Good morning good morning hello howdy ho boy is it good to see you guys I missed you.

Really hoping to see this Ed Sheeran tour go further off the rails. Feels like there’s more drama to happen there and I am here for it. I hope it doesn’t die down and he, like, gets Ed Sheeran in a mustache to open or something.

A thing a high school social studies teacher taught me is that you never really can tell who, when finally elevated by the president to a position where the president no longer has any power over them, will stay a toadie and who will actually grow a spine. You can never tell. And Kevin Warsh is, I suppose, a picture perfect piece of evidence to old Mr. Alkire’s thesis. I did not have “Kevin Warsh stands up to the president by raising interest rates” on my bingo card. I mean, I weirdly agree with the president that interest rates should be lower. I mean, I view these pointlessly high interest rates as a “help defeat Trump” tax as something I am willing to pay, yes, but honestly, they should be lower.

But all those normie businesses and economic types out there “knew” the right thing to do was raise them, Trump didn’t want to, and Warsh voted to raise them. I am pleased Trump is pissed about this. Like I’m pleased he’s pissed at Supreme Court judges he himself nominated. None of these people are resistance heroes or anything, but it’s nice to see some humans have a shred of humanity.

Speaking of which… I was thinking last night. Prior to Trump 1, I was no doe eyed idealist. Reagan was a fucking nightmare, I am old enough to remember it, and I still think the damage Reagan did to this country is on par with what Trump is doing. A lot of things have always fucking sucked, I am not, and was never, clueless about that.

BUT… if you had asked me, say, in the year 2015, what percentage of national-level politicians of all stripes were in it for power, and what percentage were actually in it to effect what they viewed as the right thing — whether or not I agreed with the right thing… well, I would have said… somewhere along the line of 60% of all national-level politicians were in it for themselves and power.

A thing the two Trump administrations have done is make me realize I was insanely, woefully low in my estimate.

What do we think it really is? 10%? 5? I mean, who do we even have if we’re being generous? Massie, AOC, Cheney’s daughter, maybe Markey, Bernie… One or two of those Lincoln project Republicans, maybe. Ilhan. There’s probably a single Democratic centrist who is pure of heart, but I struggle to think of one.

I’ve always used 50-50 as my rough math for the number of people who are basically good and those who are malevolent in some way. I think maybe that number is slightly better than I thought amongst humanity at large, but man. Amongst congress? Waaaaay off.

BUT the polls keep getting better. Have you noticed that? I am in my phase where I check the Real Clear Politics all polls page every morning. I have done this for, oh, the past 10 elections maybe. And each time, when we get this close to the election, the dems have been ahead, I’ve had cautious hope, but as the days get closer, the polls tighten. This time? My god, wider and wider every day. I am so used to my optimism being dashed, but… god. Maybe we can do this this time. Maybe.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We’re listening to the debut album from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart today. Because I saw a Tweetskeet from Slumberland records a week or two ago that was like “yo we found a couple new old stock of the 2025 blue and violet reissue of this album in the warehouse get 'em while they last,” and reader that is exactly the magic words to get Rick to spend some money. So now I’m listening to it, a band I’ve not thought about in years, and it is taking me right back to 2007, back when I was pure Bostonian, and they were like the hottest band in indie and they played the Middle East upstairs and I hopped up and down for an hour, pure of heart, blissed out on the American version of jangly Sarah Records pop and it fucking ruled. There were probably a few cute indie girls there wearing corduroy. maybe that cute woman… what was her name? Abigail? That sound lady at the Middle East back then? Maybe she was doing sound.

Topic appropriate vinyl photo!

In addition to GMHHAY, and the 750 words I write to myself every morning, I then turn to my day job and write the day-job employees a morning announcement post. And I am going to share yesterday’s with you, because it’s a pretty interesting rabbit hole and illustration of one way (amongst many) that Ai is so nefariously intertwined with everything now:

Good morning, work fam. Decent revenue day but honestly I miss it when we made twice that much. Not gonna lie. This will do for today, though. Listening to Sinead O'Connor's very good late-period album "I'm not Bossy I'm The Boss" this morning. It is weird to see her with hair.

I have added the Q4 recharge days to the calendar thank you for your time and consideration in this matter. I personally woulda picked something earlier in November but you guys do you.

Will deal with the holiday in tomorrow's announcement post.

Today I would like to address my recent decision to turn off Slackbot. This is complicated, so here we go. Slack uses AWS Bedrock for its Ai integration to assorted models. They use a thing called AWS "escrow" to use these models in such a manner as to keep all of your data secure and away from the Ai companies. Great. I did not fully understand how Escrow worked originally, but Marc investigated and walked me through it and it will basically do the trick keeping our data from psychopathic EA sex cult tech lunatics. EXCEPT: a) Slack has an engineering blog post about how they use many different models depending on the Slack Ai tool and what your task is. and b) there are one or two frontier models using AWS Bedrock that are, at this time, not compliant with Escrow, thus any data you send to Slack goes to AWS, which is fine since they're listed everywhere in our DPAs, etc (along with Slack) and stays there, EXCEPT it might go to Open AI or Anthropic which is a) morally repugnant to me, b) a bad business decision strategically, as I keep telling you and several of you probably ignore, but more to the point and lethally, c) in contravention of our DPA. So, alas, until I can confirm that SlackBot, among Slack's Ai tools, does not send to Fable or Astra (i.e. OpenAI or Anthropic), we are out of luck. I have sent in a support request to Slack about this but they do not seem especially in a rush to answer me. YMMV. Feel free to get to the bottom of this research black hole yourself if you're in a rush to get them turned back on.

So, basically, in 2025, Slack went to what — I must grudgingly admit — here heroic lengths to ensure that their customer’s data did not fall into the hands of Anthropic, Google, etc. It might have even worked!

Unfortunately they also wrote some spiffing code to efficiently allocate their Ai queries to the best of all the models.

And now, the people who made their spiffing privacy tech, AWS, have put a slight hole in it where certain models to not actually work with their spiffing privacy tech offering.

Does Slack know this? Do they safely not route your queries to the non-compliant models? No idea!

Will Slack ever answer my customer service inquiry? I mean, I only pay them $20k a year, why would they fucking bother? Does anyone answer customer service inquiries anymore?

I was talking to a doctor friend of mine last night and we were talking about Ai and he had some good stories about how Epic’s Ai keeps fucking up and they were fun. One involved it diagnosing a kid with a phenomenally rare illness because it misinterpreted the nurse’s initials as a disease.

I kept trying to tell him that EPIC does not, as far as I know, make their own models, they are totally using models from other Ai companies at worst, something like AWS Bedrock with the escrow service at best, but if they are falling into this trap here, it could be a giant HIPPA violation and even Epic might not know!

I wonder, I wonder.

Jane had a lot of problems yesterday, it was rough. Scuffed up her chin by tripping while running, which was so close to her rebuilt front teeth and god, that could have been a huge catastrophe. Threw a fit about this, threw a fit about that. She is calming down quicker and apologizing more frequently and brushing her teeth almost every morning, but god. It can still be exhausting some days. So much speech policing. Don’t talk about boring adult stuff. Don’t look at your phone. These are reasonable requests in isolation and occasionally, but you could spend an hour talking kid stuff with her, make one offhand comment to your wife, whom you have not gotten to speak to all day and she will yell at you. I kinda cracked about it last night.

BUT we did have a DDJP (Daddy-Jane Dance Party for newish readers it’s been a while) in lieu of video watching and that was nice. I haven’t heard those songs in a while, which made it kind of fun. Delicate isn’t a terrible Taylor Swift song. Blackpink is ridiculous I am kinda off K Pop now. Tired of it. Nice to hear some older Olivia I guess.

But all in all, I kinda think that my daddy journey to get my kid to listen to good music has failed, so far, which makes me sad. I mean, she listens to lots of good mommy music, but I haven’t successfully gotten her into a single daddy band.

Alas.

No playlists done today, alas. So enjoy this Toadies live performance. Never really got into the Toadies. In my head I thought they were kinda dumb punk. I mean I like dumb punk. Like silly punk. Like DK or the Dead Milkmen. I was wrong. Now I gotta go listen to the entire toadies discography jesus man I got enough to do.

Tomorrow is Friday but I do not have it off alas. I will do work. I will be here for you. I am here for you. You are here for me. We are family.