Popular Things That I Don’t Like

Christmas
Easter
Christianity
Baseball
Dogs
Sitcoms
Peanut butter
Olives
Olive oil
Grass lawns
Whiskey
Gin
Muscle cars
Audience participation
Karaoke
Pro wrestling
Peppermint
Ginger beer
The movie "Remains of the Day"
Live action adaptations of animation
Country western music
Sunrises
Anchovies
Oak barrel aged wine
Adele
Talk radio
Anything midcentury modern
Texas
Multi-factor authentication
MS Word auto-formatting
Suburban street layouts
Suburban zoning
HOAs
Golf
Slot machines
Soft mattresses
Astroturf
Vinyl
Gazpacho
Iced coffee
Wheat germ
Cottage cheese
Time shares
Sequins
Guns

21st Century Life Skills

Basic life skills that every middle class adult is expected to know in the 21st century in the United States:

1. How to type well and reasonably quickly.

2. Moderate proficiency with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Windows.

3. How to drive an automobile (unless physically impaired from doing so) and how to refuel it and what routine maintenance is necessary.

4. Knowing what to do in a car accident.

5. How to use a web browser.

6. How to call and text message and use other basic features (including the app store) of a smart phone.

7. How to tie a necktie (men only, although there are probably parallel female garments that women have to understand how to wear such as earrings and bras).

8. How to tie your shoes.

9. How to use Google maps and do Google searches.

10. Understanding of basic emojis and internet acronyms.

11. Understanding the organizational chart at a basic level, of all levels of government in the U.S.

12. Understanding of time zones and daylight savings time and leap days.

13. An ability to book a commercial airline ticket for yourself and to rent a car and book a hotel/motel.

14. An understanding of how credit cards and debit cards work.

15. A basic understanding of residential leases and mortgages.

16. A basic understanding of the financial markets.

17. An understanding of the main taxes applicable to you (retail sales, federal income, state income, property taxes) that aren't "invisible" (like gasoline taxes).

18. An understanding of basic accounting and finance concepts.

19. How to videoconference in one of several possible tools (Face time, Zoom, MS Teams, Webex, etc.).

20. A rudimentary understanding of the legal process in civil and criminal cases.

21. Knowing how to cross the street as a pedestrian.

22. Knowing how to handle weather conditions and natural disasters in your area.

23. Knowing the threats posed by wildlife and plants in your area.

24. How to read and speak in English.

25. How to use elevators and escalators.

How We Got Here, And Where We Might Go Next

Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.

Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.

This post surveys some of the possible answers.

An institutionalist approach

An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy. 

This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).

Fundamentally Broken Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.

Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.

Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.

Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.

Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.

Culture

The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.

This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.

Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules. 

There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.

The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.

For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.

This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.

Malleable culture

One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.

A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration. 

In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.

Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.

Static culture

In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.

It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.

In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.

Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.

This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.

This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.

More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.

Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.

Environmentally determined culture

A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.

While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.

Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households. 

Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households. 

Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties. 

Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.

Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.

Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.

The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.

Synthesis

Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true. 

Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.

On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.

If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.

The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."

Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).

In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.

Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.

How We Got Here

Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.

Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.

The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.

Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.

Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.

Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.

Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.

People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair. 

A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.

We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.

Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.

Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.

The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right. 

While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.

What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?

I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.

One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from  the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.

The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon. 

If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century. 

This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.

There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.

One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.

Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).

If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.

Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).

To Do

Some topics I'd like to write about in the indefinite, maybe next future:

* Law examined as a magical/religious ritual system.

* A law review article on the prospects for expanding the U.S. Constitution's takings clause as a foundation for a better approach to civil rights.

* A military technology post going beyond the first order issues, like surface combatants and tanks being obsolescence waiting to be made manifest, to a way of thinking that fits drones and robots and guided missiles and AI and other sensor technology into a synthesized vision for the future.

* Musings on how to insulate our political system of incompetents, narcissists, criminals, corruption, psychopaths, and hate without unduly compromising democracy and other positive political values.

* Musings on institutions and technologies that would facilitate political and economic development in a leapfrog manner in undeveloped countries, particularly in Africa.

* An end game for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the larger problems of Ottoman Empire succession that have been playing out since its collapse after World War I.

* A well-researched piece shedding light on prospects for political, social, and religious progress in the Islamic world.

* Musings on whether the population decline in the developed world flowing from the near universal phenomena of demographic transition could be a good thing, and how Mormonism that seems to have defied demographic transition fits into this worldview.

* Thoughts about what a post-religious, post-ethnic cosmopolitan society's life scripts which we are unwittingly or consciously rewriting will look like.

* Analysis of how we will live in a post-climate change world, as it seems that this is not an existential threat to the human race's survival, and will eventually cease to continue after it is too late to massively change life on Earth.

* Brainstorming on what people will do for a living and the economics more generally of a world that is more automated than our existing post-industrial world, and how this will impact social and economic structure of our society.

* Musings on the prospects for de-Nazification of our society from MAGA, racists, Christian Nationalist foundations. The younger generation seems far less afflicted with this so it could happen.

* Consideration of what kind of international institutions could come to replace troubled ones like NATO and the UN in an increasingly small world.

* Strategies for movement politics that would change hearts and minds in a way that would make progressive political ambitions achievable politically, something that a lack of majorities in existing political systems prevents now.

* Examining the most problematic threads of the progressive movement, the non-progressive left, and the far-right can be most channeled, and how circumstances fueling the far-right can be channeled and addressed in less destructive ways.

* What a dystopia in which the modern agents of barbarism gain the upper hand might look like and whether that dystopia can be prevented.

* How to save academia from administrative bloat, or in the alternative, why this administrative component of higher education is necessary.

* Prospects of massive, good quality, automated educational classes.

* Considering the pros and cons of the balkanization of popular culture.

* Agricultural technologies and developments as interfaced with climate change and dealing with inevitable rural community impacts that is would drive.

* Thinking through second order consequences of advancing medical technologies.

Mental Energy Levels

Some activities take more mental energy, alertness, and attention than others. From low to high:

* Sleeping

* Staring blankly while sitting or lounging

* Sipping a drink alcoholic or otherwise

* Cuddling

* Taking a bath

* Listening to music

* Driving in ordinary conditions

* Interacting with a pet

* Watching spectator sports

* Looking at art in a gallery or museum

* Browsing statistics (e.g. in an almanac or government publication) or maps

* Washing dishes or dealing with trash/recycling/compost

* Facebook

* Grocery shopping

* Making journal entries

* Reading the newspaper or its online equivalent

* Scanning academic journal abstracts

* Researching a non-legal topic

* Watching TV or a streaming video

* Watching a full length movie or opera or ballet or play

* Choosing presents for particular occasions

* Applying math or physics rules that I already know

* Gardening or landscaping work

* Making a music playlist

* Cooking

* Reading fiction for pleasure

* World building in anticipation of writing fiction

* Leading a meeting

* Blogging 

* Rehearing for a music or drama performance

* Participating in most team sports at my mediocre level

* Typical legal work outside of a trial or hearing

* Teaching a continuing education class or college class

* Tutoring

* Reading non-fiction (or a fiction classic for a class)

* Learning how to use a new appliance

* Figuring out why a computer or app thing isn't working properly, or learning a new computer or phone skill

* Social chit chat or being at a party

* Filing papers (i.e. into categories and files)

* Writing fiction

* Planning an event or trip

* The design phase of a remodeling or landscaping project

* Hiking or going on a walk in an unfamiliar place

* Handling the return of a purchased product

* Learning new math or physics topics independently

* Driving in extreme conditions (e.g. an intense snowstorm)

* Acting as a lawyer in a trial or hearing or high pressure emergency situation

* Doing business management/accounting work

* Ice skating

* Trying to learn a foreign language

Opera And Ballet

Opera and ballet are skeletal stories, told live in extremely intense ways, with maximum pomp and circumstance.

Madam Butterfly, for example, a gilded age classic written by Puccini that debuted in 1904, has only about 11,000 words (with considerable repetition), less than a novella, although more than a typical short story, which is fitting as it can't quite decide if it is a two act opera or a three act opera.

Pop songs are typically two to four minutes and have 300 to 700 words (often with considerable repetition), but are often recorded and are often presented with less pomp. Even a whole album of pop songs, to the extent that people make them anymore, typically has fewer words than a typical short story.

The intense focus these culture genres place on an elemental basic idea or story is part of what makes these works primal and emotionally powerful.

In contrast, a typical single volume novel has 70,000 to 100,000 words, often is made up of several volumes, and tells a much more fleshed out story with multiple intertwined parallel plot lines. It too is powerful storytelling, but in a more cerebral way.

Posting Patterns At This Blog And Its Sister Blog

Obviously, I'm posting this at this blog than in previous years, averaging about two posts per week, which seems like a reasonable target going forward. This puts this blog on track to have the fewest number of posts since its inception in 2005 (by a wide margin), but still means it is a very active blog compared to many blogs.

Some content that would have appeared on this blog has also been shifted to quick hit posts on Facebook, in lieu of deeper analysis here, because that's quicker and easier. Not infrequently, my Facebook posts get reworked into a quick hits post or a deeper analysis of one of those posts, and conversely, sometimes posts here make their way to Facebook when I think it would be a good fit for that format.

At sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, I've managed to keep up the pace of roughly one post every other day that I've maintained since the inception of that blog in 2011, although my posts there have gotten a little thinner and the balance has tipped a little more towards physics from anthropology and prehistory and linguistics type posts that take more effort to write adequately.

I still do continue my practice of about fifteen years of scanning every single preprint at arXiv on astrophysics, general relativity and cosmology, HEP-experiment, HEP-lattice, and HEP-phenomenology (at least 95-98% of the time), of bookmarking the interesting papers, reading the body text of the articles whose abstracts don't tell enough of the story, and of blogging the papers that are truly interesting, as well as scanning my several regular sources for anthropology type articles daily, bookmarking them, and less often actually blogging them (less often than I'd like), and scanning some of my other sources like Science Daily and other science blogs a few times a month. Sometimes I miss a day or two when I'm busy or traveling, but when I do, I go back and add them to my review later (almost all of the time, although I sometimes miss as much as five to ten days a year when I miss too much to easily go back).

This blog has fallen off more than its sister blog, in part, because the means by which I generate ideas for it aren't as systematic.

My stack exchange posting has dropped pretty much to one to three posts a month, mostly at Law.SE but rarely at Politics.SE where I used to be a moderator (a job I've relinquished and don't miss).

I also make an occasional post at the Physics Forums, although that has dropped to maybe 10% of my previous posting rate and often involves cross posts from Dispatches From Turtle Island, or a brief comment to a discussion thread that I started to post at before taking my current job which inhibits my ability to post.

I really mourn the loss of all of the Typepad blog content (even the archival posts!). But, blogger seems to be O.K. for the indefinite future (readers, please give me a heads up if it is preparing to go off line so I can archive my posts, which are also available through Lexis Nexus which syndicates this blog for a trivial royalty of about $25 every 12-24 months), and Substack seems to be quite healthy and is the latest hot blogging platform.

Reflections On Six Months As A City Attorney

Six months and a week ago, I started a new job as a senior assistant city attorney at the City ad County of Denver in the civil litigation section. We handle lawsuits brought against the City and County of Denver, and against City employees where the lawsuit arises from the employee's official duties.

The job

Most people who work in my section have backgrounds either in criminal case litigation, or in private sector insurance defense of personal injury cases. I was one of the fairly uncommon applicants who had significant prior experience in civil litigation with government entities. One of my main responsibilities at my first job in Colorado, in Grand Junction, was defending county governments all over Western Colorado from lawsuits, which is more or less exactly what I do now defending the City and County of Denver. In my subsequent private private of law, I had a low volume, but steady trickle of cases where I represented private parties in lawsuits against the government, in addition to having broad civil litigation experience making up about half of my practice in a variety of other areas in both state courts and federal courts. This has allowed me to hit the ground running, compared to many of my peers.

Fortunately, our office operates with a very high level of professionalism, and my co-workers are good to work for.

My current case load (which varies from lawyer to lawyer in my section based upon the lawyer's experience and aptitudes) is about 60% civil rights litigation (mostly, but not entirely, involving actions of the police and jail guards), about 20% plain vanilla personal injury litigation like motor vehicle accidents that is similar to what private insurance defense lawyers do but with a governmental liability twist, and about 20% litigating subpoenas and public record requests where there are disputes that go beyond what can be resolved by records custodians out of court.

Different sections of the City attorney's office handle employee discipline and employment related litigation, enforcement of ordinance violations, child protective proceedings in cases where there are allegations of abuse and neglect, and transactional/corporate counsel type work for matters like negotiating and monitoring compliance with contracts between the City and its vendors, drafting ordinances, lobbying the state and federal governments, and managing conflicts that arise between different city agencies and officials.

There are also some governmental agencies which many people think are part of the City and County of Denver, but which are not: the Denver Public Schools, the Denver District Attorney, Denver Health (the county's public hospital), the Denver Housing Authority, the Regional Transportation District (RTD), the Downtown Development Authority, the Denver District Court, the Denver Probate Court, the Denver Juvenile Court, and probably a few others that I've failed to mention. 

The Denver County Court is a unique hybrid court that combined the roles of the limited jurisdiction state government's county court found in other Colorado counties, and the role of a municipal court for the City and County of Denver where municipal ordinance violations are prosecuted.

The biggest change for me has been transitioning from being self-employed for two decades to being a salaried W-2 employee. 

Mostly, this is for the better and was an important reason to take this job. Instead of having to invoice clients and pester them to pay their bills, or to wait until contingent fee cases are converted into money at the end of a case, money just magically appears in by bank account without me even asking for every two weeks. I get paid vacations and sick days! I get my health insurance through an employer plan, a switch I made shortly before big cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies for self-employed people seeking health insurance took effect. If I continue to work for the City for five years, I get a defined benefit pension. I have a public sector defined contribution plan to which I can contribute about 20% of my income. I can pay for my parking expenses with pre-tax dollars. I don't have to pay anything out of pocket to get IT support. My tax returns will get a lot less complicated starting in 2027 (I had some residual self-employment work and income wrapping up my private practice in early 2026). I don't have to deal with fixing broken copying machines, building maintenance, hiring employees, tax withholding for employees, office security, arranging telephone and internet service, balancing an attorney's trust account, and so on. I don't have to spend large chunks of time marketing and deciding which clients to sign up. My work is mostly (not 100%) confined to 9-5 on business days.

I also get to work in a place with good systems in place, with adequate administrative support, with competent fellow attorneys who can cover for you while you are sick or on vacation, and top quality legal research and office related software packages.

We still have to pay close attention to potential conflicts of interest in new cases (and conflicts of interest that can emerge during cases), so we can send conflicted cases to outside counsel. But, unlike my fairly brief stint in a multi-state law firm with about a thousand lawyers, I don't have to spend half an hour to forty-five minutes every day (like every single other lawyer in that entire law firm) screening new cases brought into the firm for conflicts of interest.

Best of all, except for particular phases of the small share of cases where there is a prospect of receiving an attorneys' fee award, I don't have to track every tenth of an hour of every single working day, since all of the work we do is for the same client and is very unlikely to be the subject of attorneys' fee litigation.

Insights into law and policy and legal practice

Most people, most of the time, are outsiders to government, sometimes spinning conspiratorial narratives about what they think happens behind the scenes in the criminal justice system, and in government more generally. In my subpoena and records request practice, and in civil rights cases, I'm on the opposite side of the fence, with more or less complete access to the full "behind the scenes" story.

I almost always know more about what actually happened, sometimes legally relevant and sometimes not, than the other lawyers in the case and that the judge. It is a rare case where I don't know more or less exactly what happened in all legally relevant ways within a month or two of receiving it, and often within a couple of weeks.

I have nearly full access to all relevant records and a full ability to interview the government employees involved in a context where they are more quickly forthcoming about what I want to know, than in the formal discovery process.

The truth isn't nearly as nefarious as conspiracy theorists and a plurality of civil rights lawyers would have you believe.

This isn't to say that law enforcement officers or jail guards never make mistakes that hurt someone, sometimes in ways that give rise to legal liability, and sometimes in ways that don't.

A significant portion of my job is facilitating the payment of reasonable settlements to people who have been legitimately wronged by the government or government officials. Sometimes a city employee is clearly at fault in a motor vehicle accident. Sometimes a law enforcement officer does cross the line and is in the wrong. The City pays out millions of dollars a year in settlements and judgments as a result.

Most settlement payments err on the side of being generous, in order to avoid the risk that a jury won't correctly evaluate liability and damages in a case and will award an excessive amount. 

A significant minority of jury awards reach the wrong result on liability or damages (sometimes for the government and sometimes against it), often (as post-verdict juror interviews reveal) for reasons that shouldn't be legally relevant or reflect misunderstandings that neither side's lawyers even contemplated were possible. Most of the time, juries reach verdicts that are close to being right, but not all of the time by any means (even when the lawyers and judges are doing their jobs correctly).

My rule of thumb (based upon the available academic literature on the topic, and confirmed by my personal experience) is that in a best case scenario where the lawyers and judges in a case are doing their jobs right and the law dictates a clear answer, is that the likelihood that a jury will reach the wrong conclusion is about 10%. 

The odds that the jury will reach the wrong conclusion rockets up, of course, when one or the other side's lawyers engaged in misconduct, or the judge makes a significant mistake (not always appealable), or there is litigation misconduct by a party in the case such as destroying or fabricating evidence or lying under oath (often not known to the lawyers). The most common problems, however, are lawyer incompetence or a bad ruling from a trial judge or sincere but incorrect witness memories about what happened, and not outright litigation misconduct.

Some kinds of suspicions about what is happening behind the scenes are more often correct than others. For example, I know (from having access to what is in them in cases where I move to quash subpoenas) that the vast majority of internal affairs files sought by defense attorneys in criminal cases that are withheld from them, truly aren't material to the outcome of those cases, even at the margins on credibility issues. The kind of conduct that law enforcement agencies, and governments more generally, care about for purposes of internal employee discipline, are only vaguely similar to the kinds of conduct that give rise to legal liability, or would be relevant in a criminal case in which an officer was involved in some way and is a potential witness.

Timelines

Different kinds of cases have different timelines. Records request cases and subpoenas are typically litigated over a period a week to a few months. Ordinary personal injury cases in which a defendant just happens to be a governmental entity, tend to be fairly simple cases that are resolved in a year or two once a case if filed, and are often settled sooner than that. 

Civil rights cases, and personal injury cases which are really civil rights cases in disguise, take one of two typical courses. Many of them are resolved very early on in initial dispositive motion practice and are often dismissed within a few months to a year with complete dismissals on the merits (or for failure to prosecute by a pro se party, i.e. a Plaintiff bringing suit without a lawyer). The civil rights cases that aren't resolved that way can take much longer, in part because they are often prosecuted in federal court which is much slower than state court, in part because interlocutory appeals (i.e. appeals brought prior to a final trial and verdict) are common in civil rights cases, and in part because these cases are sometimes more complex and require lengthy pre-trial discovery and motion practice. I have one case that will probably go to trial soon about eight years after the underlying incident (that involved a handful of people over the course of less than two hours in one place)  took place.

If everyone knew what I know as a governmental defense attorney know within two or three months of a case being filed, these cases could be resolved in six months and would be resolved more accurately than they are in jury trials. But, of course, part of the reason that I can secure this information so quickly is because the people from whom I receive the information know that what they share with me won't be used against them in court. Still, this observation does suggest that there is plenty of room for improvement in the process.

Also, a lot of the delay in civil litigation is a function of simply not having enough judges to keep their case loads small enough to allow them to make prompt rulings, and an overall litigation system that has adapted to that reality.

The quality of plaintiff's litigation

Another thing that my job gives me is a broad overview of the quality of the legal work done by the people who sue the City.

About half the lawsuits brought against the City are brought by pro se parties, or by lawyers whose legal work falls below the standard of care that should be expected from a reasonable competent lawyer. 

Indeed, the best pro se parties (maybe the top 5-10% of them) are doing a better job of litigating their cases than the worst lawyers that we see (although no pro se parties do an excellent job). There are a few lawyers in the Plaintiff's bar who are so incompetent that I am amazed that they passed the bar exam, although even they have basic literacy and some understanding of the process. But there are plenty of pro se parties whose literacy and understanding of the process is below that of an average high school student, who would benefit from representation by even an only marginally competent lawyer.

One of the better arguments for a "civil Gideon" system in which indigent people would routinely be provided access to lawyers by the state, the way that indigent criminal defends are, is that it would make the delays and confusions caused by incompetent pro se litigants largely go away making the whole legal system work much more efficiently.

Cases brought by incompetent litigants overwhelming get dismissed early on, or settled for amounts far less than a competent lawyer could secure.

Incompetent litigants tend to be particularly weak at investigating a case and gathering facts to support it, and in understanding at a more than superficial level the relevant substantive and procedural legal requirements for proving a case of governmental liability. Now and then, they do the right thing despite themselves, however.

Of course, part of the failure rate among these litigants is an inability to accurately judge if they have a legally meritorious case. I have definitely seen cases that were winnable or could have secured a larger settlement, that don't because they are brought by incompetent litigants. But probably 80%-90% of the cases brought by incompetent litigants wouldn't have been brought at all by competent lawyers, who could have identified the weakness in those cases at the outset and not filed suit. 

When I was in private practice, I probably turned away two or three potential clients a week, often potential clients who had heart wrenching stories of misfortune. But those potential clients either didn't have cases for which the legal system had a remedy, or had cases where the likely outcome of  their cases with competent legal representation would provide them with less economic benefit than the cost of competent legal representation, and would have greatly disrupted their personal lives and eaten up huge amounts of their personal time.

And, by the way, incompetence by lawyers isn't restricted to sole practitioners with little experience. I've seen multiple cases of grossly incompetent litigation from medium to large plaintiff's law firms (some of which are household names due to their advertising or due to prominent cases that they have litigated) by lawyers with significant experience.

This isn't to say that all litigants against the City are incompetent. About half of lawsuits against the City are brought by lawyers whose work is at least up to the standard of a reasonable competent lawyer, and a minority but good share of litigants against the city are represented by lawyers whose work represents the best practices in this work, are highly competent, and have screened potential clients in such a manner that they have chosen to represent plaintiffs with meritorious cases.

At least one case that I have handled so far involved a plaintiff who was represented by two successive incompetent lawyers, only to have the case pass to a third, highly competent lawyer that salvaged the case with some smart litigation decisions and was able to secure a settlement much higher than what the previous incompetent lawyers came close to reaching.

Sadly, there is very little that a person thinking about bringing a lawsuit can do to determine if their lawyer is litigating competently or not. That's why we have a bar exam in an attempt to impose at least some minimum standards, but this gatekeeping isn't perfect.

Admission to the bar allows you as a lawyer to handle almost any kind of case (patent law is an exception, and some states set a higher standard to determine if a lawyer is allowed to represent defendants in death penalty cases), subject only to their own self-determination about their competence.

But while being admitted to the bar usually means that a lawyer meets basic standards of literacy and can find their way to the courthouse, with a vague understanding of how the process works, the vast majority of lawyers (I'm an extreme outlier in this regard), have a far more specialized legal practice and predominantly handle a fairly narrow kind of legal work.

Probably a majority of lawyers don't litigate any civil or criminal cases on a regular basis, and instead do transactional work, legal compliance work, or provide counsel to senior corporate officials in their day to day activities.

It is rare for a lawyer to represent both plaintiffs and defendants in personal injury work. It is rare for divorce lawyers or real estate lawyers to handle personal injury or civil rights cases. It is rare for commercial litigators to litigate personal injury cases. It is rare for probate lawyers to do personal injury or civil rights litigation. It happens. I'm an example of that. But it is rare.

Unlike physicians, whose regulators have imposed both a general threshold professional qualification to become an M.D., and an additional professional qualification to practice in a particular medical specialty, the legal profession has almost no secondary level of professional qualification to practice in a particular legal specialty, like personal injury litigation, or civil rights litigation.

Most specialist legal practitioners do develop special expertise in the area where they practice, from working as a junior lawyer in a firm that has that kind of practice, from taking continuing legal education classes in that field, from researching the law and procedure in their own cases, and from the school of hard knocks. But it isn't systemic or uniform among specialist legal practitioners who often have significant gaps in their knowledge of the best practices for handling cases in their specialty.

This can be a particular problem in civil rights litigation where the law is more complicated than in many other areas of law, and where firm sizes tend to be small, so that many practitioners have never worked as junior lawyers under seasoned senior civil rights lawyers to learn the ropes. A fair number of lawyers with this kind of practice went to law school because of, and are driven by, a strong commitment to social justice, but couldn't find an employer in a field relevant to their objectives out of law school. So, they never received the kind of mentorship that they needed to become competent in their field as a result and are prone to making big picture conceptual mistakes and to bad legal judgment that hasn't been honed by more seasoned practitioners.

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

Old Suits

In a long period of disuse during the pandemic, almost all of my suits, many of them favorites that I'd had for many years, became unusable for anyone. Even an extremely poor person going to a thrift store for a suit (and lots of people could use my rather large sized suits) can't use one that moths have eaten the crouch out of.

Still, it is a shame to see a beloved item of clothing, worn often for important things, go, especially when it has huge amounts of remaining good fabric. A friend of my wife sometimes donates to a charity, similar to Thread Up, that may have use for the fabric, so that's probably where it will go.

I've been gradually replacing them, with about three new ones in the last year or two, now that people are going to court and depositions and even mediations in person on a regular basis again. But it will take time fore me to become sentimentally attached to the new ones.

I've invested is cedar for the closet, in an attempt to prevent a recurrence of this tragedy, although I'm cautiously pessimistic. It's worth trying, but I don't have high hopes.

Disgust and Horror Overload

This is just from this week and only captures about half of the miserable awful things that happened. It is one nightmare after another. Sometimes you just have to hang on and hope that the situation resolves, doing what you can, but recognizing that it is a collective effort.

U.S. Health Care Spending Still Rising Because Our System Is Broken

Americans pay a huge amount for healthcare, while getting results that are below the developed world norm. Partially this is because a mixed government-private sector system leaves no one controlling costs, so we pay more to all forms of health care providers than any other health care system on Earth. And, partially, we pay much more for administrative costs. Further, the way we finance health care leaves many people either with no access to health care, or facing bankruptcy if they get seriously hurt or sick.

The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).

Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve. That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality.

Americans spend more on health care than other countries because we pay higher prices for identical goods and services, are quicker to adopt new and costly medical technology (whether or not it is cost effective) and have higher administrative costs in our complex, decentralized system. Health care markets have consolidated so much that in many regions, hospitals and other providers can charge near-monopoly prices. The fact that we pay providers per service delivered (rather than a fixed salary) also plays a role.

Next year insurance premiums will increase 10 percent for employer-sponsored plans and 18 percent for individual plans on the exchanges compared with 2025. In both markets, they’re going up because the price of medical care is rising (think hospital mergers, staffing shortages and tariffs that make drugs and devices more expensive) and Americans are increasingly using expensive weight loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. The exchange plans are seeing a sharper increase than employer plans because of the uncertainty lawmakers created over whether the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended. Insurers had to factor in the risk that healthier people would be less likely to buy insurance if the subsidies expired, which would lead to a sicker insurance risk pool and higher costs. . . .

One person’s health care spending is another person’s health care income — profits, jobs and paychecks for the tens of millions of people who work in the health care sector. And some higher spending does lead to better care. As long as they’re in competitive markets, higher-priced hospitals deliver higher quality care. 

. . . [A]s a result of Medicare payment rules created in the 1980s, the government program pays more (sometimes double) for care delivered in a hospital or hospital-owned doctor’s practice versus in an independent doctor-owned practice, even if the care is identical. That makes it more profitable for doctors to merge their practice with hospitals than remain independent. These mergers give doctors and hospitals bargaining power and drive up prices and insurance premiums.

From the New York Times (Opinion).

The loss of ACA subsidies will more than double premiums for people who get their health insurance on the health insurance marketplace, which is mostly made up of self-employed people and early retirees. That's an important reason that I moved back to being a W-2 employee this year after twenty years of being self-employed.

The change disproportionately hurts small businesses, including farms, and because of this, together with massive cuts to Medicaid and immigration changes that make it much harder for hospitals to hire foreign doctors (who disproportionately serve rural areas where U.S. doctors prefer not to work), rural healthcare in the U.S. is on the brink of collapse, with many rural hospitals expected to close and fewer doctors serving rural areas. Red states that banned abortion are also seeing a huge exodus of obstetrics and gynecology doctors, with new graduates also reluctant to take positions in these states.

Indeed, the MAGA base will be hit harder by GOP healthcare changes, and other Trump 2.0 policies from tariffs to reduced access to government benefits than Democrats in blue states, who tend to live in more resilient cities which are buffered by more caring state and local governments, while many of the Trump 2.0 tax cuts will help more upper middle class Democrats than working class Republicans.