Farewell 2020

At long last 2020, the oddest, saddest year of my and I think most of our lives, draws to an end. Everybody else is writing their year-end reflections so I might as well pile on. 

More than anything, I am overwhelmed by sadness and survivor's guilt, admixed with plenty of gratitude. Our family all been fine, well-fed, space to spread out in, plenty to read, internet working, wealth and business buoyed on a ton of money printing and people getting fired up about markets due initially to a lack of other entertainment, then sustained on a rising tide of newly minted genius millionaires, like the guy I read about in the Journal the other day who made a couple of million dollars in Tesla, so he took out an equity line on his house and bought more. Good luck with that.

Like many, I miss seeing people and talking to new ones, i.e. people I haven't met before. In particular I miss stores and retail. I like making small talk with cashiers and people showing me where things are on the shelves. In a best case scenario, that's where America's pot melts, where people get out and speak to one another, develop confidence and people skills and find new career paths. I know that's more easily said than done, but it does happen, and at the very least the process of interaction humanizes both parties.

Admittedly, I didn't get to that many stores before the pandemic because I am so busy working or exercising or reading or blogging or whatever, but I suppose that's what makes them special. My one or two trips to the mall or pet store each year can be sort of magical.

Having everything delivered to the house doesn't offer the same degree of social interaction. Delivery people are universally scrunched for time, they have full trucks. I'll bet they have metrics associated with delivering a certain number of packages (if so, I certainly hope they have compensation incentives). Sometimes we have a quick opportunity to say hello and thank you to their back as they go back up the stairs toward the street, but usually not. It's zipless.

Here's to a better 2021.

Uncharacteristically busy

Usually this week between Christmas and New Year's is pretty quiet, a time I can spend looking forward to the New Year and thinking. This year, not so much. There is year-end money pouring in from here, from there. A new client couple on their way in the door during what was a quiet week for the higher earner of the couple.

So I have been working. I've barely had time to take care of my own family's stuff and get a little exercise. Such is life.

I realize this isn't particularly interesting to read, but I am committed nonetheless to blogging a ton so I can get in as many posts as possible this year, because my readers have been clamoring for more. Just clamoring, I tell you. Bedtime.

Tech people in public service

In finance and other industries there is a long tradition of people moving from working in the private sector to working in government. While often derided as nothing more than a "revolving door" to enrich people and entrench the interests of specific industries, it's often motivated by a sincere desire to serve. After all, once you have a certain amount of money, for normal people the incentive to keep enriching onesself diminishes. This diminution is offset, admittedly, by a number of factors mixed in different measures in individual psyches: fear of major reversals, innate competitiveness and mild psychopathy, and a belief in the public mission of one's own particular industry. But still, many people accept pay cuts and enter public service, and often their motivations contain or are dominated by noble elements.

I'm not sure I see a lot of examples of this in technology just yet. Tech people have given lots of money away, for sure, with Bill Gates in the lead and MacKenzie Scott nipping at his heels rather determinedly. Indeed, those two have pretty much defined the debate around what philanthropy should look like.

But I'm not aware of many tech people actually entering public service and putting their back into using the public sector to bend the needle of history in the right direction. The recent Solarwind hacks on the US government by a state actor -- almost certainly Russia -- really indicate how much we need some to do so. Probably it is happening and I just don't know about it. How many Teslas can one buy, after all? Most likely, many of them are put off by the crazed bureaucracy of government, which is like the worst old timey waterfall project management paradigm on steroids, when they have all moved to agile (if that doesn't make sense to you, look it up using the search engine of your choice). But they need to get over that. The USA will never be Estonia in regard to e-government, but we could be a lot better, and there are plenty of tech people with plenty of money who could help.

Vignettes

Coming along Lake Shore Lane, across the street from Woody and Harriet's house, I saw a young girl in the driveway with what was clearly a new skateboard, one of the really cheap, plastic variety, just like the kind I snapped up somewhere in the southwest in 1976 (Santa Fe) and then had promptly taken away from me when I rode it inside the grocery store on what turned out to be a very slippery floor and -- having no experience whatsoever with skateboarding -- quickly sent projectile-style into a display of some kind of stuff, maybe a freezer case. I had no idea they still made those. In her case, the board itself was a very bright, electric blue, and it matched her shirt. It was pretty awesome.

Just then, across the street from me, came a young supermom type, pushing a couple of toddlers in a jogging stroller with another kid, maybe 6ish, trailing along behind them on a bike. My first thought was "where is their slacker-assed dad?" Then I realized that around here he might be somewhere working on a COVID therapy or up on an ER or something. You never know. 

Then I came past Bob and Emily's, where Bob was hitting a tennis ball against the garage door. He is pretty serious, played at least high school if not college tennis. No slacker. I had just seen that he had a court scheduled out at the Farm the next day when Z and I are supposed to be over there. He said he's taking his 12ish-year old daughter out there. Gotta love it.

The puzzling competition

One quasi-holiday tradition is doing a puzzle together, usually over at mom's house. In years past I haven't really participated, but the pandemic has drawn me in to the pastime, and rather enjoyably so. This year Leslie had the very clever idea of buying a puzzle and sending it around to everybody.

Natalie, Mary and I have been working on it, and have made a lot of progress on it. To set the stage, back in the summer there had been a puzzle I had picked up at Staples early in the lockdown period which was a pretty difficult one. I ended up doing maybe 95% of it over a week or so of evenings, during which I made a lot of progress developing methodology.

So this time, I feel like I'm the mother-fucking Puzzling Man. When I see them making progress, part of me wells up from within and wants to get in on the action and show my puzzling mastery. Which is ridiculous, really nothing more than a typical male desire to dominate, for absolutely no reason, in a pretty much counterproductive way.

I was reminded of a time, probably back in '86, when after Hilary graduated a group of us went off to Shelter Island and stayed at Janet Goodman's house. As a sophomore I was an outlier amongst all these seniors, so just being invited of course made me feel super cool. At the house they had these old bikes and somewhere down the hill there were tennis courts. Hilary and I borrowed the bikes and went down to hit tennis balls, something we had never done together, I don't think. So there we are hitting, and she goes "you're so competitive!", in a way that didn't seem like a complement. I'm sure I was subconsciously trying to hit winners, or maybe the ball was just in a place that so invited a winner that I couldn't resist it. I probably tried to dial it back at that point in time, but... we get pretty hard-wired to push for victory. It's hard to fight it. It doesn't always end well.

Christmas Day

For the first time in, I don't know, decades, we are in Chapel Hill for Christmas. Probably the first time ever as a family. We had been sweating the problem of how to celebrate the holiday safely with mom and Matt when Mary had the brilliant idea, somewhere around noon yesterday, of having them for dinner last night (when it was warm but rainy and loud from the huge volume of water passing over the dam) instead of today, when it's cold for sure. I of course had a little bit of a hissy fit when Mary proposed changing it, but I got over it in about 90 seconds, called up mom, and they came over.

So we have a lot of little bags under the tree, filled with little doubt preponderantly by books. I have a huge stack of books to be read, and of course magazines too, which come into the house much more quickly than I can read them. But I'm still a little excited to see what I got, even though I know they came right off my Amazon list. Fact is, I half forget what I put there.

It's also interesting to see what the kids will get. I peaked at their lists, but had little time to focus on them. This is always the way, and it gets worse every year as my business gets better and my professional responsibilities expand. Mary does all the Christmas shopping and pretty much resents it, but I have to earn all the money, so I have precious little time to shop. I wanted to go to Flyleaf to pick up some books, specifically for Natalie, who could use having a little greater depth and variety injected into what she reads -- particularly pre-WWII fiction and especially 19th century and before, but Mary wouldn't let me go because we were trying to manage down COVID exposures (we thought mom and Matt would be coming inside) and because she had books preordered from there for me. Oh well.

Looking out into 2020 and beyond, I have some thoughts... but I guess I will save them for another day because I have now written my statutory three paragraphs and am trying to post as close to daily as possible. Sayonara, suckers.

Reading Heschel

For some time I have been reading Heschel's Man is Not Alone in the mornings, after meditation, sit ups, and push ups, with my coffee. On the one hand, it's a great book, full of much wisdom. On the other, I feel like so little of it sticks to my brain. I read a couple of pages at a time and think "I really need to come back and reread this in the future." Part of it is just pandemic fatigue and change whiplash. I also think part of the problem is that like Kierkegaard he's such a smooth writer that you want to underline everything, but the world isn't like that. You can't have it all be dessert. The mind can only process so much aesthetic pleasure before it starts discounting the experience. For the same a cheeseburger tastes so delicious when you haven't had one in a while, but not if you had one yesterday.

Update from the court

The score today at the farm was 4-6, 6-2. Z and I have been splitting a fair amount recently, though admittedly he's been winning a bit more than I have, on average.

Today I did well to fight off a spate of negative self-talk about midway through the first set. I forget what the catalyst was, it really doesn't matter, but my mind latched onto something off-court, something professional, a small risk with which I have concerned myself this week, and I put that together with a few crappy backhands and my mind was off and running into the gutter. But I pulled back and kept the set close.

Obviously, the second set went much better, particularly in that I avoided self-sabotaging myself with a lot of stupid things, such as the false bravado that leads me sometimes to go for stupid winners when I feel like I have a margin for error. Overall, I'll take it. And, unlike Sunday, I did not fall on my butt while backpedaling to try to dink back one of Z's lobs. It still kind of smarts back there from Sunday.

Pretty sure I only had one double fault.

The Fire Next Time

Despite being somewhat literate, I had never read any James Baldwin. As part of my reading exchange program with Natalie (wherein she devours mystery and other novels and I peck away at things from her shelves) I bought and read this slim tome recently.

Slim but not light. Without trying to synopsize the book or its core messages, I should just say that there is a reason it falls within the canon of Baldwin's major works and that it almost certainly bears re-reading, which is why we can all rejoice in its slimness. As a white person in America, there was much to ponder.

I will read more. First, I've put out the Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro as suggested family viewing.

End of the semester as anticlimax

At around 10:30 last night, shortly after Graham and I finished watching another episode of Columbo, Natalie hit send and submitted the last paper of her junior year at Yale. What an anticlimax. This kind of thing should be punctuated by a little joyous excess with one's friends, who hopefully have done much the same thing around the same time. A last round of drinks and fun before getting organized to head to the airport or the interstate to get home for the holidays.

Instead, she just pressed a button. It is very sad how much is being taken from our children by this pandemic. The rhythms of their lives are being inexorably altered. I have told Natalie that she should be open to planning a year of whatever in New Haven, waiting tables, working some middling job around the university, to have some of the fun she should have had as a student and to firm up friendships. I need to reiterate that offer.

There are times, I will confess, when I am disappointed in what she's studying. It sounds all too much like what the Right lampoons universities for: an undifferentiated morass of interdisciplinary neo-Marxist, post-feminist, intersectionality claptrap. But at the same time I see that she works really hard, learns a lot, reads an incredible amount, does good things in her extracurriculars (which is more than could be said for me) and that her heart is in the right place. So I try to go easy. I just need to plug gaps where I can and accept that the world changes.

And to return to the second paragraph above, when I bemoan how much is being taken from our children, I am well aware that it pales before what is not offered to so many children at all, and that many kids from less fortunate households are being hurt by the pandemic even worse. I'm thinking of any household where there's not a lot of space to spread out and not a lot of books and a culture of learning, so black and brown kids but also rural ones as well as just flat out philistines and troglodytes. That's what we need to work on going forward, and there's lots of work to do.

Numbers and competition

Those who have known me for a while will recall that I have long had a facility with numbers. When I was very young, it was mostly expressed in memorizing them, first lists (largest cities, longest rivers, batting averages, points per game, multiplication tables, etc.). I avoided them for a couple of decades before wending my way back to finance as a career.

COVID has given us all whole new flocks of numbers to herd, and herd them I do, though as the pandemic has worn on I've learned to manage my exposure to them, because I realized that I was susceptible to their influence, even infectible by them. So I look at them only once a day, in the evening, as part of my shutting down ritual.

But one thing I cannot escape is the tendency to use them as a mode of competition. How are blue states doing vs. red states? How is NC doing vs other states on various metrics? US vs the world (generally I'm looking for somebody else doing almost as bad as us to lessen our shame). Orange County vs. other counties and states. Generally I have to recognize that this is not healthy. I shouldn't want to be beating the rest of the world at COVID, we should all be trying to just beat the damned thing.

Slightly out of control Christmas tree shopping

Having stayed off of Facebook and also hiding out from most news sources except for the Journal and the Economist (since I find if I even look at the NYT or WaPo I see the op-ed pages and am in danger of getting riled up -- mostly out of agreement), I was late to realize that there was a shortage of Christmas trees. We have also done a shitty job planning to give presents this year, almost unforgiveably, since we're around the house all the time and Google has mostly been working -- with the exception of yesterday.

So when I headed out on Friday to find one, I was determined and a little desperate. First I went down the the mall, but the TROSA place wasn't there at all. Next I went up on Estes to the Amity Methodist Church place that has been selling trees since the dawn of time. They were completely out, but there was a guy there doing something, so I pulled in. As I pulled in, a black dog got up from in front of where the car was and came around to say hello. Frankly, I hadn't seen the dog, and probably got closer to him than I should have. The guy -- who had come out to post signs telling people where trees could be had (thereby earning, most likely, my business for the rest of my days) -- looked at me a little funny, I think, probably because I had gotten too close to his dog which was, you must know, a five-month old puppy and the friendliest dog ever.

He said they had trees at Southern Village and also down near Brown's Automotive on 15-501 headed towards Pittsboro, so I headed to Southern Village first. Sure enough, they had some trees, but there was nobody there to take my money. So I went into this cafe across the way and asked the woman in there if she knew when they would be in to work. She was clearly a little annoyed, and said she didn't. As I left the store, I looked back and saw that there was a big sign in very brightly colored chalk saying people were supposed to stay outside and order using their phones. I had blown right past it. Whoops.

I went back south on 15-501 and found the other place. They had a good tree, but the guy said I needed to pay cash (though he was happy to hold the tree). I went back to an ATM and got cash, but on the way back I had to make a U-turn. While doing so, I didn't really cede right of way to a guy pulling out of a filling station (there was some ambiguity, admittedly), and he honked at me.

The point is, as I'm sure you can see, that because I was a little anxious about possibly not having a tree this year -- when the disruption of so many core Christmas traditions really makes the tree seem important -- that I was basically out of control. It's a good thing I didn't hit that sweet puppy, or get in an accident, and that the barista didn't kick my ass (she didn't look like she was playing around). Oh well. I'll do better next time.

Oh, the Places We'll Go, if we can get our shit in gear

My subscription to Barron's, like so many of our subscriptions, is both a bane and a curse. The flow of periodicals into this house never ceases, and distracts from both the reading of books, the writing of blog posts, the cleaning of grout in showers, exercise, sleep, etc. Though it doesn't slow my consumption of ~60 minutes of TV and half an hour of soccer highlights every night.

But I do try to read them. Today I was reading a series of interviews of a variety of fund managers and economists etc. about what they think the future will look like. The last question asked of each of them is "Where do you want to travel when all this is over?"

Good freakin question, and it has get my mind to working. For some time I've had two key mental destinations, both of them in the former Soviet Union: the mountains of Georgia and Lake BOf aikal. Though, honestly, when I think about Baikal, if the world were really my oyster, I'd extend the trip to embrace all the great lakes of the post-Soviet world: Lake Sevan in Armenia, Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, and Lake Baloton in Hungary. I've already checked out the smaller but magical Lakes Bohinj and Bled in Slovenia.

Of course, to do this would mean pretty much quitting my job, but I don't need to do it in one trip. But I do need to get organized to do it at all if I'm to hope that any of my immediate family will join me, before they get settled into the grind of their own lives and careers.

Then I go and Google it and see that Putin is considering restricting tourism to Baikal because of environmental depredation. Which I can totally see. 

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar

This summer 2020 novel had a beautiful cover and fairly jumped off the shelf at me at Circle City Books in Pittsboro, so I snapped it up for a cool $10. I think I must have seen a review of it somewhere, because her name was familiar, though it's her debut effort. On the one hand, I'm glad I didn't the full cover price, whatever it was, $20 or so. On the other, it was worth what I paid for it.

Majumdar, a native of Kolkata who went to Harvard and then Johns Hopkins, plants her book midway between the gloss of New Yorkerland and -- in her effort to hew to the varying stylistic registers her three overlapping protagonists, who come from different strata of Indian society -- something a good deal fresher.  

It builds slowly, then accelerates, in its tale of one character falling as a sacrifice to a collective need for vengeance, while two others rise. Throughout, she meditates on the destructive power of masses, whether brought together by new means (social media) or old (physical crowds), and on the difficulty of maintaining ideals while trying to first survive, then thrive.

Upon reflection, it would probably have been worth paying retail for it. I'll keep an eye out for her.

Being in the group

This morning I had signed up to speak at an AA meeting, which would be the first time I "qualified" (as we used to say in NYC) in a couple of decades. I was all ready to go, then the meeting leader said someone else was speaking. It was a little confusing. Fortunately I hadn't bothered to really write anything down, since I had only 15 minutes to speak and that's really nothing when you're telling your whole alcohol and recovery life story.

But I did have a moment in there where I was like "what the fuck?" Part of my desire to speak to this group was really to introduce myself to it better. I only started going there with any regularity 6 months or so before COVID kicked off, so I was figuring that telling my story would integrate me into it better. Being inexplicably passed over at the last second like that brought back feelings of rejection from younger days.

But then it also reminded me of how I've been able to handle rejection over the course of my life. I've become pretty good at walking away from a group of people where I'm perhaps not altogether welcome (or just perceive that to be the case) and settling in with others. Plus I do pretty well by myself. I have plenty of toys, plenty of things to do. In reality, even in this period of lockdown, I've never lacked for activities, only time. Even as I type I'm supposed to call my mom and coordinate going for a walk. The sun is shining and it's going to be a lovely day.

Now I'm signed up to speak the day after Christmas. The odds are pretty good that I won't be hung over, so it should be fine. 

On "Being a Writer"

On Saturday, an old friend called me up. He asked if I'd be willing to read something he had written and share thoughts on it. It just so happened that I had just finished reading a chapter of a challenging book and was about to make a cup of coffee before starting something new, so I promised to read it immediately.

It was an essay on a timely topic -- the War on Christmas placed in a deep historical context (I won't give away his punchline just here), very well written, geared towards a general readership publication like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. I spoke to him the next day and we discussed submission pathways -- people we knew in common from Yale at each place. Yesterday he called during the day to say it had been accepted for publication at The American Scholar, then he called back around 10 in the evening to say that the literary editor at The New Yorker had shown interest and he was having bird in hand vs. bird in bush anxiety.

I am, of course, rather jealous, but mostly really happy that he is getting this validation. But it also raises the question in my mind about being a writer. While we were talking he thanked me for some minimal suggestions I had made about specific word choices and we discussed the craft of writing. I said I didn't really often make time to read things by people who didn't really trouble themselves with writing well, but then I thought about the blog. On the one hand, the Grouse is an exercise in staying limber in my writing, just getting things down "on paper" and keeping at it. On the other, I can't spare the time to really go back and do quality control. Which makes me endlessly grateful to those of you who take the time to read it somewhat regularly.

One time a few years ago I was leaving an Al Anon meeting and a woman I was talking to said something about "being a writer." Naturally I asked about things about where and what she had published, and she was taken aback. She hadn't really published much, she just wrote. Which is cool. It's a free country. Who am I, or anyone, to say what it means to be a writer?

ESG and the Republican squeeze out

I was reading in the Journal about how Starbucks has appointed a Black woman as Chair of its Board. And a most impressive one at that, Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments. This comes within a flurry, nay a veritable blizzard of ESG actions on the part of various players throughout the corporate world, including yours truly.

I have been tempted to go back to Milton Friedman and review his classic arguments around the primacy of shareholder interests in corporate governance, the idea that it is the business of business to make money.* This revolves around the idea that you have a vigorous public sector acting in the public interest counterbalancing the for-profit sector. 

But then Republicans have been trying to squeeze the government from all sides, arguing that it has been too big and dysfunctional, that more should be left to the private sector. They argue -- citing de Tocqueville -- that the unique character of America's voluntary associations should provide for many key social support services. But that hasn't worked at scale. Charitable giving remains stuck at 2% of GDP, many people are working too hard just trying to get by in their silos to give back much, however much they would like to. In a sense, a true granular division of labor across the economy where every actor focuses on enhancing returns for herself doesn't provide for much giving back, an inherently lossy activity.

So acting for the public weal has been pushed back onto for-profit entities, for better or worse. 

* I was interested to learn recently that Friedman had a very influential TV show "Free to Choose" on PBS, and I see on YouTube that he showed up on Phil Donahue's show dispensing soundbites of grandpa-like crotchety wisdom. This bears investigating.

Money for towns and states

Right now stimulus talks are hung up for a couple of reasons. One of them is that Democrats want aid for cities and states, which are said to be hurting because of revenues crimped by the drop in tax revenues due to the coronavirus (actually, a note from Nuveen says that state revenues are down much less than they were projected to be in March-April, though I can't find aggregate numbers for cities).

But they're planning to send out more stimulus checks to everybody, which to my mind is just silly. I don't need the money, nor does anyone else who has participated in the updraft of the markets and the burgeoning work from home economy. There is tons of money in bank accounts and brokerage accounts belonging to individuals and corporations. 

Municipal bond issuance is up, but the total amount of outstanding munis hasn't moved much because cities and downs have been calling bonds issued at higher rates and refunding. There is demand for more munis, but the issuance cycle is a little slow. 

Really, in principle municipalities should be getting creative in funding their needs. Why not arrange lines of credit where necessary (banks are hungry to lend) and then go out to their communities and ask for money to maintain services? Set up 501c3s and hoover up $ to fund needs. That way they get the money but taxable income is reduced and the federal and state governments don't. Is it because elected officials weary of always asking for money? It's one of the things that keeps them connected to constituents?

There are probably good reasons that they don't, but I don't know them.

Blank canvas

Putting together my task list for the day, which is really an ongoing task throughout the week but something that gets really serious around 8:30 am, I see that today is a particularly blank canvas. Which is not to say that there's not stuff to do, there always is. I could work all day, every day, no problem. But there isn't that much that's particularly pressing.

Which I think really should tell me that I need to be sure to step back and focus on longer term processes that I have been pushing back for some time: managing my mailing list and sketching out a newsletter or two. That is an aspect of my business I really need to focus on more. If I am going to be writing, it might as well support my business. More importantly, I guess, if I am going to be writing, it might as well be in a way that benefits my clients. In some sense, no doubt the blog does that in that it keeps me centered and with a proper orientation towards the long term, which largely protects me from the winds that might buffet me and lead me into poor decision-making.

On the subject of the task list, I am reminded of what a professor I'll call Dan said many years ago in an Al Anon meeting, about how he has gotten to the point where he has dispensed with task lists entirely and just goes through the day doing the next right thing. He is a zen master. I need to go back to the meeting where I used to see him regularly. Much wisdom.

The end of all this

Yesterday I looked down at a stack of books on my floor and my eye latched on to Angus Maddison's The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, one of the books I finally started early in lockdown, but into which I have made little headway. It occurred to me that if I don't press further into it now, before a vaccine arrives, I may never do so. Not that I am under any illusion as to the speed with which I will get a vaccine. It won't be very soon, nor should it be. But still.

That is one book I think I should make a special effort to press forward with. The guy has a pretty astoundingly unique perspective on history, pretty much the longest view possible.

In that I guess it's fair to say that Maddison serves in many ways as a model for my practice, where my goal is to lengthen and broaden people's financial horizons. To the extent that I can get people to do that and to take the most important steps for themselves and their overall, long-term happiness, the day-to-day vacillations of the stock market become almost meaningless. Moreover, when people are really focused on the things that are really important to them, they tend to fritter away less money on little bullshit.

OK. Now it sounds like I'm writing marketing materials. I should just read the damn book. And today, I should turn my attention to my task list cuz I gotta meet Z on the court at 3. 

Aches and pains

When I was in for my physical a few weeks ago the doctor recommended that -- along with my normal diagnostic bloodwork -- I get a shingles vaccine. "There's only about a 50/50 chance you have symptoms like fatigue, shivering, nausea, etc.," she tells me. Thanks but no thanks, I said. I'll clear my calendar before I go in for that one. 50/50 is non-trivial odds. Then I went home and told Mary and she informed me I had to get it because shingles suck so bad and supplies of the vaccine have been low at times. So I scheduled it for yesterday late in the day.

After I checked in at the doctor's office, the pleasant nurse took me in an examination room and was getting me ready for the shot. We were having a quick discussion of it and she told me that most people don't get sick from the shot but that most people were sore after getting it. I told her that I was highly susceptible to psychosomatic symptoms and she goes "Aren't most men?" We had a good laugh at that one.

The fact is, I am a little sore this morning but it's completely trivial compared to the day to day soreness I have continually from doing sports and exercising consistently, and particularly compared to the clearly tennis-related pain in my right shoulder, about which I really should have asked her. I had just been given a clean bill of health on the shoulder from my two office mates, each of whom has a PhD in some sort of science, one of whom is an athlete. It's not a rotator cuff injury, and I have plenty of range of motion. Still, I might have asked the actual medical professional in the room if I hadn't been fixated on the whole vaccine side effects question. Sigh.

A new place to walk

Yesterday took the family down to White Pines Nature Preserve between Pittsboro and Sanford. It's managed by the Triangle Land Conservancy (thanks Bo Howes!) and is at the confluence of the Deep and Rocky Rivers, neither of which I had ever heard of. Most surprisingly, the hills are really pretty high, so tall, in fact, and north-facing, that it creates a cooler microclimate (often 8-10 cooler than Pittsboro, about 8 miles away).

I highly recommend parking in the first parking lot on the left as you come in, rather than going all the way down to the end. That way you end up taking a trail that really gives you the full sense of the size of the hills, with a descent marked by switchbacks of the sort you typically only see in real mountains.

On the way back we skipped stopping in to downtown Pittsboro and the excellent used book store there. Mary and I had just been there on the way back from canvassing in Sanford a few weeks back, and everybody's book stacks are pretty tall. But it was probably not the right moment to add us in as Covid vectors. Plus we had the wedding of my first cousin once removed Nola to watch on Zoom. Though the video quality was not great, we were able to clearly make out the ringbearer, who was the dog of the marrying couple. We were sad not to make it in person, but they did the right thing epidemiologically to keep it small.  

Nostalgia for the war

Picked up another Alan Furst -- one of the pile of books I snagged a couple of weeks back at the excellent used book store in Pittsboro -- as my quick read for the holiday weekend. As with all of these books, it's set in the 30s, as the Nazi threat moves across Europe, and is deeply nostalgic. Just read a lovely paragraph about the hero's dog, which came from the hills around Salonika and is a shepherd, so it escorts the kids from its block to and fro from school, likewise the postman, etc., much to the delight of the old ladies who watch it from kitchen chairs on the sidewalk each day.

It is curious that the time around WWII, a time of almost unprecedented calamity, death and disruption on the world stage -- is the focus of so much contemporary nostalgia. Perhaps it's because it was a time when the fruits of modernity were beginning to be shared more broadly across the populace, but still everything was relatively direct, person-to-person, and unmediated. The size of the boomer cohort and the longevity of the "greatest generation" and its children probably also plays a role. Will this specific nostalgia outlive those generations, just because we've all experienced the imprint of the good old days tone associated with its styles?

It's also likely that the sheer destruction of so many buildings and the cold anonymity and lack of geographic particularity of modernist architecture plays a big role.

Tippy top of the morning

When I was first starting to build my financial planning practice five years back or so, at the recommendation of the guy who ran my firm (who ended up having some hair on him), I started listening to and reading some of the self-management and improvement books that form part of the canon of the business and sales world: Brian Tracy, Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, etc. There was some kooky shit in there, no doubt, but also more than a dollop of wisdom.

One thing that Tracy talked about was that it was a very beneficial practice to wake up in the morning and write down the thoughts that came to you. To make that a daily practice.

I get that, for sure. Sometimes my mind is racing with the thoughts of the day -- and my morning meditation and sit-ups, push-ups, and reading are a conscious attempt to offset that, and similarly the practice of not touching my computer till 8:15-8;30 (today I was up early so that drifted a little early). But often I have very solid and interesting thoughts flowing into my mind just when I'm sitting down to my first cup of coffee to read. Maybe I should start journaling some of them. On the one hand, I would hate to have to put them on paper and then go back and type them up. Then again, nobody ever said everything needed to be in my blog.

Looking off to my right, I see Charlie Munger's Almanack, and I am reminded of how little he has written (similar to Heraclitus and Wittgenstein). In Munger's case I'm pretty sure it's because he believes that his time is more valuably spent doing other things, reading and/or talking to Buffett and the others in his orbit on the phone, designing dorms at Stanford, really doing whatever he wants to. Who am I to argue with him? 

Itchy and scratchy

That's where I find myself right about now on many days, having gone through a morning's worth of readings, first from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, then the Journal, then a first turn through my inbox as I build my task list for the day. I'm working from home so I don't really need to shave and shower but... man is my face itchy from this stubble.

My first call is coming up at 10 and the markets open in 10 minutes and there are piles and piles of other stuff to read and my task list keeps growing as I think of other stuff and more people ping me, there's no end to it all, but I think I will attend to my face and head.

Most excitingly, Natalie is expected home later this afternoon after spending the night in Bethesda at the home of her roommate Ravya. She's driving the Bethesda-NC leg home solo, which will be a first for her but a good milestone on the path of adulting. I can't recall when I started driving CT- or NY-NC alone, but it was at about her age. It should be good for her.

The Brothers K

As I mentioned a couple of months back, I started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time since I took Robert Jackson's course of Dostoieveskii and Tolstoi in 1985. I started, and then I put it down and read something else (Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree [currently paused] and also a mystery novel by Elizabeth George).

I must confess that the Dostoievskii is rough going. I remember this book as really being his crowning achievement, but I am frustrated by the inability of any of his characters to have a conversation which doesn't plumb some corner of the depths of the human soul, and also by the relatively unmotivatedness of so much of their behavior and beliefs. I get that Fiodor Mikhailovich was taking the novel in a completely new direction, he was trailblazing into the human psyche and the novel itself, no mean feat. But what the actual fuck? I could use a sunrise, or a tree, or a description of a meal, or a horse galloping, a little something. Man does not live by flashing eyes and soul bearing alone.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his highly influential Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics, puts forth the theory that Dostoievskii ushers in a new era in the novel by virtue of what he called "polyphony," the fact that many of the author's characters have full-fledged, distinctive voices that compete for and sometimes overwhelm the authority of the author: we don't know who is right, what to believe. I'm actually not feeling that. I think that all the characters sound much too much the same. Obviously Zosima is an exception, and by extention Alyosha, but we really don't hear that much from them.

The AIG Story

I just polished off The AIG Story, written by the guy who built AIG -- Maurice Greenberg -- together with business/finance writer Lawrence Cunningham. It's the 5th book I've read on AIG, which is pretty much all of them, so it's a topic I know reasonably well for the cohort of people who never worked there, but all of my knowledge is still very mediated.

Greenberg makes the case that he was basically taken down for no particularly clear reason by Elliot Spitzer when the NY AG was trying to make a name for himself, and he makes the case pretty diligently and persuasively. Once Greenberg was forced out of AIG, there was basically nobody capable of running the place well (and for this lack Greenberg himself probably shoulders a significant share of blame, he didn't build an able enough core of lieutenants to render himself replaceable). Then AIG Financial Products got way out of hand, and history ran its course.

Greenberg also argues pretty well against the actions taken by the Fed with regard to AIG after Lehman went down in September 2008: the Fed took about 80% of the equity in the company while foisting on it a an $85 billion loan at 14%. It was crazy times, and as a spectator back then I remember we just had an attitude of let them do whatever they need to, just make it stop. But Greenberg is probably right on this point too.

More interesting is his critique of changes to AIG's governance leading up to the crisis. He basically says that AIG was subject to generic bromides about governance: more outsiders, separating Chairman function from CEO, etc, and that the net effect was that nobody was in charge or really understood the business after he was forced out. He is particularly critical of Arthur Levitt, the celebrated Chair of the SEC under Clinton. Again, what he says makes a lot of sense, so I'd be very interested in hearing a governance specialist take a whack at his arguments.

There's no doubt that, once Greenberg was shown the door, AIG got in trouble, and we all eventually suffered. The extent to which he can and should be blamed for the organization's weakness is debatable.

Turning

It appears fall may actually and fully be upon us, even as the last leaves drift down from the trees. It has unquestionably been warm, though this is the rare year that we will take it happily, as it affords us an opportunity to have just a few more lunches outdoors before that becomes a bad option.

One of these days this election may be well and truly over. Yesterday I allowed the news of the evening -- that the Board of Elections in Wayne County, Michigan (home of Detroit, which provided Biden with the margin that let him take the state), had refused to certify that county's election results, part of a scheme to let the state's Republican state legislature appoint an alternate pro-Trump slate of electors. My blood boiled.

To calm myself I decided to watch episode 1 of season 4 of The Crown, which I had been patiently awaiting all these months. In this episode a fair amount happens. We are introduced to Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson. There is violence from the IRA (no more detail than that, lest I spoil a plot twist). But mostly we are introduced to the young Diana Spencer, who appears and fills a hole in Charles' heart and life, which could have been occupied by Camilla Parker-Bowles from the start had it not been denied him by the strictures of the court.

I will confess I was moved by her appearance, by the promise she offered, and I was transported back to the suburbs of Manchester in 1981 where I, at the tender age of 15, met one Sara G-R, cousin of Alistair (with whom Leslie had a little thing), who lived in Paris. She was only 13 at the time, which seemed like a huge gap, but she was so clever, so charming, so cute, she in many ways was a first love. Back in Chapel Hill I had had girlfriends and sexual dalliances, it's true, but none of them seemed like a really great match for me and, honestly, I was just trying to build confidence as I grew into my teeth and achieve status within the local social hierarchy, and of course hit sexual milestones. Don't get me wrong. I was happy for the attention and for the validation of my fragile ego, but none of them seemed to offer romance, like Sara did. I think we may have kissed once if that, but man did I have a crush on her. At the end of the summer,  I went home. She sent a very nice letter, one I would really like to find it somewhere, but because I had no epistolary experience and because I was a lazy dolt, I never answered it. I left a message for her when I was in Paris in the summer of 1983, but didn't connect. Then I tried again when I was there in 1988, no luck. We are of course in touch now on Facebook. 

In any case, seeing Charles swoon for the younger Diana last night brought all of it back.

After the show, I looked at the news again, once more breaking my rule of no evening news. The Wayne County BOE had in fact certified the election results, moving them on to the state BOE. Watch the fuckers try it again there.

Blanketing the bed

One of my jobs around the house is to make the bed, it's just not something that Mary prioritizes. It's the US of A, she's well within her rights there.

So it also falls to me to manage the mix of blankets, sheets, what have you that go on the bed. Recently that has gotten harder during shoulder seasons as we've seen much greater variability of weather. So today I was making the bed, and I had to take all the blankets off to tuck the sheet in at the base of the bed. Before I decided which blankets and in what order should go on the bed, I went and got my phone and checked the weather for this evening so I could make an informed decision. My windows are wide open.

It's November 12. Thanksgiving is in two weeks. There shouldn't be much to think about. It's fall on the East Coast and it should be chilly, there really shouldn't be any question.

The absence of consensus about the reality of global warming and how we should approach it is deeply unsettling. The fact that the mantle of leadership has been taken up by a Scandinavian teenager with autism is striking.

Staying clean

Since the election, I haven't so much as looked at Facebook. I don't know if I am gone forever, but I am cutting way back for sure. It is a very stressful time as Trump refuses to concede the election, I fear at times for the guardrails of American democracy, but I also suspect that going out on Facebook won't help.

So much going on. Mary's mom's health is not good. We really need to get up north to see her in case she is really close to the end, but we can't find that out till we can get her in front of a good specialist in what ails her, and right now she is in a skilled nursing ward where she is cut off from everybody. Sigh.

Then there's work, and school, and just getting through this damned coronavirus. One good thing is that Mary has been going out in the kayak pretty regularly taking pictures. After years of being underengaged with the lake and insisting that she can more or less only take pictures of people, that's a great development. She needs more variety in her life, it makes her more fun to be around, like most people.

Gotta get cleaned up and go to the office.

Cultures of law

Was thinking back to Mary's observation about warning signs about guns at houses in the country. In the city and suburbs -- at least the affluent parts -- people have security systems to protect property but basically everybody feels safe and is ~98% law-abiding. People drive 68 in 55 zones, maybe smoke a joint here or there, sometimes they drive after having 3 glasses of wine (but so much less than they used to -- and all the credit in the world to Nancy Reagan on that one). If you call 911, it comes.

Even tax compliance is high. Yes people who can afford them hire CPAs to get guidance on how to manage down their tax liability within the confines of the tax code, but egregious tax evasion is very much frowned on.

Out in the country, they don't have the luxury of trusting in the written law like we do. People have to protect themselves, hence the culture of the fetishization of guns, big trucks and other metal objects, male dominance, fences, etc. It used to be and to some extent is still subtended by a culture of churchgoing and the norms that come with this.

Of course, you have to fit in and play the country game. This is also the land of lynchings -- the historical scale and publicness of which is truly shocking (as I have been reminded recently listening to The Warmth of Other Suns). If you were gay or an ambitious woman (like my mom) or otherwise nonconforming the thing to do was get the hell out.

But the layer of superficial norms has been an important part of the placid exterior of the countryside, it's claim to some moral superiority. Trump and his demagogue predecessors have ripped the pleasant facade off of that, have made it OK to embrace one's savagery so long as it is supported by a culture of "work," which is equated with sweating and transforming matter, building and making physical things. How the preachers justify it I cannot tell you, though it's all ultimately about their way of life being threatened, I get that.

OK, I have digressed. Gotta get to work. 

The mornings after

We are still in the middle of this election, but it's not too early to start learning lessons. So long as the integrity of the vote is respected, we have to abide by the results. On the subject of the integrity of the vote, the decisions of the Texas Supreme Court -- all Republican appointees -- and its support the next day by a Federal court last week regarding drive-through voting in and around Houston were encouraging. The Trump administration and/or the National Republican Party sought to stop it, the courts protected it. That was very encouraging from a checks and balances perspective.

And checks and balances are super important right now. I think overall what we've seen in the last couple of days is America showing its strong structural preference to let Presidential administrations have two terms to work on things. Obviously that is hard with Trump, because he doesn't give a fuck about any precedents and tramples on things willy nilly just to demonstrate that he can. It appears that America is disgorging itself of Trump himself, but acknowledging the legitimacy of some of the issues he touched upon. And also lots of Republicans continue to just hold their noses and prefer lower-tax, lower-regulatory regimes.

So it looks increasingly likely we get Biden but constrained by a Republican Senate and also a House in which the balance of power shifts incrementally back towards the middle. We can live with this. Indeed, we have no choice. Or perhaps it is better to say that we do have a choice and we have just shown what that is. With the Supreme Court conservative, the legislature will have to work to do anything. Having two Senators in the White House should ideally be great for getting the legislature back in productive, compromising mode. Let us cross our fingers.

There will be time to parse out the shifting demographics of the election. If more blacks and latinos are showing an acceptance of some of the pro-growth less government tighter boarders rhetoric of Trumpism, we have to listen to it.

The astonishing thing is the general acceptance of higher overall mortality in the face of coronavirus so that the economy will grow. A large part of the problem is that red states and counties had low mortality early in the crisis so they didn't feel the shock. It was a trauma to those of us in blue places. My life is in many ways more closely bound to New York, and even to London, Paris, and Madrid, than it is to Sanford and Yanceyville. I am in touch with people in the other places, I hear their stories and feel their pain.

It only just dawned on me this morning that, if Biden is elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman in line for succession to the Presidency. That is a big deal that nobody has been playing up. Fingers croesed.

All in the neighborhood

We never see many trick or treaters at our house. The hills are steep, the lots are pretty big compared to contemporary subdivisions, the houses set back from the road, behind trees, the walkways to them are not always that well lit. Many of the houses are lived in by old professors who have been there for decades and don't have huge disposable incomes. Put it all together, and a kid has to work pretty hard to get to each unit of sugar. It's so much easier to hop in a car and go to Southern Village or Meadowmont, where it's cookie-cutter, Norman Rockwell dense.

This year was different. Trick or treating was a bit more of a fraught affair as people around the nation tried to carry on in a pandemic-friendly way. Benches and tables were put at the end of driveways with little bags of candy.

Remarkably, we had more trick or treaters than ever, about 20 of them. I think it's pretty much because people didn't take there kids to other neighborhoods. So I ended up meeting a number of people, including people I've seen around the lake in the summer. It was really nice. Perhaps this is another lesson in the unseen downsides in our metrics-driven, return-optimizing culture, in this case reflected in our children, who are well-tuned candy-seeking machines.

Although I will say I remember taking Natalie to Southern Village a decade or so ago and running into a couple of people I hadn't seen in decades, people I didn't even know were back in Chapel Hill.

Settling in

Over the last couple of days Mary and I have been out a couple of times doing lit drops again, first in northern Orange Country, a part of the county I don't know well, mostly roads branching off of New Sharon Church. Then today we went down to Sanford and went around neighborhoods in town. Yesterday was much prettier, but today it was easier to hit a bunch of doors.

First observation, something Mary really fastened on, was the prevalence of intentionally scary signage out in the country, even for houses marked for Democrats. So many signs saying "we will shoot trespassers" and erstwhile witty variants on that theme ("due to high prices on ammunition, you won't get a warning shot", etc). I don't know if that's because there is actually more crime and less police presence out there in the country (though of course the latter is true) or because people feel threatened out there.

Towards the end of our turf yesterday we came across this old dude sitting outside in his yard, which was pretty much a junkyard, outside of his trailer with maybe a bit of a stick-built addition to it. Mary got out and handed him his packet and he was like: "Oh, so y'all hadn't sent me enough stuff in the mail, you had to come all the way out here to bring it to me?" Which is kind of a good point. It does feel a little superfluous to be bringing stuff similar to what comes in the mail by hand, and surely there has been a surfeit of phone-banking, text-banking, just as there has been a mail overload. I think the real issue is that there's all this pent up energy and cash that comes spewing out of anxious Democrats (dunno about Republicans) late in an electoral cycle, and you end up sending a lot of people whose time is expensive out doing rote things at huge scale. It would be much better to productively engage their talents better across the full cycle, but the party hasn't figured that out yet. It is no simple task for sure, but it's worth pondering.

In town today in Sanford, one thing that was noteworthy was the low incidence of Biden/Harris signs in primarily African-American neighborhoods. I guess now that I think about it it's not that surprising, maybe I haven't seen them there in years past. But still. Come on, it ain't that hard.

Very good Mexican food a La Fonda Lupita, though I hoped for more a few more nopales in my gordita. When we went in this woman was singing very well and passionately along with some song she was playing on her phone. When she was done, everybody gave her a well-earned round of applause. And then I realized that she had no mask on. Thanks for that.

I think I may be done for this election. I don't know, maybe I should go up to Person County and poll greet on election day, but I may have done my part.

Kernersville lit drop

Mary and I hit the road for Winston-Salem to do a lit drop, and ended up with a list around Kernersville. After picking up our list in W-S and getting a lunch recommendation from David Fortney (good BBQ place -- Little Richard's), we parked at the top of a neighborhood and split up.

There was some confusion about whether we were knocking on doors. Naturally, I wanted to do it, so I started off doing it and saw some interesting households, including one where a 19-year old hispanic woman was the only one who could vote, had already voted, and was super-pleasant despite the fact that I had woken her up from a nap. Also, there was a "Beware of Dog" sign but the barks I heard from within indicated a very small dog.

The next guy I talked to had also already voted. Next door to him was a very Trumpy household, with a big yard sign and American flag. I asked if he and his neighbor were able to remain civil and he said yeah, but that it was impossible to have a substantive conversation.

Down at the bottom of the neighborhood there was a big apartment complex, maybe 80 units all told. Probably built in the 80s sometime, but really in impeccable shape. The clubhouse and pool were immaculate, and the playground out in the middle looked modern and was getting a lot of use. Very mixed ethnically, I spoke for a while to one white woman probably in her 80s who took a little while to register that I had on a Biden/Harris shirt, then said she was for the other side, but quietly admitted she wasn't going to vote. I talked to her for a little while to get a feel for where she was, and it turned out that she was afraid of people not wearing masks in grocery stores, and didn't realize that the CDC had initially held back on recommending people wear masks because of PPE shortages. I didn't work her too hard. She kept looking down the sidewalk a little fearfully, as if afraid that neighbors might see her talking to a Democrat. She said she appreciated what I was doing.

The neighborhood we hit next was a little more affluent, but we were pleasantly surprised to see how much diversity there was within it. Black households, mixed households. (Kernersville's median income is about the same as NC's ($52k), but the minority sharde of its population is a little lower than average) 

It's always nice to get out and gather anecdotal evidence like this. The great thing about canvassing is that it allows one to easily get out and go around other people's neighborhoods in a way that doesn't arouse suspicion. People understand what you're doing. Even if they disagree with you they support the activity you're engaged in. I always make an extra effort to wave at Republicans and say howdy if they are in their yards.

Overall, a couple of observations. First, both parties have a vested interest in portraying America as being in a crisis which it and only it is uniquely qualified to address. Trump called out "American Carnage," a country ravaged by reverse discrimination and tax-and-spend kleptocrats. Democrats focus on the hollowing of the middle class by the concentrat ion of wealth in the hands of ever fewer people.

The evidence on the ground is not always as clear, though the malefactor that neither party addresses is the chains and roll-ups that make it ever harder for small businesses, especially retail, to thrive. And everybody loves local retail, everybody likes knowing the people they buy their whatever from, keeping things in the community, and the examples set by small entrepreneurs. There's just no good politics to be made of attacking economies of scale, and we all end up gravitating towards price and convenience, just like we love fat, salt, and sugar.

Admittedly, my sample size is small and the last couple of weekends have been spent fairly close to I-85, along which is arrayed one of the highest economic growth arteries in the US. Not in the richest part of it, but not in the poorest. But in this rather median place, things were not all doom and gloom. What was sad, in retrospect, was how few people there were out in the streets on such a fine day.

A new driver

Yesterday I discovered that Mary's car Beatrice (the 2010 Prius) was due for registration by 10/31, so she needed to be inspected. This morning, I hustled her in to Chapel Hill Tire down by the mall around opening, using that as a pretext to get a biscuit from Sunrise.

When I got there Bucky (cousin to Chris and Thomas Clark) was working the desk, and he looked at me and asked "Do you have an appointment?" I didn't, and he asked if I could leave it, which I could. Of course I had to eat my biscuit before it got cold, but as I sat there I thought about how they really couldn't give me a ride back to the house because, you know, Covid. Mary was still enjoying her beauty sleep almost certainly, and I was a little overdressed to walk back, with my briefcase and laptop and all, but then the solution dawned on me: our youngest driver.

It was 8:10 and Graham didn't have class till 9, but I knew that he was laying in bed reading his iPad because I had already gone in for a morning hug, so I called him up and gently informed him that he was going to come pick me up. To make the navigation component really easy I told him to meet me at the fire station at Elliot and Franklin. He begrudgingly accepted, and came and got me.

And so begins a new era in our household. Graham has begun to earn the couple of hundred extra bucks a month for auto insurance to have this him on our policy. We may hope that, as it dawns on him that he can just grab a key and hop in that big hunk of metal, plastic and rubber and go, he may also spread his wings a little.

The cruelty of numbers

Every evening I check the coronavirus numbers to see how the world is doing and, being who I am and how I am, part of what I am doing is keeping score. I think we've all been doing it. Who's doing better, blue states or red states? On what metric (growth rate, incidence in population, mortality....) Alternately, US vs the world. Lockdown Europe vs. Sweden. It's hard not to. Part of me is a numbers guy, and these are a lot of numbers, and fresh ones every day, a new set of metrics by which to judge the world.

But this is ultimately not a productive enterprise, and it is asking the wrong questions in the wrong way. I -- and perhaps we - all too easily lose sight of the really big picture - which is that a lot of people are dying our there, a lot of others are hungry, and a lot of people (many of whom are the same ones who are hungry) are having the arcs of their lives disrupted in a really nasty way as their means of earning a living and commune with loved ones and neighbors are taken from them.

Before coronavirus settled on our shores partisanship and the atomization of society were already huge problems and we all knew it. In my heart of hearts -- and I think I am not alone in this -- I hoped that a crisis might descend upon us -- like WWII -- to give us a shared purpose. The arrival of COVID provided us with this opportunity, and for a very brief moment it felt like we might be able to make use of it.

Then things erupted. For people in blue places, it's easy to lay the blame on the Reopeners. When they showed up in Raleigh and Lansing with big-assed guns and rocket launchers and wrenches bigger than any I had ever seen, it was difficult not to be appalled, though I understood where they were coming from. Unfortunately, the echo chamber of Facebook, the too-politicized news landscape and its chief booster, our jackass Tweeter in Chief -- caused use to focus on our rage. Imagine if, instead, the Reopeners had left their guns at home and the three major news networks had dispatched the likes of Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw or Cokie Roberts to talk to the Reoperners. Things might have evolved rather differently.

Upon reflection, I think that, from the point of view of the political fabric, the big mistake the Reopeners made was taking firearms to their protests. If they hadn't, it would have been difficult not to respect their exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Even if we had doubts about the epidemiological wisdom of gathering as they did. It was the combining of First and Second Amendment rights that got us worked up. But, of course, by the logic of 2020, when it's all about getting attention to get one's message out, bringing guns is the right thing to do because it stirs passions.

But it doesn't need to be this way, and it needn't continue on this way. We have the option suggested to us, as I have written before, by Bunuel's Exterminating Angel. We just need to get up and walk out.

Cave dwelling

Yesterday gave me occasion to reflect a little more on what I had experienced on Sunday out near Burlington. I kept running up on houses that had been canvassed the day before where the canvasser had made notes indicating that they had contacted the person, or something like that.

Basically what it's reflective of is a great surfeit of energy from blue centers like Chapel Hill, people being willing to canvass, phone bank, text bank, etc, to engage in a great range and large volume of relatively brainless and rote activities to do what it takes to win and to push Democrats through as election day draws close.

But the energy is pent up because it has not been spent during the years between the elections figuring out how to substantively address the imbalances and problems that give rise to the need in the first place. We stay in our homes, our cars, our silos, amongst our own, not out listening and engaging, then want to frenetically get out and push our team over the end line so we can hunker back down into our cozy little caves. We are trying to preserve our ease rather than doing the hard and messy work of thinking through the real problems.

Struggles

 A very mediocre day on the court. Lost 6-4, 7-5. Lots of double faults, which gave rise to a lot of negative self-talk. At one point in time I was feeling kinda shitty about something and I asked what the score was, and Z tells me I'm up 40-love.

But I stuck it out through the second set though because it didn't very neighborly to deprive Adam of the pleasure of taking two sets off of me, and then I tied it up 5-5 before crumbling at the end. It was definitely a bad light day; it was hard to see the ball coming in and out of the shady side of the court. We'll be back at it late Tuesday.

Later, I went canvassing out near Burlington. It was frustrating that they sent me out to hit houses that had literally been canvassed the day before. If it was gonna be like that, they shoulda told me to stay home and work on the sink upstairs, which really needs to be unclogged and has for some time.

The disappearance

Yesterday I had "vote" on my task list. As was the case with so many days, things got busy, and by late in the day I still hadn't done it. In principle I know that if I chose to wait until later in the early voting process, the odds would be better that there would be less of a line.

But fuck it, there it was on my task list, simple and stark. So at around 4:15 I saddled up and headed out to the early voting sites to get it done. First I went to University Mall (now University Place -- perhaps they are moving away from calling it a mall because there are ever fewer stores there). As had been the case Thursday, the first day of early voting, there was a pretty substantial line there, so -- after depositing all the plastic bags that had been rattling around in my car for days in the bins at Harris Teeter -- I went on uptown to Chapel of the Cross, where I reasoned that students being out of town and lower population density would make for a less-populated voting site. Not true. The line was almost an hour long, but I stuck it out and plunged my little dagger into the heart of the Trump administration.

Since I was uptown and hadn't exercised yet, I decided to take a walk around up there. First I went across campus as far as the student union and libraries, then I turned and went back to Franklin Street. Overall, my impression was of great sadness. These public spaces that should be full of people bustling about carrying out the business of autumn, exchanging pleasantries and ideas, were instead largely empty. Many businesses were closed. The emptiness and wetness of the day called attention to buildings in need of attention, first and foremost the Campus Y, the east side of which needs a bunch of plaster and paint. As an aside, let me note that this empty time is a great moment for the application of WPA-like strategies to putting people to work. 

Or, rather, it would be a good time to attack these problems if labor was abundant and cheap. In fact unemployment in the Triangle was at around 6% in August (the last month for which we have data) and is at 6.5% statewide. We could truck people in from Fayetteville (where unemployment is at 9.1%) and put them up at underoccupied hotels at bargained-for reduced rates and do deferred maintenance on buildings. But the university in fact had to do major headcutting because it was plugging a $300 million budget gap.

There is a shortage of institutional agility and will.

Paying the Farm Bill

Today I remembered that I had a bill due for the UNC Faculty Club, so figured I had better go and pay it before I forgot about it. Often a good practice. Alongside the quarterly dues there was a bill for $20 even. "What's that?" I wondered. It was for visits to the snack bar over the summer.

Ahh yes, the snack bar, for those few occasions when Graham and I went down there for a swim and got dinner there. For him, a hot dog, for me, a burger, along with shared fries and, if they were available, some green beans. On a couple of occasions there was a guy there practicing his dives. Not a young guy, maybe a few years older than me, but a good diver, probably he had done it competitively when he was younger. And he did a series of reps of some basic dives, pikes, reverses, flips, that got more challenging as he went but never got very flamboyant. He was just working on technique. We observed and discussed.

After dinner we would head off into the evening to get some hours of night driving for Graham to fulfill the requirements of his driver's license. We would talk about this and that, coronavirus numbers, or maybe the place just west of Pittsboro on 64 where there was a Black Lives Matter billboard right next to a Confederate flag. Not by accident, mind you. And then we'd go home.

All this came back to me when I saw the snack bar bill. I wish we had gone more often. Though then I would have been away from Natalie even more.

Inflow

It has been a rather interesting week, flow wise. On Tuesday evening we had my Zoom event for Josh, which went very well. 80-odd contributors, good money, 45ish people showed up for the call, and most importantly the guest speakers were super-compelling and energetic and -- because we had taken the time to get them on a Zoom call with Josh and they had studied up on him and gotten a sense of who he was as a person -- they understood who he was and spoke from the heart.

Wednesday I was tired and needed to catch up on work, but I found myself thinking about what I should do next for campaign season: canvas, do literature drops or.... raise $ for Ronnie Chatterjee (NC's Democratic candidate for Treasurer). I had meant to do an event for him in the Spring, and then coronavirus hit. So I got to my desk and was talking to my officemate about something, and my phone rang. It was Ronnie, asking me to help out with his event next Wednesday at 5:30 featuring Beto and David Price (register here). Since I had about 25-30 people in NC I hadn't gotten around to for Josh, I said OK. Need to work on that this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was checking in with clients and prospects. Just in the last couple of days, I've had these conversations:

• A client closed the sale of a house in record time, above asking. Another client (I had introduced) had been broker on both the sale and purchase. Both clients are very happy.
• A client lost a job. I kinda saw it coming. He had been working from home for years, not pushing his career forward, and in the course of so doing had become expensive for his job function. Meanwhile, his employer, the hottest thing in big tech in 2000, no longer was, and had missed the boat on making its video conferencing product the default (Zoom ate its lunch). Got good severance, I will coach him through the period between jobs.
•  A retirement plan client got a bunch of PPP $ and then had business flourish in the virtual environment, so actually didn't need the money, but will likely be able to have it forgivable because they maintained headcount. They want advice on how to minimize taxes on the income (probably will be hard to do, but interesting conversations can be had with CFO types)
• A friend lost his spouse to cancer. Needs counsel re what to do with inherited IRA $, refinancing mortgage, etc. And he really needs to buy some life insurance. If anything, this teaches me that I need to push people harder to buy life insurance, despite how much people hate it and people who tell them to do it. Because I don't get paid to sell it, hopefully he will hear me.
• A friend and longtime prospect is having her business blow up because it got posted on an internal bulletin board at one of the tech giants. She needs to hire and scale, but doesn't have written processes and doesn't know how to scale a business, particularly in an all virtual world (hint: not many people know how to do the latter part). In principle I could help figure this out, but don't really have the time. Will refer her to another client who is a management consultant.  

This is some of the stuff that crossed my desk this week. All told, an interesting week.

* Almost exactly as I hit publish on this post, my Outlook inbox chimed, letting me know my friend who is jumping medical practices and is diving into the details of a partnership buy-in had a next tranche of documents for me to review...

A debt of gratitude

In the median of a commercial road not far from my house there's a sign that says something like:

"States with Democratic Governors 127,000 deaths,
States with Republican Governors 80,000 deaths"

As if to call out the superiority of the Republican governors' strategies in controlling the spread of the virus. This is sheerest nonsense. The high ratio of cases to deaths in Republican states now (expressed otherwise, the disease's comparably low lethality) is to a considerable extent a function of the spread being slowed enough for the medical and elder care worlds to have figured out how to manage the disease, which happened in the Northeast, where there were basically a whole lot of involuntary human sacrifices. The whole nation in fact owes the Northeast a tremendous debt of gratitude for acting as the first line of defense against the virus.

The course of the virus maps important social and economic fault lines: it's not just lower-wealth and populations of color that got pummeled, it's the ones that live in the places of highest commercial intensity and population density, the Northeast Corridor that stretches from Washington, DC to Boston, but most intensively in the New York City metro area, that great beast of commerce and culture. In effect, not only do the blue states of the Northeast (and blue counties nationwide) significantly underwrite the operating costs of red states and counties by paying much more in taxes than they receive in inbound Federal transfers, they have also paid a high cost in the blood of their citizens. In both New Jersey and New York, more than 1 person in 600 has died from the coronavirus in the last eight months. Ponder that.

Trump could have framed it that way. If he had a leadership bone in his body, he could have said thank you and rallied round his native Northeast in its pain. He did not. For the sake of political expediency and a deluded love of Americans' innate freedom to do things that put themselves and their loved ones in danger, he picked wars with the mostly Democratic leadership of the Northeast states. We are all paying the price each day, but not like they did.

Success!

Last night we took our new fire pit for an inaugural run. We got a total cheapo version, basically a metal bowl on legs with a grill inside it and a cover. We also resisted the temptation to upgrade to Adirondack chairs and made do with some cheapo plastic chairs and Carolina blue sporting event fold-up chairs with spots for your canned beverage because, after all, the occasion was a belated birthday party for teen boys and they could give a flying fuck about all that stuff.

Prepping for it was a multi-step affair. We were low on wood, so I had to restock. My normal firewood supplier, Scott Jens (CHHS '81 or so, ex-of CHPD), had no wood because he was recovering from a back surgery. I checked the interweb and to get a small amount of wood delivered -- the face cord or so we were looking for -- was prohibitively expensive for someone as cheap as I am. I had planned to take Graham down to a supplier to load up the Prius wagon, but then I thought to call my neighbor John to see if we could borrow his truck. His truck was down at the beach with him, but he told me that our neighbor Scott had tons of wood. I called up Scott and he was like, yeah man, come over and load up. Which was excellent in many ways, because I always like to visit with Scott's dog Phoebe, a largish and aging golden retriever. So on Wednesday Graham and I headed over to Scott's house with the car and loaded it up with wood, then added it to the pile in our backyard, which achieved the double goal of making Graham do something with his upper body, which really needs to add muscle. Graham also enjoyed petting Phoebe.

Scott said the wood was dry, but this being both an inaugural run for the fire pit and Graham's birthday, I decided to leave nothing to chance. So on Saturday night I headed out to the home supply big box (if they want a free ad they can pay me) and got some starter logs and some lighter fluid. Turned out I needed only one quick squirt of the lighter fluid at a moment when the fire was dimming a little 15 minutes in. Otherwise it just took a little attention.

The boys had a fine old time in the backyard, making smores, eating pizza, etc. 

Change up

For years now, I've been getting up for an 8:30 meeting on Saturdays, either AA or Al Anon. I know I've written about it before. Today I didn't feel like it. I've been working hard, the air in our room was fall-crisp perfect, it was warm under the blankets, and so on. So I've put off my meeting and will either go to the one at 11 or do something I have thought about doing for a while: attend a meeting in another part of the country, like Kansas. We shall see. In the interim I have mixed up the rhythm of the day, coffee on the porch with the cat while watching some of the first leaves of the season come down, etc. 

Let the record reflect the fact that Trump came down with COVID yesterday. It will be interesting to see how I feel if I come across this post fifteen or twenty years from now. Will it seem like a watershed, a big deal? Will all of the sturm und drang of recent months and years seem justified, excessive, or perhaps even underdone?

Of those three options, I think the last is the least likely. We are at a crossroads of some sort, and must really focus to have hope for a bright future for some much of humanity, for further progress towards the UN Millennial Goals, honestly, which are the best ones we've got. So many decisions to make, so many internal contradictions, so many interdependencies (growth vs. sustainability, greater wealth for people in China and elsewhere vs. human rights, etc.).

OK. I should have started writing earlier while my brain was fresher. This is devolving into generalities. Gotta get organized for a meeting and then a ride on my newly-refurbished bike. Plus get stuff organized for Graham's fire pit birthday party tomorrow. 

The Morning After

We watched a portion of last night's debate, then had to turn it off. It was just too depressing. Trump transcends evil and Biden is not the best debater from the selection of Democrats on offer from our last crazy round of primaries. But he is our candidate and a good man.

Trump is in essence the metastasis of Reagan's famous catchphrase about the nine most terrifying words in the English language, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Like Trump, Reagan was a brilliant showman, but he wasn't as straight-up nasty. The Republicans took this idea (which had a deeper backstory, Jill Lepore's These Truths gives a good accounting) and ran with it, and Trump is the logical conclusion. He aims apparently to destroy the Federal Government's credibility lock, stock and barrel. The legislative branch had already greatly eroded its own credibility over the years, due to a number of factors about which many books have been written: ideological hardening, propensity for corruption and capture by lobbyists, etc. We all share fault in this story.

Trump, through his tragi-comic executive overreach and disdain for everything that has come before him has taken a wrecking ball to the Executive Branch. Now, by Ruthlessly (oh, a terrible pun) seeking to jam a nominee onto the Supreme Court before the election following the untimely demise of RBG, he seeks to further weaken the judicial branch. We saw this coming when Matthew Whittaker -- Acting AG between Sessions and Barr -- questioned the wisdom of judicial review going back to Marbury vs. Madison (see here). 

The project is to take it all down, and he is succeeding. But only if we let him.

Keeping "the sabbath"

One thing I struggle with is not working, carving out time for myself. There are so many things to do pushing in on me from all sides all the time: work, non-profit commitments, family, reading, home maintenance. Hell, even my blog, to which I feel a certain responsibility.

Saturdays I try to keep clean, for the most part. This morning, literally at 9:30, just when my AA meeting was coming to an end, I heard my laptop chime twice, letting me know two emails had come in. One was from a prospect, coming in over the horn from the one instance in which I've ever bought leads, another from a client, someone I have known for many years and love dearly. I will read his email shortly and probably respond, because he is a special situation.

But in some sense it is all special situations, because all situations are special and unique in their own way, even though they must have enough in common for me to be able to add value when I respond to them. I have to have the discipline to triage and respond only when I have adequate energy and focus to do so well. 

Storytelling now

In the course of calling around to talk to friends from throughout my life about my upcoming fundraiser for Josh Stein on Tuesday, October 6 at 7 pm (if you haven't signed up, here's the link), I got into a conversation about community and storytelling in the post-COVID world. He works in cultural production -- theater, dance, film, whatnot -- so he thinks about this stuff more than I do.

The next day I was reading in one of the many issues of Bloomberg Businessweek that pile up unread on the island in our kitchen an article about how Bollywood is dramatically changing how movies are made in India, how the big dance numbers at weddings and in streets are out and how small scenes are in, just because of constraints on production. No surprise, the production of new content is constrained everywhere by the logistics of production, which is hard on the producers and sort of hard on consumers too to the extent that we are locked in to our habitual viewing patterns and starved for diversion.

But for newly produced filmed and even staged content, the reduction in the number of people on stage may have a profound effect on the content itself: more people are alone and in small groups, therefore the focus and the themes must get smaller and focus more on the individual and her/his relationship to the whole. We are in a new age of chamber content. Just as Ian Watt, in his classic The Rise of the Novel, catalogs how the rise of broader literacy and broad distribution of printed content including via serialized publication of novels gives rise to a new type of bourgeois subject, a person who views herself as discrete and independent in the world and identified with others (the narrators of novels) across space and time.

Something similar could happen to people's received perception of subjectivity as the type of content being produced and consumed changes.

Of course there is the countervailing force of the ecstatic merging of subjectivities through the endless imitation and repetition encouraged by TikTok, SnapChat etc., as well as the crushing force of peer pressure imposed by Facebook and Instagram.

And then there is the lonely blogger, like the Japanese soldier hiding out on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific, still fighting the second World War.

Keeping it going

Throughout lockdown, I've seen lots of posts about how people have been going through basements, attics, closets, whatnots, and cleaning things out. We haven't done a lot of it through the warm season.

But maybe as the days grow shorter it will be a good thing for us to do. I was talking to Mary the other day about how she wants more storage space in her studio, but how she needs a place to put the vacuum cleaner, blah blah blah. You don't need to hear all the details, but I started having some ideas about how we could clean up over here, maybe add some of the built ins that we deferred when we did our renovation a decade or so over there... and so on. It would be a natural tie in to doing some other things upstairs that I'd like to do and would be good for our relationship, so why not?

There's also the issue of the bikes in the basement that we don't use. I hear on the street that there is a shortage of bikes out there in the world, and that there are places in both Chapel Hill and Durham that will take old bikes and fix them up and give them away or sell them at minimal cost to someone who can use them. And then there's all this old computer stuff that I could take to Larry Herst over at Triangle Ecycling.  It's always nice to stop in over there.

In short, there's lots of stuff to do.

The other night I was out with friends and one of them started to lament the arrival of the shorter, colder days of fall and winter. I get that. I exhorted her to not get dragged down by it beforehand, but just keep rolling for now. I think the real problem is one of underemployment and underengagement. Her restaurant is closed and I'm not sure she is firing on all cylinders. She is a natural hostess, she loves bringing people together for parties, and it's hard to do that now. But not impossible. I will call her.

When I'm free. For now, it's time to get ready for tennis.

Exterminating Angel 2.020

The other day I set to thinking, and it occurred to me that the political impasse in which the United States finds itself, namely, that the two sides can't talk to one another, might be likened to Bunuel's 1962 film Angel Exterminador, which I had always thought had been made in 1939, I guess because it's black and white.

In the film, a bunch of rich Madrilenos go to a dinner party in a mansion, then at the end of the evening don't leave. Instead, they lie down and sleep where they are. Over days they eat and drink all the food in the house, as the situation devolves into chaos. People die. Others commit suicide. They break into the house's walls to find water, burn furniture, etc. At one point in time, they realize that they are seated in the same place where they were when it all started, and everybody gets up and walks out.

Our divide has been escalating over time in a similar way. Because of elections and the Overton window and deep tribal loyalties, it's difficult for leaders to admit in public that anything the other side says makes any sense, because to do so would be perceived as weakness. Each side must be tarred with the worst excesses of its extremists. To lean Republican makes you responsible for running people over on the streets of Charlottesville. All Democrats burn police stations and loot small businesses willy nilly. And so on. It is silly and ultimately destructive. People know it and talk about it amongst themselves quietly, but of course only when huddling with one's own. At some point in time someone has to stand up and exit.

Gear and Process

As my volume of tennis and biking has risen, I have become ever more a gearhead, something I've resisted through the years. I have been pushing my body harder, so it needs more support to keep rising to the task. Things I've upgraded or need to include: wristbands, socks, shirts, shorts, shoes, helmet, beverages, snacks, racket grip, and so on. There are more things I can do. Much of this is to alleviate and/or manage against the risk of physical pain, acute injury, or cramping, or to facilitate faster recovery.

There is a similar transition in my work. As the size of my business has risen, I need to continually get better at time management so as to not have my time and energy sucked down into stupid little chores like manually entering stuff into systems, doing simple analysis, tracking down records of conversations across multiple platforms (email, text, notebooks, CRM, spreadsheets). If I maintain a more or less standard process, I can do more. More importantly, it frees me up to focus on higher-value add tasks like staying abreast of what's going on in the various worlds (markets, tax, insurance, estate planning, etc) by reading and talking to counterparts, and then talking to clients and prospects about things that will benefit them.

What we need in the business is a new employee who can take on both doing and improving how we do some of the lower-level stuff so I can focus more on the higher. Working on it.  

Routine and variation

Somehow last year at a dinner around Thanksgiving, the topic of routine came up, and Leslie asked me about my routines. As I listed them out, I was astounded at the degree to which my life was run through routines.

On weekdays I do certain things, in rather rigid and predictable order, on weekends the same. I won't bore you with all of the detail. What I will say is that it all provides a tremendous degree of comfort and stability to my life.

Sometimes it ossifies into a rigidity that can stifle thought and creativity, which is where variety comes in, which I think of as providing "oxygen" to one's life. When I worked with software developers, I seem to recall the notion of a "perturbation element" flowing into discussions, which I imagine is kind of similar. In the normal flow of my life, I get the variation, or oxygen, that I need from travel and from events that happen outside of my routine: social events, business events, etc, which bring new people and experiences into my sphere. Plus new restaurants, books, musicians, soccer players, etc., rising and falling as they do. I get enough variation to keep it real.

Just now, in the middle of the pandemic, it's getting a little harder. Very little travel, restaurants are closing more than they are opening. The outside world is producing less fresh content. But it's not that bad. I have a huge backlog of unread books, am learning new songs and techniques on guitar. And there are new athletes, including Billy Gilmour of Chelsea and Jennifer Brady, who just lost in the semis of the US Open but is flat out fierce. And we are digging back into the archives. Last night as a family we started Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Not his best work, but still it's good to get Graham checking out the classics.

I am not, however, looking forward to the fall and winter, mostly because the shortening of the days cannot be offset by the ramp up in social activity that we normally see this time of year. But we'll get through it.

History repeats itself

After a very disappointing rain out, Thursday morning found me and Z back out on the court. I jumped out to a quick 4-0 lead, then he came back and beat me 7-6 (7-5). A chance glance at my post from August 26 shows that more or less the exact same thing happened then.  

This time there was a distinct moment after I was up 4-0 and was about to serve. I had this adrenaline surge and I thought to myself that I had to allow myself to beat him and to be better than him. I have always had an odd relationship with competition. I am, on the one hand, competitive as fuck. But I don't care that much about winning, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage when competing with people who really do.

It must go back to childhood, when I was a much worse athlete and didn't win much. I must have convinced myself that losing was OK (and it kind of is) and got this idea that I was worse than the other guys baked into my brain. Which was fine, because, after all, I was clearly intellectually superior to them, except maybe Konanc, but there was never any conflict between us. Praise the Lord, because he would have kicked my ass.

Then there's also just wanting to not have an imbalance with friends. When David and I were playing a lot of tennis in Princeton back in the late aughts, we would swing back and forth from day to day, and there was a clear benefit to our friendship to maintaining equilibrium, which disincented each of us from progressing too much.

Josh, Crabill and I were hanging out the other day talking about stuff and I mentioned my ongoing tennis war with Z and Robert wistfully mentioned that he didn't have much competition in his life just then, and kind of missed it. One thing is clear, both Z and I and raising our games and getting fitter. I have in fact been beating him more, I am just too polite to write much about the wins.

A world of work

Much hand-wringing continues to be done about the future of work in a world in which more and more tasks and roles are automated, and it is not all bullshit. There are sound arguments around universal basic income flowing out from them.

Then again, there is much in them that is fluff, because people need to feel a sense of purpose, which means they need to feel that the things they do between lifting their head from their pillow (should they be so fortunate as to have one) and laying it back down to sleep at night are aligned with some greater mission. Or, at least, that's how things work best.

This sense of purpose, then, is the ultimate requirement for work, not the production of economic value, which is instead an ancillary function which flows from the former. And, as I have written before, there's a lot of stuff that needs doing on this planet.

One key intermediate challenge is matching supply (of labor) and demand (for the same), which is what markets are supposed to be so good at. But it is so hard to bend our brains around the possibility of change that people get all caught up in maintaining the status quo and preserving the jobs we see people doing today. The cashiers, the truck drivers, the factory workers, what will they do when their jobs are automated? Oh no. And what's worse, the radiologists, the sportswriters, the entry-level lawyers, what about them?

Here's an idea: we'll figure it out. We just need to stay aligned in our goals, the things we believe in, the things we want. Which is -- as I have said before -- a problem of a deficit of leadership. And I don't just mean the Trumps and the Phil Bergers, it's all of our fault if we go running after the swankest SUV or the most lavish outdoor grill instead of focusing on more important things. We ourselves lead poorly.

One over-riding narrative around the disappearance of work is that everything will be automated, therefore everybody needs to be a programmer -- but however could a burger-flipper or truck driver become a programmer or entrepreneur? Easy. They just need to be educated, to have adequate support, incentive and encouragement to do so. Public schools won't do it all, but they are an important place to start. The gig economy, for all of the meanness inherent in its regulatory arbitraging of the employee/independent contractor distinction, nudges people towards getting out on their own and trying things, and thereby helps them build new muscles. The main thing is, people can learn things. There are no inherently stupid or incapable people, just a system that tells them that they are that, that they are useless, and demoralizes them.

Lordy lordy, give the boy a keyboard and he can ramble. This all started from my reading a daunting survey of the role of viruses in evolution and biology in The Economist, in which a proposed $4 billion 10-year Global Virome project was mentioned, and I got to thinking about all the different types of jobs that could come out of that, and how they're not all for PhDs, but there are a variety of different roles in labs, in infrastructure maintenance (HVAC for lab buildings, for one thing) that are necessary to support it. How different people can staff those roles and learn things incrementally over the course of their lives and convey their learnings to their kids.... The world is infinitely complex, there is so much work to do, we just need for more of it to point in the right direction, which means finding a way to build and maintain consensus about what that is.