When I got out of college, I rented a room in my buddy’s double-wide. He was a firefighter. I was a firefighter. I made $26,000 that year and had 0 kids. He had 3 kids, 2 jobs, rented out a room - and still needed food stamps to make ends meet and put good food on the table for the kids.

I can’t stress this enough: you cannot understand politics without reading this paragraph about why there’s no such thing as a 1/3rd pound hamburger

Picture of the East Wing demolition of the White House taken on my flight out of DCA.

Report examining the employment history data of more than 3m finance & tech workers at companies that rolled out office mandates found that turnover among women is almost three times as high as that of their male co-workers, and that women are more likely to take a lower position if they leave

Healthcare premiums (and pension costs) are eating local government budgets. At my last city, the full cost of my family plan was like $48k. I paid 5% of that. But between insurance, pension, and other benefits and payroll taxes, my total comp was close to 2x my salary. It’s not sustainable.

Willamette Couch Street Wallowa

Cyberpunk is a warning not an instruction manual, episode 2475

Taken just a few minutes ago outside the ICE facility in Portland that Trump claims is under siege. My message to Donald Trump is this: we don’t need you here. Stay the hell out of our city.

I miss the era where the idea of sending troops into American cities was the province of classic Onion articles and not real life cc: @bencollins.bsky.social theonion.com/clinton-decl...

I’m super privileged to send my kid to an amazing school. You know what she did last year for pre-k? Played in the woods and wetlands. Made a papier-mâché egret that she saw in the wetlands. Learned about playing with friends. Perfected her technique on the swing. None of this nonsense.

How your email finds me

I really need to spend less time on my hobby of book buying and start to read some once in a while.

Guardsmen on the mall with their M4s this morning. To my memory this is the first time I’ve seen the guard with long guns. Even during the days after Sept 11 they only carried sidearms.

Portland is divided into 6 quadrants.

I’m just a local government guy, but I don’t understand this attitude around public records. If it’s exempt, I’ll articulate the exemption and defend my position as needed. If not, sure, whatever, have the records. I’m just the custodian, not the owner. They’re *public* records.

One of my best public sector management lessons was “lawyers advise, managers decide”. When an attorney says something can’t be done, it’s incumbent on you to ask questions and figure out if that’s opinion, law, or a gray area. Then to go back and find a path that satisfies these concerns.

* Trump Says He’ll Fire Labor Statistics Head After Weak Jobs Data 🤡 @bloomberg.com

Someone just alerted me to this news by being snarky about it and friends, I HAVE BEEN WAITING SINCE I WAS PREGNANT WITH THE DAUGHTER WHO JUST GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE FOR A SEQUEL TO BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM. Snark however much you want, internet stranger, I am choosing joy!

Bail reform has a ton of nuance to it. Kim and Koh (2021) show an aggregate increase in property crime in NJ. Ropac & Rempel (2023) show a decrease in felony re-arrests in NYC, but not for repeat offenders. Oregon detained more felony defendants pre-trial post-bail reform (Dooley, 2024).

Elect more millennial parents of young children to get better childcare and elder care policies!

Michael Collins for AP Euro. I’m pretty sure it was on Laserdisc.

This is dumb on Axon’s part. I’m sure part of it is not wanting to build out these features. But there’s another part that I think is important, is that’s it’s immaterial which parts are AI and which are human. That’s a very SV view, but it’s not appropriate for LE. Justice is clunky on purpose.

Apple Music is generating “all-time favorite tracks” playlists from the last decade of your usage. How to tell in one quick glance that I have a preschooler. 😂😂

In 45 states child care for two kids costs more than a mortgage. In 49 states child care for two surpasses what families pay in rent.

A big problem I have with all the AI boosters is when they say things like, "if you just use them right, they're great!" Buddy, after 30 years in tech I can tell you that the one thing people will NOT do is use anything right.

There’s many problems with this, but the 2 I’d like to focus on are: drinking coffee / tea while reading is quite enjoyable. Also, the point is not to “acquire information”, it’s to learn. Which requires discovering things you didn’t know and may not have thought to ask. Browse! Read voraciously!

Thanks to @aprilehrlich.bsky.social & @opb.org for covering this story!

In which I learn that there’s a 4th book in the Rook series coming out soon (oh, and some other very smart content too)

Numerous teachers told me that they are wasting many hours of their lives giving thoughtful feedback to robots

100% endorsement for this. Also will sign a petition to prohibit schools from having 3 apps or web platforms for different tasks for your child. Attendance, health, and parent directory? Do we need 3 logins for this?

I’m an average mid-level civil servant. This has been (just part of) my week: Work on implementing Oregon’s complex recycling modernization act Mitigate the workload on local governments to create local emergency planning committees for Hazmat Work on legislation for criminal justice reform

This is perhaps a universal tale of government: someone from outside has a good idea and instead of thinking it through, tries to will it into being - and then everyone else has to spend their time trying to kill the thing that should not be.

Happy Public Service Recognition Week?

I went back to grad school mid-career. Got told not to use AI for writing. I legitimately hadn’t thought about doing that. I’m paying $$$ to go study subjects I’m interested in - why would I do anything other than struggle through the texts & find meaning? nymag.com/intelligence...

I truly think the brain damage from sleep deprivation is an evolutionary thing to make you forget how terrible the first few years are so that you’re tempted to have more kids and perpetuate the species. (Speaking as a parent of 1).

What an amazing grassroots effort. I cannot wait to see what comes from projects like this!

I worked at a gas station/ repair shop in high school and college. My first job after college was a firefighter. There’s an immense value to blue collar work. It also wrecks your body, which is why we invented social security in the 1930s. And why I went to grad school and have a white collar job.

1/ I wonder if there's a complement to Mettler's _Submerged State_ thesis: the successful state thesis. In brief: American government has *in many ways* been so successful for so long that Americans have forgotten why they need it, making anti-government rhetoric more appealing.

The value of teachers is that you can read Ender’s Game and have a takeaway more insightful than “hyper smart kids learn from tablets and take over the world through force of argument and intellect”

This is somehow a verbatim transcript of a conversation in my house.

millennials will be like i know a banger and it's the reading rainbow theme song. and they're right

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

This cure for sickle cell anemia was made possible by NIH-funded research to turn the gene for fetal hemoglobin back on. It was done predominantly by NIH researchers, including intramural researchers on the NIH campus. irp.nih.gov/catalyst/33/...

Well happy birthday to me. Excited that @moskos.bsky.social’s new book is finally here.

Nothing worse than being the intern on Monday morning assigned to the fax machine after an action alert went out over the weekend. Offices had to have an unlisted fax number so we could actually fax stuff that wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle. Though I’m guessing by now it’s all fax to email.

One of the reasons I waited until my late 30’s to have kids is that I was past the “grind it out and work all the time” phase. Weirdly this also coincided with “not have any money” phase of my career. Ahh, public service and your terrible early/mid career wages.

This is something I’ve harped on for a while. Govt, especially locals, doesn’t have the right skill set for engaging with these vendors and they keep getting taken to the cleaners on expensive contracts that don’t deliver and nobody understands the tech or the contracting side well enough 1/

18F, the federal government’s technology shop, was demolished by Musk’s team shortly after midnight. It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 billion.