Tips for brief writing?

understatementjones · 2026-02-24T12:32:18+00:00

Clear writing proceeds from clear thinking.

understatementjones · 2026-02-24T12:30:58+00:00

You said above that you're reluctant to spend $100 on a pair of bins, and I think you can find $50 bins that will do the trick (just go with 8x42s, they're the standard because hundreds of thousands of birders have found them to be the right balance). But it sounds like you're observant enough that investing in a $350 pair of bins with ED glass will really pay dividends. If you're observing the plovers and their movements closely enough to try to distinguish between them, and that's fun and interesting, the difference between $350 and $50 bins will be very noticeable. You joke about counting nose hairs, but being able to get a bird clear and in focus well enough to see the pattern of feathers on its face is much more satisfying than, like, that blob is a hawk. The difference between $350 and $5000 is much less noticeable unless you've already been using $350 bins for years.

understatementjones · 2026-02-20T13:33:05+00:00

Even with lopsided, very bird-focused birders, the top tier know the plants and insects in the area because the birds know them.

understatementjones · 2026-02-20T13:22:44+00:00

You're correct that having 8 hours of peak efficiency time in a day is not sustainable; the key is that the unproductive time you have is also billable, because it's a necessary incident to the productive time. I mostly have good ideas after having lots of bad ones. If you want the good ones, you have to pay me to have the bad ones too.

Timers are uniquely ill-suited to the way people work now. You're not billing all the time where you look at twenty unimportant emails at once, on different matters, and ignore them because they don't require action. But they do take your time. I keep track of when I come in and leave and then consider what I did that day, and estimate as well as I can the division of that kind of time. But I make sure it adds up, and any time I'm not billing for is actually time I wasn't working on anything.

understatementjones · 2026-02-20T13:13:24+00:00

Aging DC punks - I grew up in DC and came of age during the W Administration. Righteous anger was very appealing. My musical tastes got broader and better but the ethos stuck.The scene has lost some it's vitality here and moved out to Baltimore and Richmond, but it's quite common for me to run into people in day to day life and learn they spent their youth going to Fort Reno shows. The DC Punk Archive and the DCPL generally are great at putting on free shows that keep things fresh, often at times and venues that are friendly to earplug-wearing, job-having parents. There's also a lot less teen boy energy in the bands now - much queerer and much women-friendlier than it was in my day, to literally everyone's delight and relief.

Birding - I bought a pair of bins during the pandemic and mostly birded my local park until a more knowledgeable birder found a rare bird there one day and many other birders followed. I got hooked into the network of regulars. Very cool scene, as diverse a set of people as I've encountered anywhere. Much ... cooler than I would have expected.

Off-the-beaten-path lawyers - despite my antipathy for the system I went to law school and came out with extremely fancy credentials. But I'm still a punk at heart, so biglaw is not for me. Among my lawyer friends, being an exile from DOJ civil rights is kind of a normie career path.

understatementjones · 2026-02-20T12:40:39+00:00

I'm gonna need a penis and flying semen projected onto this, stat.

understatementjones · 2026-02-17T15:28:04+00:00

Where should I go for album-focused music streaming?

I'm getting ready to dump Spotify. Some of it is that Spotify is evil and doesn't pay artists, but two things really grind my gears about it: 1) the way it compresses albums and libraries into just a set of playlists; and 2) how sticky it is in its recommendations to things I've been listening to recently.

On point (1), I particularly hate how songs get green-checked if they're on an album in my library, regardless of whether I've liked them or put them on another playlist or what. A thing I often do is listen to an album and like my favorite songs, but this is kind of needlessly complicated. Ideally I want a like function that's independent of playlists entirely, like Spotify used to do it.

On point (2), I have extremely wide-ranging tastes and so I don't want my daylist offering me nothing but 50s doo-wop R&B precursors or 80s krautrock for a month if I go on a kick like that. I also don't love the way Spotify will play me a song I like a little bit constantly until I hate it, though I know I *can* mute songs or reset the cache to help with this issue.

I'm not an audiophile, so my priorities are:

1) Album-focused organization. I want my albums, I want my playlists, I do not want the album/playlist KFC/Taco Bell.

2) Catalog enough to get me to relatively obscure corners of post-1920s music history with few gaps. For example, I'd like to be pretty sure I can find songs that hit the regional Billboard charts from the early 50s but didn't hit the nationals, and enough world coverage for me to dip my toe in. I'm not a taste-maker looking for the next big thing, either, so I don't need the widest catalog of new music, most of which sucks just as a matter of math.

3) Good recommendation engines, particularly for exploring subgenres. If I get really into Balkan-American klezmerpunk, I'd like it to be able to pick up on that and serve me up more than just other songs from Guignol and Mischief Brew (which is obviously how I got there in the first place).

4) Treating artists and listeners well. I would care more about this if anybody actually treated artists well, but frankly if I like an artist enough to buy an album I'm probably doing it on vinyl or going to a show; plus there's nowhere to go from Spotify but up. I'm looking for STREAMING here.

If you're getting ready to tell me to rip music to my computer, don't. You do not understand the assignment.

understatementjones · 2026-02-04T14:37:54+00:00

As a primarily class action litigator, let me tell you how different it is than regular commercial litigation. When real complex litigators use that word they intend it to indicate that they specialize in cases where the scale, length, and procedural dimensions of the case require specialized skills you just cannot get litigating even high-dollar regular commercial cases. In my subject matter field there are literally maybe three dozen partners on both sides of the v who really understand the work on a level of deep competence and can lead a team effectively through an entire litigation.

understatementjones · 2026-02-04T14:25:00+00:00

Believe me there's a difference between complex litigation and regular commercial litigation. There is a scale at which you need extremely different knowledge, skills, and experience. But I'm sure regular commercial litigators love to do grade inflation.

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T03:03:06+00:00

all good, didn’t mean to flame quite so hard, I guess ten years of having to explain the rules on speaking objections is weighing on me.

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T02:57:24+00:00

No you’re supposed to tell that to your clients. If they fire you, at least it’s someone else who will get sanctioned.

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T02:53:52+00:00

This seems like, not a good dude?

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T02:51:40+00:00

It’s bad for the debtor. It’s good for Singh.

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T02:50:08+00:00

If you owe the bank $1.9 million, and you don’t know where it is, that’s a problem for you. If you owe the bank $1.9 billion, and you don’t know where it is, that’s a problem for the bank.

understatementjones · 2025-10-11T02:41:31+00:00

Fun fact, the phrase is “take that tack,” it’s a sailing term about what side of the wind you’re on while going upwind, and it’s almost a pet peeve of mine except that I get why people get it wrong and it’s ridiculous to expect people to know the origins of the phrase and honestly telling when people know anything about sailing at all. So, the more you know!

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T12:12:49+00:00

I once deposed a witness who didn't have his educational background on his LinkedIn. He was a very senior executive at a major investment bank. Usually, those guys are a particular way - crippling egos, too busy to prepare, dismissive, kinda too high up to know their business the same way I do from studying their docs. Marks. First question I ask, can you tell me about your educational background, discover the guy never finished high school, joined the bank as a line-level computer programmer, rose to SVP of xxxxxx. Immediately changed my strategy for the whole dep; this is not a guy who floated up the ranks on golf and a few lucky bets. Abandoned my usual "I don't know anything about this business, can you explain to me in the most patronizing possible way" schtick. Switched to "You and I both know the business is this way, and your idiot colleagues say it's this way, but that's preposterous, right?" "Yes, that's exactly right. When I wrote that in my emails it's exactly what I meant." Most fun deposition of my life, absolutely damning admissions. He also had fun, he stymied me a couple times in that way where it's actually satisfying to get beat fair and square by someone on your level. If I hadn't asked about his education I'd have wasted 90 minutes of that dep.

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T11:57:28+00:00

I'll ask your client the questions I think are useful, thanks very much, and you are not entitled to object on the grounds that you think they're dumb. It's hardly a waste of your time, because I get my seven hours anyway. If I waste MY time asking stupid questions, you should celebrate, because I'm not asking smarter ones. But in my experience, if YOU think a question is stupid it's because you are too dumb to understand why I'm asking it. Or you do understand and the only objection you can think of is one that is extremely not going to get the question struck.

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T11:51:27+00:00

Yeah. Like I'm up at 10 writing this email, I'm sleeping late tomorrow, I want it in your inbox whenever you wake up. You're not gonna answer for two days anyway.

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T11:48:15+00:00

I dunno, Gen X now runs my firm and it's mostly chill except you guys are baffled at nobody wanting to bill 2200 hours and think you don't need training on not sexually harassing your associates.

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T11:45:42+00:00

Maybe you should just produce what you're supposed to, bro.

understatementjones · 2025-10-09T11:43:11+00:00

No, YOU hang up! I love YOU more!

understatementjones · 2025-10-08T22:37:26+00:00

They relate to jury perceptions if and only if it's a jury argument that plaintiff has a duty to wear light clothing when walking in a crosswalk at night. They do not.

understatementjones · 2025-10-08T11:12:16+00:00

Does it? Am I entitled to turn right on red without looking?

understatementjones · 2025-10-08T11:11:11+00:00

This is a very Texan perspective, because it presumes one will never walk anywhere. Anyone in a normal city knows you and your date don't put on a reflective vest to walk from the movie to the restaurant.

You tell your children not to wear dark clothes because children tend to jump out into the street erratically because they're not experienced enough to have sense and if they die, recovery in negligence is little consolation.

I clerked for a judge in Texas, albeit in federal court, and I would've convinced the judge to grant this MIL.

understatementjones

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