1/30/24 (21:54)
  • Got the concrete pour done, but it was kind of a shit show. The guy who I hired to help with it was clearly not as experienced as he should have been. Ultimately it all falls on me for not figuring that out quickly enough and making changes. It was all made worse by the fact that it was going to rain the next day so I added the minimum recommended accelerator to the mix. I relied on the supplier when I probably should have asked more questions about it. I was trying to avoid the nightmare scenario of a heavy rain ruining the concrete, which was a good idea, but the weather was perfect so I should have called after the first truck and changed the order for the subsequent trucks. I should have taken the initiative and taken over the placement and vibrating away from the concrete guy and done it myself. Even though I have less experience I think it would have turned out better if I was in charge because they were shooting concrete all over the place and not vibrating enough (which left voids in a several areas that then needed to be fixed later). Only need to make those mistakes once. Unfortunately I almost never do more than a couple dozen bags of concrete so I just didn't have the experience and the help I leaned on wasn't good enough to make up for things.
  • The other big regret of the project so far was the hauling of concrete and dirt. The old slab was all over the place and we needed to take it out, including about 6" of dirt underneath. We will be putting in 6" of gravel and then a 5" concrete slab. So, we took out at least that much in existing crap to make way for the new stuff. I did the math several times and tried to take into account the fact that broken concrete takes up more space than solid concrete. Usually it's about 30-40% more space. So, if you had a cubic yard of concrete in a 1x1x1 box and broke that up, it would fill a 1.4 cubic yard container. Less true for dirt. At any rate, the guy I hired (who was charging per load) didn't fill up the trucks as much as he should have and he took out more dirt than he should have and they were terribly inefficient in their loading and the math didn't quite work out so it ended up costing about $5k more than the other guy I was going to use. I should have thought more about the downside potential and the incentive structure. I should have been more insistent to get full trucks and pulled the plug early. I should have gotten him on record for how many loads it would take to finish the job.
  • This project kills a little part of me every day. On the other hand, it also makes me learn in a way that should stick. Overall, this has been a productive month if I'm looking back at the last post here being about passing the rebar inspection.
  • We've gotten a lot of framing done and are basically all done with the difficult stuff there. We have the front wall to redo (which will have to wait until the last of the concrete is poured) and some interior wall framing (also after concrete), but those are relatively easy and my guys can handle it. We have had some union framers help with a lot of the more difficult stuff and that's been super helpful. I think I could have figured out most of it myself, but it would have taken longer and been very frustrating to do all the mental heavy lifting myself.
  • Once we get done with the slab, it will be a lot more stuff that we are more accustomed to so the stress shouldn't be as bad. Still a lot of hard work, but it will ratchet down a bit.
  • We're currently working on siding 3 of the 4 sides of the house (the front is the only side that needs to be pretty and we're going to leave that to the pros). We also have to put the sheathing on the roof (big job). We also need to dig out the front wall foundation so we can get that all formed up.
  • Plumbers and electrician need to do all the underground work (hopefully only a couple weeks).
  • After that I'm hoping we just need to bring in gravel, put down plastic, rebar, and pour concrete. The rebar and plastic is pretty straightforward and we can handle that. The concrete will need at least two guys who know what they're doing and I'm still looking for them...
  • We're spending more on debt servicing than the military now. Democrats like to point out all the things you could theoretically could do by cutting military spending x%, but I haven't heard much about debt payments. Republicans, meanwhile, only care about debt when Democrats are in charge. It's a joke. No one has principles. Luckily we're the tallest midget in the world right now because many of the other big economies are dealing with debt to GDP ratios similar to, or worse than, ours.
  • The cool think about anti-semitism is that it unites the far right and the far left. You have "jews will not replace us" from one end and "from the river to the sea" from the other end. It's a beautiful thing to see such unity.
  • Humans seem to be killing each other less in wars lately than we have in the past. At the same time we are doing this at least in part because we have more nations than we ever have. Every person who isn't a palestinian or jew agrees that a two state solution is best. Yugoslavia is more peaceful now because it's like 6 different countries. So, we get more peaceful by being more separate...at least that's what it looks like to me. At the same time, outside of wars, we tend to kill people like us more than people who are different from us. A black person is more likely to kill a black person than a white person, same for a man or a white person or whatever.
  • This Old House has been one of my favorite shows for about 30 years. I've seen most of the seasons. I recently watched the Atlanta season and it's pretty clearly the worst season to date (out of 44). Bad design, bad homeowners, bad all around.
  • I read the Elon Musk biography and enjoyed it. I don't like the guy in a lot of ways. I don't like the cybertruck. But I appreciate that someone made the cybertruck. I appreciate that he's someone who gets shit done in a society that values that less and less every day. I don't appreciate some of his methods and lack of humanity. But I do value the "question every rule" mantra. I appreciate the "cut too much and then add back" part of his method. I like that he thinks outside the box. During COVID they tried to shut down Tesla, but they were able to find a loophole that allows for outdoor car repair and they exploited that to keep assembly going. His ability to cut through red tape and call people and systems out on their bullshit is much appreciated. It's exhausting trying to get simple things done in this bureaucratic morass of modern society and yet he gets it done. I wish he never went on Twitter. I think the internet kind of broke him. He would have been just a normal autistic-ish jerk, but the internet turned him into a dumb, cruel troll. Someone needs to check his shit, but I doubt that'll happen.
  • A couple months back there was a bit of a debate about whether or not the team that wins the NBA championship should be called "world champions." It's an argument that doesn't seem to go away. I think it's pretty clear for the NFL, NHL (probably?), MLB, and NBA that those leagues attract 95% of the best talent in those sports. They pay the most, provide the most visibility, highest level of competition, etc. If you win the championship in those leagues then you're world champions as far as I'm concerned. If you took all the best American NBA players and put them on a team (olympics or similar) it's probable that they could get better than the best NBA team if they played together long enough, but that's a team that exist for a few months and then goes away. It's a theoretical invention.
  • If college lacrosse was as popular/lucrative as college football I wonder what the conversation would have been around pay. Would they have wanted to pay the white players many years ago? Would they have been upset by the increasing calls for paying college players because it could have been seen as a racist policy? Put another way, it seems that the the people benefiting most from the NIL and college pay for athletes stuff are disproportionately black. If it were the other way around I wonder if there would have been more or less push back around implementing this. I wonder when/if we'll have data around the NIL stuff. I'm curious how much money hot gymnastics girls are getting from only fans or whatever, for example. It would be interesting to see the data on which sports get the most endorsement deals most OF revenue, etc.
  • If you were to google "gender disparity in covid" what do you think you would get? Would you get information on how men are 20-100% more likely to die from COVID? No. Interesting. Also interesting that if you look up a more specific term like "gender disparity in covid death rate" then you will get a very nuanced breakdown on why men die more than women. It's interesting how when information doesn't fit the usual narrative things get all complicated. But when they fit the narrative it's a very simple story of how much one group sticks it to another group. Nice tidy explanation. But if things don't fit then it either doesn't get covered or it's a complicated and nuanced story and they might even blame behavior (instead of just blaming biology and the system). You'll notice that it's very rare that a mainstream rag will say black people or females get the short end of the stick for any reason related to their own behavior and yet when it comes to COVID death rate, that's exactly what they're willing to say. It's revealing that they don't think women or minorities have agency in their own lives. Just leaves floating in the wind unable to fight against the tyranny of the system. Poor victims, always.
  • To be clear, men's actions (like not wearing masks or not social distancing or being in jobs that put them at greater risk or working while the women stayed home [which was complained about quite a bit, yet never in one of those articles will you see them citing it as potentially life-saving]) are probably more to blame than biology and those actions should get blamed for the disproportionate deaths. But it's possible that actions affect outcomes for other groups as well, and I wish they were consistent in that idea.
  • Every individual and group should have a default assumption of some baseline level of agency in their lives. To take that away seems an affront. And yet we have people lining up to be declared a victim everyday. Kinda sad.
  • Every grain of sand on the beach is exactly where it is because of everything that has happened to it throughout the history of time. That grain of sand was once a particle (or something, not even sure) before the big bang. It became star dust and a part of a planet and turned into a rock due to molten lava being cooled or underground pressure. Then it was reduced to a grain of sand and was pushed around by the waves which were moving in a particular way because of the moon and when it was formed and where it is relative to the earth. And then a crab came along and pushed it here or there and then a little kid and some wind and whatever else acted upon it. Amazing to think about it in that way.
  • And yet we don't need to know its entire history to understand it. Do we need to go back 4,000 years to understand jews and palestinians? Maybe we could just look at the grains of sand as they lie now without understanding every wave and crab and geological event of the past 4.5-13.7 billion years.
  • Saw a billboard the other day that warned that difficult experiences can lead to toxic stress in your child.
  • I don't notice the media talking much about the extreme left very often. 146k results on google news vs. 210k results for "extreme right." And 3/10 of the articles on the first page of "far left" were all in reference to a quote from Joe Manchin. I wonder if the extreme left just isn't as active or what.
  • Top 1% of earners are 77x more likely to go to Ivy League than the bottom 20%. Ouch. It's just a rich persons' club at this point. Need to fix it.

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    1/4/24 (20:44)

  • Passed a big inspection today at the new house. Ok to pour concrete for the perimeter footings tomorrow. So, we'll be there early tomorrow to work on that. That's the good news.
  • The bad news is that every correspondence with the power company is a soul sapping exercise. We've been dealing with them for a couple months and so far we've not made any meaningful progress towards actually getting approval for the new electrical meter. It's kinda like Edison discovering 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb. In the end, I guess he got it done and so it's a good story, but it doesn't feel like that now. Most recently he sent a list of approved panels and none of them (I spot checked about 20% of the list) was compatible with the voltage/phase for our service (a somewhat unusual 120/208, 3 phase vs. 120/240, single phase). He did call out one panel specifically so I looked into it...turns out it costs about $15k after tax. For a metal box that holds a meter and a couple breakers. Standard voltage/phase meter panels would be about $500.
  • Also related to the meter upgrade was the news that doing it underground means we have to trench from the meter location to the transformer. It's about 70'. Cost to trench from a guy we have used for this kind of work before was $17,400. So, even though I don't want to do it, I think I'll have to do that work ourselves - if they'll let us.
  • The biggest issue with this build is that it's a commercial build out, which is substantially different from the residential world that I'm accustomed to. As a result, we're getting bent over left and right.
  • I wish I could be more thankful for having passed today's inspection. It was a good thing and not passing it could have been a big pain in the ass. But it's like being on a battlefield and telling the guy next to you to be thankful that the last bullet didn't hit him. Meanwhile another is right behind it threatening his life a second later. So aggravating.
  • One big reason I'm thankful to be pouring concrete tomorrow is that it has been raining lately, but we have 3 days of no rain W-F. A bit of rain on Saturday after the pour, but that shouldn't be a big deal for us. Every time there's a decent rain dirt collapses into our forms and we have to dig it out. It's an unpleasant job working around rebar and being in the mud, trying to dig out fallen mud without disturbing the soil and having more fall in. Today we had an inspection in the morning and part of that is them checking that there isn't loose soil in the forms and that the soil is a few inches clear of the rebar. So, we got there early and worked on getting the muddy soil out of the forms. It was very slow going with small hand shovels. Finally I came up with the brilliant idea of using a shop vac and water hose. I would spray the loose soil down with the water and turn it all into a muddy slurry that was thin enough for the shop vac to suck it all up. Worked great for cleaning up the rebar, digging out the soil a bit more, and cleaning the bottom of the forms to be presentable enough for the inspector. Was honestly probably 10x faster than manual digging. Just had to empty the shop vac once in a while and that was it.
  • The inspectors in Alameda are pretty tough. Oakland is worse so far, but we'll see.
  • Got a couple hikes in last weekend before the end of the year. It was good to get back out there. Hadn't done any hiking since CTC because of the new house.
  • We made a bunch of family goals for the new year and a few of them are hiking related, so hopefully I'll have another good year of hikes to report on.
  • The writer's strike was spun as a win for the writer's, but I'm not so sure. They took a bunch of time off and got basically just a cost of living raise - which didn't even cover the time missed if you do the math. They also got more money if their shows do really well, but the problem there is that evidently there's only one streaming show that has reached the metric they agreed to, so it seems kind of pointless. On the other hand, they got some AI concessions and seem to have been able to stick around for a little bit longer. Treading water is what they got and maybe that's a win in the current landscape.
  • Keep your identity as small as possible so you don't get dragged into thinking of yourself as part of any number of groups.
  • My post from 9/30/07 is interesting to look back on. BART is doing worse than anticipated and daily ridership is down from 323k/day to 164k/day now. A 50% reduction since 2007. LA metro ridership is also down - from 277k/day to 189k/day. So, I was correct that LA's ridership would surpass BART's, but I was wrong that it would double BART's in ten years. The most shocking thing is obviously the fact that ridership is down so much in both locations. I would venture a guess that no expert would have predicted increased mileage, increased stops, increased service, but also decreased ridership. I don't know the pre-COVID numbers (say, 2019), but I assume that had a big impact. Of course, no one wants to talk about the impacts of COVID shut downs because that would be anti-science or whatever. But killing public transit, stunting education for thousands of kids, and shocking the economy certainly have to be considered when weighing the pros/cons of long term shut downs.
  • I ranked AL and GA as 1a and 1b going into the bowl season. After that I had MI, WA, TX, FSU. FSU laid an egg, but most of their starters were out so... MI looked really good against AL - I was surprised. Hopefully WA can represent the PAC-12 well and go out on a positive note.
  • I don't like Jim Harbaugh.
  • Had some trouble with one of my employees recently. He's been with me 4+ years. He's a nice enough guy and is usually pretty reliable as far as showing up on time and not causing issues with the other guys. His problem is that he always has money trouble and can't ever seem to learn how to do things the way he's supposed to. Part of that is the language barrier and part of it is that he's just a dumb guy. I try to be patient with him. It's not his fault he was born with an 80 IQ anymore than it is that I'm dumber than a lot of the people I went to college with. Hopefully they're as patient with me as I am with him. But, at some point, it becomes a liability when he can't do his job and then he starts having more issues with his car and he doesn't communicate anything with me when he doesn't show up to work, etc. I know that firing him is the right business decision. But it hurts from a human standpoint. He's a nice guy with two nice daughters about the age of my daughters. I know he's probably not going to find as good a job as the one I was giving him and I know it's going to be tough for him trying to find a new job and make ends meet. His wife hit him the other day because he's not bringing home the bacon. At the same time, he's been pretty borderline half the time he's worked for me and he's not progressing. I wish I was independently wealthy so I could carry him, but I'm not.
  • Are there extreme leftists? I never hear about them in the media.
  • There should be a high bar for breaking promises, but I also think the idea of promises that last forever doesn't make a lot of sense. An example of this would be giving land owners free use of underground aquifers in the central valley of CA. Just doesn't make sense to give some farmers carte blanche because of an old law.
  • Coleman Hughes had this guy on a while back named Vincent Lloyd. Check out the podcast. Pretty hilarious how clueless he was. It's really amazing the ideas that apparently pass muster in higher education these days.
  • Ignorance is bliss. Cops are so paranoid probably because they see the reality of the dark side of humanity on a daily basis.
  • Learned helplessness is a real thing. They've done a lot of studies that prove this out in various ways. They'll tell one group (the control) to do a physical task and measure the result. They'll tell the other group that the saliva test they performed earlier indicates that they are predisposed to be better (or worse) at the same task. Depending upon what they told the second group, they do better or worse on the same task. Lots of examples of this. And yet we insist on (constantly) telling certain populations that they are oppressed and the system won't allow them to succeed. There has to be a better way to tell the true story of the past without dooming the future because of supposed present conditions.
  • How much of communism and socialism is dedicated to talking about self-improvement and sacrifice so that you can provide more for your fellow man and take less than your neighbor in the name of communal sacrifice? I can't recall much of that in the books I've read. Is that because those philosophies aren't so much about making the human condition better, but, rather, they are about bringing some people down in order to flatten hierarchies? If it's really all about helping out your fellow man then it would seem to me you might want to emphasize ways in which you could improve the total size of the pie, rather than griping about how the pie is split. hmm.
  • I wish we utilized the enormous human capital we have more efficiently. There's so much wasted potential out there. Young men looking for a destiny. Waiting for a war (literal or otherwise) so they can be called to action. Instead, they sit at home improving their gaming skills and gaining weight. Government at its best provides a structure that allows humans to flourish. At its very best it can take the destitute and mold them into something great (WPA, CCC, etc.). Those days are behind us in this country unfortunately. Maybe because we value freedom too much, even though government is bigger than it's ever been (other than WW2) in terms of spending, but also in terms of people employed, number of departments, etc.
  • Bitcoin outperformed the major indices in 2023. Did better than a lot of funds and probably your favorite stock as well. I wish I could say I cashed in on it, but I didn't. I bought some later in the year and have made about 12%, but not the 161% that it's made over the last year.
  • They need to fix factory farming and animal cruelty issues so we can eat with a conscience.


    • 2/28/24 (22:00)

  • busy


    • 3/4/24 (15:48)

  • Meryl was sick for a couple weeks and now Zoe and I got it. Just in the throat/chest so far. We'll see.
  • Bitcoin is up 60% in the last month. Almost at an all-time high after being down a ton in 2022 or whatever it was. Since that it has outperformed the major indices. I didn't have any during the dip and I've never had more than $10-12k in it, but of course I'm wishing I had put everything into it in the last month. Nvidia is getting a lot of buzz because they provide the chips for all the AI build out that is happening now. Nvidia is up about 260% in the last year. BTC is up about 200% in the last year. VTSAX (total stock market index fund) is up 25% in the last year, for reference. So, I have $6k in unrealized gains in BTC right now because I bought it a few months ago. Never sure when to cash out, but I tend to do it too soon.

    • Business is in the shitter lately. Things are slow and I let two guys go this year. Both of them needed to go to make the business better. Hopefully business gets busy and I can find someone good to add to the team at that point. In the meantime, it's just 3 guys plus me. We'll see if we can stay profitable like that or what. Also, everything is skewed because the new house is taking a lot of our energy.

    4/17/24 (21:35)

  • Dumped all my Bitcoin last week and it promptly took a 10% dive afterwards. My BTC trading has been one of the best financial decisions of the last 6 months. I've made about $8k, which is infinity percent more than the business has made this year since we've been losing money working on the new house. I'd laugh if I wasn't so sad about it.
  • Late March the allergies started and they are in full force. We have a way overgrown grass situation (I wouldn't call it a lawn) in both our front and back yards so it's killing me (and Merritt). Haven't had time to weed whack at all. I did the allergy shots for like 2-3 years and they worked pretty well while I was getting them every month, but once I stopped then the effect wore off. It was supposed to help a few years after, but it didn't even last until the next season. Blah.
  • Working on the new place a lot, but a reprieve is in sight. We poured the foundation and (mostly) passed our preliminary framing inspection so we have plumbers in this week and mechanical and electrical starting next week. After that it will be sprinklers. When all those pass then we can do insulation and then drywall. After that it's just finish work and the home stretch. This is the part of the project that I was hoping we would get two 5 months ago, but we basically needed to redo the foundation, had water issues, had a very difficult time framing while holding the building in the air, etc. Very glad that's behind us now.
  • Future hurdles include sprinkler supply from the water main. This will require trenching from the street to the building (100'-ish). This will be expensive and I don't know how expensive yet so that is worrisome. It's also unknown if the inspector will require us to redo the parking lot and striping for handicap spots, etc.
  • Since the place is zoned for live/work it's basically a commercial space. We're having to do a lot of ADA stuff for our wheelchair bound employees who don't (and won't ever) exist. We're literally wasting thousands of dollars for handicapped people who won't ever set foot (er, wheel) on our property. In fact, out of spite, I'm banning handicapable people from coming on our property ever for any reason.
  • Other than those two big things, I don't think we have a ton of unknown/uncertain things ahead of us. At least no known unknowns. There are always the unknown unknowns. We could get to the final inspection and he asks for some obscure piece of paper I've never heard of and it puts a wrench in the whole thing.
  • A couple times he's asked for the engineer (structural and electrical) to provide a letter approving a certain thing that, in my opinion, he should just allow because it's either a) approved by the code or b) approved already in an email from the engineer. But, no, he wants a formal letter. Only issue with that is that the electrical engineer charged us $500 to write a letter. Structural engineer will probably charge about half that. So, every time the inspector wants a letter, I lose hundreds of dollars for no good reason. This is one of those things that drives costs up. People ask why construction costs so much and this is just a small window into how that happens.
  • Speaking of windows, we got ours delivered the other day. We have 7 clerestory windows and 1 huge window in the front. It's about 10' wide and almost 8' tall. Weighs about 400 lbs. Took the 4 of us about 2 hours to install it. Didn't have a lift or any special equpiment...just wood and man power. It barely fit because the dimensions given were ridiculously tight. But the framing was on point so it worked out. When I'm wearing my framer hat and I see measurements in 1/16" increments it rings alarm bells. For a window opening to be 88 9/16" tall means that they're taking things seriously. Normally a window/door opening would be in 1/2" or 1/4" increments. So, we installed that yesterday and it was a good sense of accomplishment. I went back there today to test it out and it doesn't close very well so now I have to deal with that. Hardly ever does something go perfectly to plan without issue.
  • Caitlin Clark's last college game went about like I expected. She's good, but SC was the better team all year. I've heard people say she's going to get a pay cut by going to the WNBA, which I don't get. She wasn't paid by Iowa, she was paid in endorsement money. That money will continue to come in, and may increase. Plus she will get money from the WNBA. I think it stems from a perception that WNBA players don't make much. Which is true by comparison to NBA players. Compared to the average worker, they get paid plenty. Work less than teachers, don't do as important a job, and make more. WNBA loses money so the fact that they make anything is somewhat lucky. When you try to find out how much the WNBA make each year the information you get is total revenue ($200 million). Anyone with a basic knowledge of business understands that revenue doesn't mean profit and that profit is the most important thing. As far as I can tell the WNBA is almost 30 years old and hasn't ever made a profit.
  • The way I think about compensation is that it should be tied to production. If you make a TV show like Seinfeld that makes millions of people laugh for 20 years then you have contributed a lot to society and should be paid more for that. You have a business selling bead covered Kleenex boxes specializing in cat themes? Probably shouldn't make the same amount of money as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. It might be your passion. You might try really hard at it. You might have 50 customers who really like the bead work on their tissue boxes. But, sorry, you shouldn't have as much money as Seinfeld. This has nothing to do with your worth as a human.
  • A more socialist/communist way of thinking about pay is that it should be tied to existence or perceived fairness. You exist as a human? You are entitled to a universal basic income because everyone is worthy of pay by dint of their existence. You are a doctor who treats hair loss and ingrown hairs? You should get the same pay as a hear surgeon. You are a 1st grade teacher? You should get the same pay as a university professor teaching rocket propulsion. Oddly, these people who often are the same people who eschew material things, seem to conflate human value with monetary compensation. They're not the same.
  • So, WNBA players have the same spiritual and human value as NBA players, but they don't provide as much entertainment (at least in the first 26 years of the league) so they don't deserve the same pay.
  • As pointed out before, we are now officially paying more in debt payments than we are in military spending. A certain kind of person likes to point out all the things that could supposedly get done if we just cut military spending. Oddly that same person is saying nothing about the debt payments that are currently dwarfing our military spending. We have to get it under control or we're in trouble. Ray Dalio has pointed out that this historically doesn't end well.
  • We had a meeting a couple months back to address the homelessness and dumping in the neighborhood where are warehouse is. The city administrator was supposed to be there (he joined on a phone call instead), our city councilwoman was there, two beat cops, and a few other city employees were also there. Long story short, it was a waste of time. The girls came to see the fiasco. We went around to comment on what our concerns were, etc. I basically said that bad people are doing to do bad people things, but I was more interested in seeing if any of the city employees could act as the adult in the room and step up to do something about the criminals doing criminal shit. As expected, though, they committed to nothing and failed to even understand the issue. At the end of the meeting one of the city administrator's lackey's said that one of her recommendations was for us (Meryl and I - private citizens) to get better security cameras. I'm not sure what she thought this would accomplish. I had earlier mentioned that I caught a drug deal on camera and submitted it to them, but that they didn't do anything. Maybe it was in reference to that? Honestly, it was a huge waste of time and comical in its utter absurdity. Since the meeting they have continued to "work the process," which is a bureaucrats way of saying they're doing nothing of value.
  • There's a decent sized road (Fruitvale) that goes from Oakland to Alameda that I take fairly frequently. There's a stretch of about 1-2 miles where it's really slow and traffic is always bad. Within that section there is another 1/4 mile section that is right behind HD and next to Alameda that used to be 2 lanes one direction and 1 lane the other direction. It had dedicated turning lanes as well. So, they decided to shrink part of the road to 1 lane each way and add 2 bike lanes and 2 pedestrian lanes on each side of the road. They did this because they think it's green and creates a better, more walkable city, etc. All the usual utopian Europe-loving stuff you usually hear. And I'm sure it works great in cities that were built before cars existed. And maybe every single city in the country should spend tens of billions of dollars it doesn't have to disassemble our roads to eventually do the same thing. But, in the meantime, they took a thoroughfare that probably has a 500:1 ratio of cars to bikes/pedestrians and gave the bikes and pedestrians twice as much bandwidth as the cars. So, now, there is even worse traffic here. And if you build they will come is just a movie slogan, it's not a real thing. The ratio of cars to bikes is still literally 500:1 in my experience. And I will live less than a mile from this stretch of road and I don't mind going on hikes of 1-20+ miles, but I won't probably be ever walking along this road. Do you know why? 1) Because it leads to a bunch of shit I don't want to go to. 2) Because the real danger here isn't the big bad cars, but the homeless thieves who frequent the area. And I say that as both a person who has been hit by a car while riding a bike (twice) and as a person who has recovered one of my worker's truck (minus the tools and car battery of course) from the nearby homeless encampment.
  • One last point - for some reason they have a pedestrian and a bike lane on each side of the street (4 total lanes). The bike lane is asphalt and the pedestrian lane is concrete. As a builder I know this has to increase the complexity and cost of the project and I have to wonder why they made that decision. Is it so that people stay in their lanes? Is it because the civil engineer fancies himself an artist? What's wrong with stamping the asphalt with a pedestrian symbol on one side and bike symbol on the other? You could even color the asphalt (or concrete) to do it that way.
  • I had one of the AI programs quickly figure out how much cities like Memphis, Oakland, and Milwaukee were paying for police officers. Long story short, it appears as though Oakland pays twice as much per officer as other cities I had it look up. Cost of living can only account for part of that. Basically, I think we're just really shitty with our spending and it's led to a city that can't afford basic quality of life.
  • Warriors dynasty is apparently over now. I thought it was over last year, but I guess this is the year that people are saying it's official. They lost to the Kings last night. Green is dead weight. Klay hasn't bee the same since his two injuries. The young guys are inconsistent and underdeveloped. Andrew Wiggins was supposed to be the next guy, but he's constantly taking time off to be with his family and deal with a mysterious peronal matter. He's not that good anyway. The rest of the league has caught up to how they play. So, they need some new firepower ASAP or they need a new strategy. I don't see either happening right away. They had a great run and there's no taking that away from them.


    • 5/31/24 (21:00)

  • not much time lately.


    • 6/29/24 (21:17)

  • 3 updates in a month is pretty good. Just need to get away from netflix and youtube and go on the computer in order to get it done.
  • Tomorrow we'll be celebrating my birthday. 45. Still alive so that's good. Could be only half way done with life if things work out well. Or I could go tomorrow. It would be early, but not totally unusual.
  • Celtics won the finals which was expected. I didn't think they would do it in 5 games, though.
  • Oilers were able to come back after being down 0-3 and pushed Florida to a game 7. Fun, but anti-climactic.
  • Anna Kendrick distracted by her own cleavage. But teenage boys should just exercise self restraint. Sure.
  • More and more stuff coming out that supports the lab leak as a real possibility. Not much talk about it. I guess people are pretty over it and just want to move on. It would be nice to have a commission to sort some of this stuff out and figure out what we should have done. What we knew and when we knew it. What advice was good and what was bad. What "conspiracy theories" were discarded simply because of who might have endorsed them. Etc. Regardless of where it came from, I think a formal post mortem of the entire pandemic would be useful. Did it for 9/11, but I don't think they've done the same for COVID.
  • Movies and stories embody societal lessons. It's one of the reasons they are so important. It's better, easier, and more profound to tell stories like Aesop's fables than to just tell the next generation the best way to act. A good story has, embodied in it, the lessons society has learned. The stories that last are the ones that have the most eternal, important, relevant lessons. For this reason alone we can't simply discard books like the Bible.
  • James Thurber is underrated.
  • Tora Tora Tora is an interesting movie. Joint production between two former adversaries (Japan and US) about the war they engaged in a generation earlier.
  • Just because the effect of a thing benefits a group doesn't mean that that group caused it to be that way. This is a point a lot of conspiracy theorists don't get.
  • Some day my kids will leave the house and I'll be sad.
  • It's said that America is a great place if you're ambitious and smart and want to be an entrepreneur, but it's a bad place to be dumb. I agree with this. It can definitely be ruthless.
  • Speaking of which...the city of Oakland finally did something about the homeless encampment in front of our warehouse. Took 18 months of us hassling them, but they finally took the kids to CPS and got rid of the other people living on the street. Amazing how long it takes. For the record, these are people who were dealing drugs and guns, stealing things, taking up space on public walkways, etc. These aren't just out of work janitors or whatever. 18 months.
  • I was walking around the building the other day and a young man with a dog was walking in the opposite direction and I gave him a little what's up nod and kept walking. After a bit I turned back around towards my truck and he was turning back and saw me so he asked if I worked for the company that owned the building. I said yes (without telling him I owned it). He asked if we had anything to do with getting the homeless people out and I hesitated. He said it was a good thing for the neighborhood and I said yeah we worked on it, but it was a lot of people who were pressuring the city for 18 months. I didn't want to admit to doing it when he first asked because I wasn't sure which way he was going with his questions. He mentioned that it was nice to have the parking back and to have the neighborhood be cleaner again, etc. and thanked me for helping. Hopefully the neighborhood is a bit nicer now.
  • Went to see Nikki Glaser live in April. Don't think I mentioned it. We don't do many shows like that, but it was fun. I wish I went to see more stand up.
  • New house is moving along nicely. We're putting up drywall now. It's all hung and getting mud now. We'll prime the walls in the shop hopefully this week. In the main house hopefully it will be next week. Needs more mud and then they need to sand all the mud. Things can fly once you get the framing up and we've been doing that for the last couple months. Roofing and siding are progressing nicely. We have a metal roof on most of the building and then a torch down on the office. The torch down went on Friday. Those guys are really rough around the edges, but I think I got them to do their best work, which is good enough for the office. I had briefly considered having them do the metal roof, but decided against it and I'm thankful I did. Although the other metal roof guys missed one detail that I wish they had done differently. We'll see how it shakes out over time.
  • Just listen. You're welcome.
  • My new music pipeline is as small as it's ever been, but I still get some good stuff coming in. I should listen to music more often. I've got my podcast addiction under control now. I'm at a sustainable level. I used to have 300 podcasts in the queue and it's currently under 25. I have 85+ books in the queue, though, so that's another problem. I just finished a biography of US Grant that was like 50 hours long so that took a while to get through. Pretty underrated president. This was my second biography of his.
  • What's more important to make the money or determine how it's spent? Women responsible for 70-85% of spending. 123  4
  • Biden/Trump debate this week was a shit show. Biden performed exactly as expected. Trump was better than expected. He was surprisingly restrained (for him). There's no one driving the car here for the Democrats. Maybe we'll get an open primary and it will give us some hope, but right now we're dealing with a guy who isn't fit to be president. I've been calling him "drool cup Joe" for a few years now, so none of this was a surprise. Any reasonable person can see that. That said, I prefer his team/wife/whatever running things over Trump. But we have to be honest about it. I'm honest that it's not Biden running things and I'd still vote for him over Trump. Dean Phillips was my pick, so I'm hoping for an open primary where someone half way decent gets picked.
  • NYT podcast the day after the debate had Astead Herndon (they're political commentator) saying he didn't expect Biden to be so bad. It really makes me wonder what the hell these people are watching. Because if you've been seeing the same stuff I've been seeing for the last 3 years, you can tell he's not all there. To expect him to do any better in a 2 hour debate is just wishful thinking. These left wing commentators are living in a bubble of their own creation and they do it at their peril.
  • Democrats are the party of academics and often pride themselves on their intelligence. In academia, I was always told that you're supposed to be able to present both sides of an argument. In Debate you are given a topic and you're supposed to be able to argue either side because you might know which side you're arguing until the day of the debate. But it seems like the political class of commentators has completely missed the memo on this. To be so clueless about the other side's arguments and set of facts shows a willful ignorance. I don't know if it's arrogance or what. I've grown up expecting Republicans to be the party of willful ignorance, unable to fairly present the other side's arguments. But, these days, it seems like both sides are horrible at it. Each side is living in its own world.
  • At any rate, there seems to be a collective shock from the liberals that Biden wasn't a perfectly functioning adult. It's as if they haven't been watching him at all the last 3 years. So now we have what we have. And at this rate Trump is going to win the election. 95% chance that doesn't lead to a major failure of our country, but do I want to take that kind of chance with something so important?
  • Another thing the NYT podcast missed lately was that they spent two podcasts talking about the Alito flag scandal. It's absurdly comical that they tried to make an issue out of a guy flying a couple flags. One was the American flag upside down. The other was an Appeal to Heaven flag. Neither is very controversial in my opinion. The city of SF flew an Appeal to Heaven flag until the Alito "scandal." I've flown an American flag upside down. It's a distress signal. We're a country in distress. I don't see much of an issue. Then NYT went after him because he said America needs more "godliness" or something like that. What a joke. The fact that they think this is a scandal just shows how far they have strayed from the rest of the country. A lot of the country still believes in a god. I don't. And I don't want god in government. But having someone who believes in god in the Supreme Court doesn't bother me. Further, "godliness" could mean any number of things, many of them I would probably agree with even though I don't believe in god. Further, your favorite recent president (Obama) was a strong believer in god. Had a reverend at his inauguration. Went to church all the time, etc. NYT needs to get a grip.
  • Went to a Giants game at Oracle the other day (free tickets from the lumber yard I shop at a lot). They had a land acknowledgment. This has become a thing in the woke sphere. Basically they say "we want to acknowledge that the land we're on was historically occupied by the Ohlone people for time immemorial." So that's been a thing for a while now and you can feel however you want about it. I'm not going to say anything about it right now, maybe another time. The funny thing in this instance, is that it's literally untrue. European people actually made that land. All of Oracle park is build on landfill. None of that landfill was created by native people. So, maybe get off the high horse long enough to think about things before you say some dumb shit just to kiss ass? I dunno.
  • What's the statute of limitations for apologizing for this stuff?
  • Midnight so I should get some rest.
  • Other than Taylor Swift stuff, Gayle's "abcdefu" is one of the best new songs I've heard in the last few years.

    •  

     

    6/13/24 (18:50)

  • In the last month I've seen more rentable scooters on fire than I have seen being ridden by actual customers.
  • I had chatgpt compile a list of teams in the nfl and mlb that are still in their original home city. 5 MLB teams and 7 NFL teams. Apparently even the Yankees moved from Baltimore. So, the norm is that teams move. It would be interesting to see how many of those teams have moved in the last 40 years or so, but I think you get the point.
  • I hear a lot of women talking about how they want to be have a social impact and give a hand up to the next generation and all that. This is a virtuous thing. However, being altruistic or having a work/life balance or any of those things is in direct contradiction with making as much money as possible. It's precisely because Bezos and Musk are sociopaths that they make so much money and skew the average man's salary so much. You can't be virtuous and have a socially minded business while also being in the .01% of earners. Our system doesn't work that way and yet we act as if it's mysogyny that is the biggest impediment to women being uber rich. To wit.
  • I heard a podcast with Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin and she talked about how Economics is a mostly male subject, but that if you make economics about people then young women students tend to be more interested in it. She was basically getting at the way it's taught and understood and how you could teach it in different ways to appeal to women more. I find this to be true. However, saying essentially this same thing is why James Damore was fired from Google in 2017. 2017 was a tough time for truth telling, I suppose.
  • I often try to think about how the world would be if things were as people claim they are. So, if I told you that living in Oakland was like Mad Max and a post apocalyptic hellscape, then you might imagine what that would actually look like and compare it to reality. You might expect long lines for gas or people fearing things would be stolen frequently or people buying more guns to protect themselves or people having fights and shoot outs in the middle of the street. None of those things are reality so my description would be classified as an exaggeration. What would society look like if it were as truly white supremacist as some people say? There would be legal or de facto segregation. Maybe lacrosse stars would be more important culturally than basketball players. Maybe country and bluegrass would be more relevant than hip-hop. Maybe the education system would put a positive spin on slavery or colonialism. The more big ways in which reality disagrees with the the hypothetical, the larger the exaggeration.
  • Why are bus stops almost always at corners? That's where the stops are - at least if it's at the end of the block rather than the beginning. So that part makes some sense. But sometimes they are at the beginning of the block and it just slows things down. The ideal would be to always have a turnout lane that they could pull into while traffic continues around them. In which case it could be at any point in the block and maybe the corner isn't always the best place. I wonder.
  • Credit card deliquencies are up. Maybe a sign of coming recession? We've been due for a recession for a while. Not sure how this economy is working.
  • The city posted notice in front of the warehouse that they will be cleaning up the illegal encampment. 18 months after I first reported the encampment they might be actually taking action. We'll see how this sorts out.
  • Speaking of which, there was a shooting in front of the warehouse the other day, so that's cool.
  • I guess one of the major contributions to women's studies from Judith Butler is the idea that gender is a performance. It's not tied to biology at all. This is where the gender vs. sex stuff comes from, I gather. Sounds a lot like when black people say to other black people that they're "acting white." What is a drag queen then? He's acting like a woman, but he's not a woman? How is acting like a woman and putting on a woman's face any different from black face? If I wear black face and do stereotypically black things, as drag queens do, but do it in a friendly way (not mockingly as black face often is), then that's all good, right? I guess I'm just retarded because it doesn't make any sense to me.
  • Apparently the city of Oakland has a task force to inspect your trash to make sure you're sorting it correctly because it helps climate change or something. They have trash police, but can't help if your car is stolen. Got it.
  • If you have a policy of explicitly looking for and hiring people based upon their gender or race then would it be any surprise when people question if people actually earned their position? If you know that Harvard lowers the required SAT score for Native Americans then wouldn't it be logical to wonder if a Native American from Harvard had a lower SAT score? This is obviously the issue with affirmative action. We're not supposed to talk about it, but we all know it. Perhaps AA is still worth it, but that's a shitty cost for those people who would have earned it even without AA.

    •  

     

    6/10/24 (16:53)

  • Been out of the habit of writing here, but I need to get back into it. Plenty to write about.
  • Been watching a lot of the NBA playoffs. I had Boston winning it all from the beginning. That prediction is looking good right now. I also had MN facing them in the finals after seeing their first two games against the Nuggets. That turned out to be wrong. They went 2-7 in their last 9 playoff games, which is just nuts to think about.
  • Business has been very busy lately and I've brought on some temporary help as a result.
  • New house is chugging along. Insulation is done. Another inspection this week and then we can do drywall after that. Hopefully no more issues from here on out. This is the stuff we know better so I'm expecting it to be easier as we get towards the end. Biggest drag is that we're still waiting on EBMUD to give us a date for installation of the fire sprinkler main. It's a 4" line directly from the water main and it's going to cost an unknown amount of money. Basically a major pain in the ass with an unknown cost and timeline. We haven't even gotten a rep yet. Fucking horrible.
  • Maybe the most American thing I've seen. Sad.
  • One thing that's encouraging is that it seems like a lot of famous assholes are getting their comeuppance. Trump and P. Diddy are the most recent I can think of. For the record, I've never liked the Diddy or seen him as anything more than a joke. Turns out he's a world class piece of shit also. Maybe getting people killed and beating his girlfriends and paying people (Jonathan Oddi) to have sex with his girlfriend while he watches and all sorts of weird shit. Hopefully the accountability continues.
  • If you identify as a woman does your driving acumen instantly decrease? If you identify as a man do you get 30% more rapey?
  • I saw an advertisement for one of these online mental health companies recently and they advertised the fact that you can pick the race of your therapist. This is progress. This is progress?
  • If you're like me and want to see a multi-cultural society work then reality is pretty depressing. People would rather have a shrink of their same race. Blacks do better when taught by blacks. People self-segregate to be amongst their own race. Girls do better in all girls schools. Etc. The reality seems to be that people, when it comes to major interactions, would rather be with "their own kind." If you're going to a restaurant then the race of the server doesn't matter. If you're going to school or church or to a shrink, then people rather be in a monoculture. Sad.
  • One of the major foundations of modern progressivism is the idea that we should believe individuals. They speak in absolute terms about this and make no mistake about its importance. So, we get slogans like "believe all women" or "your truth" or, with trans identity, the messaging is about trusting the individual when they say they feel like whatever gender. Basically, you're not supposed to doubt what a person says because they know best what they are experiencing. Are there any limitations to this? The most radical progressives I think wouldn't put any limitations on it. But there has to be some limit. Society has to sort that out. In the old paradigm we would require evidence. But sometimes that isn't available, which complicates things like sexual assault. On the other hand, just trusting whatever a person says about everything doesn't seem all that practical either. Some percentage of people are mentally unwell, after all. It will be interesting to see where things land in the next few years.
  • Foster kids graduate college at a 3% rate vs. 11% for the bottom quintile of income earners vs. 35% for the average American. 60% of foster boys end up incarcerated at some point in their life. So, if you're a fostered boy, you're 20x more likely to go to jail than to graduate college. I just googled what percentage of black men graduate college. First hit said "As of 2022, 22% of Black men over the age of 25 had earned a bachelor's degree or higher, according to the Census' American Community Survey." So, there goes the race explanation. And the income explanation doesn't fly either (3% vs. 11%). Assuming these numbers are correct (got them from a Coleman Hughes podcast), it seems as though family might be important.
  • I don't like the word "deserve." To deserve a thing is to be entitled to it. I don't like entitlement. I think the opposite of entitlement is gratitude. We need more gratitude.


    • 7/30/24 (18:08)

  • Been getting crushed lately. Finances are a mess and everything with the new place is annoyingly in limbo and out of my control. Good news is that we'll be finished next week. Finished enough to get the final inspection and see what things we fucked up and will need to fix, anyway.
  • Next year should be a good opportunity to stop spending money. We're pretty much tapped out.
  • Didn't pay a registration fee for the dump truck so I got a big penalty for that. I got the smog check, but didn't pay the registration. I had chat gpt write me a sad letter asking for leniency...we'll see if that works.

    •  

     

    7/21/24 (07:44)

  • Finally updated our Thanksgiving trip from last year. We basically did a loop around Lake Eerie, visited friends, watch lots of sports games, etc. Great trip and I have finally summarized it here. Still need to do our 2022 trip to the south.

    •  

     

    7/19/24 (14:52)

  • Last week has been pretty awful.
  • EBMUD (water provider at new house) is dragging their feet. Without going into all the dumb details...they are a seemingly immovable object. The city probably is too. Still some hope that things will be accepted as-is, but we'll likely have to bend over and take it from behind to the tune of an additional $12k because they think the new house is three separate tenants, instead of one. Like I said, there's an outside chance that the city will agree to amend the permit to save us the money, but I'm not betting on it. I'm not betting on EBMUD being flexible in their interpretations either.
  • City school department isn't making things either. They refuse to believe that we are living in the city until we are occupying the property. So, the girls are classified as transfers which means that they get whatever schools spots are left over and we won't find out where they're going until right before school starts. Last year we went through this process and were accepted straight away....only for them to renege on the offer and only offer a spot to one of the girls...to the worst school in the city. The other girl would be wait-listed. So we just went back to Oakland for one last year. It would be cleaner for Zoe anyway since it was her last year of elementary. Long story short, no definitive answers and a lot of getting jerked around.
  • Yesterday I was driving the dump truck to a job and CHP pulled me over. Long story short, I need a USDOT number and a CA MCPP. These are things I don't know anything about. So, I go to the website and deal with that shit. The application takes an hour, in part because it asks several questions multiple times. Simple information like name and phone number are required to be put into their shitty online form probably 20 times. Government websites continue to be the absolute worst.
  • Then, I finally complete the form and immediately get an email saying that my application is under review and to give some random guy a call. Within a minute of that I get 4 phone calls from different spam companies talking about my application. Then another 3 emails come in. It's amazing. They have some sort of program running that scrapes the public data every second and then automatically calls applicants to try to extract money. This world is just so fucked up.  Every part of this is horrible. As a result of all this, I've wasted hours of my time at this point and just more frustrated about being a business owner. The end result is more frustration and I'll be raising my prices for hauling.
  • I don't use itunes much, but occasionally I will and it's frustrating every time. They constantly ask for my login information. I click on the "x" to close the popup dialog box and then another popup comes back immediately. Then another. Then another. Then it will only bother me every 30 minutes or so after that. Why do I need to login everytime I open the program when I'm just looking at my library and not the apple store? Why do I need to close the popup 3 times instead of 1?
  • Everything in life is designed for maximum aggravation. Nothing is simple. Add it all up and aggravation is off the charts. Each program you download. Each thing you buy. Everything adds up to a total pain in the ass. I need to get rid of as many things as possible.
  • Had a job the other day where we're going to replace some kitchen counters. Two of my guys did the demo and things went as usual. They capped off the water lines under the sink and at the refrigerator. Left the fridge plugged in so it didn't thaw out and cause a problem. Next time someone was there he noticed water all over the floor. Somehow the dishwasher came on. Somehow water went to the dishwasher (even though the valve was turned off). Since the dishwasher was on and it had water, but no drain to dump into, it dumped onto the floor. Probably going to cost me several thousand dollars. So, in addition to capping all the lines, I'm going to have them unplug the dishwasher from now on. This kind of shit just kills me. If the owner had a leftover box of flooring then it wouldn't be so bad, but there's no extra flooring. These flooring companies usually make flooring for a year and then move on to a new thing. So the chances of finding this flooring are basically zero, which means that I will likely be on the hook for replacing flooring on the entire first floor. Insurance? Don't make me laugh. They'll make my life a living hell as a result of this if I file a claim. I won't be able to get insurance next year without paying through the nose or they won't cover the claim or something. Everything is a giant scam. Pretty fucking over everything.
  • Great timing. I just got an email from EBMUD and, sure enough, they said they're not willing to be flexible. So, unless the city building department is willing to change the wording of the permit, we'll be paying $12k for a branch line to accommodate 2 additional meters that will never get installed. Basically 2 extra pieces of pipe for $12k. Probably $60 in materials. But this is exactly how things are supposed to work in our modern, enlighted society.

    •  

     

    7/13/24 (17:47)

  • Lots of shit going on lately, but the big news of the day is the apparent attempted assassination of Trump. I hate this guy and have said I wished he was dead before, but I also quickly corrected myself and said I wish his ideology and movement would die at the ballot box. This is really bad news. He's going to win the election at this point. Biden is pooping his pants and can't put together sentences anymore and somehow that's a surprise to 30% of the country that doesn't pay attention to anything outside of their bubble. So, we have Biden vs. Trump (most likely) again and he's going to win. How did he respond? With a defiant fist pump. His chances of winning at this moment are 90%. Maybe things will change...3 months is a long time in the media cycle, but it's not looking good now.
  • People have their panties all in a bunch about Trump. They're way too invested in him. I'm more concerned about what he does before he's gone. How does he change things and who/what does he pave the way for?
  • This isn't how society is supposed to change, and yet that's how it's always been. Franz Ferdinand, RFK, JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, etc. It's very sad to see people do this and know what the outcome will be (a more divided country), but this is how people are. It's just all very disappointing.


    • 8/19/24 (14:48)

  • In a perfect world we'd be moved in by now, but we're still waiting on a couple trades to wrap things up. Then we have the driveway we're working on as well. EBMUD process still in the works. In the meantime, we're packing things up and doing what we can to move things forward. Packed up all the CDs and DVDs. Books are mostly done. Slowly taking trips to the new place and leaving the boxes in the shop for now.
  • Trying to stay busy with work and make money so we can stop taking money out of savings (which has been decimated in the last 10 months).
  • Back hurts.
  • Back in February one of Zoe's friends got her ears pierced so of course that conversation came up. I've been trying to delay as much of that stuff as possible so I can slowly give in and not have to make any really big concessions. But I'm outnumbered and it's not a huge issue so I relented. But when I found out that it cost the friend's parents over $200 I said fuck that. I said they could get pierced if we did it ourselves. So we got a $10 kit that comes with the earring and needle in one. Zoe was in full freak out mode and chickened out. Merritt was scared, but was okay with it. I did one ear and Meryl did the other. Then Zoe tried again and freaked out again and I finally kinda sprung it on her while she was hemming and hawing. She barely felt it. Part of the deal (not sure how this happened, but it's the kind of thing that happens when you're the only guy in the house) is that they got to pierce my ears as well. Zoe didn't want to hurt me so I only got one ear pierced by Merritt (who didn't mind hurting me and actually seemed to like it). It actually didn't hurt at all. So, I had an earring for about 20 seconds.
  • After Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Dobbs decision, we are now in an odd situation where both sides feel they have lost. The liberals think that women are more controlled than ever and point to the various forms of abortion control as evidence of this. The conservatives will point out that there are more abortions happening now than pre-Dobbs and so (in their mind) more babies are being murdered than ever before. What a great outcome to have just pissed off everyone.
  • There's a tactic that some people use to silence their detractors. Basically they claim victim status and imply, or state, that you would be an awful person if you were to say anything negative about them (justified or not). You can't call women bossy, for example, even if they are being bossy. You can't call black people eloquent because it's apparently a microagression. (That one is weird because it's ostensibly a good thing, and yet it's seen as bad). The same happened recently after Trump was shot. Some of his supporters called out his detractors as being insensitive for going after him in light of what just happened. "This is the kind of rhetoric that raised the temperature of political discourse that got him shot," is how the argument goes. Basically, you can't talk badly about him because then you're part of the problem. It's ridiculous, but it's a tactic employed across the spectrum to silence dissent.
  • There should be a curriculum in school for skepticism. I think it would be much more valuable to society than learning about the mitochondria or other parts of the cell. You get an unsolicited call about a refund from some place you've never heard of, what do you do? A doctor recommends a procedure for an ailment, what kinds of questions should you ask? A mechanic says your Johnson rod needs to be replaced and it will be $3000. What should you do? Yes, trust is important, but you shouldn't trust a mechanic or a doctor without some healthy skepticism. Ask the doctor what the side effects are. What happens if I don't do the procedure? How are you compensated for this procedure vs. the alternative? What are the success rates of this procedure? Would you recommend this to your mother? What if I don't do anything? Goggle "Johnson rod replacement in 2006 Camry" to see what it usually costs. Call around to other shops to see what they charge and if the problem matches the diagnosis. You don't need to know anything about a Johnson rod (which doesn't exist and is just a Seinfeld reference) or esoteric medical procedures. And that's the great part of the curriculum - it should be generalizable to the point that you can apply it to any situation. Ask basic questions. Do basic research on trusted sites. Learn how to discern what a trusted site is, etc. Obviously parents should be teaching this as well, but it's a civic good to teach this alongside voting rights, basic economics, basic government, basic rights you have from the government, etc. If we cared, we'd teach it.
  • Some track highlights this olympics:
  • 3000m men's steeplechase. American got Silver and it was a great race. He took the lead with over 400m to go and it was a ballsy move. The reigning champ ended up winning again, but we got 2nd, so that's pretty great. I think we only have like 4 steeplechase medals in U.S. history.
  • 400m men's was good.
  • Gabby Thomas was great as always. If she ever decides to return my (many) phone calls, I'll be spending time with her in the future.
  • 1500m men's was great. I had no idea that we could get 1st and 3rd. I thought that Hocker or Nuguse had a chance at 3rd, but no better. Great race
  • If a country increases its population by 10% then it averages a 3% increase in its medals. If a country increases it's GDP by 10% then it averages a 7% increase in medals.
  • Overall we didn't do great this year in swimming. Gymnastics was good. Track was better than expected. Both basketball golds were US vs. France and we won both. Women's was on a last second shot that banked in. Pretty crazy.


    • 9/3/24 (20:42)

  • Not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but in June Meryl and I went on a hike that was supposed to be about 21 miles and ended up being 25. So we decided to double back a bit and make it a marathon. Averaged a 20 minute mile pace as well, so I think we did pretty well on that one. We're gearing up for a 30+ mile hike that goes along the Bay Area Ridge Trail. In total that trail is supposedly about 550 miles and we've done several hikes on various parts of it, but this would be 33 miles going through about 4 different cities in the east bay.
  • The new house is dragging along. Still waiting on EBMUD and the city to coordinate and approve everything and then we can get in the queue to actually do the work. Amazing how long all this crap takes. Also waiting for final inside inspection, which was going to happen tomorrow, but the inspector didn't call Meryl back so who knows when it will happen.
  • Girls are in new schools in the new town so that's probably the most important element. Once the inspections are all passed we'll move into the office and then make changes to some things before officially moving into the main house. Way more complicated than it needs to be. Empire State building was completed in 13 months.
  • In the early 1970s men were about 13% more likely to get a 4 year degree than women. This was a big part of the reason they passed Title IX. Today Women are 16% more likely to get a 4 year degree than men. When Title IX was passed only 42% of college students were female. Today 60% of college students are female.
  • I had Perplexity pull together some stats on gender gaps in teaching:
  • "Teachers:
  • Elementary Education: The teaching profession at the elementary level is predominantly female. As of 2024, 87% of elementary school teachers in the United States are female, with only 13% being male. This trend is consistent globally, with women comprising 68% of the teaching force in primary education.
  • Secondary Education: While women still represent a majority, their proportion decreases at higher education levels. In lower secondary education, women make up 58% of the teaching force, and this figure drops to 52% at the upper secondary level. In U.S. high schools, women constitute 59% of the teacher workforce.
  • Administrators:
  • Principals: At the secondary level, there is a notable gender gap in leadership positions. In the U.S., 58% of middle school principals are male, and this increases to 70% for high school principals.
  • Superintendents: The disparity is even more pronounced among school superintendents, where only 24% are women, despite women making up 76% of the overall K-12 educator workforce.
  • Superintendents:
  • In the early 1970s, women held only about 1.3% of superintendent positions. By the early 2000s, this figure had increased to 14%, and as of recent data, women now hold approximately 24% of superintendent roles. This represents a substantial increase, though women remain underrepresented in these top leadership positions compared to their overall presence in the education workforce.
  • Higher Education:
  • In higher education, the representation of women in administrative roles has also improved. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the number of women holding administrative positions. By 2016, women constituted roughly half of all higher education administrators. However, women are still less represented in the most prestigious and higher-paying executive roles.
  • Perception always lags reality. In some cases that perception can lag reality by decades.
  • It's funny how the media covers fundraising. After Trump was found guilty in NY the media widely reported that he raised over $50 million and some stories even claimed that it was mostly small donors. But the reality turned out to be that it was one guy who gave $50 million.
  • When Harris officially became the nominee the story was that she raised a huge amount of money. Of course this was all part of the plan. Big donors withheld money until Biden dropped out (this is part of the reason he finally dropped out), so a lot of the money she raised was money that was going to go to the ticket, but was just being withheld.
  • I like good arguments. One of the arguments against Harris is that the DNC didn't let her run, rather they coronated her. "For a party that cares so much about democracy, it's pretty sad that they don't have a nominee who received a single vote." That's the argument, but the problem is that when you vote for Biden you're actually voting for the Biden/Harris ticket. He drops out, dies, etc. then she's next up. That's the way it works.
  • Trying to listen to new music, but so much of it is total crap. I keep getting drawn to the oldies and classics and just keep mining those. Dusty Springfield, John Prine, Stevie Wonder... exploring more of their catalog or just discovering them for the first time. Seems to be a lot more bang for my buck.
  • Back has been hurting for a couple weeks. Started as just a little discomfort and then it got kinda bad and now it's mostly just a morning thing that goes away as I get warmed up. Our bed is over 10 years old and I guess that's what you can expect from beds these days so we ordered a new one. We'll see.
  • We were hanging out the other night and Merritt was doing some homework where she needed to come up with verbs associated with a given prompt. So, the prompt might be "sports" and she could list a verb like "running" or "swimming." One of the prompts was "old people" and I said "dying" and then someone said "falling." We cracked up for a while coming up with "old people" verbs. Hanging out with my family is my favorite activity. The down side is that it make going to work and sending them to school a real bummer.
  • We've got an epidemic of incompetence in this country and it's been going on for a while. If we keep lowering standards for a variety of reasons (some may even be nice reasons) then we'll have to continue to have bullshit that shouldn't happen crop up here and there. The secret service dropping the ball is a recent example. The excuses given after the assassination attempt were comical. "The roof was pitched" was one of the more funny reasons given. At least the director was finally pressured out, but it shouldn't have gotten that far in the first place.


    • 10/26/24 (21:24)

  • Little more than a week until the election. It will be nice to be done with the everlasting election cycle, if only for a few months.
  • New house is in the final stretch, finally. New ADA accessible driveway. New front fence and sliding gate. Had the final building inspection the other day and he sprung on me that the half bath should be ADA accessible. Never once did he bring this up until the day that I'm trying to get everything signed off. Mind you, this is weeks after saying everything inside was complete and satisfactory. It took a lot of self control to not lose my shit with him. I calmly explained that the plan checker and plans specify that the half bath need not be ADA accessible and he said he thought it needed to be, but that he'd follow up. Thankfully, he found the exception that allowed it to not be ADA accessible, so we're all good. This is exactly the kind of shit that I fear every time he comes to the job. He'll see something he didn't see before and start going down this path of fixing shit that's already been accepted.
  • The last sign offs we need are from the public works department and the fire department. EBMUD (local water company) is hooking up the sprinkler supply line and should finish up Monday. It was quite the journey to get them to finally get this done, but we're almost done with them. After they put in the water supply for the new fire sprinkler, my sprinkler contractor will make the connection from the sidewalk to our building and then the fire department will sign off on that. Theoretically we'll could have all that done this week or next.
  • The long and short of this project is that things take way longer than I think they should. 2 years of this project and more than 50% of that had nothing to do with the physical job of putting the parts together. The moving of tons of concrete and wood and metal and drywall. The skilled labor of doing that all in a way that is resilient, functional, and good looking, takes far less time than getting the papers signed and approved. This isn't the way the world should work and it's an exhausting and soul-sucking process.
  • I just think about people 100-200 years ago imagining putting together buildings and seeing the way we do things with new understandings of building science and new tools and hopefully they would be impressed with some of the things we're doing these days (even though craftsmanship isn't what it once was). But then they would see the amount of time it takes getting all this approved and inspected and insured and planned and how we had to deal with conflicting building and municipal codes and all the other boring and pointless bureaucratic bullshit and I think they would just be shocked by it all.
  • Just a reminder that the Empire State Building was built in 13 months.
  • In a similar vein - what would the founding fathers think of our current country? Perhaps they would be shocked that it's now 50 states, spanning from Puerto Rico and Maine to Alaska and Hawaii and the Northern Mariana Islands. Or maybe they would be shocked it lasted this long with so, relatively, few amendments. Who knows, but it's interesting to think about.
  • When it comes to vaccines we're supposed to trust the experts. When it comes to being assigned a sex at birth, though...not so much. It's almost as if no one actually cares about experts or science - they just use it to win their point.
  • Maybe we should reinstate tests before you can vote. I know it's problematic and all that, but we could have an open book quiz that's like 8 questions long and is the same in the entire country. It would be like a citizenship test that immigrants have to take. In those tests you get like 100 questions and answers ahead of the test and are asked 20 of them on the actual test date, but you don't know which ones it will be. We could make it as easy as possible and have 10 questions, with 8 on the test and you only need to get 4 of them right in order for your vote to count. But maybe it's not such a bad idea to give people the smallest possible hurdle to filter out some of the truly misinformed people. You're allowed to bring in papers to the ballot box, so you could even bring in the answers. So, you might ask what this would even accomplish. Fair point, but I'm willing to bet that a fair number of people would still find a way to get fewer than 4 right because they didn't think about it before going to vote and because they are that ignorant. And, frankly, I don't mind if those people don't vote. Just spitballing here.
  • Some people say they want to get rid of the electoral college (and I may actually agree with that), but one of the worst arguments for this position is when people say that people in CA and NY are irrelevant because the swing states of PA, WI, MI, etc. are the states that actually determine the way the election goes. I'm a big fan of good arguments and this is one of the worst arguments I've heard about a thing. There are a couple reasons this is so annoying and wrong:
  • It assumes that CA and NY (or TX and WV for that matter) are going to go a certain way. It takes for granted those votes. This is the same thinking that people use when saying that Nader "stole" the election from Gore. Those were Nader's votes. Period. You don't own any votes or any people. You don't own any states. You shouldn't take for granted that people will vote a certain way.
  • CA and TX aren't irrelevant just because they are taken for granted. Because a basketball game comes down to the final shot at the end, doesn't mean that the previous 200 points were irrelevant. So why do we apply the same logic to the electoral college? If CA flipped red then it wouldn't be irrelevant all of a sudden.
  • Sometimes I'll see optimism from Harris or some other politician and it seems like their optimism is that 1) they will win and 2) their agenda will make the country better. This seems pretty par for the course. But I think the only real optimism we can have is if we all 1) acknowledge the differences of the other, so if we're a white republican man, then we acknowledge the differences of the black democratic woman and 2) acknowledge the necessity of those differences in balancing out society so that it performs optimally for all (or nearly all). Very few people seem to do this. Van Jones is maybe one that comes to mind because I just saw him on Bill Maher so he's top of mind, but there are some others. But this is the most optimal expression I can conceive for how we would move forward in society. Of course, there are extremes that don't have a place in society, or sometimes people go nutty with ideas that have a grain of truth and importance and those grains should be mined for their essential truth without getting kooky. But, generally, we should seek and appreciate the point of view of someone with a different point of view because it provides societal balance.
  • In Japan people will pay others to quit their job for them. Apparently employers make it very uncomfortable for you to quit - asking lots of questions, giving a big guilt trip, etc., so people just outsource it.
  • One of the things that got a lot of play was the Springfield, OH Haitian immigrants who were supposedly eating cats and dogs. I don't think there's much truth there, but what is true is that the town of 58k now has 12-15k (legal) immigrants thanks to the federal government sending them there. I don't think that happens without consequences.
  • Two weeks ago Meryl and I went to Lone Pine and hiked Mt. Whitney (tallest mount in lower 48 states). It had been on the list for a year or so and we entered the lottery and were approved for a Monday. Drove down Sunday and slept in Lone Pine. Woke up at 2am the next morning and started the hike. Meryl was getting over a bit of a cold so she wasn't 100% and I had had only one challenging hike in the last 5 weeks so I wasn't really in great shape for it. Took us almost 16 hours, but we got it done. We were mostly worried about the possibility of elevation sickness, but we did fine. Stayed well hydrated and didn't push hard. Cactus to Clouds didn't take quite as long, but we pushed harder on that. This one was less of a slog than that one so it was more enjoyable. Great views, as well. Good hike overall and a nice notch in the belt.
  • Got a Fit Bit a while ago and used it for a bit and then forgot about it. Been using it more lately. We went for a 5 mile hike the other day and I got 3 zone (heart rate over 100) minutes out of it. So, a 2 hour walk  with my kids gets me 3 zone minutes. When we poured our driveway concrete I got 472 zone minutes (I earn double zone minutes if my HR is above 125) that day. What I've noticed mostly is that work is stressful and I get a lot of zone minutes then. I also get a lot of steps in during the week. I think my work is pretty decent training for the hikes that we do. Most days at work I get 10k+ steps. 10k steps is kind of the standard for a good amount of activity. 150 zone minutes a week is what's recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services. This last work week I got 23k on Monday, 13k on Tuesday, 14k on Wednesday, 15k on Thursday, 16k on Friday.
  • Gun to my head I'm guessing Harris will win, but I think it's going to be very close and I can definitely see Trump winning. After the assassination attempt, I thought he was going to win. But the Dems changed candidate and the media (and everyone else) moved on from it pretty quickly. She's got a lot of things that aren't great about her. She's not great in the moment. She has a strange way of talking. She has been all over the map on different topic so I'm not sure where she actually stands on a lot of things. But Trump is cancer and we need to move on from him. Hopefully we can move on from him and then address the legitimate concerns of his followers without empowering him.
  • Democrats have really lost the script in the last 10-15 years. They used to be really strong with unions and working class, but that's no longer true. They've lost young men. They've lost whites. They're not getting 90% of blacks anymore. They're not getting 70-80% of latinos anymore. They need to evaluate why that is and adjust. A hint for them - giving free sex change operations to illegal inmates isn't the way. They will point out that that's not a thing that really happens, but they miss the point. The point is that Harris supported it and most of the country thinks that's nutty. Democrats need to be willing to stand up to the nuttiness on their Left.
  • Republicans need to stand up to the nuttiness on the Right.


    • 11/5/24 (16:33)

  • The most important and consequential election in the history of the world is finally upon us. In all seriousness, I think there's about a 5% chance that Trump just completely ruins our institutions and changes the country forever. I voted for Biden last time and Harris this time. Two times in a row that I haven't gone with a 3rd party. Trump has already ruined me.
  • Last time I wrote I thought Harris would win. I now think that Trump will win. So, I guess I'll be right/wrong either way. Why did I change my prediction? Trump seems to be getting the early vote. Trump is doing better than expected among young voters. Trump is getting a lot more support from the celebrity class than before, which signals that it's no longer verboten to express support for him. He's mainstream acceptable(ish) now. Seems like he's having a really good week media-wise.
  • On the other hand, Harris had some good news from pollster Ann Selzer, who thinks that Harris will win IA by 3 points. I have a lot of respect for Selzer and trust her work, so this could be a good sign. There are thoughts that women (particularly older women) will be activated more than previously anticipated and that that could tip the election. I don't know how many old women weren't already going to vote, since they are probably the highest turnout segment of the population already, but who knows. The older you are, the more likely you are to vote. Women vote more than men. Educated vote more than uneducated. Whites vote more than blacks. Rich vote more than poor.
  • There's also the "shy voter" effect. In 2016 that helped explain why Trump won. People were reluctant to admit they liked Trump, but voted for him so the polls didn't capture that. Now people are saying that women are shy about saying they're going to vote against their husband's pick so maybe Harris will exceed expectations. I don't buy that one as much.
  • Trump is actually  the most well vetted candidate in history.
  • I think the most likely outcome is that he wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote. He wins PA and she regrets not picking Shapiro for VP. Everyone cries and says how racist and sexist the country is.
  • I think the least likely outcome is that she wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote. That everyone is happy and says that it proves the country isn't racist and sexist.
  • In other words, I think the most likely thing is that we're still considered racist and sexist after this. I wonder how many black and native american women we would need to elect to not be considered sexist and racist anymore. Or maybe the number is infinity because it doesn't matter who you elect. But if it doesn't matter then that would mean you can't point to all the white men presidents as proof of our racism and sexism.
  • Has anyone ever said they don't like a movie after just watching the trailer or hearing someone else talk about the movie? They do that all the time about other things, though. They see a clip of a politician saying a few dumb things and then they don't like him. People should get more information before making these decisions.
  • Harris once asked Kavanaugh if he could think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body. Kavanaugh hemmed and hawed and tried to get out of it because of the obvious implication, and couldn't think of anything. The answers that I have come up with are: military draft and chemical castrations for sex offenders (allowed in 8 states, I believe). These definitely aren't exactly the same. The chemical castrations are only for sexual offenders and the military draft hasn't happened since Vietnam. But I think everyone forgets about the draft. Ideally we'd make it for men and women so there's more skin in the game, and hopefully never have it again.
  • Anyway, big night. Probably won't know the answer until later in the week. Hopefully not too many shenanigans and hopefully things are peaceful and uneventful. Hopefully she wins big and we move on from the Trump era after he's been defeated twice in a row.
  • Oh, Saturday we (Meryl and I) did our longest hike ever. 33.5 miles. That's over a 50k, so I'm happy with that and don't plan on doing one that long any time soon. Around mile 30 I started hurting. Knees and feet, but mostly my knees. From mile 32-33.5 I was just in a zone of hurt and it was okay, but 30-32 was bad. We were both pretty sore after we got out of the car on our way to pick up dinner. The next day we took it easy and things were actually pretty good. After being in the car for 15 minutes and then getting out...that was the most stiff and sore I've ever been.
  • It was a nice hike from Richmond all the way to Castro Valley. Basically a straight line along the East Bay Ridge Trail. Up and down a lot through a few different microclimates. The total climb was about 5500', which was mostly in the first half or so. A couple short, steep climbs, but all very doable. Started at 420a and ended just before dusk at 630p. Stopped a total of an hour. Some nice views, but a lot of it was actually on the east side of the ridge, so not as many as I expected. It was a good time. We listened to a couple books and talked a lot. It's nice to have alone time. But walking for 14 hours is also kind of a long time to walk. Meryl was dying the last 4 miles, but she gutted it out.
  • On these long walks it's interesting to experience the ups and downs. There will be miles that just fly by and there will be some that are a total slog. Sometimes a weird part of your body will hurt for 30 minutes and then it just gets worked out. Sometimes you'll feel great and that you could do it all day and other times you question your life decisions. At one point I hadn't eaten enough and was getting a little jittery so I had a clif bar and a energy pouch (one of those little goo bags that's basically pure sugar). In 15 minutes I was back to normal. It really puts you in touch with every little thing in your body.
  • I think my lower body is in good shape because I walk a lot for work, but my upper body is just a wreck. I don't think I have good form when lifting anything and my posture isn't great. So I have shoulder and back issues and I think it's generally just not great. My legs can keep going all day, though, so at least I still have that.


    • 12/10/24 (16:52)

  • Doing some studying for electrical contractor's license. Some kinda dumb rules out there. We have too many rules in the world.
  • Powder actuated tools need training. Need to carry your training card with you at all times. Tool must always be within 25' of a worker. Need signage indicating you are using these tools on site.
  • Everything that has a warning on it needs a safety data sheet on site at all times.
  • Monitoring and medical records need to be stored for 30 years.
  • Need to inspect ropes every 30 days and keep records of inspections.
  • Backup alarms on equipment must be audible within 200'.