The Big, Beautiful Pile of Shit

The Republicans think it's all one big fucking joke. "DOGE," "One Big Beautiful Bill." It would be utterly infuriating had we not become accomplished to such unprecedented loads of continual nonsense and duplicity.

Yeah, the Democrats are far from perfect. Jill Biden and the rest of those surrounding Biden seem to have screwed us all pretty good. If Biden had degenerated so far why didn't he just step down and let Kamala be President? It would have been fine. The USA would have had its first female President.

Frankly, Biden being out of the public eye was fine with me. I am sick of thinking about the President all the time. He is the leader of the country, sure, but at the end of the day he is just another public employee and we don't really want any given living human dominating our lives. I think real Christians would much rather be thinking about Christ, Buddhists about Buddha, Muslims about Mohammed, etc. We would all be happier if the President was smaller. So Biden having a limited footprint on our lives would have been fine, had it been because he was just focusing on doing his job. 

New World Order with fries and a shake

After reading Anne Applebaum's Autocracy Inc which lays out ways in which the word's autocracies (China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Hungary, El Salvador and increasingly the USA, amongst others) provide services to and support one another on the world stage, I began to muse on Ian Bremmer's thesis that the world has new major strategic actors, namely the megatech companies we all know and love to hate but cannot do without. Then I read a review in the Economist of a couple of books about Yevgenii Prigozhin, Wagner Group and its successor entities (most notably the Afrika Corps, currently enjoying semi-autonomy in central Africa).

The big state powers sense the threat, hence Xi Jinping's decision to disappear Jack Ma of Alibaba a few years back and also to take other steps to make sure others don't experience similar rises. Pony Ma of Tencent has kept a low profile to avoid a similar fate.

Elon Musk, even aside from his DOGE doings, has already become a semi-autonomous political actor, alternately providing and withholding Starlink service to the Ukrainian armed forces depending on how he felt it would impact his relationship with Putin (but really, presumably, with Russia's sworn butt-buddy China, which is large enough to meaningfully impact Musk's business strategy).

What if, I mused, the megatech companies were to dispense with the mediation of nation-states and just pursue relationships with private security firms like Afrika Corps or, to dredge one up from the not-too-distant past, Blackwater?

I discussed this over dinner with Graham and Mary last week and Graham argued convincingly for an impressive number of reasons that it wasn't feasible. I had thought that at least it would bubble up in consciousness in art: books and movies, just as the Blackwater-Halliburton relationship was contemplated back in the days of the Iraq War.

On this, at least, I was not wrong. Cue this weekend's release of Mountainhead on Max.

Embracing the Grind, but really?

Was up at 8am this morning to go have breakfast with the Mayor. I talked to her about a client matter, then we talked about other stuff, including the fact that I am only on one Board now since I left the LFA Board a couple of years ago and am marginally underemployed in doing stuff around public goods.

So she suggested that I run for Town Council. I guess I should have seen this coming since she and David Schwartz had tried to talk me into doing it years ago, but I wasn't really thinking. On the one hand, it seems like it would be a lot of work. On the other hand, it would be good work, as she pointed out.

Sigh. It's a good point. 

Mary is not in favor of this.

An AI for wisdom

Just read an Economist leader on the fact that the Chinese government is egging its champions to focus on practical applications for AI, as opposed to the maniacal mad dash towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) prioritized by the West's tech titans. The first thing that echoes in my brain is Robert Plant saying "Does anyone remember laughter?"

This is quickly shunted from my frontal lobe by the question of wisdom. There have been a lot of smart people in history, boatloads of geniuses. Many are remembered within their domains of interest, some are elevated above that level to more universal recognition, but to a certain extent that's a function of the reach and dominance of their cultures. Think Shakespeare. A genius for sure (if he even existed and/or created all the works included in the accepted canon of his work), but surely the unversality of his reach was facilitated by the British and American empires and the reach of English as a language. And sure, there were lots of scientific geniuses whose inventions have made all of our lives better.

But there are fewer ethical geniuses. There are those who founded the great religions plus a few more: Gandhi, King, Mandela, maybe St Francis. It is odd to think that all the names that spring to mind come from the 20th century, perhaps it's a function of our short memory or of the fact that modern media (print, film and their associated distribution networks) allow for generalized ethical leaders in a way that wasn't feasible before. Or perhaps that democracy itself encourages their appearance and/or discourages regimes from snuffing them out.

In any case, more than any kind of AI, we need ethical leaders. More than knowledge now, we need wisdom. 

An hour or so later, it occurs to me that perhaps what we need is not so much ethical geniuses, since, thinking back to Kierkegaarde's statement in his prolegomonon or whatever to Fear and Trembling, there is no progress in ethics. We all begin back at the same place. What we need instead is for people to go consistently to their respective churches, temples, 12-step meetings, community gardens and organizations, etc., and reflect deeply and properly on what they are doing each day. And then do the right thing.

It would be nice to see the total amount of charitable giving in the US rise above the 2% mark to which it has long been pinned, tax rates notwithstanding.

Debt service vs. Trade deficit

Trump has continual paroxysms over the US trade deficit. By buying things from the rest of the world, he tells us, the US is being "ripped off" blah blah blah continual nonsensical bloviation "I have really big hands." In fact under Trump the trade deficit stayed more or less constant with how it had been under Obama, even growing a little bit. It had been much worse leading up to the financial crisis, though to call it worse is to imply that it's bad at all and I'm not ready to concede that. The deficit got bigger under Biden. I'm fine with that. We purchased goods from lower cost providers.

You would think he would be equally if not more concerned about needing to pay interest on the debt to foreigners. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost to service the debt will approach $1 trillion in 2025 and will rise from there.

Foreign holders of US debt, firstly Japan, China and the UK but lots of others too, hold about 30% of our debt. So we're likely paying them $300 billion a year for having lent us money. That's about $900 a year for each and every one of us. In general I think we are better off buying things from lower cost providers and being a reliable enough counterparty for them that they are happy to buy our debt at lower rather than higher prices.

Which would imply that we should take deficits seriously and try to both exercise budgetary restraint -- for instance by taking steps to put Social Security and Medicare on firmer footing, which would be financially meaningful, instead of just fucking around, firing federal employees willy-nilly and canceling grants for which funds have already been allocated -- and raise more revenue by increasing taxes on those who can pay instead of pursuing long-since debunked supply side economic voodoo.

When the bond market is unhappy with what the government is doing, the cost to service the debt goes up. This is a bad dynamic. Republicans should think about this before doing stupid shit and Democrats should too.

Shrinking universities, shrinking GDP

The Journal ran a story today about how non-flagship state universities are shrinking all around America and taking the economies of the communities around them. How stupid is that.

America's universities have been engines of growth for a long time. As I noted a few weeks back in this post, the birthrate decline being harped upon by Mr. Turbosperm Elon Musk and other rabid pro-natalists with no credible policy ideas has been going on for a long time. For the most part, the population side of America's economic growth has been tied to immigration, and our universities have been a great way to encourage the middle-class of the developing world to come to America and pay money while learning English and American ways in general. I can't pull statistics out of my butt but I am willing to bet that the best broad cohort of immigrants has come through universities.

And it can't all be Ivy League and Public Ivies. There's not enough of it to go around. But the great thing is that we've been educating a professoriate for decades and there are solid and dedicated faculty members spread throughout America's universities. No less a luminary than Kyla Scanlon, the shiniest economist of her generation and a person of considerable wisdom for her tender age, went to Western Kentucky University. Not the fanciest university in America but obviously they have som very fine good people there.

So instead of randomly grabbing immigrant students out of dorms and off the streets and throwing them in holding facilities to show how big and bad we are we should be actively recruiting cash-paying foreign students to come to our universities, live in the dorms, eat in the restaurants and become the productive, educated Americans we so desire.

We don't understand what a competitive advantage this is and won't till it's gone.

Small triumph

Started off today's league match with a guy roughly 20 years my junior in a bit of a funk, rusty from not having played much in the last couple of weeks, feeling pretty low energy. I served horribly, lots of double faults. He was breaking my serve, and rightly so. He served well. 

But I kept breaking him back. I took him to a tiebreaker, where I defeated him 7-5. Really he should have won, but he didn't. I did. I kept my head in the game and refocused on winning the next point, when I did just often enought to squeak through. After 90 minutes, he had to go home because he has a newborn daughter and is on a short leash. I think it was a little demoralizing for him. Which was exactly my point, in the end. We'll have to finish up another day. Honestly he was lucky he had an excuse to leave because I was ready to run him into the ground.

Back home, I showered outside and enjoyed the cool breeze blowing around me and marveled at the flowers growing on the fence on the border of our yard and the neighbors -- put there many years ago so that the older woman next door wouldn't have to watch my dad toodle around naked all the time. I had been neglecting the outdoor shower thus far this season. No longer. 

Frames of reference

All too often these days you see statements like "the highest/lowest since" followed by a recent time: "lowest housing starts since the last quarter of 2022" or "lowest imports since the first quarter of 2023." This is nothing masquerading as something. All that is being said is that a given phenomenon is occurring within a normal range. Try "lowest since before the financial crisis" or "highest since the first Bush administration." Then you've got my attention. Otherwise find some news on which to report.

Revisiting "The Power Broker"

I recently listened to my friend Geoff Kabaservice's podcast with Marc Dunkelman, author of the recent book Why Nothing Works. The book echoes much of the "abundance" line of thinking flowing out of Ezra Klein's well-oiled machine, arguing from a "liberal" perspective that America has bound itself up to tightly in red tape, which makes it impossible to get anything done. Trump et al would not disagree.

One legacy that is being rethought is that of Robert Moses and indeed of Robert Caro's bio of him The Power Broker and the extent to which it has reshaped thought about Moses himself and his work. Dunkelman points out that Caro works hard to take Moses down, but that it was Moses who got things built, and that after Moses and Caro it got ever harder to get things built. I am oversimplifying here due to the cadence of this blog and my days, you must understand.

A few thoughts. First, I don't think Caro's goal in his book is entirely to tear Moses down. Reading Caro, one cannot but be in a certain awe of Moses' intense productivity, the amount of stuff he got done, the number of jobs he held, even as one appreciates the ironies of such facts as that Moses never had a driver's license but would sit in the back of his limo reading and dictating furiously to his admin who traveled with him. Also, although the Dunkelman (and Klein and others going back at least a decade) point out that the NIMBYism which has grown out of the Jane Jacobs/Lewis Mumford line of thought that constrained Moses has gotten out of control, I think nobody really would have wanted Moses to get his way and build cross-town expressways at 14th, 42nd, and 72nd, or wherever he was proposing. Moses needed constraining. Nor would many fault Caro's critique of Moses's failure to provide for right of way for a train when building the the Van Wyck Expressway (from Manhattan to Idewild/JFK), or the fact that when he built expressways on Long Island headed out towards the beach and suburbs he intentionally built overpasses too low to permit buses so as to admit only cars and keep out the riffraff.

In short, Caro's point is that Moses was a complex figure who did incredible things. Some of the sacrifices required of communities were sad but necessary. But on some specific points he was pretty evil. And we are glad people rose up to slow him down some, even if by now we can see that some of the constraining forces his opponents gave rise to have ossified into counterproductive forces we should reconsider.

A Bend in the River

Don't know where I picked up a copy of this 1979 VS Naipaul novel about a South Asian merchant from the coast of an unnamed East African nation who migrates a sleepy town in the nation's interior after some political dislocation on the coast. While he's there a new regime rises and drifts towards more and more authoritarianism. 

Ever for someone with a background in Russian literature, Naipaul novels tend to move rather slowly (based on a sample of two novels, admittedly). For a while the whole thing was rather bogged down. Then a compatriot of his from the Indian community on the coast shows up in town, riding shotgun with a new development including a Polytechnic institute and some expatriots up the river a few miles. Eventually our hero gets integrated into that community and, fortunately for the reader, having frequent sex with this Belgian woman. Though the sex isn't described in a lot of salacious detail, it's nice to feel our narrator's pulse quicken, and the plot with it.

Ultimately he travels to London and then back again, only to find the cordon of the state tightening around him. It's pretty dicey thereafter.

Overall a good solid novel. Naipaul has his own groove and takes us places we mightn't otherwise go. It's important as well that as an author he precedes the highly moralizing tone of most later "post-colonial" literature, and indeed that the South Asian commercial communities in Africa occupy something of an interstitial space between the all-too often Manichean struggle of "natives" and "colonizers" that undergirds so much later fiction of the developing world, much like the Chinese merchants we see in the novels of Naipaul's Indonesian contemporary Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose Buru Quartet I should go back and read again. 

The One and the Many, take 117

Reading Peggy Noonan today about the ascension of Pope Leo XIV, she quotes Benedict XVI about the fact that a Pope is around for but a speck of time in the context of the church. Which evokes Carl Sagan and his proverbial "billions and billions" of stars or John McPhee's n books about geologists and the time scales over which they must think.

But first it made me think about "The Crown," of which I still have maybe three or four episodes in season 6 to watch. At its best the show has always been about the tension between the sovereign's desires as a human and her/his duty to the institution of the monarchy and also the polity it serves. Which seems at one level like a fairly rare and bespoke thing, hence the occasional allusions to the sovereign's Christ-life suffering.

But it's not really that rare at all. We're all living it in our own ongoing tension between public and private interests. Do we buy the new car or give money to charity? Take the higher-paying job or work in the public sector? Or (per Effective Altruism) max out earning so as to give more away? Watch the game or go volunteer at the homeless shelter? Encourage our kids to make money or do good? It's endless. All day every day. And then we go to bed. 

Old shirts

A rip appeared in the elbow of one of my very favorite work shirts this week. It's a spring colored shirt, somewhat light blue with fairly but not too bright green stripes. As with so many of my best shirts, I found it some time ago in a thrift store, meaning that someone else, a greatly valued if unseen partner, had performed much of the invaluable work of wearing it to optimal softness.

I was saddened by this occurence and thought that maybe I should shorten the sleaves and make a summer shirt of it. Then last weekend I was talking to Crabill about it and he said that either he or Whitsel had  tried that with a favorite shirt and it just hadn't worked. I am already $40 in to the failed experiment of putting patches on my grey chamois shirt that is now so uncomfortable that I never wear it. It hangs in the purgatory of my closed waiting for me to admit that its failure and consign it to the waste bin. Or take it back to the thrift store, where it might be useful to someone else.

Last weekend's conversation at least confirmed that I am not crazy in these thoughts and schemes. Or maybe I am, but I am far from alone in my craziness, that it is veritably in the water here. Which comforts me. 

Swirling forces

These days it seems that all the time things are happening so quickly that we cannot process them all. I don't have time to list them all out, but you know what I mean.

Great ironies proliferate. For example, when Trump says something like "maybe kids will have to get by on two dolls rather than thirty" we feel that out of tribal loyalties we must scoff, but if Greta Thunberg or another environmentalist had proposed a high tax on ultra-cheap plastic junk coming out of China's factories to price in the Pigovian externalities of plastic and stem the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we would all heartily endorse it.

Similarly, the left scoffed at and the right embraced Robert Bork's logic which formed the basis of a generation or two's thinking about antitrust law, that consumer benefit should be the primary goal and guiding principle behind antitrust law. When Lina Khan advanced a different model based on the negative impacts of platform power, the left jumped for joy, Biden made her head of the FTC at the tender age of 32 and with de minimis management experience, even portions of the Right buy some of her logic. Meanwhile Bork's view of consumer benefit as guiding principle, which would inveigh strongly against tariffs and in particular the way trade barriers keep things like BYD cars out of the hands of American consumers, is invoked ever more rarely these days. So nowadays it is the Left's turn to gently advocate for consumer benefit. Ultimately I think it's a complex question.

One aside re Bork. He was never an appealing figure, always seemed kind of like a crusty old bastard. But he was an acclaimed jurist. Ultimately, the attack on Bork, led by Chapel Hill's own favorite son Walter Dellinger, marked the ramping up of the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process. Maybe it was always going to go that way, I don't know. It's a moment in time I think we have to look back on and ponder.

ps. I wrote this before learning of David Souter's passing. He was a fine man, the Jimmy Carter of the high bench. We could use a few more of those.

Will future value chains miss links?

There's an infathomably large body of work out there about all the things AI is going to do for us in the future. On one thing there is fairly broad consensus: AI will help us automate the simple tasks so we can focus on higher value ones.

On the one hand, sure, I can see how this will go. But the fact is that there's a function to the simpler tasks in terms of letting us reflect on what we are doing to internalize lessons, abstract up and make the higher order realizations that allow us to make improvements higher up the value chain. I think most specifically about the passage in Tolstoi's journal where he describes the reflective state he gets into when sweeping the floor. Victor Shklovskii grounded his concept of "defamiliarization" in this passage from Tolstoi about sweeping.

One can easily argue that it has ever been thus. Technology and mechanization have taken lower-value add tasks off of our plates and we've subsequently been able to step into a given value chain somewhere much higher along it and begin our work there. Again, I think back to Samuel Pepys walking or waiting around London in 1660 to distribute cash to people, in particular soldiers. It's important for soldiers to get paid, of course, lest they get pissed and go out looting. We can just direct deposit to their bank accounts now.

But might their come a time when so much has been automated that too much of the original skill is lost. As I have written before, my utter dependance on Google Maps to get around disturbs me. I used to get to know the places I lived and would be able to easily navigate. I can still do it in Chapel Hill, but is that only because I lived there earlier in life? Could a lack of analogous knowledge-base formation in the future entirely dislocate important value chains in ways we can't anticipate?

Off to the lake

Apologies for the relative silence. Headed off to a friend's lake house for guys' weekend featuring pig, chicken, biking, swimming and, if we are very stupid late middle-aged guys, basketball. I have decided to leave my laptop at home because really who needs a larger computer when we all have the small ones in our pockets. And ears and mouths.