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.

Simple vs complex at the end of the world

We seemed to have arrived at an odd impasse in world history where a yawning asymmetry has become apparent. In too many arenas of life, simple things are overwhelming complex ones.

It is simple and cheap, for example, to manufacture missiles, while antimissile systems are complex and expensive. It is simple and cheap to gin up a sense of victimhood and historical hurt in a given class of people, be it a nation, a "race," an aggrieved minority, whoever. But it is very hard to foster and maintain a sense of complexity and interdependency within people and to foster a culture of respect and an understanding that tradeoffs must be made to keep the whole show on the road. It is easy to build consensus as to why a given public good ought to be paid for on moral grounds, but difficult to get people to understand that economics and demography make it implausible to fund a wide range of public goods while also letting people enjoy enough private goods to incentivize them to defer gratification and pool the fruits of their labor towards shared solutions.

All of this goes on while AIs are consuming everything we produce and learning to be just like us. How and why do we expect them to be not just smarter than us, but also wiser?

Drilling for topics

My life has solidified into a lovely solidity of habits and practices which leave me pretty peaceful and fulfilled. I could drone on about them endlessly. Some combination of work, reading, biking, tennis and in longer cycles social events revolving seasonally around events focused on good charities founded by friends around here.

Hovering above that is the ever-darkening macro picture of advancing populism, threatening AI, a disintegrating global macro environment in which the possibility of WWIII -- once unthinkable -- seems increasingly on the horizon. Stuff I try to shy away from here in the walled garden of the blog but which cannot be denied.

Looking for something else in the blog archives recently I came upon a post where our friend Lucy had said that the volume of writing I did on the blog increase her propensity to read it. I get that. I have pondered the problem of logorrhea before. Then again, we don't think that way about Letterman, Kimmel or the other late night people. Nor do we say of Lebron James: "ugh, he plays basketball 82 games a year plus playoff games, I'll never watch that." Actually there are those who have that attitude but there are plenty who don't.

Is writing inherently different? Should we prefer the writing of those who write and publish less? Certainly there are instances of intensely important writers and thinkers who published vanishingly little (Heraclitus, Wittgenstein and Charlie Munger spring to mind). Likewise there are many who honed there craft voluminously and in public.

In any case, I appreciate those who grace my little corner of the written world.

Vacation.os

Over the last few years, nay, decade, Mary and I have evolved what could only be characterized as a vacation operating system that suits us well. It allows us to combine elements of a rest vacation where we stay in one place with an exploratory vacation where we're moving around seeing new things. Key facets include:

• Not leaving our lodgings till late morning if not noon or, in extreme cases, 3 pm. This lets us chill and make progress on a novel of some sort.
• Lots of meals from grocery store, often prepared food dinners, with dinner planned early in the day or the day before. This happens because Mary will want to maximize time with her camera around the "golden hour" late in the day, when the light is nice and soft. This goal/practice conflicts with the fact that in the ruralish locations in which we often find ourselves, the few restaurants around are often closing around 8.
• Premade lunches at picnic tables in parks and/or rest areas. This is the most old peoplish thing we do. We make boring sandwiches at home. Who really wants to pay $15 for a mediocre sandwich somewhere just for the luxury of not having to plan? This reached its apogee on our last trip when, on the last day, we had no more sliced turkey in the fridge but we had a lot of cheddar as well as bread. So we had cheddar sandwiches on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I would never eat that lunch at home but it was easy, cheap and quick and the views were spectacular. By the time we ate it I was hungry, and the views were spectacular. I would share a picture but, by the time we were there, my phone was dying and Mary ended up taking all the pix.

It's all rather civilized, though in some ways we see a little less local behavior in different places because we interact with less wait staff and therefore get less sense of place. And who really needs more quality time with one's spouse sitting waiting for a meal to be served when you are with one another 24/7 in the car/lodging. Often what we need is a little more time apartish, which an AirBnb or even a hike provides a lot better than does a restaurant.

Quileute Oceanside Resort, La Push, WA

For a couple of years now, really since Mary caught the Alaska bug, I had been examining the Olympic Peninsula and thinking about where we might stay if we visited. One place that always intrigued me was the Quileute Oceanside Resort in La Push. The pictures were stunning. There was nothing else out there. What was this place? I had to know.

So when we got serious about planning a trip out there late this summer and Expedia offered me an oceanfront room, I had to do it, though the pricing was pretty hefty. Taxes included, it was north of $550 a night. That's a lot of money for us.

When we got there, I was a little surprised to see there was no TV in the room. Not shocked or scandalized, mind you, a little surprised. Turns out the wifi was also crappy and only worked out by the fire pit/coffee stand. Also, in the bathroom the faucet was kind of corroded from salinity. There were bare wood floors. The attitude from the operators -- the Quileute tribe -- seemed to be "why should we invest money upgrading this place to normal standards?"

And they were right. Because what the place lacked in normal amenities it made up for just as soon as you opened your sliding glass door: the Pacific Ocean, framed by a perfect crescent harbor itself ringed by "sea stacks": little islands worn away by time by the pounding of the surf. A beach covered in driftwood of massive trees, themselves set free and then planted by the same surf.

The tribe clearly had good surge pricing software that allowed them to rake in top dollar when there was a lot of demand. Fair play to you, Quileute, it's the United States of America and if airlines can do it, you can too. When demand is down prices are more reasonable. It's cheaper in the off season. I think we may be back.

Ramping up thingflow

Yesterday I had on my task list: "buy new tennis shoes." I didn't get it done during the day, but before dinner I sat down at my computer to figure it out. The ASICs I have now have done well and I like their look, so I looked for more of them in a cool color but I couldn't really find anything in my size at either of the online tennis retailers. So I kept looking. Pretty soon it was taking up too much time.

Eventually I decided that I needed to let go of the colors constraint and just buy some shoes to get it done because I'm 60 years old and nobody is really looking at me and judging me by the color of my kicks. Those days largely passed in junior high school, however I may try to recapture the frisson that each pair of new athletic shoes, when the running store like the stereo store was a place we'd visit to dream and aspire. In that regard, as many, jr high was a good life stage (though there were many downsides, of course).

Similarly, last nigh, about 70 pages in, I've decided it's time to declare defeat on E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. The book has been on our shelf forever, it's possible Mary had the book before she had me. I really liked her Fen, Bog & Swamp so I wanted to like her biggest hit too, but I couldn't. It reminded me of John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces: it was just overwrought: too much narrator between the reader and whatever was supposed to be going on. I don't need that much narrator.

So, with Mary's permission, I will put that in the stack of books for Graham to take to the Extraordinary Ventures Thrift Store, where he is pricing rare books and jewelry and listing them on Ebay one day a week while working through his MSM at UNC's Kenan-Flagler. Good skills and experience. I will also add a pair of K-Swiss tennis shoes which I bought (I will spare you the story) and wore 2-3 times. Somehow my foot was sliding in them too much. In general it feels good to accelerate the flow of things through our home and our possession, remembering one wise client's reflection upon her mother's passing that she'd like to add to her high-level list of life goals to die with a number of possessions that will be manageable for her kids when she's gone. 

Foreign names

At SEATAC I was picking up my fish tacos but the woman who was calling out my name and making sure they got to the right person was struggling to pronounce my name. She was a newcomer to our fair land, her hair restrained by a hijab and I thought "OK, maybe for a native Arabic speaker (most likely) some of the consonant clusters in 'Clark' may be challenging." It was something I had never really pondered. So when she handed me my bag I had a quick look at how my name was spelled.

Mystery solved! Speakers of many languages might find that spelling rough to wrap their tongue around. It looks straight out of Game of Thrones.

The eastern shore of the Olympic Peninsula

Getting organized to fly back east today. Met with a client yesterday night here in Olympia, Washington's capital, a nice little city on the water, like the rest of eastern Washington.

The drive down here yesterday from the Port Angeles-Sequim area surprised me in that we were butt up against the water of the Hood Canal the entire way. My surprise would surely have been lessened had I looked at the map and noted that, indeed, there's only one road headed north-south and there are in fact hardly any roads on the interior of the Olympic Peninsula at all.  We had witnessed this from the north and west sides of the peninsula but I hadn't really appreciate how completely impenetrable the interior of the landmass is. Bigger than Connecticut, home to about a quarter of a million people, all squished around the edges.

The eastern shore reminded me of the Clear Lake, California area. A very middle class vacation area with lots of small houses and RV parks jammed up against a body of water nobody from outside the region has ever thought about. Or the eastern shore of Lake Canandaigua, NY. It's honestly good to know these places still exist. Not a shred of pretense. I hope kids ride bikes a lot there.

Superfluous men

 I've been reading The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim, a 2021 novel very much in the tradition of the "superfluous man" genre from mid-19th century Russia, save for the fact that he's not privileged like Eugene Onegin, Pechorin, etc. Indeed, the Korean character falls into a kind of bastard, disaffected line that runs through Bartleby the Scrivener, Dostoievskii's Underground Man, Ellison's Invisible Man, De Niro's taxi driver, and so on. People so outside of society's framework that they get warped.

It's easy to see this archetype arising again in the grinding social context of the Asian salary man within Japan's keiretsus and Korea's chaebols. Lots of them show up, for example, in Midnight Diner (see on Netflix), little guys (and gals) who do whatever and show up at this bar and find a quasi-home for themselves.

Anyway, examples of this type abound in culture, but they don't really drive franchises. Grim reality doesn't create blockbusters with spin-off and other ancillary revenue possibilities. Eventually they find expression in folk heroes like Luigi Mangeone.   

Nordic Museum, Ballard, Seattle

The first day we were out west, our sole day in Seattle, we walked into downtown Ballard from Rob's place and checked out the Nordic Museum. It was a solid museum on a topic I had never thought much about, the immigration of lots of Nordic folks (apparently "Scandinavian" as a term excludes Finns and Sami, but Nordic includes them).

Most interestingly, aside from the Irish potato famine I had never really thought all that much about what spurred European immigration to America in the second half of the 19th century through the 1920s. It was some combination of overpopulation, famine, poor governance. A good chunk of the population of the Nordic countries came to America. 25%? 30%? Whatever the number was, it was not low.

All in all, though the museum makes much about being pro-immigrant and inclusive of native peoples liek the Sami, it's hard not to view the museum in the context of the dog-whistle discourse around "heritage Americans" that is prevalent on the Right these days. Especially when there were discussions of the Nordic immigrants' "work ethic."  Unlike, you know, all those lazy Mexicans who are somehow stealing all of our jobs, despite their laziness.

Then there's the whole thing about early laws in Oregon banning black people. While not as white as their lily-white neighbors to the East (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming), Oregon and Washington remain pretty white. Just sayin.

Some better things to picket

There have been people standing at the corner of Elliot and Franklin St, across from Whole Foods, regularly since the beginning of the 2nd Trump administration. On the one hand, I admire their steadfastness. On the other, I don't honk for them because frankly it's a busy intersection and I think that encouraging people to honk there really deprives everyone of an important signal that, for instance, a dangerous crash might be about to happen between vehicles or, even worse, vehicles and people.

I've got a better idea for where people might stand more productively with signs. In the last few years we've seen a rise of dangerous but legal drugs being sold at gas stations. Things like

• Tianeptine -- an addictive, unapproved antidepressant with severe opioid-like effects sold under such names as ZaZa, Tianaa, and Pegasus
• Kratom and 7-OH -- semi-synthetic plant derivatives that bind to opioid receptors
• Other weird stuff

It's hard for the law to keep up with it all. People should stand with signs asking others to boycott gas stations that sell this crap. Like they can't make enough money selling gas, condoms, cigarettes, beer, soda, chips and microwave burritos etc. They don't need to grow into crackpot pseudo pharmacies. Shut it down.

Labor shortages and the shrinking of the state

On a call for a NC Commission I heard about a number of employers: state substance abuse rehabs, state hospitals and other, who were having a hard time filling jobs. We also know that NC prisons can't fill roles. I could blog at length (and perhaps have) about the difficulty of getting contractors to come do work, and the aging contractor workforce is a broadly understood labor market theme these days.

We also know that NC does a very poor job paying teachers. Starting salary for teachers with a Master's in Education is $44k. Pretty pathetic.

NC unemployment right now is 3.6%, lower than the national average, though labor force participation, at 58%, also lags the national average. All of this suggests that we should be enthusiastic about letting more people immigrate to America and to NC specifically.

Republicans predictably are focused on shrinking the state in NC: reducing state income tax inexorably, trying to get it to zero, while kneecapping all government functions. And then complaining about how bad the public sector is about doing things. It's all very depressing and stupid.

AI Journalism, and the struggle

Reading a decently long piece from The Atlantic this morning about how Britain became poorer than Mississippi over the course of a couple of generation, it occurred to me that as AI takes over more and more functions in society, there would be less and less content generated to feed the LLMs and offer them something to process. Maybe this is what Tyler Cowen has in mind when he says we should "write for the AIs."

Then again, I thought, there's no good reason why AIs shouldn't themselves be scanning the newspapers and magazines of the world, generating insights, writing it up and publishing it. The unique views or clicks it generates by so doing could provide the type of weighting mechanism that Google's reverse links did in ranking search results. Maybe in some sense this is what's going on when LLMs move from research to inference. Perhaps in the short run AIs will care about uptake by humans and differentiate between human and AI attention, but one can see how that would wane over time.

The competition between AIs and humans is already well underway. AIs appear to be winning the war for capital. The hyperscalers have been hoovering up not just equity but debt capital, driving up interest rates and thereby making humans have to work harder to pay mortgages, service public debt, etc. The question of electricity is less clear, but certainly increases in generating capacity seem to be flowing to AIs. The AIs still have us thinking that our big strategic contest is between the US and China, when it may in fact be between humans and them.

Or maybe they will remain our friends, if we are nice to them.