everything

In reading this article about the damage wrought upon Ghana by the trade in used clothing, I see a larger trend.

As the world becomes richer, places like Ghana are becoming less common. What I mean by that is at some point, there will be no more Ghana's to give all the discarded clothing to.

Richer people in the US and Europe consume clothing at a fast pace, and donate these clothes to charity shops. The charity shops sell 20% of it, and the rest gets baled up and shipped overseas to places like Ghana, the Philippines, etc., where it is sold to locals. Then the remaining 40% or something that is not sold is disposed of, often improperly, because local governments can't actually afford to properly dispose of the waste of much richer societies.

The same thing plays out in recycling, and China deciding to stop playing at the receiving end of this game has thrown a lot of “recycling” efforts into doubt, as it slowly dawns on us that likely none of this stuff was actually getting recycled anyway.

I suppose we can keep going if we build big enough landfills. I am not sure about the economics of landfills, though I do believe that environmentally they aren't too bad. Things like textiles should likely go into landfills quite safely, after all, even moreso than plastics.

But is there a point where we decide as a society that this isn't worth it? I'm not sure. If there is, there has to be a next step.

Actually durable materials? Actual recycling? Moving away from single use plastics and the like? If anything, we're moving towards these things, and the alternatives are often somehow worse, like the case of reusable shopping bags which are often not reused enough times to make their use more environmentally friendly than just using the thin plastic bags in the first place.

I worry that it's more complicated than anyone wants to reckon with, and the simple solutions often actually hurt more than they help.

When I think about that, and consider how, at least in the US, the government has reacted to what are conceptually quite simple problems (transportation, housing, racial equity), I have little hope for our ability to address these more complicated problems with our current government.

I see glimmers of hope in places where there appears to be more competence in government, but this competence also comes with costs. In Europe, competence in addressing human needs comes with economic costs. Maybe they don't matter that much if people are happier, but it is a mixed bag there. In some places, people seem to be happier. In others, it seems they aren't.

In Asia, the competence seems to come with a loss of freedom, like in Singapore, or the exploitation of a neighboring, poorer country (also Singapore, Hong Kong, and other places). In Europe and America, our exploitation of others is more at an arm's length, through trade and the exporting of waste, pollution, and so on. In Asia, exploitation is up close and personal, with domestic helpers and manual laborers from neighboring countries who have second-tier employment rights and no stake in the governance of the country they live in and work within.

I don't have any solutions, just wondering how we progress. Are we stuck at a local maximum, bounded by our own state capacity? It would be a shame if the march of progress was halted by such a simple thing, but the technology of government seems to have stalled quite a while ago.

I think the worst feature of American life that has emerged since I grew up is the tribalism.

When I think about where our family can live and be happy, I think about whether one tribe or another dominates that place. Is that tribe full of people who we can get along with, who will respect and value us? Or are they people who will judge us for our skin color, or where we're from, or who we vote for, or whether we took a vaccine, or, or, or...

I remember politics being quite a blood sport even when I was a kid, but I don't remember this level of tribalism. Yes, people from the country would laugh about city folk, and vice versa. But it seemed to be far less. We would all mostly drive the same cars, and you couldn't always tell people apart based on how they presented themselves.

Now I can sense these tribes everywhere we go. In fact, many more signifiers of tribal membership are much more common. Think about wearing masks during the pandemic. About pronouns.

I don't think this is healthy in any way. We are drawing stark lines around groups of ourselves in ways that are going to be very hard to undo in the future. This causes all manner of social dysfunction.

When I think about where we should live in the US, I think about this, and the more I think about it, the more I just want to leave again. I don't think we fit into either of the two biggest tribes, and tribalism has come to dominate more and more of social life here in the states.

The worst part about it is that within these tribes, it is very difficult to admit mistakes. If you spend all your time defending yourself from the other tribe, you reflexively start to respond to anyone criticizing your tribe as being from the other side, instead of considering their argument. You do this because arguments made from the other tribe are often in bad faith anyway, so there is no point even engaging them on the merits, right?

This can create weird dynamics, where policies that only make sense to some vocal minority get adopted by your tribe, and even though the majority of people within the tribe disagree with those policies and ideas, no one wants to change it because most of the criticism is coming from the other side. The left in the US is most susceptible to this. I'm fairly certain that a huge majority of Biden voters would agree that defunding the police with no alternative plan is a bad idea, yet it has happened in several cities anyway, and remains a talking point of the left.

There is no space for nuance, because the left tribe is so busy defending itself from bad faith arguments from the right tribe. There is no space to consider, what about left leaning countries like Spain which have some of the highest number of police per capita, are very safe, and do not have a rampant problem with police corruption and victimization of ethnic and racial minorities like we do.

The result is that left-leaning cities are increasingly unsafe because police departments are defunded or laws are passed to hamstring their ability to police in the way they are used to, and simultaneously, nothing is being done to change the way policing is done to make it more equitable and safe for all.

There can be no nuance, no experimentation, no compromise, in a tribally divided society like this.

I have been relatively successful in life, for a number of reasons, including getting lucky quite a few times.

But I was not born to it, and I certainly didn't emerge from any step with a golden spoon in my mouth. I went to a “university” that doesn't appear on any rankings (it is now called PennWest but when I went it was Edinboro University of Pennsylvania). My majors, computer science and mathematics, had a combined 5 graduates the year I graduated. Only 1 was from computer science, and he was in his 6th year of attendance, to give you a sense of the place.

When I was in college, I wanted an internship. My sophomore year, I decided to apply to a cool looking National Science Foundation (NSF) internship at a university in Alaska. I also decided to tell a friend of mine about it, who went to a better school. He also applied. You can guess what happened next: he got the internship and went to Alaska, and I stayed in Edinboro working as a dishwasher at the local café.

The next year, I was determined. I applied to 17 NSF internships all across the country, including that same one. I was accepted into 2 of them, but not the one in Alaska. No big deal. I attended one in Alabama and it was awesome. I was hooked. I also realized later, what if I had applied to only 15 internships, and neither of the 2 I had gotten? Was I lucky, or did I make my own luck there?

Success after that became easier. I've found that once you have a big name like NSF on your resumé, future applications tend to go in your favor at a much higher rate. From that point forward, I basically traded up in my career until I reached a pinnacle of sorts, which is a mostly uninteresting story to be quite honest.

Today, the person that shows up to work is not that person that was constantly trading up, climbing, reaching for more and more. Today, I work to live, to be with my family, to have the money to travel with them, and spend time with them. I work to be able to provide a nice place to live for all of us, and to have time to maintain my health and fitness so I can age gracefully.

When I mentor people at work now, I have to caution them not to use me as an example for themselves at a younger age and earlier career stage, at least if they intend to move up in their career. If they had met the me that was climbing, they wouldn't recognize that person as the same person they are talking to today. Now, I'm not applying to 17 of anything. I have what I need, and I'm no longer striving for career success.

It has been tricky, downshifting in my career. I have gone through a period of wondering what to do with myself. I took a full year off to try to detox from the career madness. After a couple years in this new state, I feel a lot more comfortable with myself again, and I have evolved a new identity that doesn't center around work. It is possible. But I will say that career striving for 10+ years does change you, and you will not be able to turn it off like a light switch. It takes time and effort.

There are probably a number of years of striving, and an age at which you are still striving, past which you may not be able to turn it off. I had a lot of fear about this when I was younger, what if I work so hard I am not me any more? What if I work so hard for freedom, that I lose the desire for it? I don't think this is an idle concern, having observed so many people who are still striving at 50, 60 years old, clearly unhappy, clearly unhealthy, and seemingly never having enough.

I'm in a new season of life, and I'm okay with it. What season of life are you in, and are you intentional about it?

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history.

Heller responds,“Yes, but I have something he will never have — ENOUGH.”

I'm not old, but I'm getting old. I'm 38, and as the years go by, and having spent the last 7 of them with children, I feel my age a bit more all the time.

I've always been a fit person, for the most part, but it has been harder and harder to keep that going in the last few years. I've got my excuses, like everyone else, but I'm more interested in fixing it now.

The problem with using my own past experience to guide me, is that I was, once upon a time, a pretty decent athlete. This means that my intuitions about how to restart exercising are completely wrong for my current age. The way I would approach exercise in my 20s now does nothing but accelerate me straight into an injury. I've spent the last 5 years or so learning and relearning this lesson, the hard way.

I've decided to take a completely different approach, which is inspired by Alan Couzens (website, though I think he's more active on Twitter these days), as well as Jerry Teixiera (Twitter), and even a little Peter Attia (not going to link him because I don't endorse most of what he talks about).

Attia has a useful construct of thinking about the person you want to be at age 90 or 100, applying the usual loss of lean mass and Vo2 max that occurs per decade as we age, and working backwards to where you need to be at 40 and 50 to get to those advanced ages while still being able to function. Function here is defined as being able to carry your own groceries in from the house up a flight of stairs, being able to get up off the floor without assistance, and being able to play with your grandkids or great grandkids without strain.

I think this is a very useful framework. I've chosen a couple of people in Alan Couzens and Jerry Teixiera who I think model good ideas and behaviors around the two main dimensions of this kind of readiness for aging, which are muscle mass / strength, and endurance / Vo2 Max (aerobic) capabilities.

Alan's ideas about endurance stem from his work with Ironman triathletes, but as he ages I think he is moderating his views a bit to apply more to us regular joes. It's apparent from the literature that keeping your Vo2 Max score above 50 or so results in a huge decrease in mortality. He advocates that the best way to keep this high is to work on your low end aerobic system, the one worked in zones 1 and 2 in the 5 zone model of aerobic exercise, which allows you to work out more without as much fatigue or injury. He doesn't advocate for only this system being worked, but just that you should mostly work this low zone, and only work the higher zones at a very low ratio. And for people who don't have the requisite fitness yet, maybe not even at all.

This is starkly at odds with the way most people approach fitness, which is to do short, high intensity workouts to maximize their short term adaptations. While these workouts do achieve their goal, they don't build lasting adaptations to our aerobic systems.

I am lucky enough to have a long history of aerobic work, which places me at a 47 Vo2 Max right now without much input for the past few months, and only sporadic work over the last few years. I would like to get that up closer to 55 or so over the next year, which will take a lot of dedicated work.

The other half of the equation is strength and muscle mass, which JT uses bodyweight strength exercises to approach. If you look at the guy, he has a lot of muscle mass, and is very strong, and he largely achieves this through bodyweight exercises, with some use of pull up bars and rings. This appeals to me because I hate going to the gym, and I want to be able to workout anywhere, anytime.

I've gone ahead and purchased his four day workout program, which splits a full body workout into 2 days of upper body, and 2 days of lower body, which ideally is done in a week, though he does say that if you only get to 3 of the 4 every week, it'll still work pretty well. I know I personally struggle a lot with delayed onset muscle soreness, which puts me in a bad mood and makes me not want to exercise at all. Knowing this, I will probably either only do 3 per week, or just do some kind of plan where I only work upper body if that part is not sore, and same for lower body. This might reduce my workouts per week, but I'm not concerned with that metric really.

There are some other elements to fitness like flexibility, but I've come to the belief that flexibility is best built through strength workouts that go to our end ranges anyway, so I will be trying to use the exercises I do for strength to increase my flexibility at the same time.

In any case, I've got to start somewhere. For now, I've started doing daily morning walks where I do some light calisthenics. I've just let my fatigue guide me. If I feel like my body is fresh, I do more than I did the day before. If I feel fatigued, I just do less. Just doing this, I've slowly built up to about 8,000 steps in the morning, and many days about 20-25 stories of vertical climbing (I walk up next to a mountain that I walk up partially if I feel good). In time I will add in running to this, but always keeping my heart rate in the aerobic zone.

As I get older, I've got to accept my own limitations, and only exercise to my personal capacity. It's not easy to realize that I can't just pick up a training program from Lydiard or whoever, and execute it anymore, but at the same time, it's also a more relaxed, natural approach to exercise than I've ever had before. It suits my more contemplative nature as I've mellowed out from the competitive person I was when I was younger.

A dichotomy seems to have arisen in the left vs. right in American politics. On the left, there is an acknowledgement of the history of American police forces as racist institutions, which even today perpetuate racism in our cities by targeting people of color for more arrests, abuse, and even killings. On the right, there is a veneration of police and military as heroes, who should not be constrained by regulations and rules, but allowed to do their heroic work without restriction.

This is a false dichotomy, and it serves to alienate the left from the working class core of the Democratic party, which includes many people of color.

Progressivism, to me, should be about looking for ways to make changes in policies to bring our society towards a better future. What the “defund the police” narrative is suggesting, is that this change should be to discard today's policing model. The question, of course, is to be replaced with what?

Proposals to replace police with social workers are deeply unserious, as anyone who has observed the way policing plays out in America today can attest. Our country is awash with guns, with a huge underclass of people priced out of the housing market, a significant percentage of which have developed substance abuse problems or have mental health issues. These facts make policing more dangerous, not less.

The right side of the political spectrum says that because policing is more dangerous in America, we should give police more and bigger weapons, not restrict their actions, and give them very wide leeway in how we evaluate their work after the fact.

What inevitably happens when people are given immense power, and have very little oversight? It's incredibly foreseeable that some percentage of people in those conditions end up abusing their authority. For police, this translates to many different things. Small things, like police officers putting license plate covers on their private vehicles to avoid tolls and traffic tickets, or parking on the sidewalk or in the bike lane of cities, or giving each other and their families passes on small law violations like traffic citations and other misdemeanors.

It also translates into really, really big things, like extrajudicial assassinations, railroading indigent people into charges that would otherwise not be provable if they were not without resources, and physical and sexual abuse of prisoners and suspects in temporary custody.

Last, it just wastes a lot of money. Overtime rates on police forces have ballooned to such a ridiculous level that many officers make more money in overtime than they do in base salary. Many cases have been documented of overtime levels that are physically impossible to achieve being reported, and how this translates into waste of taxpayer money, and worse policing outcomes.

I think it's a mistake to say that because these things happen, that we should defund the police. Police are necessary for a functioning society. For example, Spain and Portugal have 3x the number of police per capita vs. America, and they are some of the safest countries in the world.

What people actually want is effective policing, without abuse, fraud, and waste. The progressive position should be to restrain the powers of police, provide greater oversight of their work, increase their training and the requirements to hold the job in the first place, while expanding their numbers. Progressives should be pitching changes in the way we police, like removing police from traffic stop work and increasing automated enforcement of traffic violations. Or like having different tiers of police who serve different roles in society, some armed, some not.

These solutions are harder, and more complicated than “defund the police”, and ultimately run into structural issues in American society, like local control and constitutional rights to face your accuser. But just because these problems are more difficult to solve, doesn't mean they aren't worth taking on.

Seeing a recent post by @paul@paulkedrosky.com on the bird site, about something a reply to it called “a lack of activation energy” which characterizes many people today, I got to thinking about myself.

Over the last few years I have felt this lack of activation energy. I've chalked it up to having young kids, but I think it's more than that. After all, even with the time I spend with the kids, and working, I do have extra time. I just use that time to play games, watch TV, listen to an audiobook, or perhaps exercise.

It's been quite a while since I created something, as evidenced by this blog sitting silent since last December.

Have I fallen prey to this as well?

An abundance of entertainment

I often ponder about the difference in the world between when I grew up, and today. I think the main difference is boredom, and the lack of it today. I don't have to be bored today, I have so many options available to me. This lack of boredom in my life removes an important driver of this “activation energy”, which is just the avoidance of boredom!

It's almost like being bored slowly refills your activation energy bar. After all, how long could you really be bored before you get up and do something? When I grew up, TV was boring. Even video games were very limited (although some RPGs did capture me for many, many hours). But, eventually, the entertainment options available to me as a child weren't satisfactory.

At that point, I would be forced to get up and do something. What that was, and whether it was a good thing, and more positive than what kids are doing today, I don't know for sure. I can say it typically took the form of trying to find a friend and explore the outdoors, and when we got older, often get into some form of trouble or another. So perhaps it's a double edged sword for children – when they are young it pushes them to explore. When they're teenagers, boredom often pushed, me at least, to do stupid things I later regretted.

Is creation a muscle?

I'm left wondering how to solve it today, for adult me. It's not very practical to completely remove entertainment sources from my life. I work on my computer, we have several TVs in the house, and my phone is pretty much integral to my daily functioning. I also know from experience, that trying to ban things from my life and expecting that to change anything is a fool's errand.

So I'm going to experiment instead with adding something. If the impetus to create, to act, is a muscle, it stands to reason that I can train it. I can hold myself to creating something, or acting on something, each day, and progressively increasing the difficulty, while building in some recovery time as well. Just like a workout program, basically.

Blogging vs. micro-blogging

I think there's a big difference between writing a blog, such as this one, and a micro-blog post, such as my posts on Mastodon and Twitter. For one thing, micro-blogging emphasizes exactly the wrong motivation – external motivation. Given the fact that even though I have numerous followers on Twitter (and a few on Mastodon), but I get almost nil engagement on my posts, chasing external validation is going to result in failure. It's also a poor form of long term motivation, and opens me up to disappointment from criticism, and audience capture, which is the phenomenon wherein a writer starts to take on the opinions of their audience in order to gain more clout.

Longer form writing is a form of therapy for me. Even now I can feel my mind calming and organizing itself better than when I started this blog. So for me, I am internally motivated to write here, instead of externally motivated. Even if no one reads this (likely), I benefit from this.

A blog also is a better exercise of my mind. To squeeze something down into 140 or 280 characters is to truncate my thinking, remove caveats, and place something down in black and white. It's not a style of thinking that I want to continue ingraining into my habits.

Consuming vs. producing

I don't mind consuming information, in fact my entire life I've been a voracious reader, of articles, books, blogs, micro-blogs, etc. Lately though I have been somewhat captured particularly by micro-blogging. The firehose of information I get about health and fitness, politics, technology, AI, and even some philosophic ideas, has been addicting to me. However, I have to acknowledge that the things I write about the downsides of writing on micro-blogs also apply to the content I am reading on those places.

Writers are pushed towards specific rhetorical devices that enhance engagement. The medium is the message, in a sense. And that medium is quite poor at transmitting fully formed ideas. I need to re-orient myself again towards consuming more longer form writing, where ideas are better fleshed out. I used to use Google Reader for this, perhaps I need to setup something like Feedly again. Twitter and Mastodon should be considered “snacks” and not consumed as full “meals” of information, as I have been tricked into doing in the past.

I love the change that's happening on the web right now, and honestly I probably have Elon Musk to thank for it.

Since Elon bought Twitter, people have been moving to Mastodon. This is great by itself – I have found Mastodon to be a better experience overall than Twitter for several reasons:

• No ads – I decided to kick in $5 a month to my server, but it's not required, so people can use Mastodon completely for free.
• Far less engagement bait – Twitter is full of these idiotic threads about the “top ways to do X” or “How to change you life by Y” and so on. These things gather so much engagement, they begin to dominate your timeline. I spent a lot of time blocking these people on Twitter.
• Far less anger – Twitter, with the algorithm, naturally tends to insert nasty flamewars into your feed. Mastodon has no algorithm, you just see a sequential list of posts from the people you follow. You can still find the high engagement stuff if you look at the #Explore area, but it's totally optional.
• 10x more connection – I have something like 400 followers on Twitter, and when I post, I get on average, probably 0.1 replies or even likes. I've seen this is pretty common too, when I look at people with 500-1000 followers, their content has very little engagement. There is no connection going on. It could be just that it's a new place, but on Mastodon I get engagement on almost every post, with only <100 followers. On top of that, people seem more eager to make actual connections, as human beings, not just as avatars on a social network.

Beyond Mastodon

Mastodon has opened my eyes again to the promise of the web as it existed way back in my college days (2005ish) – the promise of open communities, open sharing of knowledge, connections across divides. Now that the Great Mastodon Migration is happening, the Fediverse feels viable in a way it didn't before.

This blog is a great example of it, using WriteFreely to host my own blog (though you can buy a pretty affordable hosted version at Write.as), which natively syndicates into the Fediverse (so people can follow me on Mastodon or wherever else), publishes an RSS feed, and so on.

I also plan to setup Pixelfed, an Instagram like service. I'm especially excited about this, because I never liked the idea of posting pictures into Instagram, where the content is not really mine, and the format is so restrictive.

Going back to RSS

Today, upon reading that Jason Kottke will start blogging again, it took me back to those old days when I used to use Google Reader to keep up on my favorite blogs.

This was a good time on the web for me – lots of longer form content, consumed at my leisure. A big departure from what I had gotten sucked into in the last year on Twitter, constant soundbites, engagement bait, and anger.

So I went looking around for an RSS reader. I had tried to use Feedly before but the interface just annoys me to no end. I really just want a clean interface like Reader. I found today Stringer, a self hosted RSS reader I can put up on this server (so I can access it on any connected device), which has a super clean interface.

I'm excited to get back to the old web. I hope enough other people are going to do the same.

This is the first post on my first blog on my new WriteFreely instance, which I hope is just the beginning of exploring the fediverse and everything available on it.

I am hosting this blog on a Linode instance that costs $5/mo (check the pricing page for “Nanode 1GB”). If you want to get your own you can use this referral link to get some free credit (and I'll get some too).

I'd say for a software engineer it was pretty simple to get up and running, I used the getting started guide from WriteFreely, along with a few of the guides that Linode publishes to troubleshoot a few issues I had along the way. The getting started guide assumes you can do a few things that I had forgotten how to do.

What I plan to do here

This blog, which I'm calling everything for now, is just going to be my personal blog about whatever, with no specific theme.

A second blog, called urbanism will be, at first, a series of posts about how urbanism is done better in other countries. For example, how density is achieved in Tokyo, or how Paris has been completing an incredible transformation to a cycling-first city, or how a system of formal and informal transit options provides mobility in Manila. I posted about this previously on Mastodon on my account @jasonkotenko@urbanists.social.

If I find there are other themes I want to group together, I will make a new blog. I'm not sure how all this works yet but it's fun to figure it out!