pendulum to swing back for about 8-10 years (me).
  • Recently the NYT daily podcast finally had Greg Lukianoff on to discuss the state of free speech in the country. He stood up for Weinstein and Christakis when those events occurred and has been on the free speech bandwagon for a long time. Because he appears to have actual principles. Unlike the NYT. But, better late than never for the NYT. With Trump in office they have rediscovered the value of free speech and the Republicans have amnesia all of a sudden.


    • 12/4/25 (13:54)

  • Vacation was pretty good. I need to make some vacation pages because I've missed one from 2022 and then this year and it's ridiculous it's taken me this long.
  • The Epstein thing hasn't gone away and I think that's a good thing. I think it's indicative of people feeling like the elite are running shit and then that leads to conspiracy theories of child sex trafficking... basically turns into a movie like Hostel where rich elitists are buying women or hunting people for fun or whatever. I'm not convinced that this is the thing that will take down Trump. Democrats seem obsessed with finding the thing that will take him down and there just doesn't seem to be anything. Every new scandal that comes up the NYT treats it as if his followers are finally breaking away or that he's crossed some line.
  • 1. Epstein and Trump were probably besties and Trump probably participated in bad things, but I don't think it will ever be proven.
  • 2. Epstein has more ties with Democrats than with Trump. How do I know that he was registered a Democrat and gave money mostly to Democrats? Because the media never mentions it. As a general rule, if the mainstream media don't mention it then it negatively affects their team (Democrats). With the Charlie Kirk shooting they went out of their way to not describe the guy's roommate/lover as trans, for example. They do the same thing with petty crime all the time as a corrective to the times when they mentioned black perpetrators too often in the past. I looked it up today and, shocker, Epstein was primarily a donor to Democrats and was registered as a Democrat. You see this in his text exchanges with Stacey Plaskett (D) during a Congressional hearing.
  • So, I hope that we get more info on Epstein and his connections. I hope it brings people down (including Trump), but I don't think it will do much. I think Democrats will get some stray bullets more than Republicans, but I think that the biggest scandals have probably already happened. Probably the biggest of which being Prince Andrew.
  • UCSD recently released data on their incoming freshmen and all the remedial math issues they've had. Combination of factors including AI, phones, COVID, but I think the biggest one is that we live in a permissive culture that values feels over reals. We want to be the good, nice guys who value feelings and belonging over achievement and reality. I see it all over the place now and I think a lot of it is well-intentioned, but you know what they say about good intentions.
  • From the linked article: "Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems."
  • Education has been a top 3 issue for me since I wrote a paper on it my freshman year in college. I just think it's a cornerstone of a society that affects so many other facets. It's amazing how poorly we're doing at it. Yet every year a local school district has teachers going on strike asking for more and (apparently) achieving less.
  • The other leg of that stool is parenting, and I've written before about the pandemic of shitty parenting being a much bigger problem than the COVID pandemic. It's actually not an even close comparison - which is saying something since COVID killed a million+ Americans.


    • 11/11/25 (11:06)

  • Things were slow for about a week and now are busy again. Not crazy busy, but more busy than is preferred. There's basically only one perfect point of busy-ness and I never know exactly where it is. Either I'm drowning, on the verge of drowning, or worried that I can't keep the guys busy the next day. This is a me problem mostly. It's also the nature of being a contractor, which is known as a flood or famine business. If we were doing year long renovations then that wouldn't be the case as much, but we tend to do projects that are 1 day to 8 weeks.
  • Without trust, society is totally fucked. AI has the potential to totally fuck us just because of that. Deep fakes have the ability to make it virtually impossible to know if what you're watching is real. That could be antifa protesters starting fires or fighting cops or it could be Trump shooting someone in the middle of 5th Avenue. Video no longer means anything. Wag the Dog and Rising Sun are movies that foretold this many years ago.
  • So, what will the response be when the zone is completely flooded with shit? I think people will still want to trust and so they'll seek out ways of verifying things. So, you might only trust a news anchor who is in your local community...one you have met in real life or who a friend has met in real life. Otherwise, you can't even know if an influencer or anchor or reporter is even a real person. Anderson Cooper seems like a nice guy who tells the truth, but in 5 years it's possible that someone like him is completely fabricated - as is all that he's reporting. So, maybe we only trust people we've actually met reporting on things they've actually seen. In this way, it could be a return to real reporting by real reporters. Maybe this is just wishful thinking.
  • Epistemology is the study of how we know we know what we know. This will be more important than ever.
  • There are 3 levels of how you understand and deal with people with whom you disagree.
  • 1. They are the enemy. They need to be converted to the proper way of thinking or killed. They are a nuisance. An irritant. This appears to be the growing paradigm in the US.
  • 2. They are fellow humans who should be respected and peacefully disagreed with. They are to be tolerated despite being incorrect. This is the traditional (classical) liberal mindset of live and let live.
  • 3. They are fellow humans who should be respected and are necessary for the proper functioning of society. Without their contrary point of view, society doesn't function properly. You need a right wing and a left wing to fly. This is my point of view that I am trying to evangelize to the world.
  • This isn't to say that every crazy opinion or person is equally important. This isn't my way of saying Tucker Carlson is as important and necessary as Nader. But we do need to recognize that we need alternative ways of thinking and being in order to balance things out. This is a simple and important distinction from simply tolerating others.
  • The other day we were talking with a soccer parent about something and for some reason JK Rowling came up and she said that Rowling was a good writer, but a bad person. I'm aware of some of her comments on trans folx (lol), but never found myself disagreeing with any of them. Asked AI to give me all the horrible things she said and here's what it came up with:

    • 1. On June 6, 2020, she tweeted in response to an article using the phrase "people who menstruate":
       - "‘People who menstruate.’ I’m certain there used to be a word for those individuals. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?" [1]
    2. She wrote in a 3,600-word essay in 2020:
       - “I am worried about the new trans activism. The huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning.” [2]
       - She also criticized allowing "any man who believes or feels he's a woman" into single-sex spaces, saying this "opens the door to any and all men." [5]
    3. In 2021, she tweeted referencing police in Scotland recording rapes by offenders with male genitalia as female:
       - "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman." [2]
    4. She expressed support for Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job over gender-critical views, and defended the right to question gender identity laws publicly. [3]
    5. Rowling said:
       - "Sex is real and has lived consequences. I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them." [5]
    6. She criticized bills to make legally changing gender easier, saying:
       - "It would harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women." [2]
  • JK Rowling seems like a great person to me.
  • Seems like the UK is going off the deep end with free speech. 30 people a day are being arrested for violations of their speech code.
  • People are making way too much of the NYC mayoral race. It's one city and Mamdani was running against a scandalized and unpopular opponent. If he tries a bunch of socialist stuff it probably won't work and his supporters will definitely blame everything other than him or his ideas.
  • This election in general is way overrated. In no way should anyone consider it a referendum on Trump or a big win for Democrats.
  • I'd rather be useful than liked. How about you?
  • After metoo and the George Floyd stuff we saw a bunch of movies where black people and women were heroes and central characters. This is the natural result of those cultural indictments. I said at the time that watching movies then was pretty boring because you always knew the woman would do everything correctly and wouldn't turn out to be a villain because such a thing would be verboten. I said at the time that we would know we had moved on when women could 1. be a central character and 2. be a villain. This is equality. Minorities just crudely being crammed into the roles that were once for white men (both 1. central and 2. heroes) is one step in the progress towards actual equality - which means that minorities can be everything - central, supporting, heroes, villains, and everything in between. It appears as thought we are there (again). Shows like The Girlfriend or Hunting Wives prove this. I say "again" because this was the norm in the 1940s. Women were central characters, heroes, villains, etc. Real equality is good.
  • While I'm on the topic - a point for anyone who is writing these characters in the future. The thing that sells heroes in good movies is demonstrating their competence. Not only that, but often it's best to show their competence after a defeat or showing (often in a montage) how they became competent. Show the character, in a detailed way, figuring out how to crack a safe despite obstacles. Show them failing and then getting back on the metaphorical horse only to get better and succeed next time. Show them training in the snow and mud and working towards a goal. These days they just plug a woman in as the hero and she's magically smarter and stronger than all the guys. That satisfies a certain desire, but is so superficial is doesn't actually work on any real level. Rocky and Karate Kid work because there is struggle and triumph. Rocky doesn't roll out of bed great. He rolls out of bed before the sun is up and drinks raw eggs and runs throughout the city and fails at chasing chickens and punches slabs of raw beef...that's what leads to him being able to compete against Apollo Creed. And he didn't even win the fight (spoiler alert). He did all that to only go the distance against the champ - he didn't even beat him. This is so much better than 99% of the movies where the writers have a hero who is just a bad ass who can win every fight and never gets hurt.
  • According to Ken Burns, George Washington was the richest man (or just about) in the US colonies when he was leading the fight against the crown. Pretty stunning to consider how fortunate we were to have people of courage and intelligence leading us in the revolution. Look at the richest and smartest people today and what they're up to. Completely self-serving (although with Musk one could argue his work with DOGE and space x are possible exceptions...Bill Gates with his foundation as well) is how I would describe the richest people today. A few exceptions here and there, but certainly none of them have the balls of George Washington....sleeping in a tent, fighting the monarchy, trying to start a new country, turning down a 3rd term, etc. They're mostly spineless, selfish losers. What's the point of having fuck you money if you don't exercise that with a modicum of courage (see JK Rowling above)?
  • According to David Attenborough we didn't even know about the world's largest ocean coral reef until a few years ago. I heard this on his new documentary (Ocean) and I assume he's talking about this reef. With this is mind, how can we have an accurate idea about how climate change will progress or not? If we didn't know about it and then it was wipe out due to a Deep Water Horizon type event then we'd be even more screwed than we thought, right? If we didn't know about it and now we do, doesn't that affect our models? Or do the models not take into account such things? Or do they take into account everything whether we know about them or not because we see their effects? At any rate, it seems that sometimes scientists can be remarkably arrogant about what they think they know. I think we barely are aware most of what the natural world has to offer and are just at the beginning of our understanding.

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    10/22/25 (14:09)

  • Back on the economy... A lot of talk recently about when the recession will come. There's a saying that economists have successfully predicted 8 out of the last 5 recessions. That's definitely the case these days. Supposedly we were on the brink of a recession when COVID hit and then we had a self-inflicted downturn followed by a huge G spending boom that sent the economy soaring (along with prices eventually). We also supposedly didn't have a recession under Biden even though we had 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP (which was always the definition of a recession when I was learning about such things). So, it's been a while since our last recession and we're "due" for one.
  • The other thing being pointed out is that AI accounts for basically all our economic gains the last 2 years or so and if you take those out, then the economy is actually flat. With that, there are a lot of people saying that we're in the middle of an AI bubble. Typically a bubble is a downturn that takes a few years to get back to historic highs. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying sector is poor. There was the famous Dutch tulip bubble which probably didn't have much fundamental value underlying it. But the housing bubble and dotcom bubbles had good idea or real economic value underneath...things just got out of control and people needed to be regulated or figure out how the new technology could actually be monetized in order for the bubble to turn into real gains.
  • So, is AI going to be like the tulip bubble or like the dotcom bubble? I think there is some extra enthusiasm and it's not all warranted in all cases and so there will be a correction. Maybe it'll be considered a bubble and maybe not. But the underlying technology will be important and eventually valuations for the winners will be supported by real economic production.
  • How will the overall economy be affected by AI and when will the recession come? Usually it happens every 7 years or so and we haven't officially had one since 2009. Trump is running the economy into the ditch with tariffs and uncertainty and everything else. So, that's the official narrative and it seems about right to me. However, I have less and less confidence in the official narrative and the smart people in the room every day that they say the sky is falling and I look around and things (economically) are more or less like they were last year. They say that inflation is transitory and it turns out it isn't, etc.
  • I see gold at an all-time high and that's an alarm for me. Some have written it off because countries are increasing their gold supplies or they say that gold doesn't matter or all sorts of other reasons... But, overall, I don't think we're in a good situation for the long-term. I think our debt is too high and our ability to solve problems is too low. I think our currency as the reserve could be in danger eventually. I think our investments in our human capital is woefully inadequate. I think our willingness and ability to rebalance wealth is too low. I think we have a better economic system overall than a lot of countries in our class. I think we still produce the best companies and attract a lot of the best people, but I see that in danger. We used to have a near monopoly on such things and I think that's slipped over the last generation. So, recession or not, I think are long term status as the best country in the world economically is at risk. Recessions come and go and I frankly don't think we should worry about that too much. We should be keeping our eye on the long-term ball much more than we have.
  • As alluded to above, and referenced countless times here, our ability to solve the problems is probably our biggest problem. The fact that we need a sociopath who is immune to shame to get anything done is a sad reality. I've said before, that hopefully his shamelessness will lead to a new era of governing. Hopefully it will reset norms around what can actually be done in such a way that it makes governing possible. Eventually it falls to Congress to get their act together, but in the meantime maybe a newly imagined Executive can address some of the intractable problems that have been plaguing us. His use of the Executive so far has been anathema to most progressives, but if a more progressive president were in charge I guarantee they would love to see that president employ many of the same tactics to achieve their goals. Watch Gabriel Over The White House (1933, La Cava) to understand.

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    10/20/25 (18:32)

  • NYT podcast today was about figuring out why the stock market is doing so well still. They basically said that tech is driving a lot of it. They pointed out that the Mag 7 stocks are about 35% of the S&P and said that if Nvidia goes up 2% is makes it pretty hard for the S&P to go down. Which doesn't make a lot of math sense to me. Nvidia is 7% of the S&P and if it goes up 2% then that translates to about 0.14% for the S&P. Not sure what the NYT is saying there...I'm not sure if they know either.
  • The bottom line for me with the economy talk in the media is that they've been saying we're going to have a recession for a while now. They've said that Trump is running things into a ditch with tariffs, etc. So, if none of that comes to fruition then they're going to look pretty dumb. I don't really care who is right, I just want some competence. I want to know that someone has a good idea of how things work. Enough of a good idea that they can predict the future.
  • I've written about this before... The ability to tell the future determines how smart you are in a lot of ways. Anyone can write a nice story after the fact about why things turned out the way they did, but that's not very useful. I'm not interested in historians. I'm interested in scientists. Scientists do the math and know that when you drop a ball it will travel x speed and rebound y inches in the air due to the hardness of the ground and elasticity of the ball, etc. Of course the economy is a lot more difficult to explain than physics. I completely understand that it's a confluence of disciplines such as political science, psychology, economics, etc. But if that's your defense when you get something wrong then maybe you should lead with that when you're making predictions about how fucked the economy is going to be when certain policies are put in place.
  • What they probably should have said is that tariffs will likely have a slowing effect on the economy, but that tariffed goods are only x% of the economy so a 30% drag on x% will translate to roughly y% and some of that will be offset by companies eating the tariffs in an effort to not lose customers, etc. Instead, you get "Trump is going to kill the economy with his tariffs." And then they need to have hedging podcasts dedicated to covering their ass and explaining why the sky hasn't fallen yet.
  • Trump is talking about sending troops into SF now. People still are on the narrative that SF is a shithole and all that. It's actually improved since the new mayor came in. Started a bit before that with the new AG (brooke Jenkins). But it's actually improved a fair amount. Still bad in the Tenderloin and some other spots. It will always have a lot of homeless people, but the open air drug markets and on the ground lawlessness have decreased. You can believe me because I called it out as being horrible during peak wokeness and I don't mind pointing out that it's gotten better. Oakland, too, has made headway on the encampments and even the break-ins and lawlessness. Still plenty of it and they have more problems in part because they are in debt and aren't replenishing their already very low police department. I had AI research this a bit and Oakland has a lot fewer cops than most cities its size. Cops per capita is quite low and should arguably be quite a bit higher than average, if anything.
  • Just this minute I got a postcard from Johnny which is actually quite related to the first part of this post. Kismet.
  • Generally, I think that people have a set of priors that they don't update as facts change. People have a general outlook about things and fit new information into that narrative. People are not very scientific. It would be much better if people were able to change their minds more. But, if anything, I think that will be less the case moving forward. Our narrowcasting media allows us to hold onto our beliefs more strongly than ever. I can find ways to prove my side of the story (whatever side that is) more easily than ever before. So much of this comes back to the horrible job our media is doing and how we get information. SAD!

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    10/9/25 (12:19)

  • The federal government could be more useful if it chose to be. My liberal vision of the federal government is that it make easier for all state and local governments the job of governing. They could research and provide information about  (not mandate) best practices on everything from education to transportation. Some of this already exists, but it could be expanded and brought into the 21st century. They could provide a suite of applications or other software for DMVs or a program that tracks municipal projects so all entities could weigh in on a central platform. This could prevent the practice of paving a road and then digging it up 3 months later for sewer upgrades or whatever. I see this happen all the time. The sky's the limit for an entity that has essentially limitless resources. But instead of making things run better or doing the research for local governments and small businesses, the feds choose to basically give away most of the money it gets. Total waste of potential.
  • One of the reactions I saw to Charlie Kirk being murdered was basically something like this " He advocated for gun rights and basically got what was coming to him. If he had advocated for a different world then he wouldn't have deserved it." There's a sort of justice to the claim that whatever you claim about the world might come to you so be careful what you're advocating. I get that. Of course, it could be said to work the other way as well. You believe that unborn babies are just a clump of cells so when you have a miscarriage, what's the big deal? It's just a clump of cells leaving your body so what are you crying about, you deserved it just like he did. It would be cool if people thought about the other side of their thinking so the world would be a better place.
  • There are some basic sanity questions that Republicans have been asking Democrats the last few years because Democrats seem unable to pass the test. Like can men get pregnant? or what is a woman? or whatever. These are such layups that you'd think Democrats could figure it out by now, but they have trouble with the far left of their base. At the very least they need to come up with their own list of questions for the Republicans. Ideally they'd do that and also answer correctly to basic questions.
  • The discussion around book banning in schools is really dumb...as usual. The Left says you can't ban books because of freedom of speech and artistic expression, etc. The Right says of course we can because some of this is horrible porn or whatever. I'm not for banning books in general, but in schools it should be up to the community to decide on a case by case basis what's allowed and what isn't. Obviously Mein Kampf and Penthouse Letters shouldn't be allowed. So, we're agreed that banning books in schools is okay, it's just a matter of where to draw the line. Acting like it's about freedom of speech is b.s. No rational person wants their 7 year old reading Gender Queer. If you don't know what I'm talking about then go take a look. Of course, just because 7 year olds shouldn't read it doesn't mean that every book on the list rises to the same level. It's up to local communities to make a (hopefully) informed decision. The most hilarious version of this argument is manifested in school board meetings where parents argue against a particular book being allowed in schools while the school board argues it should stay (because we hate censorship!). But when the parent starts reading excerpts from that book the school board shuts them down because it's too obscene for the school board meeting.
  • Principles and consistency would be nice.
  • When Trump was shot at the NYT podcast said it was amazing how great his political instincts and sense of optics/imagery were to seize the opportunity to stand up and say "fight" to his followers. Of course they have zero knowledge of what was going through his head at the moment and are inferring that the reason he reacted that was was purely for politics and imagery. This was one of the worst and most cynical takes I heard about the event. Ascribing motive to his actions without proof. But this is where we are. The preeminent media organization in the country acts this way and the leader of the country acts the way he acts. Great situation we're in.
  • Years ago Morley Safer said that it's all but settled that alcohol is good for you. More recently the NYT, Andrew Huberman, and others says alcohol is bad for you. Every few years this changes. Alcohol has been around for thousands of years and has been an integral part of all cultures across this time, yet we still don't know all the pros and cons of alcohol. How, then, can these same medical and media professionals claim that a new mRNA vaccine for a new coronavirus (COVID) is totally safe and no one should worry about it and everyone should take it? Maybe this works fine for other people, but to me it just makes me lose faith in you when you claim such certainty when you clearly can't. Just tell me what you do and don't know and be honest about it.
  • You've probably heard many times that the US is 4% of the world population and produces 20% of the worlds global emissions (or some similar stat). Why have you heard that stat, but not that we also created 50% of the world's inventions? It wouldn't hurt the media to occasionally say some nice things about the country.
  • You know you're rich when you fill up your gas tank instead of just getting $5, $10, or $20 at a time. It's nice to be rich enough for that now.
  • Stories are, in part, supposed to encode cultural lessons into society and pass these lessons and values onto the next generation. This is why stories, movies, books, etc. are so important. Yes, they can be cheap entertainment, but they serve a larger purpose as well. Don't take that for granted.
  • Part of what made Netflix big was that they dumped all the TV episodes into your feed at once so you could binge. It was a great thing. But now they don't do that anymore because they want you to stick around as a member longer. They should adjust this model, though. If you've been a subscriber for 1, 2, 3 years or whatever then you should get the episodes all at once.
  • I asked ai:
  • where have the Oakland A's ranked in attendance since 1980? please give a list by year along with their rank in the MLB for total attendance

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    I'll provide a list of the Oakland A's attendance rankings in MLB from 1980 to 2024, based on the available data. Note that the rankings are out of the total number of MLB teams for each year, which has changed over time.

    2024: 15th of 15
    2023: 15th of 15
    2022: 15th of 15
    2021: 15th of 15
    2020: 11th of 15 (Note: This was during the COVID-19 pandemic with limited attendance)
    2019: 10th of 15
    2018: 13th of 15
    2017: 14th of 15
    2016: 14th of 15
    2015: 12th of 15
    2014: 10th of 15
    2013: 9th of 15
    2012: 12th of 14
    2011: 14th of 14
    2010: 13th of 14
    2009: 14th of 14
    2008: 13th of 14
    2007: 12th of 14
    2006: 12th of 14
    2005: 8th of 14
    2004: 7th of 14
    2003: 6th of 14
    2002: 8th of 14
    2001: 7th of 14
    2000: 11th of 14
    1999: 12th of 14
    1998: 13th of 14
    1997: 14th of 14
    1996: 14th of 14
    1995: 12th of 14
    1994: 12th of 14
    1993: 11th of 14
    1992: 4th of 14
    1991: 3rd of 14
    1990: 2nd of 14
    1989: 2nd of 14
    1988: 7th of 14
    1987: 11th of 14
    1986: 11th of 14
    1985: 11th of 14
    1984: 11th of 14
    1983: 11th of 14
    1982: 6th of 14
    1981: 4th of 14
    1980: 12th of 14

    This list shows that the Oakland A's have generally struggled with attendance rankings, particularly in recent years. Since 2017, they have consistently ranked among the bottom teams in MLB for total attendance. Their highest rankings were in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their peak being 2nd place in 1989 and 1990[1].

  • Looks like it ranked just the AL for some reason.

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    10/7/25 (14:31)

  • Went to Banff National Park in Canada last weekend with Meryl's dad, aunt, and stepmom as well as our family. "Took off" Friday and Monday so it was a decently long trip and the plane ride is only about 2.5 hours. Nice place, but as usual, too many people around. Couldn't really get into Lake Louise using traditional methods. Luckily we were staying at the same hotel chain as the hotel there so we were able to use their parking lot. I don't know what the future of these kinds of places is going to be like. We were there about 20 years ago and it wasn't as busy as it was this time and you can just imagine that it will continue with that trend...lines, more waiting, etc. I mean, if there's a line to get to Mt. Everest then there's probably no place that won't suffer from this issue.
  • We also went to the top of Sulphur Mountain. It has a gondola to get to the top which was $90CAN...for the 7 of us that would have come to about $450USD. But there's a hiking trail that gets you to the same place for free. So we hiked about 3.5 miles and 2500' to get to the top and saved $450. The ride on the gondola back down was free. Same deal as if you go to Mammoth mountain in CA. Sulphur Mountain has two peaks...one where the gondola lands and has some nice views and another that's about half a mile away with a wood boardwalk that takes you up and down stairs to get to it. I would guess that about 20% of the people who pay to take the gondola to the first peak will walk the 1 mile round trip to go to the other peak (which is a bit higher and has arguably better views). About 1% of the people at the peak took the hike and 99% took the gondola. This is a long-winded way of saying that, outside of a few marquee sites like Mt. Everest, you CAN escape crowds as long as there isn't an easy path there and you're willing to do work.
  • Been absolutely drowning in work lately. I see a light at the end of the tunnel, though, so that's good. I lost one guy a month or two ago and another is looking to become a truck driver so I might lose him as well. He's a good kid, but not super motivated and seems to forget a lot of the things I tell him. Overall, I'd like him to stick around, but I won't cry if he leaves. At any rate, I think I need one more guy who is decent and can communicate. Finding good help is really difficult. The only thing that seems to be at all reliable is to network with people and see if anyone knows people looking for work.
  • One of the little jobs I have a lot is near the Mormon church. Every once in a while they'll have some blinds that need to be replaces or a shower fan that isn't working or whatever. Each time we go there it's a new person living there. Basically the Mormons own a few units and will rent it out to people who are working at the church, but it's a rotating cast of characters. They're all named Elder Joe or Elder Mary or whatever. I never call them Elder because I think it's ridiculous and I don't think I should have to jump through weird hoops because your religion has some weird naming tradition. Same reason I don't feel compelled to call Jill Biden Dr. Jill Biden. Which of course makes me think of this story.
  • I think I figured out that I don't hate my job. Sometimes I even like it. What I hate is the manner with which I've been having to carry out my work. Shitty customers, shitty timelines, lack of support, etc.
  • One thing that my job has definitely done is change the way I interact with people. I can't say I've ever been great at customer service, even though I've had customer service jobs before, but I'm worse at it now. Once you get sued it changes how you view everything. Once you have ungenerous people throwing shit in your face or shitty neighbors complaining about blocking their driveway for literally 30 seconds even though they're just sitting upstairs watching TV and you compound all these shitty people who seem to be angling towards a lawsuit or a complaint to the city about blocking the sidewalk or unpermitted work or any number of other things...it all just changes you. People will invite themselves into the house you're working on and comment on the colors you've chosen or ask what you're doing. Karens konstantly komplaining about this that and the other. It all just adds up to being really defensive and tired of the bullshit. How about you just leave me alone and let me do my job? How about you get a life and stop calling the city about every little infraction? We had a job where we were going to replace a fence for a guy who had moved out and he gave us his neighbor's contact info so we could coordinate with him about access, etc. He had a bad attitude about the whole thing, didn't want to discuss the job, etc. Finally we got the homeowner involved to bridge the gap and then he opened up a bit, but I had to meet with him to talk about the process, had to add him as an additional insured on our insurance, etc. It's just a fucking fence and it's a major upgrade for you (for free, I might add), so I don't know why you're being a dick about everything. This is the kind of stuff that we have to deal with all the time and it adds up.
  • Now if a stranger comes up and starts wanting to talk to me about something I pretty much assume it's going to be a complaint or they're trying to catch me doing something wrong. I get defensive and standoffish if there's a hint of any of that. If they approach with a positive attitude then it's fine, but any negativity and I pretty much shut it down right away and make it clear I don't want to deal with them. I blame that almost entirely on having to deal with Karens for a living.
  • All apologies to nice people named Karen.
  • A while back there was a snarky #learntocode thing that happened because I guess coal miners and the like were being told to learn to code by white collar people who weren't sympathetic to blue collar people losing their outdated jobs. Then there was a backlash against liberal reporters who were losing their jobs and were being told by people on the right to learn to code instead of being reporters...a sort of tit for tat. Anyway, there's been a movement the last 15 years or so to encourage people to learn computer science because there's a lot of money in it or whatever. NYT podcast recently revisited this whole notion that kids should be going to college to learn to code... Turns out it wasn't such a great idea for a lot of them. Of course I could have told them this from the beginning. Something that social engineers don't seem to understand is that people aren't machines that can be repurposed infinitely. You can't just take a coal miner or journalist and teach that person computer science or carpentry. People come with their own skills and interests and you have to work with what you have. But apparently a lot of these kids in this podcast story didn't have any mentors or counselors who could have taught them any of this so they had to learn the hard way by going to school and learning this stuff (at what level I have no idea) and then they found that the jobs that were supposed to be there weren't there because of AI. So, you're stuffing people into a box that may or may not fit and then they enter an industry that is no longer growing.
  • Better yet, the story explains that some of these recent grads are applying for hundreds or even a thousand jobs. I've got news for you - if you're applying for hundreds of jobs you're not applying for any jobs. Applying for jobs means you follow up, you call and speak to a person (I know people think it's crazy boomer stuff to have a phone call these days, but it serves a purpose from time to time), you go in to the office in person and establish connections. You apply only for jobs where you might have an "in" of some kind. You're not just filling out applications online and sending it into the void. Again, no mentorship or counseling has taken place otherwise they would have pointed this out.
  • Lastly, 25% of people have a 90 IQ or less. 25% of people need to have jobs available that don't require a great deal of logic and troubleshooting, etc. I had a friend who went to Laney college and she was a nice girl, but she wasn't super smart and some counselor told her she should take a solar class. I could tell you that she wasn't ever going to be a solar installer, but that's what the counselor recommended, probably because the counselor didn't know her very well and was told to pitch solar classes to more people because solar was subsidized and a growing industry 12 years ago. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's how this crap works. I think people need to be realistic about what 25% of people are going to be able to do. This is where having an ideology that everyone is a blank slate with limitless potential can do more harm than good.


    • 10/1/25 (10:27)

  • Debate these days is around free speech because of the Kimmel temporary suspension. I love seeing each side contort themselves into thinking quelching free speech is a good idea. A couple principles to remember so you don't get lost in the rhetoric: if you only support free speech that you like then you're not for free speech. If you have a principle today, but don't think it should apply tomorrow, when someone else is in charge, then you don't have a principle. These are simple ideas that seem easily discarded as soon as power enters the equation. There's really not much more to say about it other than in edge cases like incitement of violence, etc., but it's overall a fairly simple thing. The importance of it deserves more than I'll give it here, but basically without free speech then we can't think and develop better ideas and change society. It's a cornerstone and shouldn't be fucked with.

    • Interesting to see people like Greg Lukianoff or Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald as they go from liberal to conservative media outlets as the political winds change. I don't think these guys are actually changing much at all from what I know of them, and yet they will be on Rolling Stone magazine or NPR or other liberal outlets talking about free speech (GL) or being anti-war (MT) or about govt. surveillance (GG was an author of the Snowden story). Then they'll be on my conservative podcasts as they talk about similar issues and the conservatives are opportunistically thinking the same things. Then Trump is in power quelching free speech as much as he can and Lukianoff will be on all my liberal podcasts discussing (yet again) the importance of free speech. The principles (and people who hold them) stay the same, but only one side talks about them at a time. Same goes for other principles like running up crazy federal debt levels or anything else that can be weaponized as the opportunity arises. I'm not necessarily vouching for these people, though they seem principled to me, but more pointing out that the principles are important and how easily they are forgotten when convenient by the media and political actors.

    9/15/25 (14:18)

  • Work continues to suck. Same job causing most of my problems. I think you can either care a lot and try to please difficult people and do a great job with limited resources or you can care less and have a less great job, but save your mental health. I've managed to both care a lot and do a crappy job, so no one is happy. It's working out great so far. Going to tell these people that they can get someone else to do the job and hopefully they'll just do that so I can take the L and move on with life. I'm horrible at customer service. The crew I have is bad at keeping things clean no matter how much I talk about protecting things, etc. I would rather just not work anymore.
  • Maybe gen Z has it right. They talk about self care and "funemployment" and don't seem to care much about responsibility and sticking to the script (probably because they see that the script isn't leading to good outcomes for them). Average first time homeowner is 10 years older (38) than it used to be in the 80s (29), as one example. Not sure how they live with this attitude, but it does seem better for one's mental health and personal relationships.
  • In other news, the world seems to be falling apart slowly. Charlie Kirk was assassinated the other day (apparently the shooter was dating a transgender person), there was another school shooting recently (from a transgender person), and a Ukrainian woman was killed by a psycho black guy with a knife in Charlotte (after which he said something like "I got that white girl" and "she called me nigger" [even though she didn't]). So, a lot of fun identity politics stuff to comment on there depending upon your views and all that. Conservative media is eating it all up, as expected, because each case is interesting and fucked up in ways that doesn't exactly win points for the progressive wing of society. In other words, in terms of point scoring, these are all bad for progressives.
  • But isn't that really a big part of the problem? All this score keeping and emphasis on owning the libs or "Joe Smith DESTROYS so and so," and crushing the other side doesn't seem to have advanced our society at all. And all this stuff seems to have gone into overdrive since social media and the new forms of online media that emphasize click bait in a way that 24 hour cable news didn't even come close to.
  • The medium is the message. That's what Marshall McLuhan said and I find it to be as true as ever. Would Charlie Kirk be who he was if his medium of the day was long form essays instead of TikTok and X and YouTube? Would Steven Crowder or Sam Seder or Hasan Piker be popular at all if these weren't the dominate forms of media? Seems like a constant devolution since AM radio and 24 hour news.
  • So, the medium is part of the problem, but the culture is the other part of the problem. We have a culture that, for whatever reason, seems to lap this shit up. I think most of it is because it exists online. For example, all the tough guy keyboard warrior stuff that people espouse, wouldn't be given or received the same way if all this were in real life. Our culture, though, is increasingly online. People exist online and their identity is more and more online. It's pathetic and problematic for all sorts of reasons, but it's true. So, we need to get out culture back in the real world. We need to identify that online isn't real. But we also need to correct a culture that is broken in so many ways. I've written about it in a scattered way here for 25+ years so I'm not going to try to summarize all of it now, but suffice it to say that we have a lot of work to do in a lot of ways. Our race relations are experiencing a marked ebb Economically things appear okay superficially, but are fractured, tense, and uncertain. Politically we lack the ability to solve problems and are polarized like few times in our history.
  • (21:16)
  • Whoever is in charge of pushing out updates on my Google Pixel has more of an impact on my life than Trump or Charlie Kirk or any other political figure. I guess that's white privilege, but I think it's probably true for most people because most of these political changes don't affect most people. Something to consider. By the way, whoever is in charge of pushing out updates on my phone is doing a horrible job and I'd love to vote them out of office because I hate that the phone I buy changes layout and look and functionality a couple times a year. I hate you.
  • Back to the original topic... our society is clearly fracturing. Depending who you ask they'll give you all sorts of ways this is happening or reasons why. Some think we're going to have a race riot, others think it's about the gap between the rich and poor, others think it's about D vs. R. But the only thing that we can agree on lately is that we're not getting along. Maybe this experiment in diversity and freedom was destined to fail. Maybe it was all just a stupid story and now that the meta narrative is gone we're going to crumble.
  • How bad does it get from here? I think it gets worse before it gets better. We have the cultural attention span of a gnat (thanks in part to the internet culture) so, in the short term, we'll move on to other things as new Netflix shows come out and distract us. But, like a ratchet, things won't be resolved and so we'll gradually get worse and worse. Apologists from the offending side will not only defend anything and everything their side does or says, but will also be pushed to the forefront of the debate whether they have a serious following or not. So, something like the Kirk assassination will happen and then, even though most Democrats in leadership or the base find the assassination to be anathema, the media will dig up the outliers who justify the shooting or minimize it or point out how "yeah this is bad and all that, but the other side is actually way worse." Even if this isn't the mainstream position, this position will take a disproportionate amount of the air and become the de facto position of at least one wing of the offending party in the eyes of the other side's base. Each side being defined in the other's eyes by the worst people in that group. So, Democrats are defined by Saira Rao or the worst things Ilhan Omar has said. Republicans are defined by the worst things Stephen Miller or Donald Trump has said.
  • Does the violence get worse? Probably. It's pretty bad now, but in 1970 there were over 450 political bombings...more than one a day for a year largely by the Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army. The WU was run by Bill Ayers who was associated with Obama (though they later said this wasn't much of a friendship) and was the adopted father of Chesa Boudin (SF District Attorney). So, we've seen much worse political violence than we're seeing today and we've come back from that. That's good news.
  • Bruce Ackerman, in 2010, made some predictions about the Decline of the American Republic:

    • 1. A charismatic outsider will become president and express extreme views (not an outsider who tacks to the middle as a uniter)
    2. president will have strong media manager and will appeal to narrow "micro publics"
    3. will govern through loyalists in the executive despite congressional/judicial opposition
    4. will engage with a more political military, which will help their cause
    5. will expand the use of emergency powers to justify their actions
    6. will claim they have public mandate to justify their actions
    7. will rely on lawyers to write up fringe opinions to lay the groundwork to bolster their positions
  • At this point it basically looks like a playbook, not a prediction.
  • There's a good chance that Trump will continue to use emergency powers to govern. He'll probably look for more and more excuses to take more and more power "to keep us safe." Everyone by now knows about the Reichstag fire and that Hitler used it as an excuse to seize power. Whatever happens could be a manufactured event or one that is opportunistically seized upon to increase power. Doesn't matter, either way there will be some who say it was manufactured. Some say that about the Trump attempted assassination, for example. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what the Truth is, it only matters what perception is.
  • We're at a point now where we really have to hope for a lot of lucky breaks. We have to hope that Russia doesn't do anything truly bad. Or that India and Pakistan can keep their dicks in their pants. Or that China doesn't meddle in our social media to divide us further. Or that our economy doesn't take a dump because of tariffs, general uncertainty, impending debt crisis, etc. Basically we're on the edge and weaker than ever in my lifetime. We don't want the wind blowing too hard right now. We're neither robust nor anti-fragile.
  • Gold is up 10% in the last month alone.
  • There are a couple "best case scenarios" I have been thinking of.
  • 1. Things get worse to the point that a majority of Americans admit that we've gone too far and need to get out of this modern malaise. A modern Reagan rises who can unite the country on some level. Media continues to stoke the fire and take pot shots, but people have had it with the negativity and the president does well despite the media. I don't see us having a president who wins 49/50 states like Reagan did in 1984, but a modern equivalent isn't inconceivable. In some ways, this describes Trump. He can be very positive and he, like Reagan, is a sort of "teflon president."
  • 2. Things totter along not getting too much worse, but not getting any better. It's the married couple that doesn't fight, but doesn't make love anymore either. They take care of the kids and are cordial enough, but that's about it. Some of what Trump has done sticks around because it's actually not that bad and he was the only one with the guts to get it done. The worst stuff he does gets overturned (quietly or otherwise) over time through court cases, new laws, and executive actions.
  • Those aren't especially inspiring best case scenarios.
  • I think Carter was a great person, but not a great president. His "Crisis Of Confidence" speech (the malaise speech) is the kind of thing I would probably do if I were president and it's one of the worst things he did as president. Americans are optimistic and that speech was too much of a downer. Instead of people taking it as him sympathizing with them, they felt blamed and uninspired. C'est la vie. I think he hit the nail on the head, but people don't want to hear that shit. This is one of several reasons the Trump won. He's not going to tell you that America sucks and it's a colonialist power with racist roots and that cis gendered oppressors are to blame for everything. He's going to say we're going to kick ass because we're the best. When he shits on how bad things are it's in the spirit of pointing out that we've been led by shitty politicians into the ditch and he's going to drive us out because he knows how it all works and he's not afraid to get this shit done even if everyone is trying to stop him.
  • I guess that's a 3rd best case scenario - the media is completely wrong about Trump and he really does want the best for America. He DOES have a plan and the same economists who said there was a 99% chance of a recession in 2023 just don't understand the economy. Sure, he wants to enrich all his buddies and himself along the way and getting tug jobs from 14 year olds is just part of the package, but he'll actually do all the tough work that no other politician wants to do. Most of the deals he's doing will actually work out and it'll all work out pretty well in the long run. He cleans things up like Giulani in NYC and a renaissance is born. One can hope.
  • Most likely outcome is that Trump continues to push boundaries of executive power. Economy hits a recession whether we count it as such or not (happened under Biden already, in my opinion). Political violence continues to be an issue and is justified or minimized by outspoken minority. We don't talk with our neighbors, and even if we do it doesn't matter because we self-sort to the point where all our neighbors think the same thing as us anyway.
  • Solutions?
  • Get offline. It's not real life.
  • Talk with people who disagree with you. Learn from Chloe Valdary (Theory of Enchantment: 1. treat people like human beings, not political abstractions 2. criticize to uplift and empower 3. root everything you do in love and compassion) and others about how to have productive political discussions - Steel man the other person's position. Restate their position to establish understanding. Agree to disagree.
  • Make your identity as small as possible. Don't put yourself or others in a box ("I am a liberal gay man"). Labels don't help. Labels pigeonhole us to a certain way of thinking. We should embrace heterodox thinkers who don't toe the party line. America used to be better about that.
  • Need to change the culture. It's late and I'm tired. Need to get to work in 7 hours.

    • “When people stop talking, that's when you get violence. That's when civil war happens.” - Charlie Kirk
     

    8/20/25 (14:50)

  • Work sucks lately. Took a job I knew was going to be a pain. Should have listened to my "little man" and backed out a long time ago even though that would have disappointed them. I don't like disappointing people and that has caused me a lot of pain in my life, professionally and otherwise. There are just certain kinds of people who may be perfectly nice in some contexts, but are a nightmare to work for. They have very high standards, ask a million questions, freak out when anything doesn't go to plan, have a lawyerly/corporate way about them, etc. It becomes an exercise in documentation and CYA and supplication. The good news is that at least I usually lose money on those jobs. Wait, that's not how it's supposed to go...
  • Then I have 3-4 other big jobs that are going on also to make everything more difficult. Better than not having any work and losing even more money though I guess.
  • Rhode Island AG gets arrested. This video is going viral and it's wonderful. There are a lot of these entitled idiots who act like fools with cops and it's nice to see an adult who isn't willing to deal with the nonsense. What makes it even better is that it's a white person so there's no guilt in watching it. If it were a black person then the viewing experience would be different. And that's about all you need to know about race relations in this country. What a time to be alive.
  • I've heard recently the same argument from two sides of the coin. One side says that January 6th only happened because the capitol police instigated the crowd and pushed them into the building. Supposedly there is video of this and this justifies the whole thing. Not sure how that works. Ridiculous, right?
  • I've also heard from anti-ICE protesters that ICE is provoking them into violence and that, if not for their provocation, it would be all peace, love, and understanding at the protests. I guess hippies these days bring fireworks and masks and all black hoodies, etc. No, what's more likely is that fringe people in both groups came ready to rumble and were more than happy to engage the police when the opportunity came. No responsibility, no principles.
  • There's a narrative that price inflation was due primarily to greedy corporations. Inflation has plateaued lately so I guess greed has decreased. Or maybe the greedy corporations just finally got shamed due to the brave reporting of those who called out the evil corporations for raising prices. It's a crazy theory no matter how you slice it. I followed it pretty closely when it came to lumber prices and found that a lot of it had to do with mill curtailment due to plummeting prices and then having to ramp production back up. There was also a whiplash effect that occurs when people buy more than they need because they fear things won't be available in the future. Add to that, there were a lot of logistical issues with trucking, shipping containers, etc. Or, you can just believe that greed today is lower than it was a few years ago. Strange that greed ebbs and flows like that.
  • When you have sex with someone it should be within the confines of a meaningful and committed relationship. This benefits women because they tend to be more emotional about relationships and sex. They also tend to desire feeling safe and protected and that is more likely with a real relationship. For men, a good reason to follow this rule is that you don't want to have sex with crazy. You don't want a stalker. You don't want to knock someone up and have zero say on whether an abortion is an option or not. You don't want to make an 18 year mistake because you're horny.
  • Abortion is solely up to the woman. A right that they have that we don't have. Like most rights, it comes with responsibility. Because women have the sole responsibility of bearing children, they have the sole right to abort (or not) the unborn child. If you're a guy, giving up that power isn't a great idea unless you love and respect that person. Casual sex seems great, but it just really isn't a good idea. Certainly it isn't a good idea to societally and systemically preach acceptance of it. It's one things to not judge a friend who has casual sex from time to time, but it's another to preach a doctrine of casual sex as emblematic of being a boss bitch or a stud or liberated or any such nonsense.
  • Since men give up the right to abortion, though, wouldn't it be fair to allow them to financially abort themselves from the unborn child? I think it logically makes sense. The woman has sole discretion on whether or not the child is born so maybe the man should be able to say he doesn't want to pay for the child, thus aborting his responsibility for child support? In the old days, the woman had virtually no choice and had to have the baby and the man had virtually no choice and had to marry the woman to make it respectable. Shotgun weddings were socially enforced - or, at least, that was the social expectation. I don't think this is the best way to deal with things, but it did impose upon people the responsibility and weight of the matter. Fuck around before marriage and you might end up married and with a kid.
  • In other words, actions have consequences and you'll be shunned if you don't comply. Again, not ideal, but better than the alternative in some ways. How well does it work out when a kid is raised by a single mother? How does that affect her mental health and financial stability? How about that of the child? The father, deep down, must know he's a piece of shit and hopefully that affects him as well. Or maybe he doesn't because he's one of the few % of people who is a narcissist. Now he's not tied down to a single woman - instead he's terrorizing potentially dozens of women with his serial narcissism.
  • Probably none of this should be revolutionary, but so much is shifting these days that I think it needs to be stated. We can't look at any of these things in a vacuum or as a single issue. Everything is related. Specialization in the medical field is useful, but shouldn't be the norm. You can't just look at the pancreas or whatever anymore than you can look just at abortion without considering the surrounding issues.
  • Another narrative that I can't stand is that "you're not a XYX, so you can't have a say." This is most frequently deployed by historically oppressed people like blacks or women who say you can't talk about abortion because you're a man or something along those lines. Of course it only ever works one way and is unevenly applied. It's never talking to a woman and saying "you can't have a say about war because 99% of deaths are men so STFU." Just think about all the things you're not and consider whether or not you should be able to have a say on the topic. You were born in the US so you can't say anything about immigration or immigrants. You're not black so you can't comment on reparations. You've never been on food stamps so you can't talk about it. You're not trans so you can't say if this 16 year old should be able to get bottom surgery (how's that for a euphemism? jeesh). It's just a tactic used by people who feel they don't have power, so they shut down the conversation. This is a pretty common tactic and is surprisingly effective in that average people seem to think it really means something.
  • It's odd to me that more women don't pack heat. We watched "Hunting Wives" on Netflix the other week and it got me thinking about this again. I've thought about it before and never understood. I spoke with my aunt about it once when she said she was afraid to go out of her house in Oakland (during the height of the George Floyd peaceful protests [haha]). I told her to get a gun and she'd feel safer. "God made men and Samuel Colt made them equal." All that stuff. She just stared at me like a had two heads and said I was crazy. Women are more afraid of men than bears, at least according to that one tiktok video, and they carry bear mace in the wild. Why don't more women carry guns? The NRA was going after women a few years back...they even made a woman their president, targeted advertising, pink guns, etc.. Not sure how effective that's been, but it makes a lot of sense to me. If you are actually worried for your life all the time, then you'd do something to protect yourself, right? It makes me wonder if they're really as worried as they claim or if they are even more worried about guns. Most women I talk to are very worried about guns on a visceral level and I guess that supersedes the worry about men. I don't understand that either. It's a tool like any other. Merritt and I were looking at guns at Big 5 the other day and she was worried that they would go off on their own. I told her it was a tool like any other and asked if she had ever seen one of my saws go on by itself or if she'd seen a car turn on by itself...to which she pointed out that Waymo cars drive themselves all the time. Touché. Smart kid, but I think she eventually got the point that machines don't turn themselves on. With both my kids I need to be as precise and accurate as possible or I pay the price. I should have asked if she had seen a simple mechanism activate without human intervention. Complex machines with timers and programming don't count. OK?!


    • 8/11/25 (14:13)

  • As busy as we've ever been. I'm better at handling it than ever, but the number of large jobs we have is off the charts. Unfortunately a lot of them are having issues and difficult clients and we're having personnel issues at the same time. Pretty much worst case scenario. Things that should be simple are running into complications every step of the way.
  • Truck is in the shop also.
  • Looking for help and it's hard to find. Lots of flakes and underqualified people.


    • 8/4/25 (14:38)

  • Been horrible about updating. Busy with work and other stuff. Never in front of the computer. Never take time to be by myself other than to work. Movie webpage has already gone to shit years ago. Hopefully I can keep this one afloat.
  • Very busy at work. Better than the opposite alternative. Burned through basically all our savings to build the new house and then got some of it replenished, but still down about 50% from our savings high point, so it's good to be busy and hopefully put some money back. Hasn't happened yet, but I guessing we can put some back this year.
  • Sometimes (more than I should) I like to see what people are saying on tik-tok and the like. Mostly gen z and gen alpha people who are basically nuts by my estimation. American Eagle's Sydney Sweeney ad about good jeans is, for example, is being called "Nazi propaganda" and "racist" and "fascist" and "ethnic state propaganda" and "out of the Goebbels playbook" and all about eugenics ... that sort of thing. Another thing I've seen recently is that were are in a "flirt-cession." Everything has to be a portmanteau for some reason, but that aside, I guess the issue that young women are having is that young men don't want to flirt with them. The surprising thing is that they don't seem to have a clue as to why. I mean, men have been told they're the problem with society for 10, 20, 30 years? An environment has been created where HR and lawyers and cancellation mobs are waiting for you to slip up. Women seem to have been saying for a while now that they want to be left alone. It's been made pretty clear in media and culture that women don't really want to be bothered. There's a so-called 6-6-6 rule (you need to be 6' tall, earn 6 figures, and be 6" in your pants (or sometimes they say you need a 6 pack). In some of these cases I can see their point - maybe we (women) want to be desired and courted, but it has to be respectful or done in a certain way - it's a push back against cat-calling or harassment. (Although what is desired is different for everyone and is constantly changing and the penalty for getting it wrong is much greater now than ever before). But when one recent tik tok video found that women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear than with a man....well, you come to the conclusion that women don't like men, don't want them around, find their advances annoying or scary, etc. Inevitably there would be a backlash to this and I guess that's what the "flirtcession" is.
  • I think it's a major problem that has been developing for a while now. Men are not doing well and I've outlined some of that here. One stat that stands out that is that when Title IX was put into place the ratio of men to women was lower than the current women to men ratio is today. That is, a greater percentage of college students are women than were men in 1972. The gap has flipped and gotten bigger. Virtually no one talks about it or is aware of it because talking about any of this means you're a misogynistic MRA MAGA asshole. I'm no longer dating, but I have two daughters and I'd love it if they had some decent men to choose from who weren't completely neutered by society.
  • The socio-political gap between men and women is widening and it's alarming. Young men are getting more conservative and young women are increasingly getting more liberal. They are, as a group, the most unhappy people in society. According to the research the happiest group are conservative men, then conservative women, then liberal men, and then liberal women being the least happy. This increasing gap in ideology and happiness means we're going to have trouble in the future.
  • Some of this falls into the "men need to sack up" category, but some of it is society's fault. We've successfully demonized a group of people. And it's in a socially acceptable way. If you're part of polite society and follow social norms you would NEVER make sexist or racist jokes, unless they're about white men. Yes, sexist and racist jokes happen against blacks and women, but in polite society they are frowned upon and you get labeled and chastised for them. But it's acceptable and normal to talk about the "future is female" and "#men are trash", etc. So, you can say that both things happen, but only one is socially acceptable. If men sexually assault women we have laws against it and social norms that abhor it. If women hit men then maybe he deserved it or he's a wimp for complaining about it, etc. The social norms and laws are either not there or less evenly applied.
  • If I were raising boys I would teach them a lot of more traditional masculine norms. These are things that my mom taught me. My dad was pretty much absent in that regard. Things like holding the door open for women. She told me how it felt when a random guy in a store brushed up against her and my sister and it was a cautionary tale. Things like that. Boys should be taught to be respectful and chivalrous. To be protectors and leaders when necessary. To be tough and resilient and that includes in the face of rejection when making advances. Make something of yourself and be useful. There's the old adage that to raise a good boy is to raise a man who is polite at a picnic and good in a crisis.
  • Girls, meanwhile, are taught that they can be whatever they want. Boys get a list of things they shouldn't do, and girls get a list of things they can do if they want. I'm trying to raise my girls to be advocates for themselves. Listen to themselves. Don't be nice at their own detriment. Be strong in their convictions. I think it's honestly a lot easier to raise girls in that way right now. Maybe it hasn't always been that way. And there are ways in which girls are more difficult. But in terms of fitting into society and finding your way...I think girls have a much clearer path.
  • Just like we can't have a country where its citizens hate its past, present and future....where they think the country is full of racists and was founded by racists...where they think that the country is imperialistic and evil to its core; we also can't have a country where one half of the country thinks the other half of the country is to blame for everything.
  • The male-female partnership is the greatest thing we've done in human history. Without it none of what we've built would have been possible. Hopefully we can recognize that and move forward with that in mind.
  • We're living in interesting times and I'm not loving it.
  • I've found that the younger generation who is getting into apartments now is quite picky about things. Seems like they want cheap housing, but then I get all sorts of complaints about their living situations. Complaining about touch-ups needing to be done or stained carpets, etc. You know what housing is cheap? Old housing with stained carpet and walls that haven't been painted in 5 years. That's cheap housing. You want mid-range housing - which is fine - but don't complain about the price of things when you also want them to be nicer. It's the same generation that complains about global warming, but loves traveling the globe and throws out their IKEA furniture every time they move. Wasteful hypocrites. It's amazing how much waste I see since I see so many people moving out of homes/apartments. I hate how much we waste things. Trump is right, maybe we don't need so many cheap dolls (and other things).
  • I listen to Gavin Newsom's podcast and recently he talked about a proposed law to ban ICE agents from wearing masks so people could see who they are. It won't be legal or whatever, but it's good political theater because people in CA don't like ICE or whatever. It's funny to track the evolution of the mask issue. If you just tracked the cold hard facts of mask policy in the state over the last 5 years it would be hilarious clown show. 1. masks are not recommended for the COVID virus 2. masks are recommended for the COVID virus 3. disregard #1 because we only said it to save masks for front line workers 4. masks are required in public places. 5. you can make masks out of old t-shirts 6. masks aren't for you they are for me 7. masks are actually for you 8. masks don't really work unless it's n95 or better and worn perfectly 9. masks don't contain community spread because the reality is that people don't wear the right ones and don't wear them properly 10. women being culturally required to wear masks is totally fine and not at all oppressive - don't be an islamophobe 9. masks cannot be worn if you are enforcing the border...even if your religion demands it? even if you are worried about COVID? Not sure yet because the law isn't going to be real anyway. We're not serious people anymore.
  • We pay 6 times as much to help seniors as we do to help people under 18. It should be the exact opposite. Social Security is a boondoggle and needs massive reform.

    • Lovers of Europe (progressives) often deride the US as not having a good social safety net or not spending enough on the social safety net. I agree that it could be better, but the reality is that we actually spend a greater % of our federal funds on social safety net programs than Germany (probably our best analog even though the median German makes the same amount as the media Ohioian). AI says Germany spends about 53% and we spend about 54%. Close, but we spend more. And the way it's talked about you'd think we're spending 20%, with the rest going to Bezos and Microsoft, while Germany is redistributing $ like Robin Hood. The problem, as usual, isn't that we're not spending enough, it's that the wrong people are getting the money. In this case, it's mostly retired people instead of people who really need it.

    7/30/25 (14:37)

  • Idea for a restaurant (actually 2, side by side). One is called Quantity and the other is called Quality. Same menu, but one focuses on ingredients and preparation while the other focuses on value and quick service. See which one does better. If I were a billionaire, this is the kind of thing I would do.


    • 6/30/25 (16:22)

  • New house is about 99.9% done. A few little things and one section we added for some tile work, but that's not much in the grand scheme of things. Should be 2 days of work if I had the opportunity to not be distracted. I almost never have undistracted time now, though. This is probably a big reason why my brain is losing it the last several years. I'm constantly getting information, whether it's podcasts or emails or texts or people interrupting me with constant questions...basically I never have quiet time to just be, think, or work without distraction. One opportunity for that was writing here, but I do less of that now because of my other commitments.
  • Final stretch of things includes putting up mirrors (one of them broke), installing toilet seat (looks like we received the wrong toilet base), installing water filter (looks like it was lost or never received), etc. Not having the right thing at the right time is a major pain in the ass.
  • Looking into getting new auto insurance.
  • Home insurance is not getting renewed because no one wants to insurance anything in CA anymore. The price fixing is probably the biggest driver of this, but there are probably other causes. This is what happens when G tries to fix prices out of the kindness of its heart. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.


    • 5/16/25 (20:47)

  • My eyes have been going downhill the last 6 months or so.
  • The last year in general hasn't bee great for my health. The last week I've had a bad cough. Doctor sent me to get an x-ray, which I resisted at first, but finally gave in. Turned out negative for pneumonia so that's good. It all stared after I had really bad allergies while working outside in San Ramon. Bad allergy attack that turned into a cold is what it felt like, even though that doesn't make sense. At any rate, the last year I've been working more and longer and stressed and not hiking as much as I could so it's all added up to not great health. When the new house is done then I think it will be a lot better.
  • Speaking of which, we should be done with the house in a few weeks. Trying to juggle two big projects at work, while also working on the house to finish the last things off. There was a fair amount of custom carpentry that I had to do. 3 custom built-ins for books, CDs, DVDs, storage by the front door for coats, shoes, etc. A custom hood chimney for above the range. 2 sets of custom stairs/cubbies for the girls to get to their lofted beds. 2 railing for their loft beds...
  • Others are finishing up the tile, flooring, kitchen counters. Meryl and the family spent a lot of time on a custom tile job in our shower. Eventually I'll put together an album, but in the meantime here's a pic of the shower in process. It took a ridiculously long time to plan and cut individual tiles and then the tile guy spent like a week just doing this one wall. Kinda worth it though.

  • After the girls are done with school we're getting on a plane and going to Europe. It will be the first time I've left North America so I guess that's something. Meryl and I have been together for 20 years, it's her 40th birthday, and we'll be (99%) done with the house so it's a celebration of all those things. We figured that was worth a second vacation.
  • Speaking of spending a lot of money. We finally sold the old house. Got barely our bottom price and it was during all the tariff stuff and you never know what's going to happen with the market so we just decided to be done with it. Bought a new car afterwards and got a great deal. So now Meryl has a new car. The Prius has about 240k miles on it so it was time.
  • After Europe, though, the plan is to stop burning money and start saving it again. Hopefully we get more big jobs and can continue the momentum. We've leveled up with our current house and it's given me the confidence to do larger, more complicated jobs. I understand how to read plans pretty well and understand structural stuff better than ever. I was never taught any of this stuff so it's all been learning the hard way.
  • Not sure if I mentioned it before, but with all this Trump stuff you really have to be zen. The news today is worthless tomorrow. Don't pay attention to talk. Only respond to real actions. Of course the media is horrible about this - they respond to every rumor and word. It's going to be a long 4 years. The tariffs were armageddon a few weeks ago. Today the S&P500 opened at 5929. On "Liberation Day" it opened at 5580. In other words, It's up 1.5% year to date. In other words, all the chicken little talk about the end of the economy and markets are basically flat for the year. I don't think he's doing a good job and I think his erratic behavior is bad for markets and businesses, but I also don't think we should get carried away talking about the ruination of our economy, etc. It just makes you look bad later when things end up okay. Remember when Obama signed Obamacare? His speech afterwards was him spiking the football and he said that there was a lot of doom and gloom about how socialized healthcare was going to be the end of the world (according to Mitch McConnell and the Republicans). He said something to the effect of "I woke up this morning and looked outside and the sun came up just like every other day." Republicans looked dumb, right? Same thing. Although, I have to say that that argument is pretty dumb because no one thinks that the day after a law like Obamacare is signed will be much different than the previous day. Big legislation like that would take years to see good or bad effects. But you get the point.
  • Remember when Mitch McConnell said "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for president Obama to be a one-term president?" I do. At the time it was derided as highly partisan and not focused on running the country or getting things done. Totally correct. Unfortunately, Chuck Schumer said almost the exact same thing recently on the NYT podcast. He's focused on bringing down Trump and bringing his popularity down. Round and round we go.
  • Voltaire said that work solves life's three great problems: boredom, vice, and need.
  • A while back we were walking down the street to go to dinner. We saw a woman struggling with a man on the sidewalk and she yelled help a couple times and the guy took a phone and walked off. She went into her car afterwards and I knocked on the window to see if she was okay. She was crying a lot and said thanks for checking. It's her husband and he took her phone...she found out he was cheating on her...they're trying to get pregnant...etc. I told her straight up, he's not worth it, don't go back with him, it's a good thing you don't have a kid with him, he's not going to change. She said thank you for us talking with her and all that. I wonder what happened to her. It was a good lesson for the girls to see it. Whether things work out for her or not, the girls got to see what happens when you pick the wrong guy who isn't faithful and doesn't want to care for you, etc.
  • How is it even remotely legal for companies to take a thing that you paid for and make it not work the way it used to? This happens all the times with software updates that are supposed to help. Bluetooth will work just fine between my phone and headphones or car radio and then there's an update that ruins things. Maybe they fix it, maybe they don't and I have to deal with the loss of functionality. This kind of thing happens all the time. This whole paying a monthly fee, SAAS model is total bullshit. I pay for it once and I shouldn't have to pay again. That's how it used to be.
  • A little under 1/3 of Republican students in 2021 said they wouldn't go on a date with a Democrat. Over 2/3 of Democrats said they wouldn't go on a date with a Republican. First of all, that's very tolerant of the so-called tolerant party. Second of all, it's probably because Republicans are immersed in liberal culture at school so they are more accustomed to being around people different from them. Third of all, the mainstream media demonizes one party more than the other so it's probably considered more acceptable. There used to be a similar divide among religions. JFK being a Catholic was a big deal, for example. Now we have a  new religion and it's political ideology. None of this is good news for the country.
  • I asked ai to summarize the findings of psychologists on the Big Five personality traits. I think this tracks pretty well with my experience.
  • Here's a breakdown of the Big Five personality traits and the gender differences in each trait:

    • 1. **Neuroticism**
       - Women generally score higher
       - Aspects:
         - Volatility: Women score higher
         - Withdrawal: Women score higher
    2. **Extraversion**
       - Mixed results at the broad trait level
       - Aspects:
         - Enthusiasm: Women score higher
         - Assertiveness: Men score higher
    3. **Openness to Experience**
       - Mixed results at the broad trait level
       - Aspects:
         - Openness: Women score higher
         - Intellect: Men score higher
    4. **Agreeableness**
       - Women generally score higher
       - Aspects:
         - Compassion: Women score higher
         - Politeness: Women score higher
    5. **Conscientiousness**
       - Mixed results at the broad trait level
       - Aspects:
         - Industriousness: Men score slightly higher
         - Orderliness: Women score higher
  • Something seems to have happened with the drop down menu again. Fucking great.
  • Turned out to be an easy fix. Not sure how long it was messed up or how it got that way.
  • I neither love nor hate Elon. I think his potential is really being wasted because of the internet and the mind virus he has. I think wokeness is a mind virus, but he's got the anti-wokeness mind virus and it's just as toxic. We should draft him into government service, but not running DOGE. Instead, he should head up a task force responsible for making fusion power a reality in 20 years. I think he could do it and it would be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the last 100 years. That's the kind of thing that he would be good at because it involves engineering and cutting through the bullshit to move up the timeline. He's a Manhattan project type of guy and that's what fusion power needs. If we solve that problem, then a lot of issues go away. It's worth spending a lot of money on.
  • Only certain types of people will be slow billionaires (as opposed to tech founders who sell their company and get a couple billion in one shot). Namely, the kind of people who aren't satisfied unless they are the best, richest, etc. The average person retires and doesn't work anymore after they make $100m... they live on an island or whatever and never look back. Only people who are are obsessed with work and money get to that level. Maybe this isn't 100% true, but probably 90%. It's kinda similar to the people you hear about who invest in DOGE coin and ride the wave to being worth $6m, but then it gets wiped out and they lose it all. The average person is like "what the fuck did you do?! you should have cashed out at $6m!" But the reality is that there's a kind of person who puts their life savings in a shitty meme coin and sees it go to $6m. It's the kind of person who didn't cash out when their $100k doubled overnight to $200k. They didn't cash out at $2m or $3m or $4m. Why would they cash out at $6m? This is a sick person. The average person realizes they're getting free money from a dumb meme coin and putting their life savings on the line (which they wouldn't have done to begin with) was a bad idea so they cash out when they're 20% up or 100% up or 300% up. And, thus, they never get to being 10,000% up. There's a famous story of a degenerate gambler in Vegas who was up $40 million, but kept going until he lost it all. It's a double edged sword. The same personality trait that gets this person up that much, takes it all away later.

    • They should measure the level of Karens for every given area and call it the Karen quotient. The higher the KQ, the more Karens you have and the cleaner the neighborhoods, etc., but also the lower the personality and freedom. The key is to find a place that has enough Karens to keep government and hoodlums in line, without making your life a living hell in the process. No one wants to get yelled at for leaving the trash cans out overnight or picking a bright color when repainting the house.
     

    4/25/25 (22:00)

  • too busy to update.


    • 3/25/25 (11:11)

  • They're going after the department of education now. I've still yet to hear a very good defense of the institution. The best I've heard is that it helps make sure disadvantaged communities get enough funding to get a good education. Unfortunately, I look around and see de facto segregation and poor outcomes for poor communities, so it's hard to imagine that they are being very successful in their charter (which should be to ensure good education for all American residents). It's not complicated and yet here we are. The department was created in 1979 and I can't say it's been a great success since then.
  • It's funny that with a lot of these institutions that are being dismantled the people who are so against it are the very same people who have criticized them for so long. How many times have we heard about how bad our education system is? About the school to prison pipeline and institutional racism and poor outcomes relative to the enlightened geniuses in France, UK, Germany, South Korea, etc. We've heard from Chomsky and others about how horrible USAID is. How it's a tool of the oppressors and colonialists....and yet they decry its elimination? Weird.
  • The country is becoming exactly what a certain type of person has said we are for a long time. The way Trump runs things is the way a lot of intelligentsia has been saying things are for a while now. They have claimed for most of my life that America is a bully and doesn't want government to govern, etc. Well, looks like that's definitely true now. To be clear, I'm not happy about it.
  • Went on an 8 mile hike Sunday. We haven't been doing as much of that lately. I've been working 6 days a week so it's been tough to do.
  • Kitchen cabinets should be delivered this week and after that gets done we'll be on the home stretch.
  • We also got a couple big projects that we're supposed to be making progress on. One in San Ramon and the other in Fremont, so not ideal locations, but they are large jobs to keep us busy and (hopefully) bring in some money.
  • We're going to list our old house for sale in the next couple weeks so hopefully that goes well. If we don't get a good price then we'll probably sit on it until things improve. I'm not very optimistic about the short term economy.
  • I think that we've been in need of a reset for a while and that's what this administration is providing. I don't like the way it's happening, but I think it could potentially be good in the long run. I think there will be some long term bad things as well, but that's kinda what happens when you don't address these festering sores for so long. I can't shake the thought that if the serious people in positions of power for the last 20 years had governed more responsibly and kept their eye on the ball, that we wouldn't have been stuck with this guy. The American people know we need medicine for our cultural sickness, unfortunately they picked the wrong bottle out of the cabinet.

    •  

     

    2/28/25 (17:14)

  • Seems like more and more people appeal to safety to get their way. They cry about feeling unsafe so that other people will change their behavior, for example. I get this a lot with tenants at work. This is the kind of message I get more frequently than I'd prefer: "Some of our wood cabinets in our kitchen and bathroom are falling apart. The metal tacks meant to hold the different pieces of wood together are falling loose, causing bits of wood framing to fall out and the main large pieces of wood to hang loose. Can we have this fixed or get these updated? The falling wood has metal spikes so we would like to get it fixed before accidentally stepping on one. Thanks." It can't just be "my cabinets are falling apart, please fix." It's "my cabinets are falling apart and they might hurt me." or "Something fell down and luckily it didn't hit me in the head, but it could have so it needs to be fixed immediately." (I've received that one before as well). People are so annoying and delicate now.


    • 2/25/25 (17:01)

  • It's nice to be able to ride my bike to pick up Merritt and have her ride her scooter back home with me.
  • Zoe rides her bike to and from school most days now. She opted for that over the bus, which is a good decision, though it would be good to be familiar with the bus and have that experience.


    • 2/20/25 (14:09)
  • Been pretty busy with work lately. Which means we are making a little money, which is a nice change from the last year of spending a lot of money.
  • Imagine you're Kim Kardashian and you see Kanye's new girlfriend Bianca going out on the town in a sheer thong bodysuit or stripping down to nothing in front of the cameras at the Grammys. A natural reaction might be to call her a slut, or similar. Imagine being called a slut by Kim Kardashian. Imagine being Kim Kardashian and wanting to call someone else a slut. Celebrities these days are such attention whores, it's amazing. Jaden Smith wore a house on his head.
  • Aristotle is supposed to have said "tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society." Whether he said it or not, it seems to make sense. As society loses all the other virtues, the only ones that remain are the two that allowed the others to fall by the wayside - tolerance and apathy. I certainly see it in places like Oakland, which tolerates so much that it is being overrun by homeless people and gangs. In my last vote as an Oaklander, I voted to recall the mayor (who is now under federal investigation). They are having a special election to pick the next mayor and one of the candidate is Barbara Lee, who is proposing Universal Basic Income as a solution to the homeless problems. Part of me wants to see her ideas win so we can put some of them put to rest after they fail miserably.
  • I've had this very simple argument before with people who think that progressive ideas are the way to go and that things would be better if we just let those people run everything. It basically breaks down to me asking why things in places like Oakland or California are not doing well. Crime, lawlessness, homelessness, high taxes, slipping educational achievement, the bureaucratic morass, etc. And it usually ends with them saying that Republicans or national issues like income inequality are to blame. California is the 5th or 6th largest economy in the world, we tax the rich at 13+% (highest marginal tax rate in the country), Democrats have run the cities and the state for a generation or more in most cases....and yet, there's nothing we can do about it and it's someone else's fault. The answer can't always be to give people more money, to take more from those who earn the most, to be lenient to anyone who does anything wrong...
  • Thankfully, CA voters have seen the light here and there. Most recently, we voted to get rid of the law that we had previously passed that allowed thefts up to $900 to be counted as misdemeanors. Petty theft professionals used this loophole to fleece businesses without consequence.
  • OR recently undid their voter measure to legalize some drugs. A lot of pro drug people point to Portugal as an example of a place that has legalized drugs and is doing just fine. My understanding of Portugal is that 1) it's not doing just fine (the rehab system is overwhelmed) 2) they didn't completely legalize all drugs, they just decriminalized them. My thought on the legalization argument has evolved over the years. I think that, at most, we should decriminalize some drug use - NOT selling or distribution, but use. But we can only do that if we also beef up the rehabilitation programs and have more support, housing, jobs, etc. for those people who can't get their lives together. I don't want to lock them all up and throw away the key. But I also recognize that some of these people are just going to be total junkies and we can't have them in and out of state sponsored rehab for 10+ years while they deal with their shit. Of course we also have to enforce basic laws like theft and robbery and the shit that people do when they are desperate junkies. All this stuff is difficult and none of it works if you have shitty programs that are designed to just shuffle people around and please bureaucrats instead of actually getting work done. Unfortunately government isn't very good at doing actual work, as far as I can tell.
  • Speaking of which, DOGE and Trump are kicking ass and taking names. Most of this appears to be getting done haphazardly and without thought, which is unfortunate. A lot of it will inflict a lot of pain on a lot of people. Probably about 80% of what I'm hearing is bad news, but that could be my sources or whatever else. However, I also think it's one of those things where if you fuck around for too long then an appetite will grow for this kind of shit. Hitler didn't come out of a vacuum. Things were really shitty in Germany and that sowed the seeds for a strong man. People in D.C. haven't been getting much done for a long time. Congress has been in dereliction of duty for my entire life, and I've written before about their willingness to give power to the Executive branch for far too long. Pundits are so surprised that Trump is taking all these powers, when I see it as just a logical extension of Presidential power that has been tacitly given by Congress since at least FDR. FDR massively increased Presidential power and just about every president since has either broken norms (as FDR did when he expanded the supreme court) or expanded executive power (as Obama did with his increasing use of executive orders). Congress doesn't get shit done and the president steps in. That's basically been the trend.
  • Trump is accelerating that process and it's alarming, but it's not surprising if you've been paying any attention. You can't put FDR on a pedestal one minute and then tear down Trump for this stuff the next. There are distinctions between what each has done, but I don't see much of a difference.
  • A couple caveats: FDR was elected 4 times and won a majority every time. FDR was dealing with a World War and a Depression.
  • So, I don't like most of what's happening and think it's not being executed properly, but I also do like to see government actually doing something for once. And I'm hopeful that after the dust settles, the things that we actually need will probably come back. It sounds like USAID is something that is good bang for the buck and it will probably come back in some form after Trump is gone because it's worthwhile. But that can't be said for everything. This is the kind of thing that Elon does, though, and I wrote about it after reading his biography. He cuts more than necessary and then figures out what needs to be put back.
  • All that said, none of this is going to really solve the spending issues we have....SS, medicare/medicaid, debt payments, and military (in that order) are something like 2/3 of the budget.
  • It's funny because Noam Chomsky has said before that USAID is basically a colonialist program that the big bad USA has concocted to control smaller countries. So, we kinda get shit on no matter what. Keep USAID and supposedly help poor people throughout the world and Chomsky and other anti-American progressives on the Left will shit on you. Cut the program and neoliberal Democrats shit on you.
  • We spend about half the budget on SS and medicare/medicaid, which are very progressive social safety net programs and yet it's never enough. This says nothing of the money the feds spend on education and healthcare subsidies. We need to also provide free healthcare and an ever-growing list of other free shit that various special interest groups will lobby for. Everything from free condoms and tampons to free internet and cell phones and daycare and FEMA. People always want more. And no matter what the feds do, they're never doing as much as Sweden or Germany or whatever. Some people will never be happy.

    • Anyway, if DOGE can do one thing, I hope it's that they change the culture in DC to make it about actually producing results and accountability. If that culture permeates the government then we could see costs lowered across the board, including medicare/medicaid and the military...which would start to actually save some real money.

    1/1/25 (17:26)

  • A lot has happened since my last real update in November.
  • We moved into the little house (formerly an office) at our new place. To recap, the big house was basically a warehouse and we redid essentially everything as a work/live space. The week of xmas we finally passed all our inspections and got the certificate of occupancy, which allows us to officially live here.
  • We've moved all our stuff out of the old house and started painting, etc. to get it ready for sale.
  • The little house up front is maybe 500 square feet and all 4 of us live there. Office, living room, bedrooms, bathroom, "kitchenette," is all in that space. The only thing it doesn't have is a shower, so we go through the driveway into the big house and use the shower there.
  • Now that we have the city out of our hair we have started redoing a lot of the work we already did in the big house in order to make it how we actually want it. Massive waste of resources and time, etc., but it was the only way to get what we actually wanted. So, we started that last week and have finished the framing already. Plumber starts tomorrow. Mostly done with the electrical. We are self-performing the framing and electrical. We'll also do all the cabinets, built-ins, carpentry, paint. We'll sub out the tile, plumbing, drywall, flooring. My guess is 5 months, but I'm hoping for 4. That means we'll be living in tight quarters for 5-6 months. We moved in the week before Thanksgiving.
  • Right after we moved in, we went on vacation...went to Philly, D.C. Baltimore. I'll hopefully do that trip page soon, but who knows. I still haven't done the trip page from 2022 (though 2023 is done), so it's anyone's guess when it will actually get done. Not a lot of free time or alone time these days.
  • Going on vacation with the family is my favorite thing to do these days.
  • 2024 was a tough year. A lot of ups and downs with the city and construction at the new place, but it's finally to the point where I can see a light at the end of the tunnel now that the COO has been issued.
  • Business-wise, it was a down year. Last year was really bad and this year was a bit better, though the bottom line won't reflect that because we did so much unpaid work on the new house. Our savings has ben reduced by about 70% from what it was a couple years ago, but we also have a brand new house, so there's that. On the horizon we have potentially a big increase in the number of jobs we get since our #1 customer should be quadrupling the number of properties he manages in the next month or two (he is acquiring an existing company). We'll see. I'm hoping that this year we knock out the renovations quickly and work 6 days a week for a while to get some savings back, in hopefully a more profitable year.
  • The girls are liking the new house. It's a lot different than what we had before. We used to live amongst the coyotes and deer and now we are in the middle of a commercial area. We walk to dinner, we walk to the grocery store, etc. Merritt walks to school. Zoe will soon be taking the bus to school (bus stop is 2 blocks away). I really envy them. They have a lot of things I wish I had had. I always wanted to be near school and near friends and they have that now. A downside of where we live is that it's pretty loud. We're in the front house without good windows, etc., but the grocery store gets deliveries early in the morning and I hear that most mornings. When we move to the big house, I don't think it will be an issue.
  • The former pac-12 had a pretty good year in football. Pretty sad that the pac-12 is gone and that they had such a good year. Pretty funny that the big-10 (18) champion is a pac-12 team, though.
  • I guess the other big news since last update is that Trump won. Plenty to say about that, but suffice it to say that the Democrats need to learn a few lessons and I haven't seen a lot of evidence that they are eager to do so. The Republican party is not the same party that they were pre-Trump. For better or worse, it's his party now and a lot of things have changed. Dems have to adapt - drop the woke identity politics, focus on economic issues of the working class, re-recognize that a country has the responsibility to police its borders, etc. But I'm not sure they'll learn the right lessons, at least based upon what I've heard from the Harris campaign managers after the fact.

    • Other piece of news is that I took the exam to become a licensed electrician and passed that. So, I'll be legally allowed to do electrical work without doing any other work on the same job. This also includes doing electrical in SF, which requires a licensed electrician does all electrical work. For background, as a general contractor I'm allowed to do carpentry, plumbing, electrical, mechanical if there's more than one trade in the same job...so, if we're renovating a kitchen then I can do all that work since I'm also doing some carpentry. It's kind of a weird rule, but that's what it is. However, in SF I'm not allowed to do electrical or plumbing unless I'm a licensed electrician. So, what that means, is that I would have to hire an electrician any time I did a kitchen, bath, etc....even if the electrical work was very minimal. SF is the only city that does that, as far as I know. At any rate, it's a nice thing to have no matter what. Studied for a week, but the study materials didn't do a great job. A lot of stuff on the test about solar installations since I guess the state is pushing that a lot. Luckily, I took a solar class like 10 years ago and some of that stuck, plus some common sense and I was able to pass.