Muttroxia

At Trumps direction, several Republican states broke with norms and redistricted in the middle of the usual ten-year period. How’d that work out?

(Note: Some races are still being decided. AI helped with post. I believe fully validated results are not done out. Hopefully I won’t have to retract this whole post.)

First, let’s start with what gerrymandering is.

If you started with a bunch of random districts in a state, some would lean blue, some would lean red. Some would lean very far in one direction or another. Gerrymandering is arranging the districts so that you take your excess votes in a district you easily win and reassign them to other districts. You take your voters in a district you will never win and assign them to other districts. You do the opposite to the other party – you take their voters in competitive districts and reassign them to districts where their vote doesn’t matter (either you have enormous leads, or you will never win anyhow). The ideal state is one where you have a good lead in every one of the districts.

An analogy is building walls around each district, made up of your excess voters. Some walls are very high. Some are well below water level. You want a situation where every possible district has a decent wall to keep the water in (that, keep the opposition vote smaller than yours). This can’t be done fully in practice. But you can arrange it so that far more of the districts are surrounded by your walls than if you didn’t interfere. That’s gerrymandering.

The risk of this is… suppose the water level starts rising? You build the walls to withstand a certain water level (say, a 9% Democrat advantage). But if the water level is higher than that, it floods over all your walls. Because you have no high walls, you’ve assigned that excess height (your excess voters) to other districts. Now you have no districts. This is called dummymandering.

The Democratic edge was around 15 points. It did run over a lot of walls.

The GOP: The result of all their redistricting was a net loss of 1 to 2 seats.

State	Net Change for GOP (vs. no redistricting)
Texas	-1 seat
Ohio	-2 to -3 seats
Florida	+1 seat
North Carolina	+1 seat
Tennessee	0 seats
Louisiana	+1 seat
Alabama	0 seats
Total GOP Impact	-1 to -2 seats

The Democrats: In response to the GOP redistricting, California and Utah did their own retaliatory redistricting. The result of that was a net gain of 5-6 seats.

State	Net Seat Change for Democrats (Scenario 2 vs. Scenario 1)
California	+4 to +5 seats
Utah	+1 seat
Total Democratic Impact	+5 to +6 seats

And for a bonus: Indiana (controlled by GOP) refused to redistrict. Trump was furious. But if they had… “The gerrymander that was supposed to deliver 9-0 for Republicans would have delivered 8-1 for Democrats.”

In summary, the GOP lost between 6 and 8 seats in the house, just because they redistricted at the wrong time. (They would have lost another eight in Indiana.)

Delicious. Karma is a bitch.

One. The Republicans still control two of the three branches of the federal government, the executive and judicial branches. Having both houses of Congress is huge. But it is not a magic wand that lets Democrats call all the shots.

Two. The Democrats are not popular. They are at ~43% popularity.

Three. Running Congress for two years and then giving it back cannot happen. This hold on power must be consolidated. It is possible to maintain control of these houses for a long time. Democrats did it for decades.

Democrats ran the House for 40 consecutive years, from 1955 through 1995. Democrats ran the Senate 26 consecutive years, from 1955 to 1981. To hold on to power, Democrats cannot overreach as Trump did, they must focus on policies and tactics that do not give back control again. That means being honest about what policies have public support and which don’t. That means not picking fights that just lead to these new Congresspeople from red states being dumped next chance.

Four. The GOP was, and is, a minority party. They hold on to power through various anti-democratic means.

Conclusion. The policies to prioritize are those that allow elections to reflect the will of the people. This will “lock in” the majority that the Democrats already have, as long as they don’t focus on unpopular policies and strategies.

• Trump didn’t interfere in voting after all, and he accepts the results. I was among the more apocalyptic, I figured a 30% chance of serious interference. I am very glad to be wrong. Hearing Trump talk about the results – he sounds like a normal president. Normal is good.
• Trump did a terrible job picking GOP candidates, supporting candidates, giving them issues to run on… just like in the 2022 election, his handpicked candidates were terrible choices and led to the GOP losing winnable seats. (For instance, here in Georgia, Raphael Warnock beat Herschel Walker, he would have lost to most normal candidates.) Ken Paxton? He’s a literal criminal. Trump now says he had to support Paxton, but he obviously did not..
• Winning both houses is amazing. Having good margins is important. We needed 51 for Senate control, we have 55 or more. This leads to more positive outcomes:
• To get a fillibuster-proof majority, bills only need to get five Republican instead of ten.
• Both parties vote big monolithic blocks. This isn’t good. A large margin allows for more intra-party disputes. You can have a few nutty socialist ideas on the fringe. A large margin allows for a few ‘mavericks’. Those new blue Senators in deep red states will need to break from the pack sometimes, or else we just lose those states right back. A large margin enables that.
• A large margin means that we can suffer a worse outcome in 2028 and still keep the Senate. That is vital for the Supreme Court. Four years controlling the process is massively better than only two.
• The governor flips are underrated, as well as the many down ballot victories for the Democrats — State Attorney Generals, Secretary of States, Lieutenant Governors and so on. These are the positions that deal with redistricting, election law, running elections, who gets charged for violating laws, suing or not suing the Federal government, and more. It massively reduces the voting hijinks these red states are always doing. Maybe we can make actual progress on gerrymandering?
• The democratic victories in deep red states are stunning. These are clearly votes against the GOP, not for the Democratic candidates. Let’s remember that the Democratic party also has very bad perceptions. Their candidates were good enough to ride the wave. These are likely to be more than a one-election result though. If you’ve been willing to cross over to vote blue once, you are going to consider it next time. If you know that your fellow citizens are willing to vote blue, you’re more likely to consider it next time. Incumbents have huge advantages as well.
• Muttroxia readers know I support the National Popular Vote. This outcome brings it closer to reality. There are 48 electoral votes to go. Both Michigan and Wisconsin now have trifectas of Democratic leadership. Both states had previous efforts die from GOP opposition. If these states pass it, that is 25 more electoral votes. Update: Also Arizona, Nevada, and big ol’ Pennsylvania – which adds up to 61 votes. Holy schnike, this might happen.
• It is not my perfect voting method, but I vastly prefer Ranked Choice Voting to the status quo. A better term for it might be, “Instant runoff”. If neither Peltola or Sullivan cross 50%, the folks who voted for the 3^rd and 4^th place candidates have already pre-expressed their next best options. There is no need for a runoff, the system just runs the numbers and the result comes out.
• Like everyone else, I wonder what the priorities of the new Democratic congress will be. It’s vital to avoid overshooting. The GOP would still be in power if Trump hadn’t overshot. He had good reasons (to him) to do it, but it costs. It is important that the Dems hold on to these new seats. You do that by not getting too far out of step with the voters. I am a moderate Democrat, so of course I think that moderate policies is the right answer!

Any way you look at it, a remarkable night. This was the first election my three children could all vote, it felt great to deliver our five votes and see history made.

I recently bought a new home scale. The last two haven’t worked out. My MVP (minimum viable product) was slim:

• Measure weight to within 0.2 lbs.
• Measure body fat percentage.
• Display both those numbers on the actual scale.
• Easy export of all data to .csv.
• For $50 or under.
• I don’t care about communities or fitness programs, just give me the numbers.

It was surprisingly hard to find a scale that meets the requirements. Today I received and hooked up the Renpho Smart Scale. It’s great so far. Setup was easy, the display has all the numbers I need, and everything is available easily in the app. After two hours, I am a satisfied customer.

But there are nits to pick. This product feels like it was designed by the worst corporate team. Their motto is “Empower Your Wellness”. A motto that could apply to a fitness coach, a health plan, or a banana. Meaningless words.

Their home page has yet more meaningless drivel. Look at this blather.

Of course it didn’t ask me if I was a male or female, it asked me what I had been assigned at birth.

It’s obsessed with setting and measuring goals. My goals are my own. I don’t need a scale to tell me my progress. Honestly, can any product just do one job well and then stop? Sometimes I just need a screwdriver, not a home improvement universal assembly solution partner.

This screen finally made me laugh out loud.

How much do I weigh? I DON’T KNOW!, THAT’S WHY I BOUGHT A SCALE. WHY DON’T YOU MEASURE ME AND THEN YOU CAN FILL IN YOUR OWN DUMB NUMBER.

Honestly.

You’ve probably read about this already. In the Alaska Senate race, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. One is the “real” Dan Sullivan, the other is some random schmuck who got recruited, hoping that Republican voters would be confused and split the vote for the real one. Peltola (the Democrat) denied it, but the New York Times got the evidence. They sure did do it.

Trump and the rest of the party went ballistic, calling it an affront to democracy. He (DOJ) filed a lawsuit that essentially says that if this trick works (the right Dan Sullivan loses because the other one gets enough votes to make the difference, but more complicated because Alaska uses ranked-choice voting), the result needs to be overturned and everyone investigated.

Let’s start here: Trump is right on the merits. What Peltola and the Dems did is terrible. It’s wrong. It is an affront to democracy. This tactic undermines the expressed will of the voters. Peltola and the party should be ashamed.

Tradition

Variants of this are done all the time. It is a time-honored tradition to promote candidates to try and split the vote. Trump himself rose to power largely because other candidates thought he would siphon votes from the other candidate(s), which would help them. None of this is new. Doing a bad thing more effectively is even more bad, but only marginally.

Law

This is legal. It’s gross, but it’s legal. Essentially, the Alaska Supreme Court found there are no laws against it.

 While it’s clear that the second Dan Sullivan is not acting in good faith, the courts don’t rule on the motives of a candidate – it doesn’t matter if he’s a bad faith candidate. They could only direct the Division of Elections to clearly distinguish the two candidates (which they did).

Trump and the GOP have no real legal case. The Constitution clearly lays authority with Alaska, and Alaska has ruled on it. Game over.

Hypocrisy

I said Trump and the GOP are right on this issue. They are. But it’s precious to suddenly find them fighting for democracy. Consider:

• In 2000, a poorly designed ballot led to a few thousand extra Florida votes going to Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore. As it so happened the margin of victory for Bush was only 537 votes in Florida. George Bush was seated as President. You didn’t find the GOP arguing that it was clear what the voters meant, instead they sent literal mobs of lawyers to threaten election workers. The presidency was given to the wrong person. (That was when I, and much of the country, lost faith in The Supreme Court.)

• Gerrymandering is an affront to democracy. Congress refuses to make any laws about it, so The Supreme Court has correctly said that gerrymandering is just dandy (unless it can be proven that the KKK made it or something). Twisting districts for nakedly partisan reasons is perfectly allowed. This has much larger impact than some vote splitting in one Senate race. Efforts to stop gerrymandering are prominently from the Democrats.
• Trump and the GOP broke with our democratic history to redistrict red states mid-decade for nakedly partisan advantage. And the Democrats have responded in kind, gerrymandering their states to even the scales. It is legal and it’s far worse than the Alaska vote splitting.

All these are legal. Selective vote purging and ID laws, blocking Merrick Garland nomination, floating third Trump term loopholes, and using alternate electors to blatantly steal the election… the list keeps going. They are all direct affronts to the core principles of Democracy. It always seems to be the GOP leveraging legal ploys to fight the will of the voters. It’s chutzpah for them to complain the Democrats did something scummy but legal. They started it.

How are the Celtics looking for this season? Significantly better than last season, here’s why I think that.

Note 1: As everyone else has noted, the East is stronger. And there won’t have so many teams tanking. Being better than last year may not translate into as many wins.

Note 2: Note the baseline comparison… While the Celtics would be better if we still had Jaylen Brown instead of Paul George that’s not what we’re looking at.

Top Tier (the stars):

• Since Jayson Tatum didn’t play last year and Jaylen Brown is gone, let’s look at this as Tatum replacing Brown. This is likely an upgrade. Tatum has always been a little better than Brown. Now it’s Tatum’s team, he knows it, everyone knows it, and that will simplify decision making. It’s also possible that Tatum never really gets back to his old form – but the odds are strong this is an upgrade.
• I view anything Paul George can give us as bonus. It’s all about his health. A healthy Paul George is roughly equal to Jaylen Brown. If he plays 50 games and is competing in the playoffs, we’re in great shape. The odds are against this happening. The odds are that George will not play so much.
• (I actually had a math argument with AI about this. I had to bring up the associative property of addition. Summarizing these bullet points above – The Net Change in Celtics Stars = (full season of Tatum – full season of Brown) + Whatever Paul George is.)

Mid Tier:

• I expect Payton Pritchard and Derrick White to be about the same. Pritchard is always improving, but let’s not count on that. I see no reason to assume that Derrick White suddenly remembers how to shoot. If he does, fantastic, but let’s not assume it.
• I expect Neemias Queta to improve. He was the biggest surprise last year, and I see him getting even better. He looked great in the offseason.
• Mitchell Robinson will be the same as last year. That’s great!

The X Factors, aka the Energy 5:

Last year there were five Celtics who at various times played way over their heads. They are all crazy cheap against the salary cap, and all can contribute.

• Hugo González and Baylor Scheierman: These are my picks for dramatic improvement. Both have huge upside. I expect national pundits to be saying “Where did these guys come from, how do The Celtics keep finding these guys?” by midseason.
• Ron Harper Jr: Gets moderately better. He’s very skilled, just needs a little time and love.
• Luka Garza and Jordan Walsh: These two stay the same, possibly even regress. Note that staying the same is pretty good, both showed a lot last year.
• I don’t care about Sam Hauser, Mike Conley Jr. or anyone else on the depth chart. None of these guys are meaningfully going to change the team’s success. Sorry Sam.

So where does that leave us?

• The center position is a huge upgrade.
• The wings are a small to a huge upgrade, mostly depending on the health of Paul George. George is the biggest factor, but improvements from Hugo González and Baylor Scheierman will move the needle also.
• The guards are probably about the same. Maybe Derrick White and Payton Pritchard improve, maybe they don’t.

This seems pretty reasonable to me. Will it be enough to improve our record over last year? I don’t know, there is a lot of great competition, and we overperformed last year. Still, there’s every reason to be optimistic about the season. Let’s go Celtics!

April 15, 2026 (Ride 736): Today was the first time I rated a passenger less than 5 stars. (I’ve done 736 rides so far.) She had several annoyances and one big thing.

• She was using an obvious fake name, “Debdata”.
• She was late to pickup. I appreciate that she sent a “1 min coming” message but just be on time.
• She couldn’t figure out the door handle (that’s fine, it’s a Tesla) and she was scratching to try and make it make it work (not fine).
• She gave bad directions to get out of the street.

Those were all annoying but it’s a normal part of the job. But then she went further.

She gave more directions to get out. We were near a MARTA stop. She said to just cut through here on the left. I did. I found I was where the buses go, the dedicated bus area, and I was going against the flow of buses. No, it was even worse than that. I was where the passengers stand! I wasn’t even in the road! I was on the wide curb where all the people wait for the bus! If I hadn’t stopped abruptly I would have mowed down a couple commuters! What the hell? I backed the car up. She said “if you just turn over –“ I cut her off, “shut up, I’m not listening to you!” Unbelievable. I should have booted her ass out and banned her right there.

When I dropped her off at the pin, she asked to be driven another forty feet to a different tower entrance. Just tell Uber the right destination in the first place, it’s not hard. It then took her three tries to close the door. It’s just a car door, this part isn’t hard for any functional adult. Please, would you just go to your job and get away from me and my car.

I gave her a 3-star (safety, asked for dangerous driving), and I banned her from my car (which I now know you can do).

You might wonder — why did it take over 700 rides to do anything but a 5-star? I’ve had some pretty bad passengers, you’ve read about some of them. It’s because of the UX flow in the app. When I finish the ride, I’m prompted to rate the passenger. That screen can’t be skipped. Until I rate them, I can’t get my next ride. And whatever I put will be visible to the passenger. If I rate them less than 5 stars, they are likely to do the same to me. It’s very important to keep my rating up. (I’m at 4.97 by the way). It’s much more important for me to keep a high rating that it is to properly punish bad passengers. I really have no option but to give them 5 stars. But today I learned how to change their rating later in the day. It’s difficult. Uber doesn’t make it easy. But you can. I did. I will do it more.

April 21. My 400^th 5-star rating. I guess I’m a little proud of that? That’s out of 754 total trips. Roughly half the passengers give a rating. Overall, I have a 4.96 rating. That’s down from 4.97, someone put me down as “Not polite”. Maybe it was Debdata, I wasn’t even a little polite to her after she guided me right into pedestrians.

Evelyn was a nice old lady with a new hip. After picking her up at the senior center she regaled with one boring story after another. At the end of the ride, she slowly went into her purse and pulled out one single crisp dollar bill for me as a tip. I know shouldn’t be ungrateful, but a one dollar tip? That’s just insulting, I will not say thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSu3X_bIP7g

I picked up Jason downtown in the very early morning. When I saw him I anticipated problems. He looked like the Unabomber after coming off a meth high. Just a bad vibe. But Jason was fine. He was a landscaper. He was just wearing comfortable outdoor clothes and he was very very tired. I dropped him off with a crew of other very very tired looking laborers. Rough life.

On long trips, the Tesla navigation automatically incorporates when and where to charge. It’s a great feature. It’s quite smart.

On the drives to and from Gulf Shores, Tesla recommended stopping many times to charge up. We could have done the whole drive in one or two stops, but it said to make four or more. I assumed that was a bug. It was not.

More physics! Batteries charge more quickly when they have low charges going in. The difference is large – it charges around 200 kW at 20% and below, it charges at under 100 kW once it reaches 50%. The multiples are big.  (The same logic applies to your smart phone or any rechargeable battery.)

Although you lose time by making more frequent stops, you make up that time by charging up more quickly at each stop. That is, you’re better off doing a series of short stops, each time charging to 50-60% than stopping only a few times and charging to 85%. The gains in charging time offset the losses of more stops. Charging from 20% to 50% takes 10 minutes, charging to 80% (twice as much charged added) takes 30 minutes (three times as long).

Here is an example, driving from Atlanta to Boston. Making frequent stops shaves about 20 minutes from the 2.5 charging hours needed (about 13% better).

Metric	Frequent Stops	Full Stops	Difference
Number of Stops	9 stops	4 stops	+5 stops
Total Charging Time	~78 min	~127 min	49 min faster
Total Overhead Time	54 min	24 min	30 min slower
Total Time Added	~2 hours 12 min	~2 hours 31 min	~19 min faster overall

City, State	Frequent Stops	Full Stops
Greenville, SC	Charge to 65% (12 min) (6m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Charlotte, NC	Charge to 55% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (40 min) (34m charge + 6m overhead)
Greensboro, NC	Charge to 50% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
South Hill, VA	Charge to 50% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Richmond, VA	Charge to 55% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (41 min) (35m charge + 6m overhead)
Fredericksburg, VA	Charge to 65% (14 min) (8m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Newark, DE	Charge to 50% (16 min) (10m charge + 6m overhead)	Charge to 85% (38 min) (32m charge + 6m overhead)
Hamilton, NJ	Charge to 55% (15 min) (9m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Greenwich, CT	Charge to 60% (17 min) (11m charge + 6m overhead)	(Skip)
Hartford, CT	(Skip)	Charge to 75% (32 min) (26m charge + 6m overhead)

On the other hand… the “frequent stops” strategy is more ‘brittle’, as there are more opportunities to get delayed by traffic.

And this effect is bigger the longer the drive. Since the initial charge is a large share of the total distance, starting with a full charge for a shorter drive makes a big difference. For our actual drive from Gulf Shores to Atlanta, it was probably a wash either way.

When I talk to the electro-curious, the first question is “What happens if you run out of battery?” The answer is, I don’t know. It hasn’t come up. My relatively old Tesla holds 230 miles of charge. That’s a lot. There’s plenty of superchargers on every highway and anywhere enough humans live. We’ve driven to Detroit, St. Louis, Boston without a sweat. After five years of ownership, I’m not worried.

We were on vacation in Gulf Shores Alabama. The car was down to 40 miles. Not a problem. We would go into town and get charged up while doing other things. We didn’t expect any problem since we had already visited a supercharger nearby, at The Wharf.

And so Mr. and Mrs. Muttrox, their 18-year-old daughter and 3 of her friends went into for lunch in a caravan of the Tesla and a ‘normal’ gas car. After lunch we went to get groceries, while the girls went to charge up the Tesla and hang out at The Wharf. 90 minutes later we got the call. “Dad, I’m down to 8 miles left, all the roads are closed I can’t get to the charger! What do I do!?” Yikes. Hoo boy. We’ve had these cars for five years and have never yet had to deal with being out of energy at the side of the road. Time to enter crisis mode. 

1. Girls, immediately pull over to the side of the road. Get out of the car. Turn off your Bluetooth. The Tesla needs to be powered off 100% so it doesn’t lose any more electricity.

We were fortunate to have (1) the extra car that could “scout”, and (2) the Tesla app that lets us track everything, notably location.

2. We drove to them (with the aid of the app). Some lady there had said there might be a charger at the Target down that way. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla in the heat, the rest of us took the Volvo to check it out. There was no charger. Back to the Tesla.
3. The app said the very place we had eaten lunch (Lulus) had a supercharger, and it was the closest one. I had noticed that at lunch but hadn’t seen it in the parking lot. Well, maybe I was an idiot and just missed it. Mrs. Muttrox stayed with the Tesla again, the rest of us drove back to Lulus. I asked the parking traffic guy and sure enough there were some chargers. They were practically camouflaged and blocked off (I forgave himself for missing them), but they sure existed.
4. Lulus is four miles away from the car. The car now has only four miles of charge. And those miles are an estimate. Brad didn’t think we could get there. We had to try. 

5. Thank goodness for Mr. Rodriguez in 11^th grade AP physics! I knew that wind resistance goes up as the square of speed (because you are hitting more particles and each particle has higher relative velocity), so I had to keep the speed capped at 30 mph even on the highway. I would drive the Tesla with the Volvo behind me with hazard lights on. I couldn’t run the air conditioner (uses energy), I couldn’t have the windows down (adds wind resistance which uses energy). I would just have to bake while driving.
6. I did bake. It was awful. It was over 90 degrees in the direct Florida sun and the car was a sauna. Whenever we got to a red light I lowered the windows to get a small breeze then raised them again when the light turned green. I was stressed about the energy being used by lowering and raising the windows, could that be the difference?
7. But we made it! I backed into the spot with 0% left on the battery. I’d never seen 0% before. The attendant told me I needed to straighten out the car. I told him I couldn’t until I had charged up some more, wasn’t sure I could get back the five feet into the space.  

8. It turned out these weren’t Tesla superchargers, that’s why I missed them before – I was looking for the familiar red and white shapes. These were ordinary level 2 chargers like we have at home. Charging up would take 10 hours. 10 hours is not good enough.  

9. We sent the Volvo off once more to scout “The Wharf”, the only supercharger in the area. Mrs. Muttrox called me and said it was fine, no idea what our daughter was talking about, it’s all fine, come on over. That was 8 miles away. I waited 30 minutes until I was up to 25 miles charge and headed out. I needed that time to cool down. I felt like a boxer, I must have sweated out a few pounds of water while cooking in that car.
10. But I couldn’t get to The Wharf! Everytime I tried to get somewhere, there was a road blocked off. I’d circle to the next area and that would be blocked off also. I was using up my precious miles trying to get to the supercharger, but I was just getting farther away. What the hell is going on!?
11. After a testy phone call with Erinn (I get tunnel vision under stress – I solve the problem but act like a jerk while I’m doing it) I realized what was up. One whole bridge was under construction. The Tesla navigation system didn’t understand that and kept trying different ways to get over the bridge. In the Volvo we used Google Maps, which correctly knew the bridge was under construction and just sent her to the next bridge. (Navigation is the same 98% of the time between the systems, and most of the 2% is irrelevant differences. This was the big exception.)
12. I pulled into the Wharf with 9 miles left. By now, 9 miles felt like 200. We charged up, everything was fine. What an adventure! I got back to the house seven hours after we had left it. The groceries weren’t in great shape.

I discovered that there are services that come out with a battery, the equivalent of calling AAA for a jump start. It’s called Mobile EV Charging, Bee Charged EV seems to be the major player. Or you can get the car towed to a supercharger.   

In the end it all worked out. IMO, five years without ever seriously being close to running out of battery is quite good. Consider what it took to have this problem come up. We had a fairly low charge to start. I didn’t notice the charger at the lunch spot. Major roads were closed for construction. My daughter couldn’t get to the supercharger and didn’t call until we were right at the edge of disaster. The Tesla navigation system didn’t do its job. That’s a lot of things that had to go wrong.

I remain confident that electric cars running out of juice is no more common than ICE cars running out of gas.

Like many Celtics fans, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Jaylen Brown trade. At face value it is about the dumbest trade possible. This is my attempt to justify it. (I’m writing this in the early morning just before a vacation, I haven’t been able to review it much… be kind.)

• Brad Stevens and the rest of the decision makers are still smart.
• The job of Brad Stevens is to maximize the number of championships. Over the long run, not any one particular year.
• We bought a championship in 2024, bringing in hired guns to supplement Tatum and Brown. We went way over the apron to do so. It was a great deal, and now we’ve been paying off that championship debt for a couple years.
• We can’t be a contender if all the apron penalties apply. We need to get back under and reset them. So last year we dumped a historic amount of salary to do so. (The Celtics went from $540 million to something like $185 million.) We need one more year under the apron to reset everything, then we can buy up free agents again and buy another championship or two. The year after this one is the key one.

Is Jaylen Brown Good?

• Jaylen Brown is a fantastic player. NBA finals MVP (deservedly). 6th in NBA MVP voting this year. Record highs in points and the usual stats. In the end, nothing counts more than wins. With him as team leader, the Celtics finished way above expectations, generating and extra 20 wins or so. He seems to get better every year.  He’s also a great person. This was his favorite year for many reasons, but a lot of it was clearly his relationship with young players he took under his wing and supported.
• But Jaylen Brown is not as fantastic as you might think. All the advanced analytics are not kind to him. His net rating clearly shows that the Celtics do better when he isn’t on the floor. Some try to justify this with waving hands, but it can’t be done. It has been a pattern for multiple years, it’s not just about this years bench. It is unique to him, not Tatum or White or other players with high usage around the league. The sample size is vast. It’s real. His increase in statistics this year can be entirely explained by his increase in usage.
• Jaylen Brown is a very expensive player. Remember he was the highest paid player in the league for a short time. His current contract is very expensive, and is 35% of the team cap. (The absolute numbers continue to go up, but the % of cap is stable. Tatum’s percentage is slowly rising.)
• Brown is so expensive that we can’t build out the rest of the team. We would not be able to re-create that title team, he and Tatum would eat up too much salary to get those other free agents (Jru, Porzingis, etc) needed to be a championship contender.
• So. Yes, Jaylen Brown is very good. The analytics are real, but an incomplete picture. It’s just stupid to think he’s actually a negative on any team. But Tatum is better than Brown. He’s top 5, Brown is top 15. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe (and The Celtics likely do) that Jaylen Brown, as good as he is, is not worth the money. He’d be a steal at $30-$40 million. At $50-$65 million he is an anchor. In other words, Jaylen Brown is very good. But not good enough for his contract. 
• The Celtics cannot be a title contender as long as the massive Tatum & Brown contracts eat up so much of the salary cap. We needed to move off Brown and get back the ability to build a title contending team.

Urgency

• Jaylen Brown is due for an extension in two weeks. If he gets it, all the problems set in for a few more years, The Celtics cannot win a championship. If he doesn’t get it, then he becomes disgruntled. This part doesn’t make that much sense to me. So what – if he’s disgruntled, he’s disgruntled. He’ll still play his ass off, like he always does. I think the issue is that the extension makes him untradeable, but we saw in real life that he isn’t very tradeable already. Let’s assume that not giving him the player option creates enough problems to make that a bad option.
• Therefore, we needed to trade Brown before that option deadline.

What did the Celtics want in a trade

• As Brad Stevens said 13 times, they wanted “optionality”. Which for the love of god is a made up word that is longer than the word it replaces, “options”. Just say options. Or flexibility. Anyhow… Optionality means 1) more/better draft picks, and significantly more cap room in the long run, particularly starting the year after this one (when repeater penalties fully reset).

Given the timeline and urgency, did The Celtics act correctly?

• Sorta. More or less. But if this analysis is correct and Brad Stevens is cold-blooded (which is the job), The Celtics should have traded Brown last year and tanked the season while we were at it. We’d be in a much better place now.
• It was correct to see if we could make a Giannis trade work. It was correct to walk away from the price Milwaukee was demanding.
• It was correct to shop Brown around the league and see what we could get. This was Nico’s biggest problem in the Luka trade. It was reasonable to think you couldn’t win a championship with Luka, it was not reasonable to only talk to one team.
• The basic problem is that every other team has some version of this same analysis. No one else thinks that Brown is as good as his contract either. And the more he was shopped around, the more other owners saw the wisdom of crowds (if everyone else thinks Brown isn’t worth it, maybe I shouldn’t pay a high price either.) This meant the Celtics couldn’t get back the kind of returns everyone thought Brown was worth.

What are the results of the actual trade?

• Is Paul George good? If he’s fully healthy, he’s very good – roughly equal with Brown. But he almost certainly won’t be fully healthy.
• Paul George is nearly as expensive as Jaylen Brown.
• But the Jaylen Brown contracts goes for two more years.
• Paul George has a player option after next year, but at that point he is an expiring contract. The Celtics can move off of him, in the same way the 76ers moved off him. It probably costs us a first round pick to do that, but moving an expiring contract is much easier than one that has more years left on it.
• In the 27-28 season The Celtics will have reset all the apron penalties, have significant cap space to build around Tatum, to sign their own young players cheap (Schierman, Hugo, etc.), get free agents, and will even have a premium draft pick or two. That is the basis of championship team.

Endnote: A couple dump media perspectives:

• You might hear media folks like Bill Simmons saying this years team is actually quite good (true), so that justifies the trade (false). You have to compare against the hypothetical of not trading Brown. If we hadn’t traded Brown, we’d also be a very good team.
• Was it because of the money? In the press conference, Stevens and Chisholm both said multiple times this wasn’t a money decision, it was a basketball decision. That has been mocked, but it’s true. It means that we are willing to pay financial penalties to build a good team. It doesn’t mean that money wasn’t involved – because the amount of money in contracts (cap space) drives basketball penalties.

I wish the trade hadn’t happened. I’ve always been a Jaylen Brown fan. He’s done nothing but play hard, improve, and win. He’s a great person. It’s not his fault that he is paired with Tatum. That is a pretty unique set up, having two superstars about the same age and team longevity on the same team, and it drives some weird dynamics. It’s not Browns fault that he was awarded the supermax contract that set him up to fail. I wish he was still a Celtic. But the trade is at the least defensible. Hopefully we will remember him when we raise another couple banners at the end of the 2020s and retire his number.

Stairway to Heaven.

Every guitarist tries to learn it. It was so common that the Wayne’s Worlds reference isn’t even a joke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCh6guovbt0

It’s such a cliche. It was voted the greatest rock song a million years in a row in my youth. It’s so overwhelmingly popular and so well known. It’s easy to forget that — well — it’s incredibly awesome. Every generations discovers it because it’s one of the best songs ever. What else can you say about it? (You could say it was kinda stolen.)

Led Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center in 2012. To cap off the evening, Heart did a live performance of Stairway to Heaven. It blows my socks off. It blew away Led Zeppelin, you can visibly see them getting more into it and more emotional as it goes.

Turn up the bass, turn up the volume, turn off the lights, and listen to this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cZ_EFAmj08

A few notes:

• John Bonham frequently wore a bowler, thus Jason and much of the supporting team did as well as an homage.
• Apparently they were only able to fully rehearse this once. And it was freezing backstage, Nancy was worried her fingers wouldn’t work for the delicate intro section.
• Some reflections from Robert Plant:

March 26, 2026: At 2:30 in the afternoon, I picked up two sassy fat black ladies from a brunch place (Barneys). They were taking the afternoon off to daydrink. I loved them instantly. They were terribly disappointed by Barneys “weakass brunch”, so they got an Uber (me) to hit up a different brunch. The fare was only $5. A few days later they added on a $35 tip. That’s my biggest tip ever. Especially on such a small base. What a nice treat for me.

 

March 28. Ride 703: I picked up Parkti, a proper young Indian lady at a suburban Marta stop. She quickly asked me to turn the podcast off, she had a headache. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later she asked if she could open a window. Sure, that’s not a problem. A minute later I heard heavy breathing noises and (you saw it coming didn’t you) she vomited all over herself and the seat. Just as I was pulling onto the highway. I pulled over to the shoulder of the entrance ramp in traffic for her to step out and gather herself at the guardrail.

She couldn’t stop apologizing. We continued onwards, I mentioned I’d have to hit the carwash directly after, heavily implying she owes me for a carwash. I dropper her off. When I drove to the car wash I found she had managed to furiously puke all over herself without getting a single drop on the car itself. That’s amazing. Very impressive skills, Parkti!

She was my second puking passenger. I don’t do much weekend night driving, I generally avoid the drunks. I did have one couple where the guy was so wasted he could barely get in. Two minutes in he asked to open the windows. His girlfriend saw what was about to happen and got me to pull over in time.

After Parkti I now understand the pattern. When they mention windows, look for a safe place to pull over. And I now stock a few rags and wetwipes in the trunk.

I get asked, “What happens if they puke in your car, who pays?” Uber says they will pay for a cleaning, but they ask for a lot of evidence first. Apparently most drivers just give up and pay themselves. I haven’t yet had any actual vomit in my car to test this.

March 2025: A guy with a thick Russian accent hops in with his wife. We are heading 20 miles to the airport. No, just a location very close to the airport. That’s unusual. Passengers often make mistakes. I check with him to make sure, “Ya ya it is airport we’re going, no worry.” I don’t say anything else the rest of the drive.

We arrive at the address. It’s a seedy factory in the middle of nowhere. It looks like where the bad guys torture the sidekick of the hero. As we pull in, he panics and yells “This isn’t airport! What is this!? Get me out of here!” I pause for a second, but he did put in the airport, so it’s his problem. I had even confirmed with him, but he looks very angry and keeps yelling, “This place look like I get killed here, what is this!? Why you do this!!!?” As I start to reply he breaks up, laughing. Son of a bitch was trolling me. This was the correct destination, he was playing the dumb foreigner act for fun. He got me good. One of my favorite passengers ever.