1st and 2nd Amendments meet again, in the Attention Economy

Yesterday's shooting in Manhattan, in which the shooter saught to draw attention to football and the traumatic brain injuries its players sustain, echoes perfectly last year's shooting of the CEO of United Healthcare. In both cases, the shooters, troubled young men, saught to bring attention to what they saw as major societal issues: football's role in brain injuries and runaway healthcare costs.

Since we all know how much hard work and luck is involved in courting, commanding and retaining attention in today's economy of infinitely proliferating distribution channels, they chose the only sensible and sure fired way of getting the world's attention, if only for a few days: kill some people in broad daylight in Manhattan with some big-assed guns. 

And so the practical realities of meaningful speech and the hypertrophied, nonsensically legalistic preservation of the right to carry a firearm have converged into a media strategy for our age. May we find a way back from the edge.

Communing with George Sr

Not long ago I mentioned that I was thinking of rebooting my old practice of reading some of a finance book on Sundays. I have kicked this off by reading a gem pulled from the shelves of Mary's dad George Sr, William Wilson's 1976 Full Faith and Credit: The Story of CIT Financial Corporation 1908-1975. CIT, for those of you with short memories, was a non-bank lender that was an innovator in a bunch of branches of corporate finance. For instance, in the 1910s it entered into a pioneering arrangement with Studebaker to finance the purchase of automobiles. The initial terms for the buyer were 33% down and up to eight monthly payments. A little different from today. CIT also financed businesses acquiring cash registers, typewriters, all kinds of stuff. I'm just getting started.

As you imagine, not every page is filled with excitement. But still, there's a lot here. People who hate on finance all the time don't understand how much of a grind it is, how little glamour is involved in so much of it, and how much their ability to get the gewgaws that make them so happy (produced by the "real entrepreneurs" who "make things") depends upon all the soulless drudgery of the proverbial men in grey.

Progress in Ethics

If AI really does end up revolutionizing all intellectual tasks, we'll still need to figure out what to do, what is right and best at any given moment. I doubt we will be willing to subcontract that out to the computers. Or will they be so smart that we don't have a choice?

I feel like it may be time to revisit Kierkegaarde and his idea that we all go back to the starting point in ethics, that there is no progress in ethics. Is that still true? Do new norms that get "materialized" and institutionalized into laws and best practices represent progress, or do they not? Obviously they're not perfect. The massive populist pushback to some of the stuff the critical theory-infused intelligentsia have foisted upon everyone else is a case in point. But this is likely all part of a dialectical process and the babies and bathwater will get sorted out.

In any case, and I have written about this before, as have others, wisdom will still be necessary in the future and humans are best placed to adjudicate what constitutes wisdom. We'll need to keep learning to have a little humility before our peers. Right now we need some collective resolve so that it doesn't all get sucked up by Thiel and the broligarchy.

One has the feeling, by the way, that the current Trump/Epstein frenzy suits the tastes of Thiel et al very well because if they could get rid of Trump and put a nice Christian boy like Vance in there, well, things would look pretty good for them. If not for us. 

Atoms vs. Bits and taxes

Reflecting on Kyla Scanlon's recent Substack on our transition from a Creation Economy to a Zero-Sum Economy and its relation to the "Where's My Flying Car?" question (i.e. we thought we would get flying cars and we ended up with Twitter), it occurred to me that part of the problem may be at least in a thought experiment addressable via taxation.

Ben and David from the Acquired podcast have really driven home in my mind that software is in many ways the greatest business of all time because it allows for infinite reproducibility of the product at zero cost. Unlike any physical thing, software can be just spun up endlessly and sold again and again, so long as the IP is protected. Which has given rise to the cancer on the body politic that is the world-dominating tech broligarchy of today and a society with pretty bad inequality (even if there are, as I have written recently on my Substack), lots of affluent people.

So to control the cancer why not just tax companies whose products are software differently, at higher rates? I know there are a bajillion reasons in fact that we don't, and this blog is not the forum in which I allocate enough time to think them through, but it would be a fruitful exercise to think them through one by one. Others likely have.

It occurs to me after the fact that taxing software profits (or social network profits, or....) might be a way to offer users the long sought-after way of sharing in the monetized value of their attention, which has long been expropriated exclusively by the platform providers themselves. Yes the providers' shareholders have also benefited, but shareholding is a luxury which benefits the top two (and disproportionately the top one) income quintiles while largely leaving out the other three, who just see their monetized attention sucked out of them by the online vampires.

Attention-grubbing and practice

Yesterday somebody somewhere promoted my most recent Substack post resulting in almost 1300 hits and forty new subscribers. And I do mean actual subscribers, not the hundred or so friends and family I added at the outset so that I wouldn't feel so lonely (if that means you, I appreciate your continued indulgence and/or readership).

Much has been written in recent years about attention as a component of the contemporary economy, including by my new economist crush Kyla Scanlon, who refers to attention as a building block of modern living alongside fuel, air, water, etc. There's a lot of sense to that.

I am sometimes tempted to de-anonymize this blog and promote it more broadly to see what happens. So far I resist. I appreciate my core readership's continued patronage because, although attention is indeed important, it's not all that. As yogis down through the age have agreed, much of our focus needs to be on consistent practice.

AI thinks somewhat differently.

Not my best day

For starters, I went to AA in the morning and it turned out to be a pretty crappy meeting. This one has somehow transitioned from one which was always a "show of hands" meeting (where you either raise your hand to be recognized by the speaker or just pipe in when there's dead air) to one in which the speaker calls on people. Which means that most often the speaker calls on people he/she knows, which has the effect of making it a meeting where people mouth plattitudes as opposed to speaking from the heart about something that came to them. Dead air will do that to people, convert them from someone who's thinking about something to someone willing to talk about it. Meetings flow more organically that way, if there's a tolerance for a little potentially uncomfortable silence.

Then at noon I had a group Zoom with a group of college friends. I almost forgot about it. A couple of them were self-declared depressed for some reason, in general it was a low-energy meeting.

Then I was trying to get some momentum in a new book (a finance book, rekindling the tradition of doing some finance reading on Sundays, which I've blogged about recently) and Mary started asking me computer questions. I was not in the mood to be IT support. I got pretty crabby.

Then, to cap it all off, I went to play doubles and played horribly. They say a good player will make his teammates better. That was not me yesterday. Doubles continues to befuddle me on average. I am not racing up the learning curve, to be sure.

The worst of it all was of course being crabby with Mary. However much I hate being IT support after 30 years of marriage, I must confess that she has made great strides towards self-sufficiency over the years. At least I was able to own it and apologize. Probably the ultimate solution is for her to get a new computer. Though of course that's not really a solution to the IT support conundrum. But I kind of signed up for that.

Check that, maybe the worst of it all is the self-flagellation, even here on my blog. But one has to right about something, and Lord knows you don't need someone else complaining about Trump.

Fruits of the road

For what seems like the longest time we didn't really go on vacations like most people do. We just went to Larchmont and hung out at the old Berridge family manse. Maybe it wasn't that long, because we did go to Canandaigua to Kate's place when the kids were younger in Princeton. But I guess what we surely didn't do was go on adventure vacations to different places. 

Then in 2013 we started. I'm sure I wrote about it at the time. First we went to DC and Charlottesville, which doesn't seem like much but was a start. Then to the Bay Area, the Hill Country of Texas, Seattle, the UK and France, and so on.

Finally, in the summer of 2017, we flew into Portland, Oregon and made our way down the coast to Sacramento, whence we flew out. On that trip, in a coffee shop on a wind-swept pier in Port Orford, Oregon, I bought a coffee mug. It was the beginning of what can only be called a thing. 

Since then I have become positively Griswoldian about the acquisition of vacation memorabilia. A mix of baseball caps, T-shirts, and an awful lot of coffee mugs. I drink from one most every morning and it brings back fond memories of being on vacation. I'm sure it is the most normal thing ever and I am fine with that. My most recent find, from Detroit a couple of weeks ago, is visible at right above, along with colleagues from Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Guanajuato, Mexico, Glacier National Park, and other places. Natalie brought me a fine one from Zingerman's in Ann Arbor right at the beginning of the pandemic. I usually drink from that one on Sundays.

Rare is the day I don't make use of one piece of memorabilia or another. It's like permanent vacation. Who's gonna stop me?

Kyla Scanlon

I've mentioned her a couple of times in passing, but may well continue to do so more with the passing of time. Scanlon is certainly one of the most interesting young economists out there, indeed she may be one of the most interesting thinkers.

I listened to her book In This Economy? in the car, then bought a hard copy so I could have it on my shelf for reference purposes. When she got to the end and thanked her professors from Western Kentucky University for giving her the chance to explore and think as a student there, I cried. It was so perfectly graceful of her to do so and it also demonstrates the promise of the American model of having lots of universities providing liberal educations to lots of people. The fundamental optimism and generosity of spirit of the whole thing. No, the return on investment of the grand project is not always immediately apparent, but in that moment it shone through perfectly.

I don't agree with her on everything. I think her much-ballyhooed concept of "vibecession" doesn't really account adequately for feedback loops from the nastiness of discourse supported by the algorithms. I can't always consume her videos. They jumpcut too much for someone my age.

But I just listened to her in conversation with Ezra Klein on his podcast. She is very thoughtful, wise beyond her years. I will keep diving into her universe of content. When Klein asked her at the end for book recommendations and she recommended a couple by CS Lewis, most notably the The Screwtape Letters and then, as a coda, Jonathan Livingston Seagull of all things (I've never read it but remember it sitting around on shelves in the 70s and have never been inclined to read it) I was intrigued. 

I will keep going.

Circle K, Estes and 15-501

Stopped in for propane on the way back from tennis. I was surpised to see a seemingly middle class white guy buying a Coke Zero, ice cream, and a foot long slim jim, right at noon on a Sunday. I'm guessing he wasn't married.

Even more surprising, a hard copy of the conspiracy-theory, Trump-loving Falun Gong newspaper The Epoch Times was for sale by the door. Who even knew that rag had a print edition? But the fact that one can buy one at the register right here in Chapel Hill was most surprising.

There was a guy out front in clean late model Jordans, listening to tunes on his smart phone, complaining about how hot it was. The first time I walked past him he asked for a cigarette. The second time he askedfor a dollar. I didn't bother responding.

David, the guy who took care of me at the register and came out and got me the propane tanks, was super polite and pleasant.

How Football Explains the World

This 2004 book, by Franklin Foer, was recommended to me by someone I went to high school with. It's a good, not a great book, that outlines the backstories of a lot of great soccer rivalries. I learned a fair amount about not just soccer history but history in general, for example that a lot of Irish went to Scotland during the Great Potato Famine, forming a Catholic minority there, giving rise to a rivalry between the Catholic Celtic and the the protestant Rangers. Also the extent to which football gangs were involved in Serbian atrocities in Bosnia back in the 90s.

But the most interesting part of the book is the at times smarmy, self-satisfied tone of the elegant metropolitan intellectual, reflections informed by literary and cultural theory which rose to ever greater prominence from the 80s forward and arrogated to itself and to too many of its consumers a sense of having a deep and privileged understanding of the world. I myself drank deeply from the same cups. But ultimately much of Foer's analysis is a little shallow. I'm sure I can find pretty of analogous instances here on my own blog if I go back a decade or two, before I rose up to the lofty heights of great salty wisdom with which each line of my writing is imbued these days, the stuff that keeps so very many readers coming back for more and more, week after week. 

As an aside, and at the risk of violating my rule against discussing finance on Saturdays, I read a brief article somewhere how Ken Griffin of Citadel said that young people should be reading books about topics in their fields and, if they didn't like doing so, should think seriously about whether they are in the right field. It's an interesting point, by no means baseless. It doesn't make me think about violating my finance shabbos but it does make me think about whether I might go back to having a finance book I dip into on Sundays, alongside whatever fiction or other broadening book I am reading. But not today. For now I am going to try to make some progress in the 16th century Chinese foundational proto-novel The Journey to the West.

Desktop takeover

I dreamt sometime last week that my computer's desktop had been taken over by small windows containing videos encompassing the entirety of other peoples' lives. It was utterly exhausting.

Upon waking, or maybe once I got a cup of coffee in me I realized that I was dreaming very literally about my work life as a holistic financial planner, where I try to help my clients not just make and stay steady with prudent investment decisions but also counsel them vis-a-vis taxes, insurance, college selection and finance, retirement and estate planning, budgeting (so near-term spending decisions, including cars, houses, renovations) and so on and so on, but also inevitably get drawn into divorces, career instability, kids' career stuff. And even, at the edge, health stuff. I am trying to learn more about contiuning care retirement communities because around here people need a long lead time on those.

It's a lot. In truth, I embrace it and try to run with it. But to keep track of the many generalities of possibilities for clients and the specifics of clients' lives as they emerge is a grind. Which brings me back to the age old question of general/specific, universal/particular, which in the professional domain is most often thought of in terms of "generalist/specialist." Organizations think of this in terms of insourcing vs outsourcing. Financial planning guru Michael Kitces points out that some of the most successful firms he has seen are those who have deep specializations, for example the firm that works exclusively with optometrists. I hear that, though it sounds boring.

I suspect that at the age of 59 I am too far down my current generalist path to change and just need to focus on doing my best.

Round 2

It appears I neglected to mention we all had COVID again. All three of us. In some ways, it seems not worthy of mention, but it did happen, and we tried to behave as compliantly as we could, staying home, masking when going to the store, etc.

Though it was not that bad it was definitely not nothing. I had some sniffles then some headaches and I permitted myself some naps. Graham slept the hell out of one afternoon. Mary's stomach was upset for several days and she ate a restricted diet.

And so we reverted to the traditional ways: cooking meals, watching TV together in the evenings, me spending lots of time out on the porch.

Mary slept apart from me because of alleged snoring and squishing her in bed. Honestly since she slept apart from me while going through her surgeries she seems rather keen to find excuses to not sleep with me because of these alleged abuses of sleep etiquette. Although I have gotten good a sleeping alone, I would not say I am not saddened by this. I believe I need to investigate anti-snoring things out there. Lord knows if I Google it I will be chased by ads proffering solutions. In fact, given that Blogger/Blogspot is a Google platform, if perhaps a neglected one, it wil lbe interesting to see whether I start to be chased by anti-snoring vendors the moment I press publish on this post. 

The Searcher

This 2020 novel is the first of Tana French's post Dublin Murder Squad mysteries, all of which were good. One of the blurbs on the jacket cover speculates that it's "perhaps her best" or somesuch. I dunno about that. I am still partial to her very first novel, Into the Woods.

But I've yet to read a book of hers that hasn't been worth reading, and this was my fifth. More than most, perhaps, this one is about the characters. Quite often the mystery plot functions as a scaffold which allows the author to galavant around a city and parade its types and milieux. Raymond Chandler looms largest amongst books, whereas every single Masterpiece Mystery series seems dedicated to the television equivalent of letting viewers have a good palate-cleansing Sunday evening trip to verdant old England before saddling back up for a week of work. 

There's a touch of this in French's novels, particularly in this one, where a retired US cop repairs to the Irish countryside to get away from it all, only to discover that just when he thought he'd made his way out of the mire of criminality, they pull him back in. But more than anything it's about him, his relationship to a broken family, and the process of starting anew.

The Kizuna Coast

I am dragging a little in my reading log, so here's a little catch up.

The Kizuna Coast, Sujata Massey.

I was at the library looking for mysteries set in Japan, preferably by Japanese writers. This one checked the first box. Massey is an American writer, born in the UK to one Indian and one German parent. She's written historical novels as well as mysteries set in Japan and also India. She lived for a while in Japan, so her Japanese novels are grounded in actual lived experience.

This is far from the greatest book I have ever read, but then again it exceeds any book that I have ever written (I will give myself credit for my dissertation) in quality and Massey has succeeded as a writer. Her books have been translated into a bunch of different languages and a whole passel of her books are on the shelf of the Chapel Hill Public Library, so my hat must remain off to her.

The novel differentiates itself most from ones I've read before in its feminine sensibility, verging on what I imagine are some of the tropes of mass romance novels (I should really read one of those someday, for example of written by Karen Booth, Steve Balcom's wife). To wit, there's enthusiastic sex in the novel, but none of the anatomical precision found in male novels. Instead, there's enthusiastic love for and arousal by our heroine's hunky husband, both back home in Hawaii and when he surprises her somewhere mid-plot.

Then there's the tendency towards wholeness, positivity and sentimentality. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis of 2011. A beloved old colleague of the heroine disappears and she flies from Hawaii to Japan then makes her way towards the disaster zone to find him. There's a lot of death and disruption. People are living under tough conditions in emergency shelters. Though there are a few missing people who stay dead, for the most part there are a series of miraculous finds, saves, and recoveries. Our heroine befriends a young family in the shelter and they form a heartwarming bond. And so on. To the extent possible in a mystery novel (where someone more or less has to die), within the micro-universe of the characters wholeness is re-established and everyone lives happily ever after. There are lots of miraculous coincidences, alongside just enough danger and anxiety to be a proper mystery.

Again, not my absolute favorite, but it's heartening to know that this genre of generally positive, maternally oriented mysteries are out there, and that this very pleasant woman earns a good living servicing and cultivating that community. Plus I learned some stuff about Japan. I will likely check another out from the library sometime. 

Reading history

A month or so ago I picked back up the 2008 Enough by John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and therefore one of the most influential figures in finance in the last half century. Without Bogle and the index-investing revolution his firm spearheaded, people would be paying a whole lot more for their investments and therefore keeping a whole lot less of their money. Lots of talented people who would otherwise have been subsumed by the mutual fund industry have been set free to do other things. Though it would be interesting to look at total headcount and revenue for the asset management profession over time. Maybe they've all been sucked into hedge funds and private equity and credit. Or, perhaps, financial planning.

But I digress. One of the interesting features of the book is how Bogle spends a lot of energy decrying the obscene salaries paid to top hedge fund managers (admittedly, I'm still asking the same question above). Back then it seemed outragerous that hedge fund titans were being paid hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year to do what they did/do.

How far in the past that now seems. It would still seem obscene, if it didn't pale in comparison to the rapidity with which tech titans acrue wealth these days. For example, as Oracle has gone parabolic of late, CEO and founder Larry Ellison's net worth has increased by about $100 billion over the last month. Such a sentence would have read like science fiction when Bogle was writing his book.

The world changes fast. What seems certain today may sound quaint a decade hence.

I had other reflections on a similar theme but as the temperature rises out here on the porch, the time draws nigh for me to make good on my promise to myself that I will add some brown matter to our active compost pile, which is too green and moist, even if the deer continually eat the really good stuff (especially watermelon rinds) we throw off of our deck down into it, long before it can meld with the rest of the compost. The deer, at least, process the food in their own special way. 

Against robotaxis

Not for naught is there considerable anxiety out there about the future of work as AI displaces more and more jobs. For the increasing share of the population comprising parents to kids on the autism spectrum -- many of whom struggle in the workplace -- AI only heightens our fears.

I was just reading an article about Waymo (AKA Google)'s successful rollout of its robotaxis in initial markets (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix). I took pause when reading that users considered the following traits virtues: not having to make conversation with a driver or tip.

As we have retreated into our homes and ordering more and more online, we have fewer day to day interactions with other people. This is not good. Conversations with drivers -- especially when traveling -- ranks right up there with canvassing for votes as rare opportunities to enter into reasonably sustained dialogue with others. Talking to drivers is an intrinsic good, an opportunity to get outside one's bubble and hear from another. It's not like a rider needs more time with his phone while traveling away from home. Indeed, we all need more practice talking to and listening to others.

As to tipping, well, I read another article this morning about the spending sprees the big AI companies are going on to hire top talent. Zuckerberg is spending billions to buy very small companies in "acquihires." OpenAI is offering $100 million signing bonuses in trying to poach Meta employees. Wealth is pretty concentrated in the US. Tipping offers each of us an opportunity to consciously, mindfully, intentionally give a little to someone else. Tipping is a feature of commercial interactions, not a bug.

Micro-alignment

Harping further on the theme of alignment, but in a much more constrained context, Mary and I have been on a concerted microquest in recent days to reduce the amount of clutter in our freezer. Sometimes it gets chock full of stuff, for example the last few pieces of a loaf of bread, then we need to work through it, so we've been doing just that. It gives me a warm feeling to be embark upon these little shared missions, partially because it gives me a feeling of security and plenitude but also, I suppose, because it doesn't represent an expenditure. And, most importantly, we're doing it together.

Then there's the matter of wiping the tiles in the downstairs bathroom. Since we've become empty nesters Mary and I have pretty much discontinued use of the shower in our master bathroom because the water pressure there is so crappy. Downstairs, Mary is concerned that the tile grout will get discolored from our constant showering, as happened with the upstairs shower despite a pretty concerted squeegeeing disclipine. Personally, I think her concerns are considerably overblown, but I have nonetheless been wiping the tiles with a hand towel after showering just because it makes her happy. That's fine.