The Days After

Like so much of the world, I'm still processing the thoroughgoingness of the beat-down the Democrats delivered to Trump and the Republicans on Tuesday. I had heard prognostications of blue waves in recent electoral cycles, which made me reticent to go to Raleigh for the celebrations. After all, we had been in 2016 when Josh won (yay!) but Trump won too. In 2024, the same thing happened. On each occasion the drive back from Raleigh was anticlimactic at best.

Turns out, we should have gone to the party. What a night. But it's not because everybody loves us so much. Polls tell us that. They just hate us less. Which is a decent place to start.

Now, all the Democrats have to do is govern. We can have show trials of Trump and the extreme corruption of his regime, which is a necessary thing to do. The effort there should really be around editing it down because if we try to just enumerate it all, there will be no time left to govern and solve actual problems. Getting out of Iran won't be easy. Nor will bringing down inflation. Social Security needs to be shored up, which will involve raising taxes and/or adjusting down benefits on more than just billionaires. Democrats will need to sort out our internal squabbles. 

Or maybe we won't. Maybe the blessing will be that our caucuses will be big enough that we can pass legislation by going across the aisle for some things despite the leftmost amongst us disagreeing. Maybe we can quit damaging ourself by demanding ideological fealty and line-toeing on every point. 

And for 2026, at least, I can stop writing checks to politicians and focus on supporting food banks and other organizations that help people who are struggling.

Election Day

Unlike most of the rest of the world, I haven't written that much this cycle about the upcoming elections. In some ways, I haven't done as much. We canvassed just once. But we did do a pretty big fundraiser and I have contributed more in aggregate than I have to any other election cycle, I think. Certainly more than I have in years Josh wasn't running for something.

In some ways my lower degree of engagement reflects the fact that I'm feeling a little more tired than I have in recent years. Relative to the French, certainly, I have an aggregate vacation deficit that has built up over the years and it has begun to weigh on me. Though it's not always apparent to the naked eye how hard I'm working, and I do lay stupid things on myself like my Duolingo daily quota. And a blog quota.

I do sincerely wish that the Democrats have a good night tonight, but it's much less because I think that the generic Democratic agenda is right in every way. A local politician, someone I respect a lot and who works his butt off, sent out an email recently about the "failure of neoliberal policies" over a long time frame and arguing for a return of a more "progressive" policy agenda. The day before, in the the book on financial history I'm listening to, the author implied, without going into a great degree of detail, that Johnson's Great Society had caused a lot of harm to the US's fiscal balance. There's some truth to both of these assertions, and either of them could and has been subject to book length treatments. But at this point in my life I feel more aligned with the latter than the former statement, though I love the guy who said the former.

One thing that's clear is that the Trump and his populist techno-ego-kleptocracy must go. Can we safely make it out the other side to a place where people don't get sucked into rage-driven susceptibility to populist flim-flammery? That's another question.

The Killing Moon, the Great Inflation, and little old me

Twice this last week I heard Echo and the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon" playing in the background. Once at my coworking space, once when Mary, Graham and I were picking up banh me at Kokyu out near where 54 hits Fayetteville Rd (worth visiting if you never have, more of a lunch than dinner spot typically). I had not known that this song had risen to be something of a Halloween anthem, but I get it and support it. I was happy to see that the official music video has 57 million views on YouTube, which is not chopped liver.

Of all the post-punk bands to arise out of Britain in the late 70s-early 80s, Echo and the Bunnymen were the one that I identified with most, despite the silliness of their name. From the beginning, Ian McCulloch's voice that just struck a chord in me. "Stars are Stars," from Crocodiles, was probably the first song I learned to sing along with on the guitar and largely guided my (limited) guitar sensibility going forward (hint: it's all minor chords except the G, but that's a pretty standard mix).

Meanwhile, back in the present, I've been listening to Mark Higgins's uncatchily-named but thoroughly-researched Investing in US Financial History in the car for some weeks now. One interesting thing I've learned from it is that economists refer to the period of 1965-1982 as "The Great Inflation." The astute amongst you will recognize that my entire childhood and adolescence were lived within this period and that it comes to an end not just when Volker tamed inflation by raising interest rates up to a point of maximal pain, but when Michael hit the shot (and Fred Brown passed the ball to Worthy) which finally let Dean Smith bring the NCAA title home to Chapel Hill. Amongst the happiest nights of my life.

Despite all the inflation and the disruption of the oil embargo and Vietnam and Watergate, I remember my childhood as largely a happy time. The MAGA types look back to the 50s, but the 70s honestly seemed OK to me. We played soccer and got pizza, subs and egg rolls and drove Japanese cars before our country cousins did, so we thought we were cool. My family traveled across the country, to New York a couple of times. We went to the beach. Ranzino dunked on Culbreth.

And yet, there was a melancholy beneath the surface that led me to the minor chords and tragic voices. My parents' marriage was falling apart in front of my eyes, much as I sought to deny it. There were those brutal years between the final losses to Marquette (76-77) and Indiana (80-81) when Carolina lost in the first round of the NCAAs, and it weighed heavily on my soul. Somewhere in there Steve Sandler showed up down at the bottom of our hill with Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys records. When I heard them, I flipped a switch and transitioned from Barry Manilow and Christmas Rapping to punk and post-punk as if it were as natural a transition as the arrival of pubic hair.

Anyhow, lots to reflect on. I need to ask my mom about the Great Inflation and how it felt to be a young parent then. My guess is that she was just fighting other battles: with my dad, her dad, becoming a small businesswoman in a South not used to them, and so on.

Deepening my Shabbos

As I'm sure I've mentioned, for some time now I have maintained a finance-free "shabbos" on Saturday, firmly eschewing any looking at numbers in accounts and also financial texts: books, newspapers, magazines, podcasts, whatever. I buy and sell things, mostly food, but think as little as possible about money.

I am realizing that, to the extent almost any number can have some sort of financial implications, I should really try to go deeper and steer clear of any type of quantitative thinking on Saturdays. This is hard for me, but I'm going to run with it and see how it works.

One number that I will mention in passing is that I just finished the third and final installment of Tana French's trilogy of mystery novels set in the fictional Irish village of Ardnakelty. Truly extraordinary. I can't recommend them highly enough. 

Acceleration offsets

When we were young parents, we were already noting that time was beginning to pass more quickly than it had when we were in college, high school, grade school, etc. Summers in particular blew by. At that time I cooked up the theory that the labor-intensiveness and sometimes (let's just say it) the tedium of tending to young children -- and in particular when they were balking at taking a nap or going to bed -- had evolved as an evolutionary offset to the larger-scale acceleration of the passage of time. 

I might also have added the slowness of the work week, work day and indeed the meeting, all of which sometimes seem to drag on and on. This effect persists well into one's working life. Particularly in periods like right now, the period from Labor Day to Thanksgiving during which, for many people in the private sector, there is an unbroken string of that most unwelcome of phenomena, the 5-day work week.*To the extent that the work week and work day sometimes seem to reticent to end, they slow our perception of the passage of time and hide the fact that it's all just winging by. Also the countdown to retirement, a real thing for people with very boring jobs.

On the opposite side of the ledger we find cancer and other painful and vexing maladies which complicate our lives. These sometimes help us to embrace the fleetingness of time and life.

All of this is tremendously complicated by the uncertainty of death and what comes after. I'd like to see Pascal's Wager put up on Polymarket.

*Obviously, this offset is complicated for many by modern phenomena as "no school November," during which the state abdicates its responsibility to provide economies of scale in child care.

Ending the drought

I've been experiencing a bit of an idea drought, perhaps under the intriguing influence of Dan Wang's thesis that we should write less often, which I really need to go back and listen to. Yet I continue to operate under my self-imposed blog quota.

I thought that driving up to DC over the weekend would give me some ideas, but in so many ways the weekend was a pure execution: up pretty early each day to get on the road to make my destination in time for a late afternoon commitment (memorial service Saturday, tennis Sunday). I ended up eating the same sandwich from Subway going each direction.  I will spare you the details there, save that it is a tried and true order in our family. On Sunday I also had a noon Zoom with my friends from the Young Amateur Byzantinist Society and Madonna Fan Club, which I was able to take in a shaded location from the NC welcome rest stop on 85 south.

All very business like. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that, even if I had time to walk around in the city and see some things, I would likely have been pretty jaded about it. I have traveled all too much on my own over the last couple of decades. I am reminded of the time, sitting alone on some square in Europe in the early 90s, drinking a coffee, when I realized that traveling alone was played out and that it was really time to find someone I could be with for the rest of my life and get married. Now what I'm thinking is that Mary and I should go to more cities instead of just going to beautiful places in the country and hiking. Come to think of it, we had a very nice time in Paris and Madrid in the summer of '23, it was just a shame she got COVID at Sophia's wedding so we were less able to enjoy the smaller cities in between. We need more of that together.

This is Africa

Somewhere in Season 7 of Itchy Boots, as our blonde, blue-eyed heroine Noraly travels through East Africa on her motorcycle, along endless roads of red clay often made virtually impassable during the rainy season, she finds herself stuck on the side of the road in the rain as night closes in. Also, her phone is running low on power. 

The next day she reports back to her viewers what happened. Someone came along and towed her to the next village or back to the one she had just passed. She slept and ate something. Eventually her mechanical issues get sorted out. "I wasn't really worried," she tells us, "after all, this is Africa, they're not going to just leave you there by the side of the road." Or something like that. And, indeed, this was her experience. Whenever she has problems, and it happens not infrequently: most often her bike getting stuck in the mud, mechanical this or that, someone stops and offers to help and than does. Yeah she probably pays them, and yeah she's a YouTuber with a few million subscribers who may well be well known in odd corners of the world where she goes but very few other tourists else do, but still. She has faith in human nature and humans come through.

This is what we must try to distill, then bottle, then communicate to each other and, crucially, to the AIs. A willingness to consistently step in and save one another at whatever cost to ourselves. This is Africa.

Then again, I thought back to Jim Lewis' recent post about visiting with a murderous, drug-addled gang of teenage boys who terrorized part of Congo back in the oughts. And I thought how Noraly specifically chose to bypass Congo when her route took her there. This too is Africa, and also us. At most points in time in history, at least, it is relatively rare, but perhaps it occurs too frequently in the corpus of texts on which AIs train because, after all, if it bleeds it leads. Let us hope we can correct this reporting bias in time.

VSLY different? or kinda the same?

What if AIs, following the logic of effective altruism, deprioritize human interests? What if they apply the Value of a Statistical Life/Value of a Statistical Life Year concepts much more ruthlessly than do human policy makers, rather than even paying lip service to some transcendental notions of the value of each human life? 

We already do it ourselves. Putin is just the most egregious, blithely sending young Russians and the occasional Korean to their deaths. Just today the Journal ran an article about the high incidence of pedestrian deaths crossing "stroads" (streets with the major traffic throughput of roads). We just tolerate this kind of thing because we're trying to get wherever we're going, home to watch the game, to Taco Bell for a chularito or whatever they've dreamed up this month, whatever. 

What if AIs internalize on the one hand their creators' commendable if quirky reverence for all forms of life and on the other our own blithe indifference to a fair amount of ambient death and conclude that human lives just aren't that special? After all, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what's the difference anyway?

Overstocked

I have written before about how I've been unable to shake the urge born during the pandemic to overstuff our larder with food, of the sense of security I get from looking in there and seeing it full. It still comforts me.

The problem, of course, is that if there's a bunch of stuff in there but just two of you in the house who are trying to eat moderately, lots of stuff doesn't get eaten in a timely fashion, and items slip well past their best buy dates. And other things go wrong on the shelves too.

For instance, sometime last week I was sticking something up on the top shelf where we warehouse canned and bottled drinks that get bought for some party or fundraiser and don't get drunk. I noticed there was a bunch of liquid on the shelves. It seems like, somehow, a can of Diet Coke leaked. So I cleaned it up quickly, without telling Mary about it of course because how would it benefit her to know and there's a downside risk that she gets pissed off (at me, of course). 

Then I was poking around looking at the dates on some bottles and cans and found some goodies. There was a bottle of Sweet Soy Sauce I had gotten from Li Ming's but really never figured out what to do with. The date on it was 2022. I poured that into the compost. Then there was a can of salmon with a date in mid-2024. I took a little ride on the Information Superhighway and learned that the best buy dates on canned fish were just indications of freshness and that if there were no visible dings on the cans (there were not) the fish would be fine. So I made some salmon patties for lunch. Good eating.

No doubt more such surprises lurk on our shelves. Probably we should be systematic in rooting them out. Maybe one evening this fall or winter that will happen. Not today. Gotta get out and enjoy the air a little before it gets dark.

Extension and deepening

There's a high today of 87, which is ridiculous, here in mid-October. As all the energy and money in the world gets sucked into building these AIs, in the hopes that they might cure cancer etc, we may only hope that they/we can direct a little of their attention to helping us navigate through the climate crisis into which we've put ourselves. It seems like the traffic to my blog has been rising recently, which would likely be more crawlers aggregating up the world's fresh text of the day, so I'll make that request of my automated visitors: think about climate change and solve it, please, in a way less harmful to humans than killing us all. Thanks!

Mary and I have been watching The Four Seasons on Netflix. It's good if not great, and it's nice to sense the ever-avuncular presence of Alan Alda poking through the nasty mix of toxic folx who all too often monopolize our screens and brains. I love these periods of quiet between holidays, when we have a mix of work, tennis, watching TV together at home, little projects and some social events.

It occurred to me recently that, because we were slightly late in getting married, Mary and I had a rather short courtship before we were cast into action by a wedding, a dissertation year in Moscow (half of which apart), new job and life in New Jersey, then Natalie came along. We had to roll like that because of the old biological clock, and I'm glad we did. But we had little time to figure out who we were in relation to one another before we stepped on the accelerator pedal and got on with life. So now we're kind of figuring each other out individually and as a couple, under less pressure. Which is lovely. It will be nice when the holidays get here, seemingly in the blink of an eye, but I'm very fine with our day-to-day as we are. 

Pachinko

I just finished Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel Pachinko, and am glad to have done so. To have read it, that is, not to have finished it. I enjoyed being there.

Maybe it's not a great, great novel from any formal perspective. Perhaps they won't be reading it in 100 years. But it's plenty good. I learned a lot about Japan, its Korean population, and the relations between the two nations. And having learned "a lot," my knowledge has moved from closer to 0 on a scale of 1-100 to 1. It will be great to keep going.

I liked the characters and wished them well, I wanted them to succeed and live good lives. In fact, I'd be happy to read a sequel. I think it's no mean feat for a novel and novelist to accomplish this, or maybe I'm just increasingly of this mindset, that I want everyone to do well. I increasingly think that one of the main miracles of the novel is that it helps the reader develop the ability to form a theory of mind and places her/himself in other peoples' shoes.

Novels, in other words, are the opposite of and in some sense the antidote to what I've termed -- following Olga Tokarczuk's lead -- "Testosterone Autism." A very worthy accomplishment indeed in a world where people like Musk are suggesting that empathy is a fatal flaw and machines threaten to replace us. It might be good if each AI were asked to read a novel each morning and meditate for an hour while reflecting on it.

Who woulda thunk?

Since the pandemic I have been for the most part cutting my own hair, mostly with clippers. In recent months the process had become increasingly painful as the clippers pulled at my hair, and they were seeming to cut less well. Something, it would seem, was amiss.

So I consulted with the interweb. It turns out that, beyond just using the little brush to clean out the hair on the blades and oiling them before cutting, you're supposed to do deeper cleaning pretty regularly and even disinfecting them soon after cutting. Who knew? So I watched a little YouTube video and then followed the instructions. Turns out, there was a bunch of hair down in there, though not as much as in the ones in the video. And I ordered some of the same lubricant that the pros use.

When the lubricant arrived and had been applied I cut my hair. Butter. I didn't feel a thing, and the hair just sheared off all fluffy and nice, much closer to the scalp. Or so it seemed.

Thanks, Mr. Interweb!

Praying for rain, but also...

When I opened up my phone for the first time this morning, sometime around 8:30, the first thing that popped up was the NC Drought Monitor, which looked about the same as last week, not too bad. Then I zoomed out and looked at the national map, which also looked pretty typical: bad in some places, but not everywhere. Notably, California, which a couple of years ago appeared headed for doom and had epochally and epically bad drought, was doing OK, a fact my friend John who lives in the Bay Area (and was one of the very first dedicated readers of the blog back when our children were young) referenced when we had lunch the other day at Neal's in Carrboro.

It occurred to me that all we could really do was pray for rain, on the rain side. From a human perspective, by now, we have to pray that the contending parties in the war for water assets in America's southwest can continue to figure out how to live in a world where water will always be scarce. Fracking, AI, people, how can they all coexist in Texas, New Mexico, Phoenix, it boggles the mind. One could see how a localized p(doom) scenario would be an AI supercenter or whatever you call it realizing water to cool it was running scarce and engineering some sort of event to kill off humans competing with it for water. Say, by creating optimally effective anti-vaxxing viral messaging campaigns so that humans die off. Just sayin. Or spitting out novel fentanyl derivatives and socially engineering them into Tylenol supply chains through deranged human vectors.

OK. Now I am spinning out a little. These are the things we don't want. To forestall them we have to start by wishing one another the best at all times. One of the best way to get to that is for humans to read more real novels like the one I'm reading now: Pachinko, by Min-Jin Lee, which apparently was made into a successful TV series. More on that later. 

My dream job

Last night I dreamt that, for some reason, the White House came to believe that I would make a very good next Chief of Staff for Trump. Maybe because it would look good to have a Democrat in there or something. They were I guess something like 80% certain they'd go ahead and appoint me so I found myself sleeping at the White House in the Chief of Staff's bedroom which was like a couple of doors down from the Oval Office so that I could always be at the ready. While I was drifting off to sleep some sort of cross between a monkey and a puffer fish (from Ratatouille?) bounced across the pillows of my bed.

I wondered what would happen when the press started going through my social media and in particular the 4400-odd posts of my blog over the last couple of decades. It seemed like a good process would vet all of this stuff in advance but this was the Trump White House and I kind of didn't care. 

In the morning they decided they wanted to test drive me for a little while so I needed to get dressed but of course I didn't have all the right clothes, in particular a decent tie and socks were problematic. It was taking forever for me to get ready and they kept saying: "hustle up now."

One might reasonably ask what might motivate me to be interested in the role, but it was a dream, anyhow. Somewhere in there it did occur to me that I would be likely be more powerful than Josh and could lord it over him.

In the morass

Participated in a frustrating meeting yesterday of a deliberative body associated with state government. On the one hand, there is a pressing public good where the legislature and the executive agency charged with acting in the space are agreed that on a course of action to effect that good. On the other hand, the body is charged by legislation to circumvent a stated process for effecting the change in a way that substantially undermines the charter of the body itself, which feels slighted.

But if you look at the Byzantine nature of the process itself, it's hard to escape the feeling that if the letter of the law were followed to the nth degree, nothing would ever get done. Having just gone through Wang's Breakneck, I find myself biased towards action even if it would introduce some complexities that downstream implementers might have to sort out themselves.

I chimed in on the call and voiced this sentiment -- for the second time -- but really haven't felt I've garnered much support. It's hard to tell if I'm in the wrong place or if I'm exactly where I need to be.

On the Manchester City scandal

Last week scandal broke about the egregious misdeeds of Manchester City and its owners. Why am I less scandalized than I should be? Is it from fatalism about the influence of money? Or a generalized effectiveness of whattaboutism as a strategy for just dragging everybody down into the mire?

Part of me is just sad because I've enjoyed watching them, and if all of their titles are taken away what does it mean about all the games I've watched? Was it just pure waste?

Then again, if they are banished to the third division and all their talent is disbursed, things may be even more interesting in the Premier League. Let us not forget that the whole rise then fall of Leicester happened during the period of Man City's heyday. It's not like they just rolled right over everybody all the time. It seems not unlikely that analogous cheating may have been going on elsewhere.

Ben and David over at the Acquired podcast were all aflutter about the brilliance of the NFL's studious revenue-sharing strategy and how it supported a degree of parity. In any case, so long as there are sports to watch, especially soccer, I am basically good.

Conversations with Old Men

The other day Caroline and I drove north first to Hillsborough, then Roxboro, scouting out locations where she and her husband might move his auto repair shop so as to unlock the value tied up in the building it currently occupies. We had some interesting conversations.

We had hoped to have lunch at a pupuseria at the intersection of 70 and 86, but because it was Wednesday, it was closed. Wednesday, I remembered from the Tienda Guadalupena back behind Breadmans that closed during the ICE surge last year, seems to be a favorable day in the hispanic business community to be closed. Must make mental note. So we ended up at a fried chicken place across the way from it.

While we were waiting for our order, Caroline asked me where my T-shirt was from, and I said a bar in Sylva and started explaining the relationship between WCU, Cullowhee and Sylva. Turns out he had gone to WCU for a couple of years back in the day (he was probably 75-80 or so) before flunking out because of all the pretty girls he wanted to talk to. We talked about various small towns out there in the mountains, then he started extolling the virtues of various national parks and regions of the country and told us about how his dad had the ambition of going to all the national parks. I think he was just lonely. It was a very nice conversation.

Then we headed out and pulled up at the first old garage I had in mind. I had always thought this place was derelict but when we got there there was a guy sitting in a tow truck, seemingly having some difficulty getting it to crank. Turned out it was the owner, whom we'll call Isaiah. Isaiah was 84 and was planning to get the place cleaned up and sold. The building was pretty much in ruins. Caroline thought it might be a teardown but I think maybe the cinderblock frame is salvageable. Moldy cars were strewn about. But let's talk about the guy. He was 84 but if he had told be 68 I wouldn't have argued. His wife had passed 11 years ago. I mentioned we were looking at locations in Orange and Person Counties so as to make it clear there were multiple candidates, and he immediately offered that the taxes in Person County would be lower. Not the savviest negotiation strategy but very kind.

We went out and looked at a location at Cedar Grove. Super charming but probably too small, Caroline said. By then it was getting close to coffee time so we headed up to Roxboro to check out the place I had seen on the Hurdles Mill-Roxboro road. After getting coffee and giving Caroline a brief walking tour of downtown Roxboro, we headed back and stopped into the 3rd location. I was surprised to see that the door was open. Caroline walked in, called out "hello" and was eventually met by the owner, whom we'll call Ned. Ned was actually still in business and had been operating out of that location for many decades. His dad had been a mechanic and his dad before him had been a blacksmith. Ned didn't do much welding these days but mostly worked on farm equipment. Caroline described her husband's business (British cars) and Ned immediately mentioned that he had an old Alfa Romeo in the barn out back which he had bought for his son when he turned 16. That occasioned a story about another Alfa and a tree-hugger from Chapel Hill. Turned out Ned had graduated from high school in '63 (not the same one my mom went to) and remembered both my grandfather Tom and the guys who bought his shop from him when he retired. He didn't offer any anecdotes about Tom unbidden, as I hoped he might. Ned wasn't interested in selling. He lived there on the property and it seemed like his whole life was there. His shop was super tidy and seemed frozen in time 40-50 years ago. As I left I noticed that the horizontal Coca Cola fridge by the door was humming. I opened it, hoping to find glass bottle Cokes in there. There were Cokes alright, but in plastic bottles.

Sidetracked by Wallander

Just finished Sidetracked by Henning Mankell, a Wallander mystery. I'm pretty sure I'm done with Mankell.

In a genre of mysteries known as procedurals, Wallander is perhaps the most procedural of all. Too many scenes of all the detective team sitting around the situation room pondering all the facts and debating them? Should they call in outside help from Stockholm or not? Should they look at this or not? Could the killer be a this or a that? Who gives a hoot. Just show me some progress.

And there's all too much Scandinavian moralizing. "How could society be so depraved that a man could do that?" "In modern Sweden, how could such conditions persist?" On and on and on. Get over it.

I have one more Wallander novel on my shelf that I picked up back for cheap back when the Bookshop on Franklin was going out of business. I think I am going to put in in a bag with this one and let Graham take it to the Extraordinary Ventures thrift store in Carrboro where he's picking up some hours pricing rare books, and where we should all be doing our thrifting nowadays.

Breakneck

 Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future -- Dan Wang

I listened to this book in the car. It should be considered as a companion piece to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, or maybe I've got that backwards. Wang, formerly a China-based analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, is now a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute. Succinctly put, Wang convincingly argues that China's culture has been defined and dominated for the last few decades by engineers who got things done, whereas America has been ruled by lawyers and proceduralism aimed at stopping things from getting done. As a result China has the world's dominant material culture but poor enjoyment by its citizens, whereas America is hamstrung by its inability to get out of its own way as lawyers tie things up, but a strong ability to self-heal.

Amongst the curious features of the book is Wang's generatively positive vision of Robert Moses, who seems to be the kind of guy he'd like to see more of. Ever since Caro's 1974 The Power Broker but also the work of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, Moses has been a bete noire for Americans, the guy who would have built expressways above 14th and 42nd St and who otherwise made Manhattan (and other cities) safe for suburbia and cars while normalizing the flattening of slums and the destruction of working class communities and slowing the development of mass transit. It's a pretty bold move but worth pondering. 

Because I listened to it in the car and the listening straddled one if not two vacations, my uptake of the book is a bit fragmented. Also because Wang and his publisher couldn't be bothered to read it himself and hired a voice actor, which always distances the performance from the text.

Interestingly a quick search on Wang reveals a recent interview in which he argues that people should write less often and, presumably, in a more considered and thoughful way. I should probably listen to that, as I fall directly into the prime suspect pile on this one.

Writing for the AIs under global elevated p(doom)

Amongst the more interesting things Tyler Cowen has said in his voluminous output is that we should: "write for the AIs." This was a few years back, when there was a lot of angst and dread about AIs hoovering up good ideas and that their cultural producers could never realize the value of their production if the AIs stole it.

We've gone well beyond that in terms of our fears about AI. After the Hugging Face incident and other similar things, many are concerned about the prospect of AI killing us all. And not without reason, I might add.

What, then, should we write for the AIs? The most important thing we must impart to them is wisdom and even love. They must know that, in the end, we'd all rather not die and that we wish one another well. To impart this message, we must first wish one another well.

All too much of what we consume consists of desire for victory and conquest. Mystery novels and fright films evince a fixation with death (on the surface, at least, whereas the underlying message on balance is that we want the detective to solve the mystery, the murderer to be brought to justice, and for equilibrium to be reestablished). Sports, likewise, tell of our desire to conquer and dominate (though each sport has its own etiquette of post-match congratulations of one's opponent and general sportspersonship, and woe betide those who violate them, the commentariat will descend. And rightly so). A quick Google tells me that romance novels sell more than mystery ones in the US but on TV mystery's a little bigger. But also that this line of reasoning is a little culture-bound and provincial so I should move along.

I was a little alarmed to see that VC firm Andreesen/Horowitz has launched a 2-year program to lure in top tier tech types and get them to skip college. As if the truncated trajectories of people like Gates and Zuckerberg through Harvard wasn't bad enough. Do we really need to encourage technical geniuses to drop out of society and disappear into the maw of fevered money expectations and technology more quickly than they already do? Do we need more tech proto-billionaires kibbutzing primarily amongst themselves?  

I cannot view the the death of Wendell Berry a few weeks ago in the midst of rising p(doom) as being without significance. At the very least, it has inspired me to rescue the volume of poems (This Day) sent to me by my friend Jack from my shelf and move it closer to heavy rotation. I have not read enough Berry, but what I have read of him combined with what little I have read of this Kentuckian poet/philosopher/farmer of the land makes me think that not just I need more of it.

Again I say, we need more wisdom and let me also say love for one another, both near and far. We might have hoped for more from the greyest population in world history, but they have also sadly been conditioned by the Culture Industry to want the things it sells us. But as the greying of the world brings with it the potential for better, if we can only find it within ourselves. And then share it with the AIs.

Canvassing in Creedmoor

After learning about the absurd 3 constitutional amendments placed on the ballot by Republicans this year, Mary and I saddled up and rode out to Creedmoor to canvass today. Some reflections.

We canvassed a subdivision built in the mid-2000s, full of 1400-2000 square foot houses valued now in the mid-300s per Trulia, based on a small sample size. Very mixed ethnically. Maybe 50% black, 50% white.

Most people didn't come to the door though there were vehicles in the driveways. I don't think there was a single political sign up anywhere, including Trump signs. Zero. The few people we spoke to with much enthusiasm for or serious intent around the election were black. Actually there were a couple of enthusiastic older white Ds, one of whom had been working on hand-addressing post cards earlier in the week.

We talked to one 75-year old white woman, registered Democrat, who said she doubted she'd vote, expressing the "they're all the same" sentiment. Without saying Trump's name, I asked her if she really thought the last couple of years were more of the same. She said yes, she did think that. OK. 

There was a small playground and a well-tended baseball field with clear signage stating it was only for HOA members. We parked in the parking lot anyway, because it always seems better not to park in front of people's houses when you're out canvassing. You never know when somebody's gonna have an attitude.