I never explained the unofficial motto of this blog.
When I started this blog 20 years ago, I wanted to have a north star guiding me as to why I was doing this at all. I searched the internet for quotes on writing and came across this gem from Edwin Schlossberg:
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
I finally got around to moving my Clipper Card onto my iPhone Wallet.
I used to have a problem losing my keys, wallet and/or iPhone until I read in a biography that Richard Feynman used to keep his wallet in the same pocket to prevent the same thing. That, and because they say that you should wear through your denim jeans the same way to give it “character,” meant ten years ago I adopted this system, and got rid of the FAIL of tagging all my shit with the then-very-unreliable bluetooth tracking stuff.
This is a circumlocutious way of saying that for the last decade, my cell phone is always conveniently in my right pocket while my wallet (with Clipper Card) is in my left pocket. As I’m right handed and the sensor of the BART is on the right side of the turnstile, I would have to do this weird cross-body yoga anti-pattern in order to get my bicycle onto the commute trains. I resolved to go into the office more often recently, so this was low-key bumming me out.
After jealously admiring how easily regular commuters used their mobile phone to zip through in front of me, I decided to sunset the physical card which apparently I’ve used for the last 12 years.
Also, about half the time, the reader would say that I need to see the operator because of some weird RFID interference shit with all the other crap I have stuffed in my supposedly "minimalist" wallet. WTF? Why should I tolerate this first world problem when we have the technology?
A quick google search and some weird phone-on-card jingo and now I can just put my phone on the sensor and magic shit happens. I can also recharge my card from my Apple Wallet instead of using the machine every so often, depending on how many times I had the patience to hit the “add $1 to your card” button last time I loaded it.
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But this massive quality-of-life improvement somehow made me think about McDonald’s this morning, maybe because I didn’t have time to eat breakfast…
I noticed that dishonest people have been complaining about inflation, and some of them are using the price at McDonald’s as an indicator of this. This is probably related to the popularity of the Big Mac Index: a freakonomics-circle-jerk-bullshit idea that the price of a Big Mac is the best way to compute the cost-of-living adjustment between countries.
I’m sure the price of the Big Mac has skyrocketed post-pandemic — I, if anyone, should know this, I’m like an idiot savant of McDonald’s: so much so that a former franchise owner innundated me with McDonald’s T-shirts, sweaters, and stuff which are in my clothing rotation.
But here’s the thing, I’m 100% sure a significant factor in the price of the sandwich is the introduction of the McDonald’s App. According to conventional wisdom, I usually get ~30% "discount" in "savings" by ordering through the app either via some promotion or using points to buy something outright.
In economics, there is a distinction between "nominal" and "actual." Nominally, I’ve "saved" 30%, but I’ve probably got a 5% actual discount.
The reason is that if everyone uses the app to purchase our Big Macs — which we sometimes get for "free" when we accumulate 6000 points — McDonald’s would cover this by raising the nominal price of the Big Mac to compensate by the same amount. Fast food is pretty fucking competitive — as loyal as I’m to McDonald’s, I’m totally cool with swapping it out for a Big King at Burger King or an In-N-Out double-double — depending on my access to those and my mood. So the net price is fixed by the demand curve vs. their costs and profit margin.
Why 5%? Well not everyone is using the App every time. Some people are rushed, or casual walk-in/can’t-be-bothered-to-download it, or simply don’t have access to a smartphone and/or credit card. Those people won’t/can’t use an app. So, I’d guess that McDonald’s has inflated the nominal price of the Big Mac by 25%. Those of us using the app are getting a 5% discount; The non-app people are paying 20% more vs. the null hypothesis.
The null hypothesis is a world where the McDonald’s App either didn’t exist at all, or never got so high an adoption which basically happened because a global pandemic trained everyone to build a habit of contactless ordering and payment.
So, when seen another way, my 5% discount is subsidized by everyone who isn’t using the app paying 25% more than they should. Since most of those people don’t because they don’t have access to credit to use an app or the income to afford a smartphone — either because they are a school kid or poor — then basically the poor are subsiding the rich at McDonald’s. This is known as an effective regressive tax.
Regressive taxation is shit for our social order. But I guess it is okay since it means my burger and fries cost me an average four bits less than it would if they weren’t taxing walk-ins and the poor.
Of course, at a certain point people wise up and stop eating at McDonald’s or they will have to introduce menu items they can discount that only they would order and I wouldn’t (which would be difficult since the only thing I don’t eat on the menu is diet soda). Oh wait, they did that shit! Well now you know why they had to.
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Why did I order just a burger and fries in the screenshot above? Look at the deal: the discount was free fries with a Big Mac order which netted me a 30% nominal savings. I was at the office and soda was free so this is how I maximized my discount. Oh, and after I picked up that order. I hit 6000 points so my next Big Mac is free.
Totally unrelated (or not), my son told me his “success” yesterday was that he got to present both his “clue can” and his “share day” in preschool back-to-back. The day previous, he “hadn’t been listening to the teachers” and “had to spend some time in the babies class” and couldn’t present.
His share day item was a fallen leaf he found from the plum tree over the driveway of our new house.
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Since just before the election, I was doing so well at avoiding any direct knowledge of what was going on with politics. Deleted Twitter, didn’t open Apple News, moved any political blogs into a folder I don’t read, and unrecommend anything about US politics. Almost made it through the week.
This morning someone at work noted that there was a perfect tie for city council in District 1 in San Francisco (11,001 to 11,001). I went to confirm it was my old district because it is amusing to think that M—’s and my vote — if we hadn’t just moved away — would have decided it. Unfortunately, I accidentally saw the presidential returns for city at the top. Harris won with 80% of the vote in the city.
This explains what happened when Biden dropped out. Since I’ve been paying attention (2004), the Democratic presidential candidate has always had a larger percentage of the vote in a city like San Francisco, so it wasn’t 3rd party, or enthusiasm for Trump, or whatever — it’s lower Democratic turnout, plain and simple.
Even though I skipped past it as fast as possible, it did depress my fragile mood to have been right about people pushing Biden out. Of course, I didn’t like having people gloat at me for the last few months about how I should eat crow about being angry and scared when that happened, or how wrong I was to even believe nobody should have pushed him out. I no longer want to be the I-told-you-so-but-with-facts-on-my-side mirror of them.
That was why, on election day, I woke up and decided to not be the person who has to be right. Nor will do I want to fall again into the politics-as-sport / pay-attention-to-things-I -can’t-control — and what a deep fall it’s been! “We won!” When all I did was vote and donate some $ for merch — no more that I would for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers.
The vast majority of it has been a poison for my soul for the last 22 years. I can act correctly politically enough to look at myself in the mirror about who I am and what sort of world I’d like Benjamin to grow up in. I can do all that and not have a bitter person staring back at me.
M— is right that we were right to have felt sick with Biden being pushed out even if our preferred candidate was the replacement. I voted for Kamala Harris every time I could and only missed two times in total: once when she first ran for DA before I became a resident, and the other time she dropped out before the presidential primary in 2020. I was excited to vote for her. She didn’t push out Joe Biden. She made the best with what position she was thrust into, ran an excellent political campaign, and simply lost due to circumstances beyond her control.
M— noted to me later, that these people didn’t vote because they don’t care about the issues, they didn’t vote because the issues that were being presented were so big and so beyond their ability to affect it that they simply opted out. By focusing on Trump, Project 2025, Gaza, tariffs etc. and not the things people care about that affect them and they have some agency over, we froze them from voting. The pundit class — yes the liberal part especially — was part of that, while the Democrats in the trenches working for 30 years to turn Texas blue, running and losing, were most definitely not. She is proud to be a Democrat; I need to check my party registration because I don’t remember if I stopped being “Unaffiliated.”
Democrats have a huge hill to climb because a lot of their base has been eroded into non-voters, though perhaps only temporarily. My guesses is this is due to general disgusting turn in political discourse in America has broken the Mean Voter Theorem by easily manipulating them into non-voters. “Luckily” the Republicans are so terrible at governing they’ll get voted out every time they have power because they’ll crash the economy or find some dozen new ways to make more vulnerable people’s lives miserable, and there wasn’t a big, long enough to to fix much of what they messed it up last time, and how close we are to all that for them to cause the electorate to forget. They can’t actually pass any policies; they can only destroy stuff.
(Heck, I don’t think the rich will even get their tax cut this time around, just a brief stay of execution. At this point there’s a significant number of the 0.01% who would prefer to be taxed more, not less that I’m not sure most of them even want it. After all, a lot of insanely rich people were on Team Kamala even if many were misguided on how to be so.)
It does show how easily manipulated and insidious (politically, not to judge them) the “blame the Democrats” crowd is as a bloc, because the Democrats aren’t poisoning the well, the Republicans and the “lie-beral media” are. If anything, the sort of person who blames the Democrats is a huge contributor of poisoning the well for the average voter, and shows how easily and how they can be manipulated to play their part — an easy psychological trap is being exploited: this person can “win” by pushing Biden out, “win” by voting for the better side (Democratic or 3rd party), and “win” by blaming someone else for what they actually caused (losing the election because they turned off so many potential allies that regular people collectively said, “Fuck it!”), free from the direct consequences of what they have wrought (safe in their liberal local city/state enclaves… as am I), while the people actually trying to help others and make a real difference are targets of their ire (“worse than MAGA” or “the real problem” or “this is why you should’t find common ground with <insert my enemy> in my enemy-centered world”).
Apparently how we feel about our vote (or not voting) became more important than what actually happens as a result of it. I was wrong and others were always right that the “solution” was for us to become more like them. I just didn’t realize that we both wanted the same stupid outcome: to feel good about acting against our interests.
I’m so lucky to have M—. She is truly my better half in so many ways, it’s become obvious the definition of “half” is being stretched here — like when Benjamin takes a huge bite out of his favorite candy and then gives me “half.” So much of what makes us “better” is with her, and not me.
She’s recently re-read 7 Habits, and just shared with me a new (to me) anecdote about Steven Covey that is in either the new edition or the audiobook form. He was asked “What habit do you have the most trouble with?”. “Habit 5. Seek first to understand, then be understood, I have to work on that one the most.” he says. He said his children always complained about how he didn’t follow that one and he would tell them, “It’s hard to listen when you are always right.”
M—, of course, brought this up as her way of telling me my mouth is always open and I need to fucking shut up and listen more. After the election, she resolved to stop keeping her true self bottled up, and her true self had been wanting to drop that truth bomb on me for years now. Besides, she only married me for the hoppa baby anyway. 😀 Of course, being the better half, she did it by first recounting that anecdote and then saying, “You know, you’re a lot like Stephen Covey.”
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I don’t know how I’m going to listen more on this blog — it’s not exactly a two-way street here. But it’s been so long nobody is reading at this point — you are on Instagram, or listening to podcasts, or repeat watching a much funnier version of this shit on TikTok, or, — if you are still so old school as to still be reading at this point — paying for someone to tell you some insightful shit on in some paid newsletter you subscribed to.
Because of that, I’m going to act like The Woodwork is a safe place to get these toxins out of my mind so I can be a better person out in the real world. Kind of like a good BM for my brain. I suppose, not that long ago, I’d have concentrated this into 140 characters and put it on Twitter (but you may have missed that I’m not on that anymore — I don’t slow down to watch a train wreck).
So here it is. We all gotta pee and poop somewhere, and this is my safe space. Feel free to not read this. I’m just going through some things.
When it comes to politics, I want to not waste an insane amount of cognitive surplus on what I can’t control. I need to use just enough to know who I’m going to vote for and what causes I’m going to donate to. That takes a pitifully small amount of effort at this point — not any more than the amount I paid attention back before George W. Bush did his axis of evil speech and I almost drove off the road. Before that moment, I never had even voted. Before that moment, most of my friends would call this place “the Left Coast” while actually living here. After that I became active — eventually too active. None of you were with me because I hadn’t yet started this blog. I voted for the first time, and joined the loser club, and, after that election day now twenty years gone, I became resolved and started this blog actually.
After 20 years of wasted thought on “religion and politics” I have enough of a bank account of knowledge to do know how I’m voting. And, I’m not going to change anyone’s minds there, and that goes against the motto of this blog.
I want to put some of that surplus into just being a more joyful person instead of some crazy fucking Cassandra who nobody can stand and is generally unpleasant to be around. For the last eight years, I’ve been the latter and that’s why I’ve barely written anything because that person is trash and has nothing good to say.
I started this blog with the motto I had had engraved on my iPod at the time: “write for another to think.” At some point it must have become “write to be right, and fuck others” which is why I haven’t been blogging.
Fuck that guy, I’m turning over a new leaf.
Or, as Benjamin often puts it: “Daddy shhh! Stop interrupting mommy!”
If you received $10,000,000 tomorrow, would you continue to work?
“Good one since someone got the powerball top price.”
Yes, I would continue to work.
In grad school, A classmate who would precede a lot of things with, “If I won the lottery…”
Finally I got sick of it and said, “Why the hell do you want someone to give you money you didn’t earn?” I still feel that way.
Also in grad school, the the lottery reached a huge sum (at the time). My advisor sat down, and as an exercise computed there was a positive ROI to buying a ticket.
Deciding that he it would be a crime against his discipline (theoretical condensed matter physics, which is mostly a lot of statistics) to ignore this fact, he went out of the office, next door to the local gas station to buy a lottery ticket. When he got there, in front of him was a colleague, a statistical physics professor, and soon behind him came another colleague. (I came in there later but it was to get a refill on my 64oz Bigfoot).
My uncle Francis, whom my son is named after, was also a theoretical condensed matter physicist. Every time we met up at the American Physical Society March meeting, The first thing out of his mouth was when and how we were going to get a ride to the closest riverboat blackjack casinos. There was even a rumor that we never got invited back to Las Vegas after 1986 — all those tables full of statistical physicists refusing alcohol and doing the minimum bet for hours until, suddenly, the shoe was in their favor and they all switched their bets at once, but separately.
Ironically, it looks like Casino memory is just under 40 years. They will learn the error of their ways next year. If only Francis were alive, I’m sure he’d come out of retirement to attend and make a few bucks at blackjack with me.
This morning, Benjamin and I had to get a blood test. I guess this makes us blood brothers.
It’s been about 8 years since my last test. Now that Benjamin is one year old, his pediatrician wants him tested for lead as a precaution since housing in San Francisco can date back to when paint and pipes had lead.
When getting him ready for the visit, I got him dressed. He started repeating “sosh” when I was putting on his socks. I mistakenly thought the lab could get a sample from his foot, so I skipped putting on his shoes.
He saw me pick up his sandals, and ran at me yelling “shoosh!” But when I dropped them in his diaper bag, he wasn’t having it at all. He associates his “shoosh” with going out, thought this meant I was leaving without him, and started crying.
It took all of five seconds, but that was five seconds too long for my son.
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Continue reading about adventures in blood testing after the jump
One year ago today:
Marie is starting her third trimester. Late last night, she started to spoon me. "Wait, where is your body pillow?" I asked.
"Right now, you are," she mumbled as she tried to fall back asleep.
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"Oh!" I exclaimed.
"Yeah, the baby is kicking. Did you feel that?"
"Oh! there it is again… and again!"
"He’s really active right now."
"Yeah, I’m can feel it on my butt cheek. Our son is literally kicking my ass!"
Giving up after the 5th try of getting that last piece of curdled milk out of his 4th neck chin.
Does this mean, I’m officially a dad?
Time to do as a friend forwarded to me?
She says to me at 1 AM: “I’m so glad I sucked the snot out of our son’s nose… it wasn’t really gross at all.”
This was a short while after she showed me his boogies in the snot sucker with far more pride than when she showed me her finisher’s medal after her first triathlon.
Apparently, the sucker has a filter in it… or something.
Something I learned today…
Babies can develop blisters on lips because of vigorous breastfeeding
My son shows he is clearly a milk vampire.
By the afternoon, with the air quality getting a little better, M— was beyond tired, so Benjamin took took me in his ride, a Chicco KeyFit 30 Caddy, “cruisin’ for some chicks” (his words, of course, not mine). We were going stir-crazy at home anyway.
Because the warm weather, he wanted to just buckle up and jet and show his rockin’ bod he and mommy have been working on for the last 10 months, but M— thought the seat restraints would chafe his new baby skin and selected a dinosaur shirt from Auntie Nora that all the honey babies in his life (Mommy) thought made him look cute. While it did cover up his awesome guns, he finally relented, and we were off to give M— some much needed rest for a couple hours
We walked through the park, and, on the way back, he thought mommy would like some food to keep her milk all nice and yummy so we picked up some egg bread, spam musubi, and Garlic Noodle w/Pan Seared Prawn on the trip home. He even survived his first diaper change in the field (though, mommy was right: I should have packed more wipes and diapers in the Pronto Changing Station).
Unfortunately, other than a few comments about how cute he was, he didn’t get to pick up any chicks. I thought it meant I failed as a wingman, but Benjamin blames the ‘rona.
Fuck Trump.
Here is a selfie of just him and the boys.
