Not for this blog though. As usual I started off with a couple of posts and then ignored it for eleven months. About halfway through the year I decided to focus on making posts on Substack, and I made one post then abandoned it too. I mean, I’d made one post there in 2023 as well, so maybe that can be a new tradition: a single Substack post in July each year. If you are curious, I recently posted both of those here.
But it was quite a year in other ways.
Work is still good. I enjoy the work and the compensation is enough. It isn’t perfect, of course, and there are issues with some aspects of the job, but nothing that sours the overall experience. I got a promotion this year to “Staff Engineer” which has meaning in tech circles, but not so much outside, and given the small-ish size of the company and the large number of Staff and Principle Engineers, my job hasn’t changed much – though I’ve had it hinted to me that there might be some things in the works for 2025. I generally go to the office twice a week, which is enough. While I am, in general, not one for casual social interaction, I have always loved crowds.
Dante Hicks: You hate people! Randal Graves: But I love gatherings. Isn’t it ironic?
from the movie “Clerks”
Being around people, knowing they exist, is a good feeling, and enough of a touchstone that it gives me energy and allows me to focus better than when I spend too many days disconnected.
The other side of work is vacation. I may have mentioned it before but one of the reasons I love my employer is that they genuinely understand that turning off and getting away from work actually helps you be better at your job. To that end, this year was the most cruising we’ve done. The first was a New Year’s cruise that I mentioned it my wrap up post last year. Then we had the every-two-years Nerd Boat group of friends cruise. And lastly we went on one for my fiftieth birthday. We have two cruises booked for 2025, and two more for 2026. So yeah, I guess we are cruisers now.
I slipped in that last paragraph that I turned fifty this year. I don’t feel fifty. I’ve always felt younger than my age, because I tend to enjoy new stuff more than people my age who tend to hold on to the things they already love, and because I’ve generally tended to have friends who are older than me, making me feel like the “young one”. But 2025 is going to be the year I finally start doing all the health and doctor stuff I’ve been ignoring for too long, because, you know, fifty.
Anyway, after a 2023 where I blew my reading goal out of the water, I completely tanked it this year. I only read 11 books. There are reasons for this, one of which is that I have 3 or 4 books still “in progress” because they are work/career books that I’ve been reading in bits when I am motivated. Another reason is TikTok. Too many nights, rather than reading before bed, the wife and I have instead scrolled through an hour of videos. I like it, but also, it can be such a time suck. I need to work on tempering it.
Writing, well, this blog is about it. I need to do more.
Exercising went well until it didn’t. However, at work I won a raffle and there is a Tonal home gym coming soon, so I’ll have an excuse to get back at it.
Everything else… I didn’t practice much guitar. I fell off the Making Art Everyday wagon. I didn’t work on the personal projects. Too many home improvements didn’t happen.
And while things weren’t going gangbusters before, that Tuesday in November was a real gut punch. I was so excited, so motivated, everything was looking up, and then… it wasn’t. People voted to drag this country back to it’s worst eras by pretending they were awesome. We’ve elected a narcissistic, lying criminal to the office of the president. Part of me wants to say it is because people have believed the lies and been duped into supporting him, but even though that is certainly true for some, the fact that both times he won it was against a woman a part of me knows that there are a lot of men in the world who are sexist. They may not think of themselves that way, but all of the reasons they pretend are objective for not voting for her are all rooted in misogyny and sexism. I am disappointed. And I am tired. But I will keep showing up, and I will keep voting, and I will keep fighting.
My wish for 2025: May the worst people get none of what they desire and all of what they deserve. For the rest of us, I hope we can all avoid being collateral damage, and success in our resistances.
It is a sentiment I agree with, in the original meaning of the phrase, in that the police, in many cities, have extremely large budgets that they expend on force: riot gear, elite drug squads, killology seminars, and so on, that needs to be redistributed to things that actually help the communities they are supposed to protect and serve. I don’t think there should be no police, but there definitely needs to be different police.
Growing up white and middle classed as I did (I had no choice in either), the vast majority of my encounters with police were at school. They would come in and talk about how awesome cops are, and how bad drugs are, about how they protect us and keep us safe. But cops didn’t drive through my neighborhood. In fact, out in the wild, most of the cops I saw were on the side of the road with a radar gun, protecting the world from speeders.
My very first, non-school non-speed trap encounter with a cop, he rolled up on my girlfriend and I making out in my car in the parking lot of a park. In his defense, the park was closed (although it didn’t have gates or chains or anything to stop people from going there after hours – see: white and middle classed), and there could have been a murder or a rape or something going on. There wasn’t, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that a car in a dark park away from the road might be the sort of place a piece of shit garbage human being might do something untoward with someone else. Of course, once he saw that I was scared and he checked that the girl was fine, he didn’t need to be a complete dick about it. Which he was. I’m not going to go into it.
After that, since I was out of high school, it was back to seeing cops running speed traps. I was caught three times myself. Though as I got older, and in college, and didn’t have the curfew of a teenager, I did on occasion run into cops running road blocks checking for drunk drivers. People still drive drunk a lot, despite all the readily available alternatives, so this public safety function is still pretty worthwhile, I suppose, though I suspect like a lot of things cops do, there is a lot of privilege and racism baked into who they test and who they let go. For speeding tickets, however, I think technology has reached a point that if they actually care about safety and want to slow traffic, and it isn’t just a method to raise money and harass people, there are camera systems that can auto-ticket cars and remove cops from the equation.
But I can honestly say, the incident where my opinion of cops really began to sour was after my car was broken into. Again, growing up white and middle classed in the suburbs, car break-ins weren’t really a huge deal. Every once in a while you’d get some kids kicking up a little mischief, but that was really it. My first job in downtown Atlanta had a gated parking lot with security, so again, break-ins really didn’t happen, although that was because of security not cops. My second downtown job, however, didn’t provide parking to contractors, so I had to park in the pay lot across the street. It was one of those where you park in a numbered spot, then you put your money in the matching numbered slot on a big metal board. No attendant. No security. There were homeless people though. They slept behind the vacant building and behind the dumpsters, and once or twice a week I’d give them a dollar or two. Lots of people who parked there did. And the homeless would keep the thieves away.
See, thieves don’t like being watched, and the homeless people were always there. Except, after a couple months of working downtown and parking in that lot, the cops showed up, and ran off all the homeless. For a day or two, the cops drove by once an hour or so to make sure no homeless people returned, and then the cops stopped coming. And the thieves swept in and broke into a bunch of cars – all the ones they could easily steal the stereos from. My car, a Jeep Cherokee, was one of them. They smashed the small window on the rear passenger side door, reached in with a stick or something and pushed the automatic door lock, hopped in, popped the stereo out of the dashboard, and closed the door.
When I discovered the break-in, I called the cops. An hour later they arrived. There were a dozen or so of us standing around by then. They talked to each of us, asked what was stolen, and gave each of us a case number. I asked, naively, if they were going to collect any evidence. One of them said something like “This ain’t CSI.” I don’t remember exactly, but basically just dismissed the idea. The case number, you see, wasn’t about the crime or solving it. It was just paperwork for the insurance companies. The number was required to file the claim so mine could send me a new stereo and a voucher to have it installed, and to have a glass company come to my home and repair the window. Side note: the small window on the rear door of a Jeep Cherokee is the most expensive piece of glass on the car.
Not long after, the homeless returned, and the thefts stopped. Then a number of months passed and the cops returned to clear out the homeless. Then the thieves came back. The second time my stereo was stolen, they broke the same window, pushed the automatic lock button, popped out the stereo, and closed the door. It was almost funny. I called the cops again, and in about 90 minutes they came by and gave me a case number. This time my insurance company just sent me a voucher for the stereo and installation, and sent the glass company out again.
The third time my stereo was stolen, surprise, surprise, was after the cops ran the homeless off again. I called the cops and this time they didn’t even come by. They just called me back, said they were kinda busy, and asked if anyone was hurt. I told them no, that the car was broken into when no one was around. He gave me a case number over the phone. The insurance company sent out the glass guys to fix the window again, and they sent me a check to cover the cost of a new stereo and installation.
I got a new stereo with a detectable face plate, which meant that the thieves stopped breaking into my car. At least until the time I fixed a flat tire on the way to work and left my roadside assistance kit visible in the back. They broke in and took it.
I started riding the bus to work after that.
As if the repeated thefts and disinterested cops weren’t enough, all of my cases were marked closed after the insurance paid. Maybe the thieves were caught, maybe they weren’t. Catching them wasn’t really the police’s job. Property theft just wasn’t important if no one got hurt or if the property wasn’t worth enough. And that’s when I started paying attention, when I started talking to people I knew about their run ins with cops. Too many of them had similar encounters. Crime happens. Cops show up or call, make some notes, leave. Insurance pays out for losses and damages. None of these were detectives, they were just beat cops. People that I knew who were victims of more violent crimes or much larger thefts, they’d get to speak to detectives and sometimes there was even some of the type of police work you see on TV. Perpetrators would even get arrested, sometimes.
My friends of color had different experiences. Getting pulled over a lot. Cops pulling up on them if they were hanging out somewhere. Cops breaking up parties. Cops stopping them when they were just walking down the street. I had stuff stolen four times and the cops didn’t do anything, but black people not doing anything illegal seemed to get a lot of police attention.
Now, again, I’m aware I live a pretty privileged life. Maybe there are places that we do need regular cops. But also, maybe what we need are rapid response teams for the really dangerous stuff, and a lot more detectives to track down and catch criminals after the fact. But also, so much crime is actually a symptom of other issues, and we could use more people working on resolving those underlying issues.
But certainly, and this is really a subject for another post, the vast majority of criminals don’t need jail time. They need community service, and probably they need help. They definitely don’t need to lose their job, to narrow their future job prospects, the be taken away from their families and responsibilities. The incarceration rate in this country is ridiculous, and it isn’t making things better. And again, another post is needed, but if it is determined we do need prisons, for-profit prisons is not the way to go.
People love fireworks. I love fireworks. And if you’ve ever seen a good professional fireworks show you probably love them too. The visuals at least, I could really take or leave the sound. And if you never seen a good professional fireworks show, you absolutely should.
From my own experience, the best I’ve ever seen was 4th of July, 2014, in Washington D.C., pictured above, before the show, before the people arrived. We’d gone to the nation’s capital for a week vacation, primarily to visit the many Smithsonian Museums (we managed to see four and a half of them), but scheduled the week of the 4th so that we could catch the show. And it was an amazing show.
If you don’t spend the duration of a fireworks show staring in awe at the dazzling lights in the sky, either you aren’t a fan of dazzling lights in the sky or it’s a terrible show. And if you don’t like the sound, bring ear plugs or noise canceling headphones.
But good fireworks shows are incredible, and you should seek them out. Many of them are even free!
But what about doing your own fireworks show?
I had a friend with a house on a lake, and a couple of years in a row he went out and bought some very good fireworks, and he also did a bunch of research and set up a mini-show. It wasn’t the best. Even a moderately sized small town probably beat it. But for him, his family, his friends, and those of his neighbors on the lake, it was a pretty good show.
He began by firing off a few singles, which he’d told his neighbors would signify the start of the show so they could come out on their docks to watch. And then he had a couple small series he’d rigged up where it would fire three or five fireworks at once or in sequence to add a little more drama. He ended with a finale of about ten or twelve that worked great together. It was nice.
Importantly, he’d been shooting them from his boat anchored a bit off shore, so that in case of tragedy he could dump the fireworks in the water, or dive in himself to get away.
Other than that one time I attended his lake show, every other time I’ve been to a friends’ setting off fireworks, they’ve been just a trunk load of small to medium stuff they fire off one at a time. Which I suppose is okay if you like making things go boom, but it really lacks in the awe a good fireworks show can deliver.
And someone always gets hurt. No, not like “lose a thumb”, but someone always gets hit by a spark or a bit of falling trash, or someone is flailing around with a sparkler, or someone lights a short fuse and gets the living shit scared out of them when it goes off before they can back away. But sometimes someone does get hurt for real. Every 4th of July ERs get visited by people who did “lose a thumb” or got a really nasty burn or any number of other fireworks related injuries.
Not to mention the mishaps that go viral on social media. Those times when one misfire leads to all the fireworks going off at once while everyone screams and runs for their lives.
Most neighborhoods aren’t a great place for fireworks in any event. One rocket that tips before launching and you could be setting a house on fire. Not to mention lots of people’s pets don’t like the sound. A lot of people also don’t like the sound, which is why they stay home on the Fourth. It could be personal. It could be mental health. But firing off a few dozen mortars in the cul-de-sac is pretty much a hostile act.
A neighborhood show could be good, if the neighbors coordinated. But most people don’t talk to their neighbors unless their HOA forces them to by being terrible. So the average neighborhood show is actually a bunch of different families shooting off competing fireworks.
Another argument against personal fireworks shows is that I’ve often found that people get so excited about shooting them off that they can’t contain themselves, and often overbuy. Then we get fireworks from about June 27th until July 8th. So when I complain to people that my dog doesn’t like fireworks and they come back with “It’s only one night!” It isn’t. It’s like 10 days.
I think I’ve rambled enough. Don’t do fireworks yourself unless you are going to put forth the effort to make a good show worth watching. If you can’t do that, do yourself a favor and go to a bigger professional show.
This is part of a series where the answer to the question in the title is always “No.” Originally published at Probably Not Limited on Substack
As an American, you are likely very tired of the same old two party system, and you yearn for another option. Especially when it comes to the President, and probably very much desiring that other option this year in particular. So you might want to entertain casting your vote for one of those candidates from a party other than the Democrats or the Republicans.
The answer to the question posed in the title is generally “No”, but there is a bit of nuance in there, especially in other races, so let’s dive in.
The biggest problem with most of these “third” parties is that they aren’t serious. Now, before you get offended and jump into the comments to tell me how wrong I am, what I mean by “serious” is they while they might have good ideas and their candidates might be good people, their party structure, organization, and the manner in which they go about trying to get elected is pretty much a complete waste, spending too much effort trying to run in elections they cannot win and not enough building a stable foundation upon which to grow future success.
The advantage that the two majors have over these upstart thirds is very simply “history”. They’ve been around for a very long time, and when they started it was much easier to start. Sure, that’s not fair to today’s third parties, but it’s reality. And ignoring reality only works if you have an entrenched base who is swallowing your propaganda unquestioningly, and a vast media empire keeping up the unceasing flow of that propaganda.
With that in mind, if the third party candidate you are considering voting for is in a local office, a town or city council, a mayor, or a state legislature, then go right ahead. If that third is running against an otherwise unopposed member of one of the big two, then definitely, vote for that third. In these smaller races, a third party has a better chance to win. When the constituency numbers in the thousands, a candidate can easily shake a lot of hands and meet people face-to-face, get their name out there and have a shot to swing the vote their way. And winning these sorts of races is how a third party can prove it is “serious”, capable of governing and building a base.
Once you get to statewide elections (like governor, US senator, etc) unless there is a very vocal and verifiable swell of support for a third party, they aren’t likely to win, or even come in second. The third party is going to come in third, which means your vote will only matter in that it didn’t go to one of the people who actually had a chance to win. This is what people usually call a “spoiler”, because it spoils the election for the member of the major party candidate politically closest to the third party. For example, a Libertarian candidate is more likely to pull votes from a Republican than a Democrat, and if that Libertarian gets 10% of the vote and the Republican loses by less than 10%, it’s not unreasonable to say that the Republican might have won if not for the Libertarian. It’s never clearcut that this is what would have happened, but it feels that way, which means that’s how people will act. Also, it’s probably true.
Now, Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff Voting, would be a big help with that. I’m not going into it. Read the link. But you should probably be writing to your local governmental bodies that control your elections and bug them about implementing it. And your state. And also your federal representatives and senators.
When it comes to the President of the United State though, I do not condone voting for third parties. They literally cannot win, and so voting for them is, at best, saying “I’d rather let everyone else pick the president and not have a voice in it at all.” And your vote is your voice. You might want to protest vote for that third party candidate, but they (the two major parties) aren’t listening to protest votes on election day. They only care if you vote for them or for the person they see as their opponent, the other major party candidate.
But, you might be asking, why can’t third parties win the presidency? The answer to that is…
The Electoral College.
You see, in the United States of America, we don’t technically vote for president. We vote to decide how the electors for our state will vote in the college. These electors are, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, awarded all-or-nothing to the winner of the state’s popular vote. So, unless the third party candidate is popular enough to win a state, they will get no electors. And in the college, they need 270 electors to win the presidency. If you can’t win states, you can’t win the presidency. That is, for now, a fact.
As an example of how this works, you only need to look at the 1992 presidential election between Republican George Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton… and independent Ross Perot. In this race, Ross Perot managed to garner nearly 19% of the popular vote nationwide. There were some states in which he performed better and in some states where he did worse. There are some states where he came in second place! But despite nearly 1 in 5 voters voting for him, Ross Perot got zero electoral votes, because he won no states. Bill Clinton won, 370 to 168 to 0.
He’s not the only example though. If you go back to 1968 you’ll find that George Wallace ran as a third party AND managed to win electoral college votes. I encourage you to look deeper at this race, because it’s got a lot of footnotes on it. Specifically who George Wallace was and the states that he won. His 46 electors were not enough to secure him the presidency.
Then there is the election of 1948, where Strom Thurmond ran as a “States’ Rights Democrat”, and again you need to look at who he was, and which states he won. His 39 electors were not enough to secure him the presidency.
There are a few more, but now we are a hundred years past, and every example of someone running third party for president AND getting electoral college votes has footnotes and asterisks. They are exceptions, not rules. They are also very clearly examples of why despite Donald Trump being a dumpster fire of a candidate, the Republicans keep lining up behind him, because if they kicked him off the ticket, he is likely to run third party, where he probably wouldn’t win, but would definitely spoil their chances.
Someone might try to distract you and say that if a third party garners more support they’ll get access to federal election campaign money and debates and more. But while that is true, it’s also fairly irrelevant. The amount of money they get access to isn’t nothing, but it isn’t all that, and it comes with strings. Read up on it. Debates, on the other hand, are completely arbitrary and party controlled. The big two don’t have to let anyone in they don’t want, and can just make the rules so that no one else qualifies. Sure, a third party can try to get public outcry to let them in, but then the moderators don’t have to give them time, and lots of other shenanigans.
Ignoring a third party’s poor chances of winning, if they did manage to win, how would a third party president with no party allies in the legislature govern? The answer is they’d have to make a deal with whichever of the major parties had the most control and work with them to get anything done. Or maybe we’d just get four years of no legislative action and lots of executive orders… Honestly, it’s not really worth spending much time on since the chance of a third party president win is just so infinitesimally small.
This isn’t even getting into how the Electoral College affects the weight of your vote, battleground states, etc. Or how you can win the popular vote nationwide but still lose the Electoral College (see the 2000 and 2016 elections). But there are efforts to fix that by getting 270 electors worth of states to pass National Popular Vote laws pledging their electors to the winner of national popular vote rather than just the popular vote of their own state.
With all this said about the dismal chances of third parties, the passing mention of the majors not caring about the voters who vote for these thirds, and the bit on how you can win without winning thanks to the electoral system, now you might be saying…
Does voting even matter at all? Maybe I shouldn’t vote.
You should definitely vote. Anyone telling you not to vote has a vested interest in you not voting – meaning they don’t want you voting against the candidate they support. Also the smaller the voting pool the easier it is to predict and even control.
Besides, in this country saying “voting doesn’t work” is wrong because we’ve never tried voting. Despite having elections every year, electing the House and a third of the Senate every two years, and the president every four, our voter turnout rates are pretty bad. The best voter turnout for a presidential election in the 20th and 21st centuries was in 2020 when 66.6% of eligible voters showed up. With the power of math and reducing fractions, this means that 1 out of every 3 eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s pathetic.
Just imagine, the number of people who didn’t vote is half the number of people who did vote. So if in this context, all of them showed up and voted for the same third party candidate, that candidate might win! Or in a much more likely scenario, if those people showed up and all voted for one of the two major parties and continued that vote down ballot, the chosen party would likely win the presidency in a landslide and take the House and Senate with a decisive mandate from the people.
So, again, you should definitely vote. And you should encourage all your friends, family, and strangers to vote. Even if you imagine you won’t like their politics. Because if we get 90% or better turnout and still don’t get a proper representative government, then we can finally say that “voting doesn’t work”.
But if you shouldn’t vote for third parties and you definitely should vote, that means you are left with…
Voting for the lesser evil.
I know! I know! But that’s the job. If you can’t vote for a candidate you want, you NEED to vote against the candidate you most don’t. There are, since we’ve established that third party isn’t a viable choice, only two options, and it is important that you vote for the one who will be better for us. For us as a nation, and us as a society.
And if you find yourself in the position of voting against the dumpster fire and voting for the guy who has a position or policy you don’t like, or whose administration has dramatically failed on one front or another, it sucks. But it is necessary. A democracy where you can continue to protest the thing you don’t like is better than an authoritarian country where you cannot.
This is part of a series where the answer to the question in the title is always “No.” Originally published at Probably Not Limited on Substack
This is a thing I wrote quite some time ago, but I never published it. I decided to go ahead and do that, and then I’ll provide some additional comments at the end.
Imagine two teams are playing basketball. Both teams have spent a long season to get where they are, many seasons cultivating their team, and now they face each other, again, as they have repeatedly. Early in this particular game, a player from Team Blue shoots a three-pointer and makes it. A player from Team Red calls foul and claims the player from Blue had his foot out of bounds when he took the shot.
Not wanting to stop the game, it progresses while the officials review the play. After a few minutes the officials come back and say “We reviewed the footage from several different angles and have determined that the player was in bounds and therefore the three-pointer counts. Play on.”
Team Red doesn’t like this answer. Despite all evidence to the contrary they know in their hearts that the player from Team Blue, while she might have technically been in bounds, was out of bounds in spirit, and that the points shouldn’t count. The cheerleaders from Team Red begin a cheer about how Team Blue is bad and illegal, and the Team Red fans get whipped up in a frenzy.
The officials repeat that they’ve checked the footage, Team Blue was in, the points count. But Team Red and their fans aren’t having it, so they keep yelling for another review of the play.
Team Red’s play style shifts. Rather than trying to win the game by scoring points, they are now primarily blocking shots from Team Blue and holding the ball whenever possible. They are delaying the game while calling for another review of the perceived foul play. Finally, the officials give in and say they’ll review the footage. Team Red demands to also see the footage and have a vote in the outcome. Not wanting to further delay the game, the officials agree. Members of Team Red accompany the officials to a room to watch the footage on the big screen. Every time the footage gets to the point where the player from Blue shoots and his feet need to be seen, a player from Red jumps in front of the screen blocking the view and yells “See?! He was out of bounds!” The officials try to review the play but Red keeps getting in the way, but eventually they see enough to maintain their ruling, the play was good, the points count.
Team Red returns to the court shouting that they’ve been robbed, that the officials are lying and Blue must be in cahoots with them, and they are ruining the game for all the fans, not just Red Fans, but ALL fans. All true fans.
The game resumes, and Red continues their delay of game tactics. Blue manages to score every now and then despite this, but every point they earn is met with more and more cries of “Illegal!” and “Doesn’t count!” or “We allowed you to get that because fans want to see scoring!” Over time, the Blue fans get quiet, and the fans of neither team in particular start to shift their seats toward Blue’s side, but the Red fans are getting louder and louder. Even as some Red fans begin to quiet down or even switch sides, the remaining fans pick up the slack and then some. The roar of “Foul!” “Illegal!” “Disqualify them!” and more is deafening.
Since the initial foul call, Red has not scored a single point, but have managed to halt Blue almost as much and delay the game in every possible way. The majority of fans are bored, some are leaving the arena while others are paying more attention to their phones than the game. The minority Red fans, however, continue chanting, even as their numbers dwindle.
Eventually, the clock runs out on the game. Blue is tired from trying to play the game. Red is super pumped, running on almost pure adrenaline. They are ready for the next game.
The original version of this was written in *checks notes* 2014 in response to Mitch McConnell and the Republican controlled Senate basically refusing to do anything. A skill they would fully employ to hold a Supreme Court seat open for nine months claiming “the people need to decide”, a position they would show they didn’t hold at all when they filled a seat in barely more than one month, just 8 days before the presidential election in 2020.
I revised it a few times over the next 8 years as the GOP has shown time and time again that they have no interest in nor ability to actually govern this country. They have become a party that supports stripping rights from women and minorities, that is eroding the separation of church and state, nakedly lining the pockets of the wealthy (look, there are Democrats who do this too, but they usually at least do it under the guise of helping the average American out and we do often get things out of the deal), and most recently just outright eliminating democracy altogether in favor of an authoritarian regime who is only really trying to regain power to protect himself from all the crimes he committed and is being brought to justice for.
It is just sad how far team Red has fallen and doubly sad all the people who support them that team Red will happily sacrifice for their own ends. It is depressing how many Americans will vote for a party because that party hates the same people they do, even though that party also hates them, as evidenced by all the things the party wants to destroy that those people rely on.
I keep hoping that the party will implode or explode or something. What this country needs is a good solid four full years of absolute Democratic Party control, where they can pass all the laws they want with overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate while holding the White House. We won’t get that, but maybe, just maybe, team Red will break apart and a more sane party will rise in its place.
Sometimes, when discussing education, a question that comes up will be “What was the most important class you took in college?”
As it pertains to my degree in computer science and my career, the answer has always been and will always be Discrete Math. The professor I had, on the first day, described the class as “math without numbers”. It was all proofs and logic. It helped me immeasurably when it comes to programming and crafting logic for IF statements and loops and such.
When it comes to everything else though, it has to be the Sociology 101 class I took. The first day of class, everyone took their seats, nothing assigned, just people naturally sitting where they wanted to sit. The second day of class, everyone sat in the same seats they’d sat in before, but this time the teacher made everyone switch. He made us invert the rows. People who sat in the back had to sit up front, and people who sat in the front were moved to the back, and he informed us this was now assigned seating, and we’d be expected to stay in these seats for the rest of the semester. Then he asked the class why we thought he was doing that.
I had been sitting in back, and now I was sitting up front. I knew why I sat in the back, so I put up my hand. “People who sit in the back often do so because they don’t want to be called on, they want to avoid attention or participation, and people who sit up front are usually more eager to participate. So by putting the talkative people in back, you are making them involve the entire class, and by putting the hiders in the front, you are forcing them to be involved.” I was right. That’s why he did it. And it worked. More than any class I had in college, that one, by far, had the most participation by all students. Putting the naturally engaged people in the back helped increase the engagement of the people who would normally hang back.
As a semester long project in the class, we had to watch the news. Specifically the “6 o’clock news” and then the 10 or 11pm night broadcast. And we had to take notes. The type of stories, were they national, local, good news, bad news, etc. And how long was spent on each. What he wanted to illustrate to us was that the news wasn’t aimed at actually delivering information, but in controlling emotion. Every day there would be new news, and if there wasn’t they would just rehash a previous piece, but despite what happened in the world, the news always followed the same patterns. A certain number of minutes on local, a certain number of minutes on national, uplifting stories always appeared in the exact same spot in the broadcast, there was always crime. It became so weird to know that after they returned from a particular commercial break they’d have a story of a particular type for a set number of minutes. The news presentation was manufactured, precisely. And it always ended with feel good news – someone doing a good deed, or footage of the new otters at the zoo, or something that was unquestionably upbeat. Never ending on death, always ending on life.
In class we would talk about how in a day there might be three important bad stories that should be on the news, but only one or two of them would be, because to cover all three would throw off the balance. These stories were clearly all more important than some of the fluff and filler used to hit their “good news” segments, but the format was more important than the content.
Now, because I’m old, this was before CNN and the 24 hour news cycle. But not a lot has changed. I still have trouble watching the news because of the things I learned back then. MSNBC will be on as background noise while we do things, and there will be three separate hours of news, hosted by three separate anchors, featuring different sets of guests, but all covering the same news stories, with the same facts, and the same clips and quotes, and even though the guests were different they’ll bring up the same discussion points. It’s eerie.
Anyway, we did cover more than the TV news in that class, and all of it was interesting. The core principle though was just to be critical yet open minded. It probably did more to shape who I am today that any other class I took. It definitely was a pretty big slap in the face to the conservative/libertarian privileged snot who walked in that first day and sat in the back of the class.
Last time I posted here is was February of 2023. On a good note, the steps I took to prevent hacking of my sites appears to have worked as they didn’t get hacked again. On the other hand… I protected it from hacking so that I could essentially do nothing with it. Will that change in 2024? Probably not. But maybe…
I missed posting my usual January 1st post because I was on a boat in the gulf waters just off the shores of Mexico. It was a lovely cruise. The COVID I brought home from it less so. It’s hitting me like a bad cold, so not too bad, but still a pretty shit way to end my vacation before returning to work.
Work. I still like my job. Three years in and I don’t see myself leaving soon. The works is fulfilling, and the pay is good, and the people are nice. Not a whole lot more you could ask for. I mean, you could, I guess, but there are a lot of people who have it a whole lot worse. I went to work on a lot of Tuesdays, and quite a few Thursdays too once they started their “Return To Office” which was basically asking everyone within 50 miles of the office to come in twice a week. Sadly, they only provide lunch on Tuesdays, not Thursdays. But it is nice to occasionally share space with people – though this recent bout of COVID has me questioning that a little.
Reading. I read 36 books in 2023. I would have read a couple more, but slowed down at the end of the year. I read my way though all of Grady Hendrix’s books, Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, some romance, and finished up the Iron Druid series. I really loved the Iron Druid. Especially the way that it wrapped up the story. Just superb. I’ve set my goal for 2024 to 24 books again, just to keep myself from setting a goal too high.
Writing. As far as actual writing goes, pretty shit. But I did so a lot more planning and research on stories I’ve thought up. Character sketches and world rules and bits and bobs. I really do want to focus more on writing this year.
Exercise. Went really well for most of the year. And then we (being my wife and I) just fell off at the end of the year. There was a month where we really burned ourselves out, and then we just didn’t get back on again. In 2024 I’m going to focus more on sustained exercise regimen, with more variation, and a bit of going outside.
More… another year passed without much guitar practice, maybe 2024 will be the year. I will probably try the Making Art Everyday thing again this year, but on my own pace, which will be very achievable since they decided to release the prompt a month at a time instead of weekly or daily.
Looking back at last year’s post I wanted 2023 to be a more “calm” year before the 2024 election cycle shit show, and it absolutely was not that, but also it kind of was. The Biden administration has been pretty “regular”, doing normal government stuff, and as with all the Democrat administrations since Reagan they’ve been good for jobs and the economy and for people in general. Of course, the country still has it’s Red-run hell-holes bent of stripping people of their liberties in the name of protecting “freedom”. And when they GOP retook control of the House at the beginning of last year, they predictably have don’t absolutely nothing but try to generate soundbites and animosity for future elections and fundraising grifts. They don’t have any solutions that actually help people. But they will happily claim credit for any benefits people have seen from the administration they are actively fighting. Anyway, I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant, maybe I’ll do that in another post, but 2024 looks like it is going to be a full year of a fight to save democracy… with one side trying to save it, and other side saying the only way to save it is to destroy it and elect and authoritarian regime.
Well, that was a downer way to end this post. So let’s all promise to vote for saving democracy and also to enjoy some books, some board games, some video games, some outdoor sports, some food, some drinks, and the company of others.
One of the problems that affects every job sector that exists is “replacement”. People move on. People get old. People die. And in order for a job to continue getting done you need new people, young people, to enter the field. And you need to do it sooner rather than later in order to best facilitate the transfer of knowledge. But how do you get young people interested in a career in a necessary field?
That was the question that Johanna Trisha Cinco was asked at the Queen Isabela 2023 pageant: how to get millennials to look at careers in agriculture.
I think it is time for us to stop burdening society to go to jobs that don’t benefit them, instead, we should burden the system to create a more sustainable position for farmers and make farming a good job for people. And once we do that — once the government does its job that’s when millennials will choose to be farmers because by then it is a profession that will feed their family and it is a profession that will give them a sustainable life.
That got me to thinking about what the United States of America needs to do in order to encourage more young people to look into agriculture, or farming, as a career – as a life.
The first thing is connectivity. Those who are classified Millennial and younger generations are a very online group of people. The idea of spending their lives in a place with internet speeds that are closer to the dial-up days is unfathomable. Sure, everyone likes to “turn it off” now and then, and take a break from the world, but they also like to be able to turn it back on and connect. This means that the US needs to invest heavily in broadband technologies in rural areas. I mean, they need to invest in broadband everywhere, but they REALLY need to hit the rural places. They need to string fiber across the Heartland and cover every square inch with 5G wireless and wire connect every home and business with gigabit capable connections.
And this isn’t just for social networks. All of the businesses out there need it. And that leads to…
The US needs to fully embrace, wherever possible, remote working. If there is broadband everywhere then people can work while choosing to live where they want, or where they need. This makes it possible for people to live in small towns and communities, and be able to bring diversity to areas that otherwise might be entirely agriculture based.
And if there is a solid infrastructure for broadband everywhere, that also opens up the possibility for businesses to choose mid-sized or small cities to locate rather than always trying to home themselves in a handful of the largest ones.
The next thing is … well, it’s also connectivity. As much as we fail at mass transit within most cities, we REALLY fail at it for long distance travel. We need more commuter rails that connect smaller cities to bigger ones. We need high speed rail to connect big cities to each other. We need trains to supplement air travel. And we need not to be so reliant on cars for people travel over long distances. I live in Atlanta, and I should be able to catch a train to Augusta, Columbus, Macon, Savannah, and Athens, at least for “local” rail, maybe even to Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Montgomery. And I should be able to take a train to Nashville, Memphis, Charlotte, Charleston, Jackson, New Orleans, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, and even Orlando and Miami by the same or higher speed rail. I should be able to have the option to hop a flight to New York or Los Angeles if I need to be there in a few hours, or book a ticket to ride a train if I’ve got more time, or just want to not fly.
Once you’ve got rails going to these places, it’s not just passenger. You can ship more goods longer distances, and leave trucking for port/depot-to-store work. I’m not saying we should completely abandon highways, that would be dumb. But people should have options, and right now, people really don’t. It’s fly or drive… or to a lot of places in the “flyover states” it’s just drive.
The last thing you need is basically what’s needed in practically every industry: Break up monopolies and large corporations, and create opportunity for true participation in the system for everyone. You need to break up the “family farms” that are really just people who own a lot of land (many times for historically “bad” reasons) and then lease that land to a farm corporation who hires farm workers like any other corporation, paying as little as they can get away with while demanding the most work they can squeeze out of them.
To get young people to choose agriculture as a career you need to remove barriers and create opportunities. The ones who come from those communities see how hard the work is and how disconnected they are and they want to move away. And those who start out in cities or suburbs aren’t enticed by the tales of long, hard work days so separated from the life they know. Even the people who want to work in agriculture often are turned off from it due to the lack of reward they see. The insistence that people will work these jobs without reward because “the job itself is the reward” or “they love it” is the same problem we have with teachers. But addressing educators should be it’s own post.
Anyway, to sum up, what I think we need to make more young people consider agriculture as a career is to expand broadband, trains, and more opportunity to benefit.
A little over two years ago, I was doing a lot of interviewing. It’s what you usually have to do to get a job. One of the things that I’ve always been encouraged to do, but usually didn’t, was ask questions of my own. Normally when recruiters tell you to do this, they mean to make sure you ask about the office culture and management style. But I started surprising my interviews with a question they didn’t expect, much like how they try to catch potential hires off guard with things like “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, or “Tell me something about yourself that we might only learn after working with you for a year.”, or “What would be your spirit animal?” The question I ask is:
How will the work I’ll be doing make the world a better place?
For nine and a half years, I worked at one company. For the first seven and a half, I stayed because I could see, on a daily basis, how the work I was doing made the world a better place. For the last two, after the company was sold to a much larger entity, I was walled off from seeing how my work made the world a better place.
You might be asking, “Where did this guy work?” I worked at a company that made, primarily, an automated answering service for apartment communities.
Now you are asking, “How does that make the world a better place?” You see, as the people interviewing me stammer to answer my surprise question, they’re probably thinking too big. The software I wrote wasn’t feeding the hungry, or spreading world peace, but it was making the work and lives of the people who used it better. As their answering machine, we replaced a physical device with limited storage – we could keep their messages for years. And when residents called in after hours with a maintenance issue, our automated service got their message and then automatically called the people on the schedule. Then we’d conference the two together, recording the call, eliminating many he-said-she-said claims of who was rude to who. We offered tracking of the maintenance problem, so that the manager could be sure work was getting done, and maintenance workers could be sure to get paid. We offered a notification system for the residents, so they could be alerted by phone, email, or text about things going on at their community – pool parties, parking lot paving, etc. And for the office they could send those messages, and get confirmation that they were delivered. And more. And every day I could drop in and listen to our customer service department on calls with our customers, solving problems, training them to use the software, and hear them singing our praises. Every day I got a little glimpse of how the work I was doing was making things better for the people who used the software.
Until the new bosses took over, and did what a lot of companies do: they moved development into it’s own cave, away from everyone else. No more contact with customers, no more contact with customer service – except through tickets entered into the tracking system and filtered through committee by project owners. I lost all visibility to the good my work did, and became completely mired in problems. Every day I was faced with a list of things that were broken and new challenges to solve. In the long run, it was demotivating. “Why should I fix this? Who is going to notice? Who asked for this feature?”
Back to the interviews…
Some of the people I’ve asked this question to have completely and utterly failed. Either because their company is just like the one I left, where developers are in the dark, or because their company doesn’t make the world a better place.
One example, and I won’t name names, was a company that made medical billing software. I asked my question and he had no answer, so I prodded.
“Does the software assist in some way that leads to better care for patients?” “No.” “It doesn’t help the doctors provide better care?” “Not really.” “So, what exactly is the main function of your software?” “Well, it helps doctors use the right codes to maximize billing to insurance companies.” “So that people get the correct treatment?” “No, the treatment is unrelated to the billing. This software just maximizes the billing for insurance.” “So, like a guy comes in sick, and normally the doctor would bill for the office visit.” “Yes, and our software would alert them that they should be billing everything in the visit separately. Did he perform a physical? Did he take temperature? All the things within the visit, so that the office can maximize the billing for the insurance company.” “And they need to do this because it allows them to provide care for uninsured people or something?” “I don’t know about that. We just maximize the billing for the insurance company, so the doctor can collect more.”
I was … unsatisfied … with that answer. So when they offered me the job, I turned it down.
Asking this question was dangerous. I got the feeling that after I did, and they couldn’t answer or just straight up admitted that their work didn’t do anything to make the world better, I was removed from consideration. But where I didn’t care, you might. If an interviewer were willing to drop me because of that question, I probably didn’t want to work there anyway.
So, did I end up getting a job that makes the world a better place? Yes, viewed from a certain angle. We provide software/service that is usually reserved for large enterprise type customers to companies with much smaller footprints much more affordably. And for now, that’s good enough.
First, the annual review of this blog. As usual I began the year with my annual post, and then I let the blog sit fallow for eleven months. Eleven. You might be wondering why after ignoring it for that long did I suddenly unleash a flurry of posts at the end of November and beginning of December, and by “flurry” I mean “six”. Well, someone hacked my website. This isn’t unusual. People find ways to get in back doors and insert files and do random crap all the time. I usually have to clean a file or two off every 5 or 6 months. But this was different. Whoever got in this time deleted a bunch of stuff and their hack made WordPress non-functional, which is how I noticed it. Also, there was porn. A lot of porn. A lot of very unsavory porn. Luckily, I noticed the hack in less than a day. Probably before anyone else because no one reads this blog. And I fixed it. And I finally took the time to install some better monitoring and security. I could do better, but I think I’ve done enough, for now.
Anyway, all that lead me to go digging through my draft posts and I finished six of them up and schedule them. And then walked away, because, you know, that’s how I do.
On the career front, my job continues to be good. I did go into the office on a bunch of Tuesdays when the company caters free lunches, and I rode the bus to do so which just feels so awesome to not drive. But with variants and such, the office still remains a rarity. Maybe this year.
Reading went very well for 2022. I read 24 books. Two a month is really fast for me. I’m looking forward to more reading in the new year. Of the 2022 books, I really enjoyed everything I read, except Luna: New Moon. That one was just a slog and I won’t be reading any more of that series. I finally picked up the Iron Druid series which I’d been recommended by many people over the years, and I am liking it a lot, especially since I know that it ends. I gave up on the Dresden Files series a while back because I felt Ghost Story would have been a perfect ending for the series, but it didn’t end, and what I’ve heard of the later books just makes me more annoyed that it didn’t end when it could have done so very well. Also, the latest in the Well Met series, Well Traveled, of romance books set in and around Renaissance Festivals continues to be a joy to read.
Writing went fairly poorly in 2022. I tried NaNoWriMo again after skipping a couple years, and I did not do well. Maybe 5,000 words if I’m generous. But, I bought a new (old) roll top desk, and I’m getting it to where I feel comfortable at it and making a habit of it. Along with the new desk and the writing and other things, I plunked down a big chunk of change this year and bought a shiny new MacBook Pro as a desktop replacement and put my old PC in storage (I haven’t ditched it just yet as I may need it or find a use for it). I wanted a laptop for a while now, and one beefy enough to do everything I want while also having a good battery life, so that I could do writing anywhere and not have it be on a device I’d have to later transfer the work to. The concept is solid, and I’m getting more in the habit of pulling it out instead of my phone so I can be more “productive” with my leisure time.
Exercise went solidly for the year. I’m still regularly Pelotoning and also lifting the occasional weight and doing stretching/yoga now and then. Peloton released a rowing machine this year, and we decided to get one for Christmas. It arrives in mid January and I expect that to be a nice addition to my regimen. I feel better, and I might be slimmer, but I haven’t lost weight. I try not to let that bother me because I know I’m adding muscle, but I do dislike hovering in the 245 to 250 range. I really would like to get below 200. I assume that would come easier with a better diet, and is something I will work on in 2023.
I never did get much back to practicing guitar, but if I spend more time at the roll top desk, which is in the same room as the music stuff, maybe I’ll play more.
Last year I committed to doing Making Art Everyday, and then a month or so in I bailed because the prompts were just uninspiring. But I plan on trying something like that again, but perhaps with less intensity.
At the end of 2022’s post, I said I expected lockdown to continue in some fashion and that we were looking at a “new normal”. I didn’t want to be right, but I was. With so many insisting that “COVID is over” despite still having like 400+ people die per day in the US from it, I expect hanging out in smaller groups to be the future, with rare big gatherings and the expectation of a two week breather after every one. And masking. Studies have come out not only in favor of masking, but that cold weather can weaken the immune system in your nose, which is why we get a rise in colds and flus in the winter. So, masking and keeping your nose warm can actually prevent you from getting sick. This was driven home succinctly when I did go on a cruise in the summer. About mid-cruise the Facebook group for the cruisers started having posts of people who “definitely don’t have COVID but need some cold medicine”. See, if people went to the ship medical they required a COVID test, and if you tested positive then you got quarantined to your cabin, everything brought to you via room service, and a refund for your trouble. But people didn’t want a refund, they wanted to keep enjoying the cruise, while sick, spreading COVID. So about a third of the ship got COVID, including me.
Anyway, 2023, I want you to be better. That shouldn’t been hard. I’d just like a year of precedented times, devoid of once in a generation/lifetime events. 2024 is going to be a presidential election year shit show, so maybe let us have a calm one before that.
