Busy busy

The very attentive amongst you, the truly dedicated readers, will likely have noted that I have upped the speed with which I am posting of late. The key is that I noticed my post rate was running a little low for June, something which I realized I really had to rectify to keep up my annual numbers.

Alas, my head is by now pretty much entirely taken up with business, a very large fish having swum across my desk in the last couple of days. I am angling for her now, burnishing my tackle box, trolling around in my boat in the comeliest of manners, hoping to attract her affections. We shall see.

No but seriously, the coal mine calls. Talk to you next month.

White privilege and public (and private) facilities

Towards the end of the day I saw a woman, the mother of a friend of Natalie's, someone I like, casually strolling up the hill in front of my house to go for a swim in the lake. She does good work, I think, surely is very progressive, and her daughter was a member of the Social Justice Academy at East Chapel Hill High School. She is, however, also not a member of the Lake Forest Association. So when she casually strolled down the hill behind our house and went for a swim without a care in the world and without being asked by the staff if she was a member (like they're supposed to), she was working her white privilege pretty hard.

I can't really fault her for doing it, because I do it too. Specifically, in cities, where if I need to go to the bathroom, particularly when on a business trip, I just casually walk into the nearest hotel I can find and walk purposefully through the lobby till I locate the bathroom. Often I pause to scan the room, as if I'm looking for someone I'm supposed to meet. I've never been refused use of a bathroom. If I really think about it, I could probably think of other instances, but that's the one that comes to mind.

Now, one could easily argue that it's a class thing more than a race thing, that any person of color with the right attire and familiarity with cultural codes and practices could do the same thing, and there's some merit to that argument. But being white and upper-middle class has helped me grow up in the middle of this stuff so I know the codes, to a certain extent I define them, or at least am part of the group that defines them.

So there are almost always plenty of public restrooms for me, and it's easy for someone like me to argue that there's no real reason to allocate budget for public restrooms. That's just one little example.

So, back to my friend the lake saunterer. What should we do? Frankly, I have always been happy to let her just go swim in the lake when it's not crowded, because I kind of hate being exclusive about it. The problem is, of course, that the fact that she's white and looks like she could easily be a member makes it easier to just look the other way. If she were a lower-wealth African-American or one of the Asian or Latinx families down in Booker Creek Apartments who pay a little extra rent on a per-square-foot basis so their kids can go to CHCCS schools, turning the other way would be harder, because probabilistically speaking, other members would look at them and complain of non-members using the lake and complain to the Board.

A younger person reached out to me last week and asked to have an intentional conversation about  equitable access to our park and lake. We will talk on Wednesday. It's a complicated subject. We have limited capacity in the park and lake and high demand at peak times. The lake is much more expensive than anyone understands (we are educating them as we come to understand it ourselves), and we don't have the ability to compel people to pay, as we aren't a municipality or even a proper HOA that can slap liens on properties. So we must bring our stakeholders along.

Toxic masculinity in full bloom

On 40 home from the office yesterday a couple of cars blew past me like I was standing still when I was going 65-70, whatever the rest of the traffic was going. They were maybe doing 90-95 in late rush hour traffic (admittedly diminished by the ambient work at home culture). Sitting out on my deck this morning, looking out at the lake, I heard at least one if not two guys revving their engines, seemingly from out on Airport Road. It would have been much louder if it was on North Lake Shore. Then there's the jackass next door with his truck. There is a sign in the yard indicating he is shipping out to the Army soon, praise the Lord. Then think about all the NRA-militia dudes nationwide brandishing their semi-automatics, because they can.

More and more, it seems like guys are just reveling in their ability to spew testosterone on those around them on the one hand because they can and feel empowered by the current regime, on the other because they are so threatened by all that surrounds and it. Could it ever be the last hurrah of these jerks?

Interestingly, I brought it up in the car when Natalie and I were driving north and we passed some dude in a Mustang and no muffler, and she was by no means ready to exempt me from charges of the same. It didn't seem like the time to push on the topic at length.

In the "defund the police" excitement of recent weeks, I read a sensible analysis which claimed that having cops on highways enforcing speed limits encouraged highly arbitrary and abusive enforcement, especially when speed was easily enforced with cameras and computers. Makes sense to me, though surely technologies will emerge to game that system and speed where cameras aren't, so there will be a cat and mouse game with the techonology. Maybe cops could then focus more on quality of life issues like the noise created by cars without mufflers.

Epicureanism and inflation expectations

While thinking about food today, something I often do, especially during lockdown times when feedings loom large as events go, it occurred to me that my inverse epicureanism shared much with inflation expectations, as conceived by economists. To wit, I have tried very hard to not acquire expensive taste, first and foremost in sushi and automobiles, but really in anything. So I can be satisfied easily, and so that a future reduction in the quality of what I consume won't be perceived as a decline. I hurt myself falling from a low perch.

Inflation expectations are important considerations in interest rate setting decisions by central banks, which target specific inflation levels across an economy, Goldilocks like, not too high, not too low. In recent years the American Fed has targeted 2% inflation, but has had a hard time getting there.

The expectations part works like this: if people expect inflation to be low or for there to be deflation, they will slow down purchases, in the hopes that prices will be lower in the future, creating a deflationary spiral which is disastrous for people trying to service debt, esp. mortgages and revolving consumer debt. If people expect high inflation, there is incentive to spend money in the present while they are cheap, more or less. Which can drive inflation higher.

Honestly, when I started thinking about this analogy in the morning it made a lot of sense and I was even fairly excited about it. But the day has worn on and now it is time to go home and I kind of don't care anymore, I can't quite pull it back together in my mind. I remember not long ago I was reading about John McPhee and his writing habits and he spoke of practically tying himself to his chair to force himself to write in a disciplined fashion. I can never quite carve out that time between taking care of all the shit which gets foisted upon me, which dooms me to just blogging, continually, bumping along the bottom of the discursive sea while pumping out my statutory four paragraphs thrice weekly for you, my beloved reader.

Business interruption

Sat in on a fairly interesting webinar on business interruption insurance claims under coronavirus yesterday evening. According to the presenter, anecdotal observations say that about 70% of business policies have clauses excluding claims related to viruses, whereas 30% don't. Those that don't generally insist that claims demonstrate physical loss or damage to a property for the claim to be upheld. The presenting attorney and his partner are representing businesses who are trying to claim that the virus itself constitutes damage to property, and they have a couple of different angles to work.

But basically they are going after what Buffett, particularly in reference to decades of asbestos cases but also around concepts such as "negative externalities" associated with emissions etc., has called "social inflation." That is, risks that were not understood in the past that come to light in the future, and people generally recognize that it was a broad societal mistake in need of redress and therefore the costs should be shared broadly.

But how to share the costs of businesses being disrupted by COVID-19? One obvious way would be through taxes. I.e. have the government do big stimulus spending (as it has) to pull us through in the present and then tax in the future. The difficulty there is garnering to political will to raise taxes. If the government is split, that will be hard (probably the best strategy for Republicans at this point in time is to tank 2020, let the Democrats raise taxes, and then revive the Tea Party to do an ideological re-set for mid-terms in 2022). That will also be a drag on future growth.

Expanding the scope of business interruption coverage to encompass COVID-19 is another strategy. Insurers (including reinsurers and retrocessionaires) will get slammed and will have to raise rates. The rate raises will be analogous to a tax hike and will be passed through to end consumers as inflation and/or will drive cost-cutting, automation or business failure if price anchoring has been made too rigid by the extended period of low inflation we've enjoyed (a curse in its own way).

The difference between the judicial/administrative solution of ruling to extend business interruption coverage and the tax hike strategy is that the former path forces the courts to make the decision and insurance companies to raise the money. Everybody is used to hating on insurance companies, and if the courts make the ruling, conservatives can point to this as judicial overreach. Honestly, a legislative path would be better, but much harder in the post-Cronkite world.

Return from the City of Elms

Over the last few days Natalie and I made an assault upon the East Coast. Thursday and Friday night were spent in Princeton, so that no day of driving would exceed 8-9 hours, and we could stay in only one hotel room. On Friday we went to New Haven. Yale had given us two hours to get Natalie's stuff out of her dorm room, which seems pretty tight but actually proved doable. It was done like that so that it could be staggered over months and no two kids would be moving out of the same entryway at once. In fact I only saw one other girl and her family moving out of Natalie's residential college at all. It was like a ghost town.

It was sad. There's no getting around it. It appears unlikely that kids will be coming back to campus in the fall, or at least not a full cohort. And instruction will be done remotely in any case. So when Natalie and I sat in the Branford courtyard and looked out at it, it was with a great deal of uncertainty as to when she will be back.

On a positive note, we saw friends. We stopped in Bethesda and Natalie went for a walk with one friend (despite her seemingly broken toe). In New Haven she saw another. Both very nice kids, one Indian, one Pakistani. In Princeton we sat on the porch with Ella, Zoey, Ted and Kirsten, then we stopped in and saw George and Rob in North White Plains. Even more importantly, while we were on the road I heard from one of my oldest friends who had been stricken with the Bug and has had a pretty tough dance with it -- a regular reader of the Grouse -- no less. After not responding to my texts for a disturbingly long time, he got back to me. A very good sign.

Up and down the East Coast we saw very mixed adherence to COVID best practices. Most people wore masks, yes. There was very good compliance from food service organizations large and small, from Subways and Starbuckses to the taco truck in Bethesda and the little grill in Kingston, NJ where we got breakfast sandwiches on Friday.

But amongst the lay population it was pretty mixed. At our hotel in Princeton, despite the signs on the doors mandating face masks, a lot of people weren't wearing them, including populations hit hard, amongst them African-Americans and orthodox Jews. Both of those surprised me. In the hills of Pennsylvania and Virginia as we came down 81 on the way back, I was less surprised to see the Trumpers flouting their prerogative to both Live Free and Die.

In general traffic was pretty light. The only significant backup we experienced was on the span of the George Washington Bridge, where we could feel the bridge shudder while we were absolutely still. Neither of us said anything while we were sitting there, but I mentioned it to Natalie the next day and she agreed that it was scary as fuck. The GWB is an awfully big thing to feel shudder beneath you.

Boldino summer

Leave it to The Economist to remind me about something like Pushkin's "Boldino autumn," when he was trapped on an isolated and newly-inherited estate near Nizhnyi Novgorod during a lockdown for a cholera epidemic in 1830. He didn't even have many books with him, but he made the few months' stay one of the most productive periods of his lifetime. He finished Eugene Onegin and wrote the "Little Tragedy" plays as well as a bunch of short stories and other verse.

I need to do something similar over here. I haven't been doing badly, mind you. I've been reading books, taking care of clients, getting fit, managing lake projects and dealing with the crazy shifting landscape of park regulation, eating well, doing puzzles, I've even been blogging some. But I haven't made a concerted effort to do much in particular, beyond reading.

For example, the guitar. Recently late in the evening, when I was watching a YouTube video from guitar dude Phil of Wings of Pegasus, when he was talking about Molly Tuttle and how she honed her amazing flatpicking ability, he made the comment that to make progress on a specific guitar technique, one needed to do it very slowly over and over again until you were comfortable, then you could speed it up. To which I mentally responded "Doooohhhh!"

And so I have been working on picking with multiple fingers, as opposed to just thumb and pointer, and it is coming along. I will focus on this more. One day, I may actually play for you.

Allocation

Last weekend I was talking on the phone to my friend Nora, who has managed to parlay into a vocation a life traveling the world -- first with her father, a famous anthropologist -- studying, creating, listening, and writing. We were talking about all that is going on in the world, Covid, protest/riots, global warming... And she told a story of talking to Jerry Brown sometime about the state of the world and she said to him: "Jerry, why can't you do something about this," to which he replied "Nora, you have to understand what my job is: it's to make sure that all the parts of the government get their budget allocation for the year. That's the job."

On the one hand, it seems to oversimplify and trivialize the span of influence of a very senior governmental role, but on the other hand, he's pretty much spot on. And the fact is that his job is pretty much the same as all of ours, except that we are allocating not just money but time, and we have to decide on how to allocate the money, i.e. buy something to consume or to appreciate, give it away (if so, to whom? to do what?), invest it in equities or bonds or something else, or stick it in the bank or credit union/CDFI, and thereby delegate the capital allocation function first to a bank CFO -- who could buy bonds, offset losses, or loan it out either to commercial enterprises or to residential borrowers, and then sell the loan on to a GSE so as to loan it out again. Or spend it to fix up something we already own. In which case, is it better to insource and do the work yourself or outsource and focus on doing one's own job, which earns more money? Or just rest, so you can do your job better tomorrow? I'm sure I've left something out.

In "normal times", this allocation process has a certain gravity or valence. Right now it feels different. We feel compelled to do and spend differently. To force ourselves to eat out when saving feels right, just to keep businesses afloat. To drive across town to FlyLeaf for a book rather than order it online. We were already trying to do that, now we are focusing harder. The calculus of giving directly vs. supporting political candidates feels more complicated...

In the "developed world," we are fortunate that, on average, we have something like 20,000-30,000 24 hour periods per life to allocate out our time/money, to figure out whether to earn, retain (by insourcing tasks), or spend money either on ourselves or on others. And there's no clear distinction between the two. Right now I really want a new couch for my study, I've probably written about it. The futon in here is 30 years on and not nappable. If I spend $2k on it, that's $2k I can't give to Josh or to a food bank or a job training program or medical research. But it supports a number of businesses, who have employees...

It's all enough to wear a person out. But we gotta keep plugging, because the infinite dance of this allocation process is what, per Hegel and MLKJ, bends the arc of history to the good. We hope.

The Essential

One thing we will all need to hold onto if and when this pandemic actually recedes is appreciation of small things. In times of food supply chain anxiety, we have made it a practice to really focus on eating all leftovers, often incorporating them somewhat creatively into lunches. I've been learning a lot more about ways to use various types of tinned fish and seafood, and at times I've taken to using husks of bread to sop oil out of the corners of, say, an empty can of sardines or anchovies. Why the hell not? I have come to think of anchovies as the bacon of the sea.

Also, the people. Particularly when we were all maximally freaked out, everyone was showing their appreciation for the people who work in grocery stores, drive delivery trucks, etc. We need to keep that up.

By way of contrast, when Covid infections in meat packing facilities ramped up, Trump's idea of showing his appreciation for them was to invoke legislation that -- though legally paper-thin -- tried to make it easier for their employers to keep plants open, because he deemed a safe and constant supply of cheap meat for Americans to be more important than the health of the workers, more or less. We cannot forget bullshit like this. He does so much that is wrong that it is hard to hold it in our heads.

Jonathan Safran Foer was much closer to the point right around then, when he half-called for all of us to become vegetarians. I'm working on it. Not quite there, but getting closer.

After these weeks of protests, rioting, burning, and police brutality, we need to keep this in mind. We need to fight for changes in policing -- and I am learning and assimilating the arguments about defunding the police as we go. But we also need to keep in mind the spirit of generosity towards and gratitude for others who do lower-wage work. While, however, recognizing that our more flexible labor market offers us a considerable competitive advantage over places like much of Western Europe where it's almost impossible to fire people, and therefore it's so for companies to pull the trigger on hiring people full time. This is the circle we need to square.

The many silos

On Saturday afternoon I was out riding on my bike in the country in the summer heat. I was somewhere north of Mt Sinai Rd, probably on Murphy School Rd, when I was coming up on an African-American guy who had stopped his car in the road to check his mailbox.

"How's it going?" I asked him as I came up close.
"Alright. You been out riding on trails?"

I was a little surprised at the question, as I was on a road bike, so I stopped to talk and explained that this bike was too delicate to take out on trails, how you needed one that was sturdier and with fatter tires.

He asked a few more questions, was it good exercise, did I feel safe riding on the roads, etc. I explained that as long as you stayed single file you were always OK, but that sometimes there was a jackass in a pickup truck with a Trump bumper sticker who might say something as he flew by. And of course, it is probably a measure of my white privilege that that mythical truck-driving guy might harass me differently than he would a black guy, for fear that I might lawyer up effectively if he didn't.

But what I wanted to get back to was how much this guy didn't know about bikes. He had no idea about the distinction between a mountain bike and a road bike, just because it wasn't part of this world. I have written elsewhere on the theme of siloing in society, I think, or at least I've thought about it, mostly in terms of the red-blue divide. There are so many other divides: black-white, white-Hispanic, Asian-Hispanic, etc. And so few places they are bridged. In the best of situations, political parties help with this. The fact that we have a two-party system forces the bridging of divides, balancing priorities in setting platforms, getting people together in various contexts to talk just a little. Also public schools, especially sports teams in the traditional mainstream sports, basketball and football. Jane Jacobs' neighborhood worked similarly.

But ultimately we always are forced back into our silos because we have to earn livings and tend to our own families. The exigencies of a fine-grained societal value chain but also the Dunbar number always reassert themselves. Even now, I am watching the clock and thinking that I need to get on the clock, follow up with my clients who reached out to me over the weekend (there were five of them, and somebody else asked me to look into something on her behalf), touch base with a family member who had a mild health concern, etc. Hell, I need to shave my itchy face, when you get right to it.

It is hard to make time to talk to the Other and still produce value. But maybe there's really nothing we need to do more.

Quiz bowl

Graham has an online Quiz Bowl tournament today, which is awesome. He spends all too much of his days and nights just lying on his best reading his iPad. We never are sure what he's reading about, and I really do wish he would read more books because I am a deep believer in the book and the positive impact of making the effort to ingest large amounts of experience and wisdom that somebody else has worked hard over long period of time to fuse into a coherent whole. But he is reading and also engaging in discussions. And watching some videos, to be sure.

Occasionally at the dinner table we experience eruptions of what he has been ingesting (i.e. the content, not the food). For example, last week he talked to us about a long debate he had had with someone on one of the online discussion fora he frequents about Biden's VP selection. Also a long disquisition on the history of mercenaries (that had been informed by reading an article in this week's Economist, which kept him sitting on the living room couch for much longer than usual).

My readers who have known me a really long time, going back to Glen Heights, will recognize this as being a lot like me when I was much younger, and would stay holed up at home reading the World Book Encyclopedia in the afternoons. Really, the main thing that pulled me out of that mode was having a group of contemporary peers -- Niklaus, Josh, David, Adam, and various siblings -- who came and pulled me out -- sometimes using downright cruel methods -- and made me do sports or go in the woods and build forts.

Unfortunately, Graham doesn't quite have such a cohort, and the world is different. Now he is less the exception than I was back in the day. Lots of kids live their lives buried in their devices. Plus he has his autism diagnosis, which in some ways offers him a diagnostic validation of his way of life. Coronavirus and the distancing of everything has not helped him and kids like him, not that it has really helped anyone.

So, to return to where I began, this Quiz Bowl tournament is awesome. I hope he and his buds kick some ass. But also get kicked a little, because that's part of the process.

What to say

Apologies for the mild radio silence of late. I have gotten pulled into discussions on Facebook about the ongoing protests following the killing of George Floyd (today we all know what I'm writing about, when I look back at this 10 years later, I may not -- though I hope I do).

I put a spectacularly ill-timed post up from a friend of my brother-in-law's who was a longtime  officer with the NYPD and then New York Housing Police the morning after Floyd's killing. That pissed off a fair number of friends of color of mine, after which I decided to focus on reading and listening rather than making my voice heard. But, inevitably, my brain/mouth -- to the extent I can separate them -- draw(s) me back into things. And, since I tend not to post the exact same thing as everyone else (why bother?), discussions get started, which demand responses. Which is good, because what's a social platform for if not discussion? Certainly we have seen the limits of virtue-signalling and demonstrating allegiance to one tribe or another.

But it has been a particularly difficult moment to try to be a mediator of discussions, when the basics of the situation on the ground are rather clear. George Floyd's killing has very little ambiguity in it. Nobody could look at it and make up some exculpatory fantasy -- as they did with Ahmaud Arbery. The only discussion can be about the way forward, and on this score Trump and the Law and Order faction are going with a nuclear option that threatens to explode them or us.

One edge fear I have is that Trump wants to keep populations of color and liberals in the streets engaging in superspreader events so that the coronavirus will rage on, giving him an excuse to push elections into a vote by mail paradigm or have restricted polling places in urban centers. Democratic polling has shown that African-Americans won't vote by mail. So Trump might be willing to gamble that his electorate will vote no matter what, because whatever else we may say about them, they seem to have been making it to the polls.