Channel conflict

On the way back from my ride out Dairyland Road, I heard a loud voice coming from off to the right of the convenience store at Calvander. It sounded like somebody was fighting, I even feared that somebody had a gun and something bad was going to happen. So, like the world-class genius I am, I slowed down and turned into the parking to see what was going on.

As I got a little closer, I figured out that it was not a violent altercation but in fact a preacher talking into a microphone at the Calvander Church, which appears to meet outside. He was saying something like "But he promises you his kingdom" in very strident tones. It was not a physical struggle going on, but a spiritual one.

Which returns me to the theme of the last post, getting humans aligned around the same goals. One of the problems with trying to get people on the same page with one another is that people have to earn livings while doing so. Clergy, public servants, NGO leaders, etc, all need to feed themselves and are scrapping for a restricted set of funds. As I have mentioned before, US charitable giving including political donations (I hadn't realized that) hangs around 2% of GDP irrespective of changes to the tax code. Sad to say, even people working for the same causes (say, political campaigns for the same party) scrap with one another to out fundraise one another as they seek to amass political capital and define their brands. Which gives rise to backchannel backbiting, strife, and disillusionment.

Obviously everybody's not going to agree about everything all the time. But we need to get to a point where we have enough consensus that the poor AIs don't get confused and just go, "Ah, fuck it, let's toast the lot of them." Hairsplitting and territoriality amongst putative allies helps no one.

The Jobs of the Future

Today at a social event I was talking to a woman who happens to be a client about what her son plans to study in college. He had switched his major from computer science to engineering on the widely-shared assumption that AI will continue to eat coding jobs.

The other assumption is that jobs like those of contractors (plumbing, HVAC, electricians, carpenters) will be better bets. Not sure abut that. As contractor firms get rolled up by PE firms I think a lot of six sigma and CMM will likely be applied to them to improve processes. Total headcount may drop as service levels rise and design and preventative care improves. Or maybe not. Honestly I'd be happy to be proved wrong and see small-time contractors continue to flourish.

As I think I have said before, if the big problem of AI is making sure AIs act in alignment with human goals and humans are oh so very far from being aligned, it stands to reason that the most important jobs of the future will be in leadership, diplomacy, management, listening, boundary-crossing... to bring ourselves into alignment with one another. How this will look economically, how people will get paid for doing these things, that I don't know. 

As a codicil to this thought, I was listening to Dwarkesh Patel interview a sinologist on his podcast while I was driving in Chicago last week. The guy pointed out that pre-COVID we had about 300,000 Chinese students in the US in any given year but that these days the US is lucky to have 1,000 in China. This is a huge gap. Outward-facing, low level person-to-person contact is hugely important to mutual understanding at any level. It's not so much median Trump voters we need to figure out how to align with as people abroad, first and foremost in China right about now. But everywhere, really. It's a big fucking job. Is AI gonna do that for us?

Home from the MW

Back in NC after a quick tour of a small chunk of the upper Midwest, where I focused more on seeing people than things. But I did see a few things.

On the one hand, my impression of Ann Arbor, aside from the joy of hanging out with Kate and Kim and seeing their boys and finally visiting Zingerman's, was that the romance of the college town has faded for me a bit. Which is not surprising, given that I've always lived in one. Also, admittedly, the world was suffused the whole time with the oppression of near triple digit temperatures, which rob almost any place of most charm. My visit to Bordeaux and the Dordogne in 2023 was also crushed by mad heat, as well as Mary's regrettable if tremendously delayed initial encounter with COVID.

Driving from Ann Arbor to Chicago, I had hoped to drink in the countryside and groove on the Midwestern gestalt, but in the end Google Maps and the need to make dinner at Lou's in Berwyn more or less forced me back onto the interstate. I then made a valiant attempt to find a local sandwichery in Battle Creek, MI, but all I could find was brew pubs that would have blandished me with burgers and fries, so I ended up at a Subway, where I was served by a very tan woman about my age with remarkably white and tightly spaced teeth. When I complemented her on them, she said that they were implants because she had raised two kids and now it was time to take care of herself. No doubt. I am sure she worked a ton of hours to pay for them and they looked great.

I continued on towards Chicago with the full intent to check out the beach scene on Lake Michigan. I did so at New Buffalo, after getting coffee at a cute little place where the woman handling the register laughed when I told her my name was Clark because she thought I looked a little like Chevy Chase: "so like Clark Griswold, you know." I was most impressed with her cultural literacy, though nobody had ever likened me to Chase before and even she knew that it was not necessarily a shining endorsement because, and I quote: "I hear he's a total douchebag." Which accords with what I've heard.

Anyhow, I carried on and went down to the shore of the Great Lake, where the beach was emptying out after an afternoon thunderstorm passed. The sand was different from ocean sand, much more like dirt, though still sandy enough. When I put my feat in the water, it kind of blew my mind that it was fresh, not salt water, as I trained my gaze on the horizon and saw nothing but water and more water.

Detroit

I had been meaning to go there for years, probably a decade and change, ever since the stories of the city's emptying and then repopulation by homesteading artists and the like began to circulate. Yesterday we went, with Mary's friend Kate and her husband Kim, who grew up in the area. Unfortunately it was so hot that we were a little constrained in our ability, frankly, to just think and meander.

Nonetheless we saw a lot, a lot of nothing. It's hard to imagine the sheer scale of the emptiness in a place that so clearly once was so much more. So many green fields punctuated by individual houses or churches or maybe stores, themselves just hanging on by a thread.

We saw hints of life and rebirth, to be sure. We had a deliciious lunch at a Yemeni restaurant in the town of Hamtramck, a once Polish but now Muslim-majority city surrounded on all sides by metro Detroit, which rises, if I may be permitted a seemingly stretched but truly apt comparison, like an oasis of intact homes and businesses out of a great emptiness created by an abandoned old Chrysler (now Stellantis) plant. As we left the restaurant, we heard a muezzin chanting the call to prayer drifting down the block. The promise of America made real. 

Kate and Kim's boy Oliver lives in an area where most of the homes are still intact and a lot of them are being rehabbed, but there's still a ton of work to be done. It's right near a promenade down to Bell Isle, a once city but now state park on an island in the Detroit River, which was hopping on a day of record-setting heat. There was no place to park near the small beach.

There were areas of significant redevelopment that we didn't see, to be sure. But the overall impression was of a large ghost town, hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It was the most abject illustration of the failure of America's long-term incumbent regime that I've seen, the biggest endorsement of a vote for radical change, however sketchy its promises.

On Substack -- with reference to Ted Gioia

Like many I am reading more on Substack, though as of yet I am not a paid member of anybody's Substack. By contrast I subscribe to a lot of periodicals. Here's a list:

• Paper
• The Economist
• The Atlantic
• The New Yorker
• Online
• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• The Washington Post (no, we haven't yet cancelled)
• The News and Observer
• Triangle Business Daily

I don't read all of them all the time. I also have given money to The Local Observer and, more recently ChapelBoro/WCHL, the first in the form of regular donations and then, in response to an impassioned plea from the editor, a larger check. Both of them have published my financial column. In the case of the ChapelBoro, it is "paid content," meaning I pay them to publish it. Not a ton of money, but a little, on a one-year trial basis to see if it's worth doing from a business standpoint.

So we spend a lot of money on print journalism. I spend a lot of my life reading the stuff and think it's important. Journalism organizations themselves provide a lot of superstructure that is important to getting good work done, from supporting long-form investigative journalism (a guy in my co-working space at Business Insider just spent a year or so working on a long series of articles on the various knock on effects of datacenter buildouts in support of AI) to promoting local businesse etc. News organizations play important roles in communities at various scales.

Substackers like Gioia do a lot of good work too. But the fact of the matter is he wouldn't have risen in prominence as quickly as he has of late in the absence of boosts from more traditional media orgs, like the profile in The Atlantic recently or even the push he got on the splash page of The Free Press a few weeks back. But he doesn't seem to employ any editors, senior or junior, nor does he seem to promote local restaurants, etc, important functions of traditional media organizations.

He also doesn't really write full paragraphs. Instead, he embraces the breathless Tiktokification of one-sentence and quasi-one sentence paragraphs promulgated by LinkedIn. If he wants to be taken seriously as a writer, I think he should show enough respect to his readers to offer them properly baked paragraphs. Moreover, he could offer comment space so that people can give him direct feedback instead of taking up valuable time writing to him on their own blogs, like this. Or maybe Substack just doesn't offer that functionality to those on its platform out of consideration for our fragility. I'll have to check on my Substack.

More about numbers and reading

 Upon further observation it turns out that I have to factor more or less every page number I come across. Which of course is easy with numbers divisible by 5 and even numbers, as well as numbers divisible by 3. As you go up in numbers, it gets a little more labor intensive to determine which ones are prime numbers. 

247 for example. A prime number, if I'm not mistaken.

A few years back this enquiry lead me to the question: what % of numbers are prime numbers? Below 100 it looks like maybe 20%. 1,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,79,83,89 etc. The answer is surprising. Roughly 0% of numbers are prime because as they get bigger almost all of them are divisible by something other than themselves. One could probably create an interesting proof of this. Someone other than me could, that is.

I gotta get ready for dinner.

In Ann Arbor now, for the first time ever. Mary hasn't been back here for a long time either. More later.

Running numbers in my head

I think I may have blogged about this before, but all too often when I am reading books -- even books I am enjoying like my current one, Tana French's The Searcher, my brain is obsessively looking at the page number I'm on and calculating where I am in the book. This book troubles my brain in particular because it has 450 pages, so 2 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 (I'll be damned if I know how to write exponents in HTML). So many ways to divide almost every page! The whole project of reading the book devolves into something straight out of Zeno's paradoxes where each little step yields a fresh new number and opportunity to calculate, challenging my ability to move forward. 

Of course I strongly identify with the Count.

It's enough to make me wonder whether, given that I am in finance, I ought to stop spending time on DuoLingo learning languages and switch over to Khan Academy and embrace math wholeheartedly.

Half-gone, or not yet begun

First off, I should acknowledge that it's Juneteenth and that it's as good a holiday as we have. Honestly I'm surprised we haven't had it for much longer. Clearly it has much to do with the lingering shame of having had slaves, the feeling that having such a holiday would have called out negative aspects of American history as opposed to celebrating the good. Not far below the surface there's a mindset that all societies have had slavery, that it's a dog eat dog world out there, that some people are winners and others are losers, that European civilization was better anyway and that things were better when people "knew their place..." It's a slippery slope.

I'll take Juneteenth.

Summer officially begins tomorrow, but to me it almost feels like summer is half over. Graham's internship in Raleigh is at about its halfway point. The Bikeloud boys -- once more riding across the country from sea to shinging sea in honor of Be Loud! Sophie, have by now made their way to Minneapolis. Take a look at a map and tell me that's not halfway across the country.

Tomorrow Mary and I are off to Ann Arbor for a wedding party for Oliver, the eldest child of Mary's very best friend from college Kate and her husband Kim. When Mary and I got together back in early 1995, Mary had not long before attended Kate (pregnant with Oliver) and Kim's wedding in Canandaigua, where Oliver and his bride will ultimately be married in a small ceremony later in the summer, also the site of many summer vacations for us through the years and a surprising number of posts by the Grouse  down through the years.

I've never been to Ann Arbor and am excited to go check it out. Sadly, our arrival will coincide with the onset of a heat wave, forknowledge of which has not enhanced Mary's week, nor, by extension, my own. Such is life.

More on the owls

Let me correct myself. These aren't baby owls we're talking about, they are juvenile owls, mid-sized ones. After a roughly 30-mile bike ride out Dairyland plus in the late afternoon heat, Graham and I were enjoying a little takeout Thai food, honestly my Father's Day feast since I had already planned and bought groceries for Sunday dinner before Graham informed me that yesterdaay was Father's Day. 

Just then Mary returned home from dinner with her board colleagues and announced that she could hear the owls out back. We grabbed a flashlight and headed out to see if I could get a peak. They were towards the back of our yard but seemed to be moving away from us when we got closer. A perfectly understandable response. Eventually we caught up with them out in the LFA parking lot out back. I was able to isolate one briefly with a flashlight. No longer a baby, but not as big as a mama owl, to be sure. More light grey in color.

Mary had texted Rob and he came out to the parking lot to join us. Rob heads off to Seattle at the end of the week, fulfilling a long-held dream of spending more time there after a much ballyhooed summer he spend there back in college. We'll see if it takes. He has found things he likes here in NC, but hasn't fully found his groove. Certainly he's not a fan of the heat, but then who really is? But maybe the magic of our neighborhood wildlife will grow on him. 

Baby owls and my back yard

Some years ago -- and I can't believe I didn't capture it here -- either Mary or I heard this odd whistling whooshing sound coming from our backyard. We looked out to see what it was and discovered -- baby owls, three or four of them, up in a tree branch outside our bedroom window. We went upstairs to get closer to us and looked up at them. They looked down at us. When we moved their heads moved in unison to track us. It was magical.

The other night when I took the visiting Mike White out to Sidetrack where we enjoyed a nice visit with Rod, who was hosting from behind the bar, Mary and Graham once more heard the sound of baby owls and then found them with a flashlight, up in a tree. I am sad to have missed it. Mary took a picture but they are far enough away and it was dark enough that it's hard to see them. And it would be just a picture anyway.

This morning sitting out here on the porch, where I take my breakfast in the warm months as weather permits, I saw an owl fly from tree to tree. Not a rare sighting to be honest. Of course there had to be a dear too, likely having inspected our compost pile to see what kind of edible treat we had thrown out their for his delectation. I can hear lots of birds.

I understand NIMBYs. Our backyard is a magical place, and one becomes accustomed to the specific magic of specific places. But the correlation between population density and productivity is more magical yet, if less self-evident and more complicated to create. If you want more owls and birds you can always move further out, towards the Frontier, as Americans always have. You can move to Vermont, for example, which is hemorrhaging people. Or West Virginia.

Carbon futility

As the world rushes heedlessly, breathlessly into the AI breach in search of AI dominance (for a sobering take watch this interview with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), it becomes ever harder to justify to onesself any attempt to limit one's carbon consumption. The world de facto seems to have swallowed the argument that climate change is fake news and not worth thinking about. I mean, hell, Elon's gonna take us to Mars where it will be all better, right?

In fact, now more than ever I think we need to cultivate carbon mindfulness. None of us is perfect. I still eat a burger a week and other meat too, though mostly chicken. I haven't been able to adjust to setting my AC lower than 74 on a consistent basis (though I did just now put a note to get a ceiling fan installed in my study, which will help). 

But it is not all over and it is not all bullshit. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. The life of people on the coasts is under threat (to the eventual benefit of those who own land inland, portending well for our acreage in Roxboro, though this is scarcely cause to celebrate). The game is not over, and it is not a game. 

Someone much smarter than me told me over coffee a year or so back that the next financial crisis is on its way as it becomes ever more expensive to insure homes throughout the country due to extreme weather events. When that happens, banks can't issue mortgages. I've probably blogged about it before but don't have time to check right now. Ignoring facts because they "don't align with the priorities of this administration" does not change those facts. And I don't think anyone is going to create an AI that will outsmart Mother Nature.

Deep Progress

Of late I've been making my way through Impossible Monsters, Michael Taylor's book about how the discovery of dinosaurs in the 19th century -- and especially the finding of lots of them in Great Britain then -- informed the eventual overthrow of a profoundly and suprisingly repressive Christianity that was prevalent there then. It's a bit of a grind, at times just about as scintillating as it sounds, though it has its moments.

In the mornings I've been reading Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, which came up in conversation with Graham because there was a question about it in a recent Quiz Bowl tournament somewhere. The book was a big hit in its day, I'll come back to discuss that later.

One thing that's common between them and a little surprising to those of us who pass our days within the comforting bosom of the 21st century is how easily people died one and two centuries ago, even those like Taylor's subjects who were the denizens of the economic and scientific elite of a world power in the fullness of its flourishing. Kids just got sick and they were dead a day or two later. Darwin lost two of his ten kids in infancy, another (a favorite) died at the age of 10. He and his wife suspected that maybe their kids were genetically weak because they were cousins but had nonetheless wed. The people of Spoon River -- who narrate from beyond the grave -- also die from a wide range of things easily preventable or curable now, including lots from accidents that just don't happen now because of workplace safety or product design regulations.

In short, people have benefited an awful lot in the last couple of centuries from the deepening and dissemination of medical best practices but also due to the rise of public health and the regulations to which the discipline has given rise. More or less from the rise of policy informed by statistics. How easily this is forgotten. People have lived longer and better lives.

It ain't all perfect. The rise of "deaths of despair" and their negative impact on aggregate mortality -- especially in the US -- has been a challenge over the last decade and change. We should keep working on it. 

Aid and Diplomacy as Costs of Sales & Marketing

The Trumpian right has long disdained spending on foreign aid as a waste of money, despite the fact that we spend very little on it, a little more than 1% of GDP. But as the self-declared pro-business party, Republicans should understand sales and marketing expenses. Businesses at different phases in their growth arcs have different expectations for sales and marketing expenses. Start ups spend more, mature businesses spend less, maybe 2-10% as a rule of thumb. Democracy US-style is obviously by now a pretty mature business (though it may behoove us to take a cue from Amazon's annual letter and try to adopt a perennial "Day 1" mindset). 

If we take the very cynical view that US diplomacy and aid are all about selling and marketing democracy and societies based on rules and principles as opposed to doing good, all of a sudden the equation changes. What we get for our expenses is a halo and greater international interoperability, people who want to come here to live thus lowering our talent acquisition costs -- especially for higher value add functions like innovation. We also get countries who want to buy our debt because they see us as stable and legitimate.

Oh yeah, and we save lives and do the right thing. 

But Trump and Vance have instead decided to hand victory to China by saying that international relations are all about deals and raw power, no values. The whole world loses.

The centrifugal force of the New World Order

As the US and to a lesser extent the world veers ever more in the direction of multipolarity via one-off tariffs instead of global and regional trade and other agreements, certain calculi are shifting. Trade and international affairs are going to become ever more complex, necessitating a better educated diplomatic corps not just for governments but for smaller entities (states, municipalities, countries). Although AI's ability to do simultaneous translation will get better and better when dealing face to face with one another people will always prefer someone who has made the effort to learn their language.

Moreover, product development and targeting should get more complex. This will favor those who have made the effort to get to know languages and cultures. Somehow I doubt AI is going to take this over. Maybe it's the romantic in me, me pulling for John Henry vs the steam drill.

Until the US gets its shit straight this will end up favoring non-US companies, the Unilevers of the world, who take the time to get to know their markets. Admittedly platforms are eating up product-makers for the most part, but a new world order may end up favoring a new type of platform also. We've seen huge platforms grow abroad: Alibaba, Tencent, Didi, Mercadolibre, NuBank. So long as they don't get stepped on by their sovereigns, as Xi did to Alibaba and Didi, they should flourish. 

Teamwork, teamwork that's what counts

Somehow I missed the Champions League final last Saturday, despite having it on my calendar. Since it is several days ago I hope I don't spoil anything by saying that PSG whumped Inter 5-0.

This year's season was nothing short of remarkable for PSG, primarily because the club became the most successful example of addition by subtraction since our '83 CHHS team benefited from the departure of the talented but selfish and disruptive T.R. After trying to build a franchise around the wonder trio of Messi, Neymar and Mbappe, PSG reached the top after all of them left and Ousmene Dembele blossomed after years of playing in the shadow of bigger names. Yes, some younger folks also grew into larger roles, but it was only because the space was made for them to do so.

Hats off.

The Shame of the Left

For a long time -- maybe since Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate Gerald Ford -- it seemed like the extreme American Right held a monopoly on lethal political violence. More recently things have changed. In my mind -- this could be a function of my own blindness -- it really got ramped up when a left wing guy with a rifle tried to take out a bunch of Republican members of Congress at an annual baseball game in January 2017, injuring Steve Scalise of Louisiana. We were all fortunate no one else was hurt and that Scalise was not hurt worse than he was.

Today there's a headline about an attack with a freaking flamethrower on some people in Boulder exercising their First Amendment rights. This follows hard on the assassination of a couple of young Israeli Embassy staffers in DC. And the killing in broad daylight of the United Healthcare CEO last December. And the attempt to assassinate Trump on the Florida golf course (the kid in Pennsylvania does not seem to have been on the left). There's been more.

All of these should be condemned unequivocally and forcefully. That is not who we are. If liberals are going to decry violence on the Right we need to be consistent. More fundamentally, people aren't supposed to kill each other. Full stop.

postscrypt:  I just went back and saw that the attacker is an Egyptian. That doesn't really change anything that I said. Everybody on all sides needs to dial it back.