The fraternity of sales

I was looking for decent conferences to go to in the first quarter and remembered I had been to one in Charlotte a year or two ago via NAPFA (Google it if you care). I looked it up and, lo and behold, there's one coming up in about six weeks. Perfect. I wrote to the person in charge of the conference to make sure I could get continuing ed credit I needed, and she assured me that I would indeed. Her response was punctuated/infused with the universal positivity of salespeople. "Thanks so much for checking in!" or perhaps "Have a great day!"

I used to bridle slightly at this sort of thing, saccharine as it seems. But now I get it, I'm fully bought in. Sales is hard. There's a lot of rejection to fight through. It's part of the game. All the little verbal-micro energy boosts, smiles, firm handshakes, sitting up straight in your chair, discussions of various hydration strategies, people with things to sell need that stuff to get the day with good energy, so as to do more and better. There's a positive feedback loop to it all.

And make no mistake, in the end everybody is selling something to somebody for some portion of their day/week/month. Or, if they aren't, they are at risk of sliding off into the abyss or are deeply dependent on someone who is, and one hopes that the person they lean on has some life insurance.

Reading QuePasa

I went to Li Ming's last week to pick up the fixings for the New Year's nian gao, fast becoming a tradition in our household though my understanding is that actual Chinese people eat a sweet version of the rice cakes. I cooked a bunch of those for Chinese New Year's at Jonathan and Sharon's a couple of years back and was less excited about them. One thing I will say is that if the management of Li Ming's keep the place cool in summer -- and they most assuredly do -- they don't do the opposite in winter. Dress warmly when visiting, even if you plan to eat lunch there from the steam table, as Bobby and I do as often as we think of it.

On the way out I picked up an issue of Que Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper out of the Triad (the NC triumvirate of cities, to be clear. Not the Chinese crime syndicate). To the best of my knowledge. I need newspaper both to start fires in the fireplace -- now that we don't get a print newspaper -- y tambien a practicar leer en espanol, something I don't do enough of.

I learned a fair amount from the paper. For instance, I had not been aware that the OBBBA places a 1% tax on remittances sent through cash or money transfer services like Western Union. This seems harsh given most wages remitted have already been subject to income tax. It could easily have the effect of driving immigrants into the banking system -- where they may have to commit fraud to establish accounts -- which could be used against them by ICE and make them more easily deportable. Alternately, this could fuel the adoption of cryptocurrency and stable coins as a payment mechanism -- currently helpful to Trump and his cryptobro allies. For the record, US remittances to Mexico were probably about $60 billion in 2025, something like 3% of Mexican GDP.

Also, I learned that the Mexican Government has a consulate in Raleigh, one of about fifty spread around the US to provide services to Mexicans. Makes sense.

Substack aggregation/bundling

Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.

Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.

I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever?