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.

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.

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.

I do not for a moment believe that our government structure is ideal right now, or that we have consistently good leaders. I have very little trust in the efficacy of many/most structures within our government and limited confidence in the intentions of many/most individual players.

What I do believe in is the underlying mission. Government, specifically democratic government, is by its very nature the only kind of thing that can accomplish a number of goals that are critical to our survival as a species. Whether I “love” any given elected individual or candidate at the present moment, or whether I believe that a given policy is the best possible way that a goal could ever be accomplished, are all basically irrelevant, or at best way below secondary to the primary goals: to move toward “a more perfect union.” That is a good phrase. How about, to establish justice. To ensure tranquility where it can be made possible. To control for hazards of violence. To promote a better life for all, and perhaps even to secure for all people whatever benefits can come from freedom and personal liberty, to the extent those can be achieved and protected.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

It is the preamble to the United States Constitution, written a decade after the writers experienced the forcible removal of monarchy from government of essentially an entire continent, followed by chaos of fledgling early democratic experiments. Many forget that the Constitution was not the first such document in this country, though technically it was the one in which the country as we know it was established. Prior to the Constitution, the fledgling nation had the Articles of Confederation, a much weaker coalition of independent states, that failed fairly dramatically. The Confederation was unsuccessful enough that within six years, states sent representatives to start from scratch, which they did – and gave us the structure that with periodic changes survives to this day.

These principles are good. Good reasoning went into the entire framework. It was, however, deeply flawed, and those who wrote it knew so. Jefferson famously declared that it should be rewritten every other generation or so. But Madison and others insisted on making it flexible, and instead of starting from scratch each time, we the people have on 17 occasions agreed to make changes. The last of these, incidentally, took two full centuries to happen, and many proposed amendments have been defeated. But ultimately, debate, change, and the concept of “try new things and see what works, and drop what doesn’t” were baked in from the beginning by a group who had seen the failures of the Articles of Confederacy as well as England’s own failed experiment 130 years prior. Washington was probably remembering Oliver Cromwell and Max Robespierre when he wrote his farewell address warning of demagogues (and parties).

It’s been a process… and it’s been going well. By almost every metric, quality of life and the degree of democratic representation has improved in not just the United States but just about every country that has embraced some form of constitutional republic, including even England who followed suit with their own democratic reforms, though they still lack a modern written constitution. We have seen fascism arise and be defeated a handful of times since then as well, and through those examples we know how nominal democracy can be destroyed. Yet we also know that it can come back – today, Germany and Japan are paragons of strong democratic societies.

What I am fighting for in the end is not Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party, though at the moment I am absolutely advocating for both of them as the present best choices to move toward the ultimate goal. That ultimate goal is a strong government of, by, and for the people that it serves.

There is a lot more to this than winning one election or passing a handful of small short term policies. There is no “you won’t have to vote anymore” scenario, and there never should be. Democracy must be an ongoing process with full engagement. In the short term best case scenario of Democrats taking control of the houses needed to get our most urgent crises solved, we the people will need to closely monitor those leaders, keep them accountable, and prepare to replace them when the time comes, be that in the next primary or after a handful of terms. It will never end but perhaps we can get it to a point where we don’t need to devote giant chunks of our mind space to it.

I would like government to be something that I can outsource to trustworthy people. Yet I know that whenever humans are involved, accountability is necessary, as is change for any number of reasons. Nor is perfection ever really going to be on the table.  now, the metaphor breaks down a little bit if you think of a perfect union as something like joining two parts, because with a good weld two separate parts can absolutely achieve what is called a perfect union. But I don’t think that that’s what is really meant. If you instead asking orthopedist what perfect union really means, here she will tell you that it’s not about being indistinguishable under a microscope, which is impossible, but it is about fitting together well enough that healing is possible and full function can be restored. To achieve perfect union in the United States does not mean life would be perfect for anyone really, because that’s not possible, but could it be possible to achieve a state of harmony within our society, of everyone basically agreeing on the premises of what a good society is? I think we obviously have a long way to go, but I also think it’s 100% worth the effort.  

I think, “I could do that.” Melodies form in my mind constantly and while I always feared “accidentally copying” I come to realize that all melodic phrases are borrowed, and the math of it is that while combinations of “song length” are infinite, the combinations of three or four notes that sound good together are much more finite, and indeed all music is repetitive in that sense. 

But then comes the thought, like Bill and Ted, what could be the power of a great song? Could a song unite humanity, bridge our gaps in understanding? This occurs because my prior thought was on the hopelessness of partisan politics, realizing that many people just will never see eye to eye with each other. Could a song be so powerful at conveying ideas and emotion that it unites even those people?  

As I reflect I realize the answer is probably not. Sure, most people can share a transient emotion or something like mourning a bad event that wasn’t particularly ideological. But throughout history that has always been short lived, and usually when people get back to fighting over their usual difference the fighting is worse than ever. America came together like rarely before after 9/11, and by 2004 had descended to such fierce partisanship that swiftboating became a thing. No, none of those songs united us in a meaningful way – and indeed all are basically forgotten twenty three years later. 

There is no easy answer to the problems of humanity – not even a song. 

It’s not Stockholm syndrome, it’s just family.

Few things in life ever really conform to a rigid good/bad binary. The complexity of life also includes that sometimes there’s a context where it doesn’t matter how a thing is bad. For all the damage my father did to me, I would not be here in any sense without his contribution. Some of my virtues flow directly from his vices. I would not be so well spoken if he was not so unreasonably critical. I would probably not be so well read if he had not made reading the only safe activity in my home. Yet, I wonder constantly what my potential might’ve been if I had felt safe expressing myself and taking creative risks as a child and adolescent.

Like a ghost in so many works of fiction, I see him and hear him both as I do things that honor him and as I do things that I am finally free to do without him. There are times when I smile at how he is manifested in me in some small way, and there are times so thumb my nose at him as I relish my freedom from him. There is a strange mystic way that he is literally a part of me, a biological continuity between him and I. It’s a strange phenomenon that we don’t usually think about, but when a child is conceived, there isn’t really a moment when a cell of each parent stops being itself. One cell of my father, living the entire time joining one of my mother, also continuous in life and being, and those who cells became me, and while each parent left out half of their DNA, they fed it back in decades communication and demonstration. I am a living continuous both of them, and the things that I hate about them becoming things I must work on in myself.

Now both of them as their living manifestations are gone, leaving only the five cells that became my generation of our clan, and then of course the many children with smaller pieces of them and us and others. The genetic heritage of a living person is not unlike the water in a river; bits go out to other places in drops, in evaporated molecules on the wind, and the water I paddle through today will become another river elsewhere on earth later, and rain along the way. We are in a sense just moments in that cycle, but there is a kind of unity to all of it and the true constant is change.