No One Brings Their W2 to the Grocery Store

Being someone who works in talent acquisition and recruiting means I'm very close to the labor market and work within its confines daily. Lately, I have been really interested in the discourse around whether or not the economy is "good". The debate seems to be taking place between the larger American public who express pessimism for the state of the economy in various high-profile surveys, on TikTok, Twitter (I will never call it X), and other social media opposite a whole lot of policy wonks and economists who...frequent all the same social media spaces. 

In this economists vs the mob discourse, the economists - unsurprisingly - have data on their side. People in surveys and across social media seem to be largely discussing how the **vibes** of the economy are bad; fears about being laid off, not having enough money to keep up with inflation (inflated prices), having to work multiple jobs, etc. Yet as economist Matt Darling often points out the rate of layoffs are low, historically low, and economists like Claudia Sahm have argued that the rate of inflation has fallen and that wages have risen to keep pace with the still somewhat inflated prices. 

So then why are the vibes bad? The consensus from people like policy wonk Will Stancil - who has taken up the mantle as one of the more infamous commentators in this debate - is that social media, TikTok and the information feedback loop is poisoning people's mind and misinforming their supposed lived experiences. 

There is certainly a media - both traditional and social - frenzy about the state of prices despite some of the larger myths being untrue or misleading; Jeff Stein had a great write-up on this whole debate that dismantled the $16 Big Mac meme that was going around. People are under the impression there are massive layoffs when there aren't. With all of this misinformation floating around and needing constant dismantling, there may be a point to be had about feedback loops. 

However, I find the whole argument is missing a lot of key components that the economists and wonks, at least so far as I have seen, refuse to contend with. 

Recently I sat on a Zoom call with Nick Bunker, one of Indeed's (the largest job board in the country) economists. I was able to ask him directly why he thinks there is a distinction between the objectively good economy that he and others are touting with what the American public seems to think of it. 

To his credit, he gave a pretty fairminded answer; that Americans are still seeing the inflated prices, and while their wages should be making up for this fact it may not be computing enough to snap them out of the price delirium. Which is sort of a nice way of still saying Americans are out of touch with the facts of the situation. Stancil-lite. 

But what I found interesting and what really got me thinking was his data on wages. There was a huge jump in wages in 21/22 and these have seem to come down. When pressed on this people like Stancil or Sahm will say that the wage rates have come back down to 2019 levels, which are still quite high, and more importantly, no one in 2019 thought the economy was in shambles. 

Yet as Matt Bruenig and others have pointed out, there were a lot of gains made in 2021 and 2022 in the welfare state; things like child credits, free school lunches, etc in addition to large jumps in wages that were mostly the result of pressure from the great resignation and a high demand for labor (this can also be seen in the Indeed data). For my part, I would add that workers also saw an explosion of remote work and flexibility. There were a lot of gains for workers in the economy, wages and otherwise.

Bruenig argues, and I have to echo here, that the dismantling of those programs and the decrease in wage increases is frustrating people and leading to a lot of wariness over this economy. Adding the decrease of remote work, a slowdown in hiring, and article after article about burnout among workers (this was also echoed in some of the Indeed quits data about hospitality workers), even if it's just a RETVRN to 2019, I can't understand why it isn't easy for people to see how this would be frustrating and lead many to doubt the health of an economy that so giveth and taketh away.

Let's break it down like it's an equation in a child's math book: you have one candy bar, I give you three more, but before you can eat them I take two of them away. When polled about your candy bar experience, you state that the economy for candy seems unstable and you're feeling pessimistic toward the overall state of that economy. It would seem weird to say "but why? you have more candy than you did before!". 

A more realistic, relatable situation: I was fully remote in 2021, and I only came in one day a week in 2022. After some high-profile layoffs and a cooling of the demand for remote workers, my company took advantage of the situation to increase the number of days we're all expected to work in the office. It's not five days, and it's true in 2019 I was happy with five days in the office, but I got a taste of zero to one day, so it shouldn't be surprising that my disposition has changed. Now apply that logic to wages or the various COVID programs. 

The other side of the argument is unemployment and layoffs being low, so theoretically there is still nothing to fear. But similarly, the slowdown in hiring and demand for workers has chilled the Great Resignation that gave workers empowerment over their compensation and flexibility. So maybe people shouldn't be afraid of being laid off, they might feel the slowdown in hiring as being a comparatively bad thing in the economy. 

I'm more interested in exploring these sentiments rather than just deeming them wrongheaded or misguided. When I talk to a candidate and they're concerned about leaving their current job because the economy doesn't seem as strong as it once was, showing them a graph just doesn't cut it. 

"They're All Good Stories"

 

In memory of my grandfather Donald Zimmerman

I can only imagine the waves of nervous wreckage that crashed through my dad as he watched my truck pull up to Black Lake. Your and Nonnie's cabin has been the center of something of an annual family gathering for decades and decades and here I was making a maiden surprise voyage. Uncle Doug, having just found out that I would coincidentally be staying at my girlfriend's cabin just 20 minutes away that same weekend, invited me out to surprise my dad and everyone there. To this day I wonder if he knew the weight of that invite, played mostly as a joke on my dad. A joke of philosophical merit, that's classic Doug. 

I had never been there. In fact, I had only met you and Nonnie once as an adult just a year or so prior. It hit me much later, only recently if I'm being honest, that all of the times I had seen my dad when he was in town, he was likely in town for this exact annual gathering. Oblivious as to what that meant at the time, I drove to the cabin at Black Lake not realizing I was going to meet more people I didn't know existed, some of which like my cousins, who did not know that I existed either. 

The cabin on Black Lake is your kingdom. You cleared 6'6 in your full height and you sat like a king of the giants in your massive chairs. Giant living room chair, giant dinner chair, giant camping chair, all poised in various positions around the cabin that allowed you best vantage point for observing all the fun around you. When I arrived at the cabin, I'll never forget the way you said "oh, Kyle's here" as though my arrival was casually due any minute for the last 25 years. 

The initial visit had me reeling. Meeting all of my dad's brothers and cousins and nieces and aunts and uncles, a welcoming and loving precession of faces who were also confused, surprised, or unreadable was more than I had expected (my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, said she could not tell I was meeting these people for the first time, so it's at least good to know I wasn't exuding any weirdness). It's clear my dad struggled with bringing me up there; he had no idea what my arrival would entail, what people would think of me, how to broach the subject of me to some, how I would understand it, what I would think of everyone - the list is endless. He had no idea what to do or how to start.

You knew exactly what to do. You had to catch me up. One thing I've come to know about you is that you're a - in the most literal sense of the word - gigantic vessel for stories. You collect them and share them and love them. You lived an insanely interesting life from which you can pull stories up like a deep well with a greased-up pully, but you also gather stories from everyone around you and in your commanding, retired police chief voice can get them to retell it while you watch intently for the impact. And I had consequently missed out on a lot of these. 

I was only there for about a weekend, but almost every minute I was there you parked me next to you and regaled me with story after story, sometimes telling me yourself and sometimes inviting someone over to tell one. You told me stories of your days as police chief of Bloomfield Hills, about your  Military Police deployment in the 50s, about your time as a beat officer. You told me stories about raising 4 boys, about my dad, about my mom, about your wife, my cousins. They ranged from the comical - visits my Uncle Doug had to make to the principal's office in school - to the meaningful, like my dad's speech at my Uncle Dan's wedding. And as they oscillated between the range your eyes were alight with tears of laughter or beaming with pride, the stories and their impact had a real power. You couldn't share them fast enough. 

While I wish I could say I remember every story to the T from that day, I of course don't (cut me some slack Chief, there were a lot of them). But what I do remember is how you would punctuate each story with the phrase "they're all good stories". Usually, you would say it jostling my knee or clapping one of your gigantic hands on my shoulder, your voice trailing laughter. "They're all good stories". You probably said it 45, 50 times that weekend. The phrase has stuck with me as a testament to who you are. 

Stories are often analogized as woven fabric; the idea comes from when human civilization used to weave enormous tapestries telling stories of war or family or daily life. The tapestries were woven using millions of threads and the weaving process means the stories can always be added to, changed or continually constructed to portray the passage of time. These are stand-ins for the notion that we are all contributing to a singular, larger story and that stories never die. 

It's in this context that I have come to understand what you meant by the words "they're all good stories". I am a thread in the tapestry of your life and subsequently your family. The phrase is not just a reflection of your own positive feelings toward the stories, but an assurance to me, as a newly woven piece, that my story is also "good". That whatever pain or confusion or mystery that might have been has passed and the story is now just one of unequivocal good because I am here, now, in your presence, being told exactly that. 

So as I say goodbye to you, and I watch the sadness your passing brings to everyone around you, as the weight of your greatness and presence lifts, I am reminded again that they're all good stories exactly because stories never end. And neither, truly, will you. 

Love you Grandpa. 

Climate Change is Not an Opportunity

 Climate change does not create refuge, it destroys the very concept. A response to Chad Livengood.

The halls of power in Michigan seem to be echoing with the concerns about the state's population loss. Personally, I feel it's a lot of hand-wringing over a little less than thirty thousand people, but if it becomes a trend it could definitely be a problem for the state in the long run. 

This sets off the domino of punditry trying to talk about what could reverse the potential issue. Economic opportunity, property tax reform, reducing access to abortion, increasing access to abortion, the list goes on and on. The discourse that gives me the most trouble has to be the strategy to market Michigan as a refuge as the climate crisis ravages particularly western states. 

There are many examples of people who make this case, but Chad Livengood, Politics Editor and Columnist with the Detroit News has recently made, I felt, the most cogent and assertive case for doing so in a June 5th column titled "Climate migration can be Michigan's growth strategy if state embraces it".

Livengood puts aside the accusations of cynicism to focus on the truth of the matter. He quotes Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as saying such a strategy is cynical. Though I'm inclined to agree with her since acknowledging climate devastation as a strategy for population poaching seems to be consigning oneself to the inevitabilities of the crisis rather than devoting oneself to fixing it, I also don't want to focus on the cynical nature of the claim. I actually have an issue with what Livengood refers to multiple times as "the truth".

To be clear, Livengood's assessment of the climate models in other states isn't at all inaccurate. He is right to say they will "face a reckoning on water" in the decade or so to come, he's right to say hurricanes will have larger impacts on coastal cities, forest fires will be more prevalent in high desert areas, states like Florida are literally being subsumed by the sea. He mentions State Farm's decision to stop offering homeowners insurance to homes in California due to climate-related damages expected to become impossible to cover profitably and Arizona's decision to halt new home builds because of a lack of foreseeable water sources to accommodate them. Things are bad and will certainly become worse, this is true!

Assume that it isn't cynical to answer these crises by hanging up a giant banner that says "MOVE TO MICHIGAN". Is it really true that Michigan will be a climate refuge? Livengood and others seem to think that our unique position to fresh water while being far from the coasts and having temperate weather makes it so.

It seems unfair though, to trace your finger down the climate model timelines for other states and not Michigan when you're making this assessment. Michigan does not have a freshwater accessibility problem and it sits safely away from the coasts, but that doesn't mean we won't face similar issues to other states in the years to come. While we don't have to worry about coastal hurricanes, Michigan is likely to see more frequent and more severe storms, in fact, we already are. These storms do damage to critical infrastructure, leaving people without power in increasingly common extreme weather events (heat waves, cold snaps etc). Destructive tornadoes are going to become a more common occurrence in the state. 

More frequent severe storms can also be a detriment to our water quality, as the EPA has noted; "Severe rainstorms can also cause sewers to overflow into lakes and rivers, which can threaten beach safety and drinking water supplies". The warming climate also raises concerns over toxic algae blooms in Lake Michigan and Lake Eerie. Changes in precipitation patterns, such as reduced snowfall and earlier spring snowmelt, can affect the recharge of groundwater and the availability of surface water. This can lead to decreased water availability in streams, rivers, and aquifers, affecting both human and ecological water needs.

In some very severe cases with increased temperature and higher evaporation rates, we could experience a smaller-scale battle for water between agricultural, commercial, and residential entities that western states are experiencing, though not as bad it's hardly going to be a welcome sight to the newcomers. 

While this all seems extreme, it's all as likely as the problems western states are looking to face.

The other point to consider is that climate change creates externalities; Michigan does not exist as a standalone nation. Look at the drastic effect on Michigan's air quality because of forest fires in Canada for an example of why no one is really safe from climate change. Further, if Livengood's take on states like, say, Arizona, is that they are going to be uninhabitable, there are obviously very severe ramifications to the nation as a whole. Arizona is one of the nation's agricultural powerhouses, if the state became uninhabitable, it's hard to imagine what life in any other state would look like as a result. 

At the end of the day, I believe climate change is a problem to solve not an opportunity to leverage. We should be challenging our leaders to take drastic, even controversial actions rather than craft controversial messages.

Build a Castle from the Wreckage of my Loss

 

On Wednesday, March 15th, 2023 at about 8:00 am I found out that my father David passed away. It was a tragic and sudden shock. 

Dave lived in Washington state, he was an avid outdoorsman, mountain biker, kayaker, and a gifted carpenter. He competed in a number of bike races, loved to fish and pheasant hunt, and did woodworking so fine he was hired to work in the homes of billionaires. He was never so alive as he was on a river; surfing rapids on a stand-up paddle board or bombing white water in a kayak. He competed in slalom and even got so far as Olympic qualifying races. As a man, he was just impossibly cool. 

My dad and I had only a brief relationship as far as father/son relationships go. He entered back into my life when I was 13 years old. He lived in Northbend Washington, so visits here were few and far between. The first time I met him, I was enamored. He was funny and confident, things I was able to pick up on immediately, but I think I was also caught up in what I now understand to be his immense vulnerability and bravery. 

On that very first visit, prior to which I had only ever spoken to him a couple of times on the phone and written a few letters, he took me aside and apologized to me. In incredibly simple terms he apologized for not being there and told me that from here out he wanted to make sure he was "there" in some sense moving forward. I was 13, my conception of forgiveness was very limited, plus it isn't as though I suffered much in his absence. I had a good life and a fine and caring stepfather; I couldn't grasp exactly what if any pain he believed he caused. 

Looking back, I can only imagine how difficult it was to meet me, to say those things to me, and to make an effort to stay involved in my life in the way that he did. It would have been far easier to let me live my life, but that wasn't who he was. As I came to know my dad more, taking the easier road and thinking of himself first was - as far as I can tell - only something he did once, with me, and it haunted and pained him. It's clear this is why he worked stridently to make amends. 

Over the next several years we met a couple of times a year. We'd grab breakfast or lunch and we'd talk almost entirely about me. Our relationship grew even faster when he introduced me to his wife Kate. I'll never forget the breakfast she nudged my dad into taking me - that very morning - to meet my grandparents and his brother Doug who was in town as well. This was the first time I met any of them as a conscious person. This was probably also terrifying to my dad, but he did it and now I have a great relationship with an entire loving family who has embraced me and loved me since that day. 

Shortly after, I met all of his brothers and my immediate cousins, I vacationed to up north Michigan for years with the family and got to invite my grandparents to my wedding. I've written before about going out to visit my dad for the first time, how it inspired in me a love of the outdoors and gave me such a strong sense of purpose and self-identity. It was profoundly impactful on me. My dad transformed into someone I really admired and strove to be more like in all facets of my life. I've gotten to experience the outdoors more with him and joined in his traditions like the yearly Orcas Island mountain-biking trip he has been doing for more than 30 years. I brought my wife out to visit where we biked and backpacked to camp on the Washington Coast. After my daughter was born he visited more frequently and last summer she had so much fun with him as an 18 mo old that she still talks excitedly about the vacation over six mos later. 

This is all to say that we were just getting started when my uncle called me Wednesday morning to tell me he passed silently in the night. 

The very nature of tragedy is the acknowledgment of lost potential. I was so excited for my daughter to experience more of him, for me to experience more of him, and to continue to learn and connect to him in all the ways that had previously made my life feel whole. My heart aches as much for the people in his life like his brothers and his parents and especially his wife and stalwart partner Kate. The lost potential feels immeasurable, as does the tragedy.

On Saturday the 25th I traveled out to Washington where my dad's good friend was throwing a celebration of life event. The property where the event was held was the same place my dad stayed when he first went out to Washington, right on the river, it was also where I stayed. What immediately struck me was how large and immediate the embrace of my dad's community came together. His family and friends were all out in force; sharing stories and extolling the virtues of "Dave Z".

My dad had all four of his bosses he had ever worked for as a carpenter present, they each pulled me aside, tears in their eyes, to tell me what a great person my dad was. It made me immensely proud. He had kayaking friends who went on a memorial paddle just before the event and gave him a kayaker's send-off by running his empty kayak down the river, it was beautiful. His mountain bike friends came out and cooked up some incredible food for the event. My dad was obviously such a lynchpin in so many communities. 

During the ceremony there were a number of speeches, myself included, discussing how great of a person my dad was. Not just that he was cool or a hard worker, but that he was always centering others. His reliability and willingness to help anyone were brought up over and over again. He was always the first to jump in and help, the last person to eat, always volunteering, always stepping in or up even when things were difficult or he wasn't at his best. In my speech, I wanted to exemplify this and make sure in the wake of losing my dad I too do the difficult thing. Rather than focusing on all the loss, which would be the easier thing to do, I want to look to everything that I have gained from my relationship with my dad.

It seems today that our sense of community has become more threadbare. So much of our time is spent in digital spaces or at work engaged in wrought, tensional professional interactions. There have been lots of discussions regarding the impact of losing a sense of community on mental health, some people even tie our satisfaction with life directly to the quality of the relationships in it. One thing I have gained from my dad is not just an understanding of the virtue of community but his community itself. A voluminously deep, loving family, friends and traditions, and a connection to so many amazing places.

My dad did not exist in group chats or on social media. He rarely ever canceled on plans once they were made. He spent his free time engaged with others; from making cookies for his neighbors to helping someone with a home project. He did this regardless of the difficult day at work he had or what else he had going on, how he felt was not at the center of his decision-making. I can't think of any way to honor his memory more than to try and do the same whenever I can. 

While I wish my Dad and my children could have more time together, which is truly the most devastating aspect of all of this, I keep telling myself that everything that my dad is culminates in me. The last time I was out with him on the Orcas ride in Feb 2022, on our way back to the airport, he told me he was proud of the man I have become. I know that if I can continue to live in such a way that makes him proud and honors his memory my children will get to experience him even if it wasn't exactly the way I had hoped. 

I will strive to live up to that pride every day. Love you, Dad. You'll always be "there" for me..

Could We Actually "END" Gun Violence in Michigan?

 

I often wonder how far we would have to go to end mass shootings in this country. I've talked about this before, but in the wake of the deadly shooting on Michigan State University's campus - the second high-profile mass shooting in my state to happen in just over a year - I've been thinking about it again. 

Mass shootings are truly something to fear. While they're not necessarily common, they are sporadic, come when you least expect it, and are common enough to imagine your life being ruined or ended by one. The victims are always innocent, undeserving, and unexpectant. Any elected leader is right to try and address this problem. 

When it's your local politicians proposing the gun reform legislation, calling themselves brave, and attracting the ire of pro-gun lobbyists and activists it feels different, more real. With the extra dose of realness comes the stark feeling of helplessness. 

What is a state government, even one with singular party control of every branch, going to do to curb gun violence? It's a very different question from what a state government should do and what would actually work. 

The Michigan Democrats in power are attempting to fast-track* about a dozen gun reform laws to curb the problem. While I certainly wouldn't oppose any of the measures, I think they're woefully inadequate. The MEA has historically done a great job documenting gun control legislation in the state government, here they've outlined the senate package:

• SB 76 Would require license or background check for purchase of firearms.
• SB 77 Updates references to a pistol in the State’s penal code. TIE BAR WITH SB 76.
• SB 78 Updates references in sentencing guidelines.
• SB 79 Provides for penalties for storing or leaving a firearm where it may be accessed by a minor.
• SB 80 Updates sentencing guidelines for weapons.
• SB 81 Would exempt sales tax for firearm safety devices, safes, lockboxes, and trigger locks.
• SB 82 Would exempt use tax for firearm safety devices, safes, lockboxes, and trigger locks.
• SB 83 Would enact an extreme risk protection order, also known as a “red flag” law.
• SB 84 Would prohibit purchase of firearms by an individual who has an extreme risk protection order. TIE BAR WITH SB 83.
• SB 85 Enacts sentencing guidelines for making a false statements in relation to an extreme risk protection order.
• SB 86 Would allow court fees for the service of processing extreme protection order actions.

The (literal) fatal flaw in all of these packages is that they are an attempt to curb gun violence rather than guns themselves. They each rely on incentivization and prevention logic that is fundamentally not how the law is capable of operating. 

SB 76 through SB 80 are an increase in penalties and criminal charges for illegally owning, storing, or selling various weapons. As is the case with making anything illegal, in order for the law to prevent things from happening it requires people to be caught. Further, someone who is going to use a gun to commit an act of mass murder is likely not going to be concerned that they're breaking some sub-category of the State's penal code by owning the firearm in the first place. 

SB 81 and SB 82 are an attempt to make firearm safety devices and storage boxes cheaper. The idea must be to incentivize people to better store their weapons by relying on the good old free market. This should hardly count as doing anything, maybe it's a bone thrown to the gun hounds. But it's striking to me that in what is considered a landmark gun reform package there is still this latent understanding that we are going to live in a country just teeming with guns and gun owners.

SB 83 and everything after implements and enhances what are referred to as "Red Flag" laws. These laws have shown some progress in preventing gun violence (although the jury is still out if we can even say they "work"). Essentially it allows a  state court to remove guns from the home of someone they deem a potential danger. It's easy to imagine this being used to prevent some mass shootings, even the two shootings in Michigan assuming the courts were tipped off correctly and took action. There are still many gun owners - both legal and not - who could commit terrible acts of violence without a single warning. Prevention hardly seems like the appropriate rhetoric to use here.  

None of this is to dunk on state Democrats. Michigan is a a state with a decently large number of gun owners and gun-owner sympathizers (like every Republican), so this could very well be the best a state government could do. 

But I have to wonder what my ideal package would look like. Particularly at the state level, if I was made God Emperor of the US I would nationalize and abolish gun and ammunition manufacturers on day one. If most gun advocates see the above package of bills as too aggressive, my proposals would look like an authoritarian nightmare. And maybe it would be authoritarian, but I happen to believe living under and raising a family under constant threat of murder is pretty oppressive. 

So here are 10 proposals I would implement to curb guns, and subsequently gun violence, in the state of Michigan:

1. Immediately end the sale of all weapons and ammunition in retail stores across the state and provide a scheduled end and buyout of all small weapons and ammunition dealers in the state. Making it effectively illegal to sell guns and ammunition in a retail setting. 
2. Ban all trade shows and events in which there is a sale of guns
3. Ban carrying guns over the state border for commercial sale or trade.
4. Do a scheduled and aggressive "no questions asked" gun buyback program offering well above market value 
5. Do a scheduled and aggressive ammunition buyback program offering well above market value 
6. Implement a more aggressive red flag law that permanently confiscates firearms after the court order is rendered 
7. Sentencing for firearms to extend to permanent confiscation of all firearms for improper firearm use, registration, ownership, or storage 
8. Expanded sentencing for individuals illegally selling firearms 
9. Immediately end the manufacture of ammunition and firearms in the state of Michigan
10. Ban open and concealed carry of a firearm by any civilian, resident, or visitor to the state of Michigan

As aggressive as these policies are, they still wouldn't "end" gun violence. It would take massive federal action to curb the gun ownership, production, and use this country sees on a daily basis. It's also important to note the ravaging level of opposition, possibly violent opposition, policies like this would see at an alarming scale. Yet it's still worth thinking about what it would take to effectively end gun violence rather than attempting to curb it. 

*As of this writing, the Michigan legislature has passed these bills. We can only hope the statistics fall in our favor. 

It's a Big Club

 I have a two-year-old so watching the 2023 SuperBowl wasn't necessarily in the cards for me. When I popped online the following day to see who won so I could make the obligatory small talk at work, I instead got caught up n the drama regarding Elon Musk sitting next to Rupert Murdoch to watch the game. 

Much has been made of the two men sitting in the stands. Musk the eccentric automobile entrepreneur who recently bought Twitter citing concerns over a biased media that runs rampant on the site and Rupurt Murdoch who has singlehandedly turned the brains of countless Americans to right-wing infused mush with his Fox News Network franchise. 

The image strikes at the heart of Musk's many contradictions; how can you feel concerned about media bias when you're enjoying the company of a guy who created the most profitable bias machine in the world? There is also something visually repellent about seeing two billionaire hucksters existing so casually together. These people, Murdoch especially, should be relegated to the shadows to do their dealings not brazenly at one of the nation's most viewed sporting events. 

The reactions probably seem too visceral, it reminds me of the reaction many had to seeing Michelle Obama warmly hugging George W Bush. I was always confused about what the expectation was exactly, is she supposed to stab him and stand atop his corpse shrieking "Death to American Empire"? Would snubbing him as a war criminal, however pleasing that would be to see, have made anyone feel any semblance of justice?

George Carlin once quipped "it's a big club and you ain't in it", referring to a section of society that exists on a sphere above us all. Like anyone whose interests and lives contain similarities, these people gravitate toward each other and form social cells. This hardly seems extraordinary. 

Yet Carlin is right that seeing these social cells in public is alienating and serves as a reminder that there is a group of people whose consumption and influence impact your life. A reminder that the conceptual democracy we live in seems a hollow promise when a seemingly literal cabal exists to pull the levers of American power. 

The anger is justifiable, if it seems misplaced at simply the notion of people with a lot in common just hanging out together it's important to consider what that "in common" entails. Billions of dollars, unbridled influence over the government, and a level of consumption that jeopardizes the planet to name a few things. 

It's bad enough we have to live under their thumb, let us look upon their club with anger.

US Healthcare Finance System Explainer

 It bears repeating; all healthcare should be free at the point of service. In many, many countries this is the case. It is unfortunately not the case here in the United States. The way we pay for health insurance here is through a user fee at the point of service, not unlike how you pay for other services like a haircut or a prepared meal at a restaurant. But healthcare is also very different than those things; it is expensive to administer for a variety of factors; like the technical expertise of those administering the care or the liabilities incurred from it. It is also more difficult to calculate the cost; things can come up mid-diagnosis that require special procedures or medications, providers don't have consistent rates for cost or quality, and often times doctors aren't sure of the costs of medications or technologies they use, and many times it wouldn't matter as there isn't much of a choice in whether or not to use them.

These are only a few of the reasons we have to have health insurance to pay for the healthcare user fees in this country, but rather than providing an efficient solution to these problems it ushers in all new complications. The insurance itself is often wildly expensive, we almost always need either our employers or the government to subsidize the majority of the costs. This creates problems such as gaps in coverage should you lose your job or eligibility, many people don't have insurance at all because they don't qualify for either employer-sponsored insurance or government programs. There is also the problem of underinsurance; the insurance that you have is inadequate in what it is able to subsidize as far as the care you receive which can cause exorbitant medical debt or denial of needed care. 

The result of these complications is a health financing system that oftentimes devastates people regardless of the quality of care they receive. The US is unique in that 40% of new cancer patients lose their entire life savings, over half the population reports difficulty affording care, a third are skipping out on care or rationing medicine citing cost as a primary concern, US Medical debt has topped $195 billion with a disproportionate amount being held by black americans, which alone costs financial stability, long-term health, and lives. But the lack of insurance also makes healthcare more expensive as people don't pay for the care they receive in, say, the emergency room, the providers then need to wrap that cost up in care for individuals with insurance. The whole problem compounds itself over and over again.

All of this is just a scratch at the surface of the problems with the US health financing system. The people most serious about fixing this problem understand that you have to remove the fee-for-service model that requires insurance altogether. Both Medicaid and Medicare accomplish this already in the US for people who are elderly or below a certain income threshold respectively. In these programs, the government fields the bill - or most of the bill  - for the care you receive so you either receive no fee or a very little fee. This is different than the fee-for-service model; imagine you could walk into a barber or a restaurant and receive whatever you needed and it was paid for by a tab that is wholly funded by the government. This is similar to how other countries set up their health finance system. Some, like Canada or Taiwan, finance care for their entire population this way. Others, like Germany or Sweden, have a combination of a government program and a heavily regulated employer program.

There is a lot of debate about which model would work best for the US. Medicare for All is a policy that would have a single-payer, the US Government funded by taxpayers, which essentially improves Medicare and extends it to every citizen regardless of age, income, etc. Medicare for America or the ACA 2.0 would be the combination model in which Medicare is shored up to prevent uninsurance and the rest of the US is covered by a more heavily regulated version of their employer-sponsored insurance which would prevent underinsurance. Both models would represent a dramatic improvement on the current healthcare financing model.

Those in favor of Medicare for All - the single-payer program - say it most efficiently removes the problems of our health financing system by decoupling health insurance from employment, ending the risk of insurance churn (where you lose your job and subsequently your coverage), allows the single-payer system to more powerfully negotiate care costs as a monopoly, and can deliver better cost efficiencies as everyone is in one risk pool. Those who favor Medicare for America (ACA 2.0) often cede these points, but their concern is that such a plan couldn't pass given heavy polling that suggests Americans covered by their employer-provided insurance prefer to keep that plan and would oppose anything that would eliminate it. Also that the insurance companies propped up by employer-provided insurance plans would more heavily oppose a single-payer plan that would unilaterally end their existence. Which says nothing of the workers who are employed at those companies.

Of course, the reason that we aren't even on the road to attaining either model in the US is that the private health insurance industry is very powerful. There is also a non-insignificant number of people who believe that the government should have no part in the administering of healthcare financing and, although they are very wrong, they represent a substantial enough voting block in this country. 

The Taller They Are

 Review of The Overstory by Richard Powers

I mean holy shit.

In Richard Powers' twelfth novel The Overstory, one of the characters has just written a book around the concept that trees are actually social beings when her literary agent calls her to tell her "you wouldn't believe what you have me seeing on the way into the office". The Overstory itself has this power; after reading it I can't even look at my backyard the same way. 

Told through the perspective of 9 individuals whose lives constantly cross paths - less in cheesy one domino toppling the other way like the movie Crash or something, but more like an everyone and everything is interconnected type of way - The Overstory tells a story about trees. Powers' prose style, which before now I had been unfamiliar with, seems to be just laying out stunning sentence after stunning sentence. One can forgive the sort of rigidness of his familiarly archetypal characters if only because he can describe a tree with so much poetic, philosophical, and beautifully scientific language it becomes a genuinely emotional thing to behold.

I'm not exaggerating, I have yet to find a writer in my short life as an avid reader who has inspired in me such an appreciation for things I have lived in proximity with my entire life. Moby Dick has always been a favorite book of mine because Melville could take a mundane object like a cup of clam chowder and blow it up to a massive philosophical stand-in for concepts you would think would be far-fetched, and he does it with poetic prowess alone. The Overstory does the same, but more singularly; it's just trees baby. And maybe this is because I don't live in Herman Melville's world, but The Overstory is more intimate. Powers lives in our world too, when he prompts you to look around, it feels more real, less like just a fun literary exercise.

Which of course makes the actual story of The Overstory all the more crushing. If the novel is about anything other than trees it is about the complete and utter failure of society to protect and cherish them. Unlike other fictional books about climate change (cough cough Ministry for the Future), The Overstory has stories of mass movements. We watch fictionalized accounts of real efforts (like the Lumber Wars in the 90s) across many decades to protect forests and the environment at large. Massive peaceful demonstrations, civil disobedience, and violence toward property all fail. There are more cultural, "thinkfluencing" attempts like writing books, making video games, and scientists committing suicide in the name of awareness. There are even the small personal struggles of someone who simply does not want to mow their lawn in a suburb to give their plot of land back to the earth. They all fail.

And none of this is a spoiler. It can't be a spoiler because we know what happens already, we know what happens because we're living through this exact narrative right now. While the depiction of the Lumber Wars of the 90s was fictionalized, we saw its failures in real life. There are real people sitting in federal prison for property crimes in the defense of trees, charged as domestic terrorists. Climate scientists are literally committing suicide right now in brutal ways. Nothing has changed; the consumption is insatiable. 

So while Powers builds in you an intense appreciation for forests, endears you to what we can only now see as an essential partner for sustaining life on earth, and asks you to look around, you're also forced to see the fire. This could make The Overstory an incredibly important text, one that asks people to slow down and appreciate and take action to protect what is around them. But as we see in the novel itself, even when you're inspired to action the forces against you are awful and immovable. Maybe we are just looking at another literary exercise, except this one is not fun. 

It is, however, incredibly good.