Author: Andrew

Pulled in two ways

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Events in the last couple of week have once again highlighted for me the tensions in the gun control debate. The United States has had yet another mass shooting—a real one, with lots of victims—and not just one event, but two. And just a few days earlier I had my own brush with illicitly-used firearms. Someone shot up my front door, either by mistake or bad aim, apparently intending to shoot at my neighbor.

bullet hole

I completely understand why some folks would renew their cry for additional gun control. The more shootings of this sort there are, the more strident the cries will be, and the more powerful the emotional pull will be. Everyone seems to think that we ought to do something, but I don’t think the suggestions have really improved.

Gun control advocates struggle to convincingly claim that they aren’t after all guns, even those owned and operated legally. Often their suggestions betray basic ignorance about guns themselves, or propose policies that already exist, or that wouldn’t meaningfully affect the mass shootings that have recently plagued our society. They often don’t seem to appreciate that most meaningful restrictions on guns really will require a constitutional amendment, and that without an amendment, private gun ownership is a civil right. I think it’s wishful thinking to believe that the 2nd amendment was ever intended to be so narrow as some critics suggest, and relying on the courts to restrict guns would just add to the list of cultural hot-buttons that have been removed from the democratic process.

Now, I am not opposed to seeing a constitutional amendment. I increasingly think that a carefully-constructed amendment might be just the right approach. A model that shows the strategy and the danger might be Prohibition. The federal government, seeking to end the scourge of drunkenness in society, actually got the Constitution amended to permit bans on alcohol. Prohibition mostly had its intended effect, a fact not often admitted. Of course, it also had many unintended effects, sometimes in surprising places, and which arguably outweighed its benefits. But as a one-time “surge” of enforcement to change the culture, it seems to have done the trick.

Perhaps something similar could be done for guns. Gun rights advocates also seem unserious about stopping mass shootings. They point out that the shooters have a variety of other issues, and they’re not wrong. (Most notably, these shooters are nearly always young, male, mentally unstable, and fatherless.) But the relatively easy access to guns is obviously also a factor. True, violent boys could do a lot of damage with knives or other deadly weapons. But a knife attack would be a low slower and a lot easier to stop. It is also true that most of the proposals for restricting guns focus on cosmetic features, rather than actual deadly effectiveness. Yet insofar as one of the problems is the sheer number of guns in the society, any limitations, however arbitrary, might have a good effect.

Another possible advantage of a Prohibition-style constitutional amendment would be the possibility of varying local laws. Big cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago might essentially ban guns entirely, while small towns in Wyoming, Utah, Texas, or Maine might not be so strict, thereby reflecting the different typical uses of firearms in these various places.

One reason that I still remain skeptical about gun control was highlighted for me by the events in my household over the last week. As I said at the top, someone shot my apartment door four times last Sunday morning. Two bullets went all the way through, and one of them ended up on the other side of my apartment, having gone through an interior window and hitting a flashlight on my desk. It happened around 3:45am. My wife got up right after it happened, thinking that someone was knocking on the door. She literally stood right in front of the door that had just had new holes punched in it before she realized what had happened. Thankfully, my kids mostly slept through it all, and woke up a couple of hours later to police investigators in the living room.

We found out this week that this is not the first time this person has shot at my neighbor this month. At the beginning of the month, he shot at my neighbor in the parking lot in the middle of the day. We were out of town, and didn’t find out until after he had tried again.

This is what gives me pause about the Prohibition model: without some means of powerful, legal self-defense, we’d end up entirely dependent on the police for protection from these kinds of people, and I’m not convinced they’re up to the job. I’m not anti-police. They usually serve well, taking risks instead of me, caring for people who are hard to care for, etc. I’ll even stipulate for the sake of argument that the various high-profile cases of police misconduct are extreme outliers. My worry is that they might not be up to the task of enforcement for something so profoundly society-shaping as a huge gun-control program. The current track record of enforcing the laws that already exist isn’t great. I think it is perfectly reasonable to be not “pro-gun” but rather “government-skeptical.” Nor does it seem likely that someone like the shooter here would care much about rules forbidding gun ownership. It would matter a lot how exactly the law would be enforced.

None of this is to say that I could have done anything with a gun myself. The shooter didn’t even come all the way up to the level of my front door; he just shot from the steps. I assume he was long gone before I could have responded personally. Though it seems hard to find good information about how many crimes mere private possession of a firearm has prevented, my case couldn’t get added to the list regardless, since it was all over before I was even really awake.

As far as I can tell, my local police haven’t caught the guy who shot my door, even though they seem to be pretty sure who did it. They also haven’t been willing to talk to me about it. The officers who responded last Sunday were kind and helpful—just the sort of police you’d want. But since then it’s been crickets. I’ve learned more from my neighbors than from the men and women who asked me to waive some of my Constitutional rights so that they could collect evidence in my dwelling. I have nothing against their moral standards, but I’m not yet convinced by the organization’s competence.

For now, at least, I think this is my biggest hesitation about gun control. It’s not that it’s a bad idea, but that the mechanism for doing it relies too much on an institution that all too often doesn’t seem up to the tasks it already has. But stopping the slow-motion riot of mass shooting is a compelling aim too, so I am pulled in two ways.

Exploiting emotional labor

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Casey Newton’s article on The Verge about the lives of Facebook moderators likely only adds to the growing rage against social networks. It’s worth a read. Even if stories like this often make the work seem worse than it usually is, it’s not a pretty picture.

Other journalists and bloggers have recently been talking about work and about how online communities work. On work, see Derek Thompson’s recent Atlantic essay. Thompson observes the way in which work is expected to function as one’s entire life, making it more like a religion than a job. Scott Alexander’s post on his attempts to moderate comments in his own little community is worth considering.

These articles offer a chance to synthesize some varied thoughts about how our high-tech, information-rich, ultra-connected world is affecting us. Here is just one idea that these essays have made me think about.

As computers can do more and more, jobs will be more and more about what only humans can do. Firms will look for ways to extract value from distinctively human abilities. This is what a lot of “information” jobs actually look like. They are not traditional “white collar” jobs; they’re not in management or administrative support. Instead, they are ways of leveraging part of the human mind that computers can’t duplicate yet.

For a few months I worked at a company where the task was to correct errors that computers made in reading documents. The computer did pretty well with the initial read, but any characters it was not confident in got passed to a human reader. The software we used was built to make us work as fast as possible. We didn’t need to read the entire document, only the few parts the computer couldn’t read. We were carefully tracked for speed and accuracy. Nowadays machine-learning technology has likely surpassed even human abilities in this domain, but the basic function of the human in the system is much like the Facebook moderators’ function. It makes up the gap between what the machine can do and what the product requires.

This gap-filling is what Newton’s article describes in the Facebook moderating company. Employees are asked to leverage their judgment in figuring out whether something is appropriate or not. Because judgments of this sort are hard to reduce to rules (note all the problems Facebook has in specifying the rules clearly), the task needs a tool that is good at interpreting and assessing an enormous amount of information. And human minds are just the thing.

Computers have gotten good a certain kinds of pattern recognition, but they are still not good at extracting meaning from contexts. Human beings do this all the time. In fact, we’re really, really good at it. So good, in fact, that people who aren’t better than the computer strike us as odd or different.

The problem is that this task of judging content requires the human machines to deploy what they have and computers don’t. In Facebook’s case, that thing is human emotions. Most of our evaluative assessments involve some kind of emotional component. The computer doesn’t have emotions, so Facebook needs to leverage the emotional assessments of actual people in order to keep their site clean.

These kinds of jobs are not particularly demanding on the human mind. Sometimes we call this kind of work “knowledge work,” but that’s a mistake. The amount of knowledge needed in these cases is little more than a competent member of society would have. It would be better to call these jobs human work, or more precisely emotional work, because what is distinctive about them is the way they use human emotional responses to assess information. Moderators need to be able to understand the actions of other humans. But we do this all the time, so it’s not cognitively difficult. In fact, this is why Facebook can hire lots of relatively young, inexperienced workers. The human skills involved are not unusual.

The problem is that as those parts of us that are distinctively human become more valuable, there is also a temptation to try to separate them off from the actual person who has them, then track them and maximize their efficiency. In ordinary manual labor, it’s not so hard to exchange some effort and expertise for a paycheck. Faster and more skilled workers are more productive, and so can earn more. Marx notwithstanding, my labor and expertise are not really part of who I am, and expending them on material goods does not necessarily diminish or dis-integrate me. In contrast, my emotions and capacity for evaluate judgments are much closer to who I am, and so constantly leveraging those parts of me does prompt me to split myself into my “job” part and my “not-job” part. We might call this “emotional alienation,” and it is a common feature of service economies. We’re paying someone to feel for us, so that we don’t have to do it.

All this doesn’t mean we should give up content moderation, or even that moderator jobs are necessary bad jobs. I have little doubt that there is tons of stuff put online every day that ought to be taken down. I am an Augustinian and a Calvinist, and harbor no illusions about the wisdom of the crowd. But we should be more aware of what it actually costs to find and remove the bad stuff. We enjoy social networks that are largely free from serious objectionable and disturbing content. But someone has to clean all that off for us, and we are essentially paying for that person to expend emotional labor on our behalf. Social media seems “free,” but as we’re being constantly reminded, it really isn’t—not to us, and not to those who curate it for us.

So suppose Facebook, or Twitter, or YouTube actually paid their moderators whatever was necessary for their emotional and spiritual health, and gave them the working conditions under which they could cultivate these online experiences for us without sacrificing their own souls. How much would that be worth? I doubt our tech overlords care enough to ask that question. Maybe the rest of us should. Though we cannot pay them directly, we can, perhaps, reduce their load, exercise patience with them, and apply whatever pressure we can to their employers. This is, after all, the future of work. It’s in all of our interests to set the norms for distinctively human labor right now, while we still can.

“Saving” baseball with game theory

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The conventional wisdom this summer is that baseball is struggling. Games are boring and long, too many teams are really bad, and so no one is watching. Unsurprisingly, this supposed sorry state of things has prompted people to offer “advice.” 

The worst piece I’ve seen so far is this article from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll save you the read. The author reports on a proposal called the “Catch-Up Rule.” When a team is ahead, they only get two outs per inning instead of the usual three. This makes the games closer and faster, and this is supposed to make them more appealing.

The original proposal appears to come from a game theorist and a computer scientist at NYU. If you needed proof that “game theory” isn’t actually about what we usually think of as games, this is it. 

The proposal is absurd, but it’s worth considering just what is so bad about it. First, the common complaint against baseball these days is that there isn’t enough action. This proposal would reduce the amount of action by reducing the number of outs. Second, the authors propose that the rule would reduce inequality between teams by artificially hindering the ability of the good teams to succeed. I doubt this would happen. Instead, the good teams would assume even less risk, and thereby continue their dominance, just at a faster clip. More generally, a lot of baseball is about random chance–this is why there are 162 games–and reducing the number of baseball events will emphasize the randomness.

But these are minor quibbles compared to the basic mistake the authors make. They seem to think that the purpose of playing a baseball game (and to be fair, they propose similar changes to basketball and football) is to see who wins. Rule changes that reach that end state more efficiently are therefore regarded as desirable.

This way of thinking confuses the goal with the point of the game. But the distinction between the goal and the point of a game is what makes it a game. A game is an activity in which we voluntarily, and for the purposes of playing the game, rule out the most efficient means to the goal. Consider soccer (a game that doesn’t seem friendly to a “catch-up” rule). Two of the most important rules of soccer specifically prevent the most efficient means of scoring: no hands, and no off-sides. People sometimes complain that soccer is too slow, there isn’t enough scoring, the attacks are opaque, etc. How much better would it be if you could just pick the ball up? Well, it wouldn’t be better soccer, because it wouldn’t be soccer. Though a game must have a target or goal of some sort–some action or event that is aimed at–the purpose of playing (or enjoying) the game is the joy of playing itself.

I think most serious baseball fans would object not for the sake of tradition, but because they enjoy the game, and not just the result. Reducing the number of things that happen isn’t desirable, even if it gets to an end faster. But let’s grant that serious fans aren’t bothered by the lethargic pace these days. (I’m not sure that’s true, but let’s grant it for argument.) Will the causal fans be better off? I kind of doubt it. First, to the casual fan, we’d be adding a rule that seems manifestly unfair. I’m not sure that it would be so easy to explain why competitive balance is more desirable than more exhibitions of baseball skill, but this is exactly the proposed tradeoff. Second, the rule would reduce the amount of skill displayed by limiting the opportunities for the better team to hit. Supposedly the problem is that there isn’t enough hitting, but the proposal suggests reducing it even more. And third, I think that a casual fan would likely intuit that something seems off when we have to redesign the game to finish it faster. 

The authors point out that having more people watch a game would be good for baseball revenue. Shorter games would permit more watchers, and so shorter games means more revenue. But baseball isn’t hurting for revenue, and changing the game to make it not just unrecognizable as baseball, but a deficient game seems likely to be counterproductive.

But the proposal as a whole is a perfect illustration of how suck the life out of something by making a theory of it. Baseball fans, like any sports fans, can get nerdy about the details of their passion, but fundamentally that obsession is driven by a love of the game, not a love for the theory of the game. And perhaps there’s a lesson in that for other things too. 

Universal Basic Income and the Liberal Arts

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Recent social fractures, combined with our society’s enormous wealth, has caused a fringe discussion in the public policy world to get more attention. The idea is that the society (the government) should supply everyone (every citizen?) with some kind of basic material support. This goes beyond what we usually think of as “welfare,” for it applies equally to everyone, without conditions on working, having disabilities, etc.  Slate Star Codex has a useful post supplying the arguments in favor of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) instead of a basic jobs guarantee.

I find the arguments for a UBI over a BJG pretty convincing. The basic idea still seems to have a number of unknowns, and it isn’t obvious that a UBI would work as a policy. (See point iii on the SSC post for some worries about the economics.)

I’m interested here in one particular complaint: “iv) Without work, people will gradually lose meaning from their lives and become miserable.”

It seems to me that this objection makes a basic error that is nonetheless very common: it equates “work” with “what I’m paid for.”

At one level the assertion may be true. A life with literally nothing to do isn’t a lot of fun. It’s boring. (“Meaning of life” questions are fraught, so let’s focus on whether we would want such a life.) Even here there are caveats all around. It might not be easy to determine whether a life’s activity is “pointless” or whether someone ought to find it boring. Let’s just work with the intuition that mere aimlessness is not good.

The complaint against a UBI is that without work, life would have this kind of pointlessness. And there does seem to be some evidence for this. Consider the last few decades in the Rust Belt and Coal Belt. Many of the social issues there seem to track the loss of stable, decent-paying jobs. Or consider the people who “retire” several times from different jobs, only to find themselves stir-crazy with nothing to do.

SSC rightly observes that a lot of jobs are pretty boring themselves, so it isn’t clear that offering basic jobs is going to solve the problem. A UBI is better because it gives people freedom to do what interests them.

But that’s the other problem, because a lot of people don’t really know what interests them. And this is a failure of education.

The Liberal Arts(TM) were not the subjects that would make one free, but rather those that befitted free men–those domains of knowledge that were appropriate for citizens, freed from the demands of labor, whether slave or wage. One studied the liberal arts to know things that would make life interesting when there was no need to work.

This is the problem with linking “work” with “job”, and then saying that lack of “work” causes a lack of meaning. Some kinds of work are not easy to compensate, but are still valuable and interesting. There are many people I know who, as far as I can tell, would love to be freed from their day-to-day labors so that they could do what they really like. Some of them even work less than might be considered prudent so that they can do their side-gig. Their real work is not paid, but no less valuable for it.

Our society is probably rich enough that it could probably support at some basic level everyone who doesn’t want to work in a job. Those who do want a job can produce enough marginal value to support those who want to do other things. (Lest you think these other things are themselves pointless, remember that caring for family, volunteering for charity, etc. are all things that might fall into this category. Imagine being able to decide whether to be a stay-at-home parent without having to seriously worry about making ends meet.)

This economic freedom is impressive, probably unprecedented in the history of the world. It really does seem as if, at least in the West, we are quickly approaching a time when large portions of the society don’t need a job. If having nothing to do is so bad for one’s soul, then how should we prepare for this coming freedom?

The liberal arts have two answers. First, we can prepare to do more of these liberal arts. We shouldn’t think of the liberal arts as the so-called “humanities.” It’s not that everyone should write more poetry (though perhaps some should). It might be that some should do more science or math, or more arts and crafts, or more politics, or more cooking, or more gardening. (Chad Wellmon has been critiquing this distinction recently.)

Second, studying the liberal arts gives us something to be interested in. SSC’s examples on this point seem slightly off. Folks who already feel their interests squeezed out by their responsibilities would be fine. Most people benefiting from a UBI wouldn’t know what to do with their time. The UBI would give them time to pursue their interests, but for the most part their interests aren’t worth pursuing. And often they know it, at least a little. They’d be bored because their current time-wasting distractions aren’t interesting enough to sustain an entire life of leisure. But the liberal arts are interesting enough.

The problem is that our recent educational trends have favored purely technical education–job preparation–when it seems likely that there will be no job to prepare for. One might say that this technical preparation has enabled our society’s wealth, and perhaps that is partly true. But the cost in the long run might be very high.

The liberal arts have tried to justify their existence in purely utilitarian terms–writing gets you a better job; reading comprehension helps you understand your work; etc. I wonder if the better way defend them is that the liberal arts give you something to do when when you don’t need to do anything. This was David Foster Wallace’s point in his famous commencement address at Kenyon College.

Ironically, then, the biggest problem with a UBI might be that the a society with the material means for it will not have the moral means. But that is what the liberal arts are supposed to fix, and the best part of the UBI would be to supply the modest material means to participate in the life formerly restricted to a tiny fraction of society. SSC thinks that a UBI would be close to utopia. I’m less sure, because I’m not confident that most of us are ready to live there yet.

Why did UVA lose to UMBC?

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It is sad that UVA’s basketball team’s historic season will likely be remembered for all the wrong reasons. UVA was great during the regular season, and for their efforts earned a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament, only to be the first #1 to fall to a #16.

In several attempts to analyze the historic upset, the writers have repeated a familiar trope: UVA isn’t built for the postseason. Though under Tony Bennett UVA has been a reliable force in the regular season, somehow they’ve been unable to find even modest success in the Big Dance.

The question is, “Should UVA change?”

Lots of basketball pundits dislike the slow pace and deliberate tactics that UVA uses, but at least this year they’ve been forced to admit that the strategy works pretty well. Yet now some who seemed to grudgingly accept the effectiveness of the Pack Line will surely want to revisit their concessions.

The thought is that the slow pace and suffocating defense typically comes at the expense of offense, and so when the need is for better scoring, UVA just doesn’t have what it takes. Therefore, the argument goes, UVA’s consistency and discipline undermines its ability for success in the post-season, when it is more likely that they will need to make up deficits quickly. UVA would do better if they would sacrifice a little defensive skill in exchange for some better scorers. They might even do better if they would play defense the “normal” way, thereby increasing the number of possessions and making it easier to catch up.

I think that this argument is understandable, but mistaken. More to the point, I think using Friday’s night’s upset by UMBC as evidence for the claim that UVA should change misunderstands what happened.

The upset

So why did UBMC win? A few factors seem relevant.

First, UMBC has a smart coach who knows how college basketball works. He had his guys prepared and calm, and kept them focused on the prize.

Second, the game plan itself was smart. UVA has long been susceptible to teams who can overload with guards and make 3-pointers. UMBC exploited this deficiency to perfection (almost literally, as we’ll see).

Third, UVA was terrible. I’m not sure that I’ve seem them play so badly under Tony Bennett.

But mostly, it was luck. In fact, sheer luck is probably as important as all of the other factors put together.

Even before the tournament, UMBC was already the luckiest team in Division 1. And it’s not really that close. UVA was slightly above average in luck; UMBC was already a few standard deviations above the mean. They’ve had a magical season.

When we consider the game itself, the first half was pretty unremarkable. Sure, it’s cool for the #16 to be tied with the #1 at halftime, but UVA fans probably weren’t surprised. DeAndre Hunter was out, Devon Hall and Isaiah Wilkins were in some foul trouble, but UMBC had only 21 points. It looks pretty familiar to UVA fans. A few more points on UVA’s side would have been nice, but it wasn’t way out of the norm. And UMBC had already been hot, especially from 3-pt range. UVA was shooting about 10% from 3, and UMBC was over 40%. UMBC’s three-point shooting was keeping it close.

The second half was another story. UMBC’s performance was close to as efficient a performance as is possible. We can note first that UMBC scored 53 points in the second half, which is the average number of points UVA allowed per game this year. UMBC ended up with the highest score against UVA this season.

So did UMBC just take a ton of shots? Did UVA’s defense just completely fall apart? Did UMBC finally figure out how to speed UVA up? Not really.

Usually win percentage correlates pretty well with field goal percentage.

At extremes of pace (very few or very many attempts) the numbers aren’t quite as consistent. But in this chart, you can see that the basic relationship is pretty stable. For reference, the blue dot is UVA’s performance on Friday. The red dot is UMBC’s performance for the whole game. And the purple dot is UMBC’s second half performance, if that rate had continued for the whole game. The data producing this plot is all NCAA Div I games since the 2009 season. There are only a dozen or so team performances better than UMBC’s since then.

If we look just at UVA’s games, we can see an even more dramatic outlier.

Here are all of UVA’s (regular season) games since Tony Bennett became the head coach. Each dot shows the field goal attempts and percentage for each opponent. The orange dots represent opponent wins and the blue are opponent losses. The red dot is UMBC’s game on Friday, and the orange dot at the very top is the second half of that game, extrapolating the number of FG attempts to two halves.

Two features of this graph deserve note. First, there are a couple of UVA losses surprisingly close to the bottom left. Occasionally UVA just can’t score. Second, no one has shot over 60% for a game against UVA. 

In general, though, UVA is dominant against other teams. The boxplot shows the last four years of UVA versus other teams. The values here are scaled so that we can see how far from the norm UVA’s opponents are. Because the scores are scaled, UVA’s numbers center around 0. When UVA’s opponents don’t play UVA, they’re about 0.5 standard deviations above average in FG%, compared to all teams. (Most of them are in the ACC, which historically is a good to great conference.) When they play UVA, they are between 0.5 and 2 standard deviations below average. Ordinarily, UVA dominates pretty decent teams.

But, as is the case with any statistical distribution, there is a lot of overlap. Shooting 30% better than UVA is possible, even if it is very unlikely. But we already knew that UMBC’s win was unlikely. This chart just reminds us that it wasn’t impossible, even given the existing distributions of performance.

UVA and the NCAAs

So why does UVA struggle so much in the NCAA tournament? If we take the pundits’ view, it’s because of the style. But if we take the data analysis view, it’s just as likely that they haven’t had enough chances yet. Indeed, UVA fans can easily think of some quirky reason that made a solid season turn into a sketchy tournament. Injuries (most recently Hunter), bad draws (MSU twice?), etc. all seem like viable possibilities.

Sometimes people say that UVA struggles in March. But that’s not quite right. They struggle in the NCAA Tournament, but fans of other ACC teams should quickly realize that UVA doesn’t struggle in March. They’ve won the ACC or been close for several years in a row. So it seems as if there is something about the NCAA tournament that causes problems. If it’s not just random luck (still I think the best explanation), then what changes from the ACC tournament to the NCAA one?

The obvious thing that changes is the officials. And I wonder if this has something to do with it. UVA plays a distinctive kind of game, and I wonder if the ACC officials get used to it, as do ACC teams, and UVA gets used to the others being used to it. Then we get to the big tournament, and now there are officials who aren’t as familiar with the tactics, and call them differently. UVA does seem to get more fouls in the NCAA tournament, even though during the regular season they usually get very few. This seems like a small thing, but it might matter in tight games.

As I mentioned above, some people say that UVA just plays too slowly, so they can’t generate offense when necessary. I think folks should take a close look at the last 60 seconds of the game at Louisville this season. UVA can score fast when they need to, and focusing on pace of play misses the simpler point.

Fundamentally, UVA just struggles to score at all sometimes. For the last few years (basically since Anthony Gill graduated) UVA has been almost incapable of any kind of post game. Their big guys are excellent defenders, but they can’t score reliably.

This is, I think, the better way to think about UVA’s style. Their offense is one-dimensional, and though their guards are talented shooters, they understandably struggle when the opponent can load up opposing guards, feeling safe to ignore the big men. UVA would be very good indeed if the offense could alternate between an inside post game and the typical blocking/screening scheme they use.

Perhaps the best argument against UVA needing to change is UMBC itself. The Retrievers won basically by imitating UVA.

Other consistently excellent teams have sometimes struggled at the highest level. I’m a long-time fan of the Atlanta Braves, who won 15 consecutive division titles, but only one World Series. Consistent excellence isn’t showy, but it is excellence. UVA is building that kind of program, and I suspect that eventually the trend will swing the other way, and everyone will suddenly forget why they thought Tony Bennett’s teams were incapable of March success.

Back to blogging

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In the interest of having somewhere to write that I can control reasonably well, I’ve restarted this blog. I’ve had some content at this domain before, but I haven’t updated it in years. That’s mostly because I was using Jekyll, which is cool technology, but hard to maintain (and kind of a pain on Windows).