Ideapad

On economics

December 8, 2025 /

I took a microeconomics class my first semester of college as an undergraduate. It was part of the core curriculum requirements. I found it incredibly boring. My distaste for it was part of the motivation for me to declare a major in English instead of something pre-business.

More than a decade later, I took a macroeconomics class, midway through my graduate coursework in business school. I found it fascinating and took to it easily. I enjoyed it so much that I went to my professor and asked him if it was too late to switch careers.

My professor leveled with me, and said that most professional economists pursue master’s and doctorate degrees straight out of undergrad, and my desire to pivot after nearly a decade in digital media was probably not the best course of action. So I stuck with the internet, but I never lost my taste for macroeconomics. I’ve kept up with the sector over the years, and I still think about whether I’d be good as an economist, or in a similar field, where I am trying to understand broader trends and figure out the near future (not unlike my many years in UX).

So when I discovered the Narcissist Forecasting Contest a few years ago, I was an instant yes. Adam Braff, who owns a data consultancy, runs a fun annual game that poses 25 probabilistic questions about the year ahead, predicted by 150 or so professional and armchair analysts. It’s equal parts macroeconomics, social science, political science and gut feelings.

This is the tenth year of the contest and the fourth year I’ve played. My first year, I was in over my head, but my second year I improbably finished in eleventh place. That was enough to make me a participant for life, and also a little confused—who was I to be any good at this?

I fell back to the middle of the pack in 2024, but in 2025 I combined research, contemplation, existing knowledge, and (mostly) my gut. Unexpectedly, I began seeing my name in the top ten of the standings every time Braff wrote about the contest. I had a near spit-take when my name showed up in his August update because I was in the lead—and then I held on to win the forecast as of late last night.

I have had fun morning reflecting on winning. I am irrationally proud of my victory. I’m also wondering again if I can do anything with the latent observational and predictive skills the forecast has awakened. Should I try my hand on Polymarket? Check in with my macro professor?

I actually took the time to talk to Braff about forecasting as a career angle; he works in big data, so it’s a parallel pursuit for him, too. I’ll probably stay the course with my professional life for now. But it’s fun to consider that my hunch in 2004 was a pretty good one.

The end of POP3 in Gmail

November 30, 2025 /

I have owned netwert.com since 1997. That’s a long time! I have a few dozen email aliases that route through this domain, for everything from work to shopping to family management.

I have had Gmail since shortly after it went public in 2004. That’s also a long time! Gmail is my default mail interface. I am completely acclimated to its approach and appreciate the robustness of its search features.

For as long as I can remember, I have had Gmail configured to check netwert.com emails as well as my gmail inbox, using an old internet protocol called POP3. This has made life very easy. Gmail even lets me toggle between addresses when composing, so I can email you from either my Gmail or my netwert email. I have my User Savvy email running through there, too. So easy! So useful! My consolidated inbox is 15GB of pure digital simplification.

At least, it was. Google quietly announced in October that they are shutting down POP3 access to external accounts, effective January 1. They emailed some users about it, although they didn’t email me. I read in a secondary source that this is being done for email security purposes, although I didn’t hear that from Google. Notably, they didn’t provide any alternatives, just a Google Reader-style ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and what is now a one-month deadline to do something about it. (They do still support IMAP, but I have concerns about consistent performance.)

This is, for me, very bad. Email is email, of course, and I can find a new tool for consolidating my inboxes. But I liked and stuck with Gmail for its relative permanency and best-in-breed user experience. Now I’m going to have to find a new solution—and I will probably wind up with two, because accessing Gmail from a non-Google solution is going to be undeniably worse than Gmail itself.

I’ve done a good job for many years with my digital continuity. I suppose I should be neither surprised nor disappointed that Google made a decision that’s not in the best interests of a geeky edge case. But I am, and I am.

Suggestions on better email solutions welcome. Maybe hit me up at my netwert email and not Gmail this time around.

Some of my best-evers

October 31, 2025 /

I recently pulled out my old Helly Hansen all-weather coat. My wife bought it for me on a trip to Norway back in 2007. It developed a small tear in the nylon on the chest, so I moved onto other jackets, including two more Helly Hansens. But I never let go of the first one, for a reason: it’s easily the best jacket I’ve ever owned.

I can list some of the reasons why. It’s warm but not too warm. It’s comfortable, with a soft interior and good movement. It has great practical features, including zipper pockets, a spacious exterior breast pocket, and a good hood. And it’s seriously weatherproof: I’ve coached soccer games in 43-degree pelting rain and strong winds and kept reasonably warm and dry. I wore it for yesterday’s storm, nylon tear and all, and will pull it out the next time the weather requires it.

But that’s not exactly the point. What I find interesting is that it’s lodged in my memory (past and present) as the categorical best, something I knew in the moment was as good for me as that thing would ever be.

Since grabbing the Helly Hansen yesterday, I’ve been thinking about other categorical bests from my past. Sometimes this is impossible; I couldn’t pick a vacation, I’d have three, or seven. But when you know, you know. I’m sure there are many (and I will update this post if I think of more) but here are a few:

Sneakers: Bo Jackson Nike Air SC3s, circa 1991. Man, I was still a teenager, but I was unequivocal back then: these were the best sneakers ever. I still remember them well: great looks, great support, comfortable, long-lasting. I still wear Nikes and some of them are great. But none of them were these.
Lobster: Roy Moore Lobster Company, Bearskin Neck, Rockport, Mass. I didn’t like lobster until I was an adult, and Roy Moore is what got me going. Nothing beats their straight-from-the-lobster-boat, boiled-in-seawater freshness and sweetness. It can be emulated—Jordan Lobster Farms on Long Island cooks the same way, and I once watched my buddy Rob walk down to the beach with a lobster pot, with equal results—but Roy Moore, sitting alongside some of the country’s most venerable lobstermen, stands above.
Stargazing: I’ve had a lot of special moments, from the 2024 total eclipse to the three (!) comets I’ve seen with my family the past few years. But the 2002 Leonid meteor storm tops the list. I woke up my wife and parents well past midnight and we all laid on a soccer field at the local elementary school on a frigid night, huddled under wool blankets and watching. What we got were hundreds of meteors, a barrage of flares and dreams and inspiration.
Computing: as I wrote here previously, while I’ve used many computers for countless hours dating back to 1981, the only one I’ve really loved wasn’t even mine. It was the well-loved Mac SE/30 in the editor’s office at the college newspaper. Friendly, fast and with clarity of purpose, I was never happier at a monitor. Repeating myself: “I had on it Eudora, Microsoft Word 5.1a, and a Klondike solitaire app, and it was just about perfect.”

What have you experienced as the absolute best?

Typepad

September 3, 2025 /

The news that Typepad is shutting down raised some eyebrows in my corner of the internet. Typepad was a bit of a niche service, but it was an interesting attempt at both democratizing and monetizing blogging. While it’s sad that it’s going away—I am anti-linkrot, and “your account will be permanently deactivated” is quite hostile to web permanency—it’s also interesting to me that it hung on this long.

With a little digging I found my own Typepad blog (I knew I had to have tried it out) at ideapad.typepad.com. I made two posts in the mid-2000s, eighteen months apart, both quick hits and promptly forgotten. Not really worth shoving that into the Wayback Machine, but here’s a screenshot for posterity.

Back to school

September 2, 2025 /

The end of summer brings reflection, so here are a few of my thoughts as we head back into the workaday.

➸ Sunday marked 100 days since I hit my target weight, and I checked in two pounds lower than I was in May. The embarrassing pile of sweets my family brought home from Martha’s Vineyard is making this week a bit of a challenge, but I have proved to myself that I can not only lose weight, I can maintain it.

➸ The beach club wrapped its season on Monday, and I am happy to report that everyone had a delightful summer, and we plan on doing it again next year. Who knew I’d want to spend time on Long Island?

➸ This week marks the start of senior year for our oldest son, which is thrilling, terrifying and saddening all at once, as he and we prepare for the next stage of life. Our younger son ascends to high school, too, so it’s a big academic year all around.

➸ We had so much else go on in a rather eventful summer—Eli and I went on an amazing baseball road trip; Nate got his first paying job; Amy went to Budapest; the dog learned how to open our kitchen cabinets and steal our cereal—and, well, most of it has been wonderful. On June 1 we had many open questions about the season, and we really made the most of it. More like this, please.

The impossibility of comprehending AI

August 4, 2025 /

There’s an interesting conversation occurring around conversational AI, and the thought that humans, as a species, aren’t properly equipped to handle their existence. Consider these perspectives when next reading about blind trust in Gemini search results, or people using ChatGPT as a therapist.

Rusty Foster:

Humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it. In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for “intelligence.” … Very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought.

Philip Bump:

Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. …
Remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.

Look at it what it takes for Michael Lopp, one of the best communicators and smartest thinkers on tech topics, to explain how he works with AI. I grabbed a representative sentence, but at least skim the whole thing:

The number of “decisions” the robot made to design the page wildly exceeded the number of requirements I specified. … Like everything a robot generates, the burden is on you, the human, to confirm that what it generates is sound.

So: we have these tools, and we can embrace their potential and harness their output, but entire mental disciplines must be created to engage with them at an appropriate level, while the tools are simultaneously evolving more rapidly than perhaps any invention in history.

I personally don’t know where this is taking us as a society, but I’m thinking about it a lot.

Hearing songs again for the first time

July 6, 2025 /

“If you could go back and listen to one song for the first time again, which song would it be?”

I came across this prompt in another blog post, and it got me thinking about what song I’d like to experience that with.

The answer for me came instantly, actually: “Moby Octopad,” by Yo La Tengo, on I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. No-brainer. It floored me the first time around and it still gives me chills.

But I spent a little more time with this question and came up with five more.

“Detroit Rock City,” original album version, Kiss. I was four or five years old when I first started listening to Kiss, and I have heard the mise-en-scene that opens the album countless times. How amazing it would be to hear it anew.

“Brown Paper Bag,” Roni Size and Reprazent. First heard on a hotel room alarm clock analog radio. Discovery is fun.

Endtroducing, DJ Shadow. Self-explanatory. Yes, that’s an album, not a song, because I can’t decide whether to list “Best Foot Forward” or “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt.” But it barely matters.

“Black Dog,” Led Zeppelin. Covered here previously. Blew my mind.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana. Covered here previously. For the opposite reason.

Interview

June 27, 2025 /

I was delighted to be contacted by Manuel Moreale for his long-running People and Blogs interview series, which went live today. If you didn’t come here from there, here’s our conversation. The archives are full of interesting people and worth poking through. Thanks, Manuel!

Willpower vs. attention

June 23, 2025 /

Noah Smith wrote about his weight loss journey, and came to an interesting conclusion: that for him, the issue was noticing whether or not he was full:

I started paying attention to how much I ate. If it was “time to eat”, but I wasn’t hungry, I wouldn’t eat anything. And when I did eat, as soon as I felt like I wasn’t hungry anymore, I would stop eating. …
I realized, as I was doing it, that the difference between losing weight and not losing weight was just attention.
When I didn’t pay attention, I didn’t lose weight, because I kept eating after the point where I was no longer hungry. When I paid attention, I was able to control when I stopped eating.

He goes on to say that willpower is a conceit (my word, not his), and that the typical approach—”you have to be tough enough to fight through constant hunger, and motivated enough to want weight loss even more than food”—is wrong.

I fundamentally agree with the first part of Smith’s argument: attention is important. My weight loss this year has been predicated entirely on knowing how much I’m eating (along multiple vectors) and stopping myself from eating too much. My daily food spreadsheet was a key part of my success.

But I disagree with the hand-waving about willpower. People who are overweight have been told for their entire lives to stop eating when they’re full, slow down between courses, wait twenty minutes before taking seconds, and so forth. Knowing that generally doesn’t do much, because a person needs the willpower to acknowledge and recognize those guardrails.

When it comes to weight loss, as with any aspect of personal well-being, motivation is attention’s partner. Last winter, I was scared and desperate; that gave me the motivation to create the spreadsheet, and the willpower to pay attention to everything I ate every day for five months to reach David-minus-forty. I don’t know that I succeed with just one of those factors. And I’d guess that’s true for most people trying to lose weight.

I’m happy for Noah Smith and his successful and relatively low-key strategy. Whatever works for you! Achieving a healthy weight goal is a win, regardless of the path one takes to get there.

The beach cabana

June 21, 2025 /

I haven’t really been a paying member of anything since my college fraternity. (The gym does not count.) My wife and I find it mildly amusing that we live in Manhattan with children who play golf and tennis; if we were in the suburbs, it’s likely that we’d have joined a country club a long time ago. But that did not come to pass, and nothing clubby really came up.

Nothing, that is, until earlier this month, when friends of ours suggested we join their beach club for the season. With said children now in their teens and home for the summer, we furrowed our brows at the open dates in their schedules. Why not? Amy and I took a ride out on a rainy Sunday, picked a cabana, and joined the club.

Beach clubs still exist, plentifully, on the Long Beach barrier island, just east of the Rockaways on the south shore of Long Island. (I counted 21 of them on a quick flip through Google Maps.) We have visited a few of them over the years. They’re not quite The Flamingo Kid, but the spirit and general intention is still there.

Each one sticks to the formula: an expanse of beach with chairs and umbrellas; a restaurant; some games; a pool; scheduled events; no shortage of clichés (in our club’s case, there are cabana boys, a sports-desk attendee who doesn’t know what a ping pong ball is, and two charismatic blonde women who run the show). And, of course, cabanas.

The cabanas are the big selling point. Spacious and reasonably equipped with shelving, changing rooms, a shower and electrical power, they become home base for the summer. Ours is in a courtyard, like most cabanas at this club, but there are beachfront cabanas and smaller pool lockers, too. Regulars kit out their cabanas with signage and decor, like the one down the row from ours with string lights and a patio lounge chair, and the one around the corner from there with “Copa” permanently affixed above the door (Get it?).

We went for the first time Thursday—late for beach cabana season; it opens on Memorial Day—and again Saturday. The trip to the island takes us on the Van Wyck and its unique misery, but once there, having a cabana at a club is a delight. Our stuff is waiting for us! A cabana boy dropped off some ice! The restaurant is good! We spent time with friends both days and our new neighbors are friendly and welcoming. And, of course, there’s the beach, fully 300 feet deep even in this erosional era, with soft sand and the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond. Dolphins even surfaced in front of us at one point.

I took some time Saturday to run to Target and stock up the cabana. “You should sit and enjoy yourself,” Amy said to me. “But if I’m getting the cabana kitted out, I am enjoying myself,” I replied. So we now have sealed storage for our snacks and a new outdoor speaker, with a folding table and chairs on the way. The club is open seven days a week, and an oceanside twist on remote work is not far behind.

We’re still getting our seashore legs, but so far, this seems like a great way to while away the summer.