All the fish in the ocean

"Foreigners complain about African migrants coming to their countries, but they have no problem coming to our waters and stealing all our fish."  Moustapha Balde, 22, Senegal in this article in the New York Times.

Basically the idea of this story is that China's fishing fleets -- deeply subsidized by the government -- are putting intense pressure on the ocean's stock of fish. This on top of the already sufficient hunger of affluent populations in "the developed world", which we already knew were doing this.

A couple of weeks back in the Economist there was this piece on pressure to fish down to the Mesopelagic layer of the ocean, where a bunch of tiny wierd-looking creatures that we've never tapped into live. They are part of the oceanic food chain, and taking them for humans will disrupt it further, but just as importantly they are part of the cycle of by which the oceans sequester carbon, so that harvesting them will further exacerbate global warming.

All of which led me to thank Mary, as I don't always do, for continuing to nudge us in the direction of a more plant-based diet. Beans, vegetables, lentils, whole grains. Ughh. It is honestly hard to get excited about it, unless I can slather it in melted cheese. But I know that it is right from a sustainability perspective.

Yield, supply chain, and hunger

On Wednesday I was at an event sponsored by the AgBioTech team at the NC BioTech Center, and there was a lot of discussion of food insecurity in the world. As agriculture vendors, the speakers were very focused on food production as the bottleneck that causes food insecurity, which in turn leads to people dying of hunger. 

But spoilage and waste are huge issues in getting food to people.  We have all seen or read about how much food gets wasted in America because of portion sizes, etc. Supply chain inefficiencies are huge issues too, check out this article on the path of an onion from grower to end user in India from The Economist. If supply chains could be made more efficient in the developing world, more food would make it from farm to mouth.

But an awful lot of jobs and ways of human interaction would be disrupted too. We have lost a lot of that in the West, and indulge in nostalgia by going to farmer's markets and buying a few choice things to get "back in touch with the land," etc. In Marxist terms, we attempt to de-reify a few commodities, and we feel good about it.

Meanwhile Amazon eats the world, and it's so hard to fight it. It's so convenient to order everything from there.

Anyway, back to the food question. At the highest level, from a capital allocation perspective, we have to ask ourselves whether, if food insecurity is the big issue, it is better to focus on production or distribution and supply chain management. A lot of which revolves around building better roads and/or rail as well as ports in the developing world.

Bus routes

Because it had been raining for something vaguely like forever, I went and sat at the bus stop with Natalie and a friend this morning. There I learned that the bus often comes half an hour late and just barely gets them to school on time.

They also said that, on the first day of school, when the other girl there accidentally got on the bus headed to the middle school, that the bus driver didn't even know how to get to the correct middle school and the students had to give her directions.

An outrage! Well, actually, it's just a natural outgrowth of labor and real estate markets. It has gotten so expensive to live anywhere in Chapel Hill that no bus drivers can afford to live there. In fact, I was having breakfast with a judge the previous morning and I learned from her that there were only two Chapel Hill police officers who lived in town:  the police chief and her husband, who could afford to because she was an attorney in private practice before being elected to her judge position.

And bus drivers don't even get paid as well as cops. In fact, Chapel Hill is apparently having difficulty recruiting bus drivers.

So there you have it. Labor markets.

The situation is at least in some regards better than it was when I was in high school, when high school students could drive buses, and they were often stoned. Or, at least, that's what they told me 25 years after the fact.

My book?

In recent week I've had encouraging feedback from interesting directions. A career counselor type suggested I should be a speaking nationally on some topic on which I had expertise, A professor at Stanford whose class I had guested in via Skype likened my perspective to that of a public intellectual and said I should have my own podcast. It's all very flattering.

But what should I focus on?  I have to spend a lot of time keeping up with client stuff, details of people's lives, and it's fulfilling in its own way. I'm reading all the time, and broadly, and that has its own joys. I like being out in the streets talking to people, to a degree, though I do get worn out by it and also by the very breadth of what I'm exposed to.

Again, where to focus to build a real brand? That's the question.

Return to the creek

Towards the end of my run I dipped into the forebay area where North and South Lake Shore come together. It's hard for me to believe I didn't blog about it a month or so ago when we were working on it. In short, we had to drop the level of the lake about 2.5 feet (by opening some valves at the base of the dam using a ridiculous 14 foot fork which we poke around till we hit metal). Then we had to bust up all these places where the creek between the forebay at the lake was plugged up, largely by hard-working beavers who just put all kinds of shit in the creek.

The work was cold and filthy and disgusting. One day I lost my wedding band while I was digging down into the muck with my arms and basically throwing bunches of branches up on shore.

It was, in short, awesome. And by hook or by crook, we got the water in the creek to flow and lowered the water level in the forebay significantly -- we literally drained a swamp -- so a contractor could bring in heavy equipment and dig out 10 foot tall, 50 foot long pile of muck, which was deposited alongside the forebay.

So, a month and change later, today, that is, I stopped in to see how things were going with the creek.

Astonishingly, all of our hard and good work is pretty much a thing of the past. The swamp was no longer drained. The creek was barely flowing. It seemed in one place that a beaver had been back starting to build up a dam, being a beaver, in short. In one place we had brought in a mini-backhoe to help us unplug a particular plugged up spot in the creek, and there had been heavy and visible treadmarks.  No more. They are filled in with grass.

Overall, this being Earth Day, I was reminded of how utterly indifferent nature is in the end about our presence. It could give a flying fuck. It will be just fine when we are gone. We needn't worry at all about the planet.

I thought back to McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which I just read, where he details all kinds of settlements from the 18th and 19th centuries back in the Barrens, of which scarcely a trace remains. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Me and the park

Yesterday morning I was headed to an event at the Frontier, a space owned by the RTP foundation on 54 between Davis and Alexander.  I have been there many times before, but somehow I can never quite get it straight in my head where it is.

Partially this is because of the placelessness of the park, all the glass boxes set back behind trees off of 45 mph roads and highways.

Partially it is because I have become so dependent on Google Maps for everything and somehow my brain just doesn't internalize space and directions the way it used to. Is it because dominion over this subject matter has become less compelling to my ego?

Partially it is because I was spaced out, listening to a book in the car (Abundance, by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis).

In any case, I got off 40 onto Davis and was in the left turn lane, about to head towards Miami Blvd, when I realized I needed to turn right to go towards Alexander Drive.  I should have turned left and gone up and hung a u-ey, instead I backed up, put on my right turn signal, and made my way across the lanes to make a right turn thanks to the very kind people in the lanes in the middle.  It was a silly thing to do, really rather irresponsible, as close as it was to 9 am.

Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Taking it all in

It is unreasonable to expect that anyone should read everything and be on top of everything pertaining to one's field, yet that is in some sense the expectation I put on myself. I have stacks and stacks of books, am managing a constant flow of periodicals through the house and links coming through my social media feeds, I know that I can't read it all. Yet somehow I feel like I'm supposed to.

I have internalized pretty good discipline with regard to the New Yorker over the decades. I have recognized that I will never even begin to keep up with it, and that to try basically impoverishes me via a steady diet of fast casual narrative, optimized for cocktail party chit chat, so basically read very little of it. Though I do let it pile up and then go through the piles. This weekend I recycled maybe 20 of them.

Same with the New York Times magazine, only more so. I just rarely read it, and rarely miss it.

This year for my birthday Mary asked if I had updated my Amazon list. Half paying attention, I grunted yes, meaning to go back and pare it down and prioritize it. Then I forgot. For my birthday she bought me some 8 books from the list, some of which I would have moved to the "business books" list had I made the time to look at my list, instead of watching endless Federer and Messi videos on YouTube before going to bed, or learning to strum new songs on my guitar.

So now I have a stack of even more books that I only kind of want. Though, honestly, when I turn my head and look at them, they look pretty good, and I know there is much to learn from them.

Sales gurus would say that even sitting around thinking about what I should be reading is a means of avoidance of going out and talking to people and learning what they need, that that would be more instrumental in helping me build my business. And there is some truth in that. But it is also true that I am building my product, one page at a time. And it's working.

Birthday, still recovering

On Friday I turned 51. It was most welcome for my birthday to coincide with Good Friday, which was most opportunely a market holiday, so I have been able to really milk this birthday thing all weekend.

It's a good thing too, as I was dead tired and sick after the two weeks of traveling for college trips and then again back to New York last weekend, I have been very happy to just lie around and do nothing. And mostly have few thoughts. I am still trying to find traction in a new book since I worked through the Wallander.

In fact, I went up to the Bookshop on Franklin, whose upcoming disappearance I am bemoaning almost somatically, and bought up all of the Wallander books we didn't have, since Mary is getting into them too. I even bought two copies of one book by accident, and several books by Mankell that don't have Wallander as hero. I hope they don't suck. I was sort of in a hurry to get home for dinner.

While at the Bookshop I placed a hold on one of the bookshelves there. Mary doesn't think they are very nice, but that place has been a big part of my life and I will have one of those bookshelves up here in my office, though I'm pretty sure we will have to bring it in through the window, since there's no way that it's gonna fit round the corner at the top of the stairs.

OK. It is now time to get the Easter baskets from the attic and put jelly beans in them.  Graham informed me that the "sibling rivalry Easter egg hunt is the only thing that makes Easter special."  So we gotta do that.

Meanwhile, an owl has alighted on a branch just outside the window of my office up here. It seems to have just swooped down to the ground and grabbed some sort of snack, perhaps a vole. Mary is now checking it out.

If you can go home again

For the first time in twenty years, I saw my friend Katya yesterday.  She hails from Kiev, Ukraine, but then was educated in Tartu, Estonia. She came to New York on a Fulbright in '94, and I was flattered to learn that she had heard of me from people I had met the summer before in Kazan'. We ended up hanging out some in '97-'98 in Moscow, and she memorably took excellent care of Mary one day when we went on a boating expedition to some island somewhere up the Moscow River somewhere.

So we had seen pix on Facebook, and were kind of generally up to date on the highlights of one another's lives. Children. Her move to Berlin with husband Tobias and her winning of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for a book she had written in German, of all things. In my mind, this all seemed pretty swank.

I told her how, being home in North Carolina, I was able to hang out with people I had known since I had been five, six, seven years of old, and she became rather melancholy. This rootless cosmopolitanism, she explained, is anything but glamorous. That Kiev is a beautiful town, how it had been larger than Paris in the 11th century, but that it was right at the crossroads of too many historical forces. How, the day Russia had invaded Crimea, she had stood in a store in Berlin with a woman from St Petersburg and they had both broken into tears, because they were from the same country, after all, it just didn't exist anymore.

It occurred to me that my family has not been forced to move anywhere for a long time. We have been in the Piedmont since before the Revolution, and though I went away, I came back. In this regard I am extremely lucky, and it is an effect of other people in my family scrimping and saving and earning and squirrelling, that I can.

Over the course of history, sometimes people are fortunate and can put down roots. At other times, they must move. In post-war America, it seemed like we pretty much had things squared away, and people could nestle in, mine coal, work in factories, buy trucks, watch football, bake cookies, what have you. It seemed like it was other people that had to move. At least since the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Otherwise, it was a voluntary thing to do, an option, albeit one that the higher-earning portion of the population understood was what one did to move forward.

These days, not so much. The Trump electorate is effectively asking the government to vouchsafe their ability to rest in place. They will be disappointed.

Tips by Venmo, or something like that

Flew into Newark this morning. At the airport, I wasn't in a rush, and my old black boots have a few cracks in the leather, and I knew it was gonna be damp again in the Northeast (again 😡), so I stopped to have my shoes shined and tended to.  A little shoe spa.

Turned out, my shine professional also had NC roots, and was planning to head down to Charlotte via Amtrak tomorrow to see his 91-year old father, who wasn't doing well. He needed to make another $120 today over 15 hours to get the cash needed for his ticket, and was concerned the inclement weather would mess with his volume and therefore revenue. He treated my shoes good, so I gave him a $3 tip on a $7 shine. He mighta fed me a story, but it sounded good and was convincing, and my shoes look great.

I was rather hungry, having had only a banana at RDU (where, by the way, I ran into Rhett Autry, whom I hadn't seen in 30-odd years. She also got a banana with her coffee). So I went to Wendy's, the best option. There the very friendly associate upsold me from the Artisan Breakfast Sandwich to a Panini. Good work! It was OK.

The big difference between the two transactions was I couldn't tip her.

Now, as the economy is hollowed out, as manufacturing is outsourced and then 3D printed away, as Amazon destroys dry goods retail, increasingly only service jobs will be left. And, as the advantages of larger corporations play out, there will be fewer entrepreneurs, presuming that people continue to vote with their wallets for cheaper options. So the share of people working in fast food etc. contexts will rise.

Service will continue to be an important component of this world, but we will be unable to pay for it, and thereby incentivize its thoughtful and chearful delivery and improvement.  But it would be easy enough, in the age of platforms like Venmo, to shift this a little. Why shouldn't I be able to tip the woman at Wendy's a little if I like her? Why couldn't she have a button with a QR code that I could scan and shoot a tip to? If she's a team player, we could imagine that she might like to pool her tips and pass fractions of them to teammates, as is the culture of restaurants with wait staff. This would incentivize not just good individual instances of service, but attempts to improve service.

It would be difficult to integrate this into a top-down, hierarchical management framework.  In a sense it would involve the disintermediation of management. But it would certainly be interesting, and it should be tried.

It would be good, as well, if an analog to the QR code could be found that would let one do the same thing for call center workers, It probably exists, I just can't think of it right now.

I think we all at some level understand that the progressive automation and granularization of large value chains debases human labor, but that the people doing the work are on balance good people trying to get by. The more we can find ways to individually reward the people who provide us with services, the better.

BTW, I bet someone is already working on this.

The first person

Just finished Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Much has been written about it, I won't dive deep now, a fine book.

What to read next? I can't read book two in Ferrante's series, because I don't have it. In principal I should probably start reading something non-fictiony and edifying. But it is rainy, I am sick, and I have been borne on the wave of an engaging first person narrator for some time now, so I will continue with that, in the form of a new Wallander novel. Back to it!

Reflections of the prior

I remember when, back in '86, after I had discovered there was this thing called literary theory that all the self-respecting intellectuals were studying, I was informed by my girlfriend Hilary that I had to take Lit 130 with Andrzej Warminski and Kevin Newmark. Somewhere in there we read Gerard de Nerval's Daughters of Fire, and I remember that Newmark, who I think led discussion of this book, made the point that the protagonist, as he loved women over the course of his life, always found himself trying to recapture the image and sensation of his first love. He made some very high-falutin theoretical point about this, about how this was the basis of knowledge or experience or something, how we are always already removed from experience in itself, working our way back to some ideal.

It seemed deep.

And it is, kinda, but I think that the significance is really less epistemological than just experiential. Of course we have nostalgia for the past, for moments of extraordinary ripeness and fullness, and the fact that our hormones are raging and eyes are being opened by new experiences during our college years make it only natural that we try to recreate them for ourselves... and our children.

Somehow I was reminded of this when, after touring Swarthmore today and having a little bite to eat, we had to dip into the college bookstore to find something for Natalie to read because she had finished the book she had started the day before. There weren't really many obvious young adult candidates, but since she had just read another Jane Austen novel earlier in the trip it seemed to me that Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel might be something she might like. So we snapped that up, and I'll be damned if, by the time we touched down at RDU three hours and change later, she wasn't a hundred pages into it.

It occurred to me that I have been raising the kind of young woman who I might have gone out with in college -- smart, positive, conscientious, comfortable in her own skin if somewhat unnecessarily shy -- if I hadn't been out there trying to be CLARK TROY, DAMNIT, and thereby in need of women with a little more... projection.

In any case, I'm very proud of her. She will make someone happy one day, first and foremost, herself, one hopes.