The driver’s side door was crumpled, with a big streak of white paint across it. The rear door took a bit of damage at the very front of it. The cap had popped off the mirror. That was the damage I saw in my addled state, from my immediate inspection, to a couple hours later when I taped some bags over the window to keep the rain and bugs out. I figured cosmetic damage that could be repaired. The insurance company’s initial estimate, based on the photos I sent them, was just north of $5k. A week later I got back the supplemental request from the body shop and it totaled over $12k with pictures showing all the additional damage I had refused to take a close look at. The door sill was bent, the hinge panel was bent, the window frame was bent in two different places. It was this last one that spooked me, a couple weeks after I’d processed the initial emotions from the crash. During the accident that truck would have filled at least my side view (and my best guess at the mechanics would mean it filled a lot of my front view too) and it bent metal that was just a few inches from my left arm. I looked into what it would take to keep the car, just like I did with the Outback, and indications are that it’s a hard road to travel, and a lot more expensive, even assuming the $12k estimate stuck and they didn’t find a single additional piece of damage. The shop it’s at right now wouldn’t do the work for liability reasons and there are few shops certified to work on electric cars. In order to get it back on the road there’s a bunch of bureaucratic hassle and fees to get it legal to drive again and it would keep a salvage title, causing it to be harder to insure. So, just like with the Subaru, I let go of a car that seemed like it would still drive if it just got some care. I happen to know that someone did rebuild the Subaru and it got back on the road. I hope that will be true for the VW too.

I’m kind of heartsick today. More than I expected to be. It was a good car, my 3rd Golf, arguably not as nice as the 2013 TDI I bought new, but close, and one I endlessly enjoyed being in. Like all my Golfs it was nimble and you could really lean it into a corner, with that steering and suspension that are just the right amount of firm, and just enough torque at just the right time to push you back out of turns or off the line. The interior was understated and clean and most of the controls seemed well thought out for actual humans in a way that no other car, including newer Volkswagens, ever seems to recreate. And the smoothness of the electric powertrain spoiled me. All gas cars feel like caveman cars to me now. It was a real roll down the windows, put your sunglasses on, crank the music, and put your foot down kind of car, and while it was far from perfect it was easy to forgive its faults. The kids and I spent a lot of time in this car going back and forth to school, listening to and talking about music, enjoying little rituals like commenting on how the river looked every morning as we crossed it. I loved this car and I also loved it because it was a bridge back to a time before car companies started messing with time tested interface designs, prioritizing dollar savings over driver experience and safety. It didn’t have a dumb dial to shift gears, it had a proper shifter. It had single purpose buttons and dials for all the things that needed them rather than a giant touchscreen or a single big multi-purpose knob. And it was an all electric car with plenty of capacity which charged plenty fast for my needs that I could buy for low 20s in 2023 rather than paying twice that to get into any of the other electric car options that I could see myself liking. It gave me a surprising hurt to say goodbye to it there where it sat in the body shop parking lot, partially disassembled. It was a good car, I’m going to miss it.

Evil Empire is my preferred Rage Against The Machine album. It doesn’t have the quotability of the first album, no “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” or “FREEDOOOOOOM!”. It’s looser and more ambitious musically. The songs sound like they’re pretty new and not as honed as the material on the first album. The production style comes across as raw and real. It feels like it puts you in the room with the band, just off a ridiculously successful first album and taking a big swing at a second album that is its own thing and not a copy of what they already did.

Some observations:

1. The drums sound amazing.

Andy Wallace is the man. When Rick Beato interviewed him, Rick seemed to get the same kind of joy out of the drum sounds on this album as I do. At one point they just sat and listened to the whole intro to People of the Sun so they could talk about how much fine detail you can hear in the kick. If you believe Andy, he’s really not compressing much at the mix stage, just a bit for character and only on the direct mics or the drum bus, never both. This was kind of a revelation when I heard it. Learning to mix in the 2020s and hanging out on mixing Reddit often feels like talking about compressors non-stop. Putting compressors on each channel and every bus and multiples on some channels, and side-chaining this to that. I felt encouraged to spend more time thinking about stuff like arrangement and EQ.

2. Backloaded

This is an album with a real short opening salvo. It starts with two back-to-back bangers. After Bulls on Parade, we’ve got Vietnow, which is good enough and has that wicked bridge. Then, starting with Revolver, the album slumps. There’s not a bad song on the album, but in the middle there they’re less great imo. Then there’s this amazing back half starting with Down Rodeo, consisting of four mind destroyers in a row. Then they cap it off with Year of tha Boomerang, which is a perfectly decent Rage song but should never have tried to follow Roll Right, which is my favorite Rage Against The Machine song.

3. Creative Panning

The guitar is by itself way off in the right channel a lot. It’s really comfortable there by itself. That’s fairly unusual in the hard rock I listen to, where guitars are almost always doubled and hard-panned right and left, making them sound huge and wide and making room in the middle for kick, bass, and vocals. If there are two guitarists, sometimes they’re hard-panned left and right. Sometimes each guitarist gets double-tracked for 4 total guitar tracks. Butch Vig claims that some of the Siamese Dream tracks have on the order of 100 layered guitar tracks. The hard-panned single guitar is not unheard of. Van Halen 1, for example, has Eddie hard-panned to one side and his reverb hard to the other side. It’s certainly not usual though. But Rage is not the usual hard rock band, they’ve got a killer rhythm section, a bass player with a selection of great tones, and a guitar player who is all over the place, often riffing, sometimes just following the bass, sometimes making weird repeated chirpy sounds. The guitar being way off to the right by itself rather than doubled and laid on top of everything like a blanket leaves a ton of room to hear the nuances of the drum and bass, and the great-sounding room they’re in.

There are guitar doubles used for effect, never through an entire song, and not necessarily where you’d expect. Bulls on Parade is probably closest to the approach you’d expect. The guitars are doubled on the “Come with it now!” parts and (I think) on that spikey octave riff they open with. Then the left channel disappears until the wah pedal bit just before the guitar solo. Then the doubles are back for good when they come back from the solo. This is pretty straightforward: you take elements out during the quieter parts of the song so you can throw them back in to make other parts louder. Then you have Vietnow, in which the left channel guitar is there for the verses, for the second half of the bridge, and for one tiny one-measure accent at the end of the guitar solo, but not for the hook.

Sometimes the bass shifts to the left, maybe to balance the outrigger guitar on the other side. The biggest examples I could find are in Roll Right. The final coda, over which Zack sings “Send them to… the seventh level”, is opened by the bass playing its part with a mostly clean tone over Tom making wicky wacky noises with his wah. As soon as the drums hit, the bass gets a lot more distorted and moves significantly left (ironically). As soon as the guitar double in the left channel comes in and Zack starts singing, the bass seems centered again. Similarly, in Down Rodeo, during the “Now I’m rolling down Rodeo” hooks, the bass is way left again but then comes back to center as soon as the bridge ends. I’m up against my ceiling trying to figure out exactly what’s happening in these cases. It sounds like more than the track being simply panned left. In both cases the bass is fairly distorted and it sounds like there’s more highs far left and still a substantial amount of bass in the middle to just left. This could be a couple layers of bass either as a result of merging two takes, one less distorted, or as a result of the bass signal chain having been split on the way in. In the intro to Tire Me, we hear the bass distorted and panned slightly left, but when he hits the (beautiful) harmonics they’re way to the left. My guess is that it’s two recordings, one that’s just the harmonics and another that is everything else, but there’s a chance it could have been one track with the panning automated. I don’t know enough about what the large-format consoles are capable of to even know if they could have done that. In other songs, we have more subtle bass panning. In Bulls on Parade, during the “Rally around the family” hooks we’ve got bass just slightly left of center, and if I’m not imagining it, the vocal too. I’d like to think that Andy just thought the mix was a little more balanced with the bass and vocals slightly left that way to offset the single guitar in the right channel.

The bass being panned feels more heterodox to me than the guitar being in a single ear. That feels like a pan knob that you’re supposed to leave dead center, but it obviously works here. I would also think that having the bass move around during the song would be distracting, but I never noticed this before in 20 years of playing this album. I’d have to do a lot more analysis to be sure, but if my theory about the bigger shifts being mostly in the top end of the bass is correct, then it does leave substantial bass frequencies closer to the center which would keep it from feeling like the low end of the song was moving around.

4. Loud but also quiet

This is related to the earlier point about the tasteful use of compression. Rock albums in the mid-to-late ’90s were mixed to have a lot more dynamic range than they are today. If you grok LUFS, Down Rodeo measures out at -11.1 dB LUFS-i whereas a modern-sounding rock record produced to sound good will probably be at least around -7 to -9 dB LUFS-i and a more pop-oriented record, mixed mainly to sound good on a cell phone, would be above -6 and maybe above -4. This record, like Nevermind, another Andy Wallace joint, pulls off the trick of sounding huge without big loudness numbers. Further, I suspect but can’t prove that the additional dynamic range helps achieve that feeling of being in the room with the band. Everything sounds three-dimensional rather than smashed flat. And although it’s not exactly a dynamic range thing in the same way, there’s that part in Wind Below where it gets super quiet for like 16 bars, and when they come back in they sound SO LOUD. Really fantastic stuff.

5. Pleasantly low-fi vocals

I can hear what I believe is preamp saturation on Zack’s vocals, just a little bit of fuzzy distortion. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of high-end detail. Sources say that the record was recorded in their practice space so they may not have been able to capture pristine high end. But you can also hear that placement wasn’t perfect. You can hear his breath hit the mic capsule here and there, and the bumpiness of the signal gives the impression that he’s right up on the mic. I’m guessing it’s a dynamic mic, some sources are guessing SM7B, and maybe he even held it.

This is one of the albums I remember listening to over and over in the basement of my parents’ house as a junior in high school and it still moves me today and rewards me with stuff I never noticed. I’m kind of wondering if I’ve made a mistake by making this one the first in the series. Let me know if you want to see more of these.

Update: I think I finally get the public servants being priests thing so updating my analysis.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

I have no fundamental issue with people feeling called to public service. I think people are (fairly) upset about how Palantir’s technology is being applied by US governments and it’s fair to criticize both the elected officials responsible and Palantir for building and for lobbying for these uses. But the core principle seems unobjectionable.

1. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

2. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

I found these two points among the hardest to parse. I think what they’re saying is that the concentration of wealth and ability in Silicon Valley needs to produce more value for the nation than the iPhone and GMail. And again, this seems on its face unobjectionable. Except…. for that second sentence in point 3. What exactly are they trying to say here? We were talking about Silicon Valley’s obligations now all of a sudden we’re talking about civilizations and ruling classes. Do the authors take themselves to be part of a ruling class? While it may be practically true that in our era SV billionaires have wildly more power and ability to impact my life than I do theirs, that is not the same thing as ruling me. In this nation we are governed by consent and don’t use the word rulers. The choice of language seems telling of their mindset.

1. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

The generous way to read this is that it simply says that hard power is critical and that’s why Palantir works to give it to the nation. It kind of rankles me though how this also feels like a dig at soft power. That comes across in the strawmen employed in talking about soft power. Note that soft power is not “soaring rhetoric alone” or “moral appeal”. We’re talking about basically all forms of influence that aren’t taking what we want by force or through the threat of force. In defense of soft power consider that the past 80 years have repeatedly taught us the opposite lesson. There are sharp limits to what you can achieve with hard power alone. Sanctions and the threat of war didn’t stop Iran from enriching uranium, the diplomacy that led to the Obama era nuclear deal did (and then its abandonment by the US led to the resumption of enrichment).

Putting the unfair digs at soft power aside, I think the majority of Americans and I agree with the direct point. There are times when we have to achieve our aims through military force and we should be prepared to do so. The actual debate is about what aims we should have as a nation and when is military force necessary.

1. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

I kind of agree but again rankle at the rejection of a balanced approach (via the eye roll about the theatricality of it all) in favor of this maximalism. Someone who is interested in avoiding arms race and war should also be looking at how international cooperation can blunt these dynamics. Nonj-proliferation treaties, arrived at via “theatrical debates”, take a lot of credit for lowering, but not eliminating, the risk of nuclear destruction. When leading AI technologists have called for international cooperation on the safe development and deployment of AI, Palantir have been squarely opposed.

1. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

I don’t think I disagree on the positive dynamics created by sharing the risk though it’s really worth noting that the last time the draft was used it didn’t result in sharing the risk and cost, it resulted in the risk and cost being borne disproportionately by the poor and minority. Have the billionaires pushing for greater use of hard power served? Will their children or grandchildren? I think there’s really interesting and worthwhile debates to have on this topic but practically speaking I can’t imagine how you get from here to there.

1. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

Agree

1. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

What does this have to do with Palantir? It kind of sounds like this is letting government officials know that Palantir is good with their positions making them wealthy. That having been said, the federal government does itself no favors in attracting the best talent. Serving your community should be better rewarded. Not in the being allowed to indulge in corruption sense, just in the being able to earn a competitive wage sense.

1. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Yup agree. Though I’d say there’s no “may” about it. We’re there.

1. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

Sure. Agree.

1. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

Yes, I strongly agree. I celebrate anyone espousing such ideas and striving to live by them.

1. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

¿Por qué no los dos?

1. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

2. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

We’ve moved on to the patriotic portion of the manifesto. For what it’s worth I’m happy to agree that American power has enabled a lot of good and that this country is worth fighting for.

1. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Maybe? These are weirdly specific prescriptions for the international community. Why do they belong in a Palantir manifesto? And again with their intellectual opponents being “theatrical”, not such serious sober intellectuals as themselves. I think there’s a decent thought here about needing our allies to exert more of their own power in their own regions rather than leaning on the US as much as they do. But I have my doubts as to whether it was an “overreaction” in 1945. Both regimes were cruel, genocidal, and had just cost the world mountains of blood and treasure to stop their imperial projects. I don’t think it’s crazy to have wanted them defanged for some period. I also agree that those regimes are long gone and that the imbalance they note is real.

1. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

I strongly disagree about the degree to which snickering at Musk is to do with the genuine innovations that he has driven vs the causes he has chosen to champion, his own actions in the public sphere, and the manner in which he chooses to carry himself. Before about 2018 most people I know could find a lot to admire in what he’s achieved with Space X and for the cause of environmentalism through Tesla. What has changed since then is his calling a heroic rescue diver a pedophile because he was bummed his mini-sub wasn’t the key to saving trapped miners, his project of turning the former Twitter into a safe space for the far right, his hamfisted destruction of executive branch institutions through DOGE, etc etc.

1. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Sure… but to the degree that it addresses violent crime via imposition on the rights of Americans it can’t do so without the agreement of elected officials and ultimately the people. But basically I agree up to the point that SV uses their power to push for policy that violates the rights that all humans are born with.

1. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

I mean I agreed with point 9 but as far as the exposure itself? It comes with the territory. And who are these people who have chosen to do something other than enrich themselves? Who are we talking about here? I’m guessing not Greta Thunberg or Mother Teresa.

1. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

I think this is a matter of degree. Say something highly objectionable and you should expect strong pushback. However I agree that the relentless policing of lesser thought crime is harmful.

1. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

Which circles? Which elites? Are we living in a nation where the elites are intolerant of religious belief? Who are we defining as elites here? Power in this country is currently held by elites who only seem intolerant of non-christian religions which I highly doubt is what this is referring to. I am just completely unaware of any powerful group of elites that are intolerant of individuals practicing their religions (insofar as they are not violating anyone else’s rights in doing so). This either requires examples or to be more specific about what is being complained about.

1. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

2. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Point 21 I don’t disagree with on its face. The real question whenever someone says something like this is where are they going with it. Too often it’s a prelude to denying someone the same rights that someone from a “superior” culture gets to enjoy. There are lots of thoughts in this vein that might even contain truth but in a liberal society we don’t act on such a conclusion and there’s not much good in voicing them as they mainly lead to harm.

Point 22 is where this gets interesting. I strongly disagree with this notion. We haven’t defined a national culture in the name of inclusivity? The inclusivity IS the culture. The core principles are defined in the Declaration of Independence, reaffirmed at Gettysburg. The slow but steady steps into that cultural destiny are to be found in the eradication of slavery, the fight against Jim Crow, the huge waves of 19th and 20th century immigration, etc, etc.

But the authors don’t recognize that kind of culture, they want something else. Perhaps it’s an unfair leap but given context clues one can assume we’re talking about what JD Vance was when he described America as heritage and homeland rather than a creed and ideals. In other words, taken together these two points are “inclusion is bullshit, if our culture [defined by a specific heritage that we happen to share] is better we should say it’s better and we should be in charge”. This is contrary to the core of liberal belief. If you believe that all men are created equally with inalienable rights then it leads you to conclude that all should be accorded equal protections under the law and equal opportunity. You don’t get to pick who is superior and who is inferior, who belongs and who does not. That leads you to the question of who gets to choose and it’s always just going to be whoever has the most power and willingness to use it. This is the dynamic that liberalism has fought since the enlightenment. If that’s not what the authors mean then I think they should quit waffling and say what they mean.

All of this could be boiled down to many fewer points.

1. Hard power is of vital importance to our national interests, more than soft power.
2. That is why we need the best possible weapons and why we build them.
3. We are your rulers, stop digging into our business, criticizing, and being so mean online.
4. BTW cultures are made of heritage and homelands, not abstract creeds, our culture is superior to others, and we shouldn’t be afraid to make it part of the definition of our nation.

I find the first half broadly unobjectionable. We can have some raging arguments around the details, who gets to decide what the needs of the military are, who decides what’s legal and appropriate, etc. I also think that soft power is being undervalued. But basically I think a strong military is a good thing and a key component of our leadership role in the world. Then there’s this second half; the culture war half. Interpreting it depends on what we think this document actually is. I’m seeing some describe it as a corporate manifesto, others as recruiting material. The latter is the better case. If this is for recruiting employees who agree that tech billionaires catch too much flak online and that we’re all too afraid to say that America has a distinct heritage then fine. People like to work with people who are of similar minds. People are allowed to believe what they want, regardless of how wrong, just as I’m allowed to call their ideas wrong headed and dangerous. But what a wild thing to attach to your corporation. I’ve spent my time in corporate America and I can’t imagine working at a place that had a published opinion on national culture or online behavior. This is a corporation of true believers seeking to recruit others who share their political identity. The corporate manifesto reading is far more chilling to the degree it tells us these are actual problems that the corporation intends to solve. A giant tech corporation taking on the mission to have American culture defined along lines of heritage is the stuff of comic book villains.

I was 23 in 2003 when the second Iraq war started. It’s the first event I’ve lived through where I’ve really noticed the development of a historical narrative. Nowadays, when I hear about that decision to go to war I hear descriptions on a spectrum from “We thought they had weapons” to “the administration got themselves into an echo chamber and ended up believing intel that wasn’t particularly strong”. And the (real) paranoia caused by the 9/11 attacks a year and a half prior sometimes gets a mention as well. I never hear anymore how Iraq had allowed UN weapons inspectors back into the country under pressure from the UN. At the time we went to war the inspectors had secured permission to inspect everything they wanted to, weren’t finding anything, and were asking for more time to complete their task. The other thing I don’t see in popular accounts now is that support for unilateral invasion was the minority position, that most of us wanted the inspections to run their course. You don’t hear how while the Bush administration was sneering and condescending at their critics and ultimately taking us to war that a lot of us were pulling our hair out and screaming at the radios in our 98 VW Golfs. A CBS/NYT poll in January of that year showed only 31% support for immediate military action and 63% support for a diplomatic solution. In March, days before the invasion, another poll showed that a majority conditioned their support for the war on UN support (which never came).

I guess it’s nice that some of us get to feel smug that no weapons were ever found. But being vindicated for my arguments that the war was a bad idea doesn’t overcome the bad outcomes. Over 4000 Americans killed, around 32000 injured, somewhere around half a million Iraqis killed, something like $3 trillion dollars spent. The destruction of the Iraqi institutions created a power vacuum that both Iran and non-state groups like ISIS rushed in to fill. And while Saddam was a murderous leader we’re better without, Iraq today is hardly the bastion of freedom that George W. Bush promised we’d be getting. It is hardly better off economically now than it was in 2003 after decades of war with the US and Iran and has problems with corruption and unreliable civilian infrastructure.

Like I said, current events feel familiar.

In 2016 through 2018, we had inspectors in Iran verifying that uranium wasn’t being enriched to weapons grade. Just as in Iraq we had a non-military solution to our concerns that was producing results. Then in 2018 we decided that it wasn’t enough and we could get more by bullying them with even larger sanctions than they’d been under before 2016. In retaliation the Iranians eventually threw out the inspectors and went back to enriching uranium, taking them closer to the outcome we’re trying to avoid, an Iranian nuclear weapon. But enriched uranium is not a nuclear weapon and the Iranians were at the bargaining table willing to make a deal over their nuclear program (again). Multiple neutral parties observed that progress was being made but before a deal could be reached we decided it would be better to just bomb them into submission. No one has offered up a concrete, specific, evidence backed reason why this was necessary. Enriched uranium isn’t a great thing for the Iranians to have but it’s not a bomb. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s March 18th congressional testimony was notable in her refusal to say that the US had intelligence indicating an imminent threat of attack from the Iranians. Also notable is the March 17th resignation of Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, saying he can’t in good conscience support the war because there was no imminent threat. In that same testimony Gabbard told us that the evidence for an imminent threat was essentially that President Trump said there was one. That’s not even close to good enough. Just like in Iraq we’ve gone to war based on assurances of threats without any credible evidence of them. Once again, we preemptively discarded working diplomacy to get what we want from these nations in favor of simply trying to beat it out of them.

Let’s leave aside whether this is how a moral people should behave. This doesn’t seem like a wise way to solve our problems. Our efforts in Iraq made us and the world ultimately worse off. I hope Iran doesn’t turn out the same way but this feels like a road we’ve been down before more than once. It echoes with the same arrogance, belligerence, and naiveté. We’re being steered by people who seem even less serious, even less forthright than last time. We tell our kids to solve their problems with words, that resorting to violence should be a last resort. As a nation we should follow the same advice.

Why did I leave a healthy career at a giant, successful, innovative tech corporation where I had a fancy job title and what looked like a decent shot at an even fancier one? I guess the place to start is that I never really wanted that in the first place. When my lovely (future) wife and I moved ourselves to Seattle, we told all our friends we’d be there a couple years. Then we’d come back home to pick our lives back up. I didn’t dream of being a tech tycoon. I didn’t have any desire to leave my beautiful commonwealth. My dreams consisted of living authentically, working on the causes and projects that interested me, and making my own choices about how I spent my time. At 26, when I joined the company, I was a really idealistic and moralistic young adult. Like my parents, I’ve always been pretty judgmental, having strong ideas about what’s right and wrong. Being raised in a protestant church probably also reinforced the seriousness of morality and a calling to do good in the world. At some point in my upbringing, that got refocused into a rejection of attitudes and behaviors that my family and community around me accepted as normal.

As a nerdy kid I naturally gravitated towards other kids who felt different and got introduced to the punk and hardcore music I’ve cherished ever since. I was very open to what bands like Propagandhi and Earth Crisis had to say (some of which aged well and some of which didn’t) about human and animal rights and personal responsibility. I remember being assigned to read Jim Hightower’s “There’s Nothing In The Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos” in high school and becoming very suspicious of corporations and centrism. Even growing up during the Simpsons’ golden age and their satirical take on all aspects of society probably steered me. I don’t know but maybe I was ready for all these influences to shape me into someone different because I didn’t really feel like I fit in at school or in church. I didn’t feel like all the things my parents encouraged me to do were a fit for me. That’s not necessarily because anyone was wrong or bad, just because of how I perceived the world and what felt good and what didn’t. And writing this down, it all sounds like completely normal teenage rebellion to me. What does strike me as different is that I’ve always felt like if things seem wrong to me that it’s my personal moral responsibility to work against them or to at least not participate. My observation is that a lot of people don’t really make that connection or find it easy to let themselves off the hook. I, on the other hand, have an easy time assigning and feeling bad about personal complicity. As I advanced through my teenage years I drifted away from the church I’d been raised in and eventually the religion that went with it. I drifted through high school graduation and into college. There I found peers that really accepted and valued me for the first time in many years. Then, like so many people my age, all the piled kindling in my heart was set ablaze by the political aftermath of 9/11 and the rush into the Iraq war. The square world had proven itself lacking in principles. More than ever I wanted authenticity and truth, an end to war, respect for human rights, care for the environment. I didn’t want to be part of the machine, making, advertising, and selling crap to each other at the cost of everything that really mattered. Going to work at what would become the biggest retailer in the world wouldn’t have been high on my list of dream jobs.

But I was mostly a dreamer without firm ideas for taking action on all these passions. And I had terrible interpersonal skills and social anxiety. It’s really hard for me to meet new people and to be vulnerable with them. I didn’t have a network, I didn’t know how to build a network of folks that were interested in the same things as I was. I’m not sure if I even fathomed that finding work aligned with my values was something I could do. It’s like I just didn’t know to look for those possibilities. And maybe I lacked the courage to even see paths that didn’t lead to obvious and relatively easy ways to get paid. I liked comfort and space to tinker. The kind of comfort I was familiar with required money. I discovered by my early 20s that I had a talent for programming computers and that people would pay me for it. The creative element of it, building little logic machines and watching them do stuff, appealed to me. I liked the aesthetics of logic well expressed in code. I had a vague desire to be part of building big impressive systems rather than what I’d been doing: dicking around with little corporate intranets and fixing people’s MS Access databases. As a social awkward, a giant organization is an easy place to get into and find a comfortable place in. When I graduated from college with a BS in computer science I applied anywhere that seemed even a little likely to result in paying work. I ended up working for the US Navy at a warfare laboratory. Somehow, despite my own personal convictions I ended up being part of the military industrial complex.

I don’t think that reflects especially well on me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the military or believe there’s never a just time to use it. I hate wars of choice, jingoism, and war profiteering. Which is not to say that the Navy lab exemplified jingoism, more that it was a jingoistic time under an administration that helped set that tone. Neither would I call anything that happened there profiteering, though I would say that there was a lot of waste and weak contracts and a porous fence between the government and contractor side. It was more a weird fit for me given my ideals, and I felt very conflicted. That aside I’m proud of myself for getting that job. I had been chronically underemployed as I went through a rough patch of growing up. It’s not clear that would have improved. I was rough around the edges and didn’t really know what to do or how to do it. When I saw that ad for the Navy job fair it wasn’t a place I was eager to work. And I couldn’t have felt more out of place when I got there, more uncomfortable in my business clothes than most and much less interested in shaking hands and making small talk. My friends had tried to convince me to go do something fun instead. But I needed to work and making software got me paid better than any of the other things I knew how to do. When I got to the fair I sat in my car for a while holding my small stack of resumes. I think I remember walking in, checking out the scene and then walking back out to my car and nearly leaving. But I was just scraping by on the kindness of my friends and a little from my parents. I needed work. So I sucked in my breath, ground my teeth together, opened the car door, and walked in there to find someone to talk to. I walked out with a salaried position with the title Scientist. Regardless of how I felt about that job, it bent the course of my life upwards. It gave me security and structure that I sorely needed, at a time when it was not obvious which direction things were going to go. It’s not deep or original but very true that being willing to do stuff you don’t want to do is a key skill for getting to the bigger stuff that you do want.

I found that job miserable over the 4 years I had it. Having money was great but the job was 70 miles away from anywhere I was willing to live. I commuted an hour and a quarter in each direction every day down monotonous country roads. Every day I passed the site, now in the state highway median, where once stood the farmhouse in which John Wilkes Booth was shot to death. Culturally there were huge gulfs between me and almost all of the people I worked with. I found it a bad place to learn the skills I wanted. Very few of my peers seemed to have any clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing and there weren’t any strong incentives driving high quality or efficient outcomes. There were people there of the attitude that work was boring and nothing ever happened but it paid. There were people there I never saw do any work at all. One older gentleman sat at his desk every day in the same outdated dress shirt and trousers reading the newspaper, occasionally having discussions about the bible with people who stopped by his cubicle. The peculiarities of how software is built for navy systems meant that all the hardware, software, and practices were decades behind what was happening in the outside world. The effort required to change any process and perhaps lack of incentives to do so didn’t lead to any focused efforts to improve how things were done. The contractors were supposed to be writing all the software under the supervision of the civilians but it was never clear to me in what sense the department I worked in was supervising the contractors we worked with. The whole time I was there the focus was on getting the department to do more of the software engineering ourselves. Given that, it’s striking that most of the people I worked with didn’t have very much software engineering expertise. They were looking to me to tackle what felt like complex tasks, in one case adding a new hardware interface to our simulator system, a task that another civilian who’d been there for several years had taken on and not succeeded at, in another case a greenfield effort to port the main software system we worked on to open standard hardware and operating system and a new inter-component middleware. I want to stress that I was the new guy in my first salaried job. I wanted to be taught the craft, whatever they could teach me there. US government acquisition is its own complex trade that I could have learned but I was never pulled into that part of it. Instead I was left to my own devices to figure out what to do with the loose goals they gave me. There was little in the way of constructive feedback or mentorship. None of this should be taken as universal claims about the DoD acquisition world, or even about the department I worked in. I can’t claim I clearly understood what was happening around me at the advanced age of 25. It is, however, how I experienced it. I wanted out. I had my resume on the job sites within the first couple years I worked there (back then they were called things like monster.com and Yahoo hot jobs). It was slow going, I took a couple interviews over that time. They were random roles where I remember the interviewers having little idea what to do with me. The bulk of my industry experience was writing Ada and C programs that ran on microcomputers from the early 90s and never left warships and locked laboratories. Nothing stuck until Amazon cold called me in late winter 2006. They flew me out to Seattle, put me up for a night in the Grand Hyatt at Pacific Place, brought me into a conference room in the old Pacific Medical Center building on Beacon Hill and grilled me for 8 hours (including during lunch). They spit me out exhausted. A week later they gave me an offer to come onboard as an entry level software dev, an SDE1. I was so naive that I thought they were going to pay me less money than the Navy was paying me and I had a number in mind for how much of a pay cut I could accept. Fortunately that wasn’t the case. I was also naive and arrogant enough that I thought I had killed it at the interview. Thinking through it now I think signs actually point to me just barely making it through. But I had made it. For Catie and me it was an excuse to get out of our college town and go experience another part of America. We told our friends we’d be back soon. For me it was salvation from a job I really hated and didn’t believe in.

Working for the Navy was all generic officeware, chipboard desks and padded cubicle walls, fluorescent lights, business casual, drop ceilings, the occasional framed photo of George W (offsite of course), often unclear goals, never any consequences for missing them, lots of minesweeper, a 70 mile commute mostly through farmland and forest. It’s washed out nearly to grayscale in my memory. Moving to Seattle and taking a job with Amazon is in bright, fully saturated colors. Seattle itself was exciting. It was a big city where my cultural and political attitudes were fairly normal for someone my age if not on the conservative side. We got there at a time when folks like us could still afford to live in the city. It was said that the Amazonians under 30 lived on Capitol Hill, the ones over 30 lived over the I90 bridge in Issaquah (we lived in West Seattle). Instead of driving 70 miles through interstate and country highway I was now riding my bike across the West Seattle bridge and up Beacon Hill every day. At work I was suddenly surrounded by people, mostly around my age or only a little older, mostly transplants like me, interested in similar things, with similar geeky interests, similarly skilled and deep in technical knowledge. We spoke the same language, knew the same landmarks. I was dropped into an engineering culture that continuously shipped software features at a breakneck pace dealing with customer volume and availability constraints that very few other companies do. It felt like a place run by engineers, not by bureaucrats, and it was intellectually stimulating and satisfying to be part of it. It had concrete ideals, written down, and well known by everyone that encoded how we wanted to operate daily, programming the company to move quickly towards big audacious sustainable value for customers and the business. Looking around it was easy to believe that those ideals were taken seriously and lived by. It was a company that didn’t make commercials, didn’t make many public statements, didn’t pay much attention to its stock price, just focused on making customers happy. I was a person who felt that we all had a moral obligation to drive less, consume less, eat seasonal local food, produced without the use of industrial fertilizers and pesticides. The founders of the company (I assumed) started with the goal of making all the money for all of time. Even so I felt that the focus on long term sustainable growth led me and the company to a similar headspace.

You can probably guess that the Koolaid eventually stopped tasting so good. It did. But despite anything else I have to say, there are great things that never changed over the 19 years I worked there. There was a lot to recommend it as a job. I was well compensated for my time. They made me feel valued; like I was doing good work and positively influencing the company and helping its customers. They were sensitive to my social anxiety and despite it I was promoted 3 times to positions where success required having a pretty wide influence. They always assessed my performance on the impact I was having for customers and not on whether I was giving a bunch of talks and leading a bunch of high profile meetings or speaking to high powered executives. Which was good because those are all activities that I would find extremely uncomfortable. I think I still had room to grow upwards in my career there. I wasn’t stuck. And best of all, I was around incredibly smart and driven people, real world class experts in distributed systems, scalability, and security among others, blazing new trails through uncharted territory. I never stopped learning and not just about technology but also about being a leader, how to be kind, how to think big and get a lot done, new ways of seeing human behavior and the world. I started to see a lot of things through the lens of the leadership skills I picked up at Amazon. It was not hard to stay. Later people would sometimes congratulate me for the length of my tenure and I’d wave it off. All I did was not leave. It wasn’t hard.

Despite all that good stuff I still had the gall to feel like I wasn’t doing what I was meant to be doing. Especially early on I saw working there as a short term arrangement. Since it was lucrative we’d stay there a bit and then take the money and go do other stuff. I remember hiking back down a mountain with Catie once in the mid to late 2000s (maybe Pilchuk?) and saying something like “What’s the point of selling my time to make all this money if we don’t end up with more freedom to go do other stuff?”. I remember another time drinking one too many Arrogant Bastards out somewhere with our Amazon friends and Catie pulling me aside to encourage me to stop talking to them about hating my job so much. I did a lot of talking, a lot of dreaming. I remember once at Friday beers in the office a manager trying to improve my outlook on the societal good we were doing with AWS, protein folding and all that. I was more dramatic back then. But like I said it was comfortable and easy to stay even despite all my shit talking. A few years went by where we enjoyed our time growing into full-fledged adults, we married, and had our first kid. My career at Amazon picked up some momentum. Time started to accelerate and years flew by in a sleep-deprived fog. One day we opened our eyes and realized it had been seven years and we hadn’t gone back home like we’d planned. We had to decide whether to commit to making Seattle our home or keep our word and go back. It wasn’t easy but we decided on the latter so our kids could be around more of their family. You can’t really go back home but we tried our best. I thought that would be the end of my Amazon career but they valued me enough to offer to keep me as a full remote worker even though that wasn’t at all a thing there in the early 2010s. So I stayed and kept my big city job while moving to a smaller city without a ton of jobs of the same caliber. Then just a few months after moving we had our second kid. With her plus the continuing momentum in my career, several more years flew by in a haze.

Then one day in 2020 everyone quarantined themselves and hardly anyone was driving and I spent well over a year constantly anxious about my health and my family’s health and the health of our nation and world as political fires caught and burnt hot (or maybe I never stopped being anxious). It was quiet and the birds were chirping. The sun was shining. The breeze was gentle. Every day between video calls I’d walk around in my yard watching the plants grow. It was a time for reflection and it led to a bit of a midlife crisis for me. I became obsessed with the time I have left and its shortness. I didn’t feel like I was spending it the way I should. I decided that I would take five years to, I shit you not, grow my long-time gardening hobby into a new career as a market farmer. That’s someone who grows vegetables on limited land close to a city and does some combination of selling direct to restaurants and consumers and setting up a shack at the farmers markets. The five years would let me develop the knowledge and infrastructure I needed and to grow our savings to get us closer to financial independence. Part of that infrastructure was moving somewhere with at least a couple acres. I simply had to be closer to nature, somewhere quiet with a distant horizon. The plan to be a farmer didn’t survive the coming five years. It was obviously just a desire to escape the life I’d built and if I wanted to leave myself the possibility of making positive contributions to things that matter, the 20+ years of experience as a software dev give me way more leverage than a brand new market farmer. Starting over in your late 40s is hard. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the energy for that. So that was gone but the idea that my best-by date was sometime in the next five years stayed.

A lot happened in those years. My profile continued growing, having been promoted to principal engineer in 2018. I helped build stuff that I’m very proud of and also had some painful failures. During the pandemic years and until the time I left it got a lot more stressful at Amazon and a lot harder to accomplish anything. The culture had shifted and not in a great way. And various things the company did wore some of the luster off of my image of it. I think those things started before the pandemic but they accelerated and got worse after. From late 2021 through the end of 2023 I helped guide a project that promised to radically reduce the cost of executing security efforts and maybe all infrastructure safety efforts. It was an area I’d spent a lot of time thinking about. I had big ideas I wanted to try. A lot of funding was put together to take a swing at it and it turned into a drawn out horror show of a project. I struggled to get managers involved to see the cliffs they had to avoid, that in fact they were insisting on heading directly into, to get them to see the doors they should avoid closing, and just to get them to pull in the same direction rather than fighting each other. I had peers on the project hearing me out, listening to my concerns, assuring me they were on it and then acting in a way that made it clear they weren’t. Once we spent 3 days offsite with a dozen people in order to hammer out a launch plan that everyone could align on. We spent 8 hours a day meeting and going to lunches and dinners together. We left with agreements in place and within the next few days one of the teams involved refused to do any of the work they’d signed up to do. Folks were making decisions for all the wrong reasons, for clout and short term gains, rather than to deliver long term value to customers. And it felt like they were trying to manage my perceptions and feelings more than they were trying to address my critiques. I kept making sure my managers were aware of what was happening, I kept talking to all the main folks involved. I tried to choose my battles, give up on certain things I wanted just to get everyone to agree. I kept on falling for people making commitments to me and then not keeping them. The worst thing about it is that teams were being destroyed by all this mayhem as well. A bunch of engineers could see as well as I could that they weren’t being asked to deliver the right things. They could also see that compared to other teams their work environment was chaotic and grim. I tried. I feel like I didn’t get the support I needed but it also left me feeling like an asshole for not doing more and for not being able to right the ship. Ultimately a shocking number of people either left or were managed out. We did also manage to deliver, way too late, but really nice actually. The customer response was good and it let us deprecate multiple tools that customers hated. But the delay hurt and burnt a lot of trust with partners. By the time we launched the marketplace was a lot murkier than it had been when we thought we were going to launch. Had we launched earlier and maintained that trust it would have been a lot easier to march forward quickly into even bolder ideas and bigger promises. I think those long-term prospects got a lot harder as a result of how it went down. The whole thing made me feel like an asshole.

While it definitely started before the pandemic, the emotional toil of being a principal engineer also wore on me more in the years after. This was probably because of my continuing growth in scope. I did more and more talking as the years went on, more and more advising, consulting, reviewing, in bigger and bigger groups. Folks tended to never appreciate how little context folks like me operated on. I’d walk in, read the doc, start giving my reactions to what I’d read. I’m someone who is conflict averse and who finds it very easy to argue both sides of almost any decision. I agonized over whether I was giving the right advice or being reasonable at all. I agonized over whether I was being constructive or coming down too hard on people’s ideas. People I worked with regularly would tell me in one on ones that I was nicer to them than other senior folks. My yearly performance reviews consistently said I was good at being approachable and earning trust with people. It wasn’t enough to beat those feelings down. I also never felt like I was doing enough to push my own ideas through or to clear blockers to make efforts successful. I’ve learned that I’m just not an executor, I’m a dreamer and planner and so I kept finding myself at the limit of what I knew how to do. Or worse, I would have solid ideas about things that could definitely move the ball forward, just that they were things I didn’t feel comfortable doing; stuff like giving talks, taking the argument to leaders I didn’t know well, making new contacts, pushing back in unpopular ways. I’ve learned since that this is common for introverts. Introverts and extroverts are stronger together. Introverts deeply understand problems and make plans and extroverts take bold action.

The broken glass grind of 2022 and 2023 destroyed whatever ambition I had left. I really started wishing I could just run away. Especially as we got into 2023 I started talking about maybe leaving after this milestone or leaving after that milestone. At least two of those came and went. The rise of the AI hype cycle through the last 3 years of my career poured cement over my already collapsed excitement. I’m deeply ambivalent about the technology. I see the huge potential. I also see huge risks that few in positions of power seem to be doing much to prepare us for. While Amazon is hardly one of the worst offenders here, the endless industry-wide hype dimmed my view of my industry and those leaders in positions that I was theoretically aspiring to rise to myself. I felt a growing disconnect between myself and the community around me. Perhaps I could have done a lot of good by being a voice of reason but honestly I didn’t have the energy left. I think things have escalated pretty rapidly in the 8 months since I left but it was pretty obvious then that there was a lot of pain coming, a lot of bad ideas to shut down, a lot of teams that had to be redirected to solving problems that their customers actually have, a lot of agent created chaos to mitigate. None of this is a judgement on Amazon’s decision making and there are a lot of smart people working hard to get through these transitions. I just had no passion for being part of it.

In the closing days of 2023 I was re-orged into a different team. These were folks I had worked with for a long time but who I hadn’t collaborated directly with for years. That part of the larger org had grown rapidly so I was in the fine position of being deeply familiar with much of what they were working on but also being a new face. I could look like a genius because I already had ideas for how to solve some of the challenges they faced. I felt broken after all the drama and the new role served to rehabilitate me somewhat. I had a legit good year and a half where I influenced a bunch of different efforts, started up some mechanisms to get the local PEs engaged with a wider array of the teams and projects in their space. I successfully got a project started to model aspects of the business that had not been properly modeled before. It would unlock a ton of automation to scale security and operational workflows that were either awkward or simply impossible before. It still felt like I was going through the motions and that the clock was winding down. I showed up and said what needed to be said, I did things that seemed like the right things for my role and level. I also spent a lot of time in-between not doing much in particular. I found myself feeling like I was fooling people. They were always thanking me for taking time out of my business schedule to work with them. I would think that they just thought I was really busy because they didn’t know what else I was working on. They assumed it was a lot of stuff. I figured that one day they would all get together and talk it through and realize I wasn’t really working on anything. I’ve already listed stuff I did during this time so objectively I don’t think this is true. But oftentimes it felt true. I was kind of working in bursts. I had ideas of things I could do but just couldn’t build up the motivation to do more than the first couple of steps. The thought kept cycling in the back of my head that it was time to pick a date and go. If not now then when? I’d had the idea five years previously that I was going to leave mid-decade. The persistent motivational challenges I was facing and an especially hard project reinforced the rightness of the plan. At the end I’d told myself so many times that I was going to leave that it became impossible to stay. It was like school in the late spring with all the colors and sunshine out the window and summer fun just around the corner. So finally I pulled the trigger and with almost no ceremony I slid out of the company that I’d been a part of for over 19 years. And once I gave my notice I suddenly couldn’t exactly remember why I was doing it. But in the broad strokes this is basically it.

But all this is only clear when you watch the video. I’m sure the situation was less clear to the ICE agent. He probably saw her turning the wheel but only had about a second to process that during which tensions were high, the car was moving, and people were yelling. She started to move forward. Maybe he thought he was about to get hit. Maybe he didn’t. Either way, He had a split second to make a decision and decided to pull his gun and shoot rather taking one step to the side.

We don’t know why he chose to do that. I think it’s really worth asking the question. Is it really, as Kristi Noem claims, what he’s trained to do in that situation? If so, that begs for a lot of clarification. What in particular about this situation makes this the right reaction? If, on the other hand, this turns out not to be how he was expected to handle this situation then why wasn’t his training followed? Was the training good enough? What happens to him now? I believe the bar for professionalism in all armed government jobs needs to be high enough that even an honest mistake leading to a bad kill might be the end of a career, or at least the part of the career where he gets to carry a gun among the public. The bar needs to be absurdly high because that’s the value we place on the god given rights given to humans.

And speaking of training and professionalism: why is it okay for these masked agents to walk up to the car, immediately start cursing at her and trying to yank her door open, presumably to pull her out of the car. Why is that necessary or appropriate? Is that approach going to tend to escalate or deescalate that situation? And is escalating the situation likely to make the situation better or worse, more or less likely to lead to violence? If your response to that is to tell me about Renee Good’s wife being antagonistic towards the agent as he walks around the car immediately before shooting Renee, I’ll just respond that he’s the law enforcement professional, the employee of the US government, carrying the gun. The Goods had whistles. Does behaving this way towards members of the community make it easier or harder to get their cooperation and to do the job you were sent to do? And beyond the aggression and disrespect they display, is trying to pull her out of her car while it’s still running and an officer is standing in front of it a reasonable way to arrest her. considerate of the safety of all involved? I don’t think so. I can’t see the regular police trying to arrest someone in that manner and I think her death follows directly from their aggressive attitude and the ill-considered tactics they used.

ICE operates with this level of aggression and disrespect because they’re given clear signals to do so by their bosses. They are told that they are deporting murderers and escaped mental patients, people who are ruining America. They are told that the people who disagree with the current administration are scum who are working to destroy America. When someone gets killed administration officials line up behind their agents, before time for any investigation or introspection, insisting they did nothing wrong and in fact have immunity because they’re enforcing the law. They tell outrageous lies about the victim and the circumstances of their killing in total disregard of their humanity. ICE is told they’re doing everything right, and people with concerns are told that they don’t matter. Dehumanize people and you start treating them as less than people. Situations, emotions, and tensions get escalated until people die; almost certainly the people without guns. And this administration, yet again, reacts by adding even more fuel to the fire. Nothing changes if no one in charge will admit that anything went wrong and so more of this seems all too likely.

So as to the question: You probably know that congress is supposed to authorize military actions. Let’s start there. The president can act without pre-authorization if they deem it necessary for national security but authorization is supposed to be sought and secured within 60 days or hostilities have to be ceased. So you might say that these strikes are illegal because it’s been 60 days and there is no congressional authorization.

The administration disagrees that they need authorization. They argue that these strikes are not hostilities as defined by the War Powers Resolution because there is little risk to American lives. And there’s precedence for this. Obama made similar arguments when he sent troops into Libya without seeking authorization. Whether or not we think they’re right legally, let’s consider how this precedent will age. We’re moving into an era where warfare is conducted via drones and robots. Wouldn’t this precedent give future American administrations the constitutional authority to unilaterally kill any non-citizen they want as long as its overseas, it’s quick, and all the killing is accomplished by drones?

This idea hasn’t been meaningfully tested in the courts, which have declined to take it up . While I’m a know-nothing the argument seems wrong to me. It says that the only reason the congress and the people at large could care about military action is due to the possibility of losing lives. I reject that. The people have an interest in the violence committed in their names, regardless of whether lives are lost. But I have to acknowledge that reasonable people can disagree. The constitution says that Congress has the sole authority to declare war and strikes on drug smugglers in international waters seem like something less than a war. Past administrations have chosen to interpret this requirement more broadly to include non-war military actions as in the war on terror, authorized by Congress in 2001, and that’s my preferred interpretation. However I have to admit that the text doesn’t disallow the narrower interpretation. Since we don’t have any court opinion, it’s somewhat up in the air.

Beyond the War Powers question, the choice to call drug cartels Foreign Terrorist Organizations could point to another part of their legal strategy. It could be purely a PR move, designed to make the whole thing just feel like another day of America hitting terrorists with missiles from drones. But if it’s a legal strategy one possibility is that it’s an attempt to reuse the authorization granted by congress in 2001. That seems unlikely given that that authorization was specifically to take action against the planners and executors of 9/11. The other possibility is that it’s an attempt to invoke some of the legal theories that George W. Bush and company put forward in an attempt to skirt the bodies of law regarding both human rights and the conduct of war.

The 1976 Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR) declares that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of life without a judgement after a fair trial. The purpose of the administration calling this an armed conflict could be to skirt this covenant. However I don’t buy that calling it an armed conflict makes the strikes legal either. The Geneva conventions, which define the laws of war, require due diligence to differentiate combatants from non-combatants and to avoid harming non-combatants. These strikes are only legal if the US has done that due diligence and determined that these smugglers are combatants. However drug smugglers are not combatants. Even though they carry guns, the aim of drug smugglers is not to take American lives and damage America it’s to make money. And anyway, in what sense are we in armed conflict with Venezuela except for the fact that we’re taking up arms against Venezuelan citizens? And how can the administration claim that we are in armed conflict to the degree that the law of war applies and not human rights law, but also not in hostilities to the degree that congressional authorization is not required? Again though, regardless of whether you accept that we’re in armed conflict; drug smugglers aren’t combatants.

The US is not a party to Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions which delves into armed conflict with non-nation-state actors and specifies that terrorists are combatants as defined in the original Geneva conventions. That creates an ambiguity that George W Bush tried to exploit. The reasoning of his administration was that we are in an armed conflict with terrorist organizations but we don’t recognize them as either combatants or non-combatants but rather as “unlawful combatants” and therefore neither the protections in the ICCPR or the Geneva convention apply to them and therefore we can torture them. This didn’t work out well and these arguments are not well considered today. Nevertheless, this could be where this current administration wants to go with calling the cartels terrorists and saying that we’re in armed conflict with them. However if drug smugglers aren’t combatants then I don’t see how they can be unlawful combatants. To accept that these killings are legal due a state of armed conflict the administration asks us to accept that a bundle of cocaine is an arm and offering it to be purchased by an American is an act of armed conflict, one to which an extrajudicial killing is a proportional response. That defies common sense.

So assuming you agree with me on these points so far, then the strikes are illegal because they lack congressional authorization and they’re illegal under international human rights law that we are a party to. Great. Now what? Recognizing that these acts are illegal is not a trump card that wins this fight and makes the strikes stop. There’s no law enforcement agency that is going to put American administration officials in handcuffs over this, not domestically or internationally. It’s also unlikely that suing will do you any good because the courts have almost entirely refused to settle questions around the executive’s use of military force. Which makes this a political battle. All roads lead back to the congress. It’s the congress that can investigate, can demand that their authorization be sought, threaten funding, and even impeach a president who takes un-authorized actions. So far both houses of congress have narrowly voted multiple times against blocking further strikes. Thus this congress is not for stopping the strikes or for requiring the actions to be authorized in accordance to the Constitution and War Powers Resolution.

If you disagree with these strikes or other actions like them then that’s what has to change, they have to vote differently. Making that happen requires electing congresspeople that care about human rights and making them feel like their jobs depend on fighting for them. Which will require pressure from their constituents which puts the onus on us to convince them and to convince our neighbors. It seems to me that we have to talk about more than just the legality of the strikes. The utility of the law in this case is not as an enforcement mechanism but as a starting point to have a discussion about our values, how they influence the way we interpret the law, and the outcomes that we would like to see for our nation and for our fellow humans.

We believe that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights don’t we? And that you can’t take those rights away except for really good reasons with a bunch of safeguards in place to ensure you don’t accidentally or unjustly kill the wrong person right? I don’t want people getting killed in my name unless there’s some actual good reason for it. And I especially don’t want them getting killed when they aren’t even combatants unless there’s some amazingly great reason.

Because I want to be treated in a just manner, I believe the government that I live under should treat all people in a just manner. Because I care about prosperity and peace it matters when we embark on paths that disregard the personhood of non-Americans outside the country, that paint us as a bully to be tolerated until we can be destroyed rather than a trustworthy ally to build a better world with. And the reasons we’ve been given for embarking on this path don’t come close to justifying the human rights we’re violating, the stature we’re losing, or the war with Venezuela we’re risking. So please tell your congresspeople we need better reasons or it needs to stop. Teach your children about human rights and don’t let them be bullies. Talk to your fellow Americans about the wisdom and morality of the actions taken in our names.

First a graph and table from the notebook. To make these I constructed some fake SS earnings records to show off data without sharing all of mine. What you see here the completely implausible journey of someone who started working in 2022 and made 110000 dollars adjusted to 2024 dollars every single year of their career. I tried slightly more realistic models but they didn’t illustrate the points I wanted to make any better and in fact just muddied it up. Ignore the NaN values in the table, I didn’t need to fill those in for future years. The indexed_earnings column is the one that matters, that’s the earnings for each year in 2024 dollars. We’ll talk about why they’re 2024 dollars when explaining how all of it works further below. PIA in the table and graph is the calculated SS benefits this person will get if they stop working forever in that year and then claim SS at age 67. (ignoring SS work credits as I did in the previous post. This person won’t actually be eligible to receive SS when they retire until 2011 when they’ve earned 40 credits. If they stop working forever in 2002 they get nothing at age 67).

There are three features to look at on the graph. Around 100k per year is the lowest number I could use and get all 3 of them to occur but I chose 110k because it makes a slightly more pleasing picture. The first two features are the SS bend points. The first one is at 2005, the second one in 2029. The third is a bonus off-brand bend point. Because the income past and future is a constant inflation adjusted 110000 dollars per year benefits stop growing as soon as the career is 35 years long. In this career that occurs in 2035.

At first glance the third bend might seem totally artificial but it can happen for real in a couple ways. One is that careers plateau so if that happens early enough for you you’ll see similar flattening. In fact if you’ve had a steady career you’ll probably see another flattening somewhere around 35 years in due to the effect of replacing the very early years where you were working part time around your high school classes with later years where you were making full time salary. As soon as you run out of 0 years and much lower earning years to replace with later higher earning years the graph flattens. Another point to note is that if you’re a high enough earner, the taxable earnings cap creates an artificial plateau in your earnings record. If you exceed the cap early enough in your career and keep exceeding it you’ll flatten out in the same way.

Some other interesting things to observe: firstly, as stated in the previous post, once you get to that second bend point you’ve already made 3/4 of the SS benefits it’s possible to make (the max in 2025 dollar is again about $4020). Also note how shallow the line has gotten, even if you are hitting the earnings cap in those years you cant make that line grow by more than about $60 a month in benefits for every additional year of working. This person is seeing $40 growth per year. Secondly, while it seemed going in that keeping the income steady from 22 on was totally nonsensical, and it is still is, it’s less so than I thought. Look at what the equivalent of 110k in 2024 was in 2001 (51848.09). That means a much larger part than I appreciated of the income growth that made me feel awesome over my career was actually just my salary keeping up with nationwide wage inflation. Thirdly, this person who is making a 75th percentile salary for the US (albeit from a very unlikely young age) and 66% of the taxable earnings cap has reached the top 25% of possible SS benefits by their late 40s and the maximum possible for their career in their mid-50s. Perhaps the unlikeliness of this career trajectory makes that a useless curiosity but I think it helps understand the shape of things.

What strategic conclusions to draw from all of this? I don’t know. It totally depends on your own unique situation. Which is why I’m sharing this notebook in hopes you’ll find it useful as a base for your own analysis in your own Jupyter install or even just to look at the code (and find my mistakes). I’m sorry that I didn’t do it as a spreadsheet. That would make it way more universally usable but I’m not willing to learn all the things I’d need to in order to do it as a spreadsheet.

If you just want to look at the calculations here’s the notebook rendered as html.

If you want the code instead it’s here and here’s the Average Wage Series which I’ll discuss below. You’ll also need to provide your earnings record, which I got by copying it off the SSA website and then manually fixing it (with perl) to turn it into TSV without commas, percent signs or dollar signs in the numbers.

The way this works, which seems like it’s probably pretty close to the way the SSA calculator works is:

1. Go through your earnings record and index the earnings for inflation against the most recent year in the record. In the previous post I breezed past this so fast that I completely forgot about it when I wrote my initial ruby script. SS figures wage inflation with a dataset they keep called the Average Wage Index. If the most recent year in your record is 2024 and you want to index your earnings for 2021 what you do is divide the average wages in 2024 by the average wages in 2021. That gives you the wage inflation between 2021 and 2024 as a multiplier. You multiply your wages in 2021 by it. Do that for all the years in your earnings record.
2. Add in future years. We assume we’ll make the same in all those years as we did in 2024 (or the cap).
3. Then calculate the average indexed monthly earnings (AIME) for every year. That’s the earnings for that year plus the previous 34 or as many previous years as there are, divided by 35, divided by 12 to make it monthly.
4. Take AIME for each year and calculate SS full retirement benefits (PIA) using the bend points as described in the previous post. We use the bend points for this year.

A key point to note: By using todays bend points and a constant amount for the earnings in each future year we’re ignoring future inflation while accounting for past inflation by doing that indexing. That means the answers come out in today dollars. Which is good because I know how to reason about them. In 2046 the actual benefits will be different because all the earnings will be adjusted to 2044 average wages, not 2024 and we expect the bend points and earnings caps to be updated upwards each year as well. But we expect that the 2046 numbers will be the same as the 2024 numbers I’m estimating, just adjusted upwards for wage inflation.

This notebook doesn’t give me the exact same answers as the ssa.gov calculator but the answers are within a couple percent and which makes me think that there’s just one or two minor nuances I’ve missed, maybe just off by one errors in which years are used for which parts of the calculation. Whatever the errors are they don’t seem to compound. If you find them please let me know.

Earnings and taxes

Everyone earning w-2 income gets taxed 12.4% but only on the first X dollars of income where X is a number that SS calls maximum taxable earnings and is adjusted every year. In 2025 it’s $176,100. Once you hit the cap you don’t owe any more SS taxes and can receive a refund for any overpayment when you file your taxes (Schedule 3 line 11).

Folks who have an employer only pay 6.2%, the other half is paid by their employer. If you employ yourself you pay all 12.4%. This is the second instance in two consecutive blog posts in which the self-employed get screwed (acknowledging that the self-employed do get to deduct the employer portion, still tho). One can guess that the policy was made this way so that the number most Americans pay attention to is 6.2 and not 12.4. I am not smart or motivated enough to read through the economic literature but skimming through there appears to be vigorous debate on how much of the full 12.4% ends up getting paid by the employees anyway due to impacts on wages and the labor market. As an engineer I hate that this political consideration makes the policy and the resulting world much more complicated than it has to be. On the other hand maybe it wouldn’t have gotten passed at all if everyone was looking at 12.4% rather than 6.2%. Shrug emoji

Benefit calculation

First let’s talk about how benefits are calculated if you claim the benefits at full retirement age (currently 67). SSA calls this the Primary Insurance Amount (PIA).

The SSA keeps a record of how much SS taxes you pay in each year. You can find it on their website. To calculate your benefits they sort the years by amount paid, take the top 35 and take the average. Then they divide that number by 12. This is your Average Indexed Monthly Earnings (AIME).

The amount you receive each month is then calculated using the very bend points that began this whole deep dive. The intent is that once your AIME is high enough, each additional dollar earns you progressively less in SS benefits. These are like income tax bands in that the progression occurs in steps bounded by dollar amounts. With Social Security there are two bend points. Every dollar of AIME below the first bend point earns 90c in SS benefits. Between the first and second bend points each dollar earns 32c and past the second bend point they earn 15c. In 2026 the two bend points are going to be 1,286 and 7,749. Observe that there’s an indirect cap on benefits. Your AIME can’t be any higher than if you hit the maximum taxable earnings cap in the most recent 35 years (assuming the maximum taxable earnings cap always goes up).

Now we can talk about how much you get if you claim benefits early or late. It’s easy, your PIA is adjusted by a constant factor.

Now if you’re FIRE curious, you may not have 35 years in which you’ve put your max possible amount into SS every year, or even 35 full years on record. Max possible amount here is the lesser of the maximum taxable amount or whatever your practical earning limit is in your career. If you don’t have 35 years on record when you claim benefits, the SSA adds 0s as needed to get you up to 35 when doing the PIA calculation. As you add more earning years to your career you fill in those 0s and once you get past 35 every high earning year replaces a lower earnings year. I’ve got one year on record where I earned $900 for example. So every additional year you work brings up your ultimate benefit as long as you keep turning in top-35 year years. However, this is worth keeping in perspective. The most you can add to your AIME with one year of work is max taxable amount / 35 / 12 or about $400 in 2025. And then to convert that into benefits you apply the bend points. If your AIME is below the first bend point that gets you an extra $360 per month. Above it, that $400 earns you an extra $128. Above the second bend point it earns you an extra $60. You have to decide if the additional social security money every month after you claim it is worth working extra years. The SSA has this nice page going through the math for the max possible benefit. It shows that the max possible AIME in 2025 was $13,689. The last $6,298 which is above the second bend point contributes only $944 to the calculated PIA of $4,020. In other words you could have half the average income over 35 years and still get 3/4 as much in SS benefits per month. I should stress that the math changes dramatically though as your AIME gets lower and those extra years are worth way more. I don’t really have a pat conclusion here about how you should weigh this tradeoff, there’s just too many variables that you have to supply from your own life such as how you plan to fund your life after you stop working, when that will be, how much you want to be able to spend and how dependent you expect to be on the social security benefits.

Inflation adjustments

Oh no! Inflation will eat my benefits if I don’t work for 15 years before claiming social security! In a pleasant surprise that’s actually not the case. They index all your earnings to inflation at the time that they calculate your PIA. Then once benefits begin they are adjusted for cost of living yearly

Spousal benefits

One last thing I came across is the social security spousal benefit which might interest you if you’re in a marriage where the two spouses make substantially different amounts of money. Maybe one member is the ruthless capitalist and the other is doing actual good for the community. Both members of that couple potentially get to benefit from the ruthless capitalist because of the SS spousal benefit. As long as the capitalist claims benefits first, and the spouse retires at full retirement age, they get to take the greater of %50 of the capitalists PIA or their own calculated PIA. The percentage is reduced if the spouse retires early but doesn’t increase past 50% if they wait past full retirement age.

However when you do the math you might be surprised that the difference in PIA benefits between the two spouses isn’t as great as you think. The maximum taxable income cap combined with the progressive benefit calculation means that difference between two individuals incomes gets very compressed in the benefit calculation.

Which makes sense. Greater earning power doesn’t result in greater need for social security benefits. Quite the opposite. I’m just a dummy skimming through some documents I found but the benefit calculations seem like a pretty good balancing of tradeoffs to me. If you’re one of the 94% of Americans who are earning less than the maximum taxable income cap then you get more benefits for each dollar you pay into the system, however the additional benefits you get are progressively reduced which makes sense because you don’t necessarily need more just because you put more in and you have a greater ability to provide additional funds for your own retirement. I’m sure as you dig further into the data there’s improvements to be made but for now I’m way less upset by all this than I am about healthcare.

Todd at the old job was into formalized knowledge and decision frameworks. He turned me and others onto tools and methods for managing and acting on information like zettelkastens, PARA, and OODA loops. Sara at the old job was a mountain mover and introduced me to the closely related Getting Things Done method. All of which is to say that for years now I’ve been using these tools in an attempt to organize what I know and what I’m doing more effectively. It’s been a little surprising that these tools feel more useful to me now than they were when I was working for the man.

Back then it was so easy to spend the days just reacting to things. The work ebbed and flowed. At high tide people would fill my calendar with meetings. They’d bring me information and I’d share opinions and recommendations. At low-tide I often found myself having trouble moving the things I was interested in forward but then the tide would flow in again. My personal non-work projects moved slowly but I accepted the 40hr a week job as an excuse for that.

Now I don’t have that excuse and I have a bunch of time to execute on whatever I feel like and it’s so easy to mindlessly wander around not doing anything. So I make much more use of my GTD app (I like OmniFocus). I keep a long list of projects I’ve thought about doing. When I find myself not doing much of anything I go in and prioritize the stuff on the backlog. I use recurring tasks to keep track of all the regular chores I’m responsible for. I use due dates and the forecast calendar to plan out how I’ll spend each day. Of course these plans get shredded when the days actually arrive but that’s okay, I’m doing a lot better at actually checking them off than I used to be.

Without the excuse of a career it’s really obvious how much usable time gets eaten by being addicted to scrolling and how little I get back from that.

New Friends

Some kinds of screwing around are a lot higher quality than the scrolling. I impulse purchased this guitar a few weeks ago (hi res photo of the actual guitar courtesy of Sweetwater). It’s a Squier Classic Vibe 50’s Telecaster. I’ve spent a lot of hours playing it in recent weeks and also thinking about and researching modifications (all guitars need at least a few bits of personalization). I replaced the string tree on the headstock with this one one that also pulls the G string down and that improved how that string rings out somewhat. I also put these intonated brass saddles on it. They were too big by 1/64” (I used it as an excuse to buy new calipers) so I had to file them down to get them to fit right. I later ended up putting the stock straight steel ones back on. The new saddles were good and I think they made the guitar produce less strident and more useful sounds but I felt like they killed the magic a little. I simply found myself playing it less. So I put the stock saddles back on and now it’s got this weird, brash unruliness back. I’m still learning this guitar’s paces. It’s a whole other beast than my number 1 with the fast neck and the loud ass humbuckers. Even when I get similar tones out of the new guitar I arrive at them via very different methods than with the other one. Like I said I’m playing a lot and I find myself playing a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have on the other guitar so mission accomplished. Here is some noodling to illustrate the kinds of sounds that come out of this thing.

The other stooges

New music continues to come together slowly. I put a couple days into pushing progress on a track called Aenea, got the bass and guitars almost completely done. All I have to do now is record final vocals and one guitar flourish and then it’s onto mixing. Another track called Betrayer is waiting for the same treatment, it’s all demoed just needs final versions of the guitars and vocals to be tracked. Somewhere along the way I decided to go ahead and make a single release with these two tracks rather than starting to build demos of other tracks with a bigger release in mind. As much as I like listening to a longer chunk of music I just don’t think I have it in me to invest that much energy in a single release right now. Continuous music deployment feels more sustainable emotionally.

Another big chunk of time got eaten up by a coding project I came up with. As detailed in an earlier post, I do a lot of driving during the week along the same routes every day. I don’t use navigation for these because it’s always the same route. Which means if there’s traffic or roadwork causing delays and I should have gone a different way I don’t know about it until I run into the traffic. So I think it’d be helpful to get notified when there’s an issue on my usual route and I need to check for alternates. I made a fair amount of progress, here’s a little demo that shows off the logic and backend infrastructure. The configured route is the one I usually drive, the app tells me the current time for that and the time for the fastest route it can calculate. Next steps will either involve creating a much fancier webapp or making my first mobile app. Maybe I’ll do the latter just for the learning. I think there’s something here that has the possibility to be real useful for me and maybe others. If nothing else it at least fills gaps in the resume and pads it out with new skills. The next time I interview for engineering jobs it’s probably best if I can report that I did something other than fish and play the guitar during my break.

Other Stuff

It’s weird putting family life and parenthood all the way down here because so much of my energy goes into it. There’s just very little I want to say about it in this forum. But I wanted to say it once for the record in case it ever sounds like it’s all projects and books and fish over here.

Something that was completely predictable was that not working has been pretty isolating. Working full remote for 12 years was pretty isolating but at least I spent a bunch of that time talking to people on phones and video calls. As a deeply introverted person I’m probably better equipped to spend a lot of time by myself than most but I have my limits. I’ve also found that being comfortable in social settings is a skill that atrophies if I don’t exercise it. So I went out and starting doing a little volunteering at the SPCA. I’ve done a couple things but of them laundry feels perfect to me. It’s got a bunch of technical details to remember, and it keeps your hands busy, but it’s mechanical enough to let your mind wander. And it’s a 1-person job so while I get to chat with people who come through the laundry room or who need specific things, I don’t have to coordinate with anyone or pass the time with small talk. The ultimate purpose behind starting at the SPCA was to make it possible for my youngest to volunteer there since she’s not old enough to do it on her own. So we’re also going to start taking dog handling opportunities together after we get the training completed.

Last thing I’ll mention since a few people have relayed to me that they’ve considered taking pauses in their careers is money. Taking this time off has helped me understand our finances and how they’ll work in the time after our careers in a way that I never could before. It’s one of those things where you’ll never see the unknown unknowns until you dive in for at least a while. Our monthly net cash flows are a lot different then I expected and really a lot less bad than I expected. I also didn’t appreciate the amount of income generated by our investments and the tax and healthcare implications. In hindsight I could have worked all that out but the way my brain works I have to change variables (like having a job) and see how the system reacts to understand how everything fits together. So I can recommend gaming out being FIRE because you might be surprised at how money works. I saw the suggestion online to try putting all your income in an account you don’t touch and that seems like a smart way to do it if you don’t want to literally quit working to gain this knowledge.

Speaking of healthcare, for anyone who wants actual numbers on the much discussed ACA changes: The premiums for our ACA plan are going up 20% in 2026, up to ~$1700/month. We’re going to start receiving advanced tax credits that help reduce the bite somewhat. Our total income is low enough that we’re not impacted by the subsidies expiring. Assuming I take a new job next year and the extended subsidies are allowed to lapse we will almost certainly have to pay those credits back which will suck but that would be eclipsed by the additional income. We continue to be pretty impacted by losing the coverage for out of network care that our old employer plan provided despite getting a plan from a big well known company with a relatively large network. In 2026 our market doesn’t include a single PPO, only EPOs, the E is for exclusive and it means no co-insurance for out of network care. Relative to our old plan we pay more out of pocket on copays and prescriptions.

I did a little math this morning and for a family of 4 with an annual income just getting them over the line where they lose the extended subsidies the premiums on our plan would end up being something like 16% of their adjusted gross income, nearly double what they paid in 2025 with the extended subsidies (capped at 8.5%). I just looked at the premiums I paid this year for my old employer plan. $571 pretax. About 5% of AGI for our hypothetical just over 4x FPL family. For much better benefits. That’s a system pretty wildly biased against financial independence no?