kaizen
what's been floating my boat lately:
  • smashing pumpkins
  • nick drake

    •  

     

    "How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think."
    -Hitler-
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    -Albert Einstein-

    8/31/26 (16:40)

  • If I can change my mind about Kobe Bryant then anyone should be able to change their mind about anything.
  • Dolly Parton is no longer with us. She was a good lady by all accounts. It was good to see that Trump put the flags at half mast for her. Not many who will disagree with that.
  • Jolene may be her best known song. The real brilliance of Jolene is that it isn't a song like most that are similar to it. Unlike most songs about jealousy, Jolene is mostly about the object of her man's affection, rather than about her partner himself. Not only is it about the second woman in the picture, but the protagonist clearly has great respect for her. She talks about how beautiful and powerful she is. About how Jolene holds in her hands the power to crush the protagonist if she decides to get with her man. I can't think of any songs that treat this subject like that. Also important to point out that it's never revealed whether or not her man has actually acted on anything...it could all just be that she is worried about the prospect. Yes, he does speak her name in his sleep, but it could merely be a crush - we're left to wonder. And the music is great as well.
  • Apparently there's a story about a woman who killed her kids and she's getting a lot of support from crazy ladies on tiktok. The story is that they support her because she didn't get the proper mental health treatment/support post partum. I wonder if Ed Kemper got hundreds of people outside his courthouse when he was standing trial for killing multiple people. Or John Wayne Gacy or Henry Lee Lucas or the Boston Strangler. All of whom were abused by their parents and didn't receive mental health care. It would be ludicrous to cheer these people on for the (righteous and just) cause of mental health or combating child abuse. You don't cheer on murders regardless of the circumstances. Same goes for Luigi Mangione or Tyler Robinson. We've lost our fucking minds.
  • If you are passionate about mental health or post partum care or health care CEO compensation or Charlie Kirk being a bad guy, then talk about that separately from cheering on the murderers. I wish this didn't need to be explained, but this is where we are.
  • An oldie, but goodie.


    • 8/24/26 (21:17)
  • Today is Kobe Bryant day because he wore jersey #8 and #24, so 8/24. When he was a player I hated everything about him. In his retirement and death I found some begrudging respect for his game. I could never appreciate it when he was a player because I was always rooting against the Fakers. I still hate that the Kings were robbed by him, but c'est la vie.
  • If we do enough "science" and mental masturbation then we will eventually have enough people who say that weeds and rocks and computers are conscious. It's just a matter of time. It would be wise to get ahead of those ideas a bit so we can be prepared for the AI rights movement that will be coming.
  • Social security is an albatross. About 80% of SS is retirement benefits for seniors. People who had their entire lives to build up a retirement. Some have done so and don't need the money. Others did, but should have. If they want to keep their way of life then they can continue to work or plan for retirement using their own money. Other cultures are better at saving than we are. It's not a human problem, it's a culture problem. We use too much credit and don't think long term enough. If someone is old and poor then they can get help from the G with all the programs that are meant for people who are young and poor. There's no reason for a separate program for old people. All this doesn't even mention the fact that when SS was formed it was designed to be for elderly who were living on the streets because they were poor. Life expectancy was the same as the age when benefits kicked in. There were about 40 workers for every social security beneficiary by 1945 (it started in 1935, so that's a fair starting point). Today it's 2.6 workers per beneficiary. It's a ponzi scheme where the numbers don't work anymore. It was nice for a while.
  • For the record, if I were in charge my generation wouldn't get social security, but older people could. We should also call SS an income tax. It doesn't make any sense that we separate them. There's no locked box....SS money is just tax income for the G at this point. Also, the social safety net that we currently have should be improved by a lot. If seniors, who are the most politically engaged demographic, were reliant upon the same programs as everyone else, then maybe it would get better.
  • Speaking of having skin in the game...we should do something about our education system funding. Being funded by local property taxes when people self-segregate isn't all that helpful. Rich white and asian people have plenty of money and get the best public schools because they all live together. If they don't then they just send their kids to private schools. I see this all the time, even from supposedly woke middle class progressives around here. They talk a good game about wanting diversity and supporting public schools, but they send their own kids to the best place they can. Which is fine, but it seems to me hypocritical to talk all that shit and then go running for the best possible place when it's time to put your hat in the ring. It would be more respectable if you were honest. Most people care about education and want the best schools for their kids. And some people care more than others and are willing to sacrifice more. There's nothing wrong with that. However, the disparity is the issue and it comes as a result of the funding model. I wish neighborhoods were more mixed than they currently are. Semi rich living with middle and lower income people. All in the same boat, sharing the same public swimming pools, schools, police, etc. Works a lot better that way.
  • Why is is that the same people who preach self love and body positivity and beauty at any size are the same people who advocate for people removing functioning body parts? And are often the same people who deride the Real Housewives of whatever who also undergo surgery to look how they feel on the inside: fake. Shoutout to Daniel Tosh for that one.
  • The word "moderate" in politics gets a bad rap. I think part of the problem is that they come off as unprincipled or mealy mouthed. If you're a moderate you can't just split the difference. You can't just try to please everyone by doing the "both sides" thing. You have to have real opinions. You can't be a pussy and you can't be offended by people who call other people pussies for being unprincipled because that's weak. A good moderate tells it like it is. Sometimes he's got a liberal viewpoint and other times it's more conservative. A good moderate is willing to compromise. A good moderate isn't just in the middle. We need more of these people who are willing to take on both sides and be strong in their convictions. Some people who come to mind: Bill Maher, Scott Galloway, Elissa Slotkin, Gretchen Whitmer. It's more important that you are authentic and strong than "right" on all the issues. People want to trust that you're not another patsy. That's the blueprint for success in the third way of governing.


    • 8/22/26 (21:55)

  • The last year or so I've been working on rediscovering music and movies. Been a while since I connected with them and it's good to get back into them.
  • Today was a great day. Soon enough the girls will be out of the house and I'll be sad. In the meantime, I'm doing my best to enjoy every minute I can with them. Work is annoying and time consuming, but I've tried to not get bothered by it. Keep the main thing the main thing, as Sophie Cunningham has recently said.
  • Our tradition this year has been to celebrate a special day each day of the year. Earlier this week we celebrated Bill Clinton day by learning a bit about him. There was also Hawaii State Day and we learned about the history of Hawaii. Today was Foklore day so we listened to folk music. We call it the "year of the day (YOTD)." Every day we have selected which thing we want to celebrate (each day has anywhere from 8-20ish possible things to choose from) and then do something to officially commemorate the day.
  • Another tradition we have as a family is to celebrate a "family fun day." So, each person gets to pick what we do on their "family fun day." We each get a family fun day on our birthday and then there's mother's day and father's day so the parents actually get two family fun days a year :). In addition to those days, we get a family fun day if we win our family college bowl pool or march madness bracket. Last year Merritt won the bowl pool. This year I won the March Madness bracket so today we finally got around to celebrating my family fun day.
  • I started the day by driving to SF to two job sites to check things out and setup the guys. After a bit of Saturday work I came back home so we could get the family fun day started.
  • I chose to go on a modest 4 mile hike (I have the hikes list on the miscellany link on the sidebar now) from our list of 100 peaks in the bay area challenge that we are working on. Figured the girls couldn't get too upset about that and it also helped us get closer to that 100 peak hike goal.
  • After that we went to one of my favorite Mediterranean restaurants. Then we did an escape room. Then we had a DQ treat (I chose a Blizzard because seeing them flip it upside down is one of the few joys I have in life). Then we went back home and watched Rocky 2. When Adrian awakes from her coma and tells Rocky that she has something she wants him to do for her: "win" ....that's one of the best lines in movie history. I tear up every time. Just "win." She believes in him so much and without her he's just not the same. The Rocky movies are actually as much a love story as anything else. If it were a sports movie about winning and competition then what would the end of the first Rocky movie emphasized in the ending? The outcome of the fight, obviously. And yet the outcome of the fight is merely background noise as he famously tries to get Adrian into the ring with him so they can love each other. It's beautiful.
  • After Rocky 2 we finished watching Rudy (which we had started on National Never Give Up day). Another great sports movie, which is actually about never giving up and working hard for your goals. Rudy embodies that as well as anyone else.
  • After that we watched the last part of a Justin Willman magic show (Magic Lover). I watched it before, but the rest of the family hadn't seen it all, so I watched it again with them and they were blown away. Then we decided to look for tickets to see him live and made impromptu plans to see him when he's in Visalia...which gives us an opportunity to visit Sequoia National Park with the girls for the first time.
  • Then we listened to Nick Drake and other folk music. Which made me melancholy and want to write here for a bit. So that was my day.
  • Like many others, I was introduced to Nick Drake via the VW ad from 1999. That was when VW had a great string of commercials. I think commercials were honestly at their peak in the late 90s and 00s. One more example here.
  • Rewatched Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Obsession in the last week or so. Great movies.
  • AI might actually be good for us politically. It gives basically moderate, mainstream answers on questions (in my experience). Instead of giving radical, extremist results, it actually will set you straight on issues and treats things with nuance. This is better than most other sources of information. This is an improvement over the alternatives.
  • I wonder what a conversation with my younger self would be like. A lot of changes in the last 25 years. I think I could justify most/all the changes. I get a $300/month allowance and never spend it all. My younger self would probably wonder what the hell my problem is. I should be buying awesome movies and music all the time.
  • I've changed on some politics stuff, but I think I'm mostly the same and the culture has shifted around me.
  • Obviously I have a wife and kids now and part of me never thought either of those would happen and probably obsessed over it too much.
  • I don't know if everyone's memory is as shit as mine. I honestly remember so little of my life. Occasionally something will come up that will remind me of something I did and I'll wonder why I haven't thought about it for so long. I'll think of an old friend or a place I visited or whatever and it will bring back memories of things that probably meant a lot at the time. I wish I had a better memory. I wish I took more pictures. I wonder if there are friends I lost over the years that I've totally forgotten about or if I did things to people that they remember fondly or sadly. It's funny because I might remember part of a thing and someone could remember another part. Both could be 95% accurate even years later, but have lots of missing parts or whatever.
  • During our hike I was recounting the time I lived with my mom at my grandma's house. I don't know exactly what the deal was, but I believe my mom didn't have a house. My dad was out of the picture at this time. My uncle was probably living with my grandma as well. It was Christmas and there was no Christmas tree so my uncle went on xmas eve to pick one up. He didn't have any real decorations so he grabbed whatever few decorations he could find around the house and then improvised from there. One of those improvisations included a shoe of mine. Maybe I was 3 at the time? Ever since then we would put my shoe on the xmas tree. I remember that, but I don't remember much else about living with my grandparents. I don't know how long it was or what it was like or anything. I do remember walking in on my mom and uncle snorting coke once, so there's that.
  • I wonder what my kids will remember about their childhood. Hopefully it's mostly good. The number of adventures they've been on in the last two years is probably equivalent to the number of vacations and adventures I had in 18 years living with my parents. For one they were always scraping by. My dad generally worked 40 hours a week at his main job and then worked as a bartender on the nights/weekends for extra money. My kids are lucky that their parents are doing pretty well. Our business is a good synergy, we have employees who leverage our earning potential, we're in a good business sector, we're in a region that has a lot of money, etc. I think it also helps that Meryl and I actually love each other. I'm not sure how my parents ever even got married two each other. And then you realize that they got married, got divorced when I was less than a year old and then got remarried to each other and divorced again and it just boggles the mind.
  • At any rate, my kids get to do so many fun things. They go to cool places. They have lots of inside jokes with the family. We joke around all the time. They will help me out in the shop or at the job site from time to time. I have to assume that they will have more and better memories than I.
  • I don't think I've ever been very good at long term planning. I mean I have our retirement accounts set up and that kind of thing. But I'm generally concerned about the next 1-7 days. On big projects I will plan out (as much as possible) what the construction schedule should look like for 8, 10, 12 week long projects. I think ideally, though, I would plan for 5-10 year time horizons. Where do I want to be in 5 years? If I had done a better job of that earlier then maybe I would have had kids earlier and gotten my shit together more quickly. I never really knew what my career trajectory was going to be so I sort of floated along more than I should have. Part of that was intentional.
  • At some point I watched Chris Smith's movie "American Job" and got the idea in my head that I wanted to have a lot of low skill menial labor type jobs after I graduated college. I think most people around me were looking at law school, grad school, and career opportunities...I was looking forward to a cross country road trip followed by jobs as a dishwasher, etc. That never quite panned out, but I did get jobs at a record store and movie theater. I should have done a few more of those instead of sticking around at Tower so long. I definitely would have been better off if I had jumped into construction earlier. If I had worked for more people in that field then I would have learned a lot more and my early self-employed years would have been less painful and more profitable. A lot of my 20s were spent kind of floating. I did some traveling. I spent a lot of time paying off my debt from my first road trip. Then there was another big road trip. And more jobs. Probably a couple years of fluff in there just grinding day to day. I guess that's a lot of life when you don't have money though. I should be thinking about the next 5-10 years more proactively than the previous 47.
  • Anyway, hopefully my kids have good memories. Hopefully they have a better life than I have. And I've had a good life. I have no real complaints about what's happened to me. Things I should have done differently, but I've been pretty lucky.
  • 12:24 now, I should sleep.
  • Went down a rabbit hole of reading past postings. Now it's 01:24 and really time for bed.


    • 8/19/26 (15:39)

  • Not loving work lately.

    • Fan of the British news network or big black cock? I wonder.

    8/15/26 (08:15)
  • Some good horror movies that have been released the last 10 years or so, not in any order, just off the top of my head:
  • Obsession
  • Blink Twice
  • Barbarian
  • Weapons
  • Smile and Smile 2
  • Obsession
  • Us
  • Hereditary
  • Babadook
  • Obsession
  • Backrooms
  • Get Out
  • Obsession
  • Midsommar
  • Yeah, Obsession is pretty great.
  • A hobby of mine since elementary school has been to look at license plates. A lot of time spent in traffic and that was one byproduct. The license plate pattern for a standard passenger vehicle in CA is NLLLNNN. Seven characters is the norm now, although I remember when it was six and the pattern was LLLNNN. Then they added a number to the beginning because they were running out of permutations. My first car was 1KSX996. Well, they are now all the way up to 9ZZZ999 and past that very recently. I saw the first new pattern last weekend and it was an exciting moment for me. NNNLLLN is the new pattern. So far the farthest of the old pattern that I've seen is 9ZZJ565. If I ever see 9ZZZ999 then I will probably shit myself.
  • Some questionable license plates I've seen:
  • C LINGUS (cunnilingus).
  • GASWHOL (asshole, but it was on a big truck so he's also a gas guzzler. I thought that was funny).
  • HNGLYKA (hung like a [horse is implied])
  • ILUVMYD (it seems like this person loves their dick...or maybe they just love their wife named Diane or whatever)
  • When it comes to technology, physics, geology, ability to manipulate chemistry to our whim, etc. we are at the absolute pinnacle of human development. When it comes to the education of our children, I can't say the same. It would seem that progress would be more or less linear, and so we would be better at teaching our kids basics not only about science and math, but also about how to be decent humans, fit into society, etc. But it appears to me that we have regressed substantially in these regards. Why, for example, do we have so many different ideas about how many classes middle school kids should have and how long they should be? Why are our science and math textbooks constantly changing and yet not accomplishing better outcomes? Individual teachers I have met have almost always been very reasonable and bright people. And yet when you get them altogether along with a school board and its bureaucracy, we have outcomes that often quite illogical. A group of educated and smart people producing dogmatic and nonsensical procedures, curriculum, schedules, etc. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
  • Daily podcast about French parenting style. I've heard about this topic before and I think I tend to agree with the French that kids need to fit into the adult world, rather than changing the adult world to suit children. Apparently about 40% of French parents think that parenting cramps their style (I forget how they worded it exactly, but basically they don't like parenting very much). Compare this to 4% for Swedish parents. As is true in many developed economies, France is facing a negative population growth because people are having fewer kids. This is widely seen as a problem because economies could collapse, etc. At any rate, a lot of countries are doing a lot of different things to combat this. A lot of Asian countries like Japan and Korea have been dealing with this for years and have offered tax incentives or they increase childcare benefits, etc. France, apparently, is sending out letters to 29 year olds encouraging them to have kids. There are a lot of dumb G ideas, but this is a new one for me. What kind of person reads a letter from the government and is then persuaded to have sex to have a kid? Is that the kind of person you want having kids? How many people do they think are going to be persuaded by a letter to make an 18 year commitment? "Well, I was kinda thinking about having kids, but wasn't really sure. Then the government sent me a letter saying that we need more taxpayers so I figured I may as well."
  • Speaking of good G ideas. Oakland has had a problem with illegal dumping for years and they can't seem to figure out a solution. So their new solution is a truck with a giant claw on a boom that picks up the trash quicker. This potentially means that the streets will look nicer in the long run, so that's welcome, but it doesn't address the underlying issue. There's a hole in the row boat and they got a bigger bucket. It's sort of a fix, but in the most governmental way possible.
  • A general idea in business is to stick with your core competency instead of getting caught up in side quests and distractions. I've been really trying to do that this year. Focus on the customers and types of jobs that bring in the best money and that we can execute confidently. We'll see how the year shakes out. Much of it is out of our control due to the housing market, but we're doing well right now.
  • Unfortunately it seems to me like META and others are not doing this. META got sidetracked on the Metaverse thing that burned about $80B. I'm not sure why META and X are in the AI game. It doesn't seem like their core competency. Although Musk is very good at building things so maybe he has a leg up on the infrastructure portion of that race. But it seems to me like there's not as much of a first mover advantage with software as many believe. It just seems far too easy to steal ideas and reverse engineer things after someone else has already figured it out. And I can only assume that build out costs and efficiency will get better in a couple years as competitors to Nvidia finally enter the marketplace (chip manufacturing takes a minimum of 18 months from what I've heard). So, if I'm Apple or some other company that is considering getting into AI, it seems better to let them all duke it out and then enter the market when things have been figured out and entry into the market is cheaper/easier. I suppose the counter to that approach is that it IS a race to get to the point where you have an AI that is truly superintelligent and self improving (recursive superintelligence). If you get to that point then (theoretically) you could have exponential growth that wipes everyone else out. I guess that's the gamble? Personally I'd rather be printing money like Apple than spending it like Open AI. At least META can fund its side quests with the main advertising business.
  • When I was growing up one of the stereotypes of a pothead was that he was a conspiracy theorist. Sitting on the couch getting high all day and talking about aliens, MK Ultra, etc. Basically this is Joe Rogan (for better or worse). Is it a coincidence that in an age when cannabis is the number one drug in the country we also trust experts less than ever? That belief in conspiracies seems to be higher than in the past? The cannabis enthusiasts tend to be armchair scientists who can quote studies about cannabis being a miracle drug that reduces cancer risk, etc. They know all about sativa vs. indica and CBD being helpful for sleep and every other ailment that western medicine can't solve. They're autodidacts who reject the typical expert class...pretty much in line with a lot of the movement of late. They kinda fit in with the Bay Area/Portland liberal health/wellness types who seemingly know more about cell phone waves and organic produce than the experts. They are their own experts. They typically are all Democrat voters and probably deride Joe Rogan for being anti-science on the COVID vaccine, but also don't want smart meters or electrical substations near their kids' school.
  • To be clear, I think each person should figure out what risks they want to take on their own. Hopefully it's backed by experience and science. But to be holier than thou and deride one group of people for doing the same thing you're doing seems hypocritical. Until COVID, the biggest anti-vaxxers were all progressives living in Marin county. Horseshoe theory striking again I guess.
  • Speaking of which...On race, the ends are closer than you might be comfortable with, as perfectly summarized here. On immigration I've pointed out that the (far) Right doesn't want Jose coming over the border, just as the (far) Left doesn't want Chad moving into the ghetto (gentrification).Although, if Chad is already in the ghetto and then moves out he's also fucked because that's white flight. The Right wants to "starve the beast" (government) by reducing how much money it gets (in the form of taxes). The Left wants to do this as well by defunding police because they hate the police.
  • I asked AI what is a consensus on legitimate functions of the government. Here's what it came up with, and I agree. Security and defense. Law and order. Property rights enforcement. Monopoly on force. Currency/monetary framework. Basic infrastructure for markets - contracts, weights/measures, etc.
  • Some people want the government to do more, but almost everyone (other than hyper Libertarian/anarchists) agrees on this core set of governmental functions. This is why it doesn't bother me (in principle) that 15% of US spending is on defense. Social benefit programs, meanwhile, are over 50% of spending. I think Trump wanting to increase defense spending by 40% is fucking nuts. I also think we should audit the DoD. I also think we should be spending money differently. How do we spend so much on bombs and might not have enough missiles to have a war with Iran? Doesn't seem like we're getting a good value (what else is new with G, though)? I wish we spent a lot more energy getting markets to function properly by encouraging real competition and an even playing field. It's basically a national security threat that we have 98% of baby formula produced by 3 companies. This is a disgrace. I had AI summarize a few examples:
  • Baby Formula. Market Control: 98% owned by 3 firms (Abbott, Reckitt Benckiser, Nestlé).
  • Core Cause: Strict FDA rules and exclusive state-level WIC government contracts.
  • Meat Packing. Market Control: 4 firms control 85% of beef, 67% of pork, and 60% of poultry.
  • Core Cause: Massive corporate mergers that wiped out regional processing plants.
  • Seeds/Agriscience. Market Control: 4 firms (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, BASF) control 70%+ of U.S. crops.
  • Core Cause: Corporate buyouts and aggressive patenting of genetically modified seeds.
  • Defense Industry. Market Control: Shrunk from 50+ suppliers to just 5 "defense primes" since the 1990s.
  • Core Cause: Post-Cold War Pentagon consolidation push.
  • Power Grid Infrastructure. Market Control: The U.S. relies on foreign manufacturing for 80% of its large grid transformers.
  • Core Cause: Decades of domestic factory closures due to cheaper overseas production.
  • Government is either causing the issues or not addressing them. Some blame big and powerful corporations and I think that's part of it. But G is supposed to be the adult in the room. Of course corporations are going to ask for more and lobby people for regulatory capture. This isn't a novel concept or exclusive to the US.
  • The Fauci hearing was a thing a couple weeks ago. The Daily covered it briefly and mentioned that Biden "was moved to pardon Fauci because of Republican threats to imprison him." A more impartial way of wording that would be that "Biden decided to pardon Fauci because of Republican threats to imprison him." "Was moved" vs. "decided" I think is an important distinction, particularly for the most powerful person in the world, who clearly didn't want to answer for it since he did in the last few hours of his presidency. They could have also mentioned that a preemptive pardon is fairly rare (Ford did it for Nixon and GW Bush did it after Iran-Contra) and controversial. I'm guessing Fox News would have added that part.


    • 8/3/26 (21:14)

  • Went to Boston a couple weeks ago just for fun. It was supposed to be Friday - Tuesday so we'd only miss two days of work (leave in afternoon on Friday), but there was a canceled flight so we ended up missing Wednesday as well. Some day I will update the trip page to include this trip, as well as the others I have not gotten around to writing about.
  • List of airlines we won't use again: Spirit (not an issue anymore), Frontier, JetBlue.
  • I'd like to introduce a few new units of measurement for the new generations: A tiktok. This is 30 seconds. Most TV shows are about 44 tiktoks long. A Scararmucci. This is 10 days long, which is how long Anthony Scaramucci worked for the first Trump administration. This is like the metric answer to a "fortnight," which is 14 days and isn't as nice and round as a Scaramucci, which is 10 days.
  • I really hate the way people talk these days. A lot of it is tech and corporate culture. People don't just use technology anymore. They "utilize" it or, even worse, they "leverage" it. The other influence that is big is academia (especially woke social "sciences"). There are a million dumb pop psychology words and phrases these days like "holding space" for people, but the one that has been annoying me a lot lately is "lived experience." You can't doubt someone because their "lived experience" is different from whatever it is you're telling them. 1) No, that's not how things work. 2) "Experience" is the same as "lived experience." We're just making things longer to sound cool? To me it's indicative of a larger issue - people talk and meet and bullshit and hardly anything gets done.
  • Another thing I've found is that the new generation talks about "dignity," when they really just want free stuff. They will say something like "people deserve to live in dignity." And what they mean is people deserve to have free healthcare, housing, etc. It's fine if you're a communist, but don't conflate wanting others to do work for you with your own "dignity."
  • Speaking of communism...it's making a comeback and will continue to do so until capitalism can correct itself. There are plenty of ways to do this without becoming commies, but it's yet to be seen if our society will do it. The DSA is getting more and more radical. I believe we should take some wind out of their sails by 1) encouraging real competition instead of monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, and crony capitalism. 2) doing some basic wealth redistribution through previously agreed upon methods - real tax enforcement, true minimum tax, inheritance tax, cutting loopholes like the carried interest loophole, etc. None of this is very complicated. Just takes the will to get it done.
  • A good video on the DSA and communism thereof.
  • Most of the time when I write about how society views things I'm referring to polite society. The intellectual elites that work at and have subscriptions to the NYT. They are generally college educated and well off. They're the intelligentsia. The academics. The big city Democrats who I interact with much more than Joe Bob from Topeka Kansas. These are the people who are setting the standards. They define what is taboo. Joe Bob might think an off color joke about gender politics is funny, but these people would find it reprehensible and in poor taste. They tend to be humorless, woke, and generally annoying.
  • Going to a pride parade is an "interesting" experience. We went to SF and the pride parade was happening, unbeknownst to us. Lots of odd costumes and the usual stuff you would expect and see on TV. Wasn't expecting to see a guy in a crotchless leather outfit with his hard dick fully exposed. He was fully shaved, fully erect (thanks to a cock ring) and just walking around like he was trying to get to work. I would guess that people would read my description and cringe a little at the graphic way I described things, but they might also feel compelled to not judge his expression of pride.
  • It's funny because I've been told before by plenty of the same people who were probably at the parade that this kind of thing is akin to sexual assault if it's a straight guy popping out of the bushes flashing a woman. But, in this context, it's just an edgy guy expressing his pride. My impression is that if I were to at all negatively comment on this guy to people in polite society, I would be seen as a prude or, worse, homophobic. To be clear, I've seen plenty worse, but it was still unexpected. At any rate, that's how my kids saw their first boner.
  • The reasoning for pushing kids into school went something like this (and I heard this explicitly several times from a few different sources): We've looked at the outcomes of different cohorts and found that people who have a high school education don't do as well as those who get a 2 year college degree...who don't do as well as those who get a 4 year degree... who don't do as well as those who get a graduate level degree. We conclude, therefore, that going to college is a great return on your investment and encourage everyone to do so.
  • This is lovely reasoning, however it completely omits an obvious issue. A lot of people who only graduate high school do so because that's the best they could do. If you went to a public school and took regular classes (as I did), then you know a lot of these people. Some just weren't very bright. Some weren't very motivated. Some were in families that didn't value education much at all. Some were bright and motivated and completely uninterested in books, history, math, etc. If you push all these people into college it's no wonder that a lot of them aren't going to do very well and are going to be in debt for not much reason.
  • Frankly, I think I could have skipped college and ended up doing better for myself in a lot of ways. I made some friends (and lost them [mostly]). I learned some interesting things (and forgot them). I spend some money (and I'll never get it back). But I was told that I didn't really have an option so I did it. I probably should have gone to trade school or joined a union. If I had a decent counselor maybe that would have been suggested, who knows. At any rate, this was a colossal waste of resources and a misallocation of human capital. There are a lot of men who wasted time trying to get through college when they should have been in a CCC type program getting some experience in real life and bettering themselves.
  • I've read two biographies of US Grant and I think highly of him. Pretty underrated president. Seemed like a high character guy. Won the Civil War. Helped get Reconstruction back on track (though it didn't last). Fought the KKK. Recently watched the documentary (Grant) on him on Netflix. Merritt watched about half of it and liked it.
  • Maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems like there used to be a time when a virtuous person was one with character and integrity. That hasn't gone away completely, but it seems like the following is more important: identity, attention, money, popularity, and signaling. Presentation over content. See above on the issue of language.
  • There's a theory that since we don't follow religion like we used to ("nones" [people who have no religious affiliation] have just about tripled since 1990), we have taken up that slack by making politics our new religion. Basically, people have a "god-shaped hole" in their heart and it will get filled with something. Maybe it's Christianity, maybe it's whoo whoo yoga shit, maybe it's politics. People need to feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves. They need to feel part of a larger cause. A downside to that is that politics becomes outsized and all-encompasing part of peoples' lives. When everything becomes political (as it already is with many), then we're in trouble. When you can't watch Lebron without politicizing the game, things have gone too far. Of course, the media loves this shit. They create the controversy and then report on it. Works out great for them. A recent example is Sophie Cunningham in the WNBA. An ESPN story about her got into politics and asked her about trans people in women's sports and Cunningham said she didn't think males should be in women's sports. This has created a nice little news cycle for the media and has divided the league and its fans. A similar thing happened a few weeks ago when some idiot reporters wouldn't stop asking Buster Posey about the Pride patch on Giants uniforms. He refused to answer non-baseball questions and got pilloried for it. Ridiculous. It's baseball...let people just be baseball players instead of having them be billboards for your cause du jour or having to pass this week's idiological/political purity test. Another way to divide us. Thanks, media morons.
  • Speaking of media morons...I'm not sure why I still listen to the NYT Daily podcast. I guess I just want to know the news of the day and see what the taste makers are thinking. I listen to a lot of podcasts all over the place, but few of them take themselves as seriously as the NYT. Anyway, they had an episode a couple weeks ago about high prices in markets. The entire episode was about how high prices are getting in supermarkets. 100% increase in dried apricot, 50% increase in beef prices, etc. The entire podcast kept bringing up extreme numbers and building the case for Trump causing these huge increases. I assume all the numbers given were factual and correct. At the VERY final two sentences of the story they closed by stating that Walmart, Target, and Costco would be lowering many of their prices. They also stated that overall food inflation is expected to be 3.2% for the year . This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts because (I assume) all the facts and figures were accurate so they can't be impeached on that. But the tone and tenor of the entire podcast would have you believing that prices were astronomical, but in fact they have just increased 3.2%. They have anecdotes from people on the street...one guy eats only watermelon for lunch, another woman has "lost a lot of weight," another woman basically starves so she can feed her kids, etc. Story after story about how crazy high the prices are, but then they end with the reality that it's a 3.2% increase in prices. I don't want to downplay the struggle to make ends meet, but this story was just so out of touch.
  • Imagine reporting a basketball game covered like this: "Wilt Chamberlain had a rough night at Hershey arena on March 2, 1962. He missed 27 shots and 4 free throws. He shot just 57.1% from the field (only good enough for 4th best on his team). He appeared tired after playing all 48 minutes. His team was outscored by 11 points in the second half. He only mustered 2 assists. He guarded Cleveland Buckner for much of the game and Buckner had a career high 33 points in the game. Wilt also had 100 points in the game." I looked up the box score and put this together...basically, you can cover the same game however you want. My telling of the game was completely accurate, but buried the lede.


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