The highest tax of all

Up north last weekend, I had a number of casual conversations with people about the cost of sending kids to college. It's rough up there where the flagship state universities are basically pretty middling. Rutgers, UMass Amherst, SUNYs Stonybrook and Binghamton, UConn, they're all OK, but they pale beside the flagships of CA, MI, NC, VA, etc., however ignominious the athletic scandals we may bring upon ourselves.

I recall talking to one guy a few years back who lives in CT, has four boys and makes $300k=$350k a year as a partner in a small consulting firm. He is well and truly fucked. He's not gonna get much if any need-based financial aid unless three of them are in college at the same time, or if he goes to a Yale-Harvard-Princeton that has very deep pockets and discretion in awarding aid. But that's a total crap shoot. So he has to send his kids to Storrs or go into debt, not great options.

And all of this is on top of the fact that he is paying pretty high state income tax rates and definitely high property tax rates and is also in a high federal bracket.

One wonders why the flagship state universities in the NE have never had strong enough leadership to figure out how to improve themselves and get into the top tier of public institutions. Probably because the gentry all wants to send its spawn to the Ivies and, failing that, ship them out to one of the phalanx of nice-looking small colleges eager for the revenue or to NC, MI, VA,, etc. Michigan in particular uses out of state students (over half the student body) as a cash cow.

Probably worth paying up for university leadership and faculty. It would be a whole lot cheaper to raise up the schools than to ship the students out or federate it to the private sector.

HVN-RDU

Over the years I've often been of the mind that "It's not so bad to fly into LaGuardia, take the M60 to 125th Street then hop on the New Haven line" to get from RDU to New Haven. I have buttressed this line of thought with arguments like "it's nice to take NY public transport and be in touch with the metro area and its population" and "I'm not on the train enough. It's nice to watch the world go by and read my book." All of this is true, or at least none of it is an outright lie.

But man was it nice to fly directly from New Haven to RDU yesterday. Tweed Airport is only about 4 miles from Yale's campus. Per Google Maps, it could be walked in as little as an hour and a half, which means it would actually take 1:15 or so, and would be doable if traveling with only a backpack. That, my friends, would be interesting.

Or, you could do what I did yesterday: lollygag in Branford courtyard with a novel, walk down to Nica's on Orange St for a sandwich or one of those delicious slices I've never tried, get an iced coffee, then finally let a Lyft driver take me out to the airport in 10 minutes. Of course, the irony is that with Natalie graduated, I have little reason to back there regularly, sigh. Maybe Graham will go there for grad school!

By the way, I'm aware that this last week I've blogged a fair amount about things that have made my life easier and/or little bagatelles, but it's my blog, bitches. If you don't like it, read something else. 

On not dancing

As per usual, the last night of the reunion featured dancing. As per usual, I didn't dance.

I used to enjoy dancing quite a lot, but I've been out of the game for a goodly spell by now. It's hard to put a definite finger on why that is. Obviously, not drinking plays a big role. I just don't get caught up in things as I once did. Being married is part of it too. Sad to say, a lot of the dancing was thinly disguised trying to show off and peacock around so as to attract this woman or that one. I mean, obviously, if I had a girlfriend I'd be focused on her and rubbing my body up against or synchronizing with her, but if I wasn't..I still enjoy dancing with Mary at weddings and whatnot, it just doesn't come up very often.

I also see no need to get all sweaty before going to bed.

I dunno, maybe it's a shame I can't just enjoy myself getting out there and cutting loose, maybe I would if I did. But I don't. Oh well.

College reunion

At my 35th college reunion. As usual, lots of interesting conversations, putting things in perspective. Had a solid talk over coffee with a guy I'd never met who had a long career in the intelligence world, presumably the CIA. He had the most informed, granular perspective on a wide range of things, including the relative economic trajectories of Zimbabwe and Zambia, Angola and Namibia... really smart, interesting guy. Made me sort of rue the fact that I had my head up my butt about national security when in college. Though the CIA has done some fucked up shit, no doubt.

Later, I talked to a guy I don't know that well who went to high school with a very close friend and who offered me a perspective on my friend's life arc and a sibling's role in it that made me kind of sad. That was unexpected. I'm still kind of processing it.

The streetside cart

On the way downtown for coffee this morning, I grabbed a bacon, egg and cheese on a roll from a cart around 37th and 8th. While the guy was making my sandwich another guy came through and got a coffee and something, he didn't even need to order. The vendor just saw him and gave him whatever his regular order is. Then the customer paid and said: "Hey, have a great weekend. Enjoy the holiday" in a very genuine way before continuing on.

Non-city dwellers don't understand how much of this goes on: how much micro-community there is between people and vendors on their commutes they see all the time. It is like a million little virtual small towns exist along paths between homes and desks. The fact that maybe these people never have time to get to know one another deeply and specifically doesn't matter. They interact and transact regularly and this engender a lot of mutual respect.

It is as if manners (generalities) serve to instantiate and fill in for the absence of substance (specifics): it doesn't matter that I don't know your specifics, your stressors, your fears, your joys. I know that you are human and experience tells me that whatever your specifics are, your they are worthy of consideration.

To shift frames a little, this is the beauty of rules-based commercial flow across larger value chains. 

Industrious, W 24th St

Up early to catch a 7:25 flight to JFK. Had to pad my time to be sure I could find a parking spot in the RDU lot, despite the fact that I had a "reserved" spot. All that really means is that mathematically, there should be a spot for me somewhere in the lot. The parking gods smiled on me and I found one easily.

I was most fortunately able to check into my hotel early, then I hustled uptown for lunch with a client, before coming to the Industrious co-working space on W 24th St. I had realized at the airport this morning that I could use one of the many Industrious spaces sprinkled around the city. This one fit my day.

It is slightly uncanny that so many of the things are the same: the coffee cups, the office chairs, the seltzer machine. But it works just fine. It is much better to hang out here and meet my friend Denise than it would have been to wander round the city and pay high retail prices for coffee. Overall, a lifestyle improvement.

Graham pumped

Yesterday around mid-day we were gathered in the kitchen and I mentioned to Graham that I intended to make enchilada pie for dinner. "Let's go!" erupted from Graham's mouth, perhaps with a little fist pump. I'm not used to seeing little expressions of enthusiasm like that from the boy, or perhaps just not that one. It 100% made my day.

Later, Graham, Mary and I went out to Duke Forest to break in the new hiking boots we have all acquired in preparation for our upcoming Alaska trip to visit Natalie. It was a nice mild day for a hike. All good.

How is China different, or how different is China?

After the Russian Revolution Lenin et al. realized that Russia was nowhere near close enough to a level of wealth at which Communism could even make sense: there was basically precious little means of production for the state to appropriate. So they declared a period of a "New Economic Policy," or NEP, which allowed a certain amount of capitalist practices to flourish in Russia to produce some wealth, with the intent of later tightening the reins. Stalin duly did so in 1928 as he kicked off the purges.

Much of the global south has labored under a similar problematic for a long time. Marxist regimes came to power and instituted heavily top down economies in poor places, resulting in poor societies dominated by corrupt states with heavy-handed bureaucracies. Not a great recipe for human flourishing.

Which is not to say that unfettered capitalism and liberal democracy would have just done the trick either. The evidence for that is limited. The prosperity of the US and the West is based on a lot of complex stuff, including imperialism and slavery which allowed us to extract wealth, not just because we're hard-working, freedom-loving and God-fearing. But that's a topic for another post, indeed a small library of books.

But the question remains whether China is different. Or whether we might look at the period of Deng Xiaoping through Xi's consolidation of power as a "long NEP" for China. Has China gone through a period of building enough wealth where it can yank back freedoms, have a top-down economy and flourish on an ongoing basis? I sincerely doubt it. There are lots of signs that China will hit a wall and falter. Its demographic crisis is a key one. China's population has topped out and its median age will rise and its dependency ratio will get worse and worse. To deal with this problem, it will like other societies need to become more friendly to immigrants. I neither see that happening nor see lots of people wanting to move there unless it opens up.

Recent stories about unemployment amongst Chinese university graduates point to another big problem: at scale, kids don't want to work in the industries where the party wants them to do. In a freer society, this problem would work itself out more fluidly.

Anyhow, time to hop on the clock. Lots of questions here. If the West can manage past this moment of conflict without fomenting WWIII, open societies can continue to facilitate human happiness, however unevenly. But we have to make it through. We also need to accept that the balance between the interests of the individual and the collective will look different in different parts of the world. The world will never be an exact mirror of the USA.

Salisbury

On the drive back from Athens on Thursday I was cruising along, listening to my book (Felix Salmon's The Phoenix Economy -- pretty good) when out of the corner of my eye I chanced to see a billboard for an independent bookstore in Salisbury, NC (which we last visited together, gentle reader, about six years ago). I had been thinking about Salisbury recently when my friend Brad took a job there running a center on environmental stuff at Catawba College.

Mostly I was impressed that an indie bookstore would pay for a billboard on an interstate, so I decided to stop in and have a look. It helped that it was coffee time anyway. The store in question is the South Main Bookstore, and it was a very pleasant place with a solid collection. Amongst the items on the shelves. As I scanned the shelves, what should poke its spine out at me but Maybe Esther, written by my friend Katya Petrovskaya, briefly noted here. This attests to pretty solid collection curation by the owner. I shared thiw photo of her book with Katya via WhatsApp, and she informed me that she has moved back from Tbilisi to her native Kiev, or at least that she is visiting. No shrinking violet she. Fuck Putin.

I was also very happy to see that the beautiful old hotel down the block which I had mentally noted back in 2017 is getting a major capital infusion and renovation, and that the streetscape looks pretty good, albeit with a number of vacant storefronts. Could be worse. There were a couple of good indie coffee shops, a very intriguing little hole in the wall burger place with no seating and barely any signage (sure signs of a local institution) and even a weird shop that seemed to specialize in hand-made hunting knives. Sadly, the main street guitar emporium is closing at the end of the month. Much Cheerwine paraphernalia was, of course, in evidence in store windows.  It is safe to say that I will be back.

South Asians and convenience stores

Yesterday on my way back from Athens I got off to get gas at a forlorn-looking convenience store. At first I wasn't entirely sure it was open, the I saw that it was and that gas was only $3.10 a gallon, much cheaper than the $3.49 we've been seeing around Chapel Hill. It's all too easy for us to forget how much of the price at the pump reflects local real estate prices.

I went in to use the rest room and saw that the register was being staffed by a South Asian woman. It is probably pretty safe to assume that she is part of the family that owns the store, not an hourly employee. I've been seeing more and more South Asian-owned convenience stores here in NC in recent years. I first saw it at the store out at Calvander where we used to go to the grill at lunch from CHHS in the 80s. There was also one when I got off the highway on the way out to Appalachian Ski Mountain back in February. They had pretty tasty looking breakfast biscuits for sale at that one, so I was kinda sad I had gotten one at Sunrise in Chapel Hill already.

I guess Apu from The Simpsons indicates that South Asians in convenience stores has been a thing elsewhere in the country for a long time. And of course independent southern motels have been disproportionately owned by South Asians for a long time, witness Mississippi Masala, the 1991 romcom in which Denzel Washington falls in love with a beautiful Indian young woman somewhere in the Delta. But this convenience store thing is either new or is just registering for me. I hope those families thrive in rural communities. It can't be easy.

I've reflected at times on how the brutal challenges of being a small business owner in the shrinking economies of rural America has been greatly injurious to the self-concept of the populations there and has laid the ground for populism. Small corner stores seem like exceptions, especially ones with grills, which Dollar Generals will never have. Seeing this retail segment taken out by outsiders can't help. But it is nonetheless the story of America. 

Hampton Inn, Athens, GA

In Athens to see clients, ended up at the Hampton Inn, which has been pretty much my go to ever since I got trapped in Hiltons loyalty scheme two decades ago when I got their credit card. This particular property marks something of a shift for the brand: the rooms (at least my room) has no carpeting, instead preferring a faux hardwood floor. Also the furniture is more IKEA, the bed less comfortable. There were lots of trucks in the parking lot, clearly they are serving the contractor demographic.

I get it, it's business. They are cutting costs on cleaning, presumably a function of labor shortages in the post-Trump, post-pandemic era. But I don't like it. An Asian guy with a Hampton Inn shirt got on the elevator with me after breakfast and I made a comment that they seem to be doing a lot of renovations and then I asked about the no carpet format, whether it was cost-cutting driven. He winced. I think he must be a proprietor (it's easy to forget that hotels are franchised, they aren't owned by the corporation whose name they bear). In any case, if I'm right and he was the owner he needs to hear it so he can make informed business decisions about target markets.

As I was finishing the Economist's article on "Peak China" (more on that later) sitting in a dumpy couch that should be replaced I looked across from me and saw this picture on the wall. 34. Herschel Walker. It's easy to forget just how significant he was as a college football player after his recent political run. He meant a lot to Georgia, which is why he was hard to beat at the polls. And it's easy to forget how huge and how ultimately foolish it was for him to go to the fledgling and ultimately failed USFL when he graduated. He played in the NFL for over a decade after that ended but in the end did not live up to his promise. But he still means a lot in this town, though he is not REM or the B-52s.

 

Social life

Yesterday I got home and Graham excitedly told me that his good friend Ben is transferring from Penn to UNC. Ben had been the star of Graham's high school Quiz Bowl team and had also been a standout at Penn. He was also Graham's main competitor for being the best history player on the team, in fact he was probable better than Graham because Ben is pretty much a prodigy and also has been doing Quiz Bowl for a long time and works hard at it. It is a credit to Graham that he is more excited to see his friend and also have his team improved than the fact that Ben will displace him as UNC's best history player.

Later, we watched the movie Air on Netflix. At around 10:30 I paused the movie to see where we were in it (we often stop at halfway and then watch the second half the next night). My instinct was right, we were about halfway through. Graham, however, pointed out that Tuesday nights are trivia night at Linda's and that he hadn't done anything social with his friends since Friday. In other words, he was going out movie or no movie. We finished the movie. It's awesome that Graham had that thought and forced the issue. Many kids on the spectrum might not have that instinct. Some time ago, Graham didn't. Now he does. Bravo. 

Continuing on

The question touched on yesterday is a pretty good one: why do I identify so strongly with these self-destructive, tragic songwriter types? Aside from the obvious fact that they write such good songs and/or really seem to integrate some distinct facet of themselves with the guitar.

On the one hand, I kind of ask too much of myself and don't ask for enough help. I too willingly accept the idea that I don't do enough.

So I perhaps freestyle a little excessively, trying to bull through on the rugged masculine DIY choose your religion ethos of the post everything age. A client who is deeper into AA than I am the other day said to me that she has started going to Al Anon a lot and gotten a sponsor and was working the steps because (here my mind blanks on the very convincing slogan she evoked).

Then again, she's retired and has a lot more day to day freedom than I have. I have my cruel taskmasters, each of which asks something of me today: work, Z on the court, citizenship (LFA meeting tonight), and parenting. All good. 

Minor keys

I'm not exactly sure how it comes to pass that, thirty years and change after quitting drinking and decades into the enterprise of raising a pretty happy family, I continue to be captivated by these guys who basically drank or drugged themselves to death (Jason Molina, Townes Van Zandt, John Fahey). Undoubtedly it is somehow correlated with a strong tendency to focus on negative aspects of my own performance, like the other day when Adam and I were playing and I hit a couple of good volleys in succession but in each case immediately focused on what I could and should have done better. With movies and the like I have a strong preference for happy endings and comedy, as I have discussed before, but with music I listen to very little in major keys.

The Lives of Others

Over the last couple of nights Mary, Graham and I watched "The Lives of Others," a 2006 film about the East German Stasi. Though it had an espionage element to it and some suspense, which is how we got to it, it was definitely a serious, Euro-art kind of film. It went in a direction I wouldn't have expected.

Graham dug it, which has me thinking of other, serious kinda Euro movies we might put in front of him. It is good for a college student to expand his cinematic horizons, particularly when it involves the slowing down of narratives and the changing of expectations around them.

In general, I heartily endorse this film. Three thumbs up! 

Picking up Graham from his dorm

And so, just like that, as if in the flicker of an eye, freshman year is over, Graham is a rising sophomore. Tuesday evening we picked him up from his dorm. It was an easier process than it might have been for many parents, because Graham and his roommate Sam have accumulated very little stuff. There were no posters on the wall to be taken up and rolled up carefully for next year. There was no rug on the floor (they thought they had scored a carpet sample from the ECHHS robotics coach early in the year, but had neglected to consider measuring it beforehand. It turned out to be ridiculously large for the proposed space). When they were cleaning Graham's desk Mary asked if he had gotten everything out of the drawers. Graham said that he didn't think he had ever put anything in the drawers. This was indeed the case.

I got up there for the tail end of the process and to load the mini-fridge and Graham's bike into my car. Part of me felt negligent for not being there for the whole process. Then I remembered that I myself had loaded out of my own dorm room at the end of freshman year and road tripped home with Mark in an epic trip that took us to Albany to see Mark's girlfriend Suzanne (seemed like the thing to do at the time) and saw us both reenacting the Civil War at Gettysburg with a frisbee and then sacrificing that same frisbee to the windy gods from somewhere on Skyline Drive in Virginia. The real question is what the hell was I doing with a car in New Haven my freshman year while living on campus? Where the hell did I park it? No idea. But I digress.

Below is a picture of Sam and Graham with their version of "American Gothic" right before we left their room for the last time. Happy trails.

 

Jason Molina

Discovering a new musician for me feels, as I have said before, much like growing a new soul. I recently found a new one in Jason Molina, who drank himself to death about a decade ago, which is sad, but well beyond my control.

What he has left is a body of work in which I can immerse myself. The first song to fully draw me in is this one, specifically this performance with a trumpet accompanying him on guitar (apparently a frequent feature of the song's early performances with his band the Electric Magnolia Company)

I have kept digging, and am now really taken with this solo performance on acoustic. Molina's ability to flow seamlessly between finger-style picking and strumming is inspiring, his voice haunting as ever.

Doing the work of thinking and ideation

Over the weekend conversation turned, as it often does, to AI and its forward-looking implications for, well, just about everything. One friend said that when interviewing job candidates he asked if they had used Chat GPT to help write their cover letter and, if not, why not? He believes it's a great tool for helping kick out initial drafts, and I get that.

Another topic of conversation was power-washing. I've never used a power washer and have always outsourced the task, though in truth we've gone long spells without even having it done. Many of my friends, however, own their own power washers, do it themselves, and derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. I totally get that. As my regular readers know, I too get a lot out of just sweeping a porch or driveway or even from collecting fallen branches from around the backyard, breaking them up, and putting them in stacks of kindling. There is a near-primal pleasure in the simple act of instilling order. There's also the second order benefit of the reflectivity that comes when I'm doing yard work, which often results in blog posts (though they are, to some extent, repetitive by now. That vein of ore may be tapped out).

If I were to dollarize every action I'd probably have to admit that it would be smarter to outsource the hell out of all of that, join a country club, learn to play golf, cultivate relationships with rich people, and grow my business. But I ain't like that. Admittedly, I also kind of procrastinate on yard work but that's beside the point.

But back to my main analogy: is thinking and idea generation sort of like power-washing or yard work? Do we deprive ourselves of both satisfaction and growth opportunities by outsourcing the function to a bot?

One thing is sure. I have a limited empirical basis for judgment. I haven't engaged with the bots enough just yet to offer an informed opinion. Then again, I'm a busy guy, and playing with bots would limit the time I have available to blog.

Our children

After I got back from Josh's lake house yesterday evening Mary and I got a text from Graham, asking if it was OK if he brought home a bunch of dirty laundry when we were moving him back at the end of the semester. "I could borrow some of Sam's if necessary, but I ran out of detergent squares." We assured him he wouldn't be disowned for this unheard of transgression.

Meanwhile, Natalie sent us a photo from the picnic table by a lake where she and friends had picnicked after a five mile hike in. Lovely. We had better start upping our mileage in preparation for our trip out to Alaska, or we're in for a rather rude awakening in our calves.

Disconnection and pausing AI

As the world continues to digest the implications for our future of AI, one thing seems clear: to the extent that AI runs on data and connectivity, the best way to deprive it of power and to stay its path towards potential misadventure is to deny data, first and foremost by disconnecting. This flies in the face of the general trend towards ever greater and denser interconnectivity through the datafication of everything and the Internet of Things (IOT).

We can do this by returning more and more to legacy modes of content ingestion: print media, live performances, going to movies, connecting with people one on one, etc. Many of these are things people intuitively love and miss. Of course, to do these things at scale is carbon-intensive. But particularly during all-important political campaigns, we need to do more of these kind of things to minimize the risk of deep fakes permeating by bots across the decentralized distribution networks provided by social networks. Pushed to an extreme, it's not too hard to imagine generative AIs customizing content for each of us optimized to drive us bonkers: imagine an AI that knows exactly what your buttons are and can generate a Donald Trump giving speeches designed to bug you the fuck out. No longer the stuff of science fiction.

Take for instance cars. I've long rued the fact that dependence on Google Maps (often just to optimize route for traffic conditions at a given point in time) has cut into my ability to get around places unaided. This deskilling will get worse with self-driving cars. As with everything else, the trend with cars is towards greater and greater interconnection. Electric cars have been dubbed "supercomputers on wheels." Teslas already update their software and deliver fixes over the cell network (as they did a few years back when there was a hurricane on the East Coast and Tesla updated its cars' firmware to unlock extra battery capacity that was reserved for more expensive models).  If they are linked to a network by 5G, think about the possibilities for mayhem if a rogue AI goes HAL on us. I hope Musk is pondering this.

As it is, we need to be ever more careful about giving our data away for free. (says the guy who just posted on a Google platform)

Little things

Sometime within the last few weeks I was describing my weekly breakfast rhythm to Mary and maybe twenty seconds into it she says: "Oh, sorry, I stopped listening, I don't really care about what you eat for breakfast each day." I get that. Even as my spouse, there's no reason for her to care about the details.

But the principle of the thing is important. I do feel like, if I am able to construct my life in a way that allows me to find pleasure in little things, at a high level it means that I am relatively able to please. I expect less and get more from less.

Hence my delight this morning when, having worked all the way over some months through a bowl of Harris Teeter store-brand bran flakes, I cracked open a box of some sort of ancient grains melange from Whole Foods. Each of which, mind you, I blend with a sweeter cereal mix from Trader Joe's to get some sugar in there. It was awesome.

The need to step out

As time rolls on I become ever more convinced at some level that I am developing a pretty consistent overall worldview based on a few basic principles: moderation, preservation, calm, staying in touch with people blah blah blah. So many aspects of my world cohere neatly. It all begins to look something like wisdom.

Then again, it's all to some extent predicated on the very narrowness of my world. I am highly routinized and consume a pretty constrained set of content. There's a whole range of stuff out there I don't engage with at all. First and foremost, poverty. On another register but equally illustratively, video games, which as an industry is five times larger than cinema globally by revenue.

I have to keep this kind of thing in mind and push myself outwards to keep enriching my experience. But then I run up against the age-old need to balance focus and breadth lest I become Jack of all trades and master of less than none. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of my own limitations is how amazing other people are when I can take the time to get to know more of them.

On book reviews

After posting a riposte to Peggy Noonan's criticism of Bill Gates and his book reviews, I had left a tab open to one of them and went back to it over the weekend. I read a couple of the reviews. It's not wall to wall earth-shattering brilliance, but it does show that here's a guy with a significant life experience who continues to think hard and seek to take in the experience of others to learn and grow.

In fact, at some level I would argue that reading book reviews by almost anyone, perhaps excluding those of professional reviewers in major publications (who are after all in many regards extensions of authors' and publishers' PR machines) is a worthwhile endeavor. Anyone who seeks to ingest long-form content and then offer up their reflections on it to the world is performing a valuable service to the world in general, perhaps simply as an offset to the fetishization of immediacy.

I'm a little bit reminded of my sensation, when I went to hear Boris Gasparov -- my dissertation advisor -- present a paper on Boris Pasternak at Princeton somewhere in the aughts. I was just recovering from academia at the time. What struck me was that the most important thing that was going on in his work was the amount of attention and respect he was showing to Pasternak's experience by reading so closely and thinking so deeply. It's a rare honor to have someone do that. Gasparov and I had coffee afterwards and I shared that thought. I think he may have been offended, but I don't think I was too wide of the mark.