NFT your expertise

A guy I know from college, very smart entrepreneurial guy, is building some sort of social media platform that promises to let me "NFT my expertise," which I imagine would mean creating videos or other online artefacts which would garner some sort of micropayment each time they are accessed via some sort of Defi (decentralized finance) construct built on an Ethereum backbone. Which is nice.

But it would get messy and would involve accounting and aggregating come tax time blah blah blah. After I spent a fair amount of time this past weekend getting Mary set up to sell books on her web site and accept payment through it via PayPal/Venmo. That was pain in the ass enough. I still have to make that go live and then sell the books. And teach her how to take payment on Venmo.

Years ago -- and I've probably told this story before -- I had lunch with an old soccer teammate and friend who told me of how he had tried a new concept (a combination laundromat/upscale bar in South Florida) and lost a bunch of money on it, then realized that he never wanted to be in a business again where the basic business model wasn't clear and precedented. He subsequently went on to build a very successful boutique investment bank buying and selling car dealerships, and most recently bought a house back in Chapel Hill so he can split time between here, FL and also a nice house he has on Cape Cod somewhere, I'm told. That's a better model.

Speaking of, I need to get cleaned up and head off to the office so I can get stuff done before tennis at 4:30.

Policy and randomness

Not long ago I was talking to a guy on the phone, a retired fellow who had earned his living as a professor at one of the local universities. His son had described him as an ultra-intelligent conservative. We were talking about my helping him with some of his money, but not a large enough amount that to dissuade me from trying to engage him on some of the bigger topics of the day, both to hear his perspective and to determine if I would enjoy talking to him enough to justify taking a small account.

At some point in our discussion he described himself as having had the good fortune to have been born white, clearly admitting that race had played a role in his success and conversely in others' struggles. Either I nudged him or he continued on, noting that some people also had the benefit of being good looking while others were hindered by ugliness.

When I was a kid I often wondered about how strange it was that my brain ended up in my body, when it just as well could have landed elsewhere, that it was largely a random effect. While over time I've been disabused of this naive Cartesian mind-body dualism, it's hard for any of us to escape the feeling that there's a certain randomness to the advantages conferred on us.

Conservatives will argue that there is none, that our parents and grandparents and so on have labored and planned and schemed assiduously to make it possible for us to thrive. But even they will admit certain random effects. The aim of policy must be to diminish the impact of randomness on human destiny. Or, rather, to arrive at a mid-point of intervention in human affairs that optimizes for the control of randomness while disincenting individual initiative as little as possible.

Arghh, really? Extremely mixed feelings about Omicron

I would imagine that it would be hard to find anyone psyched at the arrival of Omicron onto the scene. Even major stockholders of Pfizer, Moderna and others integral to the vaccine development and manufacture supply chains, most of whom presumably have more money than they know what to do with, could hardly be faulted if they reacted with a certain ennui.

Even before the gnarly little bugger reared its foul head on the global scene, I had already planned to pull in my social horns in the lead up to our planned Christmas journey to New York to see Mary's family. The crowds at Be Loud! 21 at the Cradle last weekend -- and also at Towny Ludington's memorial -- felt like a bit much, and the ramping COVID numbers in Europe have been fairly shouting at us to moderate our indoor socializing.

But Omicron has me doubling down. Yesterday I went to Harris Teeter after playing tennis with Z (6-1, 3-6) and -- shades of spring 2020 -- stocking up fairly vigorously, though continued restricted supplies of key items like the shelf stable juices and snacks that have become integrated into our lifestyles dampened my exuberance ever so slightly.

But I am also mindful that, if we will be spending a little more quality time as a nuclear family -- a point hammered home when we put Natalie and Stuart on a plane yesterday and Mary became emotional not just at Natalie's departure but at the anticipation of Graham's heading off to college (something I've thought of quite a bit in recent weeks) -- that we should be ever more intentional about the time we do spend together. So I put in the extra work yesterday and prodded Graham and Mary to find a movie that they would both agree to watch.

At a very high level, I have to wonder if Omicron is the Lord's little way of saying to all of us: you failed to adequately learn the lesson of round 1 of COVID, that everyone is important and that all should be appreciated. And now, with the supply chain already pretty well fucked, another wrench of untold scale has been thrown into the works. Time to try again.

Inaugural nap

Today after a quick run around the lake (OK, maybe not all that quick) and then a lunch of mysterious latinish cheesy things that had been languishing in the freezer, I finally had the occasion for a proper nap on the new couch in my study. I am here to tell you that I have officially arrived. It slept beautifully, with no noise emanating from the rest of the house. In the immortal words of Navin R. Johnson, I don't need one other thing.

Prepping for the day

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and Natalie's boyfriend Stuart is due to arrive at RDU around 4 pm. We'll see if he actually makes it then. Whenever he does, we'll be psyched. If I didn't already write about it, Mary met him at the canceled Family Weekend at Yale in October and was super-psyched about it, she says he's a wonderful guy.

This week, being totally exhausted, I am indulging myself in the holiday spirit by not setting an alarm at all. I am just sleeping in. After eight most days thus far. Honestly I could use more actual straight-up vacation but I have client meetings next week to prep for and other stuff to (CRM migration, LFA General Meeting on 12/6) so I am working short days except for Thanksgiving itself. But I am luxuriating in my new couch and shades.

Natalie continues to astound me with her ability to read vast quantities. When she got home she picked up Stephen Johnson's Emergence, a pretty dry book of non-fiction that I had read maybe 100 pages of, and went through more than half of it pretty quickly. She said "maybe I should read more science fiction," so I got Graham to pull down his copy of Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem. She looks to be close to half the way through the 400-ish page book in less than a day. She will continue to go far.

Graham had a good interview with a Tufts alumnus yesterday. We are crossing our fingers that all goes well there, obviously.

Went and got bagels from Bruegger's this morning. As there so often is, there was a line out the door. There were a few white people exercising their freedom to not wear masks. Interestingly, the oldest of them a guy surely in his 70s, ordered a whole wheat bagel. Because of his health-consciousness, clearly.

Tokyo and the eternal return of the repressed

In the end, I did finish reading my Japanese mystery novel, Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates. By British and American standards, it is by no means a "great" mystery novel. But it was different enough that it merited pushing through. Together with some of the stuff I'm seeing on Midnight Diner, I'm definitely seeing some themes emerge.

First off, it's worth discussing the role of coincidence in mystery narratives in general. For the most part, the mystery genre relies on a steady stream of coincidence: this character or that event just happening to occur when somebody is walking by or within earshot of the detective's cousin or somesuch. Coincidences yield up clues which in the end help solve the mystery.

Fiction has always relied on coincidence to make its little worlds tick. It's everywhere in Dickens and other 19th century fair, we see it in Shakespeare. Without any commentary coincidence conveys the message that there is order in the world, not chaos, and that the world is not as big as it seems. In mysteries, this is doubly important, because all these stabbings and beatings at random times in the dark of night feed on our deepest fears, but together the detective and coincidence work to restore order when it is most threatened.

In the literature of Tokyo (and I suppose other big cities, but I'm seeing it in Tokyo narratives) there's an additional message: one character happening upon another tells us that while Tokyo may seem like a massive city in which one may lose one's self, in the end Japan is a small nation and one cannot wholly leave behind wherever it is one comes from. You can move to Tokyo and try to remake yourself into something altogether new, but in the end something from your past, your village off in the mountains 800 miles to the south -- can easily come back and haunt you. If necessary, a determined detective will figure that shit out, so it's better not to even try.

The Second World?

Here and there I see references about the USA turning into a "Second World" country, by analogy with the rarely used Second World concept of days before "emerging markets" displaced "Third World" as a description of lower-wealth, low industrialization countries of the global south, broadly. The Second World was, broadly, what was behind the Iron Curtain, so the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As far as material conditions went, the Second World was broadly characterized by shortages, standing in line and -- as a result -- inventiveness in keeping old stuff working and figuring out kluges and workarounds.

I was reminded of this yesterday evening when, after going to pick up the old Subaru which I had left at the mall when my Prius was getting inspected (I also got new tires, so that now she hugs the road like a sure-footed mountain goat!), I went to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. The pharmacy was closed, and there was a notice posted that because of staffing shortages the pharmacy would for the time being be open M-F 9-6. i.e. no weekend hours at all. With built in lunch hours for the pharmacists. This is down from M-F 9-9 and weekends 9-6, something like that. So basically a 45% cut in hours of operation. Lines will no doubt be longer, and we will have to plan more carefully for when to go. Likely apps will appear telling us when lines are longest. There was also a sign posted saying that there were $1250 referral bonuses for successful referrals of pharmacy technicians.

Then this morning there's a story in the Journal that CVS is shutting down 900 stores out of 10,000 and will focus on upgrading medical services at existing stores. Walgreens had already been reducing its store count. No doubt stores closures will be concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods, like the one on Greensboro where I got my COVID vaccines, because the top lines and margins there will be shittier.

Does this make for a Second World experience for us? Far from it, just yet. Relative to the rest of the world we still have a veritable cornucopia of goods and services available to us. But it is getting harder to get them. Our problems are now on the supply side. We need more people -- thus more immigrants -- but also more places for them to live -- which means less restrictive zoning so we can put up more housing units. Re zoning rubber and road will continue to meet around issues of stormwater management, impermeable surfaces, and heat islands. Plus there's a lot of asphalt out there around office parks that is being slowly but inexorably reclaimed by mother nature. It may well be that the process should be accelerated with yellow steel to let the earth breathe in places where people are not going.

Graham sleeping in his clothes

For a long time Graham wore nothing but t-shirts, shorts and sweatpants at all. Recently he has begun wearing much realer clothes: jeans, khakis, flannel shirts, Hawaiian shirts. He looks much more styling. He has taken to them so much that he has been sleeping in them, including in socks. He has always slept in his clothes, or at least he has for a while, but back when it was sweatpants at least it kind of made sense. This does not, or at least it doesn't look very comfortable, particularly when he sleeps in his belt. I think he is just into his new look. And rightly so. He now has game. Would that he could have a year or two back.

Decision time and the lure of Japan

When I was in Princeton back in late August and stopped in to Labyrinth Books, I picked up a copy of Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a 1961 mystery novel published in Japanese under the title Vessel of Sand. Thus far it is not great. A little plodding, very much a procedural, as they say in mystery/cop narrative circles. It is not in and of itself pulling me through and giving me the energy infusion I wrote of recently, so I'm tempted to just put it aside, chalk it up, and move on.

And yet. I know there are things in this book that I don't find in other places. For one, just its description of the Japanese landscape and geographic names have had me looking things up and familiarizing me with the scale of the place. Plus it dovetails nicely with Phil Knight's description of his own engagement with Japan in the 60s, the post-war recoveriness of it all. The packed, hard seat long haul trains, so reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Just the sense of how early it was for Japan, how modest was its place in the development of the global economy then, knowing after the fact that it would build to a crescendo in 1989 and then implode into a state of significant ancillary status on the the world stage, as if it in some sense recapitulated the history of England or the Netherlands -- major mercantile forces that puffed up then shrank back to appropriate scale. It is all so very Chekhovian.

Really, it reminds me that I would really like to go to Japan sometime. And that I should keep folding Midnight Diner on Netflix into my viewing schedule. The place is just interesting, even if this novel isn't so much.

A day off at the office

After a weekend with house guest and also a dinner party -- admittedly many of my absolute favorite people on the planet but nonetheless a lot of cooking and prepping -- followed by an afternoon fundraiser on Sunday (not at my house), I am delighted that today I can just go to the office and work. And listen to my book in the car.

Yesterday evening I was not at my best. I had really been hoping to watch the last episode of season 3 of Bosch with Graham on the new couch, but Graham had not gotten his homework done and then dinner got started late and ran late because nobody was watching the clock, so it was too late for him to watch. So I got a little grumpy, but no worse than that.

Graham had a good weekend at the chess center in Morrisville but then a disappointing showing in a Quiz Bowl tournament on Sunday when his superstar team mate didn't show up and he learned how much he leaned on the other guy in that competition. I'm sure Graham could be a Quiz Bowl star too (particularly if they asked about US political history -- to judge by what he showed us last night at the dinner table) if he applied himself to it assiduously, but he works under the same 24/7 constraint as the rest of us and has never really needed to expand his Quiz Bowl range. At this point in time it's probably not the best place for him to allocate time and attention.

Energy

Facebook -- where I try to spend little time but inevitably end up touching now and again for this or that -- recently fed back to me a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that I had pulled from Caro's LBJ bio: "in the final analysis, energy is the only thing that matters."

I am feeling that right now as I continue to listen to Shoe Dog, the autobiography of Phil Knight, founder and CEO of Nike. Posted about it earlier in the week. He is still in the very early stages of getting things going right now, the sixties, still becoming the first importer-distributor of Japanese brand Tiger running shoes to the USA. 

The same is true for books. Part of me wants to trust my instinct to just read the books that are full of energy and pull me through. Then again, if I don't fight through the difficult books, I wouldn't learn the important lessons that are available from things like the bio of Deng Xiaopeng I read a couple of years back. That was a slog from which I learned a lot. But I can respect a bias for books which just demand to be read. They are not all mystery novels.

A modest proposal

The world continues to nervously watch the situation with Evergrande and other developers in China. The numbers are pretty stark. Evergrande itself has liabilities of about $300 billion, $200 billion of which is to about 1.4 million individual apartment buyers who have fronted money for apartments not yet built. Other developers have similar, smaller problems. Just the debt to individuals is more than 1% of China's GDP for 2020.

As an aside, we should note that part of the problem is closed capital markets and especially limits on foreign exchange and the difficulty Chinese investors therefore have in investing abroad. If the yuan were freely convertible, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound of NAFTA would sound like your grandmother's gentlest, demure little poot compared to the supersonic roar of yuan headed elsewhere.

But the most interesting solution to all these empty apartments would be to have some mechanism for China to admit immigrants. China has a demographic problem of an aging population and a dependency curve (ratio of working population to retirees) on a punishing slope, a huge headwind to growth going forward. Meanwhile, Africa has all too many young people.

But China is not good at importing people, and the Chinese language is something of a barrier. China could admit immigrants and have them speak English or French or something similarly simple. But it won't.

With freer immigration in general we could get back to a flatter world Tom Friedman fairly quickly. But the political will is lacking, while the epidemiology remains complex for the moment.  

Seeing the world

There has been a lot of chatter about how good a book Phil Knight's Shoe Dog is, so when I got through with listening to Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, surely a good and important book but rather dry, I downloaded it.

Very early in Knight's book still -- and yes it is quite good --, he has gone on a journey around the world as a 24-year old in 1962. Some of his travel observations are very insightful -- certainly his description of still-bombed-out Japan is worthy, and generally his reminder of just how top of mind WWII still was is instructive. Nonetheless, as he travels the world from Tokyo to Manila to Hong Kong to Calcutta to Instanbul to Athens to Rome to.... I found myself drifting off in the generic travelogueness of it all. It reminded of nothing so much as being 28 and having traveled a lot myself and realizing that I had traveled a lot and that there was just pretty much a limit as to how much one could experience the world as one person, that I needed to settle down and produce more eyes through which to see the world, more cogitos through which to refract it.

Knight definitely does perk up in his writings, however, when reflecting on the subject of shoes. 

It's also very interesting to see how much he thinks about "Great Men" as he travels. Churchill was here, Patton was there, Hitler did this there, and so on. Even at that age those are the peers he had self-selected.  I definitely was not like that. I was always thinking that Mayakovsky was here, Akhmatova there, and so on. We choose our peers. I have to wonder if he was really thinking about those guys then or if he changed his mental peer group later in life and inserted them in his narrative.

A wall of cash in a vacuum of values

The Fed has announced the tapering of quantitative easing, but it's a gentle tapering, so its balance sheet continues to expand. Supply chain imbalances remain but maybe they're starting to get worked out. Inflation does not seem to be abating and wages are rising, which is good for borrowers (households and governments) as the real value of their debt measured in units of labor shrinks, but difficult for investors (cry me a violin) and also rent payers -- as higher wages by and large fail to keep up with the prices of the lynchpin asset for Americans -- a home. 

And yet, with all that cash out there, it's hard to figure out what to do with it. All assets are bid up, so people hold cash and sink it into low utility stores of value like NFTs and contemporary art.

Meanwhile there are all kinds of important policy goals that need addressing -- first and foremost climate change and wealth dispersion -- but a toxic political climate for establishing consensus and allocating public funds towards them. At least the private sector is trying to step into the vacuum with environmental, social and governance strategies, but they give rise to resentments and pushback of their own -- and are reasonably criticized as pissant greenwashing. Much better that calm and effective leadership should rise up in the public sector.

Fruition

And so, after many months, nay years, of cajoling Mary to go shopping and pick a fabric and then waiting, all of my prayers are answered. First the metal roof was cleaned, and as a bonus we got the driveway and patio cleaned up quite nicely. Then shades were installed in my bedroom to block the fall-winter morning glare off of my screens. Now, after many months of teasing and taunting by the fates, my couch has arrived.

It is, admittedly, pretty big in this room. It barely fit around the corner at the top of the stairs (but it did, once the door was popped off). We need some sort of a coffee table (right now I am using mom's old shredder). But so what. It is here. It should be very nice for napping. Graham and I can very easily start watching TV up here in the evenings (though some sort of foot support -- perhaps a hassock, if I may be so bold -- will be important for optimal angle of viewing) and thereby not distract Mary from her eternal vigil with her laptop. Also we will need a standing lamp.

For now, there is no need to focus on the lacks. I am more or less whole, and Christmas is not even here yet.

Fresh and easy

OK, it is dark outside and it is only 5:34, which I will confess sucks. On the other hand, I have completed my application for Obamacare next year and, owing to the exceptional largess of the Biden administration, we will once more receive subsidies, if diminished ones, despite our growing income. Of course, there are a lot of ways that our income could end up being higher or lower than I predicted, but for the time being I am surprised.

In the middle of doing it a neighbor who has been a long suffering member of the LFA Board with me emailed about a fundraiser she is doing at her house. I guess I should give money since I just got some and it will be a good party, and she has given when I have been in raising mode.

I also just made our last ever tuition payment to Yale for Natalie. We may still hope for Graham.

Whoops. Gotta hustle to a book group meeting.

The passing of seasons

As I had likely shared sometime back, the couch that we ordered in March that had been promised for mid-summer had it's delivery pushed back first to early November, then to February, because of various supply chain issues. Since I had lived my whole life without it, I wasn't sweating it too hard. Then the other night an email arrived informing us that it was ready for delivery. Now I have to make space for it here in my study. 

Around the same time, we received word that four hundred copies of Mary's book will arrive within weeks from Kehrer Verlag. It is in fact available now for purchase in Europe, but don't you dare buy it from there because we will need to get rid of those books for the low low price of $48. Here's what it looks like

What all this means is that we will have a lot of new stuff upstairs here at the crib, which means we are going to need to pare down  some of our possessions. With any luck, this will spur Mary to help me figure out where we should hang some of this copious art we have just gathering dust in the corners of our bedroom.

In other news, I received word yesterday that Townie Ludington had passed away. His health had been tenuous throughout the year. In the end his death was pretty peaceful. He went to sleep and didn't wake up his second morning in hospice, something like that. He had been out and about as recently as John Pringle's service a couple of weeks back. I never knew Townie all that well but I very well remember that he was my first soccer coach back in '72-'73, whenever it was that we took up Rainbow Soccer. Ironically, I remember that I was stuck at left halfback back then, which didn't seem like a marquis place to be in the lineup but he must have somehow seen (I can't imagine how) that I wasn't going to be a Ronaldo or a Drogba. So even then I sensed that I was not in a central role and would need to earn my place at the table. Though I had no fucking clue how.

But it wasn't his fault. Townie was a nice guy.

Alex La Guma "In the Fog of the Seasons' End"

It's not clear where I found this book. There is a "4.50" penciled inside the front cover, so it could have been a used book store, or it could have been a Little Free Library or a coffee shop. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it languished on my shelf for a while, then I picked it up and read it. It was slow going at first. Published in 1972 as part of an African Writers series inaugurated by Chinua Achebe, this short South African novel tells the tale of a few ground level operatives in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

More than anything, it reminds me of Alan Furst and his faceless spies of the thirties as fascism knocked on every door in Europe. Though where the overriding motif of Furst is cold, of semi-random, furtive coupling by men and women of the continent-wide Resistance to an evil on the horizon, La Guma's world is one of heat, humidity, dirt, and smells. The protagonist never bathes and wears the same clothes throughout the novel, traveling around a South African city now on foot, now on crowded bus.

There are echoes of the great modernist urban novels of the early 20th century: Joyce, Bely, Dos Passos, Doblin. Pages of overheard dialog from street corners and buses with no speakers identified. But mostly quiet heroism and perseverance.

Wherever I found it, I'm glad I did. I was inspired by Gregory Michie, a UNC grad who teaches in Chicago and wrote a book about his experience who said in the UNC alumni mag that he had gone years reading only books by black writers. Not a bad idea, though I'm not sure I make it there.

Memories of mild privation

I am well into my countdown to the colonoscopy now. I've begun drinking the gross stuff and should be getting tended to 15 hours from now. At which point in time I look forward to eating some good food again!

The food rampdown brought back some interesting memories. While trying to figure out if ketchup was cool for the prepping period, I discovered one place that had people lay off of pepper. Although UNC hadn't proscribed it, I figured I would roll with that constraint just to see how it worked. As I ate food with just salt on it, with no spice whatsoever, my mind travelled back to the Soviet Union in 1987, where there was no black pepper to be had in restaurants and only very occasionally white pepper, a very different animal. So I started carrying black pepper in an Advil bottle when I went out hunting for sustenance in the afternoons, and I remember in particular taking it in a pel'meny place -- I think it was on Bol'shaya Nikitskaya -- and having people stare at me when I put it on my little dumplings.

I also thought back to Leslie, who after having Caroline and discovering that she had food allergies, cut her diet down to lamb, rice, salt, and peaches for a little while before building it back up.

Certainly these periods of limiting what I eat remind allow me to build up anticipation of better meals ahead. But I already mentioned that, didn't I?

Easing the way forward

Yesterday there was an article about Mark Carney -- former central banker of the UK and of Canada (separate jobs) -- in the Journal. I knew who he was, of course, but what I didn't realize was that he was my age, that he went to Harvard, that he also came from the provinces (way northern Canada), and even that he has somewhat ad taste in music (Nick Cave, but also Taylor Swift -- he must have a daughter). Of course, that makes me look at him and compare myself to him and consider myself mildly wanting.

Which is why it is probably merciful that Graham is unlikely to end up in one of those institutions that encourage this kind of self-flagellating thinking. It's probably much more healthy to go to a place which doesn't set you up with impossible expectations and "peers" that make you feel less than. I hope only that Natalie can steer clear of this curse.