Thinking Out Loud about Measure RTM

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I have lived in a city where public transport was as ubiquitous and as thoughtless as it gets. People owned cars in that city only so they could travel beyond the umbrella of the transport. The bus, the metro, the tram, just part of daily life. Millions of people moved every day at minimal cost.

I now live in a region with transport that aspires to that goal but has absolutely fallen short. Understandably; this is California. The car rules. But I do take the bus to work sometimes, and there are trains to take me farther if I ever had a reason to. The tech companies also have private mass transit.

Apparently BART and CalTrain have never recovered from COVID, and are going to have to seriously cut services without a bailout. I am about to vote on that.

Top line: people should not be required to have a car to have a job. Beyond that, it is cheaper for everyone if there is healthy public transit. Gas prices and time wasted in traffic are the most measurable costs of loss of public transport, but there is also air quality and insurance costs and road repairs (somehow the cost of adding lanes to freeways doesn’t come up in these conversations). Public Transport saves everyone money. Public transport could be completely free, no cost to riders at all, and it would still save everyone money.

Importantly, the tech companies have their own transport systems because current services are inadequate, but many, many well-compensated people ride from towns fifty miles distant, rather than drive. They moved there precisely because there was a BART station. Transit is not only for the poor; it benefits all.

So RTM is almost a no-brainer, except for one thing: it’s funded with a sales tax, the most regressive tax we have. The aforementioned poor will be paying a larger share of their income to keep things alive, subsidizing the wealthier riders. That’s backwards!

Were I King of the Bay Area, I would be adding trains and busses to existing routes and not adding any more lane-miles to the freeways. Those are expensive! I’d focus transit improvements on places where traffic jams occur every day. There are plenty to choose from. And I’d make transit completely free, always, to everyone.

How to pay for it? The obvious target is gasoline, but you can’t just charge every vehicle. The gasoline tax would ideally apply only to commuters who chose to drive, rather than use transport. But when framed that way, the answer is pretty simple: vehicles certified as work trucks for a particular purpose are exempted from the tax at the pump*. José’s landscaping truck does not pay the tax, Karen’s death mobile she parks in two spaces at work pays.

Leave the roads for the people who actually need the roads to move goods and get their tools to a jobsite. Public transport is for the rest of us.

* \* Bureaucratic Nightmare!” people shout. This is the mantra of the corrupt, who don’t want oversight. Work-truck certification would be simple, gas pumps already read cards, and there would be fraud but it would be small next to the net benefit.

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I Don’t Know how I Feel About This

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That’s tropical storm Dolly. The Storm-Naming Folks published even before this storm was named, that Dolly was on the list long before Dolly Parton died. If anyone chose this coincidence, it was Dolly the human.

While both came out of nowhere to be tremendous forces of nature, the comparison stops there. Dolly Parton was sweet, spicy, and never forgot who she was or where she came from. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who did more for regular folk in this country (and many others) than Dolly.

Dolly the storm is expected to dwindle and fade away, something Dolly the human never did.

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Health is Complicated and Shoulders are Poorly Designed

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My shoulder hurts. It’s been hurting for a long while, but lately seems worse.

Flashback: 2023 — a PET scan shows cancer in my shoulder, among other places. The cancer is advanced enough that I will never be rid of it.

Now: I mention my shoulder pain to my cancer team and they set up an MRI to see if the cancer was waking up. There is a central pillar to my day-to-day life: as long as PSA in my body is undetectable, my cancer is dormant. “Well, most of the time,” my doctor said. I have to tell you, friends, that most and all are not the same.

Flashback: 2020 — I spill off my bike at high (for me) speed, and my shoulder takes the worst of it. X-rays ensue, damage is noted.

Most of the time. I had really invested in that number. I am still invested in that number. But confidence in my ability to be alive a couple of years from now is undermined. Which, in retrospect, is obvious. There is no single number that holds all the magic.

Now: I lie in the magic magnetic tube, advised not to take deep breaths, the thought of which makes want to fill my lungs. I have ear protection; it is loud in there. BRRR BUZZZ GRRR. The progression and interposition of the pitches of the loud buzzing noises are governed by mathematics, which makes them seem almost musical. The Laurie Anderson/Brian Eno tube of experience, featuring Philip Glass. It helps me keep still, listening to the sounds as music, mesmerizing, and I began to understand the patterns of the sounds as the scans progressed. Philip Glass.

Flashback: 2021? — I’m on the elliptical and when I’m pulling with my right arm I hear a pop and my shoulder hurts like hell. I’ve had the bicycle crash, but I don’t connect it with this pain. The activity was so normal, so innocuous, that I discount the idea that I might just have done serious damage. I’ll be walking like a t-rex for a bit but things will get better. Eventually. But they never did. In the meantime I have learned to use my left arm to support my right when lifting is required. You wouldn’t even notice me doing it.

Now: My cancer team is all over the MRI results. The good news: no evidence the cancer is causing trouble. In the opinion of the radiologist, my pain is not because of cancer but because my shoulder is (I’m paraphrasing) seriously fucked up.

Full tear of the ligament used to raise my arm. Just not connected anymore. Partial tears all around it. One of the biceps ligaments undetectable, detached and presumed atrophied. Scar tissue becoming a problem, arthritis setting in.

NOT cancer. Not cancer. This new uncertainty injected into my life has not manifested. My shoulder’s fucked up is all. It’s a structural issue, and nothing more.

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AI is Breaking Loose! (and is not AI)

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All the major “AI” companies (the “I” is a lie) have recently fessed up to their latest models busting loose and hacking other companies.

We are NOT comparing this to a biker gang blasting their way out of prison to go and wreak mayhem in an uncontrollable burst of violence. We probably should be. The AI “agent” is lawless and subject to no control, bound not by ethics or morals. That it has no actual goals beyond “solve the given problem” only means that our biker gang thoughtlessly obeys the drug lord. And when I say thoughtlessly, I mean exactly that. There is no thought. There is no intelligence that can measure the effect of an action against a larger context.

Large Language Models, or LLM’s, are being used at terrible expense to create worthless bullshit. So much bullshit. The world is heating up and fresh water is more scarce so someone can create SpongeBob porn, or, worse, “historically accurate” footage of a woman hatched from an egg sired by a mediterranean father who obviously should be blonde.

But you know what a big pattern-matching machine is good at? Writing code. There are whole books about patterns in software design. Software is, fundamentally, not that hard.

Anthropic said it was “human error” that lead to the breakout of their new robot. I use Anthropic’s Claude to assist my coding (I hope to make it to a comfortable retirement, but that’s not a given), and I can tell you for a fact that human error is built into the system.

When I ask my pal Claude to do a task, I am met with many, many prompts asking me for permission to do something, with an explanation like “Contains shell syntax (string) that cannot be statically analyzed.”

Do I carefully evaluate every “Do you want to proceed?” prompt to make sure I am not about to give Claude permission to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War? Fair reader, I do not. I do not look at the string that cannot be statically analyzed and decide if it’s safe. I say “yes” or if it’s available “yes and don’t ask me again about that.” There are just too many of these questions, hundreds a day, and there is no way to assess “This time it’s important!”

So some asshole at Anthropic was answering yes, yes, yes a few dozen times for questions that don’t matter, and then answered yes to one that did, while also running many other tests in other consoles, and answering yes to those others as well.

This “safety” layer asking for permission a thousand times a day is designed in a way that demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of how the human brain works.

I would say yes to “this will amplify the sun and destroy human civilization.” So if that happens, sorry in advance.

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Building Web Services: Go, Rust, or Swift?

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Yep, it’s another technical episode. I promise soon I’ll tell y’all about Felix. He’s s good dog.

But today we’re talking about building services that run in data centers and provide some slice of the information you see when you log into a web site. How those services are made will mostly be felt to you by how fast the site responds.

A lot of this stuff is written Java, or Microsoft’s shameless copy C# (pronounced c-sharp). I was a fan of Java back in the day, but it failed in its core premise “write once, run everywhere” and became instead a not-awful language everyone used on servers. The only reason I can figure this is: It’s harder to make a terrible mistake in java than in C++.

I built a thing in Java that has yet to be reproduced. So I say this to Java with love: You are done. You did not fulfill your original promise, and there are much better languages to be running in servers. The absolute monstrosity that is SpringBoot reinforces that fact.

If you’re going to write a service that runs in the cloud, even PHP is better than Java. (We will not speak further of .NET). But the top three? You’ve got Go, Rust, and Swift. This is an opinionated comparison.

Go: Google’s baby. It is all about a simple syntax for tasks that can run in parallel. ‘go’ do this thing and give us the result when you are done.

Rust: Mozilla’s baby. It is all about memory management. It is uncompromising to the extent that “memory leak”, a bugaboo of services, is impossible. Because of its architecture, it’s a hard target for hackers.

Swift: Apple’s baby. Almost as hard-assed as Rust. With some effort you can apply the memory principles in Rust, but not at the deep compiler level. Running tasks in parallel is an add-on, rather than the effortless Go.

My biased opinion:

I have more than once looked at Go, and asked, “where’s the rest?” Surely I must be missing something. But apparently I’m not. There’s just not that much here. A well-considered language should encourage good patterns. Go has interface, at least, and now has picked up generics, but remains skimpy. “Simpler is better”, the Goog declares, and if that’s your bag of beans, then maybe Go is for you. But… no optionals?

Rust. Hardcore shit. They ask you to tune your thoughts to a different frequency and you will know the rewards. I’m not saying they’re wrong. If you will indulge me…

A Brief Aside — Memory. When a program runs, it puts data into memory in a place everyone who is interested can find it.

  • C/C++ requires that in your code, every place you allocate memory, you must have a matching process to free it up again. This is the single thing that made Java popular — it lifted that burden from the programmer.
  • Go has a garbage collector: each item in memory keeps a list of everyone who is interested in it. When no one is interested, the garbage collector comes along and releases that memory for use by anyone else. This means that everything stops for a very brief time for the garbage collector to do its work.
  • Swift also counts the number of things interested in a chunk of information, but when that count goes to zero it immediately frees the memory. This means whenever something goes out of scope checks must be made.
  • Rust, however, makes sure that only one thing owns that chunk of memory, and when that thing is done, the chunk is gone. Fast, simple, precise. But it means you have to code in a particular way. Who owns this? will eventually become second nature, but it’s a climb to get there.

So that’s Rust. It’s pretty cool. Big names are using Rust in critical services — including the people who invented Go.

That leaves Swift. Generally dismissed as the language to make iPhone apps, it is fundamentally grounded in the belief that a programming language should make it as difficult as possible to make mistakes. Common errors that cost the world billions of dollars a year simply won’t compile in Swift.

But Swift is bigger (in scope, not popularity) than the others. It has the semantics for running many things at once, and if they aren’t as native to Swift and Rust as they are to Go, they still work just fine. It also has deep semantics for inheritance and composition (strongly favoring composition), along with generics, closures, and of course type-safety. Even JavaScript has a type-safe version.

Mmm… delicious type-safe closures.

I’ve been writing Web services for a while now, and I choose Swift. Rust might be incrementally faster, but it might not; it depends on the specific application. Swift compiles up to be fast. Go just doesn’t have the constructs I need to make a good server. Maybe for simple CRUD it’s all right, but I wouldn’t want to write serious business logic using it. Too much not there.

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You Think You’re Tough? Meet Jodi

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While there is Yet Another Dog that I have not even mentioned here, I have more to say about our Tiny Tyrant. I didn’t post any photos before, but how about this one:

Getting this x-ray was not simple. We gave her sedatives the night before and the day of, and she shrugged them off. “Is that the best you got?” she asked over her fifth martini, a forgotten cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. “Because I call that breakfast.” Under the heavy drugs that followed she was sure she could drive home.

She is already a legend at the vet’s office.

But levity aside, above you are looking at Jodi’s insides, and you do not have to stare too long to see that all is not well. On the R side (your L), her entire hip and femur are kerploded. On her left, you can see how the bone fits into its socket. On the right, the bone is crushed and also the socket is destroyed. That little cup-shaped structure on the right below the break is part of the healthy socked on the left. It’s a mess in there! Farther down the leg, you can see how things are crooked on that side where they are straight on the other. Although over on the left side it looks like the wing of the pelvis is messed up.

This has to hurt. It probably happened in 2019, the result of getting hit by a car. The people who (probably) loved her then recovered her from the pound and, most likely, simply could not afford the medical care she needed. They probably couldn’t even afford to discover what care that was.

Animal welfare follows human welfare.

Having seen the x-ray, I’ve been alert to times she uses her left leg over her right. But watching her, you would never know that she is supported by muscle rather than bone. It’s going to take more than a shattered leg and a destroyed pelvis to stop this girl, and I love her for it.

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Welcome, Jodi Foster

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I have been traveling. It was planned that when I got home that we would be taking in a dog with serious anger and fear issues. But while I was away, The Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas started watching another little dog.

The girl has a rap sheet that goes back to 2014; she was a young adult the first time she was brought in. Now she was in the pokey again, and she was not doing well, snapping at the staff, defending herself and living in fear. The shelter scheduled her death.

Official Sweetie understood instantly that she was not a bad dog, not even a biting dog. She was simply a dog that could not cope with living in a shelter, a dog that had been through some shit and just needed a little space. Official Sweetie worked with other rescues to find help, but there was never a question: Jodi would not die there.

And now she lives here.

I was nervous, coming home from my travels, that the new dog would see me as an intruder in her new, most excellent life. Not so! Jodi was curious about me and not the least defensive, and hours later she was curled up next to me on the couch. I let her be, mostly. I didn’t want to push it.

Last night, on the couch again, I dared to give her skricthins and lovins, and she was all for it. We’re going to be all right.

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JSON Sucks

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“Oh, Hooray!” I hear you all shout. “I’ve waited so long to hear Jerry to rant once more about esoteric technical standards!” I’m back, baby! You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do. (occasionally)

If perhaps you were not looking forward to a technical rant, may I suggest you spend a little time at We Rate Dogs instead. They are awesome, and work hard to make life better for people and animals.

Back to the rant…

How to move information between systems that know nothing about each other is a challenge. The two sides have to agree on how that data is reduced to ones and zeroes to be pumped over a wire, and how the ones and zeroes are interpreted on the other end. In the biz, we call this a transport. It’s a way to move information from one place to another. As long as both sides understand the transport, all is well.

But “all is well” is relative. Some transports are more flexible and precise (and simply faster to encode and decode) than others.

The first serious contender in this space was XML. XML is really complicated, but allows sophisticated layering of the rules for encoding and decoding. But for everyday shifting of data XML is overkill. When you just want to move information between friends, XML imposes a lot of unnecessary overhead. JSON provided a simpler answer.

JSON exists because every web browser supports JavaScript, so a JavaScript-compatible transport made perfect sense. The “JS” in JSON is “JavaScript”.

When the kids were inventing JSON, they could have defined ways to pass arbitrary data as bytes, but they did not. They wanted a simple transport that Javascript could easily decode. JavaScript can’t handle really big numbers, so there was no reason to have JSON solve that. The transport was designed for a very narrow problem: getting data to browser apps written in JavaScript. The JSON builders could have looked past the immediate problem to make a more general transport, but that would have encumbered their own, very focussed standard.

But, like so many standards to fix a specific problem, that standard was embraced unquestioningly as a solution for many cases it was never designed for.

This is why web app development is twenty years behind modern software practices. There is a problem, and the first shitty solution to come along is embraced, and the whole “this is how things work” is promoted so loudly that any better solution is lost in the noise.

But JSON can’t handle really big numbers. JSON can’t handle image data in a compact format. JSON has to turn UUIDs from 16 bytes to a huge-ass string. JSON, actually, is not very good. And there are MUCH faster and more flexible ways to send your info over the wire. JSON is only useful for passing data to and from a browser.

And yet!

You know what makes no sense at all? Using JSON to pass data between cloud services. If there is not a browser on either end of the pipe, JSON is the wrong answer. And yet today I’m dealing with GraphQL, which could have chosen any transport at all to talk to its various parts, and chose JSON.

This is the lingering malignancy of past bad decisions. It never even occurred to the people who made GraphQL to use any transport other than JSON. They knew its flaws, but never considered an alternative. In fact, they never considered that there might BE alternatives; they wrote their specification directly around JSON.

So today I am trying to make my services become subgraphs, and I am grinding my teeth as my tight, well-considered data types are stretched and warped to fit JSON. Bigger, slower, and not type-safe. No modern system should use JSON. But here we are.

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Ferrari’s New Electric is Too Subtle for its Own Good

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Ferrari has entered the electric market. It isn’t going so well. This car was designed by Jony Ive, the guy who designed iPhones and iMacs and even Apple’s new corporate headquarters.

When you read about the design, about the craftily integrated front and rear wings, about the airflow under the car, you appreciate the attention to every tiny detail that went into the design. But there’s this:

The wind tunnel has its way. If you look you can see the gap in front of the windscreen that air passes through underneath the front wing. The construct on the rear is similar but subtler. The elegant integration of aerodynamics is artistically unimpeachable. But, this is a Ferrari. We are not here for subtlety or even elegance (Dino excluded). This car is ridiculously fast, but not as fast as other electric supercars. Notably this is the first Ferrari to seat five.

The super-low-profile tires you see above are part of the answer to the biggest question for electric performance cars: How do you make a car with a thousand pounds of batteries turn? Tesla, in this space, is including on their upcoming supercar a SpaceX version with actual fucking (electrically powered) rockets to improve cornering. They will not make a measurable difference.

Honestly, were I the boss of a supercar company, I would certainly embrace aerodynamics in my electric entry, but I would embrace my heritage more, and put fat soft tires on the road and have the four wheel motors tuned to distribute the thrust for cornering (maybe the Ferrari does that already, but I haven’t heard about it). While I find many supercars absurdly macho — angular and fiddly — there is a middle ground out there.

Ferrari fans are not terribly impressed, and I believe it goes beyond performance numbers or styling that goes out of its way to be like a jelly bean. There’s something a roaring V12 engine directly behind your head can do that no electric motor will duplicate. It’s loud! Loud in the way an arena-rock concert is loud, invigorating and unnerving and isolating.

And for the male Ferrari drivers (which is almost all of them), it makes their testicles vibrate. And that is what they are paying the big bucks for.

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A Big Weekend

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Three days, three big things.

First! Billy was Adopted!

Second, Stripes was adopted!

These two events have filled the house with a joy we were sorely needing. Both adopting families have kids and other dogs and fell in love right away. I am sure those awesome pups have long and happy lives ahead of them, and will bring joy to their families.

Those great pups securely in their new homes means another will be coming here pretty soon. Which makes this even more exciting

Breakin’ on through to the other side!

The flooring has been a slog, but this weekend we navigated the portal between the two halves of our home. That floor is so damn beautiful I just stop to stare at it sometimes. This transition was tricky; based on math that started in the back of the closet in the master bedroom, and the absolute refusal of walls to be straight, there were some pretty subtle angle cuts. But those are done now, and we are off to the races on a section of floor without fiddly bits and surprises. Choosing the right plank to put in next is now the biggest challenge. It’s so encouraging.

I hope your weekend was as good as mine.

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Self-Driving Cars: They’re Doing it Wrong

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I can’t wait for self-driving cars. I would like to spend a long retirement never having to drive. Don’t get me wrong, I love driving. I love hitting the right gear and working the clutch perfectly at the apex of a tightening uphill curve. That’s the thrill we live for.

But that’s when I choose to drive, not when I have to drive. I HATE driving to work. It is stupid and inefficient, a grind surrounded by people who believe ten seconds of their life is worth exacerbating the problem for everyone. There are enough of those that they, too, are delayed. The thing is, it is absolutely possible for our roads to handle that traffic without slowdowns. You just have to get rid of the drivers.

Cars moving on the freeway and on city streets would be massively more efficient if they simply cooperated. This is more than the simple “zipper” concept that seems to be beyond the understanding of half our population. Way more.

If all the cars talk to each other, they all hit the brakes together when there’s a problem. Cars in the fast lane could literally hook together, bumper to bumper, a train with good aerodynamics that can shed and add cars without ever slowing down.

On city streets, the story is similar. If cars work together, traffic is fundamentally changed. Traffic signals are obsolete. Those four-lane-each-way urban arteries can become two lanes each way, and the recovered space given to bicycles, pedestrians, and sidewalk cafés.

This is not where the car tech bros are taking us. They are spending massive resources to try to train cars to be autonomous vehicles. It is easy to believe that those cars would suck less than human drivers — at least they won’t be looking at their phones — but right there is a way to fundamentally change how cars work. The current thought is to make cars that make better decisions. That’s all right, but limiting those decisions to individual cars misses the whole point.

Cars should not have to make decisions based only on their own sensors. Any attempt to make robot cars work that way is blind to the opportunity. Cars can share data! Cars can be guided by a central control that can optimize traffic flow!

As far as I know, ALL robot cars are built simply to be better autonomous drivers. Autonomy is antithetical to the goal.

In a well-designed system, every car would simply be following instructions. They would have sensors that could put on the brakes if there was a pedestrian in the road, and when those brakes were hit the whole city would know about it and adjust.

Car hive-mind seems obvious, but no one is building it (as far as I know). Why not?

Alphabet, Tesla, the rest of them, sell cars, not infrastructure. But what we need is infrastructure before we start setting the cars loose. We need those guys to find a way for cars to talk to each other. Or better yet for there to be a central system that guides all the cars.

There’s no money in that for the car guys. Making the next transportation system is not in the interest of the billionaires. But it’s the right answer.

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The California Governor Trap

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Here in California, we have a pretty fucked-up primary system when it comes to selecting a new Governor. The current primary system was shoved through during the last days of the Schwarzenegger administration — our last Republican Governor — theoretically to protect the little guy. It was really an exploitation of the easily-predicted situation we now face.

In this system, the top two vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party, face off in the election.

This time around, there are two truly horrible Republican candidates, and maybe seven Democrats of varying levels of viability. Roughly 40% of voters will give the horrible people roughly 20% each, with the fucking Fox News guy ahead of the fucking murderous county sheriff.

It is critical that a non-Republican gets more primary votes than the murderous cop. It would seem in a state like this that it has to happen. But if you divide the remaining 60% of votes evenly, no one comes close.

So do I vote for my favorite, or do I rally around someone who is already popular to make sure the election is not between two Republicans?

The rally-around candidates are a guy who worked for Biden, and an (apparently) reformed billionaire. Both are wealthy men with skeletons. The insider was not so good at his insider job and the billionaire did not get rich without costing others. I could vote for one of them, hoping to avoid the worst outcome. Either would be better than the Republican offerings.

Or I could vote for the person who would be the best governor of California. There is one woman still in the race, who has been criticized for her temperament. In a male candidate, the same behavior would be described as “assertive”. Her biggest problem with the one-time billionaire tax on the ballot is that it is only one-time, and bypasses the people who are only worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s a good start for me, but I have to study more before I decide.

But if I vote for my fave (whoever that turns out to be), will I help to install a Republican in Sacramento?

The Democratic Party is apparently composed of idiots. The whole reason you HAVE a party is to prevent this sort of thing. And while I think the Democrats are being absolute fucking idiots by ignoring their progressive roots (this is why we have the president we do), a party should AT LEAST be able to avoid this nonsense.

The Democratic Party is stupid and badly run; their only saving grace is “Hey, at least we are not actively evil… most of the time. You know, except for…” They are absolutely evil less than the Republicans, but “less evil” is not what I want to be voting for. This is exactly why people stayed home in the last presidential election and we have that motherfucker as president.

To pull my own ramblings back around to this election, I feel I need to circle up and make sure Fox News doesn’t score another major political office. But that kills me, because it just feeds the “less evil” narrative, which has been the downfall of the resistance. I want to vote for “good”!

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Tax the Rich – There, I said It

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New York real estate baron Steve Roth, who unlike Donald Trump is a competent New York developer, said that the phrase “Tax the rich” was hate speech comparable to “disgusting racial slurs”.

Tax the rich.

This piece of shit is apparently able to completely ignore how the victims of those disgusting racial slurs made him rich. Steve Roth is not smarter or better than any of those people.

Tax the rich.

Slavery and worker exploitation that approaches slavery is what the American moneyed class is built on. The rich in this country did not make their money by being smart or clever, they became rich on the suffering of others.

Tax the rich.

The new rich have changed to a paradigm of wealth accumulation by sucking the life out of ordinary people. They are less racist, I suppose, because they will fuck over anybody.

Tax the rich.

Meanwhile, worker productivity continues to skyrocket, but the workers do not benefit. The benefit is concentrated among a handful of rich assholes.

Tax them. Tax the rich. Take the value created by the people actually doing the work and distribute it, first to those people, and secondarily to everyone else.

They did not earn their wealth. Tax them.

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How to Restore Global Faith in the United States

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It used to be that nations could forge agreements with the United States and at least have some idea that the principles of the agreement would be honored. Businesses could make plans accordingly. With our current president, all that is out the window. You think you have a deal, but then his McDonalds is delivered in a Volvo and poof! the deal is toast.

It is simply not possible to make a deal with the guys currently in charge. You think you have an agreement, then our fearless leader has a soft poop and the deal is off. The rest of the world is coming to terms with this: Try to ignore crazy nuclear grandpa and hope he goes away. They will never again trust a nation that would elect someone like that.

But all is not lost. Here is how to regain the trust of the world:

  1. Orange Julius Cesar, in chains, a gift to Iran. While there are many deserving candidates for this gift, recency bias and impending economic disaster push Iran to the front of the line.
  2. Pete Hegseth to Central America in chains. I do not know which countries have the best claims for his blowing up fishing boats for propaganda points, so I left this general. Pete Hegseth is a war criminal.
  3. Elon Musk to Africa in chains. Again, a general area, but as he came from there he needs to explain to the people there why he killed thousands if not millions by cutting off US Aid.
  4. RFKjr to Wuhan in chains. The shit that guy’s got going on, he should actually be used to advance medical science.
  5. All the insiders making millions off “prediction markets” using inside information about our capricious wars, in chains before US courts. They are ripping off their own citizenry, and are making strategic decisions about foreign powers and actual goddam wars with a profit motive. Strip them, and their families, of every asset.

I realize I have not properly addressed Europe’s newfound deep distrust. Maybe some of the generals and admirals carrying out Hegseth’s agenda. There’s plenty of war criminals to go around! Business will be booming in The Hague.

But that won’t stop the trade deal nonsense. The only way to get that trust back is for the courts and congress to SHOW A FUCKING SPINE. A nation can’t be negotiating with some guy, they are negotiating with an institution that has specific mechanisms in place to prevent some random asshole from unilaterally chucking a treaty out the window.

p47 imagines himself a king, but even if we let him do it HE IS BAD AT IT. He is the worst imaginable king!

Project 2025 has been stacking the Supreme Court for years now precisely to enable this bullshit. The white pointy hoods are off now; the people doing this know that it’s now or never. In November it is entirely possible that we will learn that the fascists have prevailed. At which point there is no deal with anyone anymore.

It is unfathomable why anyone would make a deal with us until they know who they are dealing with. And if it’s our current president, they know not to bother.

2

Thanks!

Me and my Best Pal

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The pack recently took a road trip to New Mexico. The reason for the trip was sad, but the outcome for Stripes was excellent. We quickly learned that our current foster pup is a road trip pro; content to snooze in his little chair-box as the miles went by, excited and eager to sniff and explore when we stopped.

Good times out there!

When surrounded by all the strangeness and new things (including a Very Big Dog that desperately wanted to be his friend), the pack bonds were reinforced. Suddenly I could carry him, and put his harness on, and be generally trusted in non-couch situations.

I almost didn’t realize what a big deal it was the first time I scooped him up, and he probably didn’t either. It was just natural. Easy. And there we were.

I believe that whoever adopts this awesome little guy will have to spend a little time earning his trust. But the reward for their patience will be tremendous. This little guy is the best.

On a slightly heavier note, when we are out walking we meet many dog people who say they would be fosters but they know they will fall in love with the dog and it will be too painful to let go. Others just ask, does it hurt when they leave?

I love Stripes. He is awesome. I would happily keep him as our second dog. We are pals now! But… There are hundreds of great dogs who need to find homes right in this area. There is another home where Stripes will be given a better name and unconditional love, and he will return the joy. He can’t help it.

And that is what it means to be a foster. I will cry when he leaves, but the tears will mostly be happy ones. Another little dog will take his place here, and there will be uncertainty and frustration as we learn who this new dog is, and I will fall in love all over again.

As I type this Stripes is doing the chase-base game with Kenny. That’s new too. Kenny doesn’t understand the crisis that has put so many dogs at risk; he would vote to keep Stripes in the pack as well. But Kenny’s superpower is making friends, and we will be leaning on that superpower for a long time.

In the dog world, the phrase “foster fail” is considered a happy thing. “We took in little Ajax and we just couldn’t let go.” I would love to be a foster fail, but that ignores all the other dogs that need homes. I will do my best to remain a foster-fail failure.

But just look at this guy! He’s the best! Make me cry already!

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Thanks!