A Quick Rant

I am disgusted that so many Americans support Donald Trump when his mendacity and incompetence are so widely known. Some of the GOP and political right's high profile figures are almost as bad: Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert and more.

I am disgusted at the corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court by justices like Thomas and Alito, and by the gross disregard for judicial norms and logic and common sense in many of the rulings it has made since the 6-3 conservative majority was put in place on the court (through dubious political tactics).

I am tired of the counter-majoritarian rules of the U.S. federal government lead to gridlock most of the time.

I am tried of having to deal with people who make bad decisions based upon the misinformation they receive from Fox News and less prestigious conservative news outlets.

I am tired of having my country's policies influenced by people who don't believe in evolution, who think the world is flat, who think the moon landing was faked, who think that the U.S. government is hiding secret technologies it received from aliens after they crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, who think that Noah's flood really happened, who think that vaccines are a threat but prayer heals, and on and on and on. And, I am tired of the nut jobs like Tucker Carlson and Evangelical Christian clergy who perpetuate these absurdities.

I am tired of living in a country where one of two major political parties, the Republican Party, absolutely refuses to acknowledge reality and embraces corruption and criminality and political violence. I want a political environment where you can have your own opinions but you are not free to make up your own facts, and everyone has to obey the law.

I am tired of living in a world where a handful of authoritarian bad actors like the current leaders of Russia and North Korea, can cause so immense harm to global peace. 

I despair that in the 21st century, Saudi Arabia is still executing people for witchcraft. 

Rants And Quick Hits

 * There really ought to be a law forcing firms to make their IT systems accept names that many current databases do not, such as hyphenated names, names with apostrophes, names with accented letters, single names with two words and a space, and names with only one or two letters in them. It is such a godawful pervasive form of discrimination against a specified class of people (that includes me, my son's girlfriend, and my wife and in-laws even before we married). It is also very easy to fix with only a modest amount of non-laziness.

* I similarly hate the limitations on file names in many Microsoft Products (One Drive/Sharepoint, here's looking at you) that other programs lack. This is one of Microsoft's many sins that is a persistent pain in the ass.

* There ought to be a defense to disabled parking offenses for someone who doesn't have a tag or license plate but is actually assisting a disabled person in their car on a particular trip.

* The construction trades really ought to be regulated at the state level, rather than having separate licenses for every municipality and for the unincorporated part of every county, usually without even any reciprocity system.

* Building codes should be a copyright free part of the public record. So should the Restatements of Law. It is unconscionable for authoritative sources of law to be available solely on a pay per view basis. If necessary, have the government use the power of eminent domain to buy out the copyright holders.

* Hurray for the iPhone abandoning under E.U. insistence, the lightning power connector in favor of a USB-C connection. The U.S. government should have done the same thing.

* I dread the potential merger of Kroger and Albertsons, which would put almost every "regular" grocery store in Colorado (in contrast to niche organic or gourmet grocery stores with higher prices) under common ownership except a few stores divested to Win-Dixie in an effort to appease regulators (which could easy close down a few years later). A grocery store monopoly in Colorado would be horrible for consumers, and would likewise be horrible in other states similarly impacted.

* Unpopular opinion, but 1950s houses and "mid-century modern" are extremely fugly, far more so than the new homes criticized for that today.

* U.S. cities really made an early strategic mistake in classifying sidewalks as easements that property owners have to maintain to a certain standard of maintenance and snow removal, rather than as public roads for pedestrians which would be maintained by the city as part of its general expenses from property tax and other revenues the way that city streets are handled. Sidewalks are a "network" asset that work only as well as the worst link in the network, and collectivized snow removal would be vastly more efficient (and prevent a lot of injuries and deaths of the elderly and infirm trying to do it themselves) than the status quo of homeowner clearing of sidewalks.

* Someday, when I am not dealing with more urgent repairs like the remedying of the removal of a structural wall that a contractor said wasn't a structural wall, I will get around to replacing the last couple hundred square feet of conventional lawn in my home with a lower maintenance xeriscape alternative. Bluegrass lawns make absolutely no sense in the arid western U.S. I really like the Western U.S. centered Sunset magazine aesthetic and cultural movement that is responsive to its local conditions in that regard and I am pleased to learn that is hasn't gone out of business even though it suspended publication for a number of months and isn't as widely available in grocery store magazine stands anymore:

In March 2020, with the magazine struggling financially due to loss of advertising revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company put most of its employees on unpaid leave. During the pandemic, the company briefly ceased printing the magazine but returned to print with the December 2020 issue.

* In the same vein as xeriscaping, the Western U.S. should transition to something like the Old Mexico daily schedule that is quiescent in the hot midday, but has more public activity in the evenings. 

* Similarly, the American business and professional class should continue to recognize that business suits and ties invented to meet the needs of professional in London, Berlin, Paris, and Northern Italy are ill-suited to sweltering summers of most of the United States which are virtually unknown in Europe (most of which doesn't even routinely need air condition in the summer). French and British colonists themselves didn't feel so constrained when they presided over colonial governments in tropical Africa and India in shorts and short sleeves. Americans need not straight jacket themselves into Ataturk's mandate that businessmen and professionals in Turkey wear wool, European style suits and top hats in the early 1900s in an effort to "modernize" (even though his basic insight that cultural change in inseparable from modernization and economic development wasn't fundamentally wrong). We need to think more like the Japanese on the verge of ending a long period of isolation, whose Emperor sent emissaries out all over the world to see how other countries more advanced than them at the time did things and then picked, chose, and adapted Western ways of doing things in a way that was sensitive to their own local conditions and culture.

* The big picture is that we should be changing our culture to be in better harmony with the conditions of the world we live in, rather than being so tradition bound culturally, whether its yards, the hours we have dinner and work outside, or our clothing.

* The U.S. has backfilled its falling total fertility rate a.k.a. TFR (i.e. number of children per women per lifetime) with immigration to keep its population stable as it has undergone demographic transition with its economic development. The capacity of China, Japan, Korea, and Japan to do the same, in a manner that is within the realm of the politically possible is much more difficult. None of these cultures is very receptive to immigration. This is true even between these East Asian nations with a lot of shared history and culture. Korean migrants are ill treated in China and Japan. Chinese people aren't too welcome in China either. Korea has an officially sponsored pride in its national homogeneity although South Korean farmers who can't find wives are starting to secure wives from Southeast Asia especially. China's 1.4 billion people with dramatically falling TFR has a need for people to refill its workforce that greatly exceeds the supply of people willing to relocate there. Maybe it is good to have a smaller global population as we are approaching peak global population, to place less of a strain on our planet's carrying capacity, and maybe the demographic transition that comes with economic development reflects a buried hidden wisdom that a higher standing of living ideally supports fewer people.

* The similarities between much of the Islamic world and the Victorian era and early 20th century are striking. It suggests that the Islamic world may sooner or later experience a cultural transition similar to the West from the Victorian era to the present. In the fights over the hijab in Iran, we see echos of the 1920s flappers. Most Islamic countries are treating women a lot better now than they did half a century ago even though it can be hard to see when comparing these countries to the modern West. Even though Islam allows polygamy, Tunisia and Turkey have banned it as a matter of secular law that doesn't force anyone to do something that Islam bans. The death penalty and corporal punishment are much more common in the Islamic world than in the West (and this is also common in communist countries for some reason), but apart from holdouts like Iran and Saudi Arabia, its declined a lot just as it did in industrial era Europe. Countries like Iran and Turkey are genuine, if flawed, Islamic democracies, although Afghanistan seems to have regressed. What does the Islamic transition to modernity look like? How does a global transition to a post-petroleum economy impact that?

* The nation's legal system is really digging into Trump. On the civil side, he had to settle the Trump U. case, he lost the rape/defamation case, he lost a major motion for summary judgment in a case in New York related to asset value fraud. And then he has the New York criminal fraud case, the January 6 case, the Georgia election fraud case, and the Florida classified documents case, all on track as the election comes in. And, the insurrection disqualification cases are pending.

* In 1970s the G-7 countries contained 67% of global GDP, today it's only 30%. There is every reason to think that this trend will continue. It is easier to have a higher GDP growth rate percentage when you are copying economic solutions and technologies that someone else has already proven to work successfully than it is to come up with new ways to grow the economy from scratch. So the percentage gap between G-7 countries and non-G-7 countries in GDP per capita should narrow and at the same time, less economically developed countries are growing as their population grows at a higher percentage rate than more economically developed countries whose populations are often shrinking or stagnant. As the G-7 countries dominate the global economy less strongly over time, all sorts of things change, among them the character of international trade and the feasibility of an across the board export based economy like the U.S. had post-WWII because WWII destroyed the economic infrastructure of the rest of the world more than it did the economic infrastructure of the U.S. which just had to shift its factories from making swords to making ploughshares. Probably, we'll see more orientation towards domestic production and more specialized export markets in each country.

* Intellectual property laws and privacy laws need reforms. IP laws need to be weaker. Privacy laws need to be more manageable - our current reactions are too cumbersome and overrate privacy against other values, including free speech.

Time Entry Sucks!

There is nothing I hate more about the practice of law than entering in time entries of absolutely everything I do in 0.1 hour increments. After a quarter of a century of doing it, I still absolutely hate it.

A Modest Proposal

Every gun owner should be registered in a selective service lottery. Every single time someone is killed as a result of the use of a gun in a crime, someone in that lottery should be selected at random and executed. 

Maybe if they personally bore the consequences, they'd realize that mass, largely unregulated civilian gun ownership is a horrible idea.

Transliteration, Scripts and Orthography

Something of a scattered rant here.

Transliteration and Orthography

Transliteration is the process of writing a word not normally written with the Roman alphabet into Roman alphabet letters for people who don't understand a language's main script. There are consistent systems of doing so from one particular language, but this can lead to weird orthography.

Why are transliteration systems for various languages into the Roman alphabet so often at odds with intuitive pronunciation? 

Some examples:

* Why does transliteration of Maori transliterate an "f"-like sound as "wh"?

* Why does transliteration of Vietnamese transliterate a "wh"-like sound as "ng"?

* The revised Romanization of Korean adopted in 2000 by the South Korean ministry of culture is much further from a natural pronunciation of the transliterated words the way that they sound in Korean than the previous McCune–Reischauer system (which admittedly had too many accent type marks for the Internet and wasn't perfect itself). The new system is unambiguous leading instead to consistent error by the uninitiated instead of allowing people to sometimes get it right, especially if they've heard the word before but not seen it written.

* Why does the letter "X" used in so many disparate ways in transliterations, having different sounds, for example, in words derived from Greek, Chinese and Aztec?

It would be nice to have a simple reference of how non-intuitive transliterations work in all of the world's major languages in one place.

It would also be nice to have a list of what phonemes are absent in American English that are present in other major languages, and what phonemes are present in American English that are absent in particular other major languages.

Scripts

Why does Japanese of all language have three phonetic scripts (two based upon syllables that basically code every possible syllable in two different ways, and a Romanization)?

Japanese has a fairly small set of phonemes, pronounced in a consistent way, with few complexities such as a vowel later in a word influencing how a vowel earlier in the word is pronounced, few silent vowels and consonants, few vowels that are implied but not written, very few consonant clusters, little use of tone other than a pitch-accent system, etc. It could totally manage with a short and simple alphabet along the line of Hangul in Korean whose phonology is similarly straight forward.

Golf

Golf courses will reopen in Denver tomorrow. As far as coronavirus risk goes, done in a responsible way, it can be pretty low risk. 

My inlaws are about as good as you get as amateur golfers. My daughter was captain of the golf team and even got a golf scholarship to college.

This said, I don't get the value of the sport. Personally, I would not be troubled in the least if every single golf course in the state were bulldozed and converted to open space, campgrounds, parks, and even housing. 

Golf courses are water hogs in the arid west.

Golf is also the physical personification of inequality. They take large tracts of land for the benefit of a few. It takes an immense amounts of leisure time to play eighteen holes, or even nine, which few people have to spare. And, it isn't a cheap sport in terms of money. The equipment isn't super cheap. The fee to play on a public course isn't trivial. And many people join country clubs with membership dues of upwards of $10,000 a year and selective admissions just to play.

As I understand it, the public golf courses in Denver pay for themselves, but that ignores the property tax free opportunity costs associated with the idle land. I don't know if country clubs, which are generally organized as non-profits, pay property taxes on their golf courses or not.

I suppose it is a "lifetime" sport that one can engage in for your whole life, not that there aren't other alternatives. I'm sure that my class biases and values are showing. But, in my humble opinion, a world without golf would be a better world. 

What Were They Thinking?

The Nissan Kicks (replacing the all wheel drive Nissan Juke), the Toyota C-HR, and now the Hyundai Venue, are all new "subcompact SUVs" (Kelley Bluebook calls them "SUV-lets") with front wheel drive only.

What were they thinking? Why bother creating a front wheel drive only SUV type vehicle?

I guess it makes sense for the California and Hawaii markets. But, for those of us who live in places that get serious snow, and who sometimes drive on dirt roads that turn to mud, this is insanity and an oxymoron of the worst kind.

What I'd Like To Have In A Future Social Media Platform

Consider this my request for proposals for Facebook® 2.0 (no claim to the trademark is made here, this is purely nominative use):

* I'd like a platform that doesn't show you the same post over and over again, even if it is shared and reposted (even months later), or at a minimum, minimizes repeat posts to just show the person posting it and new comments and content.

* I'd like a platform that clearly displays when linked material was published and gives old news lower priority without completely censoring it. At a minimum, it should prevent material that was breaking at the time but is now old news from appearing suddenly new.

* I'd like a platform the automatically flags and attaches to linked material sources debunking the link as fake, or including subsequent developments about events reported in the linked material.

* I'd like a platform that allows you to "bookmark" posts that you see for future review and reference without having to share them which can appear to endorse the posts or let the public know you are interested in something that you'd prefer not to advertise without having to read it right then.

* I'd like a platform that automatically makes a first shot at categorizing posts you've expressed interest in by subject matter. Posts could have more than one category. For example, a post about today's school shooting in Santa Clarita might have one "Santa Clarita November 14, 2019 shooting" category, and another category about mass shootings or gun violence. The categories would be personalized based upon cluster analysis of content you've responded to, posted or shared.

* I'd like a platform whose spelling checker has a larger vocabulary.

* I'd like a better way to review archived material.

* I'd like an ability to back arrow to the exact page you were on previously rather than seeing an updated version of that page that might not have what you were just in the middle of reading and accidentally clinked away from.

* I'd like a platform that automatically "yellow flags" posts and comments from people with a history of being the kind of people you unfriend, downrate, etc., but doesn't censor them unless you choose to do so.

* I'd like a platform that automatically shows you something describing the credibility and bias of sources of linked material, which you could manually adjust (e.g. maybe one to five stars that have a color from red to purple to blue reflecting their bias or white if unknown).

* I'd like a platform that automatically yellow flags potential friends who seem spammy or like fraudsters.

* I'd like a platform that allows you to flag a few categories of ads (not all of them, I recognize that they have to make money) that you'd prefer not to see.

* I'd like a platform that promptly (but accurately) resolves cases of two accounts for the same person, one real and one fake.

* I'd like a platform that allows two or three links that have a preview page in a post, rather than just one.

* I'd like more fine tuned control over what I am notified about. I usually don't want to know that someone reacted to a post or comment, but I do want to know if there is a comment that I might want to react or respond to.

* I'd like for there to be an easier way to retroactively change privacy settings for large numbers of prior posts at once.

* I'd like it to be fairly easy to deactivate features like the "Your Story" feature in Facebook. 

* I'd like a feature that you tell you, at least when you have a large enough number of friends, how many have unfollowed you and how many you actually reach with your posts.

* I'd like a way to sort posts with links from posts without links (both my own and other people's).

* I'd like a feature that stops a repeat loop GIF after a certain number of loops, unless you manually choose otherwise.

* I'd like a feature that translates non-English text embedded in an image.

* I'd like a feature that allows you to manually nudge your feed to have more or less or some kind of content without making an all or nothing rule about it. Hence, maybe you'd like more cat videos and fewer political posts, but don't want all of one and none of the other.

* I'd like direct messaging that don't involve "winks" and allows you to filter out or deprioritize direct messages targeted at lots of people at the same time.

* I'd like a platform that doesn't flag Wikipedia links as spam and trigger content filters for them.

* I'd like to be able to globally deactivate image hiding features designed to protect people from seeing gross or violent or not safe for work content, even though I think it is a good feature to have in the system.

Feel to add your own suggestions in the comments.

Screens Of Death: Forty Years Later

I came of age just as the computer did. One of the first computers that I used was only available in a mail order kit that you assembled yourself and used a cassette tape to store data. Another weighed 30 pounds, had a three and a half inch screen with a text only interface, and five and a half inch floppy disks and was considered "portable." My first video games were graphics free affairs that ran on the university mainframe and used less computing power than a modern graphing calculator.

Early on, I was programming in BASIC, one of the first computer languages that used words rather than machine language. And, one of the very early things that you learned was how easy it was to make a programming mistake that created a recurring loop that left your machine stuck until you powered it off.

Not long after that, Star Trek featured an episode in which the crew cleverly and intentionally got a ships computer into an infinite loop to prevent something horrible from happening.

At the time, I did buy it. Sure, we had problems like that back in the late 1970s and early 1980s with our computers that everyone knew were in their infancy. But, I was sure that this problem that was known so early would be non-existent in no time, let alone in the 25th century or whatever far future era Star Trek was set in.

But, forty years later, this is still a routine problem that comes up many times a week with computers that I use in my personal and professional life. It isn't uncommon for whole big businesses and governments to go down now and then either.

Is this program really an inherently difficult one to stamp out, or do the multi-billion dollar companies that make most of the software and hardware I use on a daily basis just really suck at quality control because they thing there is no money to made in developing reliable systems that aren't so fault prone?

Windows Is Still A Screen Of Death Nightmare

Sabine Hossenfelder (a physics professor and physics blogger) describes her birthday present from Microsoft: an extreme screen of death nightmare that took industrial grade measures to resolve.

For the past couple of days one of my laptops has tried to install Windows updates but didn’t succeed. In the morning I would find an error message that said something went wrong. I ignored this because really I couldn’t care less what problems Microsoft causes itself. But this morning, Windows wouldn’t properly start. All I got was a black screen with a mouse cursor. This is the computer I use for my audio and video processing. 

Now, I’ve been a Windows user for 20+ years and I don’t get easily discouraged by spontaneously appearing malfunctions. After some back and forth, I managed to open a command prompt from the task manager to launch the Windows explorer by hand. But this just produced an error message about some obscure .dll file being corrupted. Ok, then, I thought, I’ll run an sfc /scandisk. But this didn’t work; the command just wouldn’t run. At this point I began to feel really bad about this. 

I then rebooted the computer a few times with different login options, but got the exact same problem with an administrator login and in the so-called safe mode. The system restore produced an error message, too. Finally, I tried the last thing that came to my mind, a factory reset. Just to have Windows inform me that the command couldn’t be executed.

With that, I had run out of Windows-wisdom and called a helpline. Even the guy on the helpline was impressed by this system’s fuckedupness (if that isn’t a word, it should be) and, after trying a few other things that didn’t work, recommended I wipe the disk clean and reinstall Windows. 

So that’s basically how I spent my day, today. Which, btw, happens to be my birthday.

The likely culprit was a bad Windows update.

Fall Cleaning

Turning A Corner

As an adult who isn't a student or working in the education fields or a farmer or fisherman or construction worker or tourism industry worker, my work projects often last more than the nine months of the school year, and more importantly, there is never a time, even briefly, when all of your projects are completely finished before a new set of projects begin. But, the school year still defines the life of a parent, even when your kids are in college far away from home. The new school year is as close as one gets to a new clean slate beginning in middle age.

My son and daughter are ensconced in their college dorm rooms in New England for the year, my two nieces are beginning the 6th grade years in school, and my nephew is no doubt breathing a sigh of relief at having his very chatty sister out of his hair during the day as he continues at the grindstone of home schooling in his eighth grade equivalent year doing so. I am done traveling until Thanksgiving after trips to Greece for a 25th wedding anniversary trip and a trip to Providence to get my son settled into school, although my dear wife will be jet setting on a couple of trips before then, seeing family, this fall.

Fall Cleaning and an MS Word Rant

After two decades with kids at home, it is amazing how easy it is to be uncluttered when they are both gone. And, clearing out the clutter is a nice way to quietly recognize a new phase in life. 

In fairness, my fairly conscientious kids, with not a little nagging, also did a lot to get their own rooms and the house, in general, in order before they left and purged a fair share of their own obsolete junk in addition to what they took with them in my daughter's full sized SUV filled to the gills with two kids worth of stuff to move into their college dorm rooms. The lawn got mowed at the very last moment, the house was well vacuumed, pictures that had been displaced from painting work got hung, and so on. 

The task was already half done after frantic efforts to get the house in order for a high school graduation party with lots of out of town guests and reorganizations needed for some home repairs and minor upgrades (all intended to be finished before graduation, but some of which took well into the summer).

The last of these tasks, which I hope to make a dent into this evening when its not 98º with the sun beating down and no wind, and perhaps finish next weekend, is to clear various kinds of landscaping and camping and sports stuff out of my garage (designed with the 1920s and 1930s cars in use when it was built in mind), so I can squeeze the car my son left behind in there until he returns for winter break, so I don't have to get tickets if I forget to move it on street sweeping days or for leaving a car idle parked on the street longer than allowed by law.

It's not just physical clutter either. I used dead time while traveling to and from Rhode Island to update software, delete space hogging files and applications that I don't need, put electronic files in the proper folders, etc.

I also took a shot at making the style sheet in the default document on my version of Microsoft Word closer to my standards which I must always redo from scratch with each fresh document not recycled from a previous one. It is surprising hard to do that in a system that is so focused on styles and maximizing opportunities for user customization. I want fewer options easily available for my daily work. I would be happy to go through extra clicks to consider fonts and colors and other formatting options I never use, for example. Ideally, formatting options never used for a long period of time would automatically default to a background status that would require extra clicks to use so as to reduce clutter in the user interface. Likewise, I wish it were easier to make style functions that I do use more prominent (e.g. superscript, subscripts, Greek and mathematical and typographical characters). The fact that Microsoft doesn't do these things reflects poorly on their corporate culture. The fact that third-parties don't offer software that resets defaults to better standard sets likewise reflects poorly on the domestic IT industry culture (whatever the cause of that may be).

While strictly coincidental, two years after the building was purchased, after sixteen months of renovations before we could move in featuring delays in getting permits and construction delays, and eight more months in occupancy, the punch list items from the construction are now almost done and my building where I have my new office is finally very presentable. The outside looks complete now, and we're getting ready to clear out the last office stuff and construction materials out of our garage at work so we can use that in the winter. Now, if we can just get our industrial sized copier, printer, scanner, fax machine to work for more than a week without needing repairs . . . . Law offices use a lot less paper and snail mail far fewer things than we used to, be we aren't entirely weaned from that yet.

Mission Accomplished

Our nest is empty. 

In some ways, it is time to say "mission accomplished" in the parenting department. My children are both adults (although, for some perverse reason, there are only a handful of motels and hotels in Boston that are willing to rent rooms to adults under the age of twenty-one, let alone rent cars to them). They got into good colleges that they will be able to attend student loan debt free when they attain their undergraduate degrees. My oldest will graduate in the fall after three years with a major in environmental science and a minor in managerial economics and will turn twenty one a month later. My son may someday find out what he wants to do with his life. Or not. They've both had serious significant others for extended periods of time, who may or may not be around for the long haul. They are capable of surviving with only minimal assistance at this point and even if both my wife and I passed suddenly in some accident, they'd have each other, extended family on both sides, and many friends to turn to for support, as well as a modest inheritance and a substantial sum in the form of term life insurance payouts to provide (realistically) more financial support than we would have provided to them and their families over the next several decades of our lives.

According to sources cited by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers", most of the economic boost that the children of people with high socio-economic status and affluence receive in life comes not from inheritances received when their parents die or large lifetime gifts during their lifetimes, but from the human capital and education that they acquire from their parents grown up and in their early twenties. Some of that goes all of the way back to genetics and pre-natal good health they have received before they are born. More comes from good parenting, great opportunities, and most importantly, a lack of severe deprivation, neglect or abuse (what J.D. Vance in his memoir the "Hillbilly Elegies" refers to by the psychologist and social worker's terminology of "Aces" which stands for "adverse childhood experiences") growing up. A bit comes from opportunities to attend the right college and universities and the connections that they can benefit from on the eve of and at the very dawn of their careers.

Obviously, parents are not irrelevant even in adult life and grandparents can pass on benefits to their children and grandchildren, although my sense is that this contribution has been greatly diminished as of the early 21st century and also is a role that can be filled quite adequately by someone who isn't a blood relative if need be.

Refocusing

So, with all of these changes, and the mission of parenting, if not actually fully accomplished, at least greatly diminished, the time has come to consider where to refocus my efforts and what goals to give greater emphasis.

For example, one of my wife's goals was to get everyone to compete in an athletic competition this year - something that she and the kids have already done, and now I'm signed up for my own baby step, a one mile race while she runs a 10K, in a few weeks.

It is time to contemplate, reconsider, reinvent, and redirect. And, the quiet discipline of "fall cleaning" is a good way to let that cauldron of decision-making simmer in my unconscious background, with mental resources not diverted to other tasks.

When Is Revolution Necessary?

Politics is not simply a matter of opinion.

If voters choose bad politicians in elections, and those politicians are able to implement bad policies, those bad policies will cause bad things to happen.

If voters choose good politicians in elections, and those politicians are able to implement good policies, those good policies will cause good things to happen.

Some outcomes driven by policy decisions are objective better than other outcomes which different policy decisions would produce.

But, our existing political system does not consistently elect good politicians and even when it does does not consistently make it possible for those good politicians to implement good policies.

Suffice it to say that the U.S. political system not only fails to consistently produce among the best available policies. It also consistently fails to produce policies as good as better designed, more modern political systems. The U.S. political system isn't just the Windows of political systems, compared to the MacOS of political systems. It is the Dos of political systems.

This isn't to say that the U.S. political system is by any means the worst in the world. But, there are currently about 50 other countries that have political systems that function better.

The State Of The Nation

Now, fortunately for us, the situation could be worse. 

While we aren't truly "at peace" the magnitude of U.S. involvement in "hot" wars is small and even if we fail in the conflicts that we are currently involved in on a "hot" basis, this is not a huge threat to domestic security. Nobody is even seriously thinking about a military invasion of the United States or a concerted effort to use military force to disrupt our global economic trading any time soon.

The economy could be doing better and there are dark clouds on the horizon. But, unemployment is low, inflation is under control, we aren't in a recession, Obamacare is continuing to provide more access to health care for average Americans than was available before the ACA was enacted even as this slowly deteriorates. The U.S. has not defaulted on the national debt. We have deferred a lot of maintenance on our nation's infrastructure and have failed to actively improve it, but it isn't in a shambles yet. Oil and gasoline prices are low. Technologies like IT and new medical discoveries have and continue to improve. The divorce rate for college educated families has fallen even as working class families continue to fall apart.

We face some serious environmental problems like climate change and the Trump administration is rolling back environmental regulations as fast as he can. But, the U.S. has made huge gains in reducing pollution and protecting the environment relative to the 1970s. Mass produced electric cars have a significant share of the market for motor vehicles in California. More electricity is being produced with renewable sources and less is being produced with coal. Recycling is much more widely done than it used to be.

Worker and consumer safety have significantly increased since the 1970s.

Yes, there are signs that the economy could take a turn for the worse. Trump's trade war has done harm to the national economy, especially to farmers and blue collar auto workers. Defaults on car loans are rising. Student debt levels are climbing. The national debt is soaring due to irresponsible tax cuts. While overall inflation isn't out of hand, the cost of housing in desirable markets, of health care, and of higher education have surged. Private sector unions have never been weaker. Life expectencies are falling.

There are far too many gun deaths, but crime including violent crime is still down dramatically relative to the early 1990s. Gay marriage is legal nationwide. The number of people who are Evangelical Christian is falling and even among them, the younger generation is much less crazy than the current generation. More people are going to college.

What If?

So, anyway, in the status quo, where the courts haven't completely rolled over to the Trump administration, even with conservatives in charge of the U.S. Supreme Court, and where Democrats control the House of Representative and deny Republicans a 60% majority in the U.S. Senate, and where many states have effective state legislative action underway, there are means to hold back the worst of the worst new policies that the Trump administration would like to propose. So, now may be the time to let the political process work.

But, it grows easier by the day to imagine a situation so dire and urgent that American civilization is at imminent risk of collapse, even though we aren't there yet. At some point, putting up with politicians with power in the U.S. could easily reach the point where bad policies with a real chance of presenting an existential threat to the nation could bring us to the point where the life according to the U.S. Constitution could become a suicide pact. And, at some point, many people might come to the conclusion that our nation is stepping in the wrong direction in an urgent way that would not be survivable.

So, the real question, which has taken a long time to set up with background and framing in this post, is: 

At what point is breaking the rules of the process to get a better result with a particular set of policies and a particular set of politicians, that a break from the authority of the regime might be the only way to save our nation. How bad does it have to get before a coup occurs, or a civil war breaks out.

I'm comfortable that there is such a threshold, however.. Maybe to head off a global thermonuclear war. Maybe we need to become tress, together forever, even if we have to bend or break the rules of the U.S constitution to achieve that. The flaws in the constitution as currently implemented, may lead to bad policies that imminently affects us with bodily harm on a widespread basis. And, at that point someone would have to intervene and either engineer a coup, or run street protests. But, what is that threshold and what can we instead, live with. 

Being Sick Still Sucks!

I've been sick for almost four weeks!

I've missed about a week of work and not been fully productive when I've been at work, despite every available medication under the sun and many days with 20 or so hours of sleep in a day (which suck because they deprive you of any ability to work or play in those lost hours).

Maybe, after all of this, I am finally turning the corner and at 90%. But, it is so, so, so damn frustrating to try to function and then to be held back by coughing, headaches, giddiness, hives and more.

Grr.......

Least Inspiring Independence Day Ever

I can't recall a single year in my entire life when the prospects of our Republic's future have seemed more bleak.

Since Trump took office, almost all of our federal government departments have been run by people who are either grossly incompetent, or actively want to undermine their agency's mission, or both. The judicial appointments we've seen have included dramatically unqualified candidates and candidates whose views are beyond reactionary. Faithfully executing the laws has gone out the window. We now have bona fide Nazis and white supremacists in high offices wielding great political influence in the Trump administration.

Trump has blindly sought to repeal every positive regulatory development of Obama's tenure, stripping environmental protections, shrinking national monuments, eliminating protects for workers and consumers, and so on. Obamacare has been undermined in every possible way by Republicans, despite the fact that it has worked as advertised. Irrevocable damage will be done before these good policies can be restored.

Trump has failed to meaningfully address a clean water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the aftermath of a record setting disaster in the form of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, an epidemic of mass shootings, and a wave of blatant instances of law enforcement misconduct. Trump's approach to the opioid overdose crisis has been counterproductive, making it worse. Trump's response to marijuana legalization, at least where states have taken that step, has been all talk and no action, and his campaign promises on that issue have been directly disavows by his Reefer Madness obsessed attorney general who has also flagrantly lied to Congress and fostered other malicious mischief.

Trump has used the bully pulpit and executive orders to fan the flames of delusional xenophobia, racism, sexism, and religious based hate. He has vilified the press in an effort to alienate his followers from all connections to reality, and relentlessly showed utter and total disregard for the truth, lying pathologically in ways that are easily to falsify multiple times every day. Somehow, in the great national divorce between white Evangelical Christian racists and everyone else, Democrats even ended up with the NFL on its side of the divide. Trump has encouraged corruption and nepotism at the highest levels. He has converted the Republican party from a party of bad ideas to a white nationalist party of hate and ignorance. This is a genie that can't be put back in its bottle now that it has been unleashed.

Trump has provoked trade wars with our allies that are deeply damaging the economy, has cozied up to Russia and North Korea (our historical enemies), has disavowed long standing and widely supported treaties, and done everything possible to undermine the orderly working and human functioning of our immigration system. The standing of the United States in the world has plummeted and will take decades to restore if it can ever be restored. Trump has materially increased the risk of nuclear war with North Korea, Iran and Russia. Trump has intentionally degraded our ability to respond to natural disasters and catastrophic disease outbreaks.

Republicans have dramatically given away the store with tax cuts for large corporations and very affluent individuals and now want to pay for these cuts by dramatically gutting the social safety net in the form of deep cuts to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and housing aid. In the meantime, the deficit is soaring to unprecedented levels (again, totally contrary to campaign promises and purported Republican policy), the government has shut down already at least once, and the credit rating of the United States has been downgraded due to the shenanigans of Republicans in Congress. The storefront retail sector is collapsing and the promised trickle down benefits of the tax cuts have proved to be as illusory as Lucy's football.

We are on the verge of a permanent conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court for all practical intents and purposes, after moderates like Kennedy and O'Connor have positioned SCOTUS at the far left fringe of the Republican party establishment for most of my life. This will have huge practical consequences, undermining almost all of the America's core values. Courts have intervened to significantly thwart and stop some of the worst parts of his agenda, but this is just a finger in the dike.

In a year and a half, we have taken giant steps backward, setting us back by decades.

The United States is now rated a "flawed democracy" by international observers. The Pope has repeatedly condemned some of the worse of our recent developments. Fundamental flaws in our political process are limiting the ability of democracy to intervene to prevent these problems or remedy them, and almost all of these flaws favor Republicans. The Electoral College gave us President Trump, despite the fact that Clinton won three million more votes than he did. Laws designed by Republicans to suppress voting, like felon disenfranchisement in the South (especially Florida), voter registration purges and voter ID laws have kept legitimate voters who would like to vote from voting. Partisan gerrymandering has mostly given Republicans an improper advantage in the House of Representatives and in state legislatures in many states. Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia (both of which strongly lean towards Democrats) continue to have no Congressional representation. The U.S. Senate unfairly favors small states to an absurd degree with Wyoming and California, for example, having the same political clout. The Voting Rights Act has been hamstrung bad bad court decisions. Conservative court majorities have made it dramatically more difficult to prosecute corrupt politicians criminally. Voter turnout remains abysmal in the U.S. for a variety of reasons. Third-party voters routinely spoil the major political party contests to the detriment of the people they agree with most in those contests. Russian proxies tampered with our 2016 election in favor of Trump, a fact he denies despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and the FBI's selective disclosure of information undermined Clinton at the expense of Trump based upon trivial and bogus charges. Campaign finance laws have also weakened, although I believe that most progressively leaning political reformers vastly overestimate the importance of this relative to the other factors degrading our democracy - still forces like the NRA and the Koch Brothers efforts to push anti-democratic agendas with cash have harmed our Republic. The Trump administration wants to manipulate the census so that even that neutral broker will start to favor them. The dramatic failures of political polling in the 2016 election also cast doubt on that entire methodology's reliability going forward and those poor polls led Democrats to misallocate their resources in the late days of the 2016 election.

The remedy of impeachment would require Democratic gains in Congress that the flaws in our democratic process have made unattainable. Democrats have perhaps even odds in the face of nearly unprecedented outrage to retake the House of Representatives, but have no hope of getting close enough to a two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate to convict Trump in an impeachment hearing with the help of the handful of Republican Senators who are less than completely loyal to Trump. Likewise, the palace coup contemplated by the 25th Amendment seems equally unlikely.

Midterm elections could dramatically shift the political balance, and they will undermine Trump's administration somewhat. But, Democrats are struggling to wage this electoral campaign well, and are painfully divided by infighting in the Sanders-Clinton Presidential nomination fight of 2016. This nation needs an unprecedented landslide in the midterms to right the ship, and it isn't at all clear that the results will be that extreme and unprecedented, although the two score safe Republican seats that have been flipped in vacancy elections over the last year or so, and the large wave of resignations by Republican incumbents can give us some hope that this isn't an absolutely impossible outcome.

Until a couple of years ago, it was possible to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had a good faith vision for our country even if it was different. Now, we know better. Republicans simply hate everything that America stands for, have no moral compass whatsoever, and blindly support policies that have been empirically proven to fail, while opposing policies with massive evidentiary support. Policy divisions have been replaced by tribal divisions.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and this era in our history is no exception. By staying the course in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that was established by Obama, ISIS has been defeated as a de facto nation-state and effective organization in both of those countries. An improved process for approving drugs to treat terminal conditions has been adopted. Lots of bad tax breaks were eliminated in a tax bill whose big dollar provisions that overshadowed these reforms were overwhelmingly bad. Low unemployment is a good thing, although job creation has slowed since Trump took office and wages remain stagnant. But, these consolation prizes are overwhelmed by all that has taken a turn for the worse and both low unemployment and the defeat of ISIS are carryovers from trends started during the Obama administration.

Quote of the Day

As much as I'm annoyed with #Facebook, today reminded me I've hated #Microsoft since long before Mark Zuckerberg graduated from using an Etch-a-Sketch.

- Professor Bainbridge (March 29, 2018).

His particular complaint was an "autosave" fail in Microsoft Word.

Overcoming Rot

The United States of America does not want for the raw materials of prosperity and a just society.

We have many, many million decent people. We have thriving, tolerant, prosperous cities full of well organized talented people. We have brought some of the best people from all over the world into our society to make something entirely new. 

We are a nation of laws, and many of our judges and civil servants are willing to act bolding to protect those ideals and standards in the face of a political leadership that does not believe in those laws, does not believe in our nation's ideals, is corrupt, and has values no better than those of the KKK and the Nazis.

As our politicians over the last thirteen months has done their best to unravel all that is good in our society, our nation has not taken it meekly. We have fought back and stopped many of the worst proposals. A resistance has been organized and people have mobilized to get our nation back on the right track. The injustices and wrongs have not been ignored or normalized. We have been steadfast in distinguishing what the American people want from what is being done in their name.

They have learned to utilize power bases like big business, the legal profession, the medical profession, mainstream media, teachers, and the academy to take on opponents like the NRA, xenophobes, and a regressive attorney-general on criminal justice policy.

The opposition has started to bring its A game to this political fight. The Trump base in falling in on itself and making excuses instead of stepping up from an accidental victory that they weren't ready for.

Government is a matter of both power and choice. Most problems in democratic government don't have a single right solution. But, almost all of those problems have many wrong solutions. Gaining political power gives you the ability to choose solutions, but that doesn't get you very far is you only have the wrong solutions. You won't make your people, or even your supporters, better off that way.

America's center-left, and even its sane center-right which is out of power within its own faction, have solutions that can work. And, those solutions don't cease to be good ideas simply because they are not implemented. Ideas to improve our society that actually work have a power all their own. People who promote failed ideas, in contrast, are prone to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The current administration has an extremely narrow base. Old, white male Evangelical Christians, the NRA and Russian political leaders and their proxies back it. The young do not. Women do not. Non-whites do not. Non-Christians do not. Our former international allies (except Israel) do not. Big businesses are, at best, lukewarm despite receiving massive tax cuts and experiencing business regulation rolled back on almost every front. Credit card Republicans are pushing discredited economic solutions and poisoning our nation's economy with attacks on education and immigration critical to our nation's human capital, and on trade.

You can't defy political gravity forever. If you keep acting incompetent and craven; if you repeatedly enact widely unpopular policies; if you keep narrowing your basis by alienating everyone else even if they are inclined towards your coalition (as conservative activists at the CPAC conference did last week); if you show yourself to have no principles; if you lie more often than you tell the truth; eventually you pay a political price for that.

No politicians can keep all of their promises. But, the more often you betray you own promises when you didn't have to, the less power your promises will have to motivate voters when you go back to them.

This administration is so bad that it has united a lot of strange bedfellows. The tribal partisan base of racist Fox News watching, talk radio listening Trump supporters may be willing to adjust their values and worldview on a dime to match their leader.  

But, conservative elites aren't as spineless even if they must feign total support in the current political climate. There are plenty of conservatives who are not comfortable having a crass serial rapist and open adulterer who endorses pedophiles, idiots and racists as their leader, even if they are holding their noses for now. There are plenty of conservatives who have an agenda other than tearing down everything done in the Obama administration who recognize that government is a necessary evil. There are plenty of conservatives who have no taste for Donald Trump's affection for Russia and don't welcome Russian interference in American elections even when it helps their side.

Principled conservatives are certainly a minority at the moment. But, when Republicans have as thin support as they do in Congress, it doesn't take many dissenters to paralyze their political agendas. Don't forget that independent counsel Mueller is one of those principled conservatives.

And, if not before the mid-terms, certainly before the 2020 election, we are going to have a recession that our political leaders and their incompetent appointees will not be able to manage well. An administration that can command only a 35% favorability rating in a continued economic boom will fall even further if the economy staggers, as it inevitably does from time to time.

There is still enough of a foundation beneath the rot to rebuild our nation into one that we can be proud of and one that can be respected internationally, so long as we cut it away soon enough. And, it can be cut away, so long as the resistance remains motivated and energized.

A Crazy Idea

"Bleeding hearts" want to reduce the suffering that animals experience in feedlots and the like.

Other liberals think we should reduce meat consumption because it is bad for our health or has too large of a carbon footprint.

Men who are "brutes" want more opportunities to engage in violent activity that sports can only partially handle, and enjoy hunting large animals. But, trophy hunting is problematic as it hastens extinction of wild megafauna.

The solution?

Meet both concerns by providing a larger share of meat on a "free range" basis in which food animals roam free and wild in natural comfort, while people pay money to hunt those animals.

This is a far less economically efficient way to produce meat, if producing more meat is your sole objective. But, this inefficiency is reduced when the process not only improves animal welfare, but also provide a recreational outlet for lots of people. Yet, since this would still be a more expensive way to produce meat, the price of meat would rise, and this would cause people to eat less of it, improving public health and reducing our carbon footprint.

This would basically be a true "paleo" solution, rolling back the clock on herding to replace it with hunting to a significant extent (while still parting with tedious "gathering").

Proverbs, Maxims and Aphorisms

A grab bag of some of my favorite nuggets of wisdom:

* Religions that protect threatened cultures thrive.

* Unemployment is not a shortage of jobs, it is a failure of entrepreneurship.

* Make up your mind, the world is full of flat squirrels.

* Policy always trumps process in politics.

* Nobody cares about federalism and every significant societal issue seeks solutions at every level of government.

* Information is cheaper than education; tools are cheaper than ability; incentive are more easily found than motivation.

* Culture matters more than institutions.

* Artificial solutions are appropriate answers to artificial problems.

* The poor have proportionately more economic power than political power.

* Price discrimination drives a large share of seemingly irrational economic activity.

* Governance quality and democratic responsiveness both have a strong positive correlation to the number of people represented per elected official.

* Economic dependency is the best first order predictor of marital stability.

* Rich women make bigger earning capacity sacrifices to raise children than poor women.

* Standard of living and wealth are predominantly a function of earning capacity rather than consumption and investment choices.

* Student body socio-economic background is the predominant driver of academic achievement at the school level.

* The main reason that capitalism is stronger than communism is that capitalism is better at shuttering failing enterprises.

* The military is a socialist institution.

* The less people are paid for demanding work, the more children will follow their parents in leadership positions in these careers.

* People who make their own fortunes have children who are professionals who have children who are artists.

* People who grow up with material scarcity care more about making money; people who grow up affluent care more about leisure and autonomy.

* Problems that can be solved with money are more tractable than those that require regulatory law.

* Relaxed land use regulation is more effective at producing affordable housing than subsidies.

* Legislatures are not very responsive to bad case law and judicial outcomes.

* Language change is driven much more by language formation and contact issues than by random drift.

* Languages naturally grow more complex over time until there is an influx of language learners when they become more simple.

* Courts are rights enforcing institutions, not dispute resolution institutions.

* Monetary policy mainly influences non-real inflation and doesn't matter much for the economy except to the extent that it produces unexpected inflation or deflation.

* Decentralizing manufacturing and food production is usually a bad idea.

* Sacred religious texts tell you almost nothing about how the religion that uses them except who toponyms and babies will be named after.

* A larger percentage of the population manage to have sex and have kids than almost any other significant life activity.

* Serial marriage is quite similar to polygamy.

* Stability and affluence create secular liberals, instability and scarcity creates religious conservatives.

* It is important to consider not just how democratic political institutions are, but also how robust and stable they are when threatened.

* Conventional wisdom about the factors that make an institution or cultural practice work is often wrong.

* Particular policies are only liberal or conservative relative to others in contention at the same time; the long term trend is towards liberalism.

Good Riddance 2017!

On the whole, the year 2017 has been a dumpster fire, and I am happy to wish it adieu.

The Threshold For Disarming People Needs To Be Lower

[T]he gunman had no known criminal history, but he was well known to law enforcement.

From the Denver Post.

Five deputies were shot (one died) and two civilian neighbors were shot, before the gunman who was the source of the domestic violence call was killed.

When police respond to a domestic violence call and the gunman was "well known to law enforcement", that person should have been disarmed already and the criminal justice system is failing us.