Welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some links that I think are worth your time. Everyone gets half of this month’s items (and some thoughts to chew on), but the other half (and footnotes) are paywalled. Please don’t begrudge the paylisters! They’re why I write almost weekly now instead of “sometimes.”
I usually just provide a “money quote” and invite you to read the whole thing at the link, but this felt important enough to me to quote (virtually) in full:
I've been extremely upset for days now. It's because of the Charlie Kirk assassination, but not primarily the act itself—a horrifying, evil murder, but of a kind that does happen every few years. Sometimes a lunatic decides to kill a public figure, and sometimes they get through. That alone, as awful as it was, wouldn't have shaken me up this badly.
No, it's the revelation that followed. In our society, we often debate whether a particular kind of killing is murder; those debates will always happen, and must. They happen because we all agree that murder is wrong, and other kinds of killing sometimes aren't, so we have to get it right.
I truly never thought we would be debating whether murder is actually is wrong.
I've been struggling with whether to talk about it and how; I find it hard to compose posts at the best of times, much less times like this. […]
But I will say one thing now. If you've chosen to publicly express your non-condemnation, or even approval, of this murder, that's your right. Just know that you may as well throw in "And I would feel the same if someone killed Colin."
See, the view you've expressed is that it can be okay to kill someone for speech. That view has no limiting principle. You can't colour-code it, can't use it just this once. Either you believe in freedom of speech or you don't, and if your theory is "A has the right to speak, and B has the right to kill him for it", sorry, but that falls into the "you don't" category. A society doesn't have free speech if it condones answering it with violence.
Why me? Because the only reason anyone would kill me (that I know of) is my speech. Math rarely drives people to murder, and outside of math I'm just a person with opinions. That's what Charlie Kirk was, and that's what he was killed for. If you can excuse it for him, there's no point pretending you couldn't excuse it for me or anyone else. You've chosen to no longer oppose murder in principle.
You probably won't believe this next claim, and God willing, I'll never get to prove it—but I would be saying ALL of this no matter who was killed over speech. I wouldn't care about their politics or how extreme they were or even if they'd gone after me personally. Killing anyone for words is a middle finger to everything the western world is supposed to believe in. We are a civilization, and we answer speech with speech.
If you're willing to throw that away for one murder that you like, you're no better than the idiots on the right openly calling for civil war. If anything, they're more honest.
God rest the soul of Charlie Kirk and God help us all.
The title of this edition of Worthy Reads is “All Fun and Games.” I picked out the title early last week, planning to share a number of interesting reads on slightly whimsical topics. (I still intend to do that.)
But, as the saying goes, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets shot through the neck and gushes his life’s blood out on the pavement while tens of millions of cackling ghouls toast his death.”
I had a lot to say about the Charlie Kirk murder, but my friend Colin (a reader) was able to focus, concisely, on the aspect that is affecting me the most:
I know now. I know now, and can’t un-know, how my friends will react if I am murdered.
Joe M., Eric B.: some progressive will compile a list of the worst things I ever said out-of-context, and you’ll start “respectfully” informing people on Facebook who are upset about my death that (while violence is never the answer) nobody can really expect the Left to mourn my being shot through the neck while my daughters look on because, well, look at how “abhorrent” I was. You’ll be committed enough to this view that you will only double down if given context. You will be shocked, shocked that your friend James turned out to be so despicable without you even realizing it—but you sure will be grateful to have been “educated” (by people who have always hated me) in the days between my blood-starved heart fluttering to a stop and my cold corpse being lowered into the earth.
D.Q.: you’ll see all the celebrations of my death on the one hand, and all my friends who are (justifiably) outraged by those celebrations on the other, and you will decide that the people who really need to have their necks pulled in right now are my friends. You will make a long-winded post about an incredibly abstruse intellectual point, critiquing one particular argument that my friends are using to explain why they are upset about celebrations of my murder. Having framed this abstruse trivia in the most offensive manner possible, you will repeatedly say, “BUT DON’T HEAR WHAT I’M NOT SAYING.” People will hear what you are saying, and note your careful omission: in all those words, we’ll never get to hear you say a single kind word toward me, the murdered man—much less anything like, “And joyous celebration of James’s death is hatred, which comes from the bowels of the Devil.” Indeed, all we’ll get is a pointed barb implying that I had done “serious harm to our nation.” To top it off, your point won’t even be correct.
Jon C., Jimmy B., Chad C.: you’ll performatively announce how hard you aren’t mourning me, and how many more important things there are to worry about than my murder. (There’s some truth to this—my life is not the most important thing in the world—but you would never dream of announcing this truth about anyone except your hate objects.) When challenged, you will clarify that, in fact, we cannot love one another through disagreement—at least, not if the disagreement intersects with any of the many, many, many things you consider “oppression.”
Duly noted.
Countless others this week followed similar patterns. Others didn’t bother; they just openly admitted their happiness.
Some of us aren’t friends anymore. Oh, we’re still capital-F “Friends” in the Zuck sense, but something has snapped this week that cannot be unsnapped. (Besides, I never turn my back on someone brandishing a knife at me—or laughing about one.) I’ve had drastic “red pill” epiphanies before,1 but they’ve always involved people I didn’t know personally. Watching people around me make excuses for murdering other people like me, for nothing more than their words… that’s the first experience I would describe as radicalizing. This week has changed me. I suspect permanently.
At this writing,2 I don’t know why the shooter killed Charlie Kirk. Most shooters do it for bizarre reasons that don’t map well to an ideology. It largely doesn’t matter. I don’t buy the idea that the Left “caused” the shooting with its relentlessly militant rhetoric, any more than I buy the idea that the Right “caused” the Gabby Giffords shooting by using a bullseye as a fundraising metaphor.3
But, once Kirk died, so many of you didn’t even try to hide your hate-boners. You actually got angry and defensive when people asked you to stop stroking them in public. You sickos aren’t being nutpicked by LibsOfTikTok. You’re my friends.
Or, at least, I thought we were friends. Now I know better.
Late Thursday night, I realized that, not only are there people in my small suburb who would kill me if they could only find a permission structure, but I could name almost half a dozen of them off the top of my head (plus many more who would snicker about “just desserts” after). I realized I had no good means of resisting them when, someday, they come for me. After I turned it over in my head for a couple hours, I texted a reliable friend, who lives nearby:
A Related Matter for Which I was Unable to Write a Smooth Segue:
You know who else should buy a gun right now? Trans people. In the wake of the shooting and the celebrations around it, the Right understandably became enraged at the Left. (I don’t think this is correct, because it is not the whole Left, but it is understandable.) Less understandably, though, portions of the Right became enraged at trans people, due to (at the time) extremely thin evidence that the shooter might have been trans. Take this tweet, from a popular Trumpworld account:
“A transgender.” “That species.” “Those creatures.” This is textbook dehumanization.
I staunchly resist the accusation that the Right wants to “exterminate” trans people. Laws banning medical transition for minors are not “genocide.” However, my ability to resist this accusation depends on it continuing to be false. Mannarino’s rhetoric is clearly exterminationist.
Mannarino’s on-his-sleeve hatred was not exactly widespread across the Right. (I saw far more left-wing websites denouncing this tweet than I saw right-wing websites celebrating it.). However, I did notice a swift uptick in “troon” and other anti-trans slurs in right-wing commentary this month. This comes as the Trump Administration seeks to strip Second Amendment rights from all trans people on “dangerous mental illness” grounds. (Gun-rights groups have broadly—and correctly—condemned this effort.)
If I were trans, I suspect I would feel similarly radicalized by at least some of what’s circulating openly on, say, Facebook right now—but I would be learning to fear the Right, not the Left.
This is bad. I do not know whether trans people are over-represented or under-represented in mass shooting incidents,5 but I know it makes about as much sense to treat all trans people as responsible for the violence of a handful as it does to hold every white male accountable for all the other mass shootings. (Also, innocent people, like your average trans person, should not fear the Right.) So cut it out. Make only careful, well-sourced claims about trans shooters. If you can’t back it up, don’t post it. There is an allegation circulating widely right now that Kirk’s death was coordinated by a Zizian-style trans death cult. While we can’t yet absolutely rule this out, the overwhelming weight of evidence right now points toward Tyler Robinson, a cis man, having acted alone. Robinson’s trans boyfriend is cooperating with police and appears to have been both shocked and alarmed that Tyler did what he did. So do not make this about “trans people” killing Charlie Kirk. The person who killed Kirk is Tyler Robinson. If others helped him, then they killed Kirk, too, but no class of human beings did this.
Indeed, do not dehumanize trans people in general. Don’t dance on their graves. (Some of our right-wing brethren have done this, though I think it has not been nearly as widespread as Kirk-based Luigism.) If we can’t, at minimum, properly mourn trans dead, our justified outrage about the celebrations of Kirk’s murder will ring rather hollow!
I did not include this aside in my original draft of this item. It came to me only after I thought about my many left-wing friends who have been completely silent in the wake of the post-Kirk wave of hatred. I am not outraged by their silence. I understand it, even respect it. Nevertheless, I found myself wishing that more of my left-wing pals had said something, gently but firmly, to quell their side’s obvious bloodlust. Then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute. Why haven’t I?” So I’m not as selfless as I’d like to be, nor as virtuous as I’d like to signal.
Nevertheless, knock it off with the trans bigotry.
(Of course, I don’t think De Civ readers are tweeting out any bigotry, but, if you see some other right-winger doing it, tell him to knock it off from me.)
…Okay. Should we move on now to the “fun” promised in the title? And possibly even to the “games”?
Fourteen hours later, Ms. Cressel [the middle-class subject of the article] has experienced nine of the park’s attractions, three in the Tier 1 category, plus a parade and the fireworks show. She and her companions leave, exhausted, at 11 p.m., when the park closes.
[…]
It is a different kind of Disney day for Shawn Conahan, a California tech executive who takes his 13-year-old daughter to Orlando around New Year’s — one of the busiest times of the year to visit the parks, according to Mr. Testa.
Getting Disney’s Lightning Lane Premier Pass, which ushers its holders to the front of the line at each ride once, is a no-brainer, Mr. Conahan decides. Given he was already in for $7,000 for the four-day trip, “it’s not that crazy to spend another $900” to see the Magic Kingdom, he says. (The pass’s price varies based on the day and the park in question.) Pass holders don’t need to worry about booking reservations online in advance; the system holds all their seats for them.
[…]
In all, Mr. Conahan and his daughter are able to visit 16 attractions, including all five of the park’s Tier 1 rides plus its two most coveted attractions — Seven Dwarfs and Tron — that charge separately for passes. They do all that, plus the lunch stop and a Dole Whip snack break, in just seven hours. His daughter declares it “the best day ever.”
This fascinating article contends that the (undeniable) price hikes at Disney are a symptom of an economy-wide turn toward “the affluent.”
To begin with, this seems like a misnomer. America is affluent. Our middle class is affluent. We have lots of food, good houses, and air conditioners (Europe largely doesn’t). The people the Times labels “affluent” are just filthy stinkin’ rich. Their thesis is really that there has been an economy-wide turn toward the rich.
Anyway, the Times contends that, first, there are way, way more rich people than there used to be (great!) and that they have way, way more money than the middle class now (boo!). Moreover, businesses have learned how to target their rich customers. Therefore, businesses are catering to rich people instead of the middle class, making way more money by charging higher prices to a much smaller set of people. So argues the Times.
I am not convinced, at least not on the strength of the Disney World example.
The fabled “Disney World trip” is desired by approximately 100% of American parents. It’s not a top priority for me—I have better vacation destinations in mind—but, if someone said, “You won a sweepstakes! Here’s free tickets to Disney World for you and your kids,” I would be delighted. I have memories of EPCOT that I’d like to pass on. If your parents were upper-middle class,6 you probably do, too.
The author is overjoyed to meet the chef, circa 1991
Now here’s the problem: in 1955, when Disney Land opened, there were 23 million American families with children. Today, there are 33 million, a 40% increase. Moreover, travel to Anaheim and Orlando has become vastly more accessible for the middle class. In 2025, I can book a round-trip plane from Minnesota to Orlando for a family of four for $158/person,7 and it would cost me just 25 hours of work at the national median wage. In 1955, Orlando had no major airport, and the round-trip flight to Miami cost 437 hours of work at the national median full-time breadwinner (male) wage.8 In other words, it is vastly easier for middle-class families to travel cross-country9… and we routinely do so! A whole lot more American families have practical access to California and Florida today! This is great news for Americans!
But the Haunted Mansion cars aren’t any bigger than they were when the ride opened, and nobody wants to make the ride shorter so more of these extra families can ride it, so what can you do? Supply and demand tells us: when demand increases, either supply increases, or price goes up.10 Disney has limited power to increase supply, mainly by opening new rides and parks, but this isn’t always possible (there’s no room to build a new park like Animal Kingdom in Anaheim), and they aren’t always great substitutes (even in Florida, nobody actually wants to go to the Animal Kingdom). Moreover, the trend in theme park design lately (for reasons that absolutely baffle me) has been toward spending extreme amounts of money on a smaller number of “megarides.”11 As a result, the queues at Haunted Mansion are obviously going to get longer and longer, even with competitors like Universal opening up their own parks nearby to get a slice of this lucrative market!
Inevitably, high ride demand will lead to increasingly convoluted methods for managing that demand—and, with supply constrained, a whole lot of that management is bound to come in the form of higher prices. So is Disney’s “turn to the rich” a result of a collapsing middle class, or is it the unfortunate side effect of a growing middle class that has more purchasing power over a scarce good?12
The Times article also observes that there has been a change in our economy driven by analytics and smartphone access. Parks are more likely to sell consumers a “bare bones” access ticket, then aggressively upsell them all day with added “perks,” largely pushed through “the app.” I can’t argue with the Times about this. This is obviously happening economy-wide. In some ways, this “unbundling” trend has been a huge boon to individual consumers around the world.
Take airline travel. Airline travel used to be amazing, with plenty of leg room, generous meals served by gorgeous stewardesses, and… whatever this is:
This was all included in the price of your ticket!
Except, well, not your ticket. You would never, ever fly at this time. You couldn’t afford to. Average fare prices were well over double what they are today (in real terms), at a time when American households made a lot less money (in real terms) than they make today, with far fewer ways for determined flyers to get a “bargain price.” The government blocked competition and sharply limited the number of routes in order to allow airlines to jack up prices even higher.
As a result, in 1958, more than 80 percent of Americans had never set foot on an airplane. Your dad across the country just died? Tell them to wait a few days for the funeral, because, if you’re going at all, you’re driving. As we saw earlier in this item, a flight that might cost the median worker today just about half a week’s wages could easily have cost nearly three months of wages in 1955!
Airline deregulation, one of the great economic success stories of the neoliberal era (1980-2016), made flight accessible to everyone. Nearly half of American adults flew commercial in just the year 2022, and nearly 90% of adults have flown in their lifetimes.
However, everyone hates air travel now. Paradoxically, the more we hate flying, the more we buy plane tickets!
It’s true: flying has become uncomfortable at best. You can still get a great experience on an airplane, but you’re going to pay for it repeatedly: check your luggage? That’s a charge. Nice food? That’s a charge. Leg room? Oh, honey, you best believe that’s a charge. The constant upcharges are economically efficient, because they allow budget-conscious consumers to choose exactly what they want, always balancing cost with comfort. However, choosing over and over again is stressful!
I am fairly convinced that a big part of the success of cruise lines is the fact that they include so much in the base fare. They still try to upsell you, of course—left, right, and, center—but, once you’re on the boat, your basic food is covered, you have access to all or nearly all the boat’s amenities, you can visit the ports where the boat docks, and you have a place to sleep. Your essentials are covered and you’re going to have a good time even if you don’t spend another penny. On an airplane, that is no longer the case, and figuring out exactly what you need to pay for and how much it will all cost and whether it will break your budget and then living with your choices on the flight is stressful. It’s cheap (which is great!), but stressful.13
One of the problems with theme parks today is that they feel less and less like they are in the “cruise line” upsell mode, where your basics are covered and the upsells are fun extras. Theme parks feel more and more like they are in the “airline” upsell mode, where your base fare covers only an unpleasant experience and you must purchase some unclear collection of upsells in order to avoid an actually miserable time. Of course you need several FastPasses; otherwise you’ll spend all day waiting over an hour in each queue for a three-to-five minute ride. Of course you need to budget some unknown but surely hideous amount for food (or buy the convenient park one-day food plan! *drink plan sold separately!) because the park won’t let you bring in sandwiches to eat in the queues where you’re stuck. You’ve already stretched the budget thin just getting into the park, so will you bankrupt yourself, or will you condemn your family to a miserable day, thereby wasting the money you’ve already invested in making memories?
The park no longer feels like a friend, but a wily enemy, assaulting your limited reserves of self-control and prudence, deliberately giving you anxiety, which you must try to evade as you snatch a few minutes of pleasure for your kids at the top of Space Mountain, like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. This is happening in Orlando. To some extent, it’s even happening at sleepy old Valleyfair here in Minnesota!
At bottom, I suspect this is just another way parks are dealing with the problem of higher demand: because they can’t increase supply, they must increase price to keep crowds under control, but they really don’t want to increase prices because it leads the New York Times to write articles like this about how the parks are betraying their middle-class roots, so they hide the price increases behind “unbundling” and upsell schemes. This makes the actual cost of a day at the park inscrutable to all but the initiated, and the New York Times writes the scathing article anyway.14
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. — Douglas Hofstadter […]
When marketing asks for an estimate, they want something they can commit to. They want to know the time by which, with 99% certainty, the product will be ready. If it's done sooner that's great, but that's not what they're asking. They want the 99th percentile. And that is what they think they are hearing, when they are told "four hours". It's not their fault; they asked for one number, and they got one number. At no point did anybody ever draw out the probability distribution to clarify whether they're discussing the same number.
On the other hand when a sprint manager asks for an estimate, they usually want the mean. They're assigning tasks to people, and people to tasks, and figuring out how much work can get done by the next sprint. If some tasks take longer than estimated and others less, that's fine as long as the errors tend to average out over a decently large number of tasks.
By giving you the money quote (and money graph), I fear I’ve ruined the article, but the money quote here is really quite useful. Estimated-time-to-completion of a given project should not be understood as a number, but as a probability distribution. And, very happily, that probability distribution turns out to be fairly predictable.
(I guess I have a pretty curious idea of “fun and games” if probability distributions are my idea of “fun and games,” but here we are anyway. I’m also a big fan of using hypergeometric distributions to help construct decks for CCGs like Magic: the Gathering.)
This particular article is by a software guy, and it is written for software guys, and software guys know the pain of this more keenly than almost anybody, because our projects are often very long and notoriously hard to estimate. I don’t know whether the entire field of project planning was invented to deal with software guys, but it feels true.
Nevertheless, Hofstadter’s Law governs many domains, so these useful observations may be used in any context where you’re trying to estimate how long a project is going to take.
However, please note that this whole article assumes that you did really good, careful estimates of each and every part of your project, building in a reasonable amount of padding to deal with unforeseen issues, before you apply any of this. If you did bad estimates in the first place, this isn’t going to save you. But if you’ve ever spent considerable time in the special hell of planning poker sessions (I had a badgile team at a previous employer that used to do planning poker and sprint planning over a four hour session every month), having this chart can be pretty liberating. I want to send it to all my project managers at work, but we don’t have that kind of relationship, so I share it with all of you instead.
Below the paywall: I laugh (?!) about the Kirk murder; an eyebrow-raising clique in the Administration; a critique of conventional explanations for hideous architecture (it’s not Baumol’s). Plus, all three Videos of the Month, the comment section—and, of course, the footnotes! If that sounds like a treat to you, annual subscriptions are only $4.16 a month—one of the cheapest subscriptions on Substack! (If not, though, thanks for reading anyway!)
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