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. 

Getting geared up

We are maybe 90% organized for our trip out west next week. We'll make only a brief stop in Seattle to see Mary's brother Rob. We've got lodgings booked for every night but one and are evaluating the landscape out west.

Last night I confirmed one important data point to enhance our enjoyment. After a blessedly mild week in NC this week, with cool mornings (I'm wearing a flannel shirt and socks out on the porch right now a little before 8) and highs only in the 80s, next week promises highs in the mid-90s here. I'm seeing highs in the mid 60s, lows in the low 50s out at Forks, WA. Let's go!

Uzbek Silk Road, Cary

I can't recall how it came to my attention. I may have speculatively inquired of my preferred search engine about "Khachapuri Triangle NC". In any case last night a few friends joined me and Mary at Uzbek Silk Road in Cary, which features not just Uzbek treats but a wide range of favorites from the good old days of the former Soviet Union, such as the Georgian Khachapuri (a cheesy bread most often with an egg in there, as it appears in America -- it wasn't always so in Russia) but also salat koreisky (a carrot salad), borscht and, for the really unadventurous, pizza, gyros and spanakopita. 

We ordered a bunch of classics: plov', shashlyk, manty etc. It was all tasty and reminiscent of being back in the homeland. It took me back, which was the point. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

One thing there wasn't was any alcohol, since it was Muslim-run. Fine with me and nobody in our group complained, even Mary, who likes to have 1 or 2 glasses of wine with dinner. That must be hard on profit margins. I hope they make it.

There was a nice range of folks in there. There was a largish table of Muslim folks, some nerds, some black people, America, in short. In the same strip mall there was a Brazilian place, the original La Farm bakery store and even a little cocktail bar where some of the poor, beleaguered 20 something hipsters of Cary were hanging out. Long may they thrive!

We need to keep exploring the wilds of Cary and Raleigh, home to more a wider variety newcomers to America than Orange and Durham Counties, it would seem. Fun stuff hides out in unassuming strip malls.

Holding something back

After losing 6-4 to Cary on Tuesday and hearing some of the wisdom Sam, one of the Farm coaches, had imparted to him, I decided to implement some of that against Z yesterday. So I held myself back from trying to hit winners -- including for the most part drop shots -- and tried to hit deep to his backhand. For my efforts, I won 6-3. 

The mental effort of implementing this plan consistently was pretty exhausting, to be honest. I enjoy myself a heck of a lot more when I swashbuckle and come to the net, hit interesting angles, etc. I like to express myself. I guess in some sense that's what I have my blog for, self-expression. But I need more!  

Not nothing

Last week I met with a member of the UNC faculty to discuss helping him with his finances. He waxed gloomily about the state of the university and how it was "disappearing before his eyes" or something like that.

I get it. You get used to being something one way and then it changes. University faculties came over the course of a few decades to believe that they had this really comfortable place that rightfully belonged to them within which they could do and say pretty much anything so long as they didn't go entirely off the rails having sex with students -- and superstars could honestly do that too so long as they were discreet about it. They drifted far from the sensibilities of their funding bases.

Professors loved to rail about how money ruled everything and that had deleterious effects on everything. They were not entirely wrong. What they got wrong is that, in terms of guiding one's practical behavior, while money and power are not everything, they are not nothing. Drift too far afield from your funding base and eventually you get spanked hard, particularly when the demographic winds are blowing directly in your face. 

Poor saps

On Friday we went to the funeral of someone in our community who had passed away after a long battle with metastatic breast cancer. We had gotten to know her and her husband over the last decade or so a little at social events. We weren't super close, but we were plenty fond of her.

She and her husband hadn't been the most regular of church attendees, but apparently her brother insisted that her service be in a church so it took place at the Chapel of the Cross, the most gothic of Chapel Hill's two Episcopalian churches, through the intercession of an old friend and neighbor. Therefore the preacher didn't know her and, in his brief eulogy, had to use such phrases as "her family tells me that..." He did a fine job, nonetheless, being a professional. The service was also brief and a touch perfunctory.

Nonetheless I couldn't fail to note that Mary was crying more than a little. My guess was that the breast cancer aspect of it was hitting home pretty hard. I know from experience that the last thing in the world she wanted was to make eye contact with me or for me to comfort her, lest that make it worse. After the service we all headed to the reception hall for food and congregation, I assumed. 

But when we got there, we were told that her brother would make a few remarks. And so he did. He began at the beginning, when their dad was a cop in the city and the family lived first in one apartment in the projects in Queens, then another as the family expanded, finally out to Levittown on Long Island. He told the story of her life, stage after stage, act after act, with great joy and feeling and directness, culminating in looking directly at her kids and her husband and expressing deep love and appreciation for them. Everything the service lacked he filled in and then some. There was also some Christian stuff thrown in.

Mary was a wreck. I wasn't far behind her.

As one does, I started thinking about our life and how it seems like there may be a little too much blocking and tackling going on, too much getting from one challenge to the next, making and saving money, planning for the future, etc. And how I still feel like I'm at a vacation deficit. A quick consult of the calendar and prices on the internet confirm that we can still make it out to the Olympic Peninsula in early September without breaking anything. I think that's happening. Will lock it down tonight.

The end of the trail

When I graduated from college in 1988, I came back to Chapel Hill because... frankly I was lost. I really hadn't thought much or well about the future, my substance use issues were in full blossom, I was a little scared of the world and didn't have a decent sense of how I would make my way in it. I made up some threadbare excuses like "I wanted to move from the consumption to the production side of culture and there's a creative community and low costs in Chapel Hill" and "I'm training to dunk." There was a kernel of truth in each of them, but mostly they were kind of excuses for poor planning and even worse execution.

When I got home, after going on a lovely trip around Europe with my mom -- her first, and my first in which I stayed anywhere nicer than a hostel -- my dad gave me this mountain bike. It had belonged to Laura, dad's girlfriend then, who would become his second wife. So it's frame was a little too small for me (I just jacked the seat way up). I also painted it with gold leaf in honor of the Cheap Art "movement" which some friends of mine from college were spearheading.

Over the years there were periods when I rode the bike a fair amount. In graduate school after I got sober it was my bike both for getting around and for riding around Central Park on Saturdays, and sometimes for "commuting" downtown to Mary's place in the West Village once we became a thing. The subway was an easier way to commute, but the bike was more fun. I also rode the bike in my first adult charity ride, the 2006 Tour de Cure for diabetes research, on the team of my friend Cyrus.

I only just now thought to check and it turns out I had written about my bike already back in April and even in my most recent post. Today at least I've added some detail so I'll leave it. I finally brought it to its final resting place yesterday. Ashes to ashes, metal to metal.* At the very least, this disposal forms part of a bigger project, the revivification of our basement (from which it has now been removed). There will no doubt be occasion to share more detail about that in the months to come.

*It occurs to me that my slowness to get rid of this thing and need to keep writing about it has something to do with my complex relationship with my dad. Also the never-ending need to generate blog post topics.

WFH frenzy

With Amanda out doing a couple of days of online training, I've decided to work from home for today at least. I am veritably overwhelmed by the array of things to do, things to ponder, things to read, people to write, etc. that present themselves to me. Some of them, admittedly, are things that I have hesitated to allocate weekend time to: for example, take my 40-year old mountain bike out to the solid waste management facility and "throw it into the bin for metal," as I have been directed to do by my bike-whisperer neighbor Russell. 

I resist doing it partially because I'm sad to do it and partially because I don't want to give up precious weekend time. Weekday time, however, feels less precious. Anything I do on a weekday can, if given the proper spin, be made to feel productive. Perhaps it's not the "highest and best use" of my time, as we sometimes say, but if I have a work-relevant podcast I am listening to, and if I'm out in the world thinking slightly differently than I might if at my desk at work, who's to say it's not productive in the strictest sense. I might even run into a client or prospect if I go to a store. It might give rise to thoughts that blossom into not just a blog post, but a Substack post (I really need to write one of those).

There's also actual work to be done.

Ask me again at the end of the day. At least I've gotten a blog post out early and can now check that box.

Missing hands

We had a guy come out and give us a quote on replacing some ducts back in the spring. They were ancient ducts, original to the house, even. Not surprisingly he also recommended we think about replacing the furnace too. I did a little light research and realized he was right: that would be a smart thing to do. So we greenlit the project, conceptually. I reached out to try to get it on the calendar.

Since June I've been back and forth with this salesperson, actually more back than forth. I call him, or email him, or text him, maybe he gets back to me and says he'll call me the next day, and then doesn't. Last week I called his employer and asked about him. Apparently he still worked there, but they didn't have any record of his interaction with me because, well, they have no CRM and are managed out of a paper bag. But 10 minutes after I called them he texted me and apologized and said he'd get back to me. He didn't.

It has been hot and the HVAC companies are busy, I guess. But still. I suspect this primarily has to do with the much-ballyhooed "shortage of contractors." They're all retiring, or so we've been hearing for a decade or so now. So it would only seem natural to let more people who would like to do this work into the country. It ain't rocket science. People want to live here and work. Let them.

A new wrinkle

Headed out for a bike ride around 11:30 Saturday morning. I know it sounds late for August, but it didn't look that hot our, upper 80s but not 90s. I've ridden in much hotter weather.

Then again, what with going north and then hosting a fundraiser, I hadn't ridden for a month. In any case, I got all geared up and lubed up and headed out, planning for an 18-20 minute ride. I huffed and I puffed up Curtis, the most imposing climb of the ride which has the misfortune of coming right at the beginning. Once I was up that, I figured I was in good shape.

Over at Estes and Airport, I rode around inside the new Aura/Booth complex, trying both to gauge occupancy (rising but we won't really be able to tell till the semester starts) and, more importantly, what will be occupying the pair of commercial spaces not yet filled up by a gym. A cafe? A brew pub? Those are the logical candidates. A bodega with features of one, the other, or both would be brilliant but I doubt there's sq ft for it. I also looked at an interior parking area behind the row of units facing onto Estes. There the Potemkin village comes to an abrupt end. It's a huge heat island of concrete and onto which many 10s if not 100 and change units back. Ugly as sin. 

But I digress as, I suppose, I did yesterday. My main point was that when I got maybe halfway up Hillsborough towards Calvander, a little shy of the middle school, my left calf cramped up pretty good. Turned out I was 5.2 miles from home. I got off, found some shade, pounded water mixed with Noon, ate a packet of yellow mustard (thanks Sherman for that tip) and then made for home, this time going through town for ease of hills. I stopped at Weaver Street to refill my 2nd water bottle and there ran into someone I hadn't seen maybe since high school (Christoph Nettesheim), though I've talked to him on the phone. He had to hustle, but not before I extracted from him a promise to come to our next reunion. I made it home.

The key moral here is, I think, that I need to plan and execute my rides a little better. I hadn't ridden my bike since June and my biking muscles were a little in retreat. Since I got the new Prius I haven't been riding my e-bike to work at all, which has been a valuable way to keep my biking legs doing at least a little something a couple of times a week. Plus I didn't prehydrate mindfully enough. Aging is not for slackers. 

New opportunities

In recent months I've been offered to chair a board I've been on for a long time. Also, the local Democratic Party is spinning up an interesting venture (a "service corps") to provide direct services to the community and it wants board members. In some ways I think the service corps a good idea. I even gave a little money towards the kick off. In others I'm less sure. I've been thinking about that this morning.

The big problems are with expected scope and systems. What can someone asking for help reasonably expect the Corps to do? Help with anything? Is it to be a privately-funded analog to NYC's 311 service, providing a guide or entry point to municipally-provided services? Or will it endeavor to help with just about anything, including services typically-provided by the private sector?

Either one of these is a massive undertaking. Is the goal to ultimately provide all of the services or primarily to build goodwill and let people know the Democratic Party is trying? To build internal, aligned connectivity.

How will it set guardrails around requests on risky, loaded issues? Like if someone calls in saying "my insurance company won't pay for gender-transition surgery for my 11-year old"? Or "I can't afford ammunition for the handgun I like to carry everywhere?" 

At some point in time it risks become a big, lossy overlay on the full set of governmental and non-governmental services, mostly a recipe for failure. But maybe the thing is that you don't expect petitioners to get everything solved for them, they just need to have a place to ask and someone on the other end of the line. And it becomes another place to aggregate constituent concerns, to listen and learn.

It's an interesting endeavor but it has the potential to become all-consuming and one where setting boundaries is very difficult.

Need for adventure?

Met with a client yesterday who has, this summer, gone to the summit of one mountain on one continent and also done a multi-day hiking trip around another mountain on another continent, on top of a business trip to Asia. When I had first run into her into the hallway in our office after the latter trip, he had said he was exhausted. Then both of us got busy for a week and change before out meeting and we hadn't caught up properly. I asked yesterday if how he was feeling now, did he feel like she'd had enough. He said that in fact he had already planned another expedition in Latin America.

On a professional level the thrust of my questioning was to suss out how much money he was going to need in retirement. Might his travel needs flatten out? The answer their was a clear no.

But, truth be told, I'm also thinking about myself. Mary and I just had a nice trip up the East Coast. It was great. We saw old friends and clients, much of whom are the same thing. We got some exercise, went up to the top of some (small) mountains. But it wasn't very adventurous.

At home, in the evening, I continue to ingest adventure content on YouTube, first and foremost Itchy Boots (where our Dutch heroine Noraly is about to pass for the last time out of Argentina as she rides her motorcycle north towards Alaska), but also other channels here and there too. It's entrancing, if sometimes slow going.

When I was younger I got out a bit. I went to some somewhat offbeat places in my 20s, mostly in Eastern Europe. But I could have done more. Sometimes I wish I had done so. By now I'm not all that adventurous and Mary definitely isn't, though she'll go a lot of places if I do the planning and, if she's been there before and she feels like she might get a good picture out of it, she'll go there again (hence her multiple trips to Juneau and Haines).

I think probably we should be breaking out a little more. I could even go on a trip or two without her, given her limited taste for ascending mountains.

But there's always the carbon to think about. YouTube for sure has a lower carbon footprint. And our back porch here in the morning is rather nice...

Early Rising

Over the last year or two I have been obscuring the face of my bedside clock and also the one in the bathroom before going to be because, if I wake up to pee and see that it's something like 5 am, it will probably be difficult for me to fall back asleep, and it's already too late for me to take the two Sonatas it takes to knock me out. Not knowing what time it is therefore helps me get back to sleep. My discipline lapsed last night and I forgot to cover the clock in the bathroom. I went in and discovered it was 4:45am.

Right about now I have legitimate things to be worried about. Mom seems to be unable to get out in front of medical issues that are making her unhappy, and she's not getting any younger. It makes me want to see her more. Meanwhile business is ramping up. Opportunities for actual business growth are presenting themselves, but the fact that I'm financially stable and with a 6-handle on the front of my age makes me think whether growing my business is the right thing for me to be doing.

On top of the basket case that is American public life in 2026. The Right, the Left dominate the headlines but nobody wants all of that really. Nor do they in China, I don't think. Or even, left to their own devices, in Russia.

Towards the end of our collective 60th birthday party at Sidetrack earlier in the summer I heard Will talking to someone about sleep and his issues with it. I should take the topic up with him again next time I see him.

Thankfully at least one source of minor one-time stress seems to be abating: our local drought. 4-6 weeks ago it seemed really bad. Now it appears to be moderating. It's not all done, but it's a comfort to see one thing back off.

Return to NAIRU

As I sometimes do, this week I looked at the tables of economic data in the back of the Economist. One of the most important relationships in economics for the last few decades has been that between inflation and unemployment. Ideally, both of them should be stable. The Fed has long had a stated goal of 2% inflation, and the idea has been to set interest rates to manage business cycles to keep inflation around there. When the economy is growing fast, tight labor markets drive up the cost of labor -- a big component in the cost of everything -- so banks raise rates to slow growth in order to drive unemployment up to the equilibrium rate of unemployment, the NAIRU for short ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment").

Recently we got the news that inflation had run above the target rate of 2% for 63 consecutive months. Leaving aside discussions of causes, which I'd say are manifold and contain amongst them a lot of COVID-driven accident compounded by policy mistakes on both sides -- amongst the biggest being ill-targeted stimulus from Biden and too-tight borders and excessive Fed jawboning from Trump (early 2018 rate cutting cycle was a mistake -- markets should have been left to correct and settle) -- that's a long time.

But the biggest mystery to me is why public discussion of what the NAIRU should be has vanished. It sounds like a really wonky discussion but it's not. When the debate first came on my radar, back in the mid-late 90s, consensus on what the NAIRU should be hovered around the 5.5-6% range. Unemployment went down to 4% in the height of the dot-com boom then topped out at 6.1% in August 2003, by which time the Fed was lowering rates. Admittedly, we now see that may have been a mistake because it created the credit conditions which created the financial crisis. Under Obama we climbed back from the brink, and by the time Trump was elected unemployment was well below 5%, where it has stayed with the exception of the short-lived COVID megaspike. 

I'm going deeper into the weeds than I intended to but my main point is that since late in Obama's days, we have tolerated unemployment much lower than we would have historically. It sounds cruel to want higher unemployment when everybody wants to work (in theory, except when we are complaining about our jobs, of course). Maybe we actually need to get back to managing to somewhat higher unemployment.

One more thing: it's important for there to be unemployment up and down the labor value chain. Highly compensated people need to be getting let go for a bunch of reasons, both economic and social (for the growth of empathy). We need businesses to fail. Career and business failures create the seeds of creativity and growth. We may see a lot of this as AI gets integrated into the economy. We may need empathy from and for many.