Gong south

Bobby and I had breakfast at the Breakaway Cafe today, since I had a coupon for a free breakfast sandwich. Pretty good, though it pales beside what you can get at Deli Edison, so I recommend going north on that front. I liked the place, though, and the trip was enhanced by the fact that, after I waited for the bathroom for a little while, the person who came out was former Tar Heel great Kendall Marshall. A celebrity sighting!

Afterwards I took a half an hour to drive down to Pittsboro to check things out. Not surprisingly, lots of development going on, including some substantial apartment buildings or condos near the school at the south end of Briar Chapel. Multifamily is greatly welcome.

But I was also very surprised when I drove back into the core commercial area of Chatham Park. The Root Cellar had been there for a long time but it was closed when I went by. I quick Google shows me that it has been rebranded "Cafe Root Cellar" and is open Friday and Saturday 4-8 pm only. That's crazy. Shouldn't even pay the rent with those hours.

I have to assume the issue is staffing the place, and/or maybe demand that is slow in coming because they are having trouble building out Chatham Park, again because of lack of people. Politicians need to shut the fuck up about "jobs." That is last decade's problem. We need people, and housing. There's a chicken/egg problem here for sure.

Gotta go cook dinner. 

Becoming inured to war

One of the calculations Putin seems to be making is that we in the West will tire of the war in Ukraine as a story, that day upon day, week upon week of pictures of bombed out buildings in Kharkiv and Mariupol will cede the front page to The Slap and the Duke-Carolina game, etc. In this calculation he is not entirely wrong.

Once more this point up the importance of a professional government, the so-called swamp, the people who provide depth and continuity to our embrace of and interface with the world and all of its complexity, across administrations. We cannot have a wholesale shift of focus every four or two years based on which way the winds are blowing and which soundbites and memes are resonating most clearly. People in different parts of the government will have different foci and views of the world. They will fight amongst each other for budget. There will be tussles along ideological grounds. But we can't burn it all down or cut off all their heads every few years just because it polls well and draws eyeballs.

Being informed

My body has informed me that it is Spring Break and that I am not supposed to work this week. Certainly not today and I'm guessing that tomorrow is also out. Instead, I've done some minor tax-related chores and read a book. After dinner we will watch television.

Graham had some rather heavy gloves out on the island in the kitchen and I asked what they were for. He said it was in case he had to drive to Srinivas' house to help with the robot or something like that and he showed me that it was 36 degrees outside. As I pointed out, clearly if he needs heavy gloves for such conditions, he belongs in school in Chapel Hill and not in Easton, PA, Schenectady, NY or Cleveland, OH. Really it's pretty clear. 

For Christmas I got this book Unstoppable about a guy named Siggi Wilzig, an Auschwitz survivor who became a Wall Street legend, albeit one I had never heard of. Somebody gave it a good review, so it went on my list and Santa brought it. 

Frankly I got it for the Wall Street part because I've learned a lot about the business and business in general by reading page-turners like this. But to get there, I had to go through the Auschwitz part. I hadn't read a Holocaust narrative for a long time, but it was good to go back through it and to have what happened thrown in my face in detail. We easily forget how horrific it was, what people are capable of under the right conditions. What we are seeing in Ukraine is but a pale shadow. 

We have to wonder what is actually going on in Xinjiang.

Eastbots rule

Over the weekend the East Chapel Hill High Eastbots went to the Guilford Regional Championship in Gibsonville, where they dominated. They went undefeated, including within rounds (i.e. they won the first two of each of their best of three serieses in the quarters, semis, and finals). Moreover, I can't remember a match which was close. Several times their team scored in triple digits. Even when their robot was disabled for the second half of a quarterfinal after some vicious D by a competitor knocked something loose, they had built up enough of a lead and were complemented by the nimble and hot-shooting bot from 1533 Triple Strange out of Greensboro that the game wasn't even close. Not that it wasn't a moment of nervousness for a lot of us up there in the stands. But our top notch mechanical team sorted it out in the pit area between matches and we were back up and running quickly.

Next up, the state championships at Campbell in a couple of weeks. I do hope we win.

That said, just having a win under his belt provides us with an opportunity to have a talk with Graham. A week and change back when he was processing his rejections from Williams and Swarthmore (which, on top of not getting in Tufts or UVA probably sets the stage for a similar outcome from Yale and Cornell), Graham had displayed an unexpected level of angst and bitterness. He wants recognition from the world for his intellect and it also seems he wants to lord it over some people in his class who he doesn't think are as smart as he is. Probably some payback for people who were mean to him somewhere along the way.

But he may not get it this round, because he took some risks in math earlier in his high school and got a couple of Bs. That's life these days.

It's great for all of us to win sometimes. But we don't need to win all the time or at everything. If you get that mindset, you could end up like Michael Jordan or Coach K. Very impressive figures, no doubt, but each a jerk in his own way. One much worse than the other, for obvious reasons.

Return to energy

Had a fine lunch yesterday with a guy from my neighborhood, where of course we were talking about our kids and college and next life stages etc, because of course we were, and my mind drifted back to the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes via Robert Caro; the only thing that matters is energy. And, I would add, sustaining it over life stages. Enthusiasm. 

But to this must be added the question of time periods. Ideally energy should be husbanded and sustained across as many time periods as possible, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, telescoping down. In reality that's hard to do and must be managed carefully by balancing sleep (especially through the judicious insertion of naps), diet, exercise, work, blah, blah and blah.

Right now I am tired but need to get my butt in gear to go to Greensboro for Graham's robotics competition. I ain't really feeling it but I know when I get there it will be exciting and I'll be glad to see robot 4795 do battle and, most importantly, will be in the flow of Graham's one great team endeavor, one which could form a part of his life for years forward in various capacities should he choose to stay involved.

First may take a COVID test cuz I have a little sniffle and we have some here at the crib.

Myth and reality?

Before Natalie headed back off to college after Christmas I asked her for some book recommendations off of her shelf of many interesting-looking books. One of the books she gave me was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which tells a tale, which at least seems at least largely autobiographical, of a young, gay Vietnamese boy growing up in Hartford, CT with his mom and his grandmother. Though we may eventually prove gorgeous, through the first half of his book his life is anything but. It's a hard immigrant's life full of poverty, hard physical labor, shitty food, sleeping on floors, all carried forward by a narrative style that's fairly stream of consciousness, proverbial and non-linear -- flitting easily from the present in Connecticut to origins in Vietnam. In many ways it's stylistically reminiscent of another favorite book of Natalie, Karla Cornejo Villavicensio's The Undocumented Americans in that the immigrant first-person view of the world is very fragmented, violent and precarious.

It's hard not to contrast it with the immigrant tales told by Jhumpa Lahiri, in which we read of South Asian graduate students -- future doctors, professors, what have you -- who struggle in cold apartments in Rhode Island or wherever while thinking of family and food back home and have to deal with dislocation and disconnection, but we know they will settle in. "Model immigrants," little Horatio Alger tales. The stories of coming to the New World that we want to hear because they recapitulate our own origin stories from centuries past. In reality, making it to the middle class in America is more of a slog for most newcomers than it is for Lahiri's Brahmins and their stories are harder to tell because we are less used to and open to hearing them.

Running on

One of those typical weekends, some biking, some tennis, some serendipity (running into Chuck down by the lake while he was recovering from Carolina's epic second half collapse against Baylor), a party (Whitey's 56th with a fine Dead cover band - words I thought I'd never issue from my keyboard), some drama (Natalie's COVID diagnosis, Graham struggling to process rejection from top tier schools -- in this case Williams and Swarthmore) and a couple of Zoom calls with college and family around the globe. 

All of this against the continued backdrop of war in Ukraine and the sadness that Russia -- a place to which I dedicated a big chunk of my life -- is going down the tubes.

Speaking of Russia and tubes, one issue I haven't seen pondered much is the implications for global warming of the economic embargo on Russia's energy infrastructure. They have a lot of natural gas being piped through a network of largely above ground pipes. It's a big country with a poor history of rational asset allocation. A lot of the pipes are old and leaky. There's a huge risk that they degenerate and spew a lot of shit into the atmosphere because Russia is going downhill and they could give a flying fuck about anyone else right now.

Arghh Fucking COVID!

On a beautiful mild spring day in North Carolina, I was looking out at the flowers, emailing a client about something TIAA-CREF fucked up, when what should arrive but a text from Natalie informing us that she had just tested positive for COVID and could therefore not go on her senior spring break trip to Portugal with her friends. COVID has not harmed our household too terribly, but I feel horrible for the experiences of which it has robbed my children. 

So much of Natalie's college experience has gone down the gullet of this fucking bug. At least she spent her junior and senior years in New Haven and had developed some really good friendships. She and her besties were all teed up for a fun-filled week in Portugal. Tickets were cheap. They were flying out tomorrow. She had worked hard and was in good shape on her senior essay, etc. All her ducks were in a row, as they tend to be.

Then today she wakes up with a sore throat and reads an email saying that her test yesterday had come back positive. Arghhhhhhh. Thank God for her lovely boyfriend whose spring break is not the same as hers (he is at Wesleyan) so at least she'll have someone around to talk to. But this just sucks.

 

The lint filter

On the island downstairs this morning there was a note from Mary for me to check the dryer to see if the load was dry. She had washed Natalie's bedspread, on which our shy cat Leon spends his days, so it had been pretty replete with cat hair and she had dried it on delicate, I guess because those were the instructions on the label. I checked the lint filter, which turned out to be covered with a thick snow -- an amalgam of cat hair and stuffing from the bedspread.

For some strange reason I derive a perverse pleasure from a very full lint filter. I suspect that it is part of my curious workaholism and I appreciate the earnest and diligent efforts made even by the machines of our household.

Our dryer, I'll have you know, is the same one that was there when we took over the house from my mom back in 2009. I don't know how far back beyond that it goes. The door is a little bit broken, some threaded bolt popped out of it sometime during the pandemic and you have to bang on the bottom left corner to get it to close right, but I have perfected that art. Mary blames me for putting hampers of wet laundry on the door when transferring loads from washer to dryer and she may not be wrong, though I'll never admit it. I got mom's new boyfriend Matt (an engineer who likes to fix things) to look at it a month or two back and he was unable to figure it out. In time I'm sure we'll need to get a new one, but not yet.

Dreams of New York

Last night I dreamt that I was in New York. The first night I was there I stayed in my old building on Claremont Avenue in the apartment of my friend Jill (she is actually, in fact, in Moscow now. She says she is not leaving because it is now her home, though she like any educated Muscovite is horrified by what is going on). Out on the street, it appeared to me that the cross street between Claremont and Broadway had the wrong name (it is actually LaSalle) and that a small building on the north side of that street was missing. I was discussing this with someone else there in the dream.

I decided to move on and go down and stay the next night down at the Yale Club near Grand Central. I have never joined the Yale Club -- it seems too expensive -- but over the years as I tire of being a guest in other peoples' small NY homes it becomes more attractive. In my dream I was also not a member, but I sneaked back to where the rooms are and changed my clothes in one of the rooms and then was heading out front to see if I could talk them into letting me stay a night or two on a test basis before becoming a member. I actually dream about this kind of thing. It crossed my mind in my dream that I might run into a client who is a regular reader of the blog and who sometimes retreats to the library there through an agreement with the UVA alumni club, which was a very nice dream-thought.

There's no doubt but that this dream was motivated by a meeting we had yesterday in which I and one of the partners in my firm -- together with a prospect who could be large for us. Things seem at last to be turning a corner to where my business will grow in without my needing to do everything, where we might see some real synergies -- to use that dread word. I will take it. 

Robotics in Greenville

The East Robotics team ventured down to Greenville and ECU this weekend for the year's first competition. This year's competition is basketballesque, with a low basket that got a robot one point and a high basket that earned two. There was also a climbing station at the end that let a robot earn 3, 6, 9, or 15 points, depending on how high it could climb. Points were also offered for doing things in "automatic" mode, based solely on programming, at the beginning of each match, before being taken over by human drivers.

Because of the technical complexity of the tasks, very few robots were very good at both shooting and climbing. Ours is a shooter and is very good at the automatic routine, consistently getting a couple of shots into the upper basket. It could also climb for 6.

In fact, what our robot and team was best at getting the ball up there. Once it's up in the basket area, there's a lot of randomness because of the shape of the basket and the bounciness of the balls. So just getting them up there is the name of the game.

OK. I'm getting into too much technical detail. After the qualifying rounds, we were 3rd, and got picked to be on the first alliance of three teams by a team from Raleigh with a 15-point climber (no alliance could have more than one because of spatial constraints) that was also a decent shooter but wasn't that mobile. We were crushing everyone but lost in the best of three final. We won the first game handily then lost the second two by one point in each of them after the Raleigh team's climber froze up. Literally in either game if one of many shots that bounced out had gone in, we would have won.

On the first day the competition's spirits seemed a little bit down relative to pre-pandemic tourneys. Mostly that was a function of no dancing. One of the best things about FIRST Robotics (an org founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter thingie) competitions is how hard they work to make it fun and inclusive, and one of the best ways they do that is through leading the kids in line dances and also singalongs during breaks between matches. Classics like "Buffalo Girls," "YMCA", "Sweet Caroline," etc. FIRST volunteers and MCs lead down on the competition floor while the kids in the stands get into it. At first Graham was reticent to participate but by now he has gotten into it, which is a wonderful thing to see. All in all FIRST just does an exceptional job creating a fun, collegial and sports-like competitive context for a population of geeky kids who might not otherwise have a place to be part of a team. Lots of kids keep volunteering for FIRST during college and after. I can totally see Graham doing that.

Checking our priors

Bayesian analysis says that one should be careful and diligent whenever possible to "check your priors," the beliefs and prejudices one carries with one into a given situation that cloud one's judgment. I am feeling that now.

Perestroika and glasnost kicked off in Russia when I was in college. The Berlin Wall fell in '89. Nikolai Ceausescu and his wife were shot in 1989. Mandela was released in early 1990, Freedom was on the march globally. This has formed the backdrop to my whole adult life, so the narrative seemed inevitable.

Recent events have seriously called that into question, I won't enumerate all of them, but it hasn't been just one thing. It has been complexity defined. Putin's invasion of Ukraine really demonstrates how high the stakes are.

Of course the whole situation is greatly complicated by the improvements in living standards we've seen in societies where freedom is under the most acute threat, specifically China and Russia. To what extent are those improvements a function of the opening of those societies to markets, and to what extent do they derive from the stability of their governments? We think one thing, Xi and Putin another. That's where the rubber meets the road. Time will tell.

One other thing. The Journal today quotes Democrat Mark Kelly of Arizona, a former Captain in the Navy of all things, of saying in a debate about gas tax relief that Americans shouldn't be bearing the cost of this conflict. Oh yes we should, motherfucker. All of us. We are not at risk of losing our lives yet, but we have money and at the very least we need to be contributing that.

Every fiber of my being

Last Friday Graham had tickets to High School Musical: The Musical, out at East. We were pretty excited about this because Graham had never been to or shown interest in this kind of thing, he didn't have close friends in it, really he was just going because everybody else was going and it was the social thing to do. I was in Hillsborough with a client but I grabbed food at a taco truck and hustled home to feed Graham the agreed upon repast. Graham duly snarfed his tacos al pastor and headed off. We expected him back at around 9:30, 9:45, somewhere in there.

Maybe 35-40 minutes later, we hear the door to the mudroom open as Graham comes back in. "What's up?" we asked him. "I hated it with every fiber of my being," he informed us, "I walked out during the first song," at which point in time he retreated to his bedroom. Thankfully, it turned out, he had been seated near the back so the whole school did not note his hasty retreat.

So Graham and I got to get up under the blanket and watch the last episode of Season 6 of Bosch, with Rascal perched on the back of the couch, as she is wont to do. Worked out for me.

The Silent Discourse on Inflation

As public balance sheets were growing at an unprecedented pace during the early days of the pandemic and even during the build back from the financial crisis -- a cycle which has never quite turned -- much discussion was had in the business and economic press about how equilibrium might eventually be regained. There are two basic paths out. Annual government deficits could shrink through reduced public sector spending and increased taxes. Or we could inflate our way out of it.

This second option is less intuitive. Inflation measures the cost of a basket of goods purchased at a given point in time. As costs go up, people get paid more. We're seeing that. So people get more money for each our of their time.

But what doesn't rise is the real cost of debt -- measured in the amount of time it takes to earn an amount of money. So someone with a 30-year fixed mortgage who makes a payment of $1500 a month has to work fewer hours to earn that amount of money, which means that servicing her debt is now cheaper for her.

This is also true for governments. A billion or trillion dollars of fixed rate debt becomes cheaper for a public sector entity who is benefiting from increased taxes on wages, sales, etc.

The problem is that this process is regressive in its benefit in that it helps only those who have bought things by borrowing money. Homeownership in the US has risen from a nadir reached after the financial crisis, but there are still an awful lot of people paying rent. Over time, rising rents and the collapse of retail real estate should bring more rental housing into being and bring down costs. But that will also depend on the liberalization of zoning and less zealous NIMBYism. 

The Great War as touchstone

One of the great ironies and complexities of our current situation is that -- however much everyone protests that they want to avoid WWIII, both of the lead actors in the current drama derive the core of their self-concepts from their behavior during WWII, so each in a sense is motivated by a return to it. Russia, most obviously, sees WWII -- along with the campaign against Napoleon -- as its moment of greatest heroism and triumph. In each case Russia, by means of incredible sacrifice and loss of life, beat back a formidable invading power. Victory Day, May 9, is a huge celebration. Here's a quick video to give you a taste.

In the US, likewise, WWII was our moment of greatest moral clarity. We were attacked. We joined the war, stormed the beaches at Normandy, turned the tide of the war, liberated Auschwitz... Then we launched the Marshall Plan, yatta yatta. After WWII, it got more complicated. We tried to do the right thing, but time and time again we did things that were questionable (Mossadegh, Vietnam, Allende, Iran-Contra, Abu Ghraib...). We like to see ourselves as defenders of a rules-based international order that promotes and defends democracy abroad, and certainly the world votes with its feet and people are on average happy to come here, but it's complicated. Time and again realpolitik and the simple realities of operating in a complex world draw us into behavior that is less than ideal, certainly not black and white like fighting Hitler was. In the end we can only hope that on balance the judgment of history will be positive and strive to make it so.

At the end of the day, the Make America Great Again sentiment, hearkens back to the time of Eisenhower, when America manufactured things, the hierarchy of things seemed relatively clear to the majority, and we still basked in the glow of our victory in World War II when everyone rowed in the same direction, or at least seems to have done so, viewed from the whitewashed perspective of several decades of remove and forgetting. But Democrats also long for that moral clarity. While we understand that the world is complex and compromises must be made -- so for instance right now we must cozy up to Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalists as a counterbalance to Chinese dominance in Asia -- we'd much prefer to see ourselves as an unalloyed Force for Good globally, and to do so makes us think back as far as WWII.

The past ideal that Russia and the US share is a problem, to say the least. For the two of us, if not for China. 

Life During Wartime

Throughout the pandemic, as we've cycled through serial reopenings and retightenings, shortages and blockages, we've always been bolstered by the expectation that soon it would be over and life would return to normal, that superabundance to which we had all become so accustomed and which we had come to believe was our birthright. And then along comes Putin, who says: not quite yet, my friends. I'm going to fuck with you some more. So we return to yet another new normal, with another new set of challenges weighing on our supply chain and our value chain.

But again, perhaps we are faced with another version of the same challenge by the universe because we so singularly failed to rise to the most recent one. We need to get our act together, figure out what we are about on this planet and focus on doing that.

Twice on Friday a client and I tried restaurants for lunch, only to be gently turned away. One wasn't open because it couldn't staff the shift. The other had only one server so we had to wait 20 minutes to be seated. So we went to another one. In the grocery store on Sunday I'd say 95% of the things we were looking for were stocked, whereas at PetSmart we got one of the two special cat foods we feed our delicate-stomached felines, and they didn't have our preferred litter. We will get them elsewhere or get something else. For now, we have to let these little challenges remind us not just of how much we have, but of how delicate and fragile is the balance of forces that lets us have so much.

We need only look at the pictures of Ukraine coming to us each day to be reminded of how much that is. 

Spiritual experience

Today in AA the leader put out as a topic spiritual experience, as it is a tenet of the 12-step world that somewhere in there everyone who is successful in the program will have a spiritual experience that will be integral to staying sober or off of whatever else ails them. So we all think about it a lot. What was mine? Did I have it? At our lowest moments we all wonder "was her spiritual experience more profound than mine?"

For me the first one was early in sobriety, back around '92 at Columbia in NYC, when I was suffused with profound gratitude and realized that it didn't really make sense for me to be grateful for nothing, that there had to be something on the other side of that gratitude, something I was grateful too. Beyond AA, I'm still not exactly sure what it is. In many ways the last 30 years have been a process of trying to maintain that gratitude.

Since I have recently been going to only one meeting a week, quite often when I am in a meeting my mind is drifting all over the place and I have a hard time listening to what everyone is saying. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, but really I needn't. It has much in common with being in church as a kid and having my mind be all over the place during the sermon or the reading of the scripture or lessons or whoever was droning on about what up there at the front of the church. It's a once a week thing where more or less like-minded people come together and agree to be still and quiet while somebody else talks. There's no quiz at the end. In a sense it also has a lot in common with the so-called "monkey brain" that afflicts most of us during meditation, which we manage through the admonition to "come back to paying attention to your breath." It is a place for recentering.

It's all good.

A Great Reset

I must confess I am very glad that attempts to gather up trucker convoys in the US have fallen flat, not so much out of triumphalism over the folly of the Trumpians but because we have come to a point where we have bigger fish to fry. We need to forget all about masks, vaccines, etc., at least in the hyper-political sense in which we have been indulging in that discourse. For the moment, we need to back off talking about who fucked up worse in the lead up to Ukraine and also about microaggressions and trans kids participating in sports.

Instead, we need to recognize that armed forces play an important part in keeping us safe to have those discussions, and that diplomacy does too. So we need to speed confirmation of diplomats (Cruz and Hawley were the main offenders there as of last November) and be less negative about the role of non-political professionals in government who work across administrations. But we also need to be open to higher levels of defense funding as we confront a structural challenge from China aligned with Russia (and, it turns out, others in Asia).

But global warming looms in the back of all of this. John Kerry was right when he said in Munich the week before last that it remains an existential threat above and beyond the threat posed by Russia. Perhaps if we can dial down our internal rancor we can find ways to get those on the right to accede to what they already know in their hearts of hearts, that global warming is a real problem that we aren't addressing at appropriate scale.

Overwhelming

More than anything, Russia's attack on Ukraine drives home the complexity of the world, and therefore how fortunate we are that we have a large and diversified economy with different institutions doing different things. Right now I'm thinking about the military and diplomatic establishment, such as it is across the various governmental entities, think tanks, suppliers... However much I read, however much any of us tries, we'll never take it all in. And it's important that there be continuity to it across time.

All of which argues for the importance of the non-partisan "administrative state," as it has been called by the Right. The expertise developed by all those people shouldn't just be jettisoned because it doesn't make sense to some congressperson or collection thereof who spends a good chunk or most of her time out winning elections.

Certainly, within the military, there are a lot of people I'd be initially disposed to disagree with, because they see the world differently and have literally seen a different world than I have. That's OK. We really need more channels to get their way of thinking through to us, and vice versa.

I must say that my eyes were significantly opened yesterday by this article  from NYT about how various Asian nations view the situation in Ukraine. On the one hand, I think about how much goodwill have we squandered through the years through rigid ideologically-driven adventurism abroad. On the other, I remember how limited our span of influence and control is at the end of the day. We'll never get everything we want. Nor, in some sense, should we.

The luxury of home

Of late I've been trying to coax a friend to finish up a project, occasionally with a touch of impatience. Mostly my problem. Saw him today and was delighted, and I was reminded of my friend Katja, originally from Kiev, currently living in Tbilisi after spending time in Tartu, New York, Moscow, Berlin and sometimes jetting around the world in support of an award-winning book. I wrote about our comparative situations a few years back.

Back then she just wasn't living in her hometown. Now it's not clear if she ever will be able to and, per a message I just got back from her, she has family members who are currently far from safe. I, by contrast, am in continual contact with people I've known for many decades all the time, which I am aware is an incredible gift and luxury. Events of the last week remind me more than ever that it's something we cannot take for granted, something that's been fought for and earned by others. Let's hope we don't need to do it again on a grand scale.