The official poverty line in the United States is $32,150 / year for a family of four , maybe that threshold should be higher:   $140,000 ! When the line was set in 1963, food made up 1/3 of the average family's budget, so taking a minimal grocery list and tripling it was a reasonable calculation because food prices were far easier to track than e.g. housing prices. But in 2024, food only makes up 5%-7% of the average family's budget! Tripling the food budget to reach a minimum income no longer corresponds with "people above this line are not in crisis."

Often, we think about rules and regulations as concrete: even if the language is fuzzy (and needs interpretation), in theory there is a single "right" interpretation of the rule, and we can know if we're following the rule. One regulation where this is not the case is the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) rule that moving work between factories can cause "no undue burden" to the FAA to monitor the work. I encountered this issue when cleaning up a regulatory violation at my former company: the violation was inadvertent, we disclosed it to the FAA, and we needed to 1) catch up on undue-burden assessment requests, and 2) put better processes in-place to avoid the issue coming up again. Like other "special" projects , I was pulled in to help on this one because I could quickly absorb the data and turn it into actions and close the issues. This post will have a brief discussion on how I solved the issues, and a longer musing on the difficul...

Complying with US export regulations can be surprisingly tricky: at various times in the 2010s and 2020s I've had to be hip-deep in them as part of my various roles. Today I'll focus on an urgent assignment I was handed in late 2024. Normally I don't explicitly name my former employer when talking about projects, but I'll be referring to certain public documents so it'll be pretty obvious this time. Also, the US State Department files are exclusively downloadable PDFs, as far as I know you can't just view them online, sorry. "Uh-oh" In late 2024 my boss pulled me into a meeting to ask how I could help with an urgent project. The company had just negotiated a consent agreement and $200M fine for export violations to China, and I was one of the people who would help with the urgent work of ensuring that we weren't going to find any further violations and identifying any programs or product lines with any export-regulations risk in China. This i...