An aside about the writing process

The Netflix show Russian Doll is great. If you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend that you do, it is probably some of the best TV out this year. It's also very short. About 8 episodes at 24 minutes a piece makes it just 3 hours and 12 minutes, basically a long movie.

Etymology is fascinating with, particularly how words continue to echo their origins long after you would have expected drift to completely separate them. Reflecting on current and previous meanings of words helps me think about things in a new and useful light. There are a few words in politics that I think can use a little bit of inspection right now.

A friend of mine recently posted the question on facebook "If you could change one thing about our government, what would it be?"

I think it's a wonderful question, and really enjoyed reading other peoples answers, as well as coming up with my own. I have more than one answer myself, and I also feel like the ways in which I agree and disagree with some other people's suggestions reveal some interesting principals about how I think.

I rather enjoy the game of trying to guess what the year to come will hold. Usually I feel like a lot of other people are playing along with me, but this year has been oddly silent.

So let me start by making some guesses, followed by the likelihood I attach to them, and some explanation :

The most recent Republican revision of tax law, written for 2018, created a new legal-financial concept called an "Opportunity Zone" also referred to as an OZone. OZones are physical areas where different, looser financial rules apply. The idea behind opportunity zones is ostensibly to encourage development or redevelopment of blighted areas.

Facebook and Twitter, (as well as many many other online platforms) censor their content. The legality of this is pretty clear as they are private platforms, the ethics of this are interesting and sticky, touch on if they claim to be a common carrier. Even as a common carrier, we have president, legal and emotional, for censorship that applies to specific mediums like the restriction of Telemarketing.

Assume for a minute, that there was unlimited free housing in rural Montana. Anyone who wanted could sign up, and get a very simple modest house in the middle of a rural area, power and water included. How many of the current homeless would go for it? My guess is not many, and quite rationally so: it's actually a pretty bad deal. By going out to the middle of nowhere you lose access to all sorts of other civil services (health, education, etc) the people you care about (friends and family), and any number of white/grey/black markets.

I usually try to read listen to audio books of all of the Hugo Nominees every year. This year it was slow going as I had some new and very attention grabbing people in my life, and as few of the books really grabbed me. Every single nominee is from an author I am well acquainted with, and 2 or 3 of them (depending on how you count) are sequels. None of them were really all that gripping, and none opened up a brand new perspective.

The commonly held myth of the middle class that an investment should return about 7% per year on average. This is the conventional wisdom, and largely based on the fact that the american stock market has averaged out to this number over a long period1.