Werd I/O

It turns out that Cheltenham Township, the municipality where I live across the northern Philadelphia border, incurs an extra earned income tax on top of the state and federal taxes that I’m used to paying. This would have been fine if I’d had any idea that such a tax existed, or if it had been automatically deducted from my payroll (everyone I got a paycheck from in 2022 used Justworks), or if Turbotax had let me know that this was something I needed to do. As it turned out, I didn’t have any idea until I got a letter in the mail this morning, it wasn’t deducted from my payroll, and Turbotax gave me the impression that I was done with my taxes, so I was inadvertently delinquent on my taxes until I paid them and the associated late fees tonight.

This isn’t, by the way, a post about being mad about paying tax! I like taxes. I want to pay for great community infrastructure like public schools, community fire departments, integrated public transit, and so on. I want those things to work when I pay for them, but I’m delighted to do so. (Please also let me pay for single-payer healthcare. I’m begging you.)

Also worth saying: I work in a well-paying industry and should pay tax at a higher rate than people who earn less than me. I welcome this with open arms. Tax me well! And then use that money to pay for vital infrastructure for my whole community.

Here’s what I don’t want: to not pay my taxes because I didn’t know they existed and didn’t know to look for extra earned income taxes. That doesn’t feel good.

What also doesn’t feel good: tax collection in Cheltenham has, for some reason, been outsourced to a private company called Berkheimer Tax Innovations, which has a website that looks like it was built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998, which you appear to be forced to use to file those taxes if you want to do it online. They also have an app — Berkapp — which lets you e-file by writing out your tax return by hand and then taking a picture of it.

It’s baffling to me that a local government should outsource its tax collection to a private company in this way — particularly one that provides such a bad service at the taxpayer side. Presumably they have a hefty contract with the township, or perhaps even a cut of transmitted funds, which could have been better used on a more open system. Again, I’m not objecting to the taxes themselves, but I’m extremely grumpy about how I was notified, how I had to file them, and the arrangement underlying how they are collected and paid. (I’ve come to understand that the county chooses this arrangement, even though the county itself does not levy these taxes. What?!)

What I’d love to see: a well-designed local government portal that lets me log in, see all my local services and responsibilities, and notifies me of everything I need to know about living here as it comes up. I’d love the software and infrastructure to be owned and developed by the township, or more likely as an open source endeavor by an alliance of townships, rather than outsourced. Give me some Code for America-influenced 21st century public service web software. Let me pay any fees — earned income taxes, trash pickup, whatever — straight from the portal. Let me volunteer from there, too. A real community hub.

Done well, this could be less expensive than private contracts to weird third-party companies with terrible websites. It could be more open and participative, and actually involve civic participation in its code from people who live here. It could drive awareness and ownership and help build local skills.

Instead, we got … whatever the hell this is. It’s incredibly broken. And surely someone at the township has got to know how terrible it is.

Today was my best writing day in a while. I’m in awe of writers like Lancali who blithely post about hitting nearly 6000 words in a day. That is not me. That is very far from being me.

If I can hit a four figure word count, I consider it a pretty good writing day. I don’t do it every day. Some days, I stare at the screen and make a bit of a sad face and write 250 at best. But the upshot is that there is forward motion, and I haven’t set the whole thing on fire yet, and those two things are all I really want out of the project right now. All else being equal, I will have produced a full-length manuscript this year — a full-length story — and I can’t ask for more than that.

I don’t have an editor, or an agent, or a publisher, or a publicist, or any of those things. But those aren’t what I need right now. Those things are like drawing the logo before you’ve written the software. The main thing is to write. And that’s what I’m doing.

One day, I hope you’ll read it. But right now, it’s all for me.

Update: Zoom has clarified its position in a new blog post which makes it clear that AI features are, in fact, opt-in.

Zoom’s terms of service now allow meeting content to be used to train AI, without opt-out:

What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

Google Meet also appears to train AI on meeting content. I would guess that virtually every newsroom in the country uses a videoconferencing solution that allows the content of customer calls to be used to train AI.

This blanket approval also means that this customer data may be available within a model somewhere (albeit not publicly) to be perused, including sensitive information about ongoing investigations and reporting on abuse of power.

Platforms like Wire may be more secure. At any rate, anyone discussing sensitive information may wish to find a solution beyond the usual suspects.

As a (relatively) new parent, one of the questions that preoccupies me is: how can we show our son that anything is possible, and that he can be anything he wants to be? More specifically, how can we ensure that he knows that the templates and stereotypes laid out for him by society aren’t the only ways, or the best ways, to live a good life?

I was thinking about this last weekend at the memorial for my cousin Cort, who, among other things, sailed across the Pacific Ocean. The things he did were amazing — true adventures — but he talked about it so matter-of-factly that he made them seem like real things you could do. By simply existing and living his life how he wanted to, he broadened the horizons of the people around him, including me.

I’m grateful for all the people in my life who have lived outside of those set templates.

I remember going round to my childhood friend Clare’s house and learning that her dad had a room where he sat and wrote. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that this was something one could do, but here he was, doing it. (He asked me what I wanted for my birthday once, and I was too shy to ask for a signed copy of one of his Mr Majeika books, which I regret to this day.)

Humphrey Carpenter was the first time I became aware that using your imagination and harnessing your love of writing could be a profession, but writing surrounded me. My grandfather translated Crime and Punishment and Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia into English. As a young teenager in Oxford, my after-school job turned out to be a hub for interesting characters; for example, an odd man who regularly came in to use the photocopier turned out to be Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse mysteries. And in my adult life, my cousin Sarah has built an amazing career writing young adult novels.

My parents were staunch believers in doing things their own way, including by fighting for what they believed in as Berkeley activists. I’d lived in four countries by the time I was twelve, and knew about our family history across many more. I heard my dad’s stories about being in the US Army and protesting the Vietnam War afterwards, and about his own father’s leading role in the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia during the Second World War. I learned stories about Ukrainian Jewish villagers coming to America with nothing, Swiss textile merchants, diplomats, and avant garde film directors.

Conformity and parochialism were not on the menu. I’m grateful every day that this is the context I grew up with.

How the fuck do I live up to any of this? Let alone convey the same sense of freedom to our son?

You’d be forgiven for thinking, reading the above, that we were wealthy. We were not. There was a freedom inherent in mindset: if you were clever about it, you could do incredible things with meagre resources. But the world is less forgiving than it used to be towards people who aren’t independently wealthy. America in particular is designed to force people into a life of salaried work at the hands of another employer. Here, both your healthcare and your retirement savings are at the mercy of who you happen to be employed by; yes, you can get insurance and retirement plans independently, but they’re never as good, or as cheap.

If you already have resources, you have opportunity; otherwise, American society pushes you into pouring your labor towards someone else’s profit. Sometimes, people are tricked into a life of non-stop hustle as a way to find escape velocity — only to find that the hustle also is a grift on behalf of someone else’s profit. (Some investors I’ve spoken to speak of founder pedigree as a thing they look for; if you scratch the surface just a little, this resource independence is what it really means. You’re backable if you already have the freedom and network to build something.) Add this to the pervasive fear that sits just under the surface — of guns, of crime, of violence — and modern America seems to be set up to subjugate.

Some people share the white picket fence American dream, and I guess there’s nothing really wrong with it. But I don’t share that dream, and won’t be forced into it myself; I want our son to know, at the very least, that other dreams are available, and that he gets to choose his own adventure. He can settle in the suburbs somewhere in America with a 9-5 job, a two-car garage, and a backyard lawn. He can also live anywhere in the world, do anything he sets his mind to, and be exactly who he wants to be, whatever it happens to be. He could be President of the United States, or a revolutionary artist, or a social entrepreneur, or a spear fisherman off the coast of a small island in the Pacific. There is a multiverse of possibilities. Eleven months in, the world is his.

To really convey that well, I’ve realized, I need to be exactly who I want to be. Which is hard! The last decade was characterized by supporting my mother through a familial terminal illness, including redefining my life and moving continents to do so. We’ve lived through grief after trauma after grief after trauma, and at the same time I had to learn how to build a life and career in the US to be able to stay afloat. It was a constant state of stress and being constantly reactive to whatever was going on that felt like being trapped inside my own life. I made some very poor, harmful decisions while living in this state, as well as some other decisions that were just incredibly dumb. It hasn’t all been stupid, but I certainly haven’t emerged without regrets, and I often haven’t lived up to my own ideals.

But now I’ve got to switch gears and think about being an example for our son. You can’t convey a set of ideals without living up to them; it rings false. If I think that an untemplated life is more fulfilling (and I do!) then how can I do better to embody that and show that it’s a real possibility? How can I be Humphrey in his writing room or Corty sailing across the Pacific or my dad protesting the war in Vietnam?

If the possibilities available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I expose him to more? If the mindsets available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I show him that there isn’t one way to think or be?

Knowing that I’ll inevitably fail to live up to my ideals, what can I do to set him up well to live an amazing life?

Like I said, this is a question that preoccupies me. I don’t know what the answer is, or even if there is an answer. I hope the exploration will be enough.