Ideapad

(Dis)parity

January 16, 2026 /

Baseball headline of the week: Kyle Tucker, Dodgers agree to 4-year, $240M deal.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2026 payroll is larger than the bottom five Major League Baseball teams’ payrolls combined.

The Dodgers’ payroll is so big that the gap between them and the New York Mets’ #2 payroll is larger than six teams’ entire payrolls.

The Dodgers and the Mets are the only two teams with projected payrolls over $325 million. Fifteen other teams—half the league—are under $160 million. You could put any two of those teams on the field and play ball for less than the Dodgers or Mets pay for one dugout.

The Dodgers’ use of deferred money means they have $298 million in commitments for 2028 already. Twenty of the other 29 teams have less than $100 million on the books, and three have $0 (really).

I don’t know how this ends, and I root for the original large-market juggernaut, but this game needs some degree of payroll parity in the next agreement, because leagues need fair competition to stay interesting.

(Source)

The Year in Cities 2025

December 30, 2025 /

Many of the newsletters I read are publishing “best of 2025” wrap-ups where they rattle off the posts that either got the most attention or made their authors most proud. Which is nice and all, but I saw that content already. I guess the digital cadence means it’s better to do the newsletter version of a clip show than just not hit send for a week?

Here at the Ideapad, where there’s never been a post schedule, one thing that hits like clockwork is the Year in Cities recap. Herewith, the twenty-first edition. All the places I went and spent the night. A procession of weddings and ballparks, pretty much.

As with last year, the commitment to sleeping over eliminates some of the nuance: we went from Pittsburgh back to New York by way of Baltimore, because baseball. And that Kentucky stay was over the river from Cincinnati, a pedestrian bridge away from a Reds game, which was the point of our visit. But we’ll stick with the system, which allowed us spend a night in Kentucky, after all.

Repeat visits are noted with an asterisk.

New York *
Coral Gables, FL
Chicago, IL *
Palm Beach Gardens, FL *
Cleveland, OH *
Detroit, MI
Newport, KY
Pittsburgh, PA
Edgartown, MA *
Montecito, CA

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!