Most of the time when someone talks about empathy they talk about understanding another person’s emotions, understanding their feelings. They might also focus on “seeing things from someone else’s point of view”. But that’s advanced stuff.
When we think about empathy, we need to begin at the most basic level. And doing so doesn’t require having another person to try to understand. Empathy begins at home. The most basic step of empathy is understanding that your emotions and feelings, your thoughts and experiences, you, all of that is yours and everyone who isn’t you… aren’t you.
The first step of empathy is realizing that just because you feel and think some way doesn’t mean that everyone, or anyone, feels or thinks exactly the same way. But too many people skip this part of empathy. In fact, humans seem to almost always assume that other people think the way they do.
One of the places you can see this is in politics. Someone who is a lousy person, who thinks other people aren’t worth caring about, sees someone else caring about people and they assume that person is faking it, that they are “virtue signaling”. That person must only be pretending to care about others in order to get something, to win an election, or gain support for another reason. Because if the lousy person doesn’t care about others, and they have colleagues who also don’t care about others, then not caring about others must be normal. Nobody really cares about anybody, and anyone displaying otherwise is lying. Conversely, someone who does actually care about issues and is serious about their viewpoints assumes that their opponents must also be serious about the things they do and say. I hope you can see how this is going to lead to problems. On one hand you have a person advocating about education, and their opponent thinks “they don’t care about education, they are just trying to buy votes!” Going another way, you can have a person who is espousing divisive rhetoric just to pander for votes, and their opponent acts as if those views are deeply held beliefs.
Another example of this are places on the internet like 4chan. There you will find a message board of anonymous posters spewing a lot of racist stuff. I knew a person who hung out there and sarcastically posted racist and sexist “jokes” because it was funny and “nobody is serious”. But some of the people there ARE serious. Very serious. And there is no way to know for sure, being that it’s all anonymous. While the person I knew was just doing it “for the lulz” and assumed everyone else was too, there were clearly other people who very much were racists and sexist and assumed they’d found a community of like-minded individuals. It took a couple of shootings and manifestos for him to finally stop participating.
You have to be careful when you start assuming that everyone around you is thinking and feeling the same way you are for the same reasons you are. And that is the first step of empathy. You need to realize that your positions, your feelings, your experiences, they are yours, and other people don’t necessarily have them, they don’t know where you are coming from.
This leads us to Ted Lasso, and quite possibly one of the finest scenes ever filmed.
A system built on the possibility of unlimited profits is guaranteed a foundation of exploitation.
If you own a business and at the end of the year, with all your costs and expenses paid, you are left with a sizable profit, you have failed. Plenty of people will tell you that you are a success, but they are mistaken. They have been deluded by the lure of profiteering and unlimited profits. Because you must understand that these profits are not conjured out of the æther, they come from somewhere.
The two primary sources of “profits” are:
Overcharging your customers
Underpaying your employees
The first one is easy. People blame “the market”. They’ll say that they are charging what the market will bear, but in the repurposed words of Dr. Ian Malcolm “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. If everyone is always pushing the upper boundary of what they can charge, this is part of how you get inflation. And everyone will claim they aren’t responsible because the few cents or dollars they upcharge isn’t enough to be a problem. Of course, if everyone is doing it, the aggregate is that it costs a consumer dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of dollars more to exist. You are extracting the profits from the consumers.
Also under the umbrella of overcharging your customers is producing an inferior product. If you make your goods from subpar materials but charge premium prices, you probably think you are a very smart business person, but you are just someone who doesn’t mind exploiting their customers.
The second is also easy, if you want to see it, but hard if you want to pretend that “cutting costs” is always desirable. While I listed it as “Underpaying your employees” it goes beyond simple low wages. You could be cutting corners on safety, or making people share desks, or not improving your working environments when you have the ability to do so. You could have better pay, better benefits, better working conditions for your employees, but you are choosing not to in order to maximize your profits.
All of this comes down to many people being unable to define “enough”.
When I was young, I figured out that if I could just get $3,000,000 and put it in a high yield savings account or index fund investments, and earn 5% per year on that principal, never touching the principal, I’d be making $150,000 a year, which at the time was more than my parents made. I could live the life my parents had – them, three kids, the occasional pet, a house, a couple of cars, a vacation or two a year – and I could have that without working, just relaxing, enjoying life, reading books, writing, etc. It was an amazing idea. And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why there were all these millionaires still working 40+ hour weeks and not spending time with their families and just hoarding more and more money that they weren’t even spending.
My vision hasn’t changed, though the amounts have because inflation has. I want to be there by now, at age 50, but the math hasn’t mathed yet. Another thing that hasn’t changed is that I still see these multi-millionaires and billionaires who continue to keep hoarding more and more money, though maybe I do understand them a little. Maybe they enjoy the work. Maybe they loathe their families. Maybe they don’t like reading or vacations. Maybe what they like is piles of money. And probably power. And I find that kind of sad.
I hope that one day I can retire. And if I don’t, it’s because I run a wildly successful company where I overpay and over-employ and have really nice offices and great benefits, and I’m making enough money to live a good life on, and not a penny more.
I am someone who seeks to be right. I often don’t contribute to conversations on topics I haven’t spent at least some time doing research on. And in my desire to be right, if someone challenges me, I am open to being wrong. I will listen and evaluate, and if I determine that I am either wrong or just not fully correct, I will gladly adjust my position, because I want to be right.
Contrast that with the abundance of people currently on display in the conservative Right in America who are much more obsessed with being “not wrong”. Being “not wrong” is very different than being right. Being “not wrong” means that you will not accept challenges or corrections, you have your position and you will not be moved because you are “not wrong”. In fact, when presented with any information that contradicts your position you will essentially refuse to hear it, and you will double down on your position because you are “not wrong”. Even if someone were to show you that you aren’t at fault for being wrong, but that you have based your position on false information that someone else provided, on lies that someone else told, you will not move because you are “not wrong”. You have internalized that you are “not wrong”, made it your identity, and any suggestion that you are wrong, for any reason, is seen as a personal attack on you, and you will respond by, at minimum, putting your foot down and insisting that you are “not wrong”. You might even lash out at people, and turn things around, stating that clearly the evidence being shown to you must be fake, that the person saying you are wrong has an agenda, some nefarious purpose for convincing other people that your position is wrong when it is “not wrong”.
This is particularly prevalent in the Trump administration. They make decisions, those decisions turn out to be bad, but since they are “not wrong” they don’t reverse course unless they can frame as “part of the plan all along”. Like tariffs. Trump doesn’t understand how to employ tariffs in a good way, partly because he will not accept a situation that is mutually beneficial. He always has to win. And he defines winning as “paying him money”. You cannot explain any of this to him, because he has his (incorrect) understanding of tariffs and he is “not wrong”. When his tariff announcements are received poorly, he doesn’t listen to any of the criticism or analysis because he is “not wrong”. He knows that tariffs are the solution, he knows it, and he is “not wrong”, so anyone suggesting that tariffs are wrong, bad, or not working, they have to be wrong because he is “not wrong”. And further, how could he be wrong when people keep paying him money to get an exception to his tariffs, that they don’t want because they are bad and will ruin companies, so he must be “not wrong” since it is making him money.
Climate change is fake. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. It no longer matters how many studies there are, or how many scientists support it, or even how many wildfires burn, or if the sea levels rise as the glaciers melt, they are “not wrong”.
Masks do not work. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. Any attempt to require masks is a personal attack. It doesn’t matter if you can show that masks do work.
Vaccines make people sick. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. Decades of history with employing vaccines safely, mountains of supporting evidence. We have all the stats showing how many people used to die from various illnesses, and now people aren’t dying. But all that doesn’t matter.
Trans people are dangerous. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. It doesn’t matter how few trans women are actually in women’s sports. It doesn’t matter if every study on gender affirming care shows that it is at worst harmless and reversible, but more often is greatly beneficial.
Illegal immigrants are invading this country, mass murdering people, and stealing all our stuff. They know this, and they are “not wrong”. And no one will inform them otherwise.
I could go on. Every position they hold they are “not wrong”, and they are willing to burn down the whole system, the entire world, before they would ever admit to possibly, maybe, being mistaken.
We can’t go on like this. We will never survive if we keep periodically putting in charge people who are “not wrong”. We need more people who strive to be right.
We bought this house in January of 2020. That was a hell of a year to move into a new house. Just as we got mostly unpacked and ready to tackle some home improvements things shut down and the supply chain buckled and … well … not much got done.
That was okay though. We changed our minds of some things since then. But bit by bit we’ve been doing a bit of painting and moving something around. My home office set up has changed several times. First it was going to be in the basement. There is an unfinished room we were going to have finished. But back in 2020 we couldn’t get anyone to do the work for us, and we couldn’t find all the supplies we needed to do it ourselves, so it didn’t happen. So I set up my computers in one of the guest rooms. And then I set them up in both of our guest rooms, one for my fun/gaming PC and one for my work computer, because I learned that having the separate from work and home to be important. Then my gaming computer went to the “music room” on the first floor, and I moved my work desk into the closet of the guest room, which was now the “LEGO room”.
The closet was an inspired choice. It’s one of those shallow wide closets, with double doors, not folding or sliding ones, just deep enough to put an IKEA desk in. I put the desk and some shelves, and it works great. The inspired part is that when the work day is done, or on Friday when I sign off for the weekend, I can close the closet doors and work just goes away. Hidden from view, and, as they say, out of sight, out of mind. The mental load that takes off at the end of a day/week is so lovely.
The Issues
Once of the issues with the closet is that it, like most closets, doesn’t have any power outlets. So I had to plug in surge protectors with very long cords into outlets in the main room and then run them along the wall and under the door to be able to plug everything in. Another issue is that the light in that closet sucks.
This brings us to recently, when we finally began to do the work to implement the full vision of the “LEGO room”. We emptied out the room and I migrated my work to the “music room” for the days I’m home (our return-to-office policy puts me there two days a week). We painted, and now are in the process of buying wood to build the French cleat shelving that is going to cover most of the walls to maximize modularity of display for our LEGO sets, mostly buildings. So while this was happening, this was my moment to address the closet’s power problem.
The Project
First, replacing the light. The builders decided that the best light for this closet was one of those under-cabinet lights you usually find in kitchens. In fact, our kitchen had four of the exact same ones, which I replaced months ago with better adjustable lights since the old ones kept flickering. I couldn’t decide on what sort of light I wanted, and with the builder’s choice of light it meant their wasn’t actually a proper light box in the wall or ceiling to install a normal light anyway. Then my wife had an idea: what if I put in an outlet and then we could plug in some pendant lights we have from IKEA, which we could then hang from the ceiling wherever? Genius.
Second, a power outlet for my electronics, which include: a printer, laptop, a monitor, speakers, a GoogleTV connected to the monitor, and my Nintendo Switch. The monitor connects to the laptop, GoogleTV and Switch, and I toggle it to whichever one I need. I only use it as a second screen for the laptop when I have meetings, and the Switch is there because my team at work sometimes “commutes” on WFH days with Mario Kart 8. Luckily, there is an existing plug outside the closet on the same wall. It spends much of it’s time behind the open door, and it where I’d had my surge protector previously. I can jump off that and put a new outlet inside the closet.
Execution
We head off to Lowe’s to buy what I need, and I have to get them to unlock the cage the electrical wire is kept in, because apparently people will steal it for the copper. Wire, four outlet boxes, two outlets, and two cover plates. Just in case you are new to home improvement and electrical work, when you buy outlet boxes there are two kinds: new work and old work. It is literally what it sounds like. New work boxes are for when you have an open wall and can screw directly into the stud at a 90 degree angle. Old work boxes are for when you have an existing wall you are cutting a hole in and either need to screw into the stud at a 45 degree angle, or you won’t have a stud to attach to and need boxes with these little plastic flap things that brace against the drywall itself. Obviously attaching to the stud is preferred, but not alway possible. I bought both kinds of old work boxes because I hadn’t cut into the wall yet and my stud finder isn’t always reliable.
Back at the house I do the light first. The existing wire is in the ceiling, fairly close to the front wall. I make sure the power is off and then I verify the power is off with my tester. Then use the outlet box and the cover plate to judge where to cut the hole and the outlet box as a template to outline, and it happens to be around the existing spot the wire is coming out. When I cut the rectangle of drywall out I discover it is literally perfectly lined along the stud. I do some test fits and adjustments, and then I feed the wire through the box, put the box in the hole, and screw it’s two screws into the stud. I wire up the outlet, finish installing it, put on the cover plate, restore the power and test the sockets. Success! I hang the pendant lights.
Now the other outlet. On the outside I determine which side of the existing outlet the stud is on. On the inside I’ll want to be within the same gap between studs as it but against the other stud. I measure how far from the closet door the existing outlet is on the outside, then I go inside and measure the same distance. Now I know where my gap is. I use my stud finder to find the other stud, then I use my drill and do a test hole about an inch off where I think the stud is just to be just I’m in the gap. I use that pilot hole as a place to inside my blade and then cut toward the stud until the stud stops me. Now I know where the stud is exactly. I use my outlet box again as a template and draw out the hole I need to cut, then I cut it out. Because the outlet on the outside has it’s plate off and the outlet is hanging out, a little light is coming through, and from the inside I am able to verify that I didn’t screw up and I’m definitely in the same gap. From the outside outlet I punch open one of the unused wire access points in its box, then I feed my cable in. I fish it out through my inside hole and then pull enough wire through. With the power off, and verified off with the tester, I attach one end of the wire to the existing outlet in the appropriate spots, then reinstall that outlet in its box and close it up. I then go inside, feed the wire through my new outlet box, put the box in the hole, screw the screws into the stud, and then I wire up the new outlet and install it in the box. I turn the power back on and test both the old existing sockets and the new sockets, just to be sure I didn’t mess things up. All working!
Wrapping Up
Then I clean up all my drywall mess, and put away my tools, and pack up the extra wire (I needed like two feet but couldn’t buy less than fifteen), and put the two unused old work outlet boxes that are for when you can’t connect to studs in a bag with the receipt to return to the store later. With that done, we can move on to the next part, which is building a new desk and putting some better shelves in the closet for the printer and other odds and ends. There are plans for this space as it returns to being my office, among other things.
Throughout all of this, I was fairly confident in my ability to do the work. One, because I’ve done it before. In our old house, we had a bonus room off our garage, and the wall it shared with the garage had no power in the bonus room, so my father and I performed the same “add an outlet off the existing one on the other side of the wall” process, but with him leading as at that time I hadn’t done it before. But also because my father had taught me this sort of stuff, both when I was much younger and later when I lived in the house just three doors down the street from him. Not to mention I’ve always been a “figure out how stuff works” kind of guy.
Not everyone has a dad who can pass on this kind of knowledge, but as long as you are willing to learn, and do a little leg work to ensure you aren’t getting bad info, YouTube videos are a great place to pick up these sorts of skills. There are some good channels that just do thorough guides for simple home improvement and maintenance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone can and should do this. Remember that unfinished room I mentioned? When we finish it I want to add three or four power outlets in there, and I’m not going to just daisy chain them off the one outlet in there. No, I’m going to hire an electrician and probably add a new circuit entirely, because that is not work I’m willing to do, and our plans for that room are bit more intense.
Still, this was a very satisfying project. I can only hope installing the French cleat shelving goes as smoothly.
More accurately, I keep not posting. There are drafts, many drafts. And a lot of them are political, and repetitive, because right now we are back in the Trump-cycle where he does something stupid or crazy or unprecedented or whatever, and the news reacts to it, and the people in power talk but do little else, and then he does something stupid or crazy or unprecedented and we repeat. The only difference between this term and the last is that the blatant open corruption, and the party behind him pretty openly supporting it.
And I keep writing these things, often specific, sometimes general, and by the time I’m done writing I’m just exhausted, and I don’t want to see it anymore, and I don’t post it. Which doesn’t totally make sense, because unposted means I’m the only one who sees it. If I posted then maybe someone might read it, and might respond, though likely not. Maybe that’s why I don’t post, because at least in draft form I have only potential rejection and potential no response, but if I post it will confirm that my efforts don’t matter to anyone.
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.
