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from 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.

 
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from everything

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.

 
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from everything

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.”

 
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from urbanism

“The 84-year-old white man accused of shooting Black teen Ralph Yarl in the head for ringing the wrong doorbell “spent considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume,” one of his relatives told The New York Times…

source

I've been telling everyone who wants to listen about how land use is the source of so many American problems, and I'm once again going to link land use to the rash of killings lately perpetrated by people who have unreasonable fear of someone showing up at their door, or getting close to their car, or pulling into their driveway (three recent incidents of people being shot for no good reason).

Land use determines social cohesion

Suburban and rural populations are less close to their neighbors, just as a geographical fact. They are also farther from their jobs, at least on average, than urban populations.

This means that to get to and from work, they spend more time commuting, and in the US this means sitting in their cars.

More time commuting is less time spent at home, less time available to develop relationships with neighbors, to spend with family. It's less energy available (anyone who has had a long car commute knows how tired you get from it).

What happens when people get home late, already tired? They watch TV. This habit gets ingrained in us during our working careers in America, and can you blame us? Who has energy to go out and hang with the neighbors after 90 minutes of commuting and 8 hours of work?

Compare it to being in a walkable city, and your commute is under 30 minutes each way, and you don't have to drive (so you can listen to an audiobook, read something, listen to music, whatever). Not only are you closer to your neighbors, you have the energy to interact with them on weeknights.

Aging in America is a process of becoming more and more isolated

Unless you pack up and move to Florida or some other dedicated retirement community, people who age in their homes are at unique risk of isolation in America. You are surrounded by people commuting huge distances to work, who have no time or energy to interact with you.

As people age, they get less confident in driving, and eventually lose the ability to drive altogether. Now you are in a place where you can no longer get around by yourself, and are dependent on family or paratransit services to get to important appointments. You are not going out to socialize on a whim very often.

What do you do? You sit inside, and watch TV. Eventually you run out of shows to watch or get bored of them, so you tune into the 24 hour news, because it's always fresh information (seemingly) and it's more exciting.

Sound familiar to the quote at the top of this piece? It's not just old people getting radicalized by Fox News, OAN, and the like, but I'd wager that a very high percentage of older people are getting sucked in by it, because of this dynamic.

There are no easy answers in America

So much of our society is already built around cars. There are no safe, affordable, walkable areas in any city in the US (choose two of those three, basically). There is no transit to get you to a walkable area if you live outside of one.

Changing that is probably the work of several generations, even if people wanted it to happen. The rub? They don't want it. Why don't they want it? Well, the latest culture war battle has been against the 15 minute city. I can only guess that the people who run the Fox News' of the world realized that if people become more urban, their hold on them will decrease. So people have been convinced that living in a place where all your needs are available within 15 minutes of walking or transit, is somehow a bad thing.

The very dynamic that is causing the problem is preventing us from solving the problem, at least in part.

Of course there are many more reasons. The appeal of a big house and car are undeniable. Even people in Europe are getting sucked into the idea. But it's a case of choosing to eat sweets for every meal because they taste good, and ending up with diabetes, but at a societal scale. Even though living closer together would be better for us, we don't want to accept it and figure out how to make it work.

 
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from everything

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.

 
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from everything

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.

 
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