The economics of gate checking

One cannot help but wonder whether airlines would actually prefer that passengers gate check bags, instead of paying $30-$40 to check back at the check in counter in the main terminal. It could well be that the economics of the transaction are actually favorable to the airline because 

1. Staffing needs at the front of the airport are reduced, also you need fewer people moving bags between there and the tarmac

2. There's a lower propensity of bags to get lost

3. Passengers pack less stuff, saving on fuel costs and even perhaps allowing for less luggage space on the plane as a whole and more seating

4. The costs of scanning bags is more externalized to the TSA if passengers get them to the plane.

There are probably many more reasons. I bet it pencils out. Time to board.

Painting, the bridge

There had been little spots on our screened in porch where the white paint was flaking away, spots that are exposed to the storms that blow in from the mini-lake effect that amplifies storms on our lake. Crazy to think 47 acres of water would do that but I am pretty sure it does.

Of course I had been procrastinating on this task but finally this last weekend I tackled it. Went down to the basement and found some exterior white. Tracked down a little bit of sandpaper (note to self, running very low). Brought around the ladder. Scraped, sanded and painted. Certainly not a professional job, very Pareto, but it will suffice for a little while and certainly it's better than having done nothing.

As always, I was reminded that one of the initial themes of this blog was the staving off of entropy and disorder generally as a primordial human activity. Certainly as Graham begins his senior year at UNC I have to reflect on whether I may have failed by not passing on many basic home and yard maintenance skills to my kids. 

But maybe not. Maybe I don't outsource appreciably more than my mom did. Certainly it's hardly worth dragging my dad into this because this kind of thing was never his bag at all.

Talked to Dorothy yesterday and scheduled dinner with her when I am out in Seattle in a couple of weeks. As I recalled, she is now a grandmother and I look forward to hearing about her grandson. She assures me that nobody really wants to hear about other people's grandkids. I disagreed because I do want to hear, but she is probably correct that few people want to hear as much about the grandkid as the grandparent is willing to share. At any rate, it's kind of a new chapter, hearing about peers' grandkids. Bring it.

Learning Japanese

Most of my focus these days on DuoLingo remains on learning Japanese, but depending on my degree of exhaustion or boredom or how much time again I may still deviate into Italian, Polish, German, French, Spanish or even, when I am being really slack, Russian. I keep waiting for Serbo-Croatian to show up.

But my real project is Japanese, and it is a project indeed. All these characters! No common morphology with English! No spaces between words! It has really turned into an ongoing exercise in acceptance of my own limitations and the necessity to just keep plugging away.

Recently I have reached the point where DuoLingo has at long last made available to me a set of exercises where I just have to listen and repeat back what it says. Quite interestingly, I have discovered that this is easier for me if I close my eyes and just listen instead of looking at the characters on the screen. I am better able to divine the spaces between words this way.

If, indeed, the concept of "word" even applies in Japanese in the same way that it does in English and in Indo-European languages generally. It seems like it might be easier to frame Japanese in terms of "semantic units", insofar as one can insert a concept (pastness, conditionality, negation) more easily into a Japanese phrase. Or does this just apply to verbs? 

Must keep going.

Changing every day

Stopping in to Harris Teeter after my Saturday meeting has become part of my weekly routine. In recent months the store has been playing this Cranberries song every single time. I swear.

I never really listened to the Cranberries that much, their heyday was during my early sobriety when I was away from music and they were too poppy for someone as music snobby as me, so I didn't really know this song till it was featured in the soundtrack of Derry Girls. It's a sweet and lovely song and maybe the best showcase* of Dolores O'Riordan's soaring vocal exploits.

O'Riordan said the song was about young love and it sounds like it, but that opening line, "Oh my life, changes every day, every possible way," resonates on other vectors. As the seasons change and we go back to empty nesting a trip to the grocery store immediately brings up the problem of needing to be mindful in the purchasing of bread, lest we end up with too much and have to throw it in the freezer.

Abstracting up a level, it makes me think that maybe this is why Mary's dad George Sr was always focused on not having too much food when guests came over, lest it spoil, whereas when we were younger I was always focused on being sure we had too much, on the principle that the only way you could be sure you had enough food when hosting was to have too much.

Again, I am struck by the mild melancholy of September encroaching, offset by the comfort of knowing that the holidays are for all intents and purposes next week.

*Just went back and listened to "Zombie." I retract this claim. 

Ingles in Waynesville

On the way from Asheville out to our place in the hills above Whittier/Sylva last week we stopped at an Ingles grocery store near Waynesville. We were shopping for several days so we had a pretty full cart. There was no way in hell I was ringing all that up myself and bagging it.

So I directed our cart through one of the aisles with a cashier and found myself talking to a nice lady, maybe a few years older than me, named Kim. "Are you an Ingles club member?" She asked. I was not, I responded. She pointed out that with the amount of groceries I was buyting there might be a tidy savings, that the application was very easy to fill out, and that it could easily pay for itself many times over if my family came out to the mountains each year... 

She had me. I filled it out, and while doing so she rang us up and gave me a good deal of detail about how I could use it for this and for that and how I could get a discount on gas purchases... It was all rather lovely and delivered with enthusiasm and care. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, very hometowny and welcoming, which she clearly enjoyed. If that place is sensibly managed she will get a bonus.

The First Thing

Back when I was at the very early stages of building my planning practice I was of necessity deeply ensconced in learning to sell. After all, nobody else was going to do the selling for me. Therefore I had to dive pretty deeply into the literature of sales. Of course it exists. There's a literature for everything.

One of the content creators (I hesitate to call them writers since writing isn't really their point per se) who made the biggest impression on my was a guy named Brian Tracy, who is the ultimate white guy from central casting (says the pot, calling the kettle black). Not all of his oeuvre stands out, but some of it does.

One of the things he advocated in his book The Psychology of Achievement was that people should get up and jot down 10-15 ideas first thing in the morning, while the brain was the freshest and least inhibited. I never quite got to doing that. My morning routine has been meditation/stretching/strength then reading then later writing my blog, which sometimes suffers from the hungry attention hippo of DuoLingo. But my reading, and perhaps my routine as a whole, has gotten a little stale. Perhaps it's time to change it up a little.

The End of Summer

And so, here we are again. Graham has moved off to the Quiz Bowl house and UNC's school year has kicked off. Natalie has returned to NYC, soon to begin her new job at the City and Country School in Greenwich Village and continue with her M.Ed. program at Hunter. Mary and I, once more, find ourselves empty nesters. Things are, admittedly, easier.

The worst of the heat seems to have past, at least for a week or so. Right now I'm on the porch in shorts and flip flops and my toes are, it must be owned, a little chilly.

If we've made one mistake this summer, it's the same one we made last summer, a typical parent mistake. That is, because we were bending our schedules to match Graham's work schedule in Raleigh, we didn't get out to a family vacation or even really any vacation till late in the game. Yes, we are making up for it at the tail end with last week's trip to the mountaints, Mary and I will have a week of remedial vacation in the Adirondacks right after Labor Day before a wedding 9/6. Even the week or so I will spend in Seattle in the 2nd half of September will have some leisure aspects mixed in, with Mary there at the beginning before continuing up to Alaska to take more pictures.

But as we learned last summer, September travel, though it has the advantages of fewer people and easier access to services (restaurants, parking, traffic, etc) also has the disadvantages of mostly being populated by older people. You see fewer people, most of them older. So you miss out on the joy of seeing children and other families and the access it offers to the memories of what it was like to be at those life stages ourselves. 

All the same, the lack of traffic lines at restaurants and brutal heat has a certain charm to it.  

Formulas -- the international assassination syndicate

Picked up a Max Sjowall-Per Wahloo novel at Downtown Books and News in Asheville. One of the series of books I saw around a lot at used book stores in the 70s-80s (and maybe my dad's shelves at home) but never read. Snapped one up for a little retro mystery.

One of the tropes here is the international crime syndicate, specifically the shadowy global group of "assassins for hire." This is a motif that has had legs through the years, surviving as far as Killing Eve on Netflix and even the Mr and Mrs Smith mini-franchise, first a movie with Brangelina, then a show with Donald Glover (apparently there's a season 2 coming, though we stopped after two episodes. Kinda forgot about it).

It's hard to figure out what gives this trope its legs. Graham posits that it may be because attributing persistent criminality to one country/ethnicity or another could be dangerous to a brand/franchise in a shifting geopolitical/moral environment. "Those Mexicans" or "those Chinese" could quickly be a commercial liability, but who will find fault with an amoral international syndicate composed of a mix of people? We can all hate and fear those. (As an aside, remember how the bad guys in the initial Die Hard were Germans, of all things?). I think that's as good a suggestion as any. I must read on.  

Cherokee and roadside culture

We drove through Cherokee yesterday on our way to Kuwohi AKA Clingman's Dome. Although the place still seems to be hanging on, there were a lot of classic motels, putt putt golf courses, diners and gem mining stores that are suffering from the same waning of traditional roadside culture that is visible in so many places around this great land of ours. Places that used to be exciting or at least worthy vacation destinations that now survive at best.

I used to think it was that cheap airline tickets meant that they were being outcompeted by the Vegases, Bransons, Orlandos, Londons, Parises and Grand Canyons of the world. And there is no doubt some of that going on.

But I also think it's a function of the waning of the working and middle classes in a America...

But then I thought of checking the data. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park remains one of the most visited of our national parks, garnering 12 million visitors or so a year for the last decade, peaking at ~14 million in 2021. Cherokee and Gatlinburg, TN remain key points of entry, and there are bigger population centers on the eastern side. I think people are coming through Cherokee. Maybe we caught it on a bad day. But it looks a little forlorn, certainly it compares unfavorably to Sylva, which is more or less the Chapel Hill of Western Carolina U, scaled down appropriately.

Whittier, NC

It is very pretty here and we are relaxing at 3,473 feet (DC and Mary live yet higher, at 3800 feet). Today, I was able to convince the family that -- instead of packing lunches and then hopping in the car and driving an hour and change to find a trail where we would walk up to a view and then back down to the car, we should just walk down our driveway and the other gravel roads leading to it and then back up and have lunch here at our rented view. They were swayed by this logic. Now we are reading and cooling off. There will be laundry and, perhaps, naps.

Is social capital a fixed and scarce commodity?

A non-trivial portion of my time ends up being taken up making phone calls or writing notes on behalf of others, and increasingly peoples' kids. Conversely, as Graham has been making his way in the world, I have very little shame asking people to have lunch or coffee with him or, even better, nudging him to ask them. Before I'll advocate for somebody's kid, though, I make sure that I have coffee or at least a phone call with them to make sure I think they're an OK person.

Moreover, much of our social calendar ends up revolving around charitable and political fundraising functions at people's houses or at the sites of NGOs where they show off their work and talk about their plans for the future. Showing up to these events, giving the money, advocating for them, wearing their t-shirts and whatnot, all of this is social capital building. The giving earns one the right to ask for other's people's time and attention, at some crude level.

And all of this backchannel asking, favor doing, backscratching etc, viewed from the outside, could be construed as corruption. HR departments now remove names and alma maters from resumes before having them reviewed by decision-makers. Kyla Scanlon noted in a conversation with someone I listened to recently that the screening of her alma mater's name (Western Kentucky U) may well have helped her get her job at Capital Group, a large mutual fund company, despite the fact that she was valedictorian and ran D1 track.

I'm not sure what the right direction is. Certainly the social capital of having the relationships to get past gatekeepers through backchannels is relatively scarce because it takes a lot of conscious work to build up. But it is overwhelmingly how hiring is done, particularly in smaller organizations that have neither the prestige that drives volume of incoming job applications or the budget to set up blind screened hiring processes.

Informal channels are also how people and companies hire contractors, consultants, lawyers, accountants, doctors, lawn care people, and so on.

But is there any way over and around the very high costs of building social capital, and the impossibility of doing so for those who aren't well positioned to do so from the outset? I've been thinking about this a lot and will come back to it. Right now it's time to get organized to drive off this mountain in the hopes that this impenetrable mist breaks. At the very least we need to go to the grocery store.

Where hipness goes to die

Walking past the corner of Weaver and North Greensboro yesterday evening in Carrboro after picking up Graham's car at Autologic, I saw the lot that CVS had wanted to build on many years ago and had been stopped from doing so by a bunch of folks, roughly in the "Occupied" mode of thinking. I posted about the horrible waste of a great location on Facebook and a bunch of people piled on, while others were generally supportive.

I was reminded of a quote by the great Juan Alva some years ago, to the effect that Carrboro is "where hipness goes to die." There's a lot of truth in that. I stopped going to the music festival many years ago because it was such an oldster fest. If I want to see some guy in his 50s playing old songs on an acoustic guitar, I can just set up in front of a mirror in my house.

There are still students there, for sure. And some nice places to eat and get coffee and so on. One can even buy a used book and some guitar strings, praise the lord. And it's nice that one can get around on foot. But Carrboro has long since ceased to be a particularly dynamic place where interesting things happen. It could get some of that back by letting more stuff get built. 

Some thoughts on "Abundance"

Niklaus and I went for a walk a couple of weeks ago and Ezra Klein's "Abundance" came up as a topic of conversation. Since neither of us had actually read the book, Niklaus made the brilliant and altogether novel suggestion that we should actually do that and then perhaps come back and discuss the book after that. After much consideration, I ended up listening to the book in the car using Libro.fm, which I think assigns some trivial amount of revenue to Flyleaf Books.

Broadly speaking, Klein is onto something here and listening to his book wasn't a waste of the scant car time I get between the office, the Farm and home these days. Undoubtedly Democrats (primarily, in America) have larded together too many layers of restraint on lots of things people want to do in the world these days, raising compliance costs. Broadly speaking, that's why the sane amongst us understand that the warp and woof of American history has given rise to alternations in regimes, with Democrats adding regulations on and then Republicans trimming them back, until some sort of crisis comes and makes it clear we need more back (the burning of the Cuyahoga River and the Financial Crisis loom large here).

Klein puts the accents in the right places and argues convincingly about housing scarcity as a huge societal problem and cause of homelessness, no doubt. But when he holds out Houston as an exemplar and the huge number of housing units it has been able to add due to it's lack of zoning, he kind of forgets how the Houston metro area's willingness to build in watery lowlands has caused it to be an epicenter of home insurance damage claims when climate change strengthened hurricanes come through. If you build a house in a swamp so people can sleep there, have you really created abundance? 

Klein argues convincingly that we should be pursuing a lighter regulatory touch around energy abundance because having more bountiful sources of energy could help us solve some of the big problems that bedevil us. Briefly, making it easier to have transmission lines to get solar power generation to where the power will be used and to build nuclear power plants (and harness fusion) could get us a long way towards carbon capture and sequestration, for example.

One place I'm not sure he's right is that less is less and more is more in all cases. First and foremost I think about America and our fetish for freestanding single family homes designed for car culture. I remain unconvinced that this is the best way. I think 1600-1800 square feet of semidetached for family of 4 with good soundproofing and better parks with good public transportation would provide for the higher populaton density that promotes better human connection and higher productivity. Yes, it sounds like Europe.

The physical infrastructure of Europe and a culture where businesses can scale up and down (i.e. hire and fire) as needed and individuals can try, fail, file and file for bankruptcy without stigma does not sound all that bad.

Anyway, I am basically farting out text now and must move on. I will keep an eye out for a copy of Klein's book at one of our local used book stores and buy the physical thing. An important book.

The Eye of the Needle

After tucking in to a book culled from the shelves of George Sr, I ploughed through one from those of George Jr, to with, Ken Follett's espionage classic The Eye of the Needle. Somehow I had never read it.

It was solid, if a little easy, in the sense that the MI5 crew on the tail of master German spy "Die Nadel" track him a little too easily, basically with some industry and ingenuity but not a whole ton of struggle. They just pretty quickly happen onto his path and never really lose it.

Which allows Follett to move the book along to a conclusion in 320 scant pages, in the edition I was reading. Really I just ploughed right through it.

So Follett eschews the classic device of leading the investigating team after a large series of red herrings, the better to describe a broader range of society. The plot does follow Die Nadel across a decent-size chunk of Great Britain, allowing fot the presentation of a number of character "types," so all is not lost on that front. All in all, a good if not great book with enough texture, variety and character development to be worth it. I won't spoil it for you by saying whether the good guys win.