AI forever?

As I process the ongoing stream of messianic enthusiasm for AI I continue to come back to the central problem: how are a bunch of turbocharged nerds who are excited by delusions of grandeur going to solve the fundamental problems of the world? Our biggest problems are that too many people -- rural, urban, suburban -- feel disconnected and lost in the world, unable to do something that both feeds their families, helps others, and allows them some degree of enjoyment. We should be focusing on the things that allow a greater number of people in the world to progress up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Full stop.

Right now the most important task is to calm the geopolitical situation so that a global conflagration doesn't escalate and also to manage down internal tensions so that internal conflicts don't ramp up. The best way to make that happen is to effect more person to person contact across social and geographical boundaries. People need to understand other peoples' challenges and perspectives to grasp complexity. 

Concentrating ever greater economic power in the hands of a few nerds won't do it. If the stories of Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk etc. don't make this clear, I don't know what will. Bill Gates offers us hope, but there are challenges even with that model. I deeply appreciate how Bill has chosen to spend the latter part of his life. He's a brilliant guy who tries to make the best possible use of his wealth. I should read his blog more to piggyback on his reflections. But having philosopher-kings determine the best use of aggregated wealth is ultimately suboptimal. 

As for AI, for sure it can and will do a lot of good. But it ain't all that.

Dog Tired

Fell asleep last night more or less in the middle of doing my evening Duolingo. Hard to tell what's making me so tired, particularly after a restful weekend down at the beach with Jonathan and Sharon. Driving back on Sunday evening? Just watching Jonathan in his continued quest to master the repair of any item possible (HVAC, golf card, you name it)? The break in routine? A strenuous match against Z last night (6-4, 1.6)?  Or is it just getting old? Probably a mix of all these things.

In any case, it's all good. It was kind of refreshing to pass out under the weight of my own exhaustion rather than after a complete menu of pre-bedtime YouTube consumption. It was all rather reminiscent of Roy Atwater falling asleep on the recliner on his porch after a day of tending his pigs. Good living.

A secret mission

Sometime a few months ago, when I was averaging about 420 points a day on DuoLingo, I decided to raise my average to 500 points a day. Given that I was maybe 220 days into a streak that was no mean feat. Over the 80-odd days I needed to average about 720 points a day to get there. It will come as a surprise to few of you that I did it, and I did it on my 300th day, on which I clocked 150,000 total points. Somewhere in there I finished the Ukrainian course and switched to Japanese as a third language to rotate in there with weeks of Italian and German.

It was all a bit of a grind, but honestly it was better than focusing on staying in the Diamond League, which I have nonetheless done this whole time. For now I am going to hold off on setting new aggressive goals, but I'll try to maintain this 500 points a day pace because it's really not that hard. And I'm learning stuff.

Continued triumph

My victorious streak on the Farm Men's 3.5 ladder continued yesterday evening, as I beat a guy 6-1, 6-2. Adam had had more trouble with this guy than I did, and since Adam and I are pretty even (though historically he probably holds a 60/40 advantage in our matches), I consider this a victory. Mostly over myself, honestly. I decided on a strategy (defense, wear the guy out, let him make mistakes and beat himself up mentally while staying chipper) and stuck to it.

At this point in time I am 4-1 and leading the competition, since the one guy who beat me, nay destroyed me, has dropped out, probably having been kicked upstairs to the ranks of 4.0s. For the most part this is the most success I've had in an individual sport since my 9th grade track season, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it's very much a mental competition in which I could easily torpedo myself by getting off kilter.

We'll see how it goes. Adam and I will have an official match before too long. Today we will play unofficially.

Guilty by association?

Continuing forward in the Bible, for whatever reason, I find this passage, Colossians 3:18-24

¹⁸Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. ¹⁹Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. ²⁰Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. ²¹Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. ²²Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. ²³Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, ²⁴since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

To the modern eye it's impressive how naturally and seemlessly the text flows from talking about wives and children to slaves, who were just that integral a part of the landscape that you couldn't not address them. To the modern eye that throws the whole enterprise into question. Were wives and children really so analogous to slaves? Certainly even for me there's a bit of a gut punch as you read through it. One wonders how the clergy in today's Black church thinks through this stuff. The passage does go on to enjoin masters to do right by slaves, to be sure, which might have been pretty revolutionary at the time.

And then it immediately goes on to speak very abstractly to everyone, in a way I suspect was novel. (Colossians 4:5-6)

Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.

All in all I continue to see how the Bible study project intrigues so many. But there are so many other books too. To say nothing of movies, music, blogs, YouTube serieses, and the like.

Birthday weekend

We stayed deliberately quiet here on the home front this past weekend, which of course marked the celebration of my 58th birthday. Honestly we were more celebrating the very good news that a strange bump on Mary's brother Rob's chest turns out to be not male breast cancer, which is a apparently a thing, if a very rare one. But not on Rob's body. It was some other wierd shit, but benign.

On Saturday I did as little as possible, which turned out to be quite little. I had told my neighbor Caroline that I would put together the electric mower that we had bought for our two households after years of borrowing their gas mower (and sometimes taking suboptimal care of it due to my personal idiocy). That 100% did not happen. 

The one thing I did do on Saturday was a second round of pollen remediation out on the screened in porch, in preparation for having the family (including Rob and Graham, Mom and Matt) over for my birthday feast of chinese food and coconut cake (from New Hope Market). I swept while listening to Bella White, then I even did some raking of the patio. On Sunday I went further and actually broke out our old vacuum cleaner (after asking Mary's permission) and vacuumed the porch. It didn't let me listen to music while working, but man was it gratifying. Shout out to Caroline Slade for the vacuum cleaner tip.

It turns out that a more or less usable screened in porch was the very best birthday present I could have given to myself. I had breakfast out there this morning and it was perfect.

Sweetgrass

Reading McPhee's 1986 Rising from the Plains, was reminded of this film

If you haven't seen it, you should. Ununseeable once seen.

No surprises here

The Journal yesterday came out with a story about how ancillary costs of homeownership (insurance, maintenance, taxes) have been rising along with mortgages. I also saw in the Economist not long ago -- in a story about the acceleration of the melting of Antarctica -- that the Army Corps of Engineers are projecting that the cost to build a megadyke near Galveston will be $57 billion, mostly to protect the petrochemical industry around Houston which keeps getting pummeled by storms. That's the initial projection. For comparison's sake, the 2022 CHIPS Act authorized $39 billion to support development of domestic leading-edge microchip manufacturing.

A big driver here is climate change, no question -- hurricanes, fires, etc. driving up insurance premiums. If government won't price the risk, the insurance industry will. But there are also a labor supply questions as well as a monetary supply ones. Lack of labor drives up construction costs (we could let more immigration happen). Excess liquidity feeds inflation, making it harder for local governments to hire, so they have to raise taxes to pay up to staff up.

Again, we could have addressed macro monetary issue after the pandemic-driven rapid expansion of monetary supply by raising taxes, but everybody was like: "that's my money you're trying to take", despite the fact that the money hadn't existed until the government printed it. Inflation is a tax by other means.

But the government does need to look at expenditures too. We cannot cut back on military spending now with Russia and China driving so much of the world towards autocracy. If we believe in anything, if WWII was fought for anything, we need to maintain our strength while also driving our allies to do the same. Discretionary government spending aside from defense barely moves the needle, but some sacrifices will need to be made on a pro forma basis. Entitlements are the only meaningful lever we have to pull, so we need to pull it.

A new day

After a league match yesterday evening (6-2, 6-0), I got back to my car and saw I had a lot of texts. Only one was important. Someone very dear to me had passed in Brooklyn.

There has been no announcement yet, so I will stay detail lite. I was reminded of how it occurred to me some years ago that one of the curses of knowing a lot of people is that, once we reach a certain age, someone we know will always be fighting cancer in one way or another. Right now I have several, some quite close to me.

And perhaps I am getting to the age now that someone will always be dying, though it feels a little early for that. Time will tell. As I have remarked before, I do hope that I will start to see an offsetting quantity of weddings and births happening amongst my broad brood. Niklaus did just tell me that Elsa and Eric are officially wed now, in the eyes of NYC and, one may hope, the Lord, though their party wedding in Switzerland, to which people like me aren't invited, is not yet till summer. Eric and Anna's girl Emily is also engaged, up in Washington Heights. I better get a freaking invite to that one. Meanwhile my cousin of some sort Madelyn (my mother's sister's daughter's girl) has announced she is pregnant with her second over in England. So I guess that counts. 

Another goodbye

I went out to Saxapahaw yesterday for the memorial for Dexter Romweber. It was lovely to see a wide range of people and to remember Dexter, though he was, in truth, a cypher. Everybody had great Dexter stories, indeed, how could you not. Even as he was the very embodiment of music and art, he was also in many ways a carefully calculated legend in the making his whole life. But few seemed really close to him. I know I never was.

There was lots of great music, which honored the seriousness with which Dexter took music, rising to a surprising crescendo when two guys from the band Starcrawler -- itself a full band, not a two-piece -- ripped the place up in a guitar-drums Kiss cover and a traditional ("Froggie Went a Courtin" which Dexter was apparently known to play) in which they thrashed around in a way that seemed to raise Dexter from the dead. I was almost moved to tears. (go to 2:12:50 to see these kids. The second song at 2:15:55 blows the doors off the place)

John Howie was also great doing a George Jones song. That was one of the several ways that the day was evocative of the day, almost a decade back, when we had first gathered at Saxapahaw to send off Steve Akin, who had like Dexter, like Tim Brower, basically lived and then died art and rock and roll. I think maybe that's why Marvin didn't come.

Witch trials

Listening to Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Interesting that Christians sought to ban Harry Potter books because they promote belief in magic, when so much of what legitimates Christ (and even Old Testament figures) is magic he performs (loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc), as indeed was a non-trivial amount of the Old Testament (parting of the Red Sea, water from stone, walls of Jericho tumbling down, birth of Isaac when Sarah was 95ish). Even modern day preachers profess to do magic (faith healing). 

The problem, it would seem, is not that reading Harry Potter inculcates in readers a false belief in magic, but that it exposes them to the charms of the wrong kind of magic, the magic of the wrong team.

As an aside, one almost has to wonder why the Christian right has not inveighed against Duke's popularization of its mascot "the Blue Devils." Particularly when the support thereof so literally involves the support of the dark (blue) vs. the righteous light blue of UNC, the university of the people. Indeed, is it not strange that Duke Chapel, one of the tallest church buildings in NC, is part of an institution associated with such blasphemy? And what of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons? Is all of this cool with fundamentalists?

My greatest accomplishment

We were discussing something pertaining to our cat Leon this morning and I made Mary laugh. When I can do that, I consider it really my greatest accomplishment. We have recently gotten to the point where we have been together half of my life and almost half of hers, so she has been exposed relentlessly to my "humor," my timing, my jokes, all of it. So getting a laugh out of her when we are not around other people and she is just pretending that I am witty is not chopped liver.

Medical history in the present

Somewhere in the last year or so the spouse of a friend of mine had a heart attack. I see her a few times a year on Zoom calls and if the stars align when I pass through the town where she lives, which has happened less frequently in recent years. She didn't really make a big deal of it on one Zoom, so when she referred back to it in passing in a subsequent call I was a little surprised, which admittedly was my bad.

In retrospect, I think it's rather exemplary. As we age we will all be passing through medical crises of various sorts and we have the option of being more or less transparent about them. The more one calls attention to one's own medical crises and those of one's family, the more one creates reporting relationships to the rest of the world: they expect to be updated regularly, which becomes a burden. Hence the popularity of such sites as CaringBridge which allow people to send out updates to targeted audiences of friends and family.

When friends get together they don't want to get dragged down into all of that. We all know things get hard. It's part of the deal with life. Getting involved in a competitive cycle of my woes are worse than your woes is no fun for anyone.

Conflicted victory

In this week's 3.5 ladder match I beat a guy 6-3, 6-2. On the one hand, it's nice to win. On the other, it's not really pleasant to make somebody feel crappy about themself, as I could tell he did after I got a rhythm. The guy is 71 years old and honestly I will be super fortunate if I am as fit and mobile as he is when I reach that age, a super nice guy.

With all of that said, I am somewhat proud of having had the mental discipline to go ahead and beat him as opposed to taking stupid risks and letting him back in the match. I kept doing the things that were thwarting him and they kept working. It was not easy to maintain my focus like that.  

Parasites vs decay

Up at a friend's lake house over the weekend, we saw some changes to the landscape. Where there had been a derelict gas station/convenience store by the interstate, there is now a "Games of Skill" place (i.e. gambling), matching the one across the street from PayJay's -- the historic corner store a couple of miles off the highway that has been there for years. Is it better that at least there are utilities running in these buildings instead of having them slowly decay and collapse? Maybe.

Meanwhile, next to the old corner store a shiny Dollar General has sprung up. We had to take a trip there because the idiot who brought coffee brought only enough for one day. In the past I've been able to score Starbucks at rural Dollar Generals. This place had only Dunkin Donuts, and for the price of $10 for a 12 oz bag. Even in the post-pandemic world of more expensive coffee that is paying up quite a bit.

We are rooting for PayJay's, though I must say I was disappointed when I went in there and the grill wasn't up and running when I went in there in the morning for the milk forgotten by the breakfast crew. I had been hoping perhaps for a quick biscuit.

Quick resolution of a tax issue

When I got back from DC a couple of weeks ago I found a letter from the IRS telling me that we owed $12k for failure to file 2022 taxes for an LLC I had managed for Mary and her photo friends from grad school who were trying to publish a book in honor of their friend Jeannette, who succumbed to cancer a few years back. Then the project lost steam. I had agreed to handle the finances and taxes because... I am an idiot. That's enough detail.

The note from the IRS instructed me to call an 800 number to discuss the issue. Since it was late March when I did so and therefore peak season for filing, I approached this task with dread. But I went ahead and did it. A nice young woman from the IRS was able to resolve it for me in just under half an hour. This was a very pleasant surprise. I assume this was because the 800 number I had was for a specific use case other than people filing taxes for last year, so I wasn't part of the general flow. That's good management and process design. 

Since I had relied on guidance from the IRS website in not filing the return in a year with no income and no expenses, I was annoyed when I got the initial notice. To say the least. But it all turned out OK in the end, so I guess I'll just take the win and move on. It also gave me a nice if not scintillating blog topic.

The Atlantic today

 The Atlantic numbers among the many publications we pay for. Often, that means it's among the many publications I don't read. But sometimes I pick it up and read it. Of late, it often seems like a voice of moderation and sanity in today's often overwrought and cartoonish world of hyperventilating obsequious social justice warriordom. The most recent issue, for instance, contains a reasoned piece about Woodrow Wilson, who despite being a prig and a particularly racist and a guy who made some very bad mistakes around WWI (not pressing for peace in 1916, sending many thousands of US trips to their deaths by not digesting the lessons already learned on its battlefields -- all of this war stuff is entirely news to me in the last couple of hours, by the way) was a real force for good both in enacting progressive reforms and in setting out a vision for America's place in an insitution- and rule-governed world order that we are still striving to achieve, nationalist-isolationsts be damned.

There's also a great piece on playwright Michael R. Jackson, a guy I'd never heard of but am now very intrigued by, and how Jackson seeks to surmount all the reductive focus on race, sexual orientation, blah blah blah and create good and deep work that elicits a variety of human responses in different audience members.

This is all despite being owned by the Emerson Collective, the non-profit arm of the empire of Laurene Powell Jobs (spouse of Steve), which sounds like it is generally an empire of firmly left-leaning money seeking to do trendy things, most of which I agree with, of course. It's good the Atlantic appears to have some editorial and intellectual independence.

The Walking Path (from 2006)

Going through old drafts for posts I found this one. This was at Union Central, a life insurance company in northern Cincinnati where I worked on a project in 2006: 

________________________

Here in the basement my midwestern insurer, I noticed a sign overhead in the tiled hallway leading to the men's room across the hall from the other men's room, which was closed for housekeeping. The sign said "walking path," and pointed down another tiled hallway. Intrepidly, I set out along it. At the end of the tiled hallway, the path entered onto a long carpeted hallway with fetching fluorescent lights. I took this too.

It was lined with boxes of old documents, and occasionally gave way to views of large rooms filled with paper files.

At the end of that hallway, it turned down a short hallway, and then doubled back along the length of the building again, another long box-lined hallway. Towards the end, and old forelorn mainframe cabinet.

Mysteriously, when the hallway ended, there was no sign for the path. Could I have lost the thread? There was a door to the garage, which was actually a loading dock with a few fancy cars (Jags and Caddies), which curiously supplemented my comment the other day that there were no fancy cars in the parking lot, only workaday vehicles. The executives had hidden the fine rides in the bowels of the building.

My walk ended, I found it hard to concentrate on work, dazzled as I was by the glamour of it all.

More thoughts on the Bible

I keep slogging through the Bible. Just got done with Galatians, in which Paul argues that not being circumcised demonstrates superiority in that Christians are following and made whole by the love of and spirit of Christ rather than by fealty to the law. In some sense, we are getting somewhere. In another, who cares?

At a very high level the biggest problem I'm having with the Bible right about now is that, to borrow one of its metaphors, it builds a castle on a little bit too much sand. So much of Jesus's authority seems to derive from magic he performs: multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc. Which is all good and well, save for the fact that it's not replicable. Or, rather, that some portion of it (scaled up food production, medicine augmented by hand-washing, antibiotics, pasteurization, etc) has only become replicable thanks to the Enlightenment and scientific method, thousands of years later after a couple of millennia of very slow technological advances while much of the west was waging silly wars in Christ's name. It might perhaps have been better for humanity to have been more focused on abstracting up from Aristotle, assimilating more math from the near East, other technology from China and appreciating the local wisdom and understanding of native peoples around the world as they were encountered, assuming that exploration and colonialism happened in roughly analogous fashion in the absence of a religion that encouraged conquest.

The rabbinical and monastic communities seem to indicate that if you devote your life to studying the holy texts and cross-referencing them, you can get to a good place, ish. But is that the highest and best use of one's time and are those really the best texts to spend all that time reading? Maybe, maybe not. Right now I'm not feeling it. Not sure if I slog on or take a break. 

Subway at a Virginia truck stop

On my ride up to DC last week I was excited to get back to a Subway and get our family's favorite sandwich (rotisserie chicken on whole wheat with pepper jack... I'll spare you all the granular detail). It's a sandwich we Mary, Natalie and I settled on after a lot of trial and error over the years for our jaunts up and down the coast to the Northeast, so we were very sad when Subway briefly axed the rotisserie chicken from its menus during the pandemic.

Right around noon I got off of 85 at a truck stop between the VA-NC border and Petersburg. When I walked into the Subway section of it I was surprised by an exceptionally enthusiastic greeting from the woman at the register. No argument there. It being the very tip of noon, there were maybe eight people in front of me, but that's what one gets for stopping right at the statutory hour of the mid-day repast. I stood and waited.

Shortly thereafter a few Black* people came in and the woman behind the counter greeted them with cheer equal to what she had offered me and then asked: "Are y'all off of that bus? How much time did they give you?" The newcomers said something like 15-20 minutes and the woman behind the counter said she was pretty sure she could get them through in time. This was the moment of my fail. I probably should have offered to let them go in front of me right about then. I was slightly pressed for time in that I wanted to get to my hotel in downtown DC before rush hour and then to my co-working space to work on my presentation for the next day. But it's not like I had a bus that might leave if I didn't make it through on time. I'm pretty sure they got them served anyway. They were cranking.

*I draw attention to their race only because the woman at the register was white and country and in all likelihood a Trump voter. The urban intelligentsia's view that that makes them entirely, inherently and reflexively racist is entirely devoid of nuance. Plus we're as racist as fuck in our own way anyhow. We just mask it better with pieties, yard signs and layers of bureaucracy.

A banner day

Yesterday was a super happy day in our home. After running a disciplined process of finding and following up on leads for summer internships, Graham got an offer from the Carolina Population Center up on campus to work this summer. It's perfect. 40 hours, working on site, getting some exposure to using Stata (some software that economists use a lot), for 8 weeks. Which means he gets some real job experience, learns to work with others, is supervised by someone other than me, has some time off before and after the job starts to maybe travel a little but certainly to sleep in some. And for all this they'll even be paying him some money.

It's awesome. I was such an idiot about this kind of thing when I was his age. My stated position at the time was that having a realish job like this would be soul-sucking and... I don't even know what I thought. Really it was just pigheaded stupidity, laser focus on academics because that's all I knew about, and fear of doing something different. Much better than Graham should learn to work in normal office to see that it's OK and that you can learn stuff while doing so.

Go Graham!

The Bond King

When Mary and I were down at Circle City Books in Pittsboro back in January I picked up this book about Bill Gross and PIMCO. It's a typical rise and fall story. I hadn't realized how integral Gross was to the early stages of active bond investing when he got PIMCO going back in the 70s. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because everything I read over time indicates how much the science and practice of finance has progressed over the course of my lifetime, which also indicates how humorous the idea of efficient markets back in the early days of its advancement, back in the 50s and 60s. Back then there was still money lying in the streets for those who worked hard. The problem was that with a growing population, protected sinecures for white men and endless improvement to be had in all facets of commerce, there just wasn't much need to work that hard, for the most part.

Anyway, The Bond King by Mary Childs of NPR's Planet Money is pretty good but no better than that. It could have been trimmed by 100 pages with no great loss. The story of Gross being a continuous dickhead to everyone around him just isn't that interesting.

At the end of the book it was interesting to see that Gross trots out the belated recognition that he's on the autism spectrum as a justification of why was so rude to everyone. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. I know lots of people on the autism spectrum and though sometimes they commit social gaffes (who doesn't? I remember the time the Bordens from Durham were over at our house for Christmas and I got out the nail clippers because somehow I had never registered that it was typically done in private), being autistic is not a social get out of jail free card. Decent autistic people have consciences and moral compasses.

Jah save us from Great Men

Jason Zweig's column in the Journal tells the story of Micro Strategy, whose founder has been buying up Bitcoin for years now, recently going so far as to issue a big chunk of convertible debt to do so. His company is valued at a substantial premium to the value of its underlying software business plus the Bitcoin holdings (even with Bitcoin hovering around an all-time high) because the market imputes to it a "genius premium." What absolute and utter bollocks.

All too often the world lets itself be held in thrall to the exploits of "great men." Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, even Warren Buffett and Barack Obama, everybody wants to line up and worship them. It's sheerest laziness and just a shitty way to be.

If we want to look for a leader right about now, I would suggest MacKenzie Scott.