Who is winning and losing in the post-Trump 2.0 economy?
Winning
New York City (tech)
San Francisco (finance and tech)
San Jose (tech)
Losing
Rural America (agriculture)
College towns (higher education)
Manufacturing towns in the South (trade hits to manufacturing)
Las Vegas (tourism)
Washington D.C. (federal government employment)
Disaster hit areas including parts of Florida and Appalachia
Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.
* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.
* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.
* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.
* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.
* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.
* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.
* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes.
One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).
The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.
In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.
As interpreted the U.S. Constitution has various problems:
* The insurrection clause was gutted by making it not self-executing.
* Presidential immunity from crimes was a horrible mistake.
* No one has standing to pursue too many violations of the law, such as the emoluments clause, the bar on increasing Congressional compensation, some kinds of religious establishment (e.g. not enforcement the ban on political action by religious groups).
* The pardon power is too easily abused.
* Limiting campaign finance by corporations in a partisan neutral way is prohibited (although Citizens United is less of a problem than it is given credit for being IMHO).
* Term limits for Congress would be good.
* The filibusters has done more harm than good.
* Gerrymandering is an intractable problem and the first past the post system also leads to spoiler effects and a two party system instead of a multiparty system.
* Grounds for impeachment are too feeble and impeachment is too hard to accomplish for genuine crimes.
* The veto power is too strong, undermining Congress.
* The electoral college has proven to be a bad idea.
* The Senate is too distorting.
* The Second Amendment is a bad idea.
* Treaties are too often found to be not self-executing.
* Treaties are not subordinate to domestic laws.
* Given Congress control over election disputes in their own houses was a bad idea. Their roster should be out of their control.
* The unitary executive theory is incredibly harmful and should be actively overruled. The ban on legislative vetos is less of a big deal but also deeply problematic.
* The 25th Amendment on Presidential disability was a good idea, but was executed poorly.
* It should not be possible to be President as your first political position. Prior statewide office, a cabinet post, a top generalship, or service in Congress should be required first.
* The franchise should be affirmatively defined.
I've said it before, but it remains true that while there is not one right answer for the policies that democracies should adopt, there are many objectively wrong decisions that democracies can make.
Brexit harmed the British economy more than anticipated. Trade barriers hurt the countries erecting them.
This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using almost a decade of data since the referendum, we combine simulations based on macro data with estimates derived from micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These estimates suggest that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by between 12% and 18%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These large negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process.
Comparing these with contemporary forecasts – providing a rare macro example to complement the burgeoning micro-literature of social science predictions – shows that these forecasts were accurate over a 5-year horizon, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.
Ms Sheinbaum’s government says Mexico’s murder rate has come down by 32% in the year since she took office. Analysis by The Economist confirms that the rate has fallen, though by a significantly smaller margin, 14%.Counting homicides alone misses an important part of the picture, namely the thousands of people who disappear in Mexico every year, many of whom are killed and buried in unmarked graves. A broader view of deadly crime that includes manslaughter, femicide and two-thirds of disappearances (the data for disappearances is imperfect), shows a more modest decline of 6%.Still, Mexico is on track for about 24,300 murders this year, horribly high, but well below the recent annual average of slightly over 30,000. Ms Sheinbaum is the first Mexican leader in years to push violent crime in the right direction.
The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills . . .At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort.
A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation. . . .
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8. . . .The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).
From Marginal Revolution.
The deemphasis on standardized tests in admissions, which provide a means to test these skills in a way not influenced by high school specific grade inflation is probably the primary factor.
Admitting students who aren't academically prepared to college isn't doing them any favors.
My wife and son ran the NYC marathon together (they were just one minute short of getting a mention in the New York Times for it).
It wasn't my first trip to NYC, but each visit stirs up no impressions.
It is amazing how much a tiny hotel room (there was barely room to walk - the bed was almost wall to wall), a suitcase full of clothes, and a credit card with enough money on it to buy food and subway fares makes. We had a kitchenette, so we could have lived there, and led a reasonably dignified life.
While some things in NYC are modern and cutting edge, it is also to a significant extent, an enclave of the past. The engineering behind the subway train operations is ancient, even though the fare system is very modern. The operations of the NYSE are at their core, ancient. Its residential co-ops are historical relicts from the pre-condo era. Its trash collection systems lack alleys or even dumpsters. Its street system doesn't handle car and truck travel well at all, although its bike lanes are modern and work rather well. It has been highly resistant to big grocery store chains found everywhere else. Its rent control system is its own thing found in only a couple of other places in the nation. It is home to the UN which, alas, isn't a modern, functional institution. It tries, but isn't very disability friendly.
We are in the longest government shutdown of all time in U.S. history. The second longest was also under Trump. There is still no end in sight.
The Dodgers won the World Series.
Two words that would seem useful:
* Dila = daughter-in-law (adjacent)
* Sila = son-in-law (adjacent)
These word would cover both engaged people and people who are in a serious long term relationship with a son or daughter to the point where they have met the family and might very well be more or less permanent family members. The need for a compact word to describe someone who has this relationship to you is real.
I haven't seen a full set of 2025 election results, but generally, Democrats did well.
The federal government shutdown is on day 26, the second longest of all time, and the record holder for person-days of federal employee furloughs. Trump has accounted for a majority of all days that the government has been shut down for all time.
Trump has literally demolished the East Wing of the White House to put up a ballroom (all contrary to federal law regarding how that is done).
SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps, will be shut off on November 1, 2025, out of Trump's spite because there are contingency funds in place to keep it going longer.
Trump continues to deny everyone federal disaster aid.
Trump continues to illegally murder people in boats in the Caribbean, ostensibly because they are dealing drugs, but that isn't grounds for summary execution, the basis for doing so hasn't been substantiated, and Congress hasn't authorized it.
ICE is ignoring the law and court orders in Chicago. On the bright side, someone stole two National Guard tanks in Memphis.
The No Kings Protest on October 18, 2025 extended to large attendances even in deeply red places. About 8.1 million people nationwide participated.
In a political stunt to celebrate the Marine Corps. birthday, they fired artillery rounds over Interstate Highway I-5, where some rounds exploded prematurely over the highway.
Charlie Kirk's wife appears to be deeply connected to kidnappings of Romanian children for adoptions when she was 17 years old in an activity that Trump apparently played a part in funding.
The National Young Republicans Group's racist, pro-Nazi, pro-rape group chat was exposed. The group also stiffed venues where it held events of tens of thousands of dollars more than once.
More than a third of ICE applicants can't pass basic physical fitness tests. About half of them can't pass a basic, open book test, on the part of immigration law that they need to know and the 4th Amendment.
The Toronto Blue Jays are in the World Series.
Trump increased tariffs on Canadian imports by 10% because he didn't like a truthful TV ad playing recordings of Ronald Reagan explaining how bad tariffs are.
Trump is ramping up dubious criminal prosecutions of his political opponents using illegally appointed attorneys in the Justice Department's U.S. attorneys' office.
Trump appears to have received more than a billion dollars of illegal personal gain from his office already since January 20 when he was sworn in.
Trump illegally tried to conduct layoffs during the government shutdown, which a judge halted.
Republicans are refusing to swear in a newly elected Democrat to the house from Arizona because they don't want to release the Epstein files and don't care about the continuing government shutdown.
All of this just scratches the surface of the horrible news that rains down every day.
A video at this link explains the concept of an "Extinction Burst". People go into a rage when something that they used to be rewarded for isn't working any more, until they give up.
This is the most hopeful thing that I've seen for ages.
The number one trigger for military coups is the military not getting paid, which the U.S. is doing right now. And, when Trump has called up the national guard, he has done so for time periods one day short of what is necessary for them to receive full compensation for being called up. VA spending has also been slashed.
Corruption and incompetence are also major factors. But you have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find a President who rivals Trump 2.0 in those dimensions. It doesn't inspire confidence to talk about conflicts between Albania and Azerbaijan, or a European country and Cambodia. His dementia is apparent and was on full display at his unprecedented speech to all generals and admirals.
Humiliation and disrespect for the military can be factors, and Trump has shown both towards soldiers, and in particular, POWs and military casualties. The meeting of all generals and admirals where Trump, a repeat draft dodger, and a Fox News commentator, calling them out for being fat and woke, didn't help.
The meeting, met by stony eyed silence from the assembled military brass to the last man, also potentially broke down the single biggest barrier to a military coup in the U.S., which is the collective action problem of figuring out which officers are on your side. This is why numerically smaller militaries are much more likely to carry out coups. But by showing unanimity of distaste for Trump, he may have inadvertently overcome some of that barrier.
There are other signs that the military has distaste for Trump. For his birthday Army parade in D.C., he wanted a communist style show of force and got a boring historical display. Morale was brought very low when the National Guard gardened and cleared trash when occupying D.C. The National Guard has not been effective in L.A. or Chicago or Portland or Memphis at reducing crime and multiple judges have held that Trump is illegally deploying the military. But when rule of law is the only thing keeping the military subordinate to the civilian government of the U.S., Trump's flouting of the rule of law undermines that singular force. The military didn't get involved in January 6 and like most law enforcement is probably dismayed by the January 6 pardons. Trump's rogue attacks on "drug dealing" boats in international waters in the Caribbean without legal authority is another example.
The military has spent a lifetime opposing enemies like Russia, and supporting traditional allies, but Trump has turned that on his head, making war with NATO, coddling Russia, envying North Korea, threatening Greenland, Canada, and Panama.
The idea that an armed public discourages tyranny behind the Second Amendment is empirically not true historically, and obviously not true now. Gun owners in the U.S. today, not only aren't resisting tyranny, they're the ones welcoming it.
Is a coup likely? Probably not. But it is more likely now than at any other point in U.S. history.
The demise of the TypePad blog hosting site has obliterated many of the blogs in my sidebar.
This could have been pretty cool.
Around the turn of the 20th century, inexpensive meat, a product of American prosperity that had long been available to even the poorest immigrants, was suddenly in short supply. Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard thought he had a solution: embrace hippopotamus ranching. He even outlined the details in his “American Hippo Bill.”
What did his plan have to do with the water hyacinth and what became of the proposed solution?
Full story at the Smithsonian Magazine.
The Ukraine War seems to have reached a turning point. Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and on coal and natural gas fired electrical power plants, often deep inside Russia, are having an impact that ordinary Russian citizens can no longer ignore. And, when Russia can not longer supply oil and gas to Western Europe, European resolve to take a firm stand against Russia strengthens.
ICE is rotten to the core. Basically everyone who works for it is a corrupt, racist, bad cop, with no regard for the rule of law who lacks moral character.
Democrats in Congress should sponsor the Fire ICE Act. This would:
1. Immediately terminate the employment of every single employee and contractor working for ICE.
2. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from working for any federal government agency or any federal government contractor in any capacity, even as an unpaid volunteer or as prison labor.
3. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving security clearances.
4. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal financial aid for higher education.
5. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from eligibility for SBA loans.
6. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from serving as a sponsor for any immigrant.
7. Retroactively downgrade every former ICE employee who is a military veteran to dishonorably discharged status.
8. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal farm aid.
9. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal housing or disaster assistance, including FHA and VA loans.
10. Revoke all non-vested employee benefits of the ICE employee from any federal government employment.
11. Extend the statute of limitations for civil liability and criminal liability committed in connection with service as an ICE agent to 50 years.
12. Create a private cause of action, including minimum statutory damages of $50,000 and attorneys' fees, for any violation of federal law committed by an ICE agent while employed by ICE or a contractor for ICE. This would include any wrongful deportation and any detention made without probable cause. And, allow any vested retirement funds or homestead property to be used to satisfy any such judgment even if it would otherwise have been exempt from creditors. Make any such debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
13. Bar all companies that provided deportation transportation services to ICE from all future government contracts.
14. Make all former ICE employees ineligible to serve on the board of any 501(c)(3) organization, or as an officer or paid employee of any such organization.
15. Revoke the visas of any ICE employee who is not a U.S. citizen.
16. Prohibit former ICE agents from owning or possessing firearms.
17. Bar former ICE officers from making new applications for federal disability benefits.
18. Prohibit federal civilian employees and federal government contractors hired in any law enforcement role from wearing masks, or enforcing the law in unmarked cars, subject to very narrow exceptions that are heavily reported upon, required all sorts of red tape, and are limited to circumstances that never include immigration enforcement.
19. Create a list of places like hospitals, court houses, churches, and immigration offices, where immigration enforcement is not allowed.
20. Allow any state or city to prohibit federal immigration enforcement from taking place in their jurisdiction, subject to very narrow exceptions for people convicted of serious felonies within the last five years.
21. End all grounds for denaturalization and punish people who secured U.S. citizenship by fraud with criminal penalties that do not revoke their U.S. citizenship.
22. Place former ICE agents at the bottom of the priority list to receive organ transplants, at at the end of the line for any Medicaid, Medicare, or VA medical benefit for which there is a waiting list.
23. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any honor or recognition from the federal government and revoke any honor or recognition that the former ICE agent was previously awarded by any federal government entity, military or civilian.
24. Deny former ICE agents any benefit of U.S. international child custody treaties.
25. Prohibit former ICE agents from notarizing any document used in the federal courts or submitted to a federal government agency.
26. Make former ICE agents ineligible for all federal licenses, including but not limited to, patent examiners, SEC licenses, BLM grazing permits, FCC licenses, interpreter qualifications, pilot's licenses, federal firearms dealer's licenses, and federal fishing or hunting licenses.
27. Prohibit former ICE agents from being buried in military cemeteries.
28. Prohibit former ICE agents from being granted patent or trademark applications.
29. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers of any federally recognized employee unions.
30. Prohibit former ICE agents from attending any federal educational institutions.
31. Prohibit former ICE agents from making mining claims.
32. Impose a 50% excise tax on any vested, deferred compensation payable to former ICE agents on top of any other applicable taxes.
33. Enact a rebuttable presumption in any federal discrimination case that a former ICE agent intended to engage in illegal discrimination.
34. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving a registered lobbyists.
35. Require former ICE agents to disclose their employment with ICE to all future employers, in any commercial contract, in any campaign for public office, and prior to being issued a marriage license.
36. Make status as a former ICE agent an aggravating factor under the federal sentencing guidelines.
37. Prohibit former ICE agents from entering federal parks and federal landmarks.
38. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers or directors of any publicly held company.
39. Prohibit former ICE agents from purchasing cyptocurrencies or selling crypocurrencies that were not owned prior to the enactment of the law.
40. Prohibit former ICE agents from obtaining any federal loan or bailout of any kind.
41. Disclose all internal ICE records and a list of all former ICE agents to the public on a publicly available database that disclosed all internal affairs information, all service information, and all contract information of former agents.
42. Immediately release everyone in ICE detention who isn't an undocumented immigrant convicted of a crime within the last five years that is a felony or worse. Transfer the rest to the federal Department of Corrections.
43. Ban all future private prison contracts of any kind.
44. Deny all de minimis tariff exemptions for former ICE agents.
45. Formally authorize private sector employers and state and local government employers to discriminate against former ICE agents.
46. Give cases in which former ICE agents are plaintiffs, the lowest scheduling priority in federal court.
47. Require disclosure of former ICE agent status in every lawsuit filed by a former ICE agent, and as part of the witness testimony of every former ICE agent in any federal court or federal administrative agency proceeding.
48. Prohibit former ICE agents from participating in clinical trials for new drugs and medical devices.
49. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any new federal tax credits.
50. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as employees or unpaid volunteers in federal funded schools at any level.
If this bill is introduced as a bill in Congress, and secured enough co-sponsors in the House and Senate to have some credible chance of being seriously considered, it doesn't even matter if it passes.
It will still powerfully discourage people considering employment with ICE from doing so. Every if some provisions are subsequently invalidated by the courts and are severed from the larger bill, the uncertainty would seriously chill anyway from applying to work for it.
Autism may be related to the human specific evolution of higher intelligence:
Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection. These shifts may have slowed brain development in children while boosting language and cognition. The findings suggest autism is part of the trade-off that made humans so cognitively advanced.
A post at Quora has a thoughtful take on why the MAGA movement is opposed to so many fundamental American ideals.
Tomaž Vargazon ·Practicing atheist
Sep 10 [2025]Why are MAGA so opposed to the very principles on which the United States are based -- liberty and freedom? Why does MAGA want to surrender their freedom to an authoritarian loser like Donald Trump, who only wants to use and destroy them?My personal opinion, after spending an unhealthy amount of time looking at various extremists over the past 20+ years, is a significant minority of people who are simply not capable of modern human civilization.
ISISTake the Islamic world for example. Various studies have been made as to how many Muslims support the crazies and it’s usually in the 10–20% range, depending on the country, region and time in history. They are a minority, but a very sizeable and vocal minority that has the ability to control the narrative, due to their vicious nature.But this is not limited to Islam at all. In Europe we have various kooky-looney parties that look different, behave differently, but share the same core disdain for modern human civilization. In Germany they’re the ones who support AfD, across Europe they’re the main provider of various neo-Nazi gangs and so forth.These same people, born in a Muslim family, would become the radical crazies of ISIS. In Europe they fawn over Michaelle Le Pen. In Britain they bend over for Nigel Farage. Born in an America, they become MAGA. It’s the same kind of mindset, right from the stone age: my way or the highway, my leader is perfect, your side has no redeeming qualities, anyone who opposes us is evil or crazy, we will solve everything and nothing you do is worth talking about.The reason why I think this is intrinsic to humanity is because whereever you look, the numbers are always hover at approximately 20% of the population. Sometimes it’s a bit more due to temporary surges when people don’t really know what they’re voting for (Hitler in 1933 had about 33% support), sometimes it’s a bit less because there are several competing groups for the stone age vote and they steal the stone age vote. Sometimes the excesses of one such groups also drop their support, because they get percieved as bad - this certainly happened to ISIS.But in the long run the crazies, once they’re known to everyone, end up with ~20% support. It’s not that odd if you think about it, approximately 99% of our history we’ve spent in tribal groups and endemic warfare in prehistory. It was your way or the club or spear of the other tribe. Of the recorded history we’ve spent a clear majority, certainly over 5500 of the past 6000 years and likely more, in one dictatorship or another. Keeping your mouth shut and head down in front of the powerful leader was the way you kept it on your shoulders, questioning authority being something positive is a new development.In light of this the fact 1 person in 5 is not okay with the modern state of affairs and wants to have a strong ruler that will tell them when to shit, when to eat, when to clap and when to kill, should not be surprising. They don’t function well when disconnected from the hive and feel lost. Making choices and taking responsibility is hard and tiring, just following orders unquestioningly is easy. No, the most surprising fact should be is 4 out of 5 people do want modern society, with all that entails.Unfortunately that means we have to contend with 20% support for crazies, like MAGA or what have you. What Trump did in other words was not to convince anyone of anything. He just rallied the deplorable vote under one banner and make them vote consistently for the return of the stone age.
So, today was my first day at a new job as a senior assistant city attorney with the City and County of Denver.
As usual, as a lawyer, I can't talk about the substance of what I actually do at work, due to attorney-client privilege and confidentiality rules and so on.
But, as in any big organization (the City and County of Denver has at least 11,000 employees), day one at a new job is not mostly about the substance of the work that day. I probably only did about two hours of actual legal work on my first day.
Day one at a new job in a big organization is about getting your employee ID, completing employment related paperwork, getting accounts with various workplace software systems set up, learning where the bathrooms and break rooms are located, figuring out the layout of your part of the building so you don't get lost, introducing yourself to your co-workers while trying to match their names to faces in your memory, watching orientation videos, and reading orientation materials.
This wasn't my first rodeo. I'm a middle aged man and I've been through this drill before in my life. But I haven't done it recently, since I've been self-employed and worked in small offices for a couple of decades.
A couple of things struck me as very different from my prior experiences.
Preparing For Mass Shootings
The last time I went through the "onboarding" drill, in 2004, was five years after Columbine, and three years after 9-11. At the time, we were more concerned about international terrorism in high profile locations, than we were about the era with a never ending wave of school and workplace shootings, even though, in hindsight, that era really began with the Columbine High School shootings in 1991.
On the day of the Columbine shooting, in 1999, I had just recently moved to Denver and lived close to downtown before moving to the Washington Park neighborhood after which this blog is named the next year. I saw the Denver bomb squad's truck rush right by me, sirens blaring. I recall thinking at the time that something really bad must be going down, although I hadn't listened to the news yet that day and didn't know what was going down at the time. The Denver bomb squad truck was headed for Columbine High School. Not much later that day, the news confirmed my suspicions. It was a massacre. Thirteen students and one teacher were killed before the two shooters committed suicide (one died a quarter century later from these injuries, while the others died almost immediately); twenty-three more people were injured (twenty by gunfire) in a spree that lasted 49 minutes, even though a police office had responded within five minutes.
But back in 2004, during my last onboarding to a larger employer, five years after Columbine, our society's response to "active shooter situations" still hadn't really jelled yet.
Before Columbine, police and institutional administrators had doctrines about responding to armed threats that favored the cautious approach appropriate for situations where an armed person had taken multiple people hostage, but wasn't actively shooting anybody.
After the fact recognition that the institutional and law enforcement response to Columbine had been inadequate, crystalized the recognition that a different response was appropriate in an "active shooter" situation. In an "active shooter" situation, the right approach is to minimize harm by denying the shooter targets, and by boldly doing everything possible to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. But it took years for a consensus to emerge around the best law enforcement and institutional response to an active shooter situation.
"Lockdown" and "active shooter" drills only started when my children were in early elementary school, in the late aughts. None of my onboarding experiences in 2004 or earlier had imagined the possibility.
The mostly small law firms that I worked at over the years devised skeletal security plans on an ad hoc basis when there were specific security threats (usually from a client's ex-spouse, or soon to be ex-spouse), like keeping shades drawn to deny someone with a rifle a target in our office, or thinking about escape routes out back doors and how to stall threatening people while everyone was trying to flee.
Fast forward to 2025. Onboarding and HR materials still have the old mainstays. A brief history of the institution you're beginning to work for. A review of various nuts and bolts considerations related to sick days, employee benefits, and other employee policies and procedures. Strong cautioning against sexual harassment.
What is new to me is the new, major focus on how to head off violence in the workplace, and how to react in the event of an active shooter, even though it has been a part of my children's lives for as long as they can remember. There was even once a shootout unrelated to their school, that took place just outside their high school, during which their high school was locked down.
For me, this hit hard. Unlike my children, this was not something that I had ever been systemically prepared for before. Even in years in the Boy Scouts, with its "be prepared" motto, all of the way to becoming an Eagle Scout, we'd never considered these scenarios. But, this issue was raised in two or three different sessions in my orientation activities today, consuming almost an hour on my first day of work.
This isn't by any means a criticism, even though it was unsettling. This instruction is necessary in our day and age when these kinds of shootings are weekly, if not daily occurrences. There were two school shootings on the same day on September 10, 2025 last week. And, the instruction works.
At the Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado last week, which involved an active shooter who emptied and reloaded his revolver many times, all over the school, firing dozens if not hundreds of times, and trying to attack students in many different classrooms, only two victims other than the shooter were shot.
One victim was in the school at the time. This victim was a casualty of one of the first shots fired, and was probably one of the intended primary targets of the shooter. He was shot with little or no warning, and until then, no one at the school knew that the shooter had a gun with him that day.
No amount of training about what to do when an active shooting incident starts could have saved this first victim, although someone might have taken action to prevent it from happening in response to the shooter's disturbing social media activity (which his parents appear to have been aware of, at least to some extent, but didn't act upon). The FBI had started investigating the shooter's social media postings in July, but wasn't able to identify who was making them prior to the September 10 shooting.
The other student was shot by the shooter while fleeing, outside the school. This student was probably a target of opportunity after the shooter was thwarted in his attempt to find his other intended targets in the school, and instead shot someone else at random out of frustration, not long before the shooter shot himself. The active shooting episode (as is often the case) was all over before law enforcement could confront the shooter. This second victim was, realistically, the only conceivably preventable casualty that all those drills were not enough to completely save.
Both of the victims who were shot were initially in critical condition, but have survived for more than five days so far (as of early this evening one victim was in critical but stable condition, and the other victim was in serious, but not critical, condition), as a result of extremely rapid and decisive medical responses once the shooting stopped (or maybe even earlier, the details aren't perfectly clear). The two victims were brought to a specialized trauma center, while receiving emergency care en route, well within the "hour of power" when a serious trauma victim can often be saved. While this is speculation on my part, I suspect that the less seriously wounded victim was probably the second one who was shot while fleeing, and that the distance that this victim put between him or herself and the shooter was probably decisive in preventing that shot from killing this victim.
The only life that wasn't saved was the shooter, who died from his self-inflicted, point-blank, gunshot wound which he intended to be suicidal and which ultimately did cost him his life. But even he survived in critical condition for hours due to the rapid medical response, and the quality of care that a Level One trauma center can provide.
There were eight hundred or more people in Evergreen High School school at the time the shooting started. But, the active shooter training and lock down drills paid off. The shooter would almost certainly have killed many more people, as the shooters at Columbine did in 1999 in another affluent part of the same suburban Colorado county, if everyone in the school hadn't done what they had learned in their annual drills.
Evergreen High School's students, teachers, and administrators, almost instantly after the first shots were fired, turned the school into a fortress of locked or barricaded doors. The shooter repeatedly tried to break into classrooms to kill more people, some of whom were probably his intended targets, but he failed. People who couldn't lock themselves into a safe place hid out of sight if they couldn't flee and weren't shot. The rest of the students, including those in a cafeteria near where the shooting started, and some hallways full of high school students, successfully fled to safety purposefully and without hesitation, mostly getting out within a minute or two after the shooting started. They ran far away, beyond the range of the shooter, to safety.
Everyone who wasn't shot was promptly accounted for, to make sure that there were no victims who were shot, but not found, who needed medical attention.
The world has changed. Twenty-five years ago, an active school or workplace shooting of multiple people was shocking and almost unthinkable. Now, while it is still much less common than other kinds of murders and attempted murders, school and workplace shootings are a routine fact of life that we have accepted as a society (even though many of us urgently want policy reforms to address them), and we prepare for them in much the same way that we prepared for tornados when I was a kid in school, and in much the same way as we prepare for plane crashes in advance of every commercial airline takeoff.
Preparing For High Rise Fires
Another change today was more thorough and vivid instruction from HR on what to do if there is a fire in a high rise building than at any place I've worked before now.
This is a direct offshoot of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, as well as the fact that I'm working on the 11th floor of a downtown office building.
I don't recall ever even thinking about fire safety when I worked near the top of a high rise office building in Glendale, Colorado from 1999 until the summer of 2001, a few months before 9-11. No one ever even mentioned the possibility.
My office at the time of 9-11 was a single story steel framed building with a brick facade, multiple exits, and a window that could be opened and escaped from in every room, so escaping a fire wasn't a concern there either. And, nobody was worried that our tiny suburban office building, which was also home to a miniature golf course and a drive though coffee kiosk, was a terrorist target.
This threat wasn't a big deal at the workplace I joined in 2004, the last time I had a thorough onboarding at a new job in a large organization, since our offices were on the second floor of a modern, up to code, sprinkler equipped, three story concrete, steel and glass building in a suburban office park. It also wasn't much of a concern in 2005 when I worked on the first floor of a two story converted Victorian era mansion with a fire escape from the second floor, and many windows in every room from which people inside could safely escape if need be.
I did get a little fire emergency training from 2010 until 2019, when I worked on the 20th floor of a high rise office building in downtown Denver (on the same block as downtown Denver's signature "cash register building"). Within a year of starting to work there, I was appointed to the unpaid position of fire marshal for our little office suite with a peak occupancy of about six people that took up about half a floor of the building. We went through annual drills where we walked down twenty flights of stairs and assembled at our office's appointed regrouping site in front of the Warwick hotel a couple of blocks away. But my duties were communicated to me in a low key manner, face to face, from our previous office fire marshal to me. I served in this role until the office suite's lease ended, and so I never had to pass that hat to anyone else. My subsequent offices were also small and low rise.
But, now I work on the 11th floor of a downtown office building for a large, bureaucratic organization that employs everyone in the building. And, the horrors of people trying to escape the World Trade Center still seem almost as fresh as they did twenty-four years ago, even though the threat of foreign terrorism has slipped to the back of our consciousness. So, this was, rightfully, a significant focus in our orientation, even though it was also unsettling.
The case for a next generation A-10.
One recent article tries to justify the retirement of the A-10 Warthog attack aircraft. Retiring the fifty year old aircraft is understandable. But the Air Force has for decades scandalously ignored its obligation to support ground troops and continues to do so. Some of the recent article's reasons are more sound than others:
The F-35 Can Do Its JobOne of the reasons for decommissioning the Warthog is redundancy. While the A-10 is great at its job, which consists of ground strike and close air support, these missions can be carried out by the F-35. Since the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy all fly F-35s, each service can call in Lightning IIs for danger-close missions. The F-35 does not have the Warthog’s GAU-8/A Avenger 30-mm rotary cannon, but it can drop numerous munitions when it is equipped in beast mode. F-35s can launch the StormBreaker smart weapon and the Paveway laser-guided bomb. The F-35 can also share targeting data in real time with other airplanes.
The argument that the F-35 is a suitable A-10 replacement doesn't hold water. The A-10 is more robust, is better suited to the slow and low flights needed for close air support, and has better protection for pilots against small arms fire than the F-35, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, or the AC-130 adapted C-130 transport plane which only flies missions at night because of its vulnerability. The A-10 (when new) needs less maintenance per flight hour as well. The A-10 is better for most close air support missions than the AH-64 Apache, the AH-1Z Viper of the Marine Corps, the MV-22, or the AC-130, and rivals drones in situations where there aren't sophisticated anti-air defenses but there are anti-drone defenses like electronic jamming or directed energy weapons.
The A-10 Would Not Survive In Modern WarAnother reason to retire the Warthog is its low survivability. Air defenses are constantly improving, with better radar and surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems such as the Russian S-400 and S-500 that are layered in depth.The A-10 would have little protection from being detected, tracked, and destroyed by newer SAMs. The A-10 is not known for speed and maneuverability, although its performance in air shows has left me impressed. A-10s are also not stealthy like the F-35, and they are much slower and less maneuverable.
The basic problem with this point is that it is all or nothing thinking. Against an opponent with strong, modern air defenses, the A-10 (and close air support in general) doesn't make sense. But, in many conflicts, such as President Trump's contemplated involvement in wars with the armed militias of Latin American drug cartels, or in the global war on terrorism, or against pirates, the adversaries don't have modern air defenses and close air support is desirable. As a country with the largest air force in the world, not every fighter aircraft needs to be a generalist suited for every conflict.
Even in the same conflict, there may be an initial stage, when the goal is to destroy enemy air defenses when air superiority has not been secured, when an expensive stealth fighter may be the right tool, and a later stage of the same conflict, when enemy air defenses have been secured and air superiority is substantially achieved, when an attack aircraft may make more sense.
A manned close air support aircraft may be desirable when the opponent has advanced anti-drone or electronic warfare resources (that can also thwart guided missiles and smart bombs) but not sophisticated air defense resources that are still functioning. And, a modern version of the A-10 would have more active air defenses.
The A-10 Is Costly to Keep in the AirFurther, the A-10 is an older airframe. It was introduced in the 1970s and requires significant maintenance. The airplane’s need for spare parts and tender loving care makes it expensive to keep in the air.The money saved by no longer maintaining Warthogs can be spent on other airplanes, such as the new F-15EX, as well as the F-35. The cost per flight hour of the Warthog ranges between $19,000 and $22,000. This adds up quickly, and in a future war, the costs would multiply. The Air Force has requested $57 million to retire all A-10s.
This is a legitimate concern. Airplanes are machines that don't last forever and even training missions put a lot of wear and tear on them. But, it is a straw man argument.
The real debate is not over keeping the original airframes from the 1970s, but over whether the niche of a simple, robust, fixed wing close air support aircraft should continue to exist. The Army designed helicopter gunships and an armed version of the MV-22 Osprey because it didn't trust the Air Force to be committed to providing closely coordinated close air support for it, and the Army wasn't wrong. But a helicopter gunship or MV-22 Osprey is slower and more fragile than an A-10. The real question is whether a successor to the A-10 that is designed in a similar way with a similar mission should be built. If it was, its hourly maintenance costs (and per unit production costs) would be much lower than a supersonic stealth aircraft, or an aircraft like the F-15EX optimized for air to air combat.
Supersonic speeds, advanced air to air combat capabilities, and stealth make an aircraft much more expensive.
Also, an A-10 successor would be better suited to intercepting drones than a more expensive, supersonic, high altitude F-35 or F-15EX. The A-10 or a successor in the same niche, would be better suited to engaging adversaries in the typical drone airspace.
Would It Even Have Any Tanks to Destroy?Finally, warfare is changing. Combat in Ukraine has focused on first-person view drones that loiter and drop down to eliminate tanks and people. The A-10 is not the best tool to take out small drones.Plus, the tank, which has historically been the main target of A-10s, is becoming an obsolete platform. The A-10 could still offer close air support for soldiers and Marines in tight spots on the ground, but there may not be as many tanks and armored personnel carriers on the battlefield compared to the days when the United States first fought in Iraq.
Tanks probably will play a smaller role in future conflicts. But, the same folks who are pressing for the retirement of the A-10 also think we still need tracked manned tanks with a 105mm to 125mm main gun whose primary purpose is to destroy other tanks. But even without tanks, close air support is needed, and there are artillery batteries, trenches, fortified positions, and other armored vehicles to strike. Drones can take over many of these roles. But, a manned A-10 isn't vulnerable to electronic jammers, doesn't require fiber optic control wires, can evaluate the situation with richer visual and electronic input than a small laptop computer screen displaying digital camera images can (which is critical when friendly and hostile forces are close to each other), is much faster than any ground vehicle (and especially faster than a tracked vehicle), and can ignore obstacles on the ground like rivers, trees, mountains, and barricades.
In general, fixed wing aircraft are faster, have longer range, can carry heavier payloads, are more fuel efficient, are more survivable when hit with enemy fire, and are easier to maintain from austere forward operating bases. And, unlike transport aircraft, their ability to land and takeoff vertically (as opposed to from short field airstrips) isn't as important (unless they are non-aircraft carrier ship based).
Not Needed for Combat Search and RescueThe A-10 had a secondary use for combat search and rescue, but the F-35 can carry out this mission as well. Special operations forces have personnel called “combat controllers” who act as air traffic controllers on the ground. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data collected by the F-35 can be shared with the combat controller, who then relays the findings to other special operators and helicopters that can rescue downed pilots or stranded personnel.
A critical mission like combat search and rescue isn't necessary a task for a single aircraft. It is generally a team effort.
Neither an A-10 nor an F-35 is suit for a "rescue" mission. These are single plane fighters that can't pick someone up and evacuate them. They can play a role in a "search" mission, and a supersonic F-35 at 30,000 feet simply isn't as suited for this role as an A-10 at lower altitude with a much lower stall speed that can operate from more primitive air strips.
Drones do provide an alternative, but a manned aircraft close to the ground provides richer visuals than a digital camera and is vulnerable to being jammed. The attack aircraft could control other drones with line of sight, hard to jam lasers or microwave beams, rather than general radio signals that are used by a more conventional drone.
Also, while a fighter aircraft may not be actually "rescuing" someone, it could be dropping supplies for the troops in need of rescue or could be serving as an armed escort for a helicopter or tilt-rotor aircraft that is actually doing the retrieval. Both rolls may be better suited to a low and slow aircraft.
The case for the Marine Corps force redesign.
Another article complains about the Marine Corps divesting itself of main battle tanks and much of its heavy artillery. The Marine Corps was right and the skeptics are wrong.
I've written repeatedly and at length about why main battle tanks are obsolete. They are highly vulnerable. They are very difficult and slow to deploy. They are very slow moving. They have long and highly vulnerable logistics trails. Their main guns are ill-suited for destroying tanks.
I have also written somewhat less voluminously about the problems with traditional howitzers, which are vastly less accurate than missiles and drones (which both means multiple shells per target destroyed and undesirable collateral damage, which also undermines their cost advantage particularly with cheap drones that are often comparable to or lower in cost than a cheap suicide drone), often have more limited range, and are much heavier than missiles or drones per target hit.
As a rapid reaction, expeditionary force, these heavy, slow to deploy systems with long logistics trails are ill suited to the Marine Corps.
* I was supposed to be in a trial out of town today for one of my clients. She's been hospitalized since Sunday (it is not life threatening at this time, although it sucks to be in the hospital, of course). So, the trial had to be continued to a future date to be determined. As a result, I have some found time today.
* I was in court 24 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon took place, and Flight 93 crashed after passengers rose up and disrupted the efforts of the men who hijacked the plane. 2,996 people were directly killed in the attacks including 19 terrorists were killed in the attacks, predominantly passengers on the four hijacked flights, people in the World Trade Center, and World Trade Center first responders.
I still lived in the same house and was married to the same wife. Back then, I was a junior associate attorney with a two year old and an infant. Now, my children have finished college, have apartments of their own, have good jobs, and have significant others with good jobs. My daughter is engaged to be married in less than a year. I'm a few days away from starting a new job as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, after almost twenty years of self-employment as an attorney in the interim.
* In the U.S., the 9-11 attacks, after briefly completely shutting down commercial air travel in the U.S., resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy to create a Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of much more strict security checks and protocols for commercial air travel, the creation of memorials and compensation schemes for the victims of the attacks (several thousand people were killed), the rebuilding of the Pentagon, and the erection of a new skyscraper where the World Trade Center once stood. Islamic terrorism in the U.S. after 9-11 proved to be extremely rare and small in scale. Some of the measures imposed in the wake of that attack, like a requirement to remove one's shoes in a security line that was triggered by a single failed shoe bombing attack on December 22, 2001, are finally being rolled back now. The 9-11 attacks also spurred the passage of the controversial PATRIOT Act which strengthened the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies, the substance of which largely remains on the books with several modifications adopted since then.
* A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, dismissing a lawsuit alleging the arbitrary detention without probable cause and mistreatment of American Muslims in the wake of the 9-11 by the federal government adopted a new standard for bringing federal lawsuits, that replaced "notice pleading" that allowed lawsuits to be brought upon information and belief to be substantiated in the discovery process with "plausibility pleading" that requires allegations of facts that were actually known to state a plausible claim for relief to bring a federal lawsuit, and many but not all U.S. states subsequently also adopted this standard. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have actual knowledge of the insider discussions of top U.S. officials in adopting the policy. The case and a related one called Twombly, which involved an anti-trust lawsuit in which the plaintiffs did not have the "smoking gun" of actual knowledge of the deal reached by allegedly conspiring insiders who had allegedly reached an anti-competitive agreement with each other, made it much harder to bring lawsuits that involve misconduct that only actual insiders have actual knowledge of without court ordered discovery.
* The 9-11 attack was planned and orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization operating in Afghanistan, an organization that the Taliban, which controlled almost all of Afghanistan at the time. al-Qaeda was backed financially and intellectually mostly by factions of the Saudi Arabian royal family and allied wealthy elites were were not part of the ruling faction. The terrorist was Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Lebanese nationals.
In response to the attacks, Congress promptly and almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against this non-state actor. Starting on October 7, 2001, a small U.S. force using a combination of CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. air power promptly crushed the Taliban (by December 7 of 2001), which had been on the verged of conquering the entire control over the opposition of a coalition of warlords, called the Northern Alliance, that was resisting them.
A multinational coalition led by the U.S. then occupied Afghanistan in the resulting power vacuum, shepherded a constitutional assembly based upon local traditions which adopted a Western style government (but with Islamic law as the supreme law of the land) under which a democratically elected civilian government of Afghanistan was formed, with the multinational force supporting the newly formed Afghan government (whose take on Islamic law was far less extreme than that of the Taliban) in counterinsurgency actions against the Taliban.
The Afghan government fell in 2021, just days after U.S. forces withdrew on August 30, 2021, under an executive agreement that previous U.S. President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban without Afghan government involvement. The Taliban government swiftly seized control of the entire country and has imposes a very strict Islamic law regime in the four years that have followed.
The AUMF, however, continues to be in force to fight a larger "War on Terrorism" against Islamist terrorist groups and insurgencies related to al-Qaeda, especially the "Islamic State" group that briefly operated an ultra-extreme Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military action under the AUMF, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, has continued into 2025.
