Around a decade ago, maybe a little more, I doodled in my spreadsheet to come up with a “retirement plan.” It ultimately boiled down to a certain number of cases to win, a certain amount of legal fees to bill. This was written as something like a career goal or plan, just “the way through” until the next thing.

I did the things.

At some point I got a little sloppy in my record keeping, but the goal lines were crossed. The goals weren’t lofty, just earn enough money to retire in the most minimal way possible. It was basically around 100 cases to win, along with a billing figure that was closely affiliated with the case count. I realized, almost in passing, a few years ago while reviewing tax returns for another purpose that I had long since crossed the line of my career billing goal, and checking my list just now confirmed I had gotten there by case count as well.

There was no fanfare or awards presentation, but sometime in 2024, more than a year ago, the ten year mark of my solo practice had been passed. The numbers that would have enabled retirement had come and gone, but of course, because of spending choices, didn’t put me where I am until an inheritance put me back on track. And now I’m basically here, but with some big asterisks. The numbers just barely work. But, I’m essentially semi-retired in a very real way.

What does semi-retired mean for me?

It means I get to be pickier about the cases that I take, because I’m not desperate for work. It means I get to start working on cases that are interesting long shots that probably won’t be profitable. It means I am free to do whatever work appeals to me, across the board, including work other than the practice of law.

I am truly free and it feels like somehow at the moment, it still ends up just feeling like another thing that makes me hard for others to relate to.

I officially closed on the boat this past Tuesday, so this weekend it was a high priority for me to just go to the boat and see what was needed. The plan was simple and amorphous: literally go, set foot inside for the first time as the owner of a boat with an actual interior, look around, and start “the project.” I didn’t have a detailed agenda for that because it was an agenda-setting day. The trip would hopefully include some “lay of the land” exploring around the marina itself and the town, maybe identify key stores and venues. The other planned goal was to start getting a feel for the projects I’ll be working on over the next few months.

I know that the boat is blocked in storage by many other boats until at least April, maybe into May. Some projects can’t be started until the boat is in the water or at least not surrounded by other boats. My goal this weekend was not to finish or even start any particular project, but to just get started on preparations.

From the survey and general research, there were a few things I knew about and wanted to specifically investigate: a source of water coming in from weather, corrosion to the compression post, and a short list of generic unknowns like “where are certain tanks located.” I also know I’ll have a range of cleaning tasks, and a handful of specific small and medium projects, with some being expensive or requiring outside help.

I didn’t expect to accomplish a lot but I did want to have a productive trip by some metric. I set the base goal of simply “getting started.”

So the one thing I was sure I wanted to do was get a better assessment of the compression post situation. I’m still not really done at all with this task because, well, good old “but first syndrome.”

This part of the compression post was easily accessible via the bilge access hatch above the forward keel bolt. There’s stuff in the way, but not so in the way that I couldn’t reach in with my phone and get some quick photos. Ironically enough, at this task the phone beats the bulky “real camera” just by being small and effortless. The photos show that while the post is rusty, it’s not rusted through to the point of collapsing. Repair is important, but not imminent before launch, and it may not be necessary to replace the whole post vs just the bottom. It is a thick piece of steel, but like the frame of a pickup truck, it can absolutely rust through and become unsafe. Catastrophic failure could mean debating, a very bad day on a sailboat and a life threatening situation out to sea. In other words, I want this fixed before I cross an ocean. But I may need to defer it until launch or close to launch, because of access issues to get a crane in to destep the mast.

Meanwhile, around the compression post is wood, part of a bulkhead made mostly of doors.

I started trying to take this wood shell apart to expose the post, but didn’t get very far.

Turns out the piece with exposed screws was just a ridiculously nice piece of cable conduit, in my opinion a testament to the whole character of craftsmanship on this boat. Instead of a piece of low grade PVC tubing and some angle brackets, Ted Gozzard set this wire up to be covered in a piece of mahogany molding that matches everything else perfectly. It’s “just trim” built to a ridiculous standard. But pulling it off moved me closer to discovering the moisture source. Even so, it was close to time to call it a night.

Lots of little details discovered. Documents, notes, brochures from before the boat was first sold, equipment. The task of just going through what I have, what I know, and what I need, is just kind of information absorption. It’s amazing how many details there are to something like this.

One of the goals was to remove old personal effects, and surprisingly there was quite a bit less of that than I expected. A couple pairs of women’s pants, some t-shirts, and some jackets and rain pants which would be really nice if they weren’t way off from my size. I found a ton of good equipment, and didn’t find some key stuff I’ll need. No epirb or similar. No liferaft or dinghy, but four pretty nice sailing PFDs, one nice handheld radio with GPS and a handful of obsolete related devices, a box of spare engine parts, lots of canvas pieces, all labeled to some degree, of covers for trim and hatches and extensions to the Bimini cockpit cover, but no spare sails, storm sails, etc.

The prior owner left a bit of a gift in some plastic bottles of barely labeled booze! Handy, because in my haste I had forgotten to bring a bottle of wine. And apparently I neglected to get pictures of the two hidden wine racks.

There’s a lot more to post but I’ve got at least a week until my next visit so I’m gonna save some for another few posts.

It has now been over 20 years since I first put to sea on the Pacific Ocean, which I crossed in an aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan. I only “lasted” a single deployment, but in that cruise of a little over six months, I got to “see the world” in the form of crossing two oceans, the Equator and the International Date Line, visiting half a dozen foreign ports in Australia, Oceana, and Asia, and ultimately, including my road travel, passing through 17 out of 24 nautical time zones.

When I returned from that trip, it occurred to me that I had a good start on a handful of travel checklists. I did not want to immediately go on traveling just as an end in itself, as I had other concerns at the moment, but when I returned to San Diego and it was time to drive back to New York, I made the simple choice to alter my return route to go through more unique States than necessary. Having crossed westbound through only the “border” states – down the coast to Georgia, then Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, NM, AZ, CA – I decided to “bump up one state” and cross through Utah, Colorado, Kansas, etc on my way home, so that by the time I was back from that journey, I had visited more than half of the 50 states. Then in summer 2007, an old friend convinced me to take a road trip through eastern Canada, “covering” not just half a dozen provinces but also getting one more time zone, putting me at the current 17 time zone count.

By the time of that 2007 trip, I already knew that I was heading pretty intentionally toward a career in law, but I wanted to make sure my travel opportunities didn’t stop. In 2008, I managed, mostly by happenstance, to find a legal job that would “require” (allow, in my head) a lot of travel, and ultimately that job, which transcended law school and existed for me both as an “advanced paralegal” and a licensed attorney, got me to not just visit but work in well over 30 states, getting my state count to 43 before the pandemic ended the mandatory travel aspect of the job. In 2023, I manually finished the “50 state project” by driving my Volvo to Alaska, and now, well, the itch is still there. It’s time to travel again, it’s time to do something new again.

A small part of me feels like I used the 50 state project as an excuse to stay stagnant. From 2007 to 2017, I allowed my passport to expire without a single stamp in it, and even waited a few years to renew it. I still have a pristine book that hasn’t even been shown at the Canadian border. That feels like a personal failure. I want to finish something that I started. What, exactly? Well, let’s start with the oceans. At this point I have crossed two oceans, and visited three. I chose not to visit the Arctic in 2023 in part to “save something big for next time.” So now it stays on the list. I’m not planning to ever “cross” the Arctic or Southern oceans, but yes, I will need to navigate upon them in some fashion at some point. What I do want to accomplish is complete, though across more than 20 years, the “simple circumnavigation.” This means traversing a complete closed loop around the planet, a loop that at some point touches itself. To accomplish this, I basically need to return in some fashion to the Straits of Hormuz, as everything beyond that last time was “a dead end” from which one has no choice but to backtrack unless changing modes from sea to air.

So, there’s a concrete geographic goal here: to finish out the circular path that began in New York, changed from land to sea in San Diego, and terminated at sea in the Persian Gulf. To do that, I need to cover, somehow by land and sea, a path that goes from New York to the Persian Gulf itself.

This journey can be and is routinely completed in a handful of ways, most of which involve oil tankers. I had considered that option: to crew on a tanker or other cargo ship, or even a series of them, to make my way across the Atlantic, and then either through the Med and the Red to get to the Indian Ocean again, or around the Cape of Good Hope the long way and then back up along the eastern coast of Africa to the Middle East again. But, I can’t crew on a cargo ship and still remain focused on other priorities and goals. I have my dog to consider. I have my legal career, which I can work remotely and part-time, but cannot abandon entirely. These and other factors lead me to “it has to be on my own boat,” and both the cost of fuel for such a journey and the environmental considerations mean that a sailboat is really the only practical and suitable option.

The timing is based on a few things but the main two are this: the resolution of my father’s estate, giving me not a fortune but a small amount of financial breathing room, and the fact that, heading into my 45th birthday, I am no closer to, in fact further from, my goal of becoming a father, when compared to twenty years ago. This is either the ultimate expression of freedom for a childless person, or a bet the farm Hail Mary way to give the universe one last chance to connect me with the right partner.

So that’s why I bought a boat.

Why this boat?

Based on the known goals, I knew that I needed a boat that was suitable for extended ocean travel and robust enough for a possible North Atlantic crossing, often described as one of the most challenging passages for a sailboat. I talked to a lot of people and there were some consensus ideas:

• Get something with a full keel, or at least a “modified” full keel for stability and tracking in heavy seas
• Get something practically bulletproof in materials, design, and construction technique
• Spend less on the boat itself to leave more in the budget for refitting to suit my goals
• Get something soon so that I can start preparation in advance of finishing the estate process and getting the business to a good spot for a break

So, it ultimately came down to, now is the time. What, where, and how remained to be figured out in the usual fashion. In early October, I started calling around to set up sailing classes, something I would have done much earlier if finances hadn’t been uncomfortable for most of 2024 and 2025. It turned out there was a “101/103” class being offered that very weekend, so I gave them my credit card and packed the car for the five day class in Annapolis. Visiting Annapolis for the second time was a whole other story in itself, but along the way I met a yacht broker, because she just happened to be the instructor of the class. During our second day of sailing, a small fitting that served an important role on the boat broke, which led me to a bit of an infodump explaining to the instructor how I would respond to a problem like that on my own boat. I could see that old “light bulb” expression on the instructor’s face, and she said “I think I have the boat for you.”

She told me about this old Gozzard that she “rescued from sinking.” It was an interesting old boat with a classic “pirate ship” design but a few years of neglect. It was built heavy, overbuilt really, as many early fiberglass layups were, and was designed for ocean cruising in comfort. But it was an estate sale situation, with an owner who had become disabled due to an unfortunate geriatric health condition, and the boat was in bad enough shape that most brokers refused it and the family was looking to just get rid of it. I went back a few weeks after the class to take a look and it was kind of like love at first sight. It reminded me of how I felt when I met Jackson and knew right away that he was “my dog.” I made an offer for about half what I was told they were asking, and it was accepted quickly. I then had a survey done, a bit of a story in itself, and the survey found what I expected: a handful of pretty minor problems that were all within the realm of “deferred maintenance” but nothing that would prevent the boat from being seaworthy at least for coastal cruising, and yet a long enough list of minor repairs to get the appropriate value very close to zero. I rounded up to a figure I felt would at least cover the expenses of sale and leave the family without taking an immediate loss on disposal, and they accepted. So now it’s mine.

This is already a pretty lengthy post, but it’s kind of a catch up as I haven’t been writing here about this particular journey yet. If you’re reading this later on, it may look excessive after I circle back and move posts here from Facebook retelling other pieces of the story.

I’m going to create a new section of this site and it’s quite possible I’ll add a whole new site just for the sailing blog. But stay tuned as any of that will all be posted here first.

The initial message was an invitation to go golfing, which I interpret as generally indicative of trying to target a certain kind of man. So, it’s almost certainly a scam right from the start.

Admittedly, I was lonely and bored enough to engage with the character, and the responses were… pretty compelling. Essentially, I did the thing I do sometimes when I’ve got someone talking to me that I’m not at all afraid of alienating, and I “test ideas” that I assume are ordinarily too controversial to fit within small talk. Things like mentioning to a mediocre online date how I plan to live in an RV and home school my eventual child(ren), or asking about their views on the phenomenon of consciousness. 

So, we could possibly call this a reverse turing test: questions that we can reasonably assume would be offputting to most real people, but to which positive and mirroring responses might indicate a sycophantic algorithm. See screenshots. 

I should and do know better, but the idea of an actual human being who talks like this is indeed absurdly appealing to me, because I am an actual human being who talks like that and am very tired of it being something that isolates me from everyone else. But, I did get the impression that it was way too good to be true. From the start, the premise of a person maintaining interest in conversation after confirming “wrong number” is unlikely enough in the modern age. But it’s not just that it’s “unlikely” as much as that it’s less likely than the alternative. Which is more likely, that a completely random person finds me appealing after a few terse texts and one meme, or that a non-random scammer is pretending to find me appealing and using technology to mimic my style? Probably the latter, but it would depend on how good the tech is. 

So to test the hypothesis, I started with a question that I thought would be easier for an LLM than any human: spot the pattern in my phone number. The answer to this question is that the last four digits form a common dictionary word that reflects one of my core values. But the speaker seemed to just not understand the question, instead doubling down on explaining the random mistake that led them to the number. I tested this by asking ChatGPT the same question – and it got it wrong! I used a fake number that contained the “real” pattern but not the rest of my phone number, and the machine spotted a number of other words in the fake data, but even upon being given hints never got the actual key word. It took a lot of follow up to get to the actual word that I had embedded in the number, so apparently this wasn’t as easy an LLM question as I thought.

As you can see it was not quick at all to match “8683” to “Vote.” In fact it almost entirely missed it.

But then I tested the more important question, because there are any number of reasons why it would fail “what dictionary word is in my phone number,” the most likely being that the machine doesn’t actually “know” what the phone number even is. I next asked ChatGPT if it could role play as someone trying to convince me that they were my soulmate, and then asked it a similar “nature of consciousness” question to answer in that character. The safety mechanism halfheartedly tried to talk me out of it, then agreed to do it. I went straight to my ridiculous question from the chat, though a paraphrase of it.

This feels like a mic drop moment to me. I continued the chat just a little further, enough to confirm a match in style between ChatGPT responses when asked to roleplay as a scammer, and the text messages I was receiving. The style was almost identical, down to things like how it commented on how it was “funny” that we thought alike and it was “drawn to” such ideas. 

It makes me feel stupid and invalid, frankly.

I was wrong about my idea that these are deep thoughts or that sharing them means someone is a mindful person. Indeed, ChatGPT was eager to remind me that there was no mindfulness involved at all:

This is like, okay, game over. I’m convinced that anything you want, any personality, any style, can be imitated, and it’s going to be harder than ever before to tell real versus fake. Turing tests are now too easily gamed. 

This to me means an end to anything that exists primarily online and isn’t “intentionally fake.” It doesn’t really matter if entertainment content is fake, so it’s not like “I can’t even watch TV anymore.” Fiction remains fiction. But, this does mean that I can’t trust any stranger that I talk to online to be who they claim to be or after what they claim to be after. Everything that could have any reason, however remote, to be fake can absolutely be fake. And when it comes to the question of companionship, social conversation, etc, there are enough reasons to fake it that we can’t really trust any of it. A fake person could be put into my ear for any number of manipulative reasons, and because it’s so cheap, those reasons could be as trivial as to influence a minor consumer choice. I don’t know what this scammer’s end game was, although it would presumably be to get something of great value for me like actual access to money. But it could also be worthwhile for a company like Meta to give me an imaginary friend that can simply encourage me to visit places where I’ll see particular advertising, or to choose one product over another. This text message pen pal could be worthwhile at the other end just for eventually trying to convince me to vote a certain way, prefer Chinese products over European, or even abstain from running for office. 

I really don’t know what to do in response to this, except disengage further from the internet.

There are two different ways to say no and I think it’s important not to get mixed up.

One way to say no is to turn down opportunities. and within this, I would include certain specific no’s like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m not ready” and of course the worst of all, “I’m not worthy.”

But there is another very important kind of no, which is setting a boundary. To say “I’m not going to do that because it’s not right for me,” or “I understand that is what you want, but it is not what’s best for me” is very different from saying “I’m not going to take that chance because I don’t believe in a positive future.”

I’m sure there are narrow exceptions to this general rule, but good things in life come to those who take risks, not to those who indulge only their fears against taking action.

This of course comes back to two main topics in personal psychology that I’ve been studying for the last couple years, boundaries and attachment. These two things are very closely related, because people with attachment problems usually also have boundary problems, and people who learn to set and enforce healthy boundaries usually get that skill from a basis of secure attachment. There are many excellent and lengthy books on these topics, and I can’t expect to adequately summarize them in a blog post. But if I wanted to try, I would say that the essence of good boundaries is being able to recognize the difference between what is good for you versus what someone else desires, and the essence of secure attachment is similarly the ability to be confident that you’ll be OK even if this particular risk doesn’t work out. Secure attachment enables healthy boundaries.

People seem to mostly talk about secure attachment in the context of romantic relationships, but it really does touch on just about everything, particularly your ability to take risks in life. When you are not secure, every risk is amplified on the negative side. When you look at a potential risk like applying for a desired job or pursuing an attractive potential romantic partner, secure attachment allows you to say “the downside risk is manageable, so it’s worth taking a chance on the upside risk.” Insecure attachment, or simply the lack of secure attachment, tends to make a person fixate on and exaggerate the downside potential, the negative aspects of the risk, and often minimize the upside potential. Minimizing the upside potential while amplifying the adverse side of the risk equation is a pretty effective way to talk yourself out of anything. Surefire, even. If you amplify the negative (cost) while minimizing the positive, your math will always “rationally” land on “no.”

And yet we cannot fix this just by saying “yes to all.” The “yes man” concept can be a great exercise, but it’s a learning experience only. (There is a book and a movie directly on this topic, but it’s explored in many other places.) Saying yes to everything might be a great shortcut to taking bigger risks, but it’s also a recipe for burnout and bad boundaries. Saying yes to everything can indeed mean that you take that big adventure or challenging job, but it also might mean you get stuck babysitting while someone else does all the fun stuff. You need to be able to distinguish between the “nos” that enable you to say “yes” when you should, and the “nos” that really should be “yeses.”

I am by no means any kind of expert on this but increasingly I’m receiving confirmation that i’ve learned some things worth knowing and had some not quite unique but unusual enough experiences that there are people who want to know how and why. And the how is “By saying yes when fear might have otherwise led me to a no.” Going to law school, enlisting in the Navy, going river kayaking for the first time in a February when I was in bad physical shape, and yes, accepting that case that my paralegal didn’t like (and quit over) were all risks that paid off in one way or another. And of course the potential payoff was kind of obvious: (the benefits of each is easy to guess) but the costs or downside risks are also obvious enough. Law school could mean debt and lots of work and maybe wasted years, especially if you don’t get through the whole program. The Navy could have been a great career, but it could have led to a tragic premature demise; where it actually went for me was neither of the poles of that spectrum and took years for me to see how it really paid off (and boy did it pay off). Winter kayaking was nuts, and most people still think it is, but it became the best part of my life for a long time. These are prominent examples from my own life but the list from others lives would and does fill entire libraries. 

Did you ever take a big risk that paid off? Hopefully you did, and can articulate what that was. What could have gone wrong? What could have gone right? How did you get your mind to see the upside as worth the risk? Odds are good that it was either being down enough in some way to be willing to risk it all no matter what (rock bottom), or it was having the “faith” or “confidence” or just security it took to believe that taking the risk was worth it. 

Learning to say no at the right times helps you get there. And this is probably an easier thing to see in the other direction, unfortunately. Can you recall a time when you said yes for the wrong reasons, usually a sense of social obligation or frustration, and paid for it, perhaps dearly? Can you think of another time when you instead said no to something that you felt pressured to do but knew wasn’t good for you? 

The subtlety is indeed tough. How do you really know the difference between a good no, that is boundary protection or truly rational self-care, and a bad no, that is letting your fear and doubt take the wheel when it should be confidence or faith in command? I definitely don’t have an easy answer for that either, and if i did it would probably be the “happiness project” key i’ve been seeking. And yet, what was that key? Years of research confirmed that human happiness comes mostly from good social relationships, strong connections that do not drain your energy by more than they replenish you. And this is such a hard thing to get to from a position of trauma, loss, poverty, or disability. But I remain convinced that it is possible. I would never go as far as the “toxically positive” lies that anyone can do anything, or that “If I could do it, anyone can.” Neither of those things will ever be true, at least not in general. What I do believe is true is that everyone who has a bad life could get to a slightly or significantly better life if they are able to learn boundaries and security, and that there are in fact small and concrete steps, which I would generally categorize under “mindfulness”, that just about anyone could take to make small but significant improvements in their outcomes. 

that’s how they get ya

I am, I confess, a consummate consumer. I care about the products that I buy, and I am very concerned about things like quality and durability and functionality and a little bit about design and aesthetics. also means that I’m probably one of the easier people for marketers to manipulate.

So, take sunglasses for example. when I was a kid in the 80s, Ray-Ban was the cool brand of sunglasses, but I would never even think about aspiring to ray bans, because my family was poor, and that that Miami Vice product placement was for rich people, not people like me. instead, I begged my mother, probably got whatever was five dollars at Caldor or JCPenney, or maybe even McCrory’s. and over the years, as happens with kids and cheap things, they would always break or get lost quickly enough, and I would buy another one, usually for $10 or less, usually thinking, why spend more on something disposable. But eventually, you start to creep up. you get your first job, and now you’ve got a $50 bill in your wallet. You don’t need to limit yourself to the five dollar sunglasses that are bound to break, you can get the $20 ones that might last a little i longer. now the Oakley brand got pretty popular in the 90s, which was around when I had my first job, but a pair of Oakley’s was 80 bucks or more, which was literally two entire paychecks from my job McDonald’s. but eventually, I was in the military, making all of $1500 a month, and at $110 instead of the full price of $130, a pair of brand new Oakley’s felt like just the way to mark my arrival in the world.

so instead of sunglasses, I had Oakley’s, and they were a little more valuable, a little more durable, something I was a little proud to be seen wearing. naturally, that became my baseline, my new standard for the minimum quality of a product that goes on my face, so any other eyewear, like my prescription glasses, also needed to be something premium like Oakley or Nikon. and all of a sudden, you have two. You didn’t just aspire him with one pair of Oakley’s, he expired to one pair of Oakley’s and a back up pair of Oakley’s, or maybe a pair of Oakley’s to keep in each place.

now, I can’t believe the redundancy of expensive products in my life. at the moment, I am wearing a Patagonia fleece which I bought on sale for 80 bucks (regular price 150), and I’ve definitely lost count of how many hundred plus dollar Patagonia fleeces and jackets I’ve owned over the years. I don’t even think about it. “I already have a Patagonia jacket” isn’t a thought that I think about pondering whether to buy another Patagonia jacket, I think about whatever circumstance compels me to need one more. in this case, it was a combination of I accidentally went hundreds of miles from home without any kind of casual fleece or sweatshirt, and I happened to not have one like this that fit me at the moment.

but, I feel like I’m a little disgusted by my own consumerism lately. it’s just too much, even if I got there by making choices that seemed rational in the moment. indeed, I’ve come to be a little more strategic about these objects, seldom buying them brand new for example. i’m rebuilding my library from used bookstores for 5 to 7 dollars apiece instead of $20-$50 apiece. every vehicle I presently have was purchased secondhand, though still from a dealership with a warranty. Even the leash that I’m using right this second to walk my dog came from the returns rack at REI, for half price. Yet, it’s also a fancy brand “high end” piece of fabric.

I’m something like addicted, although at this point I can’t expect an outside observer to see a difference between me and a “label whore” who buys clothing based on the branding alone.

I tell myself it’s just about quality and value. And that really is true to some degree, the old “vimes boots” story from Terry Pratchet. That is just “ultimately, the poor spend more on clothing because the stuff that costs half the price lasts a lot less than half as long.” It’s also that when I shop used, I can still expect the used Patagonia to outlast the brand new Walmart in many but not all cases. So I buy fancy underpants, which do indeed last longer, but for t-shirts I usually buy the ones that are under $10 in the sportswear department at Walmart or Target, new, because it’s not worth fussing for used t-shirts.

I’m typing this on not quite the latest iphone, but one of many latest iphones that i’ve purchased over the years. There, it’s my extreme fussiness that leads me to insisting on the latest. This phone had a better data transfer plug than any other iPhone, and a particular camera feature I had wanted for a while. The next one added another feature I really like, but i couldn’t bring myself to spend that much for one button. Now i’m seriously reconsidering and this is probably my last brand new iPhone, and certainly my last top of the line iPhone.

what’s really strange is, I’m having a hard time convincing myself of a different way. The vimes boots story is true. replacing my high-end products with lower end products will not give me any advantage. my strategy of buying used and particularly out of fashion colors and styles essentially limits any savings I would get from the brand new cheaper product, and the cheaper product doesn’t exist used in general. well, it does, but the savings is negligible; the used Walmart jacket at the thrift store doesn’t cost a whole lot less than just buying the same thing at Walmart, and indeed, it’s usually pretty much used up in terms of wear. it’s really only the redundancy that I need to call myself out for. Do I really need two pairs of Oakley? I kind of feel like the fact that necessity has compelled me to wear the spare today gives me a “yes”. and yet, I’m starting to feel just a silly having two pairs of Oakley’s as I do having too late model Volvos. and apart from really the cost of insurance, I can’t seem to find an argument that compels me to do anything different with vehicles either. Any other strategy is bound to basically cost as much money or more in the end. A car that costs less on sticker price and insurance is pretty likely to cost me more on repairs or even fuel. that’s not because luxury cars are inherently reliable, quite the contrary; but I found kind of this loophole that luxury car manufacturers are more generous with warranty mileage on recertified cars.

that kind of circles me back to, it’s a bad look but I’m not wrong. 

I’ve been working in Social Security Disability law since 2008, and as a solo attorney since 2014. Among my peers we monitor various numbers like “grant rates” and “backlogs” at different offices, but to my knowledge there isn’t a published central compendium I could link here.

Historically, though, backlogs have always been a problem. When I started in 2008, the biggest backlogs were in hearing offices, where a claimant could wait over three years for a hearing to be scheduled, and at the Appeals Council, where cases could languish untouched for even longer. The main factor in these backlogs has always been staffing, specifically the alignment between the specific office’s staff and their capacity to process claims per day/week/year, and the number of cases they have to deal with. When I started in 2008, the government was “experimenting” with telepresence to attack some of these backlogs by using video teleconferencing to allow judges who had no backlogs to handle cases for others who were buried. This helped hearing offices nationwide to get backlogs down to consistently below two years, though it came with other problems. But, progress was being made.

In 2010, the “TEA Party movement” swept the country and the “Freedom Caucus” as we now know it came into play, with radical right wing extremists in Congress obstructing routine government work like basic funding and staffing of administrative agencies like SSA. So beginning in 2011, the SSA budget became a continual hostage in every budget discussion. We were already a decade past the last “regular budget” passing Congress, but this began the new normal of governing from crisis to crisis and using things like shutdown threats to keep essential agencies like SSA perpetually fighting for mere survival. By refusing to pass a meaningful budget until an 11th hour “shutdown threat” negotiation, congressional Republicans have been able to avoid even discussing any real funding requests such as increasing staffing levels to match the growing US population, instead usually having to settle for an “emergency” measure that simply matches last year’s funding, effectively cutting the budget by the inflation rate every year. Most SSA workers have not had raises in many years, and most parts of the Administration have been in a perpetual hiring freeze. The result of this has been staff losses “by attrition.”

Staff loss by attrition: In any workplace, “turnover” is a part of life. In a healthy workplace without major issues, it’s typical for a few percent of workers to leave for routine reasons like a better job offer elsewhere, returning to school, having a child, getting married, or even just retiring or dying. There’s nothing odd about this; the best run business on earth still expects 5% or so of workers to leave each year for these various reasons. But when there is a hiring freeze, the result is your staffing drops. The first year of this is fine; when staff drops by 5%, workload increases by around 6% which only means two extra hours of work each week per worker, and that can be made up in various ways. But after two or three years of that, each remaining worker basically needs to work an entire extra day to stay caught up. This has been happening now for 14 years, so we have offices within SSA that are operating with half or fewer of the staffing they need.

There is a death spiral effect to this as well. As I said, after a couple years of this, we get to where each worker is basically looking at a nearly doubled workload, but there are no raises to make this worthwhile. The customers (general public) aren’t happy and don’t understand the problem, so the workplace becomes hostile with each worker being attacked in every interaction with the public. This eventually leads to even greater attrition.

As an attorney in this area, i’ve seen the backlogs shift here and there. SSA has made triage moves like the video hearings to shift work to less strained offices, and has moved workers around as well. But overall the situation has continued to decay. The pandemic actually helped in some ways, because adding remote work options made some offices, especially hearing offices, more efficient. In fact there is no longer a significant hearing backlog at all. But other parts of the agency have gotten dramatically worse. Initial claims were once routinely handled in 60 days or less; now it’s not uncommon to wait over a year for an initial decision. And “payment centers” used to be invisible even to my peers. I remember a decade ago explaining to a client that we have never once had to follow up on backpay at the payment center because they always fix their own mistakes within a few months; now, i’m seeing claimants remain homeless for a year or more after resolving claims because of backlogs at payment centers.

As attorneys, we have sought workarounds such as billing cases through alternate channels to bypass the worst delays. Recently, I billed a case through the District Court in hopes of bypassing a hopelessly delayed payment center, only to learn that the District Court’s payment center has become just as backlogged.

For me personally, the main result of this is absolutely extreme delays in payment. I am now looking at a likely average of two or more entire years after resolving a case to get paid my fee on my most lucrative categories of case, while the most “routine” cases are now taking six months or more on average to be paid after full resolution.

As of about a year ago, it was crystal clear that this problem was going to keep getting worse until a political solution happened. We have a handful of allies in Congress, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who both believe that the US Government should be able to keep its promises to the American People. But Republicans for the most part don’t seem to believe that anymore, and they have been mostly i. control for a while now.

I had a lot of hope tied up in this past election, and not just the Presidency but Congress as well. If Democrats took back the House as well as the White House, then I could expect that some of Warren’s bills to restore the SSA could pass, along with perhaps a comprehensive budget that restores subsistence funding to all essential agencies like SSA. But the opposite happened; Trump won, and the Freedom Caucus retained control of the House agenda. There is now zero hope for any fixes to this in the next four years.

SSA staffing is now at its lowest level since the 1990s with fewer than 58,000 workers. Elon Musk has vowed to make life worse for those workers in hopes of getting even more to quit, which will mean more delays for disability claimants and retirees. There has been a lot of political discussion of “the trust fund running out” as the threat to Social Security, but that actually isn’t true; the SSA trust fund is doing just fine. The real problem is that there is nobody left to actually run the thing. It won’t matter whether or not the money is there if there is no staff to issue the payments, and that is where we are headed.

Top 10 books from the 21st-century that mindful people should read soon

Today has been a travel day, and it seems to be the case that my travel days are always characterized by conversations about the things I’ve learned in my travels. I’ve been realizing quite a bit lately that I often lose track of which knowledge came from what trip or where I read an interesting fact that I find important. 

Tonight while at a retail checkout counter, the clerk who was checking my ID noted that we have the same astrological sign, and I said I don’t believe that the stars are influential as such, but it can certainly make a difference what time of year you’re born, and I told him the story about how you’re more likely to become a successful pro hockey player if you’re born in January. That story is covered in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I said. And we spoke briefly about the books we had respectively read or were reading, and I realized I was short on a concise recommendation for where to start.

And now I realize as I sat down to write it definitive list of books I recommended to people, what is even the theme that we are going for? What ties together the books that James Ratchford would recommend to a person who wants to be a wise and worldly decision-maker? 

Really, it’s the same theme as the essay book that I’m working on, and I’m still working on a title that doesn’t sound pretentious and condescending, but one working title might be “everything I wish you had learned in college.“ Let me know if you have some better ideas on that. One book to save you four years and 100 grand? Or how about, liberal arts in a nutshell subtitle, a teaser of stories you might learn in an excellent liberal arts program.

When I recommend books, it’s usually for the purpose of edification. As a child I was told by certain people in my life that only one book really mattered, but I will never circle back to that mentality. The more the merrier, and I think if you asked me to choose one book for the rest of my life I would be paralyzed over the decision. Instead, let me take you through a brief literary history of my own development as an adult.

Let’s start with Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is best known for popularizing the idea that it takes 5000 hours to get to proficiency in just about anything. I don’t believe that Gladwell invented this idea, but he came to be popular associated with it, and this is the book in which he really fleshes it out.  The book is largely a set of essays debunking various versions of great man theory. Gladwell points out through numerous examples how the exceptional people that we revere in our society, who he calls outliers, or seldom as inexplicable as they seem. The hockey birthday story starts with the odd coincidence that most Canadian pro hockey players have January birthdays. Doesnt this seem like a very odd coincidence? It can’t possibly be the case that through sheer random chance such as spectacular number of athletes share the same birthday. Does being born in that month somehow cause a person to be more likely to be discovered for their great talent, or is there something else at play? Ultimately, Gladwell walks through the selection process, and particularly how young hockey players born in January have a totally rational likelihood of being the oldest and therefore the largest and most developed child athletes in their community team, simply because they are sorted by birth year, and of all of the Boys born in 1985, the boys born in January 1985 typically larger, faster, and generally better athletes than the ones born in December 1985, at least, if you do the measurement in 1992 when they are all different kinds of seven-year-olds. What actually happens is that the older seven year olds do better than their slightly younger peers, and are therefore that much more likely to be selected by the coaches to proceed onward to next year‘s team, and this trend of distillation continues through high school and college. If the cut off point was June instead of January, we would probably see a lot more athletes with summer horoscope signs, and nobody would’ve ever heard of Wayne Gretzky.

Freakonomics, by Steven Dubner and Steven Levy.

This book is probably the modern classic on a pop culture accessible introduction to the field of economics. Free economics began as a blog before becoming a book and a podcast, and I found it as a podcast before anything else. These two university of Chicago economist (I think one of them is actually a journalist First) decided it would be fun to look at unusual social questions through the lens of the science of economics. In the book, they tackle the range of perhaps controversial topics, including the odd phenomena of decreases in violent crime often lagging years or so behind the legalization of abortion in various jurisdictions. Now of course, we have to be careful about what conclusions we might draw from such data, and their original finding being profoundly controversial was challenged by many who offered alternative explanations for the perhaps coincidence, although intuitively, it does kind of makes sense that if you reduce the number of unwanted children growing up in poverty, you might end up with fewer of the kinds of people who tend more often to become criminals. I won’t say that I think this is the best economics book out there by any stretch of the imagination, but my goal and recommending it is not to teach you the fundamentals of economics or present a useful introductory textbook; instead, it is a book that makes the basic ideas of behavioral economics a little more reader friendly than they usually are.

Thinking about these two selections, I wonder if maybe we should make this a topical list. But, what are the topics? Academic subjects? OK, so freaking Alex is the subject of economics, outliers is what, statistical psychology? It certainly an integrative text, and the core premise of liberal arts is integrative studies – the basic idea that field of science operates in a vacuum, but that instead a good thinker is well rounded.

What are the important core subjects of an effective education under the liberal arts philosophy? Philosophy for starters, and specifically, the epistemology, which is asking the question, what is truth, and then certainly ethics, which is one of two ways to ask the question, what is good, with the other aspect being aesthetics. I’m not a big fan of aesthetics, I don’t think it matters that much so I’m not gonna make recommendation on it. and I think that my own dismissive attitude toward aesthetics is probably wrong, and I probably should revisit it. Most integrative studies are gonna give you some of that through the arts, which I think is a much better way to deal with the question of what should I like.

Mathematics is obviously very important, but which field of mathematics is most important? Social scientists care most about statistics. Physicists tend to care more about calculus. I haven’t really read a lot of books without math, instead taking a very unusual set of classes in different programs. my naval nuclear power education was essentially pre-calculus, never really getting beyond shortcut approaches to derivatives because that’s what we needed to handle things like reactivity deltas. I took calculus my senior year of undergrad just because it was interesting to me at the time, and can’t say that I’ve ever actually needed it beyond again the shorthand versions. You don’t need calculus to understand general relativity it turns out, and Einstein’s book relativity is fairly comprehensible without it. Yet I’m really not sure that I would give you Einstein on the reading list. Instead, I would probably start you with Brian greens quote the fabric of the cosmos“, or Stephen Hawkings a brief history of time. Both cover essentially the same subject matter, and I would have to go back through both to really pick one. 

This is on my skid steer, which stopped driving correctly over a week ago, getting stuck with one drive wheel spinning freely and a broken chain. I bought the replacement chain, cut it to length, and got it looped around the sprockets, but I cannot for the life of me get it to connect.

It took me ages to get the chain tensioner to loosen, which was the real problem. Eventually it did, but even after loosening it as much as I could get, I still can’t get the chain ends to connect.

I’ve tried various approaches using a few different tools to hold the ends toward each other. The issue is clearance – there’s only room on one side of the chain.

That gives me an idea, actually. I could try aligning the links with one tool and then separately inserting the master link after they are close enough. That may work. Let me try, before the daylight is gone.

—

no picture just rage. Nope, that didn’t work. It almost worked. I used the coat hanger to get the two ends very close. Then i tried to insert the master link from the higher clearance side, knowing that would leave me fighting in an even tighter space for the last step. Instead, i dropped the link trying to adjust my grip on it. Didn’t just drop it either, it went flying somewhere within the drive compartment. I can’t abandon it either, it’s fod now what will chew up the chain if left there.

This is a simple maintenance task now into the third week of frustration. Ugh.

When you hear the phrase “supply side,” you probably think of Reagonomics and “trickle down theory.”  And if you are on the left, you’ve probably observed that it doesn’t really work.  As an economic stimulus policy, “supply side economics” is the idea of stimulating the economy by lowering taxes for the sellers of products and services, in hopes that it will “trickle down” in the form of various kinds of spending that results, in terms of pay to workers and supply chains, in more people getting paid.  It doesn’t work, though, because economics doesn’t work that way.  People who have money choose to invest based on demand, not based on their own resources. Lowering costs does not lead to producers producing more, it just increases the surplus that they can save.  They still behave as rational econs, producing only as much as they can profitably sell, and selling it at whatever price the market will bear.  All economists know (but many won’t say out loud) that stimulative economic policies are more impactful when the money is given to poor people, who always spend it all back into the economy.  

In terms of drug policy, when I say “supply side” what I mean is that the efforts of law enforcement are more focused on trying to disrupt the supply chains of harmful products, rather than focusing on measures to reduce the demand for them.  For example, they spend money on policing the national borders for potential drug imports, and on policing regional and local drug dealers to break supply chains.  These efforts don’t work in terms of economics, though, for a simple reason: supply follows demand.  When they consumer still wants the product but a supplier has been disrupted, the consumer will just go to another supplier.  If the volume available for sale is decreased, then the remaining suppliers will raise their prices, and the rise in price will increase the incentive for someone new to start producing or importing.  The market self-corrects, and the supply chain is always restored after the momentary disruption.  The only real effect is that a few individuals suffer along the way.  But the effort never actually leads to “less drugs in circulation” in the long term.  Instead, it just increases the magnitude of the school to prison pipeline, as “drug dealer” remains the most lucrative opportunity for many young people.  The supply side approach to drug enforcement is ultimately a jobs program; it keeps the turnover rate high among drug dealers, such that the economy is always hiring for that position, and also gives police officers and prison guards, who might otherwise be violent criminals themselves, justification to be employed by the government.  

If we as a society actually cared about drug abuse as a systemic problem and wanted to really solve it, we would be better served to address the demand side, which means a few things that we don’t want to talk about.  Of course we start with treatment programs and alternative medications like Methodone, to give addicts a physical pathway out of addiction.  But what we should really be doing is addressing root causes.  There are really two main causes of substance abuse and they are poverty and medical problems.  We could fix many substance abuse problems by giving people a worthwhile reason to stay sober, like a good job or academic opportunity; and we could solve many more by giving people easy access to quality healthcare to actually troubleshoot and treat causes of chronic pain or mental illness, rather than leaving people to self-medicate in potentially harmful ways.  Of course, solving our national mental health crisis is not as simple as just passing a funding bill to put one extra therapist in every town free of charge.  Our mental health crisis isn’t from a lack of therapists (though that exacerbates it).  It’s from a culture of scarcity, competition, and relentless demands on our energy.  It’s from social media and pop culture that inundates us with fake connection and makes it harder to get our basic needs for love and belonging actually met.  It’s from cultural messaging that gives people endless reasons to feel inadequate or unworthy, and too few pathways to meaningful fulfillment.  Unfortunately, none of these things is trivial to solve, or even to show progress within a single elected term of office, so our system of “accountability” that punishes politicians who engage in long term policy planning prevents us from even trying.  

Incidentally, all of this applies to guns as well as drugs. While some categories of gun crime can be reduced by adding friction to the purchase process, determined criminals are seldom deterred by a mild inconvenience in having to seek a different supplier, and as long as the demand is unchanged, a black market will always arise to fill that demand. This is especially true when supply constraints are only regional, such as restricting gun purchases in New York but not in adjacent Vermont, or Illinois but not adjacent Indiana and Iowa. We would get more consistent results if we turned levers on the demand side and reduced the number of people seeking these harmful objects and their willingness to pay higher prices for them, than by essentially just moving the supply curve to increase the equilibrium price.