JW

Went to an AA meeting this morning, where I ran into someone who reminded me of Akin, who in turn reminded me of JW, about whom I have written recently. I had hoped to run into each of them in AA in North Carolina, but they never quite made it there.

There was a time we were friends, and had fun together. He road tripped with me to Bloomington (where he had gone to high school, I think) the summer of 1990 when I went for a summer course in Slovenian. He had gotten a book called Learn Italian By Yourself. He refused to speak any Italian with anyone else, insisting that he was learning it by himself.

Over time JW degenerated into someone I was generally not excited to see. We were on very different wavelengths. I had quit drinking, had kids, and was focused on the future in addition to the present. He had not, not, and was living resolutely in the present. Apparently there were many who found him charming, and I will confess that, on Facebook at least, he seems to be handling this whole death thing pretty well.

But it would have been great to have seen him get a handle on things and live a little longer.

Slightly charred

Woke late this morning, fairly burnt out after an intense two weeks, crowned by the social intensity of the last two weeks: client party on Sunday, followed by 10 neighbors coming over Monday to eat and drink leftovers, and a Board meeting at the house Wednesday to work through more of the pappadam and beer.

I am encouraged this morning by a couple of stories in the Journal, one about regional variants of pizza around the USA, another about the blossoming of baseball in Peru in the hands of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing Chavez and Maduro, in turn. Twas ever thus, the spread of culture. And it's a good thing.

Along those lines, I am intrigued by the Turkish Cultural Center opening near us on Franklin Street. It is certainly odd, given the low density of Turks around here. A little Googling shows that it is being funded by one Aziz Sancar, a UNC biochemist who won a Nobel Prize (Daily Tarheel article referred to is as "Noble" -- a shameless lack of copy-editing and/or basic cultural literacy).

So, the obvious questions: how close is this guy to Erdogan, and is there a Turkish government role in funding it?  He met with Erdogan in 2015 after getting the Nobel, and again in 2017. Erdogan was already descending into autocracy by then, though he wasn't as much of a cad as he is now, enboldened as he is by the world's turn to nativism.

It will be interesting to see the path of this center over time. If there are deep pockets of Turkish emigres around here, deeper than I know, then it may flourish. If it is dependent on Ankara for funding, I would like to think that it will fail in time, as the autocratic mode retreats. Although perhaps an enlightened regime in Turkey will support it too.

In any case, it is certainly odd to have a faux Turkish building going up just down the way from the always oddly place Hotel Siena.

Time to go pick up Graham from Duke TIP!

Thoughts on inflation, value, and values

Most economists think the Phillips Curve -- describing the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment -- is broken. Therefore we can keep cutting interest rates as long as there is no inflation these days.

I think that in fact we don't have an absence of inflation these days, we have inflation that is not being measured properly, because it is expressed in the inability to find people to get things done. Contractors who don't call back because they're too busy, for example. Businesses that can't expand because they can't staff up quickly enough. Right now Amazon is seeking to hire 20,000 people nationally, 10,000 in Seattle alone. But housing is so expensive in Seattle that a medical practice downtown (where a client works) can't hire young doctors because they can't afford to live within an hour's commute of work. That is a to a large extent a zoning problem (they need to build more housing and to do so must tear up restrictive zoning).

A couple of stories have supported my thesis. The Fed is taking the view when people say they can't hire they aren't offering enough pay (see here in the Economist). Meanwhile, the town of Emeryville, CA has raised its minimum wage to $16.30, but businesses are having trouble because their margins are eroded. A large part of the problem there is that one small town was trying to take action on its own, so it made its services more expensive than those of neighbors. Why pay $18 for a burger when you can drive 5 miles and get it for $13?

Fundamentally it's a problem of price-inelasticity: people balk at paying the prices that things actually cost, so they substitute or go without. If we want things to be cheaper, we need more people.

But that clearly means we need to arrive at an immigration policy that is acceptable politically. Unfortunately the current situation at the border was probably fueled by an instance of judicial activism (a 2015 court decision that created an exception for families seeking asylum, vs. individuals seeking asylum) that has created an opening for nativist extremists, who also are suspicious of judicial activism. Better that the border situation be addressed legislatively and the nativists defanged.

Almost done

After several days, one large party and a smaller one to attack the leftovers, we have reached the point where we are almost done with the tandoori chicken from Vimala's catering, and we are left with only rice, channa, naan, papadam, and some sauces. Which is not terrible, but still a little sad. Also some beverages. And cookies.

One very positive outcome was that I attacked a lot of things that had been nagging at me around the house, aside from the standard cleaning of windows and all the white paint on the porch, I also did some touch up painting, changed filters in the AC units and also the water filter, and even tested out Marvin's proposed method for cleaning the roof (hand-wiping with a bleach solution), which would be rather labor-intensive but is probably a plausible way to go about mitigating the really dirty areas. And it would be a good way to hang with my boy. Though the logistics of having enough of the right kind of rags to clean it all off is pretty daunting. And rinsing and wringing them while up there. In some ways it's a kind of crazy plan. But it would work without messing up the plants, and no power washers will send us a quote, it seems.

But the house is intrinsically in much better shape than it was a week or so back.

The role of the advisor

To probabilistically frame the nature of the tradeoffs between present enjoyment and future security inherent in a given choice for a given counterparty, and then contextualize it for them in their own life or business situation. All of this is subject to the uncertainty of the future course of events well outside our control, the limits of the client's willingness to share with the advisor, and indeed the limits of their own self-understanding.

Grasping

In recent months I've had difficulty achieving the zen-like state of morning groove that I try to get to from my early routine. While meditating, I keep getting distracted by business and other topics. My readings haven't felt as deeply engaging. On the positive side, it has gotten much easier to do 100ish crunches and 20 push-ups (those I can keep track of more easily than the crunches, perhaps a bad sign... Probably should ramp up and do more)

I have taken to going out on the porch and reading with my coffee when it's not too hot out. Today, while reading Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where he was talking about "seeking" (or not seeking, ideally) to do away with a firm distinction between "I" and "this" (whatever we're doing), I found myself increasingly distracted by the sound of birds singing and absolutely grooving on the wind blowing in the trees (always a fave). And I realized that I was doing pretty well.

Once more

Back from the lake, my face is scratchy from its deferred date with the blade. Made surprising progress over the weekend re-reading Eugene Onegin, getting ready for my upcoming September lecture at NC State on the topic. Which is, by the by, going to be huge and of considerable interest to all.

But now I must get in gear and get out to the office. Long day of stuff to do, thankfully most of it interesting.

Getting moving

Gotta hustle up to the lake so will keep this brief.

After a week of not swimming much, my lower back pain is back (not acute, but worse than yesterday and the day before) after maybe 25-30 minutes in the water yesterday evening. Hmmm.

Also spent some time around dusk yesterday getting the house ready for the party next weekend. First I swept leaves and grass cutting out of the driveway. I wrote not long ago of the place of keeping the driveway clean in the The Great Program, and I cannot help but to think back one of the original moments that led me to think about this, watching shopkeepers sweep the sidewalk in front of their shop. I forget where I was, Italy, Spain, Harlem, Brooklyn, somewhere. And I thought "why would he do that? It will just get dirty again tomorrow." But, as time goes on, and it becomes clear that keeping one's space relatively clean, and thereby bracketing not entropy itself, but its impact on those who enter your space, is one of the few instances of control permitted us by the universe. So, far from being futile, this Sisyphean effort to sweep the sidewalk, it is fundamentally noble.

Also makes the place look nice, attracting more customers.

More later.

Ghosts of things past

Today being Sunday, it was of course pancake day, so I made pancakes. Graham has come to prefer pumpkin pancakes, even in warm weather, so I made "pumpkin" (actually substituting sweet potato because he can't tell the difference and I am a little sick of pumpkin myself). But today's batch tasted funny. Had Graham forgotten to put sugar in the dry ingredients, which he mixed? He had not, he allowed surely. Hmmmm. What was it?

Turned out, it was the baking soda. We had left a thing of it in the back of the older Prius after Mary thought she had squished a baby mouse in the door many months back. I was never sure about that, but there was a smell. Well, the baking soda didn't absorb all of it, but clearly it absorbed some. Neither Graham nor I finished our pancakes.

Later in the day, after we had checked Graham into TIP over on Duke's west campus, we were eating lunch in Brodhead, Duke's swanky new uber dining hall/food court. After we got our food and sat down, I realized we were in the old dining hall, and I remembered the last time I had been there, in early 1990. I was auditing courses in Duke's graduate program in literature with Fredric Jameson, and he together with the Duke Slavics Department had sponsored a conference on new trends in literary and historical thought in Russia. We had a great set of people come over, people I didn't know from Adam but who turned out to be players.

Surprisingly, in the crowd of attendees, I saw a name tag that said Joseph Kosuth, who turned out to be the Joseph Kosuth, who back in the 60s had been a leader of the Conceptualist school of art in New York. A pretty well-known guy. I pointed out to Jameson that he was there, then introduced myself. Turned out he and the guy he was with, maybe a finance guy from New York, were hungry. I escorted them over to the dining hall -- the one we were sitting in today. We went through the line, and Kosuth got very excited when he got to the soda fountain and he realized he could combine sodas however he liked. So he went at it, mixing up Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and root beer.... like an 8-year old. It was pretty disgusting. Artists.

The meeting

Went back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands after some time away to read a couple of suspense novels (an Alan Furst after the Highsmith I mentioned). Shortly back into it, the heroine meets with a professor who lavishes great praise on a paper she had written and tells her to go to grad school. This is the second time I've read such a passage recently, the prior time being in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and each time I've been profoundly moved, wishing that some professor had given me such a talk. Not that I was treated unkindly in grad school or even college, mind you, I just never had that talk. Well, OK, my undergrad advisor did promise to get my senior essay published, and actually saw to it that it happened, but still.

Clearly I still identify all too strongly with the hole that Lahiri's heroine has in her ego, which needs to be filled in, even all these years after I have passed beyond academia. Oh well.

Also, my back hurts, I am lying in bed, and a storm is blowing in, which promises to make it difficult to grill, as Mary had hoped I would. But it's pretty.

Being the market

Some years back, as I was transitioning into the financial advisory world, I asked a woman whose firm I was considering joining, who invested only in actively-traded mutual funds and herself traded little, only to rebalance to fixed asset allocations on a quarterly basis, why she read about individual companies and trends if she was outsourcing the task of implementation to others. "That's a really good question," she allowed.

And it is one I could easily ask of myself, since I use ETFs and mutual funds to implement portfolios almost exclusively. In the final analysis, I feel obliged to read about individual companies and their securities because there is a simple pleasure in being the market, in observing the warp and woof of history as it plays out in its infinite complexity.

I would say also that the work of the markets, by and large the broad provision and distribution of goods, services and opportunities to the world's population, is a relatively uncontroversial good. Yes, the ecology of it all is complicated, to the extent that we would appear to be rendering the world progressively less if not outright un-inhabitable, but we are working on that. Hopefully quickly enough, though I'm not sure. Also, there is a very reasonable and time-honored debate as to how good the markets are as arbiters of who gets what, and what is the role of the state as both regulator and provider of capital. I doubt this debate will ever reach resolution, but we may hope that it will trend towards optimization.

This is by way of contrast with politics and social discourse, which are themselves also complex, fluid and dynamic to an extent none of us can grasp fully, but only as they unfold on a day to day basis. But they are ever fraught with conflict and minefields, so it is hard to try to take them in anything resembling an objective fashion, without being drawn into the emotions of their flow.

Saccharine rides

Went for a walk this morning with a friend who sells software to corporations. At the end, I brought the conversation around to carbon offsets, as I often do, and we got into the tired discussion of whether or not what we do as individuals matters in aggregate. Of course it does.

We started talking about car mileage and he starts telling me that in the tech sales community, you have to have a sweet ride or you have no credibility: "You'd get hazed if you drove a Prius." I was not too surprised by that, because I had recently heard how another guy had been harassed by "golf buddies" into selling a Prius within a couple of weeks of buying it. He ended up with an Audi, and also has a couple of Porsches. Still, it's pretty pathetic for adults to get pushed around like this by peer pressure.

I got home and went for a swim, because the walk -- a slow walk of 4 miles -- really wasn't enough exercise to justify my love for food. On the way out I saw another guy who sells tech in the corporate world. So I asked him: "Nope. I drive a 2010 Acura, paid off, 100k miles. If I had to drive a lot to cover my territory I'd be looking for something with good mileage."

So there you have it.

Together again

Graham and mom came back from their Italian biking adventure last night at around midnight. Mary and I both went to pick them up, though mom's new boyfriend insisted on bringing her from the airport separately.

It was a long day of flying for Graham, involving some sleeping and, surprisingly, some puking at Dulles, though that seems to have been a passing thing. We'll get more of a download later today.

On the way to the airport it occurred to me that this was far and away the longest I had ever been away from him since his birth, by about a factor of 3.

Our little phase of test run empty nesting went well. No fights, got some things done, had a nice trip. We did not open a portal to marital magic, but then we didn't really expect to.