Ben Cooper's Blog

My ranking of museums

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I love museums. The main reason my parents took me downtown (Chicago) as a kid was to go to museums and it was our default thing to do when visiting cities. I have a super vivid memory of my brother screaming "no more castles" at the Taj in Agra after spending half our time in London and Delhi (most of which's museums are castle-like buildings) because of the sheer quantity of them we visited. I've been made fun of by my exes several times for taking them to museums for dates and by friends for dragging them to a museum and then progressing too slowly: they're important to who I am!

As follows is my ranking of the museums that I've been to, in order. If it has an * near it, I've been to it but not recently enough to be confident in my ranking. I'm not counting aquariums but I'm counting planetariums or similar.

Museum of Anthropology - Mexico City, Mexico

It's hard to overstate how good this museum is. It does have the advantage of covering a subject that the West (sadly) mostly ignores but the sheer quantity of artifacts is staggering. It contains the Aztec Sunstone (yes, the one you're thinking of) as well as original burials from Tenochtitlan (the city that preceded CDMX before Cortés razed it). I deeply regret not reading this book before going but it was still an incredible experience.

It also has a cool-looking, Changi-style (or perhaps SIN is CDMX-Museum-of-Anthropology-style?) outdoor waterfall for some reason.

Come prepared with Google translate for the labels and to deal with irritating guards: they don't like Americans.

The Met - New York City, New York

The continent's other mega-city comes in strong here. Frankly, I feel misled by the recommendations for MoMA over The Met. I spent over 4 hours in here and I think covered about half the exhibits. The Egyptian exhibits were swoon-worthy (I spent at least 15 minutes just staring at the collection of scarabs steatite scarabs).

The sheer amount of space the Met has available is just unfair - they just fucking took a Frank Llyod Wright build and dropped it in the middle of Manhattan¹. They also have plenty of open atriums that give the artifacts physical space to shine.

They had one exhibit - that seemed temporary - that paired an Egyptian artifact with another artifact from the continent that represented the same motif. I thought it was a brilliant way of bringing non-Egyptian African cultures to the fore by linking them to a culture that is universally admired. It doesn't hurt that the Met has access to some of the most incredible artifacts of Egypt.

Besides that, I quite enjoyed the exhibit on British art. We rarely get to examine English culture in a vacuum (because they insisted on pressing it onto... everywhere) but this did as good a job as you could. The teapots in particular were extremely pretty.

National Palace Museum - Taipei, Taiwan

The history of the National Palace Museum is much of those artifacts were carted across the Taiwan Strait once it became clear to the Nationalists that the Communist Party would win China's civil war. As a result, this is the best Chinese museum outside of the PRC and arguably the best overall.

And, my goodness, it shows! This museum is well put together (still not as good as American museums) and their underlying collection is fabulous. This is a museum where you have to care about the details and especially the dates. You can look at a bowl and think it's just fine and then look at the date and see it's from 5000 BCE. In some ways, this museum is just a repeated reminder - through metallurgy, through pottery, through painting, through sculpture, through weaponry - that China has been a great civilization for longer than most outsiders could comprehend what a great civilization is.

One way of experiencing each artifact at this museum is looking at an artifact and considering whether it demonstrates wealth or technology. Much of the pottery that is impressive on a technical level (and was highly coveted for literal millennia by outsiders) is a demonstration of technology that may be hard to ooh and aah at. On the other hand, the existence of pointless artifacts (like the coupled vase) is a demonstration of wealth and a society advanced enough that there was a class of artisans who specialized in the pointless.

And, if anyone can find a replica of this, I will pay all the money.

*British Museum - London, United Kingdom

I went here when I was ten and don't have a great memory of it. I remember being floored at the Rosetta Stone and mildly impressed with the Elgin Marbles but the overriding memory I have is of too much. That's probably a good signal that an adult would enjoy the museum and its reputation is self-recommending.

Field Museum - Chicago, Illinois

Field Museum is "the" Chicago museum - if a special exhibit comes to town, it's probably coming here.

It's titled as a natural history museum but its status as "the" museum means it inherently covers more - it has large exhibits on Meso-American and Egyptian civilizations that are as well-crafted (but perhaps not as extensive in terms of artifacts).

Perhaps the greatest endorsement of this museum is that they were willing to shift their iconic T-Rex, Sue (which is assuredly what you picture in your head when you think "T-Rex skeleton") out of the main hall as paleontology caught up to the reality that it probably was a poor representation of the overall taxonomic group that was dinosaurs. It's still weird to walk in and not see Sue though.

Textile Museum - Washington, DC

I'm very lucky that I was staying a short walk from here and stumbled upon it, otherwise I never would have known it existed. This museum will take you a short time - 90 minutes, tops - but it shines in terms of density of quality. The technology of fabric is criminally underrated - probably because it's traditionally associated with women (I recommend The Fabric of Civilization to learn more) - and their examples of different techniques across the world did a good job showing that. The highlights:

they had a toy loom that was definitely meant for kids but I was the only one there and got to see how much I would suck as a weaver
their special exhibit (till July 1, 2023) on Islamic carpets and shawls was a personal thrill for me. I also learned that a carpet salesman in New Delhi in 2007 probably scammed my family.
on their top floor, they had a floor-length display of suspended thin cords, at a density such that it was legitimately disorienting. If you must see a picture to persuade yourself to go, google "Anne Lindberg: what color is divine light?" but if you can take me at my word, I think you'll enjoy the display more without seeing a picture beforehand.
they had a quipu (the fabric-based recording method the Incas used to quite successfully maintain a state before the Eurasian technology of paper came to the new world)

Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum - Washington, DC

This is not the Air and Space Museum you are thinking of!

America is very lucky that Mr. Udvar-Hazy decided to leave Hungary and come here. The first Air and Space museum on the National Mall is already a goddamn delight (it's not ranked because I don't remember specifics, just good vibes) and this is just more of that. It's less curated than the original because its selling point is quantity. Aircraft of every vintage you can think of, from every war (including an example of balloon tech from the civil war) you can think of, and from other countries too: they have several unique examples of Japanese and German aircraft. It's interesting to look at them and see where they diverged from American designs but also where the laws of physics forced convergence.

My highlights:

the entrance of the main hall has a Predator drone staring straight at it which is vaguely disconcerting
The Enola Gay - the B-2 that dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima - is there. I don't quite know how to describe how I felt looking at it.
The Discovery space shuttle is there which extended my guilt of owning the LEGO set for many months and having not started it.

Many people there seemed to enjoy looking at the Boeing 707 (well, a 707 prototype). The Museum of Science and Industry has one you can walk into so it didn't excite me as much.

The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) - Chicago, Illinois

The Field Museum is objectively better but I have a soft spot for this place. As a child it drove my interest in math and science and the demonstrations are no less cool as an adult.

If you can, go around Christmas - they have a big ass tree that's very pretty.

Pay to go inside the U-505. It is highly unlikely you will enter a submarine of any type during your lifetime and to go inside one that was in service is a rare opportunity. The exhibit surrounding it is free so no need to pay to go a second time but going once is a must.

Tokyo National Museum - Tokyo, Japan

There is zero excuse for this museum to not be in the top three. Japan has been conquered by culturally extractive Europeans exactly zero times and therefore the country has retained its artifacts. There are legitimately stunning pieces in here, including evidence of very old trade with China and so. many. statues. of. Buddha. However, it's all presented in a rather boring and uncreative way. The best presented exhibit here was the visiting exhibit from the Mexico City Museum of Anthropology (see above) and, given the rest of the museum, I wholly credit the Mexicans for that. Frankly, based on Japan and India, I'm beginning to think that museum curation is a mostly Western skill.

All that said, the underlying quality of the collection and the subject makes this a must-visit if you're in Tokyo.

Renwick Gallery - Washington, DC

I'm not sure if this counts as a sleeper pick or not? A few people recommended it to me but it didn't come across my radar at all on online searches.

This seems to be the Smithsonian's place to put contemporary art. It's quite small - no more than 10 galleries across two floors - but that makes the curation shine all the more. My friend and I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out how a few of the wooden things were made. The room-size display by Janet Echelman was the obvious highlight but everything was great.

Mani Bhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya - Mumbai, India

This was Gandhi's Mumbai headquarters. It has many of his personal possessions and there are scholars visibly working in it. Well worth the time and nominal fee.

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) - New York City, New York

I am not the best at appreciating art so this probably should be ranked higher.

I enjoyed many of the contemporary artists they had on display and had a confused indifference to the rest (plus or minus a few famous pieces, Starry Night is Starry Night no matter how ignorant you are) that I unfortunately usually do with art.

As a result of this visit, I will probably acquire a print of Ellsworth Kelly and I would like to acquire a clip of Refik Anadol's AI hallucinations but they do not seem to be publicly available.

Their design store is fine but overhyped. Probably had more value pre-internet when it was harder to find pretty and cool objects.

Art Institute - Chicago, IL

Full disclosure, I was only here for about 2 hours and did not experience everything. I suspect this would increase rank on a re-visit.

I somehow contrived to - despite being born a 20min CTA ride away - not go to this museum for the first 25 years of my life. As you might hope, that was a mistake.

I'm found this art museum more legible than most others. Paintings like Nighthawks helps with that as does the variety of styles. As soon I was getting bored with a certain style, there was something radically different to activate a different part of my brain.

Museum of Natural History - Washington, DC

Dinosaurs are cool, the Hope Diamond is worth seeing, everything else is pretty meh. I was hoping the exhibit on Africa would be interesting but it was not. Even the dinosaurs were presented worse than I would have liked.

The ranking of this below Field Museum is mostly driven by the ways in which the Field Museum isn't a natural history museum, specifically the Egyptian and African exhibits. As a natural history museum, the Museum of Natural History is better.

The Museum of Flight, Seattle, Washington

One of the best air and space museums in the country (the Smithsonians' are widely regarded as better), the proximity to Boeing makes this place incredible. Most anything Boeing has built, they have one. Highlights include a space shuttle and a 747.

Great place to take WW2 buffs/men.

Portland Art Museum - Portland, Oregon

This museum is considerably better than its counterpart north in Seattle. Their contemporary art is the good type instead of the insane type (the coolest: a picture that looks different to the naked eye versus a camera) but the absolute highlight is the collection of Japanese landscape paintings including a print of the Great Wave. I spent so much time in that room and later used Midjourney to create a version depicting Chicago:

de Young Museum - San Francisco, California

The unique parts of this museum - like its Polynesian art exhibit - are top-notch. The pieces of art are relatively new (a few hundred years old at the most) so I was less impressed on a technological level but hard to beat in terms of sheer novelty.

The exhibits with American painting were boring, at least for someone who's been to at least four museums that have better stuff. The contemporary art was dull and edging more on the crazy side. The Mayan artifacts were cool. There's a Taiwanese visiting exhibit coming soon that looks interesting.

The tower in the museum is a nice view of San Francisco.

Seattle Asian Art Museum - Seattle, Washington

Per the name, this museum mostly focuses on East Asian art but it does not temporally limit itself. Their contemporary art is the standout in my opinion. Don't miss the Yang Yongliang exhibit: he blends traditional Chinese landscape paintings with contemporary cityscapes in a way that quite appeals to my taste.

The few South Asian artifacts they have are lovely.

Museum of Fine Arts - Boston, Massachusetts

This museum would be much better for art lovers than it was for me. There were a few classic American Revolutionary War hero paintings (Paul Revere etc) that I liked on a patriotic level. I wish I had a better capacity to appreciate the Monet and DeGas works. The Greek and Egyptian collection were excellent but I think would have benefitted (for me, anyways) from being framed via history, not via art.

Cahokia Museum - Collinsville, IL (next to St. Louis)

Cahokia is criminally underhyped - there are not many places you will see evidence pre-Colombian North American urbanism. I desperately wish the Americas had developed a useful corn and agriculture earlier than they did - it would have been interesting to see what a culture totally foreign to Eurasia but just as advanced would have looked like.

Nezu Museum - Tokyo, Japan

This is a rather small museum in the Aoyama neighborhood. Unlike the Tokyo National Museum, the curation here is average, not actively bad. I wouldn't call this a must-do based on the artifacts but they are interesting and in-depth: this museum has a large collection of artifacts in specific subjects (like Japanese Koh masks) rather than a collection that spans many subjects. Half the museum property is also a lovely contemplative garden with some Buddhist statues dispersed throughout. By no means a must-do but a good place to relax for a bit.

Museum of American History - Washington, DC

Overrated for adults. The Star-Spangled Banner is great - and something most Americans should strive to see - as is the exhibit around it. A few other exhibits I enjoyed:

A display of a bunch of currency (mostly American, some foreign). I enjoyed this more than I would have because I've seen a similar exhibit in Mumbai and it was fun to contrast.
An exhibit of electricity and other heavy-industry tools. It was elucidating to see the development of them, how American-driven that was, and then despair that China entirely dominates this sort of industry today.

Keralam - Museum of History and Heritage - Thiruvananthapuram, India

You have to be interested in the subject matter to enjoy this museum (although what are you doing in Trivandrum if you're not interested in Kerala??) because the curation is the typically low quality of Indian museums. They have some cool stuff though and seem to be able to take advantage of the fact that the British didn't seem to care enough to steal their stuff.

(they also weirdly have some natural history stuff? If you've been to any Western natural history museum, it's eons ahead, don't bother with those exhibits)

USS Midway - San Diego, California

I might be stretching calling this a museum but it has plenty of exhibit-like rooms. Aircraft carriers are cool.

Nordic Museum - Seattle, Washington

It's hard to not enjoy a place so clearly obsessed with its subject material. It exaggerates in places but... come on, you're not going to ever find another museum that goes so into Nordic-Americans and their history. Check their special exhibit, you might get lucky - my friend got in during an IKEA exhibit, on my first visit I got in during a loan from Sweden's Nationalmuseum, and for my second visit I got in on a special exhibit from the lead of Sigur Rós that was basically a sound bath.

*Adler Planetarium - Chicago, Illinois

Maybe I'm being unfair but I don't recall this having anything you couldn't easily experience online. The value here is in being put into a space-mood, not really in the exhibits.

Toshugu Museum - Nikko, Japan

If you're at this museum, you've also done the shrine which is awesome. The museum is very cheap and very fast and it has a few artifacts from Tokugawa himself, including his armor. It also includes a hilarious anime that glosses over him murdering an 8 year old but, you know.

Prince of Wales Museum - Mumbai, India

As with many things in Mumbai, nationalistic local governments have officially named it after some Marathi ruler that no one except them cares about instead of retaining the original British name that everyone uses anyways. The actual name is Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Sangrahalaya means museum) so congratulations to you if you remember that.

This place is not great, at least in comparison to expectations. The curation is bad, the artifacts are boring, and the guards will probably try to scam you on the ticket price. I will very reluctantly say it is worth the hour or two it will take you (the top museum is the #2 city in a place as big and old as India should take you considerably longer but here we are!) but... ugh. Mumbai is a great city to visit but it does not have the best tourist attractions.

The highlights for me were the (I think temporary?) exhibit on Indian textiles (which are usually underrepresented, probably due to their usually-feminine origins) and the history of Indian currency.

Seattle Art Museum - Seattle, Washington

Very underwhelming. The contemporary art here is the crazy type (there was an exhibit that asked people to just scream which was oh-so-joyful to hear while looking at art). The Asian art there was cool (note this is the same organization as the Seattle Asian Art Museum so they are splitting their collection) as was the Mesoamerican art.

The highlight that is unfortunately not there anymore. It was a temporary exhibit on Ikat, a fabric dyeing technique. I suppose I can contingently recommend this museum if they have a good temporary exhibit.

Museum of Popular Culture (MoPOP) - Seattle, Washington

This place probably isn't for me but I was not super impressed. I guess learning about Nirvana and some old sci-fi movies was cool.

Burke Museum - Seattle, Washington

If there existed a pill that rendered a person temporarily illiterate, I would advise taking it before going into this museum. The curatorial impulses and the collection are good but the politics of the people who work at this place get in the way. There was a big sign in the lobby that recommended masks to "protect our young and vulnerable". The untruth² that COVID affects the young isn't a huge deal in itself but it's a pretty bad signal when you go to a place to learn things and one of the first things you see is based on an untrue premise. There was also a sign declaring all museums as colonialist enterprises. That certainly has been the case with many - not all - museums but if you believe that... why do you work at a museum?

The indigenous artifacts they have are interesting - and I like how they stress the technology of indigenous peoples instead of portraying them as savages (as was/is often done in America) or as in-tune-with-nature-Pocahontas-types (as modern liberals often do). I particularly enjoyed seeing some of the boats that Pacific Islanders used to colonize the oceans, as well as the way they weaved the sails.

The natural history parts of the museum are fine and I don't think you'll find better in Seattle but that's more of a criticism of Seattle than praise of the Burke. I would have enjoyed them as a kid but tastes change. Personally, I find it sad to see stuffed animals.

This place is probably worth a couple hours of your time but go in with your expectations set. The cafe is great though - it serves Native American flatbread tacos (a food I haven't seen elsewhere) and is generally high quality.

Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) - Seattle, Washington

The Pacific Northwest became interesting in 1916 when Boeing was founde; most everything else is a prequel. MOHAI does not prioritize accordingly; more industry, less history please!

*Frist Art Museuem - Nashville, Tennessee

My experience here is coming as part of a university event as an 18-year-old, looking at some cool antique cars (special exhibit) and a few paintings and then trying to leave at which point I was not allowed to leave and was instead locked inside a building I did not want to be in for an additional hour. Go Commodores!

Museums I want to go to

(but like I'll go to most museums if I'm in their city long enough)

British Museum - London, United Kingdom (again, as an adult)
Museum of Islamic Art - Doha, Qatar (if I get over my allergy to funding middle eastern dictators)
Vatican Museums - Vatican City
Art Institute of Chicago - oops this is embarrassing
Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago, Illinois
Chicago History Museum
National Palace Museum - Taipei, Taiwan (they stole all the best stuff from the CCP)
War Remnants Museum - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Museum of Anthropology at UBC - Vancouver, Canada
Museum of Egyptian Antiquities - Cairo, Egypt (reluctantly included because everything else I've heard of visiting Egypt is awful)
National Museum - New Delhi, India (Indian museums tend to have bad curation but I'm hoping the quality of the underlying topic bails them out)
Museo Textil de Oaxaca

Places that call themselves museums but come on

St. Louis (STL) City Museum

This is a children's museum for adults and it's incredibly fun. I barely have to recommend this because if you're visiting St. Louis, you'll definitely go.

Chicago Children's Museum

I have incredibly fond memories of my mom dealing with me and my brother misbehaving on the blue line to take us here only to deal with us misbehaving there. I hope to go back someday with children of my own.

The House on the Rock - Spring Green, Wisconsin

I don't even know what to call this place but it's fucking weird. Go develop an idea of what the STL City Museum is and then think that but on cocaine.

Pacific Science Center - Seattle, Washington

It's closer to a children's museum than a true museum which is fine but not for me. It's quite good for what it is. Their IMAX screen is true IMAX so recommended for Dune 2, Avatar 3 etc.

Cup Noodles Museum - Yokahama, Japan

I suppose this is technically a museum but come on, that's not a real subject. A ton of fun though, come prepared with the app so you can listen to the translation of the extremly over-the-top documentary where they absolutely gloss over the creator ruthlessly exploiting his patent for profit.

Unranked

I've been to these but have exactly zero memories so who knows.

Smithsonian Air and Space
National Holocaust Museum
International Spy Museum
Newseum

Admittedly, you can see plenty of better examples of his work if you're willing to road-trip the Midwest but you can't get to Taliesin on the subway.
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I hesitate to call it a lie because I don't want to ascribe intent but, honestly, for people as educated as working in a museum implies, they could have easily found the truth.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

Seattle's Initiative 135 is ridiculous

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I've been taking a break from writing endorsement guides because I moved to Seattle in May of 2021 and I'm less familiar with the political terrain here. It's also harder to learn; the death of local news basically seems to function with speed inverse to the size of the city: the best sources in Seattle are comparable to the worst sources in Chicago¹.

However, the Feb 15, 2023 ballot in King County has one question on it and it upset me enough that it got me to write this.

Seattle Initiative 135

How should I vote?

I mean, you should probably read the whole post but if you're busy, vote no and close the page.

What is it?

Seattle initiative 135 would establish a "Public Development Authority (PDA)" which (per the initiative's phrasing) would "develop, own, and maintain public financed mixed-income social housing developments". You can find the full text here².

It does not allocate money to build or acquire housing, instead it requires the city to allocate money and resources to get it started up (18 months of office space, legal services, basic staff etc). It leaves to the City Council the decision whether to allocate ongoing financial support (support that would absolutely be necessary if the PDA were to actually manage housing stock).

Were (and there is a considerable amount of uncertainty as to whether or not it will) the PDA to manage housing stock, it would be permitted to rent to anyone making up to 120% of Seattle's median income. For a family of four, that would be any family earning less than $145,088. The rent would not be permitted to exceed 30% of tenant income.

Why should I vote no?

I could make a pro-housing argument against this initiative - I think so long as new construction is difficult (there's an apartment near where I live that's going through design review: it's replacing an ugly parking lot with rats in it), it's just a waste of time to create new agencies dedicated to building housing (they'll have to go through the same design review and all the other barriers that slow housing construction). That said, this proposal is such a procedural mess that I don't think you even have to dive into the details of building more housing.

Zero money dedicated to housing

An obvious thing you might do if you wanted to start a public housing agency is give them some money to buy or build houses. The authors of this initiative decided to go in a different direction.

This initiative allocates about ~$750K for starting up this agency and running it for the first 18 months (an amount, I would note, that could build about two homes that could actually house people) but absolutely nothing to actually manage property, instead depending on hypothetical future allocations from the Seattle City Council. Will those allocations be forthcoming? No one knows: the Seattle City Council is going to turnover seven of nine seats this November so it's basically impossible to predict the future politics of this funding.

That said, the financial constraints will not change in November - Seattle has had slight budget shortfalls (on the order of $10s of millions of dollars against a $7.4B budget) and it's not clear where money for this housing authority would come from. Much of the opposition to this initiative is coming from existing private housing charities who worry the obvious place this money would come from - if it comes at all - is their existing allocations from the city. I share that concern and would prefer to continue funding the existing organizations that have a proven track record instead of standing a new one up.

WRITING REPORTS IS NOT MAGIC

At some point, some clever politician somewhere discovered that a lot of people are satisfied by legislation that requires writing a really good report. This initiative takes advantage of that by requiring that "[w]henever the City considers the sale or gift of public lands for private or non-public use, it would need to prepare a feasibility study regarding whether the property should be transferred to the PDA for social housing".

I can't overstate how much I hate this. The horniness of the American political system for wasting public servants' time writing reports ruins projects. We spend more time thinking about doing projects rather than doing them and this ultimately bolsters the conservative anti-government agenda. Private actors don't have to write massive reports before doing things while conservatives and so-called liberals delight in saddling government with writing essays like they're high schoolers studying for the SAT. And, at the end of the day, nobody will read that PDF except legal arsonists dedicating to ruining the project by finding some slightly malformed fact pattern that will consume city resources and time on a multi-year court fight.

If you believe government should do more things, that doesn't just mean funding them or stopping malevolent corporate lobbying, it means actually expanding what they can do without begging permission. It means not creating tortuous bureaucracies and instead creating clear power structures that you can vote for or against every other November.

I suspect that Chicago's scale isn't enough for it to escape this trap, particularly given its population loss. It seems like it will take longer though.
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I'd like to take this moment to register just how ridiculous is is that, in twenty-fucking-twenty-three, a city government is uploading a scanned PDF image. This probably also violates the ADA.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

Unorganized thoughts on LASIK

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I got LASIK recently. I have a few thoughts on the experience and its technology/economics.

Holy fuck, it works

The science of LASIK is very cool. The reason (most) (younger) people have vision problems is their cornea (the front of the eyeball) isn't bending light perfectly: imagine using a camera where the glass is weirdly bent. LASIK seeks to change the shape of the cornea by burning away tissue.

There are two lasers used: one laser creates a flap on your eye, making the tiniest possible cut as far from the center of the eye as possible (imagine peeling an apple in the most minimal way possible) to grant access to the cornea and the other laser alters your cornea by burning away tissue. This is where most of the risk comes in: we currently do not have the technology to restore burned away tissue and the eye is so complex (there's a reason there are two separate medical professions dedicated to it!) the body will not heal it. If the surgeon fucks up... well it's bad.

But it actually works! LASIK was first approved in the FDA the same year I was born (1998) and has been remarkably successful. Stories of it not working are the minority (see "Even good medical resources are bad").

Moreover, its improvement is tied to the relentless progress of technology in the way most medicine is not. As our laser technology improves, we can aim at the correct area of the cornea more accurately. The machine also uses eye-tracking (so it's always aiming at the correct part of the eye) and the processors and algorithms that enable the tracking have improved immensely since 1998. One could easily imagine LASIK being as common as optometrists someday as the cost of lasers go down.

FWIW, besides my left eye being unusually dry, I've suffered no side effects and have something between 20/15 and 20/20 vision now.

It's still a laser pointed at your eye

It's one thing to know all the science and quite another to have the laser pointed at your eye. There's also a scary moment after they open the flap in your eye when you can't really see (just black with some flashes of light) and you're really hoping that this shitty beige medical room isn't the last thing you ever saw. Surgery is still surgery and surgery is very annoying, at best.

Still! It's fucking wild this works! We went millennia without any vision correction, figured out eyeglasses around 1300¹, took another 600 years to figure out contacts and figured out how to avoid corrective devices in most cases just 100 years later. The results of science are cool. My hope is the progress on vision correction accelerates enough that by the time my vision starts deteriorating again in my 40s (the lens - the thing in your eye you change the shape of to change where you're focusing on starts to become less flexible around then), there's some process to fix that ².

It's weirder being able to see than I expected

I hadn't realized how much of my life is centered around this seeing/not-seeing dichotomy. A few days ago I was going to sleep and felt guilty that I hadn't taken my contacts out because I could still see - but, of course, that was just the LASIK-improved-eyes. I've needed glasses since the 1st grade so I probably should have expected more changes to my life than I did.

The economics are fucked: the petty complaint

Of course, it wouldn't be the American medical system if extraordinary, almost mythological science wasn't backed up by an economic model of incredible stupidity that benefits nobody except a few monopolistic companies.

I paid $4,000 for LASIK. It's usually $5,000 (they had a sale) but that's also because I went to a place with the best laser. I probably could have saved around half if I went with an older - but still FDA-certified and everything - laser. I originally projected LASIK to save me money in the long run (I've wanted it for about 4 years). I was spending around $400 a year in daily contacts. LASIK is estimated to last around 20 years (that's around when non-corneal vision problems start cropping up) so I would have saved around $4,000 over that time-span and avoided the downsides of contacts³.

However, I recently started a job and got vision "insurance". Insurance is a misnomer there, they don't actually insure your eye (in general, if you develop an eye disease or hurt your eye, that's the purview of your general health insurance). They're basically vision coupon plans that companies offer employees because the government offers tax breaks on compensation that's in the form of insurance because the American healthcare system is spectacularly poorly designed. The one I'm currently on (VSP Vision Care) will pay for frames every other year plus eyeglass lenses/contacts... but nothing for LASIK.

This changes the economics of LASIK to be squarely negative. Of course, as promised, this is a very petty complaint: people born with 20/20 vision go and work for companies that offer vision insurance all the time and they don't whine about it. Still, this is one of many examples of where the American healthcare system is bad. The total cost of contacts is cheaper than LASIK is but the structure of how each is paid leads to more total spending being the most logical one for the consumer.

It ends up like this is because vision insurance plans typically own or are owned by larger corporations that acquire optometry chains and even glasses/contact lens makers. This sort of vertical integration gives them more control over a consumer's dollars (John Oliver does a good overview of the funhouse mirror nightmare that is American optometry). The higher LTV of a contacts consumer, combined with the fact that there are very few makers of glasses/contacts leads to bad incentives.

The economics are fucked: a better complaint

A better complaint of the economics LASIK is that the time it's most logical to do and the time most people find it most affordable to do are very different. LASIK makes sense to do as soon as someone's vision stops changing. It's a one-time investment that has a relatively fixed deprecation date (the patient's 40s). The squares out to the most logical time to perform LASIK as most people's 20s.

I don't know if you, dear reader, have seen the news lately but young people are not doing so hot economically right now. There's a lot of reasons why ⁴ but the point is that most young people would probably struggle to meet a $400 expense, let alone a $4,000 one⁵.

This is, of course, shitty in a broad sense but, bringing it back to LASIK, it's particularly shitty for that. The optimal medical window to get LASIK does not align with a time when most people can afford it - I'm very lucky that I was able to. The result is that most people get LASIK when they're older and thus get fewer years of good vision + have a harder recovery. Not great.

Even good medical resources are bad

The meme that WebMD will tell you literally any symptom is cancer is well deserved. But WebMD is trying to ride the SEO dragon and get clicks so whatever, good on them for finding a business model, I guess. On the other hand, Mayo Clinic brands itself as a serious online medical resource. However, if you go to their page on LASIK, you're treated to (after a good explanation of how it works, to be fair), a large enumeration of the risks with absolutely no context on how likely they are. Buried at the end is that the surgery works for more than 8/10 people (itself, a very conservative estimate). This page looked a lot like the consent form I had to sign for the surgery where they're covering their ass by enumerating every possible thing that could go wrong.

Without knowing the legal risks that Mayo could subject themselves to - because I'm sure they're real and I certainly wouldn't want to run a site that has to deal with them - I think this is a bad model for informing patients. A patient that has a precise-ish measure of the chance of success and knows nothing about the risks (except there's a bunch and they're all >0) is just a patient that has been successfully scared. I think a better model would seek to quantify the risks, and would at least mention that the procedure being FDA approved means they have to be relatively small for an optional procedure. America has plenty of entities trying to confuse us about healthcare; we really don't need the neutral ones contributing to the confusion. I suspect that lack of good patient resources leads to the well-known phenomenon where patients blindly listen to doctors even when that leads to suboptimal outcomes.

Good Lord, the American medical system is bad

I was actually surprised at how bad the patient experience was during this process. It wasn't worse than normal but the same QoL nonsense that pervades the rest of American medicine - difficulty getting someone on the phone, irritating pharmacy delays, etc; all of that was here too. I didn't expect that for an optional luxury procedure that presumably has a quite high-profit margin in a competitive area (eyeballing Google Maps, it looks like there are about 10 places around Chicago that do LASIK). All the typical Republican talking points about the free market really should apply here and they really don't. As a particular example of this, I called and requested a receipt (not automatically sent to me, because of course not) and my options were snail-mail and fax. I hardly need to point out here that the ability to fax probably implies the ability to scan which implies the ability to email; the lack of an option to do so implies they don't give a shit⁶.

I don't really know what to do with this - and the people reading this, myself included, probably don't need to be persuaded about this - but with the caveats of N=1 in mind - it seems clear to me that if the free market doesn't get this procedure right, it's not going to get much right with respect to healthcare⁷. Universal healthcare, whether single-payer (Canada), single provider (U.K.), or some sort of regulated and subsidized free market system (Germany), doesn't have to be very good to represent a massive improvement. Maybe the equivalent of Ben Nelson (US Senator, D-NE, one of the deciding votes to pass Obamacare but also make it worse) in 20 years will believe this and won't pussyfoot around with complicated exchanges and shit and just pass something straightforward and good.

The discovery is officially credited to an Italian. As with many discoveries, the usual arguments on whether the Arabs or Chinese figured it out first and didn't document it apply.
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You know, assuming America and this planet are still around.
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Glasses would have been much cheaper. I estimate around $2,000 cheaper but they're also a clearly worse product in terms of vision compared to contacts. Glasses leave blindspots, contacts do not.
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I have some controversial takes here but let's just blame Baby Boomers and all be happy.
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That report doesn't break down the $400 unexpected expense by age (itself an example of the natural myopia - get it, "myopia" - democracies have towards the lower voting young population, in my opinion) but if 40% of adults would struggle, young people who are worse off then the aggregate population and since COVID has hit, I'm comfortable characterizing it as "most".
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When I finally received the receipt (one week later), it was a printed piece of paper in a hand-addressed envelope. Everyone involved in the design and execution of the process of procuring that receipt should feel bad.
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I should note here that Obamacare tried to create a system of electronic medical records which was a spectacular failure. Maybe someday.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

IL November 2020 Endorsements

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

These are my "endorsements" for the November 2020 IL elections. You can find the ballot I'm working with here. This will be (from least to most) relevant for you if you live in the US, live in Illinois and live in Cook County.

The idea behind this post is that I try to put a lot of effort into voting well each election. I'm hoping to increase the returns on that work by helping others with their voting¹.

I published my endorsements for the first time in March for the primary. I was fairly pleased with the results: I got about 63 unique pageviews on that with an average visit time of about six minutes which I'm hoping is a sign that some people found value in my endorsements. I also enjoy writing this guide and I think it's a good opportunity for me to advocate for quixotic causes I believe in that don't neatly fall into our partisan divide.

While reading this, keep in mind that I call these endorsements for a reason: they're the distillation of my values into a binary choices between imperfect candidates. Politics is hard and there are cases where two good people with similar values can disagree. I don't intend this to be me calmly laying out the differences between candidates - it's a defense of my voting opinion. Take these endorsements with that in mind.

Before we start, I want to enumerate my values so people know where I'm coming from. If you disagree with my choices, I'm guessing it's because you disagree with my values - the nature of general elections in a super blue state means that the ideological difference between opposing candidates is vast and it's harder to vote on things like competency (that's for primaries).

I'm a progressive Democrat and I like the Democratic Party.
I define that progressivism in terms of net benefit. That has a couple implications:
- I do my best to not vote on identity, but to vote on policy and electability.
- I sometimes make compromises that leave a bad taste in my mouth but I think will lead to more progressive policy overall.
Somewhat paradoxically, I'm one of those high information/involvement voters that political scientists have established vote more on identity rather than personal interest (I'm very happy to raise my own taxes). I do my best to align my identity with what I think the best policy for my values are. This fails sometimes.
I think politics and policy are really tough. They involve unhappy compromises. People who pretend they have a magic bullet to solve our current quagmires are probably wrong.

This guide was distilled from reading the Chicago Tribune's endorsements, the Chicago Sun-Times' endorsements, and my own eclectic knowledge of politics and policy.

Let's get into it.

Not-Judges

President and Vice President

Frankly, if you disagree with me on this, I don't think the rest of this guide will be very useful for you.

Endorsement: Joseph R. Biden & Kamala D. Harris.

United States Senator

This isn't really a competitive race so it doesn't super matter. Dick Durbin being in the Dem Senate Leadership is good for Illinois. I wish he had faced a real primary - the nature of IL is that his opponents in the general election are jokes.

Endorsement: Richard J. Durbin.

US Representative, 8th District

This also isn't a competitive race. There is no Republican candidate and the Libertarian candidate said "Hillary was not locked up, or even properly INVESTIGATED" in his Sun-Times endorsement interview.

Endorsement: Raja Krishnamoorthi.

State Senator, 28th District

Laura Murphy is unopposed. What I wrote for her unopposed primary still holds true:

As a member of IL legislative leadership, a good rule of thumb is that she's not great. Laura Murphy doesn't disappoint. She has been part of IL's mismanagement of the state.

As an aside, she's also been a rabble rouser about O'Hare noise. I'm not particularly sympathetic to suburbs complaining about the consequences of suburbanization (and am glad that she is typically overruled) but it's her job to represent her constituent's opinions. Concentrated costs, and diffuse harms, man.

As in the primary, I will use the luxury of a protest vote.

Endorsement: No one.

State Representative, 56th District

Long angry sigh.

Illinois is not a well-managed state. Say what you want about Republicans but the fault of Illinois' mismanagement falls directly on Democrats. Mussman (the Democratic incumbent) is not particularly to blame for this but she's not particularly innocent either.

Her opponent, Scott Kegarise, is a pretty bland Republican. He does a lot of stuff in the Township and is generally a cut taxes Republican. In years where the Republican Party isn't actively ruining our country, I'd be tempted to vote for him. This is not one of those years: everyone who runs under the GOP banner should face electoral retribution until they reform their party².

Endorsement: Michelle Mussman.

The Fair Tax Referendum

I'm going to write a lot here which makes it seem like I'm undecided. I'm not: we should pass the Fair Tax Amendment. Rich people should pay their fair share. If you earn less than $250K, your tax burden will go down or stay the same. You can skip the rest of this section unless you care about the details. Click here to skip.

The Fair Tax Amendment changes Illinois' constitution. It is currently against the IL Constitution to have a different state income tax rate for different incomes. That means that poor people can't pay higher rates... but it also means rich people can't pay higher rates. In practice, the status quo only defends against the second: it means that a poor family, an average family, and the wealthiest families pay the same percentage in state income tax.

This is really bad. Part of the bedrock of Democratic politics is that the rich should pay their fair share. Since the rich can survive and enjoy the luxuries of life even with a higher tax rate, that fair share is going to be higher (on a percentage basis) than an average family. I don't think we can call ourselves a progressive state without taxing the rich more.

The Actual Plan The Legislature Has Put Forward

It's important to note that this amendment doesn't actually establish a new set of tax rates: it gives the legislature the right to pass a progressive tax plan. Theoretically, they could use this power to tax 100% of the income of those making less than $10,000. To assuage such concerns³, the legislature has released their plan. I'm going to talk about the family plan because I think that matters to more people. The individual plan is basically the same, the brackets are just at lower incomes.

Income	Marginal Tax Rate
$0 – $10,000	4.75%
$10,001 – $100,000	4.90%
$100,001 – $250,000	4.95%
$250,001 – $500,000	7.75%
$500,001 – $1,000,000	7.85%
$1,000,001 and above	7.95% on net

For context, the current rate for all incomes is 4.95%. Since 97% of people in IL earn less than $250K, 97% of people in IL will receive a very small tax cut (that's where that claim in the ads is coming from). For example, a family earning $87,771 (the median family income in IL) will see their tax go from $4,344 to $4,285, a decrease of $69. That's nice but nothing to write home about. The big effect of this law will be to tax the rich a lot more. Here's a chart of total tax owed (in dollars) versus income⁴:

There's a few things to observe here:

While the Fair Tax technically gives a tax cut to those earning less than $100K, it's basically indistinguishable from the status quo.
The tax burden of rich people will go way up.
There's a straight vertical line at $1M.

What's Up With That Vertical Line

This is my only criticism of this plan. The way marginal tax rates work is you pay the rate for each range, not on all your come. For example, under the Fair Tax, a family earning $20K will pay a tax of 4.75% on the first $10K and a tax of 4.9% on the second $10K. 4.75% *10,000 + 4.9% * 10000 = $965. For some reason, this isn't true for the IL plan for people who earn more than $1M. They pay the 7.95% rate from above on their entire income. Frankly, I don't really care about people earning $1M a year but the result of this plan is that it's smarter to earn exactly $1,000,001 a year than it is to earn anything between $1,000,001 and $1,008,764. It's not a huge deal but it's stupid and should be called out.

Overall

All of that said, that rich people should pay disproportionately more in taxes is a dogma of progressive governance. I agree with that dogma. This plan achieves that.

Endorsement: Yes.

Metropolitan Water Reclamation District Commissioners

We really shouldn't be voting on this. This is a highly technical job that involves managing wastewater to keep Lake Michigan and the Chicago River (mostly) clean. It also helps prevent floods. Literally nothing about this is political (although a few stupid Republicans usually run that pretend climate change doesn't exist for ??? reasons). In situations like these, it's best to go with the endorsements of news organizations. The Sun-Times and the Tribune agree on their endorsements and those are my choices. They also endorsed the same candidates in the primary so I'll just copy over what I said then.

I'll be heavily relying on endorsements here. Conveniently, the Tribune and the Sun-Times agree with each other on endorsements.

Davis is a no-brainer. He used to work for the EPA, was President Obama's point person on the Great Lakes, and has led the fight against the invasive Asian Carp in the Great Lakes.

Kimberly DuBuclet used to be in charge of the Chicago Park District's legislative affairs, and has done good work with encouraging greener construction. She obviously knows what she's talking about based on her Sun-Times interview.

Eira Sepúlveda has an exceptionally cool background. She's a village trustee for Hanover Park but she got into the MWRD's work because she walked her kids to work on the MWRD's property (the MWRD is the second biggest landowner in Cook County), and when her home flooded, she did her own research to figure out how things work. I adore people who figure shit out for themselves.

Endorsement: M. Cameron ‘Cam’ Davis, Kimberly Neely DuBuclet and Eira L. Corral Seplúveda

State's Attorney

With the obvious exception of the Presidential race and the possible exception of the Fair Tax, this is the most important race on the ballot. This job involves taking the information that police give and deciding who to charge. This has tremendous influence on our criminal justice system. Supposedly liberal white voters voted to disproportionately jail black people for decades (remember, most mass incarceration happens on the state level) by pulling the lever on "tough on crime". Luckily, we have a new generation of progressive prosecuters (Larry Krasner from Philadelphia leading the charge) who aren't continuing that.

The main two candidates are Kim Foxx (Democratic incumbent) and Pat O'Brien (Republican). The major endorsements are split: Foxx with the Sun-Times and O'Brien with the Tribune.

I don't think this race is close. Progressive prosecutors are a great way to change our justice system and O'Brien is not one. His endorsement from the Tribune describes him as one but it's flatly wrong. His website (which has the classic Republican tactic of including a blurry unflattering picture of a black women to play on racism) includes this line "[c]riminals have carte blanche to pillage and burn our cities because Kim Foxx has declared publicly that there will be no consequences for their criminal behavior". That is a flat lie. Cook County should not accept it.

I will say the reason this race is even close is because Foxx had very questionable judgement in a case with a minor celebrity. Her conduct was technically not criminal but it was obviously bad and she never really apologized for it. I'll take that over 90s-era tough-on-crime policies but Foxx should have done better; it's important for prosecutors to be above reproach when it comes to corruption.

Endorsement: Kim Foxx

Clerk of the Circuit Court

This is a mostly logistical job of retrieving records and making them accessible. The reason it's important is because ensuring that criminal records are accessible matters a lot for defendants. For example, let's say that someone is in jail because of a misunderstanding that can be clarified with a record. The retrieval time (which, in this day and age, should be instant) is literally the limiting factor on how fast they can get out of jail. It's currently horribly mismanaged.

The Democratic candidate has lots of government experience but is part of the IL legislature. The Sun-Times noted that she doesn't have many concrete ideas to improve the office but endorsed her because her Republican opponent has no ideas and most of her reputation is in culture-war issues like same-sex marriage. I trust the Sun-Times here on both their endorsement and their hesitancy.

Endorsement: Iris Y. Martinez

Board of Review, 1st District

The Board of Review hears property tax appeals from property owners. Cook County has had a corrupt system for a long time where the rich get their property undervalued (and pay less tax) while the rest pay more than their fair share. It's an elegant reverse Robin Hood situation. The Assessor (the person who comes up with the valuations) is a guy named Fritz Kaegi who's actually good at his job and is trying to be fair. This election is about the Board who will hear appeals against his valuations.

I'm super upset about this race. There was a great guy running in the Democratic primary - Abdelnasser Rashid - but he got voted down (in such a low-information race, I wouldn't be shocked if it was just because he has a foreign name). Instead, the winner, Tammy Wendt, is a lawyer who protects cops that murder Black people from being fired.

The Sun-Times and the Tribune endorsed her Republican opponent, Dan Patlak (incumbent). He's not outwardly opposed to making the system fairer, he's done a solid job so far, and he hasn't made a career of protecting murdering cops. Sounds good to me⁵.

Endorsement: Dan Patlak.

Judges

Judges are irritating to vote for, and honestly we shouldn't be voting for them. There's good evidence they give harsher sentences during election years to appeal to voters. They should be nominated through the executive branch and confirmed through the legislative branch.

Nevertheless, we have to vote for them. I will be using guides from Bar Assocations and the like. They are listed here. In particular, I'll be emphasizing http://www.voteforjudges.org aggregation of recommendations and Injustice Watch's guide. If a candidate lacks a recommendation from any one Bar organization, I will not be endorsing them because the median is having all recommendations. I may still vote for them based on their opponent.

Additionally, I will not recommend any candidate who is a former prosecutor or has the Fraternal Order of Police's endorsement.

I'll also be skimming their platforms (where it exists) to confirm there's no tough-on-crime nonsense in them.

There will frequently be many candidates tied. In those cases, I'll say who I'm voting for but not provide an "endorsement", per se.

Races

These are races where there is a Democratic and Republican candidate to vote for or a candidate from just one party. This is different from the retention ballot (I'll cover that next). The vast majority of these are unopposed. I'll only write about the competitive one.

Judge, 13th Subcircuit (Vacancy of Kulys Hoffman)

This is rather tough. Susan Groebner did not receive a "Recommended" rating from the Cook County Bar Association, and is a former prosecutor. Her opponent previously called himself "the only true Republican" in a race from 2018. I don't love either candidate. I won't endorse her but the Tribune's endorsement of Groebner tips it to her.

I'll vote for: Susan Groebner.

Retention

This is a simple yes/no vote on whether someone should stay a judge. I'll do this in a table and only explain only a few.

Appellate Court

Judge	Retain?	Why?
Aurelia Marie Pucinski	Yes
Mary Katherine Rockford	Yes

Circuit Court

Judge Name	Retain?	Why?
Michael P. Toomin	Yes	The Cook County Democratic Party is against him because he investigated Kim Foxx. He's well qualified and has integrity. Keep him around.
James Patrick Flannery, Jr.	Yes
Mary Ellen Coghlan	Yes
Shelley Lynn Sutker-dermer	Yes	Prosecutor but worked on child sex abuse.
Patricia Manila Martin	No	Awful candidate but she's stepped down anyways so your vote doesn't matter.
Kenneth J. Wadas	No	A lot of his decisions are reversed by upper court and his mistakes mostly seem to be in the direction of imprisoning the innocent.
Gregory J. Wojkowski	Yes
Robert E. Gordon	Yes
Lewis Nixon	Yes
Margaret Ann Brennan	No	A lot of her decisions are reversed and her mistakes seem to mostly be in the direction of big corporations.
Janet Adams Brosnahan	Yes
Peter A. Felice	Yes
Kerry M. Kennedy	Yes
Casandra Lewis	Yes
Laura Marie Sullivan	No	Good chance there's some corruption happening here.
Raul Vega	Yes
Michael B. Hyman	Yes
Joan E. Powell	Yes
Patrick J. Sherlock	Yes
Maureen Ward Kirby	Yes
Edward A. Arce	Yes
James N. O'hara	Yes
Mauricio Araujo	No	Serial sexual harasser but he's stepped down anyways so your vote doesn't matter.
Thomas J. Byrne	No	A lot of his decisions are reversed and his mistakes mostly seem to be in the direction of hurting the innocent.
Ann Collins-dole	Yes
Donna L. Cooper	Yes
Anna Helen Demacopoulos	Yes
Diana L. Kenworthy	Yes
Pamela Elizabeth Loza	Yes
Jackie Marie Portman-brown	No	She's rated unqualified by several Bar assocations, likes to lock up innocent people and locked her 6-year-old niece in a holding cell for a few minutes as punishment for some reason.
Dominique C. Ross	Yes
Kristyna Colleen Ryan	Yes
Debra B. Walker	Yes
Ursula Walowski	Yes
Anthony C. "Tony" Kyriakopoulos	Yes
Caroline Kate Moreland	No	Former prosecutor and denied foster care visitation rights during COVID.
Thomas J. Carroll	Yes
Cynthia Y. Cobbs	Yes
Daniel J. Kubasiak	No	Missing Bar recommendations and served as campaign manager for a racist in 1987.
Andrea M. Buford	Yes
Pamela Mclean Meyerson	Yes
Chris Lawler	Yes
John Michael Allegretti	Yes
Kristal Rivers	Yes
Steven G. Watkins	Yes
Abbey Fishman Romanek	Yes
William B. Raines	Yes
Judith Rice	Yes
Patrick Kevin Coughlin	No	Former prosecutor in charge of drugs. Almost certainly part of War on Drugs.
John Curry	Yes
Megan Elizabeth Goldish	Yes
Anjana Hansen	Yes
Robert D. Kuzas	Yes
John J. Mahoney	No	Missing Bar recommendations and former prosecutor
Maritza Martinez	Yes
Terrence J. Mcguire	Yes
Bridget Anne Mitchell	Yes
James Paul Pieczonka	Yes
Diana Rosario	No	Missing Bar recommendations and former prosecutor
Patricia O'Brien Sheahan	Yes

Insert spiel about zero marginal costs.
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I actually know both candidates. My family is friends with Michelle Mussman. Scott Kegarise also refereed one of my youth soccer games in 6th grade and turned in possibly the worst referring performance I've seen in my life. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if I'm still salty about that and am withholding my vote on that basis. 😊
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Although, frankly, I think the existence of democracy should assuage such concerns.
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I didn't include deductions or child credits in this graph. Those laws aren't changing so they should be the same before and after the Fair Tax.
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Fun fact: this will be the first race where I have ever voted for a Republican.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

Apple is really close to a traditional monopoly

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

One of the biggest changes in the internet era has been the introduction of companies that can aggregate demand. To take the canonical example, Facebook is the place where most (internet-connected) users in the world go for social interaction. Each additional user makes the platform more valuable because it becomes a better place to chat with friends - I'd like to leave Facebook but my high school friends refuse to leave it, and I value them more than my desire to leave. It costs Facebook basically nothing to add another user, and thus they have a direct relationship with 2 billion people. This enables them to onboard advertisers on their platform on their terms, giving them significant control (again, each incremental advertiser has no marginal cost). This gives them the best advertising platform on the planet.

Those of you familiar with Stratechery are rolling your eyes because I just described what everyone in the Valley has known for 3-5 years. A fuller version of that description is available on Stratechery by the creator of Aggregation Theory, Ben Thompson.

Aggregation Theory is the webbiest of web stuff - you could not become an Aggregator in a pre-Internet world because no product on Earth had zero marginal costs - and even if it did, how would you distribute it widely to make up for fixed costs? Literal wars were fought because the reality of economics included marginal costs, and driving those down REALLY mattered.

Ben Thompson has recently proposed/noted that because Aggregators are new because the web is new, the way you'd regulate is very different. Thinking people who wanted to antitrust regulate Big Tech (or at least Amazon/Facebook/Google) always had a little tingling feeling that something wasn't quite right. Yes, they are huge companies and they control something just as relevant as rail/oil were in the 20th century, but the Google argument that "competition is just a click away" was absolutely true - it takes literally no effort for me to suffer through Bing. The reason why they're still dominant is these companies controlled demand and had a flywheel running through their business where their scale makes them better at serving each customer. Anti-trust law is built for a zero-sum world where you have total control or don't - the ways that companies like Facebook build power is much more subtle. I think that means they're still very very worth of scrutiny - it's just a different type of scrutiny.

Let's go to one of the first companies broken up because of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (the Act being the most traditional and well-known implementation of the traditional anti-trust philosophy): the Northern Securities Company. This was a combination of three railroad companies that basically controlled all rail traffic to the West (via Chicago). This case is the origin of the famous tale of J.P. Morgan asking Teddy Roosevelt to not file charges and Roosevelt refusing¹. The three companies merged after a very public fight which upset the public quite a bit and probably helped encourage the DOJ to file their case.

It's very obvious what the Northern Securities Company controlled: all supply of rail transportation to the Western US. The US Congress (channeling the public will) didn't want one company to control all that (and raise prices, as they were explicitly planning to do). This is despite rail companies' creation of new businesses that would not have been possible pre-rail (hell, the entire city of Chicago exists basically because of rail), and that there were alternatives to rail (wagons!). Their upfront investment and innovation in transportation were not regarded as sufficient justification for them to be given the ability to abuse their control of all supply³. There's a moral dimension here - it's just not fair - but also a national self-interest one. Capitalism should be a profitable endeavor for the individual to incentivize growth, but if the individual begins taking growth from other areas via their dominance in one, capitalism is failing the national self-interest. Assuming you live in a place where capitalism is a just means to the national self-interest, and not an end (I'm not convinced we do), this is a bad thing.

This brings us to Apple. Let's be clear: the creation of the iPhone is perhaps the most significant moment in human history. Their app store has created billions upon billions in value, much of which they don't capture. I work for a company worth billions that would not exist if the iPhone/App Store didn't exist. They are the posterchild of the success of capitalism: they wanted money and created something great in the process, and basically, everyone is better off as a result.

You should read this before you continue.

Buuuut let's zoom in on the App Store here. Ben Thompson, in the Aggregation Theory article linked above, argued in a brief aside that Apple is an Aggregator when it comes to the App Store. Apple controls all demand for apps via its direct relationship with its customers so developers onboard on Apple's terms - which include a bunch of annoying rules that developers mostly put up with it. I think Ben Thompson² misses the mark here. I think a better way to look at this is that Apple has total control over the supply of code to the iPhone. It's impossible to install apps they don't like, and via regulations on web engines and the ineptness of whatever engineers are assigned to mobile Safari, the web is not an adequate replacement. Telling someone to use a web app on an iPhone (and even iPads) is like telling a Chicago meatpacker in the 20th century to go use a wagon. It's a recipe for an uncompetitive product that will fail. Apple's control is not quite like a monopolized railroad because Apple doesn't exactly stop unauthorized apps at the network transit level, but via modern cryptography and their maniacal control of APIs, they achieve essentially the same thing.

In my view, this makes the anti-trust case against Apple much stronger. As explained above, however we regulate other big tech companies, it probably has to come via new laws and approaches (and no one has a great one yet). Controlling all supply though? We know how to regulate this - or at least we know how to diagnose the problem. Apple has total control of any ability to ship code to the iPhone (one might call it a monopoly), the dominant platform among wealthy (wealthy is defined here on the global scale - basically every American is wealthy on that scale) people, and part un of a duopoly, regardless. They are using that control to do what any Wall-Street-approved monopolist would do: squeeze tighter to grab more and more profits from independent developers like HEY.

The method of relief here don't seem to map between the situations as well as the sins do. There are actual physical bits to change ownership of with railroads, not so for digital goods. There are a host of solutions one could imagine; perhaps you make Apple allow 3rd party app stores? perhaps you set a ceiling for their cut? perhaps you do what Ben Thompson has suggested and allow alternative payment methods so in-app purchases have to compete on convenience? To be clear, I don't think Apple will do anything independently. Governments will have to make them do it - but I think they can do it being very confident in their diagnosis of the problem. This case is a lot simpler than the other policy issues in tech.

I haven't written anything like this before and I think I enjoyed it more than being angry on Twitter. Let me know what you think!

Makes one wonder how our current President would handle such a request.
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Who, to be clear, is much smarter than me about this stuff.
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Notably, later in the 20th century, after the invention of semi-trucks and the interstate, those same companies were allowed to merge. They could be as abusive as they wanted then - trucks served as a check on their power to do so. Perhaps that moment will come with Apple but an extended time of wrong in the meantime is not justified.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

IL March 2020 Endorsements

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

These are my "endorsements"¹ for the March 2020 primary election. I'm voting with a Democratic ballot and you can find the ballot that I'm working with here.

I have to come up with these recommendations for myself every year - here's me sharing them! A few principles that I work off of:

I'm a progressive in most every sense.
I define that progressivism in terms of net benefit. That has a couple implications:
- I do my best to not vote on identity, but to vote on policy and electability².
- I sometimes make compromises that leave a bad taste in my mouth but I think will lead to more progressive policy overall.
Somewhat paradoxically, I'm one of those high information/involvement voters that political scientists have established vote more on identity rather than personal interest (I'm very happy to raise my own taxes). I do my best to align my identity with what I think the best policy for my values are. This fails sometimes.
I have some... weird pet issues. For example, I'm a big proponent of removing cars from cities³ which uh... has no popular support.

If you disagree with those, that's fine - just keep them in mind when reading this guide.

This guide was distilled from me reading their platforms, from theChicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune's endorsements, and my assorted personal knowledge of IL politics.

Post-election note: I've put down who won for each position next to my endorsement.

Not-Judges

President, US (Democratic Ballot)

This section probably doesn't matter. Realistically, you've probably made up your mind or are leaning some way. That said, here's my choice and logic

At the time I'm writing this (March 4, 2020), there are three real candidates in the race⁴:

Bernie Sanders
Joe Biden
Elizabeth Warren

The math says that Elizabeth Warren can't win. She's out. Update: she dropped out one day later.

Bernie vs Biden should be a close choice but it really isn't. I actually think I agree with Bernie's economic world view more. Two big things stand in the way of me voting for him though:

Bernie's view on race is bad. From suggesting that Biden's current lead (based on his support by African-American voters) is less legitimate or not from "working-class" people to his view that economic issues are the major difference between white and black Americans' relative success, his views are bad. It says a lot that, of the several "bad" party-supported votes during his career, of which he mostly bucked the party and voted in the correct direction, the '94 crime bill is where he agreed with the party (yes, I know Biden also voted for and wrote part of that bill).
Bernie's implementation of his world view is bad. The progressive takeaway from the fact that "trade deals bring a lot of prosperity to some people but screw over others" should be that taxes and redistributionto to fix that externality - not banning trade deals. The progressive conclusion to fact that "US hospitals charge insurers way more than peer countries' hopstials do" is not "let's make the government the only insurer overpaying greedy hospitals and doctors"⁵, it's to lower the fucking prices. Basically, Bernie is a progressive who has only read Jacobin and never read Vox.

Therefore, I support Joe Biden. He's running on a platform far to Obama's left, he probably maximizes Dem chances of winning Senate seats in places like Alabama⁶, and I think his experiences means he'd do a good job repairing a destroyed civil service. Whatever criticisms you have of Biden: there's a solid chance I agree with them. Politics is about picking the least bad choice though; it's not all a fairytale.

Endorsement: Joe Biden. Victor: Joe Biden.

US Senator

Durbin is unopposed and him being in Dem leadership is good for Illinoisans. It gets us stuff like funding for the O'Hare Modernization Program (the reconfiguration of the runways). I don't think a protest vote omission is justified here.

Endorsement: Dick Durbin. Victor: Dick Durbin.

US Representative

There are three candidates here:

Raja Krishnamoorthi (incumbent)
William Olson
Inam Hussain

Inam Hussein seems like a decent man and I like his background. His answers were good in the Chicago Sun-Times interview.

However, Raja's interview just blows it out of the water. It's fabulously detailed, he's been an unusually effective Congressperson for being so new to the House, and (personally) has been very receptive to my concerns.

As for William Olson, this is a real thing he said in response to the Sun-Times asking "[w]hat’s your favorite TV, streaming or web-based show of all time. Why?""

I might have answered a better question with this: By the power and authority vested in a citizen of the State of Illinois, I declare Donald John Trump a domestic enemy of the State of Illinois.

I can't even.

Note (3/7/20): I'm temporarily pulling my endorsement for Raja. A friend of mine pointed me to troubling support he might have for Narendra Modi. I'm going to reach out to his office to get clarification. In the meantime, I suggest you try to delay voting.

Note (3/16/20): Raja never responded to me but upon further research, I determined he's probably not a Hindu nationalist (I looked at his past votes and comments). Even if he is, the marginal effect a representative has on this is small. In every other way, he is the superior choice so he is endorsed. I meant what I said when I said I defined my progressivism by net impact, not identity.

That said, I want to note that this is a serious and real issue. Narendra Modi is tearing apart arguably democracy's greatest achievement (democracy struggles in multi-ethnic countries and basically collapses in non-developed countries. India is a shining exception.). To the extent we can, we should fight to stop him.

Endorsement: Raja Krishnamoorthi. Victor: Raja Krishnamoorthi.

Delegates to National Nominating Convention

These folks go to the DNC Convention in Minneapolis, and formally vote for the the nominee. They're technically not required to vote for the person they are pledged to (which is mentioned on the ballot) but they basically always do.

Vote for whomever supports your Presidential candidate. I'm voting for Biden's. Victor: Biden's.

State Senator, 28th Senate District

Laura Murphy is running unopposed.

As a member of IL legislative leadership, a good rule of thumb is that she's not great. Laura Murphy doesn't disappoint. She has been part of IL's mismanagement of the state.

As an aside, she's also been a rabble rouser about O'Hare noise. I'm not particularly sympathetic to suburbs complaining about the consequences of suburbanization (and am glad that she is typically overruled) but it's her job to represent her constituent's opinions. Concentrated costs, and diffuse harms, man.

I'll be voting for no one here but that's just me utilizing the luxury of a protest vote. I expect I would vote for her in November.

Endorsement: No one. Victor: Laura Murphy.

State Representative, 56th Representative District

Michelle Mussman is running unopposed.

She's concerningly close to Madigan and has had a few bad #MeToo associated votes. I'll vote for her but it's a close call.

Endorsement: Michelle Mussman. Victor: Michelle Mussman.

Commissioner, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD)

It's insane that we're voting on this at all and that's it's separated by party. This is a highly technical position with not a lot of political influence or decisions. The best we can do here is pretend we know how water, land, and the environment should be managed, and vote based on what the experts say.

Here are the candidates:

Michael G. Grace
Mike Cashman
Frank Avila (incumbent)
Heather Boyle
M Cameron 'Cam' Davis (incumbent)
Kimberly Neely Dubuclet (incumbent)
Eira L. Corral Sepúlveda
Patricia Theresa Flynn
Shundar Lin
Deyon Dean

I'll be heavily relying on endorsements here. Conveniently, the Tribune and the Sun-Times agree with each other on endorsements.

Davis is a no-brainer. He used to work for the EPA, was President Obama's point person on the Great Lakes, and has led the fight against the invasive Asian Carp in the Great Lakes.

Kimberly DuBuclet used to be in charge of the Chicago Park District's legislative affairs, and has done good work with encouraging greener construction. She obviously knows what she's talking about based on her Sun-Times interview.

Eira Sepúlveda has an exceptionally cool background. She's a village trustee for Hanover Park but she got into the MWRD's work because she walked her kids to work on the MWRD's property (the MWRD is the second biggest landowner in Cook County), and when her home flooded, she did her own research to figure out how things work. I adore people who figure shit out for themselves.

One last note: Frank Avila is a long time member. He certainly understands the problem domain. My guess is he's not getting the endorsement because the MWRD has had frequent corruption with which probability would tell you he's been involved, given the length of his tenure.

Endorsement: Cameron Davis, Kimberly DuBuclet, and Eira Sepúlveda. Victors: Cameron Davis, Kimberly DuBuclet, and Eira Sepúlveda.

State's Attorney, Cook County

With the possible exception of the Presidential race, this is the most important race on the ballot. This job involves taking the information that police give and deciding who to charge. This has tremendous influence on our criminal justice system. Supposedly liberal white voters voted to disproportionately jail black people for decades (remember, most mass incarceration happens on the state level) by pulling the lever on "tough on crime". Luckily, we have a new generation of progressive prosecuters (Larry Krasner from Philadelphia leading the charge) who aren't continuing that. That said, there's other issues in this race.

Here are the candidates:

Kim Foxx (incumbent)
Bill Conway
Donna More
Bob Fioretti

Kim Foxx was first elected in 2016. There is good evidence that she has done a better job prosecuting violent gun crime than her predecessor⁸ while also dropping ridiculous crime prosectuions (apparently the most prosecuted crime at the time was retail theft). Shootings have decreased and prosecutions for petty crimes have as well. She is endorsed by the Sun-Times.

I think she's done good work with reforming bail. That said, the Tribune endorsement (which she does not get) criticizes this reform based on the underlying data being faulty. I think the Tribune is correct. However, the consequence of the Tribune being right would be that the violent crime rate for those let go on bail would be approximately 2%, instead of .5% (note that the analysis they're correcting is not Kim Foxx's - she did not perform the program review). Chicago's base violent crime rate is a little higher than 1%. That's certainly an increase but not one that justifies jailing more people, in my opinion. In particular, I can't justify voting to jail people if we aren't doing things like investing in transit and schools in the historically underresourced and disrespected communities from which criminals often come.

The other big issue she's had is the Jussie Smollett case. Basically, a celebrity (from Empire, I believe) faked a mugging and Kim Foxx didn't charge him, possibly because of political connections (the special prosecuter report is pending). This was obviously bad and Kim Foxx shouldn't have done it. Additionally, her expressed regret doesn't seem entirely genuine because she believes her chief mistake was not being transparent, not doing it in the first place.

Bill Conway has been incessantly sending flyers to my house. I'm not too impressed by his experience, I'd prefer to vote for someone more representative of the Cook County community, and his rhetoric in his endorsement interview was slightly troubling. I don't see a great reason to vote for him but I doubt he'd be actively bad if he won.

Donna More lost the 2016 primary to Kim Foxx. Frankly, I can see why. In her Tribune interview, she said we should prioritize retail felony theft cases more because they're "easy to prosecute" (the reason they're easy to prosecute is that it's very easy for prosecutors to force a guilty plea out of the predominately low-income and black populations this charge is wielded against). She has repeated Fraternal Order of Police (the police union) talking points about violent crime lawlessness, and she has suggested further use of civil asset forfeiture (explained here). It's a good sign that one of the "tough on crime" candidates is significantly more progressive that the incumbent was in the 2016 primary but I still think she would be worse than the other options. She is endorsed by the Tribune.

Bob Fioretti was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, and believes in more prosecution and jailing. He has repeated the narrative that Kim Foxx is waging a war on the police. Just no.

Kim Foxx has done good things in terms of reducing crime and not over-prosecuting. If the nadir of her performance is letting a small time celebrity fake a mugging and get away with it, I'll take it.

Endorsement: Kim Foxx. Victor: Kim Foxx.

Clerk of the Circuit Court, Cook County

The current clerk is insanely incompetent. Court files are mostly paper and they're literally losing them before lawyers can see them. This would have been unacceptable in a pre-digital world, now it's embarassing. The incumbent is stepping down (she was a real weirdo: she made everyone who worked for her wear smocks). This isn't really a political position - it involves sorting files - but it requires political courage to pull off. The person who takes this job will likely have to reduce headcount and treat every case equally, to ensure the privileged can't rely on the Clerk's well-timed incompetence to lose their files. There are 4 candidates:

Jacob Meister
Iris Y. Martinez
Richard R. Boykin
Michael M. Cabonargi

In situations like this (where it's mostly about competence, not having a certain political viewpoint), I like to trust the Tribune's endorsement. It's typically more cyncial about the IL Democratic Party than the Sun-Times is. Cabonargi is endorsed by the IL Democratic Party and the Sun-Times but Boykin has has an independent streak, is against wasteful government (which is a good thing: you want a Clerk's office to be lean and mean).

Martinez and Meister do not seem like bad choices by any means. I'm trusting that the Tribune's endorsement process did a good job sniffing out competency. For what it's worth, Boykin's answers were much more detailed.

Endorsement: Richard Boykin. Victor: Iris Y. Martinez.

Commissioner, Board of Review 1st District

This is really important. These folks review property tax assessments and decide whether to reduce taxes or not. This system has been corrupt for decades, undervaluing wealthy peoples' properties and overvaluing normal peoples' which means the not-wealthy pay a disproportionate share of property taxes. In 2018, Cook County voted down the idiot making the bad assessments and appointed Fritz Kaegi as County Assessor. This Board of Review functions as the appeals process for the new (good) assessments, made by Fritz Kaegi. There are two candidates:

Abdelnasser Rashid
Tammy Wendt

Rashid is obviously qualified but he used to work for Fritz Kaegi, creating a potential conflict of interest. The Tribune was skeptical but still endorsed him, despite that. The Sun-Times was less skeptical but also endorsed him.

Wendt is a lawer for Jason van Dyke, former CPD officer and murderer of innocent teenager. Absolutely not.

Endorsement: Abdelnasser Rashid. Victor: Tammy Wendt

Judges

Nevertheless, we have to vote for them. I will be using guides from Bar Assocations and the like. They are listed here. In particular, I'll be emphasizing http://www.voteforjudges.org aggregation of recommendations and Injustice Watch's guide. If a candidate lacks a recommendation from any Bar organization, I will not be endorsing them because the median is having all recommendations.

Additionally, I will not recommend any candidate who is a former prosecuter or has the Fraternal Order of Police's endorsement.

I'll also be skimming their platforms (where it exists) to confirm there's no tough-on-crime nonsense in them.

There will frequently be many candidates tied. In those cases, I'll say who I'm voting for but not provide an "endorsement", per se.

Judge, Illinois Supreme Court

Vacancy of Freeman

There are 7 choices:

Jesse G Reyes
P. Scott Neville, Jr.
Shelly A. Harris
Cynthia Y. Cobbs
Margaret Stanton McBride
Daniel Epstein
Nathaniel Roosevelt Howse

As pointed out to me on Twitter, the IL Supreme Court doesn't just make decisions, they also administer the full judicial system. Therefore, after limiting the pool based on bar endorsements, I'll be evaluating them closer to how I evaluate the non-judge positions.

All but Harris and Epstein are well recommended. McBride is a former prosecuter.

Both the Sun-Times and the Tribune endorse P. Neville Jr. I'm not well qualified to evaluate lawyers, and his endorsements and records seem solid.

Endorsement: P. Scott Neville Jr. Victor: P. Scott Neville Jr.

Judge, Illinois Appellate Court, 1st District

Vacancy of Neville, Jr.

There are 4 candidates:

Maureen Patricia O'Leary
Carolyn J. Gallagher
Sandra Gisela Ramos
Michael B. Hyman

Everyone except Hyman is not well recommended.

Endorsement: Michael B. Hyman. Victor: Michael B. Hyman

Vacancy of Simon

There are 2 candidates:

John Griffin
Sharon O. Johnson

Both are well recommended. Sharon o. Johnson didn't have great recommendations last time she ran but I prefer her experience (family law vs property law). That said, John Griffin has a better and longer history and a good track record of just rulings.

I'm voting for: John Griffin Victor: Sharon Johnson.

Judge, Cook County Judicial Circuit

Vacancy of Bellows

There are 3 candidates:

Tiesha L. Smith
Cristin Keely McDonald Duffy
Kerrie Maloney Laytin

Smith has no recommendations, and Duffy used to be a prosecuter.

Endorsement: Kerrie Maloney Laytin Victor: Tiesha L. Smith.

Vacancy of Coghlan

There are 4 candidates:

Kelly Marie McCarthy
Aileen Bhandari
Elizabeth 'Beth' Ryan
James T. Derico, Jr

All are well recommended. Bhandari used to be a prosecuter. Derico is the Democratic Party Endorsement and I like his history of pro bono work.

I'm voting for: James T. Derico. Victor: Kelly McCarthy

Vacancy of Ford

There are 3 candidates:

U. O'Neal
Laura Ayala-Gonzalez
John O'Meara

O'Neal is not recommended. Ayala-Gonzalez is endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police and used to be a prosecutor.

Endorsement: John O'Meara. Victor: Laura Ayala-Gonzalez.

Vacancy of Funderburk

There are 4 candidates:

Jacqueline Marie Griffin
Daniel L. Collins
Mary Therese Quinn
Celestia L. Mays

All but Griffin are well recommended. All but Mays are former prosecutors.

Endorsement: Celestia L. Mays. Victor: Celestia L. Mays.

Vacancy of Larsen

There are 3 candidates

Levander 'Van' Smith, Jr.
Suzanne Therese McEneely
Megan Kathleen Mulay

All are well recommended. All but McEneely are former prosecutors.

Endorsement: Suzanne Therese McEneely Victor: Levander Smith Jr.

Vacancy of Mason

There are 6 candidates:

Arthur D. Sutton
Bonnie Carol McGrath
Jennifer Particia Callahan
Chris Stacey
Joy E. Tolbert Nelson
Joseph Chico

All but Callahan and Stacey are not recommended. Callahan is a former prosecutor.

Endorsement: Chris Stacey Victor: Chris Stacey.

Vacancy of McCarthy

There are 2 candidates:

Teresa Molina
Michael O'Malley

Both are well recommended but both are former prosecutors. O'Malley is endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

Endorsement: Teresa Molina Victor: Teresa Molina

Vacancy of Murphy Gorman

There are 4 candidates:

Sheree Desiree Henry
Dan Walsh
Amanda 'Mandy' Pillsbury
Keely Patricia Hillison

Only Henry is well recommended. The Illinois State Bar Assocation noted her "sensitivity to racial and ethnic diversity issues" which is a big plus for me.

Endorsement: Sheree Desiree Henry Victor: Sheree Henry

Vacancy of O'Brien

There are 3 candidates:

Elizabeth Anne Walsh
Lloyd James Brooks
Heather Anne Kent

All are well recommended. Kent is a former prosecutor.

I'm voting for: Lloyd James Brooks Victor: Elizabeth Walsh

Vacancy of Patti

Lynn Weaver Boyle is running unopposed.

Luckily, she is well recommended. Unfortunately, she is a former prosecutor. I'm excercising the luxury of a protest vote here.

I'm voting for: no one Victor: Lynn Waaver Boyle

Vacancy of Roti

There are 3 candidates:

Lorraine Mary Murphy
James Patrick Crawley
Araceli Reyes De La Cruz

All but De La Cruz are well recommended. Murphy is a former prosecutor.

Endorsement: James Patrick Crawley Victor: Lorraine Murphy

Vacancy of C. Sheehan

There are 3 candidates:

Deidre Baumann
Maura McMahon Zeller
Russel W. Hartigan

All but Hartigan are not recommended.

Endorsement: Russell Hartigan Victor: Maura Zeller

Vacancy of K. Sheehan

There are 3 candidates:

Jill Rose Quinn
James Samuel Worley
Wendelin 'Wendi' DeLoach

All but Quinn are not recommended.

Endorsement: Jill Rose Quinn Victor: Jill Rose Quinn

Judge, 13th Cook County Subcircuit

Vacancy of Kulys Hoffman

There are 5 candidates:

Joe Gump
Matt Flamm
Michael Harry Minton
Susanne Michele Groebner
Michael P. Gerber

Minton and Groebner are not recommended. Groebner and Gerber are former prosecutors. Joe Gump is a former public defender.

Endorsement: Joe Gump Victor: Susanne Groebner

Referenda

These are mostly dumb but might as well write them down.

Village of Hoffman Estates, Referendum Question 2

"Shall the Village of Hoffman Estates encourage the State of Illinois to appoint judges based on merit?"

Sure, why not.

Endorsement: Yes Chosen: yes

Village of Hoffman Estates, Referendum Question 3

"Shall the Village of Hoffman Estates encourage the development of entertainment venues within the Village of Hoffman Estates' Economic Development Area?"

Again, sure, why not. Development is good.

Endorsement: yes Chosen: yes

Village of Hoffman Estates, Referendum Question 1

Shall the Village of Hoffman Estates encourage the creation of a full interchange at Beverly Road and the I-90 Jane Addams Memorial Tollway?

OK let's look at the map:

You see that you can already get on I-90E (towards the city) from Beverly Road. You just can't get on I-90W towards Rockford and Elgin from Beverly Road, you have to drive 1 mile to Sutton Road.

This is really really stupid. The reason it's easier to go east than west right now is because more people would rather go to Chicago than Rockford. There's no need to super-serve the few westbound people.

Going back to my anti-car views, this being a dumb project makes me like it more (not enough to vote for it). Making it easier to drive induces demand to drive (this is why highway widening never fixes traffic, it creates traffic). Making it slightly easier to go to Rockford will still induce some driving but far less than making it easier to go to Chicgao would.

Still, this is a bad idea and bad ideas should be voted down.

Endorsement: No Chosen: yes

I'm co-opting the term that we apply to real political actors, hence the quotes. Some people may call this a voting guide but I think that describes a document that tries to distill your values into a vote. I'm explaining how I distilled my values into a vote
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A good and depressing example of that is Elizabeth Warren. I like the way she approaches problems and I think she's the candidate I'd like to "get a beer with"... but I think many of her polices are bad even if I like the way she got to them.
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And Nashville.
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Tulsi Gabbari is what would happen if the fairy that brought Pinocchio to life also brought a Russian Twitter bot to life.
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Seriously: US Doctors make way more than their peers in wealthy countries because the American Medical Association artificially limits the supply of Doctors. The math of US healthcare means that we will either perpetually overpay or we need to figure out a way to deal with this. Bernie has talked about universal healthcare for decades and has barely mentioned this. That's bad.
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It says a lot that Doug Jones had Joe Biden record robocalls for him in his 2017 Alabama special election.
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Irritatingly, the Sun-Times frequently ommitted the accent in their endorsement article. I'm assuming this is because the ballot also does. Do better, Cook County.
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I voted for her predecessor out of a moment of laziness. I am very glad that my vote lost.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

My Salary History

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Note: this article is currently outdated. I intend to update sometime in the next six months.

The purpose of this article is for me to share what I've made in every job I've taken to provide a slight bit more transparency into what employers pay. Employees not sharing salaries is a stupid tradition. For a market to function fairly, there must be transparency - a way to tell if you're getting ripped off. In particular, women and POC ¹ do frequently get ² paid less than men for the same work. Without reference numbers, it's very difficult for an individual employee to tell if they're getting ripped off. Sites like Glassdoor can help with this problem but a) it makes me very uncomfortable that you have to provide personal data to a corporation to get information crucial to your livelihood and b) anonymized data is inherently less useful. You know nothing of their professional history - it's just a slightly lessened informational asymmertry.

Additonal recommended content on this subject can be found in these places:

And below can be found what I've made in each job along with a short description of it. I will be updating this each time I take a new job. Note that I have tried to convert to an hourly rate wherever possible. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to me. Various ways to contact me can be found here.

Company Name [Location]	Role	When	What I did	What I got paid
Spantree Technology Group [Chicago West Loop]	FT Summer Intern	Summer 2016; directly after HS graduation	I came in knowing a decent amount of programming but basically no software engineering. I built a basic but poorly designed Slackbot in Groovy for the company.	$15/hour + lunch + $12 in Ubers/day
Vanderbilt University Psychology Professor [Nashville, TN]	PT assorted technical tasks	Fall 2016	I organized a bunch of old computers and technology, differentiating the useful from the not useful. I quit the job when the Professor in charged asked me to code without a previously promised raise.	$10/hour
Freelance website designed for Vandebrilt University Education Professor [Remote to Nashville, TN]	PT Summer Project	Summer 2017	I designed a basic website using a CMS written in PHP to represent a Professor's curriculum design work. I was probably overpaid for this.	$3500; flat
Art of Problem Solving [Remote to San Diego, CA]	Freelance Grader and Assistant	December 2016 - Present	I grade mathematically inclined students' work and assist them in virtual classrooms. I mostly focus on Python classes and simpler prealgebra classes.	$15-$25/hour; depending on raises and precise task.
Art of Problem Solving [San Diego, CA]	FT Summer Intern	Summer 2018	I worked with React, Node and HTML Canvas to help build out Beast Academy. Note that I received no housing distance despite San Diego being a fairly expensive place to live, particularly for a short lease.	$32/hour; $500 starting bonus
Amazon Web Services [Seattle, WA]	FT Summer Intern	Summer 2019	Unknown as of right now!	$47.81/hour; $1925/month in housing assistance; travel assistance

Yes, I'm brown but that's not really an impediment anywhere but TSA checkpoints.
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The actual pay gap between women and men is not nearly as big as the 73 cents per dollar figure would imply. Stuff like the fact that paternal leave is rarely provided and/or taken or that men negotiate more than women are large sources of this disparity - neither will be solved by eliminating direct compensation discrimination.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

How to setup a Windows PC to be secure and useful

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I've been setting up quite a few Windows PCs lately. I wrote this down for my reference in a Google Doc but I figured others could get use out of it, so here it is, published.

This guide goes through a lot of stuff from DNS config to aesthetic to important security stuff. This is stuff that I find useful. Freel free to use this wholesale or not at all. Reach out to me if you have questions with the contact info at benc.io.

Clean install?

A lot of people will tell you that you absolutely need a clean install of Windows. I think the reality is a bit more nuanced. I wouldn't do a clean reinstall if you have Windows 10 Pro (be careful: a nontrivial number of manufacturers will give you a Pro license but only have Home installed on your machine, forcing you to upgrade yourself. I suspect it's because they don't actually have to pay Microsoft for the more expensive license unless you actually upgrade) or if you're have a highend laptop (particularly the Surface line). That said, default to a clean install. Pro tip: mute your PC before clean installing unless you want nightmares of Cortana coming to life.

On the other hand, if you don't clean install, you'll have to manually get rid of Candy Crush and some of the other crap that Microsoft dumps on you. Even on Pro. In 2019. Yay.

BIOS Stuff

This stuff sucks but it's important. Just get it over with. From decentsecurity.com:

From the boot of your computer, press the setup hotkey. It may be F1, F2, F8, F10, Del, or something else to get into SETUP mode.

In the BIOS:

Set a setup password. Make it simple, this is only to prevent malicious modification by someone in front of the computer or by a program trying to corrupt it.

Change boot to/prioritize UEFI. Disable everything except UEFI DVD, UEFI HDD, and USB UEFI if you plan on using a USB stick to install Windows. Enable the TPM (if available) and SecureBoot (if available) options. This is super important.

Disable 1394 (FireWire) and ExpressCard/PCMCIA (if you're on a laptop) as a layer to further mitigate DMA attacks. This isn't as important anymore, but if you don't use them you might as well turn it off.

If you want, and if the computer offers it, you can enable a System and HDD password. We will be using BitLocker to protect the disk, but this is an extra layer you can add if you want. I don't.

If you don't use webcam or microphone, you may be able to turn them off in the BIOS

Save settings and shut down.

One thing I'd add is that you shouldn't fuck with anything you don't understand. Fucking with things that you don't understand is how computers go haywire.

Some more boring stuff

Keep updating Windows 10 until it tells you that you don't have more updates to install.
Make sure autoupdate is on. Not updating your computer is how you get fucked. It's important.
Set UAC to full (instructions here. UAC is that window that opens when you do stuff asking "are you sure you want to...?" or "do you want to trust...?". Yes, it's annoying but it's an incredibly powerful tool to prevent bad software from doing bad things. The partial level doesn't do anything - it's only there as a compromise because people complained about Windows Vista.
Enable device encryption. Most modern phones/tablets will offer this feature and it makes it much harder for an attacker with physical access to your device to steal your information. I'll just direct you to Decent Security's instructions for this - it's step 7 here
You don't need an anti-virus. Windows has one (Windows Defender). Don't be stupid and disable it and you'll be fine
- If you're actually super concerned, MalwareBytes is arguable worth it. Unless you pay, it requires you to manually initiate scans which is a lot of hassle. Not being stupid online will be a lot more effective. Personally, I more use this as an investigative tool when I think something is wrong.

Changing your DNS

I make this an extra section because it's arcane but important. DNS is often called the phone directory of the internet. When you type "google.com" into your browser, your computer contacts its designated DNS server. The DNS server tells your computer where Google's server is on the internet's network and your computer then goes there. You can see how DNS is important here - it literally has the ability to create a record of every site you've visited.

The shitty part is that many DNS services, especially in the US, do. Remember the hoopla about internet privacy in 2017? Part of that was about the ability of ISP to monetize DNS records by selling your history (that's not the full story but it's a large part of it). Your home WiFi will default to your ISP's DNS server. These aren't just insecure but they're also slower than they have to be and probably less resilient to failures. Worse, unless you happen to be on the cutting edge, DNS requests are typically sent unencrypted.

I typically change my DNS services (instructions to do so here) to the following:

IPv4
- Preferred: 1.0.0.1
- Alternate: 8.8.8.8
IPv6
- 2606:4700:4700::1111
- 2001:4860:4860::8888

Preferred: 1.0.0.1 Alternate: 8.8.8.8

Those are, respectively, Cloudflare's¹ and Google's DNS services². They're both super resilient to failures, fast, and both pledge to be secure. Cisco's OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) is also a strong option compared to Google (although I think Cloudflare is objectively a better choice) - I've just had a few bad experiences with them so I'm cynical.

Personalization

Go wild. Change your desktop image, sidebar, to your heart's content. The big things that I do are:

I move the taskbar to the right and hide it. It being on the right means it takes up less screen real estate when it's open (about 56% as much on computers with normal displays) and it being hidden means it usually takes up 0. I also change the icon size on it to small just so I can fit more of them.
Turn on Night Light. Night Light makes your computer screen go more orange-y at night. It's better for your eyes and possibly your circadian rhythms. Don't do color sensitive work with this on!
[iOS] I'm pretty sure there's an Android equivalent but the ContinueOnPC app for iPhone is great. Let's you automatically share things that open up on your phone. Has an irritating setup process but works smoothly most of the time. Unfortunately, Microsoft has set it up so that no matter what your default browser is, the links open in Edge. Freedom!

Install all the things

Best software to automate this is ninite.com. You can check all the software you want and it'll download and install all of it in one awesome isntaller. I always download more than I need from here so if disk space is a concern, be careful. Don't get any of the security software except maybe Malwarebytes and don't get the Skype client - Win10 has one built in.
- See below for thoughts on browsers.
Download your software. This could be anything from video games to productivity software
- Microsoft Office probably falls into this category. I always forget to install this until right before I need it.
- I'm a big fan of ShareX. It gives better screenshot functionality to Windows (although Microsoft might fix this soon?). I currently have mine setup to upload screenshots to shared.benc.io when I capture them. However, it defaults to imgur uploads which work just as well.

Browsers

My first version of this guide recommended Chrome. However, Chrome (and Google writ large) have been doing a lot of sketchy stuff lately from potentially making adblockers less effective to creating a monopolistic browser market where they control the entire web. Moreover, I've become more and more uncomfortable with Google getting unfettered access to my entire web history.

This wouldn't matter if there was not alternative but there is: Firefox! Firefox has tremendously improved since it's nadir. It's now faster with rendering webpages and usually faster with running Javascript. The big downside is incompetent web developers might not design their projects for Firefox. That's why I keep Chromium as a backup (Chromium is the open source version of Chrome - it's open source and generally more trustworthy IMO).

Anyways, in terms of setup:

Login to your Firefox Sync account. Not having to replicate the effort of configuring theme and downloading extensions is amazing. On Chrome, this would be your Google account
Install the following add-ons
- [Highly recommended] Install uBlock Origin. This is the best adblocker. It's not a business, it's a free product and it doesn't fuck around with blocking ads.
- [Highly recommended] Install HTTPS everywhere. This will ensure your connection with all sites that support it is secure even if the site doesn't force it to be. 100% necessary on a laptop, a very good idea on desktop.
- [Recommended] Install Math. The biggest downside of Firefox to me has been the toolbar isn't an automatic calculator. This partially solves that problem.

Cloudflare calls their DNS service 1.1.1.1 because, let's be honest, that's a lot cooler than 1.0.0.1. Unfortunately, a bunch of bad telecom equipment will unintentionally override 1.1.1.1 and there's limited evidence that AT&T is purposefully doing so (bolstered by AT&T's general shittiness). Fortunately, 1.0.0.1 works just as well and doesn't have the same issues.
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You've probably already used Google's DNS service if you've ever used Starbucks Wifi.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

The Value of Old Friends

Thu, 02 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I had dinner with one of my high school math teachers tonight. Those of you who have known me from my high school days to now will be able to tell that my behavior has changed a lot - and not in a particularly good direction. I've had a niggling feeling of this for a while but I've pushed myself towards the CS world too hard. The majority of my valuable output in life is either code or organizing efforts for VandyHacks ¹.

I enjoy both of those a lot. My website is ridiculously overengineered not because it has to be or needs to be but because I enjoyed exploring all the fancy toolchains found in today's JavaScript ecosystem. Putting together VandyhHacks and seeing people put out all sorts of cool projects that they just learned how to create is incredibly satisfying. However, they do not make up the sum of my passion. Back in high school, at IMSA, I spent most of my time on debate or Student Council². I certainly wasn't the most productive person and I was also very naive about the impact of some of the stuff we were doing. But, I was fulfilled. I did a lot of cool things that I felt good about bragging about. Nowadays, my projects have scaled in terms of expense and impressiveness to the world - but they have not scaled in terms of fulfillment. VandyHacks involves coordinating a team of about 50 people and a budget of $75K. StudCo was 15 people and a budget of $8K. And yet, I got more out of StudCo than I have out of VandyHacks (and, I suspect, will).

I had a lot more hope back at IMSA. Vanderbilt has made me hardcore cynical (and it's not like I was an optimistic back at IMSA) which has corrupted my world view. Every time that someone says something good to me, I find some way to twist it into being something bad. The world is mostly a bad place but it's certainly not deserving of the type of hard-core cynicism I've been giving it. That cynicsm has left me 2 years into a CS degree, on track to work for some big programming company, making big $$$. I don't want that. I have never wanted that. And yet, here I am.

Anyways, back to my high school math teacher. This particular teacher is probably the 2nd or 3rd most valuable teacher I've ever had. He taught me the value of hard work and taught me how to struggle through problems - despite the fact that I spent a few weeks with a 30% in his class. He was always supportive of the sort of stuff that I did with StudCo - even thought a lot of it came at the expense of his class. We had dinner tonight and had a massive bitch session about a lot of things (mostly education focused). But a lot of it was about how it could be improved if the right people were put in the position to do something. It reminded me of the late night talks that we had at IMSA. It reminded me of the big stuff that I wanted to do there and how my ambitions had steadily decreased since.

I got a lot of soul searching to do. I don't think this will be a fast process. Transitioning into doing something other than just CS (whether that be teaching or data analysis or public policy or something) will be hard. But I think I gotta do the hard work. I owe the person that I used to be when I met this friend that.

Epilogue: The writing in here sucked. I know that. That said, it was much more stream-of-consciousness than anything else that I publish. Would be interested in hearing thoughts.

You can loosely consider the stuff that I do for classes as "valuable".
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Much to my parent's chagrin, school is not on that list.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

VandyHacks' Process for Handling Board Applications

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Every year, the VandyHacks team has about 30 awesome people from different background work on 5 nominally disjoint teams to put together a kickass event. Last year, we received about 40 applications and we took about 20 of them. This year, we've received 57 applications (as of this writing) and we're expecting more.

Since we're between events, these 56 applications are managed by 10 people (the directors and presidents) - two of whom are abroad this semester. Managing all those applicants is no easy task and we use a variety of tools to get it done. Here they are.

Typeform

Everyone loves Typeform because it's super pretty - that's why we picked it. You can see our application here That said, Typeform can be a huge pain on the survey administrator size. Its view of results is annoying and its feature to push results to a Google Sheet will only apply to future entries (which means that if you try to enable it after abut 20 applications, it's basically useless). It's frustrating that the best way to access your results is probably by building your own Google Sheets integration with their API.

That said, the survey looks pretty and it offers a direct push of emails to MailChimp, the software that we use for sending out batched email campaigns. All in all, we tolerate its function and love its form (get it?).

MailChimp

Typeform automatically pushes email to a MailChimp list with all our applicants. I didn't realize this till we had the bulk of our applicants but it's possible to trigger an email when they get added to the list. That meant, we could have sent our emails to applicants without ever logging in to MailChimp.

As it was, I logged onto Mailchimp every day and replicated the same campaign to all new members of the list. It was 4 clicks each day which was no big deal.

Calendly

Calendly is a great service that allows you to post available times and have the users sign up for slots. This is what we used to manage our interview times. We left 4PM to 9PM available everyday (more or less) and let users sign up for their interviews there.

Calendly is pretty and provides powerful administrator tools but my biggest pet peeve is its system to reschedule. We had a situation where we had to push an interview back 15 minutes. I thought it'd be easy to do but Calendly showed that time slot as having a conflict. It turns out that the conflict was with the person we were trying to reschedule - Calendly didn't realize that when you're changing the interview time of someone, their original time is no longer occupied.

Webhooks and Slack

After applicants signed up for interviews, we needed an easy way for our internal board members to sign up to interview. I have a bit of experienced developing Slackbots and an uncomplicated process like this is perfect for Slackbots. Since this is just a one way input - the bot only needs to post not "read", we were even able to just use plain webhooks instead.

The basic flow of the bot is in this handy infographic:

A few notes on this process:

Calendly charges for usage of its webhooks¹.
The Lambda function is written with the Serverless framework (because that's what I'm familiar with). You can find the code here.
You can see below what the bot looks like for someone who cancels and then selects a new time. You can see the reactions too - those are our board members saying that they're free to do this interview.

After that, the reactions are (manually 😢) put into a spreadsheet by me and interviews are allocated.

What works and what sucks

Unsurprisingly, the best parts of this process are the ones that happen automatically: Typeform -> MailChimp and Calendly -> Slack. The worst parts are the ones that involve human (read: my) involvement to make it work.

I ran the logistics of a similar interview process for IMSA's StudCo during my senior year of high school. We couldn't spend money and I was no where near my current level of coding competency. That process was centered around each applicant having a code name (one of my closer friend's code name was "snugglyLlama4846"). That gave relative anonymity to each applicant (when we read an application or read an interviewer's notes on an interview, we had no idea who it was) for internal evaluation purposes but also gave them anonymity when they signed up for interviews on a spreadsheet (the replacement for Calendly).

That process was more efficient (in terms of work done by humans) but that wasn't a result of the technical choices; it was a result of that process not being rolling. Constantly sending emails, copying over reactions and scheduling board members is not a fun thing to do but in a rolling process, it has to be repeated every day.

The Holy Grail

If we had the time, we could have automated this entire process. The applicant filling out the Typeform could trigger Mailchimp sending them an email with the Calendly link. Them filling out the Calendly link could trigger the message being sent into Slack, and then, board members reacting could have the Slackbot inputting their volunteering into the Google Sheet. The Slackbot could even allocate interview times for us in an evenhanded way.

Header image credit to Janet Fang.

They say that they don't. It's a lie 😕.
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(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)

[Deprecated] It's a blog

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Note: this is an explanation of my old blog site, not this one. I only include it for archival purposes.

Ever since buying benc.io in summer 2016, I've intended to create a blog here. This is mostly inspired by the fantastic writing I've seen across the web and also a general desire on my part to communicate my ideas in a medium with more than 280 characters. This post will go over some of the design and technical choices that I made when creating my blog. A future post will do the same thing but with my main personal site - found at the root domain.

Technical details

Personally, I love reading about the choices and tradeoffs that go into great products. Most every tech company has a blog on this and, without exception, I've enjoyed every one. I thought I'd do the same for this blog even though the choices won't be nearly as exciting.

The core blogging platform behind this site is Ghost. It was recommended by Troy Hunt (the security researcher, for anyone who doesn't want to click that) and, so far, I've had zero complaints. It's open source and designed specifically for blogging by a few disillusioned ex-WordPress employees. Good advice for life: anyone who doesn't like WordPress is probably smart.

Ghost uses Markdown for creating posts: that works perfectly for me since I've had plenty of experience writing READMEs for GitHub. Ghost stores all its data in a MySQL database and all images & other files in an AWS S3 bucket hosted in US East 2 (Ohio).

The S3 bucket wouldn't ordinarily be necessary when using Ghost - files could just be written to local storage. However, the blog is running on Heroku which doesn't have local storage. This decision was primarily inspired by my deep desire to avoid NGINX and everything about it. At some point, I'll probably get to using a DigitalOcean Droplet or an AWS LightSail instance to run my various APIs off of but for now I'm perfectly OK paying Heroku the $7/month for the dyno (AWS does charge me for S3 storage + ingress/egress data but it's so tiny that it's hardly worth mentioning).

I'm not wild about the idea of maintaining my own blog. Updating Ghost and worrying about whether any of the dependencies has security flaws is not a great time. However, the managed service from Ghost costs $19/month which is decently pricey and not worth it for me.

The decision to self-host isn't a fun one but Cloudflare, my reverse proxy, makes it an easier one. Cloudflare provides me an insanely big worldwide CDN. For context: at a time when neither Google nor Microsoft nor Amazon offer a single server in Africa, Cloudflare already has 5. Ghost isn't meant to be a distributed system - it's meant to run on a single server. The static nature of the content that it distributes means that slapping a CDN with caching in front of it is the most effective option (I've also done that for my S3 bucket). Cloudflare also offers me DDoS protection so my dyno isn't overwhelmed and provides some nice services like minification of HTML and JavaScript. It would offer me CSS minification but their CSS minifier still can't handle media queries in CSS files which Ghost makes use of. As a result, I have to minify the CSS file in the source code.

Design choices

Design is one of my favorite things to do conceptually but executing on it sucks. Getting every pixel right is hard work but it's also important to get it right. Luckily, in the case of this blog, I had very few choices to make because of this prebuilt theme. It's a very minimal theme which I appreciated. If people want to contact me or learn about me, there are plenty of links on my main site. I wanted my blog to have very few frills.

Under the hood, I made a few changes (like using Font Awesome instead of loading custom icons from Heroku - faster load time and less bandwidth on my part) and removing a few menus that I didn't find very useful. I also changed the main color! This did come with the tradeoff that the RSS feed for my blog isn't easily findable. RSS is basically dead anyways but if you want it, you can find it here.

That header picture

The picture in the header is from NASA and it's a composite of many images NASA took at each location's night period. It shows the distribution of lights in the world. This is one of my favorite images. Light is a symbol of technology and development and we can see its distribution across the world. There's a lot of talk about income inequality and such in liberal circles these days. This image shows it with glaring clarity and, at least to me, the imperative we have to do something that makes the world better for many people - even the ones who don't have lights on that map. To me, this image represents the intersection of my two main interest groups: technology and public policy.

On a techy note, the image is optimized to the best of my ability but mobile devices and the like will probably end up downloading a larger file than they need to. CloudFlare charges for their image optimization services 🙁.

What I plan on doing here

Over the past few years, I've become very good at writing memos and other such summaries. I've lost a lot of my narrative writing skills and I've never been able to focus on my writing voice - it's always been about the voice that pleases the Professor or the SAT grader. Finally, I want to share the lessons I've learned from my various experiences - from VandyHacks President to Art of Problem Solving intern to middle class multiracial at a college considered elite.

Thanks for reading my inaugural post - I hope you read the ones that follow.

(This is an article posted to my blog at overreacted.io. You can read it online by clicking here.)