Sam's L33t Journal

For Erica's school break, we fist spent six nights in Baltimore, meeting up with my parents there. Then for the second half, Julie flew back to Boston for some focus time, while I took a road trip with Erica and my parents back to Cleveland and spent a few extra days working there.

Was a really great trip. Erica, Julie, and I got in a side-trip to DC with Melissa, Erica got a chance to see the National Portrait Gallery. We got a return trip to Clavel in Baltimore and the new Edwins location at Nighttown in Cleveland. Julie and Erica and I got in a side-trip to DC with just Melissa, visited the National Portrait Gallery and Botanical Garden. Went swimming with the kids in the hotel pool. Seeing Erica swim really amplified Simon's interest in getting in the water. The weather in Baltimore was great, and it's such a lovely city.

Had a nice visit to Cleveland, too. Erica did a bunch of fun activities with my parents. We got in a visit to West Side Market and to the new Edwins location at Nighttown (very sad that left Shaker Square, but at least the Nighttown site is seeing someone make good use of it). There's a new cafe in Shaker Square, and at the very least it's a big step up from Bigby. It's a nice place to hang out! I walked in and the manager there recognized me because he was in the same sixth grade class.

And then on the national stage, things have just been scary and nuts! The administration rendering people to Salvadoran concentration camps in direct contravention of court orders. A 9-0 SCOTUS ruling against the administration, which the administration is defying and lying about. The administration trying to coerce more SDNY prosecutors into denouncing the now spiked case against Eric Adams, resulting in more resignations. (Just letting Adams off scott-free, as in fact happened, is not enough for the administration's pro-corruption agenda.) Tariffs were backed off to levels that are at the very least the most consequential change in trade policy and tax policy within the last many decades. And I'm probably 37 even more consequential things.

I finished reading Princess Academy to Erica and thought it was really good (the real superpower is education all along). Started reading the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Lightning Thief as her next bedtime-reading selection. We've also been watching the new Anne of Green Gables anime adaptation, Anne Shirley, together. It's really charming, Erica is enjoying it a lot.

On my own, I'm watching the last season of The Handmaid's Tale and I started watching The Bear.

Erica has been excited about a potential family trip to Japan, which I have penciled in for next year. Erica's been studying Japanese on Duolingo for the last number of weeks. (I'm well aware of the limitations of Duolingo, but she's having fun with it, and it seems a decent taste of a lot of aspects of language learning.) Erica got us to write some cards for my host parents, my host mom wrote back and sent Erica some really adorable picture books, which should be great kana practice (and are fortunately/unfortunately probably just about right for my current reading level).

Local election season seems to have started in Somerville, the primary for a contested mayoral election is in September. Current at-large city councilor Jake Wilson came to my door today canvassing in person. He's probably my favorite of the candidates at this point.

I knew Trump would set his sights on NATO and push for Ukraine to surrender. Certainly fits with the goals of the first "America First" crowd. But I wouldn't have expected him to also try to undermine NORAD.

I expected Trump would pursue crazy tariffs policy because that's he's become attached to that as his signature genius idea. He really hates trade because he rejects the concept of any transaction being positive-sum, and he likes the idea of US government stuff being paid for by other countries, which is how he conceptualizes tariffs working. But I had not expected that we'd get a tariff policy of "harsh tariffs on America's closest trading partners and allies imposed for exactly one randomly-chosen day each month".

One of the stories from this week that's very significant (objectively Watergate-level) is the Trump administration's attempt to corrupt the criminal case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams to help the Trump administration to help him / influence him to further their immigration policy goals. Adams is facing federal bribery charges. After Trump's election, Adams started cozying up to Trump and there was speculation he was angling for a pardon or other legal interference. That certainly seemed possible in line with the GOP's current position on political corruption (they're for it). After all, Trump commuted the sentence of Democratic (at the time) Governor Rob Blagojevich for trying to sell Obama's Senate seat in 2020 (and pardoned him in 2025 because commutation was somehow not enough).

Trump did not pardon Adams, though. Instead, Emil Bove (former Trump attorney, now deputy US AG) ordered Danielle Sassoon, acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop the case in a way that can be reconsidered after Adams runs for reelection this fall. A pardon could be done unilaterally and would definitely be a completely legal abuse of the pardon power, under the current ruling that there's no abuse of the pardon power for which any President could be found criminally liable. Instead, they've decided to do things in a more complicated and probably illegal way, which has the advantage of keeping the threat of prosecution dangling over Adams, in case they need both carrot and stick.

Sassoon escalated the issue to the new AG in a pre-resignation letter that points out that a judge still needs to agree to the dismissal and might object to something obviously so pretextual, and also accuses Bove fairly directly of agreeing to an explicit quid pro quo with Adams and trying to cover that up. AUSA Hagen Scotten also resigned with this excellent letter that gets to be shorter by agreeing with Sassoon's earlier one, and better by dispensing with the "if you're not willing to reconsider".

Scotten's letter concludes, "But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me." A good approach to take if someone is trying to get you to do something foolish and illegal. Even if someone else will do it eventually, it doesn't have to be you.

Bove eventually did file the motion along with Edward Sullivan and Antoinette Bacon*. It's not clear what Judge Dale Ho will do when faced with such an obviously pretextual motion. There's not a lot a judge can do to force a prosecutor to prosecute, but there may be people at the DOJ he'd like to at least question about it. Relevant bar associations may take an interest as well.

(* There's an interesting Cleveland connection here as well.)

Snowy morning this morning. So much not to write about this week.

At work, my manager abruptly left the company due to [reason redacted by management; as near as I can tell he wasn't technically laid off but maybe something of the sort]. So that's three changes of manager since I changed teams only three years ago, in addition to the engineering headcount dropping by half in the past year.

In the news, the US executive department seems to be trying to do reorg-by-Elon-Musk, specifically having Musk do the equivalent of cutting the power to whatever he doesn't like at first glance. I want to emphasize that Musk is inevitably going to find a bunch of stuff conservatives find dumb / expensive, specially since they take both "helping people" and "raising the reputation of American democracy" as non-goals. So don't get caught up in an eternal Gish gallop about whether this or that program is a good idea, on the premise that it's reasonable to judge that from a title and headline amount.

Musk is a guy who believes he is able to acquire at-a-glance expertise at basically anything, but he's also a dum-dum who uncritically takes up stupid right-wing conspiracy theories. He's become very conspiracy minded, and seems to see smoking-gun evidence of massive fraud in observations adequately explained by "old computer systems are old".

Having the (advisor to the) President line-item manage the whole government regardless of whatever Congress says is also not how our Constitutional system is supposed to work, but all Republicans in Congress seem fully in support of this approach, and that's unlikely to change until they manage to really obviously break something.

Let's see, what else... maybe a little media talk:

I finished playing The Outer Wilds. As I said earlier, I really recommend you check it out spoiler-free. It's a really remarkable example of knowledge-as-progression in a game. As is often the case in such games, key bits of information are eventually obtainable in some explicit form (e.g. writing or diagrams, something that is diegetically explaining the thing). But in this game there are so many instances where you can figure out those key insights just through careful observation and deduction, which is really rewarding

I also finished the second season of Megalobox, which was really very well done. I think the remarkable thing about that is how different it manages to be than the first season, which is a pretty typical sports story, an underdog-to-champion arc. The second season jumps ahead to start in media res a story about being a former champion, struggling with the

Finally, I've returned to playing Dicey Dungeons. Still a very fun and funny game, but some of the challenges are quite tricky.

Mystery Hunt was this weekend, run by my team this time. I helped a minimal amount, but I did work hard through the actual run, mostly answering a run of hint requests. The hunt had a noir mystery theme, and the team did a phenomenal job and wrote some great puzzles.

In other news, the Biden administration wrapped up with an bizarre, implausible declaration that the ERA had actually been ratified years ago. (I mean props to Virginia, but that was in January of 2020, so why didn't Biden say anything about that before now. And it would require courts to decide that Congress can't place a deadline on ratification and states can't rescind their decision to ratify before an amendment is approved, it's doubtful they'd agree with either.) And also blanket preemptive pardons for his siblings and siblings-in-law, Mark Milley, and the Jan 6th Committee. I can see the perspective that the people in question have a patriotic duty to defend in court against any baseless, vindictive prosecutions Trump decides to bring. But also can see the perspective that you shouldn't just stand by and let people be put through that, when Trump has given some very strong indication that he intends to bring vindictive prosecutions for nonexistent crimes, without regard to whether he has anything that could reasonably prove a case to a jury. Gruesome stuff.

Trump spent the days before his inauguration launching two separate cryptocurrency scams. He kicked off his administration by withdrawing from the WTO and Paris Climate agreements, pardoning the rioters who attacked police officers as a small component of his plan to illegally toss entire states' 2020 elections, setting up legal efforts to trash the Constitutional guarantees of citizenship, and preparing for mass deportations. Elon Musk gave the Nazi salute twice in a row at his inauguration speeches. He's such a damned edgelord, the "how could you think I would do something like [thing I just obviously did]" gaslighting is the whole point to these people. Well, half the point. (To clarify, there are lots of gestures where you end up with a straight arm and hand angled down at some point in the gesture which don't look like that, this is video. And that is not how a my heart goes out gesture is generally done.)

The speech that most comes to my mind today is this one.

It's a new year.

Trip to Texas over winter break went all right. Wonderful Christmas together. Fun time with the cousins. Took a trip to the Fort Worth Stockyards to see the longhorn cattle drive, went to the Crayola Experience (like the Lego Discovery Center but swap blocks for crayons) on Erica's birthday.

Transitions impend. The Biden administration limps along as the lamest of ducks. Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the federal death row was the most notable good bit. Leaving a few exceptions out (the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber, e.g.) was, well, I can understand the choice. I would have preferred a more unequivocal rejection of the death penalty. But if Biden thinks it should be reserved for a narrower set of cases and grants clemency consistent with that, it's a step in the right direction.

I finished watching The Magicians before that show departs from Netflix in a few days. I'm glad I finished that and ambivalent about having started. It was at least an interesting take on its source material. I read Seasonal Fears, the sequel to Seanan McGuire's Middlegame, another dip in the highly-specific alchemical conspiracy American road-trip novel genre. Was good. I also read Nostalgebraist's latest bit of web-fiction, The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen in which a mad prophet discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Like the author's other work, it's very interesting and well written.

Went home with Julie and Erica for Thanksgiving. Quick trip this time, but was great to see the family. Melissa's family was in town, too.

This year I am thankful that of all the terrors at humanity's doorstep, some of them have been put off so far, and some could continue to.

Best reading from this weekend is Noah Smith's post No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land, a really cogent takedown of (including nominally-"decolonial") ethnonatialism.

The latest political news is Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. It is sad that we have come to this, and despicable that Biden is reneging on his promises. Unlike Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law who he pardoned for witness tampering and then nominated for an ambassadorship, Hunter Biden surely wouldn't have been prosecuted but for his association with the President in question. But say, maybe Biden should just go ahead and pardon the January 6 criminals himself at this point. Surely they are more worthy: After all, not only their prosecutions but also their crimes would not have happened but for Trump.

Americans have voted and it seems our President will once again be this guy. A lot of it seems to come down to "when there's inflation, some Americans will just flip the lever". (People hate unemployment, too, when it happens to them, but inflation happens to everyone.) But lot of it comes down to (however little it conforms to my taste) "Trump is liked, and Harris is not". There was a lot of ticket-splitting this election in Trump's favor: North Carolina is most notable for Dems winning five of six state-wide races while Harris lost, Dem Senators won Michigan and Wisconsin while Harris lost. It seems like Casey will lose Pennsylvania, but that remains as of yet too close to call long after the Presidential race in the state was called for Trump. Arizona hasn't been called, but Trump is likely to win and Lake likely to lose.

Harris 2024 did worse than Biden 2020 among virtually every cross-section. It was broad-based. Gen X have taken their place on the Boomer-throne as the generation that utterly prevents America from having anything nice. (Seniors have actually cooled a hair on Republicans because they might actually gut Social Security and Medicare this time and also tried to kill them all for the sake of the economy during COVID.) But Gen Z men in particular are also taking a hard-right turn. With luck like this America's going to end up with SK-level gender politics, which is real, real worrying.

Not doing a "reasons why Harris lost" breakdown (or even a "why the polls underestimated Trump"; they did by a little, but it doesn't seem that interesting, likely voter models just continually struggle with the guy's unique appeal). Nate Silver does a good enough job with that. Some of it's real "what can you possibly do about that?" stuff. Biden certainly should have stepped away from running for reelection much earlier. (And maybe he should've made a different choice for VP.) I'm hearing second-hand that some people cited the lack of a competitive Dem primary as a cause for them voting Trump over Harris, and that seems an insane (and probably dishonest) reason to prefer Trump over Harris. But people hate having the establishment govern their choices, and there are clearly no sly sophisticates trying to arm-twist anyone into thinking that voting for Trump is a good idea. Biden saved America from the disaster that was Trump, only to deliver America right back into the disaster that is Trump.

Harris should have gone on Rogan, I guess. In hindsight, seems like it couldn't have made matters worse.

2025 seems poised to be worse than 2017. And the years of the first Trump administration were a mess, despite starting in relatively sunny circumstances. This isn't the first Trump administration, but it is the first Presidential administration of the Party of Trump. This Trump administration won't (sometimes repeatedly) stock State, Defense, and Nat Sec posts with inveterate Trump-haters (apparently) who resist his (allegedly) brilliant ideas. Also, this Trump is really not holding it together physically or mentally and 2016 Trump didn't really have it together in the first place.

Moloch has seen its shadow and we're slated for four more years of chaos. Unfortunately, we will see how it goes.

Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.

I've already submitted my ballot for the year, but I usually go through the ballot questions and my position on them, so why not this time as well.

Question 1 is about enabling the current State Auditor's quest to audit the legislature. The legislature already publishes detailed financial disclosures. I was mostly persuaded by the Committee on Initiative Petition's arguments against in this case and voted no. (Though note they tend to oppose every ballot measure. Which makes sense, in that you'd expect them to be representative of the legislature as a whole, and if the legislature as a whole thought an initiative petition was a good idea, they'd just pass it themselves.)

Question 2 removes the MCAS (Massachusetts standardized tests) as a graduation requirement. It doesn't remove the MCAS as a thing students have to take or as a measure of performance of school districts, so I don't think it will help the state escape the pull of Goodheart's Law on that front or avoid "teaching to the test". But I still voted yes on the basis of my general antipathy for standardized testing and because the teachers seem to think it's a good idea.

Question 3 provides collective bargaining protections for rideshare (Uber, Lyft, etc.) drivers who are currently denied those on the basis of "they're independent contractors, not employees". The details seem very complicated, but I voted yes, mostly on the basis of this argument.

Question 4 would legalize (in some contexts) and regulate certain psychadelic drugs. I voted yes because I think it's good on balance, but the details are complicated and this is the one I was least certain about.

Question 5 would remove the tipped minimum wage, phasing that up to the overall state minimum wage over five years. After that, it also allows employers to pool tips and distribute them to all employees (which currently tipped employees can do voluntarily, but their employers can't force them to). I think there are really good arguments against the practice of tipping, but this doesn't get anything to get rid of that. The main reason I voted no on this measure is that what I heard from restaurant employees on the subject was a lot of apprehension (or outright opposition) and not anything in the way of argument that it would actually improve their lives.

Somerville Question 6 was an additional city ballot measure to approve an increased surcharge on property taxes to provide funds (and secure matching funds) under the Community Preservation Act. I think Somerville gets a lot out of these investments and voted yes.